David Oliphant
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Four Books and a Video - Talk 1:  Introduction

6/13/2019

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Four Books and a Video

A series of talks given at a Retreat for Uniting Church clergy in the Canberra and Region Presbytery at St Clements
Conference and Retreat Centre at Galong NSW from the 28th to the 31st October 2018.
By
David Oliphant, retired Anglican Priest and Uniting Church Minister. 39 Bate Street, Central Tilba, NSW, 2456     dol62834@bigpond.net.au  02 44737838


​Four Books and a VideoTalk One: Introduction

I feel honoured by the invitation to give these talks. I live at Tilba on the far south coast and until a few years ago was the Minister of Mt Dromedary parish. I am a member of the contemplative community Open Sanctuary that meets regularly at Tilba and I continue to train people for chaplaincy and pastoral care work with my wife Angela.

The one thing I really want to do before I die is to write about Christ, even if no one reads any of it. I have called my book The One Who is to Come: Re- Thinking Christ for a Twenty-First Century World. So when Kevin asked me to give this retreat, I could think of nothing else. These talks are then, if you like, the bare bones of this big apologetic task I have set myself. I feel very conscious that this might be more than some of you had bargained for in attending this retreat. Can I assure you that I believe myself to be someone without an axe to grind but with a very deep commitment to Christ coming out of some transformative experiences in my twenties, and a long service in the institutional church. I believe this church is being challenged in our day like never before since the early days of interpreting Christ into the Greaco- Roman culture of the first century. Are we up for the challenge I ask myself and others? So please see these talks in that spirit. If you have responses I will listen carefully and take full note.

If you are at all like me you will be wondering about the world we live in more than usually, and you will reckon most things have become more uncertain in the last three years or so. Armageddon is no longer a ridiculous idea. I think of the famous words of the Irish poet W.B.Yeats in his poem The Second Coming,

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


The great challenge at a time like this is not to become overwhelmed and hence unable to act effectively but at the same time not hide our heads in the sand. The challenges before us as a human race are enormous. What I want to do in these talks is to introduce you into how I am grappling with this challenge in my own life, at least at the level of my thoughts about Christ and God, given the person I am and the experiences I have had. You will no doubt think differently because of who you are and the experiences you have had. I am hoping this might lead to some good conversation and quiet reflection for all of us. If Christ has ever been important to the human race before this, tell me.  For he is surely so now if he really did rise from the dead and is somehow alive in the Universe or the Multiverse. But let me creep up on this grand theme gently.

In June this year, two of the world’s leading public intellectuals, Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson, held a four and a half hour debate before a huge audience in Vancouver. It is now available on YouTube. Sam Harris is one of the original Four Apocalyptic Horsemen of the New Atheism, alongside Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, and author of many books including The Moral Landscape. Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist and university lecturer who rose to celebrity status relatively recently by opposing the excesses of campus identity politics and the compulsory use of non-traditional gender pronouns. His opponents have tried to label him either right wing, even alt-right, or left wing, but all this is far from the truth. Unlike Harris, Peterson is steeped in religious studies and thinkers such as Jung and Eliade. He has set up a large collection of videos on YouTube. His lectures on the book of Genesis have been particularly highly rated.

The nub of their debate that interested me is that while Harris believes values can be derived directly from facts without having to resort to religion or any such intermediary, Peterson believes an overarching story or myth or meta narrative is needed that instructs people how to live and act in the world, including how they apply science. Such stories or myths have been the foundation of societies from the beginning of human community. If Peterson is right, as I believe he is, it is not enough to say value can be derived directly from facts. Science would need also to construct a meta narrative, an overarching story that tells us who we are, where we have come from, where we are going. The question then is can science do that, or does science in fact have boundaries? The scientist Rupert Sheldrake answered Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion with his own book The Science Delusion. He successfully maintained that the belief that science can in principle explain everything is a delusion.

Perhaps a far more sensible project for Harris would be, Can science contribute to a new meta narrative that is so desperately needed in our western world, and perhaps all the world, a story that can unite us all? For surely what we are seeing in the world today, and very much in our own culture, is a clash and confusion of meta narratives. Add to this mix the incredible fixation with rights in our culture and the scant regard to responsibilities, and we have the current ferment around such things as gender and race identity, religion, and equality and diversity. We are many worlds being kicked, screaming and shouting, into One World. Our need for a new meta narrative that might bring us together in the same story is urgent. Post modern relativism cannot hold. Surely science, which has successfully crossed all cultural boundaries, could be the catalyst we need for a new all embracing meta story or narrative; as long as we also understand that science has boundaries and can let us down if these boundaries are crossed.

Let’s face it, even within our Christian tradition across the world there are many meta narratives, all linked by the fact that none of them now really connect with the heart of our western culture, so influenced as it is by materialist science. I remember that one of the first things I learnt in church history was that there were three key elements in the stabilising of the early church and its institutionalisation; the role of the clergy especially the bishops, the scriptures and the tradition. The tradition was all important. It contained the meta narrative; it gave the outline of where we came from and where we were going and it taught the faithful how to read the scriptures in a way that affirmed this meta narrative. By the middle ages the meta narrative had changed and developed, particularly with the general adoption of the Great Chain of Being; but its function remained the same.

In our pastoral care training group recently, a candidate who is steeped in the Vedic traditions, gave us a talk about his view of reality. He pinned up a large poster that told the outline of the story distilled from the Vedas and handed down over many ages, and he pointed to it as he expanded different aspects of the story. It reminded me very much of similar charts that outlined the biblical story into various dispensations from Creation in 4004 BC to the coming of the New Jerusalem at the end of time as we know it. Such meta narratives pervade not only fundamentalist groups but also most evangelical groups. A group’s identity is tied into the meta-narrative that prevails in its view of the world.

The liturgical traditions on the other hand have their meta narratives more entwined with the institutional church and its doctrines and dogma. I am part of a reading group based at St Marks in Canberra which reads books by Rene Girard together. This year we have been reading an about- to-be published book by the group’s convenor Scott Cowdell. Scott is a Girardian scholar with an international reputation. His book is entitled Rene Girard and the Non- Violent God. In it he is attempting to show that adopting Girard’s ideas need not necessarily put one off side with the received traditional liturgical church, especially in its Anglican incarnation. Scott is both affirming the received meta narrative and also pushing it into the modern world as seen by Girard, without losing the former as he argues for Girard’s ideas, he hopes. He may be trying to have his cake and eat it; and it must be acknowledged that dealing with meta narratives is not a superficial process. People’s sense of identity and understanding of the world and reality are all tied up in the meta narratives. Scott wants a non-violent God, rather than the traditional God of the Bible, but he does not want to lose the Church he loves in advocating for such a non-violent God.

What of the Uniting Church? Where are we with meta-narratives? There 
are others present here who are in a much better position to answer that of course. My own opinion was formed in part from a conversation I had once at a presbytery meeting. This person told me that she was a member of the Uniting Church because in the UC issues were discussed intelligently. True story! We should take heart from it; these are the people I want to talk to in putting forth my apologetics. However, the Uniting Church probably mirrors modern day Protestantism generally, with people at one end clinging to old meta narratives and at the other, the so called liberals, engaging modern western secular culture as best we can. I place myself in this second group but I am the first to recognise that we have let go the old meta narrative but we have not yet found a new one of any power and influence to replace it. We embrace an evolutionary world view but it plays little part in our understanding of God or Christ. We don’t assume the Bible is the Word of God in any literal sense, but we don’t yet make clear how it does fit into our religious life. We want little or nothing of substitutionary atonement theory, from either Anselm or Calvin, but we struggle to name any greater meaning to Christ’s death than that it happened. We come alive most around issues of social justice, and increasingly the environment; all good but what of the faith once delivered to the saints. Where is there a meta narrative to guide us, to help us know who we are, to tell us where we have come from and where we are going, a meta narrative that embraces the big story and has Christ somewhere there in the centre, that faithfully acknowledges the scriptures and the history of the church, that embraces other traditions and shows how they fit into it all as well.

It is this quest for a meta narrative that takes our modern secular world seriously, spiritually, and religiously that I am introducing to you in these talks. Only introducing mind you; that is all it can be. And it is only as I am seeing the issues. I want as much to learn as to share my thoughts.
I will be doing this by reference to four books and a video.

The first book is Origin Story by David Christian. This is the latest of his books on what he calls Big History. It encapsulates what science has already contributed to a new meta narrative, the story of the cosmos from the Big Bang to Now. Bill Gates has underwritten pilot programs on teaching Big History in schools, and apparently the results have been significant. It is doing for these students what the dispensation charts in bible study groups once did for Christians; it is providing a framework in which knowledge and understanding can be placed.

The second is Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliot Friedman. Friedman is a significant scholar of the Hebrew Bible who, possibly more than any other modern writer has placed the Bible in history while deeply respecting it as sacred text. It is essential that in any meta narrative that is persuasive that all our sacred texts can come eventually to be seen in their historical origins. This is no mean task, and probably impossible for some traditions. I think Friedman has achieved this for the Judaeo/Christian tradition. The challenge for us rather now is how do we incorporate this into our church life, into our teaching and liturgy and preaching, into a meta narrative that truly engages the Mystery without recourse to thinking of the Bible as the Word of God in a simplistic way.

The third book is The Age of the Spirit by Phyllis Tickle. This is the most important book on the Holy Spirit I have read, recommended to me by one of our current Presbytery ministers no less some years ago. Taking the Spirit seriously is the challenge Tickle puts before us in this turbulent time she calls The Great Emergence. And she means it both practically in our spirituality, and theoretically in our thinking. In a way what I am saying to you in these talks is in part my response to her challenge.

Next comes a video by Jordan Peterson entitled What Talking to Sam Harris Made Me Realise in the Past Few Months. This introduces what Peterson sees as a fundamental part of most myths and stories that carry the capacity to release in us energy that can change and transform us and inform us of the values we need to live by. Without recognising the abyss and its central place in life, we have no means to grapple with the big questions. We are left only with our science and our technology but no moral or ethical base.

Finally, my fourth and final book is Underworlds: Philosophies of the unconscious from psychoanalysis to metaphysics by Jon Mills. Mills is a Canadian philosopher, psychoanalyst and psychologist who has possibly done more than anyone to anchor the floundering psychoanalytic world and our understanding of the unconscious back into the philosophic tradition. He did this initially in an earlier book The Unconscious Abyss: Hegel’s Anticipation of Psychoanalysis, and has developed his analysis in this book, specifically looking at developments in psychoanalysis since Freud, including Jung. As you will see, I think the time has come for those who would follow Christ to take the unconscious seriously.

It is important that you know that what I am attempting to talk to you about has a very personal dimension for me. It is definitely part of my passion. I underwent an experience when I was 24 that I believed was God. It was a very powerful spiritual experience that completely changed my life. Up until that point I had thought of myself as an atheist, despite the best intentions of well meaning clergy at a grammar school. Three years later I experienced something that drew Christ right into the centre of my understanding. I experienced something similar to the experience Jordan Peterson talks about in the video he made after talking to Sam Harris. I looked into, in my mind’s eye as it were, the abyss. It was the most horrific experience of my life. At its height I heard the words in my mind, ‘My son not only looked into this, he went into it’. It is important to realise that at that stage of my life I knew little or nothing of the traditional faith. I was largely atabula rasa! That Christ went into the abyss and this was an horrific but all important experience has been central to my understanding ever since. What I am presenting to you in this introductory way is, if you like, the fruit of a life time of reflecting on this mystery that changed my life so dramatically.

Let me finish this Introductory talk with a quote from Professor Ewert Cousins, author of 'Christ of the 21st Century'.

"For the first time since the appearance of human life on our planet, all of the tribes, all of the nations, all of the religions are beginning to share a common history. We can no longer think in terms of Christian history, or even Western history. When Christians raise questions about Christ, they must now ask: How is Christ related to Hindu history, to Buddhist history - to the common global history that religions are beginning to share?"

Indeed, it is within the common global history that a meta- narrative for the modern world has to emerge, a narrative that takes seriously all human experience and traditions, and that means relating Christ to our secular, scientific, materialist history as well. The apologetic challenge facing us who would follow Christ is surely of an order not less challenging than that which faced Paul and the early Church.

What follows is my first formal attempt to be an apologist for the man in whom all my hope is placed.
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Talk 2: Origin Story

6/13/2019

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Talk Two: Origin Story

In this talk I am hoping to persuade any of us that still have doubts that the time has come to fully embrace the emerging scientific Origin Story. I don’t mean pay lip service to it, but to actually embrace and work with its theological and Christological implications and opportunities. I have noticed that for many in this regard there is still the tendency to ‘hedge bets’; evolution does not really contradict the Bible, for example, or there may well have been a Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago but it is the affirmation of God in the first chapter of Genesis that really matters. I have been one such hedge better. Can I invite us to let go, at least for the duration of these talks, such ‘hedge betting’ and join me in trying to embrace this emerging new and very important origin story, and see where that takes us. Some of the emerging story may well not be true of course, but in general cultural terms it is now the dominant origin story and we ignore it at our peril if we are serious in standing testimony to Christ in our time and culture. It is no longer enough to decry fundamentalism and penal substitutionary theory and pay lip service to the wider culture; we have to come up with a broader more inclusive understanding of Christ within this new origin story that has power to persuade and transform and unify.

Modern histories of the universe and the world now abound. I have chosen David Christian’s Origin Story: A Big History of Everything because it is one of the most recent and it builds upon his work on Big History over a long period. It is well written and engaging. I found myself looking at the world around me with new eyes and a stronger sense of connection as I read it, much as I did when I first accepted the claim of geneticists that every human being on the planet is related to common ancestors, chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve, so called. We can think of ourselves scientifically as one human family. This is not mythological thinking. It is scientific.

But Christian actually takes us back much further than chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve, to LUCA, our Last Universal Common Ancestor, the first living organism. He writes:

She [Luca] was not a free-living cell but a rocky labyrinth of mineral cells, lined with catalytic walls composed of iron, sulphur and nickel, and energised by natural proton gradients. The first life was a porous rock that generated complex molecules and energy, right up to the formation of proteins and DNA itself. (Christian 2018:91)

We can even argue that we can go back even further in declaring that we are ultimately all star dust created in the Big Bang, but of course it is what happened to that star dust that is the main story. There is an extraordinary capacity to unite in the evolutionary story, which is technically a myth in the best sense of the word.

Christian gives God short shift in his Origin Story, but he is not a militant atheist, and he is honest about the limitations of the emerging origin story.

Frankly, today we have no better answers to the problem of ultimate beginnings than any earlier human society had...... we still can’t explain it any better than novelist Terry Pratchett did when he wrote, “The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus: In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.” (Christian 2018:21)

More on God later.

It is not my intention to go into any great detail about the text. He organises it around the idea of thresholds that mark the key transitions that constitute the history of the universe. He identifies eight thresholds: In the Beginning, Stars and Galaxies (thresholds 2 and 3), Molecules and Moons, Life, Humans, Farming, and The Anthropocene. He finishes with a chapter onWhere Is It All Going, raising the stark choices we humans face and the challenges they present. His organisation of the text is also around key concepts that give a further continuity. Energy is the fundamental concept in his origin story; matter is compressed energy and life is the interplay of energy and information.

Like so many evolutionists he does not hesitate to reify important evolutionary concepts. He gives motive and intentionality to these concepts. I used to object to this wholeheartedly declaring evolutionary scientists wanted to have their cake and eat it, and that the real challenge for them was to write about evolution, natural selection, entropy and so on without making these abstract ideas the equivalent of persons with motive and intention. Perhaps Dawkins’ understanding of evolution as a blind watchmaker is the icing on the cake in this regard. But I have come to wonder if maybe it is in fact impossible to write about evolution without reifying concepts because the seeming presence of intentionality and perhaps even motive in life does seem to appear very early on. They can’t be escaped. Purpose is maybe somehow indwelling life from its earliest and simplest forms. It is interesting that vitalist ideas are being seriously re-visited, particularly by some feminist environmental thinkers.

Christian accepts this equivocation and exploits it. On the one hand he affirms the primacy of inert matter; on the other he gives it intentionality, even agency, which implies motive. It raises the all important question, is evolution a descriptive idea or an explanatory one? I personally think the same question can be asked of natural selection. For me they are descriptive. Only by ‘smuggling in’ intentionality and agency in by the back door as Christian does do they become explanatory. For example:

Indeed, complex adaptive systems, such as bacteria, your dog, or multinational companies, act as if every component is an agent with a will of its own, so each component is constantly adjusting to the behavior of many other components. And that yields extremely complex and unpredictable behaviours. In using the word agent, I have smuggled in a new idea that will become increasingly important: the idea of information. (Christian 2018:77)

So you can see there is much in all this that is suggestive of something at work in the evolution of our species that the ideas of materialistic science are beginning to pick up, but at the same time deny. Hence I am happy to let such scientists continue to reify their concepts. It may well be pointing to a truth they still consciously deny. Perhaps purpose is discernible in the universe, not just to the philosophic mind but also, some time in the future, to the scientific.

What I want to do now is look at where I think Christian’s text is not adequate and where I think he misses what I think are essential things to include in any modern origin story.

​I have already mentioned that he sells ‘God’ short; but his ‘God’ that he rejects seems to be the traditional church God. In fact, ‘God by any other name’ seems to walk into his story from the start by the backdoor. There are two women I know well.  One is a staunch church goer of the fundamentalist kind; the other has not been to church for a very long time. I love them both. The first is so sure of her God that she is hesitant to pray with me because she thinks I don’t call God ‘Father’; which is not true by the way. The other talks to the Universe; she commits everything to the Universe without a sideways glance at the Bible, and expects grace and answers to come back to her from the Universe. I wonder if there is something here that applies to Christian and others like him. Let me explain.

For Christian God cannot be included in any modern origin story. He writes:

Most versions of the modern origin story no longer accept the idea of a creator god because modern science can find no direct evidence for a god. Many people have experiences of gods, but those reported experiences are diverse and contradictory and they cannot be reproduced. They are too malleable, too diffuse, and too subjective to provide objective scientific evidence. (Christian 2018:26)

We will return to this question of subjectivity later. Then to add insult to injury he uses two arguments beloved of Richard Dawkins which I have always struggled to believe any intelligent human being could possibly put forward in a serious discussion. The first argument is originally from Bertrand Russell.

At the age of eighteen, Bertrand Russell gave up on the idea of a creator god after reading the following passage in the autobiography of John Stuart Mill: “My father taught me that the question, ‘who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, ‘who made
God?’” (Christian 2018:19)

He then caps this with:

And there's another puzzle. If a god is powerful enough to design a universe, that god must surely be more complex than the universe, so assuming a creator God means explaining a fantastically complex universe by imagining something even more complex that just... created it. Some might think that was cheating. (Christian 2018:20)

So on these two extraordinarily naive understandings, God is dismissed. But Christian is quite unconscious of the backdoor. ‘God by any other name’ sneaks back in. What about the Universe, for instance, like my sister. Surely no one can deny that we are products of the Universe. Could we not play with the idea of the Universe as God? How ‘bout the Cosmos. Let’s not hesitate to reify them into personal beings with motive and intention and agency, just like Christian and others reify evolution and natural selection.

​But Christian’s favourite is Nothingness and the mystery of the Quantum world.

Quantum physics tells us, and particle accelerators—which speed up subatomic particles to high velocities by means of electric or electromagnetic fields—show us, that something really can appear in a vacuum from nothing, though grasping what this means requires a sophisticated understanding of nothing. (Christian 2018:23)

And so he finishes the section in which he denies God any part in the story with,

As quantum physics allows things to appear from a vacuum, it seems that the entire universe really did pop out of a sort of nothingness full of potential.(Christian 2018:38)

A sort of nothingness full of potential. This reminds me of David Bohm’s implicate order before it becomes explicate, or Hegel’s concept of Spirit. Is not this a spontaneous creatio ex nihilo? I personally have no problem in praying to a nothingness full of spontaneous potential. Wow! Even happy to call it Father.

So, the problem is not with spontaneous creativity. Christian seems to be fully endorsing this. It seems to be with the word ‘God’, as he thinks of it, that the problem lies. And this is where we, disciples of Christ and members of the remnant of the institutional church, need to find a new flexibility and willingness to play with concepts and engage the world people like Christian inhabit. If we could but lighten up a bit and become ourselves more spontaneous and engaging in the modern world without claiming any ecclesiastical or traditional authority for what we think. We are coming out of a long tradition in which those before us built defensive walls out of ideas and then argued for those walls on pain of excommunication or death.

Continuing this way of understanding Christian discipleship has no future and is itself a sort of death.
There is some evidence that new ways of approaching theology and ideas about Christ are emerging that are more flexible. It is being called Theodrama, originally from the work of Urs von Balthasar, the famous Catholic theologian but now being developed amongst a number of both Catholic and Protestant thinkers. Experimenting with Theodrama rather than doctrine and dogma is the sort of flexibility I am meaning. I think it will be increasingly productive. Ideas can be played with within a sense of Big Story without arguing over doctrines and dogmas. On top of that Theodrama is taking some of the methodology of improvisational theatre and theatre sports into its orbit as a way of working with concepts. An idea might be ‘blocked’, or it may be ‘accepted’, or more importantly still it maybe ‘over accepted’. It is in over acceptance that spontaneity can enter the process and new creative ideas emerge. This is a new way to do theology that necessarily brings with it the challenge of bringing these new ideas up against the tradition and its doctrines and dogmas. This is a difficult task.

An example of this is to be published next month. As mentioned in my Introduction, Professor Scott Cowdell at Charles Sturt University in Canberra has written a book on the anthropological thinker Rene Girard entitled Rene Girard and the Non-violent God. And he is framing it in terms of a Theodrama. I have been privileged to be part of a group reading the book with Scott.

This brings me to my next problem with Christian’s Origin Story. Christian barely mentions religion and his understanding of the human condition is quite naive. I suspect he shares the view so common amongst
materialists that religion was an aberration amongst primitive people that has been made completely redundant by the rise of modern science. Such staggering cultural appropriation amongst otherwise intelligent human beings is hard to imagine possible. But there you are. There is little feel for the great challenge human communities had and have for staying together, for organising themselves socially, for dealing with forces that disrupted and threatened; in other words the very stuff of religion. Not so with Girard.

Girard was a French academic who worked for the bulk of his life in the States at various universities. He died a few years ago. His first book was an analysis of some great novels in which he realised that the writers understood something about human nature of which the bulk of us are unaware. This was the particularly human nature of desire. Without saying as much he neatly reframed the idea of sin.

It is not possible to look at Girard in any detail here but I warmly suggest you have a look if you have not already. His first book created much interest in academe, but not nearly as much as his second, Violence and the Sacred in which he showed human desire leading to communal fragmentation leading to uncontrollable scapegoating and murder leading to the communal experience of transcendental peace and the reconciliation of the community. In one swoop he had come up with serious ideas about the origin of religion and sacrifice, myth and culture.

Unfortunately for his sudden rise to academic stardom, he became a Christian toward the end of writing his first book. This did not colour his second but it certainly did his third book, his magnum opus, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, a direct quote from Christ. In a way this ended academe’s fascination with his ideas and he went into limbo until discovered by some Catholic theologians. This then propelled him into an illustrious career as a non-theologian writing theology and anthropology and pointing to the great truths of the human condition and Christ as revealed in the Scriptures. His importance has been likened to Darwin’s by some, and he has been called the most significant apologist in the modern period.

Scott divides his Theodrama into five acts within a general understanding of evolution.
1. The Pre-Human Paradise of Savage Innocence.
2. Hominization, the Primal Murder, and Providence. 3.The Breakthrough.
4. The Best of Times. The Worst of Times.
5. The Un-Theorized Eschaton.


I have questions for both Scott and Girard, but I fully concur with the general direction of what they have done and are doing. And I love the idea of Theodrama. Scott works hard to bring Girard’s ideas up against the Bible and the Tradition, something that I find in the end unconvincing. I don’t feel the same commitment to the Tradition as Scott; I think we have reached a point where everything should be on the table. On top of that, I question Girard’s understanding of the scapegoating mechanism as an essential element in the hominization process. I am more interested in it really coming into play in the great transition from hunter/gatherer life to settled agricultural life when human communities swelled in size so markedly. This tallies with the great archeologist and anthropologist Jacque Cauvin’s suggestion that the birth of the gods and the origins of agriculture are intimately related, something that seems to be confirmed in the extraordinary discoveries at Gobeckli Tepe. It is currently being argued by researchers that hunter/gatherer groups were never large and were remarkably egalitarian, which included leadership by women. Religiously they were deeply connected spiritually with the environment with varying forms of shamanism and communal sacrifice for the sharing of food. Issues of authority, priesthood, ritual and especially sacrifice for group cohesion came later as the communities got bigger. It was then the scapegoating mechanism came into play, I am thinking. This way of thinking is different from Cowdell’s.
But my point here is that there is much fruitful and exciting things to be working on in such Theodrama as part of any Origin Story, and that it will be very important for thinkers like Christian to begin to take these issues seriously. The ubiquitous nature of human sacrifice, for instance, can no longer be denied, a practice that eventually moved into animal sacrifice. What does that tell us about ourselves and our origin and story and our methods of holding community together.

But the issue that I most wish to raise in being critical of Christian’s origin story is his failure to do justice to human subjectivity, as does the scientific materialistic world generally. He of course does not deny human subjectivity.

No brainy creature (not even you or I) is in direct contact with its environment. Instead, we all live in a rich virtual reality constructed by our brains....... Sensations, emotions, and thought together create the inner, subjective world that all humans, and probably many other large-brain species, experience. (Christian 2018:141)

Consciousness and the mind-body problem is the other great frontier of science, along with the Big Bang. For scientific materialism consciousness is an epiphenomenon arising out of the complexity of matter, something as Christian says is ‘constructed by our brains’. In other words he is saying our brains are the cause of our subjectivity, and yet our subjectivity is all we know and can know directly, not only of ourselves but of the world. It is our ‘I’ pure and simple, an entirely psychic entity that experiences and exists only in psychic images, however this may be connected to the body. The psyche has as much evolutionary history as our bodies, going back to the origins of life, to LUCA in fact. Our brains are not the cause of our subjectivity, our psyches evolved with our bodies. In fact, looking from the inside, our psyches are the cause of our minds. Mind emerges from psyche.

Modern science has never taken psyche seriously, because science does not take individuality seriously. Science deals with statistical generalities, and has claimed this as the only real knowledge. But when we say we know someone, we do not know them scientifically. We know them psychically; we understand them through our capacity for emotional connection and empathy. Such knowledge and understanding can be had not only with other persons but with animals and other living things. Our psyches are deep evolutionary structures that know the world because the world formed them. And the crowning glory of our psyches is our capacity to think and reason.

Our capacity for rationality is the icing on a huge cake that does not yield itself easily to rational investigation but is the very basis upon which our lives are built. Any Origin Story that does not take the evolution of our psyches and our subjectivity as seriously as the evolution of our bodies is to be questioned. Psyche is part of the origin of life, as is matter, however we understand their relationship, if we ever do.

One of the most telling philosophical critiques of science in this regard is the recent book by Thomas Nagel, 
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo- Darwinian Conception of the Nature is Almost Certainly False. And Nagel is in no way denying we have evolved.

So my main criticism of Christian’s Origin Story is that he does not take psyche seriously and see it as an evolved structure as complex and magnificent as our bodies. Our minds are dependent on these psychic structures that began with life, the inner face of outward living matter, entirely valid in itself.


So here is the emerging shape of a grand Origin Story that may in part replace the story as we have understood it from the Bible. How then do we incorporate the Bible into this grand Origin Story and see it in its historical origin while remaining true to what it tells us of the truth of God and Christ. That is the focus of our next talk.
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Talk 3: Who Wrote the Bible?

6/12/2019

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Talk Three: Who Wrote the Bible?

A few years ago I visited my eldest daughter who was living at the time in Lancaster in England. Someone suggested we visit a particular church during our stay. It was an evangelical Anglican church that attracted many university students. I went to an evening service with Angela. It was full of people of all ages. The vicar was a man in his early forties. He was speaking about the central role of women in the Bible and Church, and finished with a panel of people responding to questions (asked via text messages from the congregation’s mobile phones!!). Some of the panel held very different views to him. He managed it all with grace and good humour. All this was very refreshing and engaging, but what really struck me was that he made a good deal of reference in his address to the Documentary Hypothesis of the origin of the Bible, and drew points in his address from it. I had never experienced this before in any sermon I had heard, let alone given; I had of course studied it in theological college but had never learnt how to bring it into parish life. What really struck home of course was that this was happening in a staunchly evangelical parish, for whom the Bible was central. This seemed extraordinary. I loved what he was doing and I regretted my own hesitation in the past to present the Bible in this way.


Mind you I had felt tensions in my understanding of the Bible and its place in the christian mission from the early days of my pilgrimage. I remember listening to a famous Baptist preacher Sidlow Baxter, a most delightful human being, talking about Jews, Muslims and Christians all being People of the Book. No, I thought in my new found faith. Jews and Muslims maybe, but Christians are People of the Man, not the Book.


I have continued to feel strongly about this ever since, in a world in which Christians, at least at the popular level, seem to have increasingly understood God’s primary revelation to be the Bible. I use a computer App called Accordance, and hence receive their promotional material. I am truly staggered at the number of Bible Commentaries and other aids that are continually coming out. Accordance does cater for conservative evangelicals, but it also caters for all traditions including professional scholars and Jews.

That the Bible is the Word of God seems now to be part of Christian DNA. Yet nowhere does the Bible say it is the Word of God. It does say that Christ is the Word though, the Word made flesh, which to me clearly means an ultimate revelation.

I have always found this a very difficult issue to raise because it lies close to the sense of self for many Christians, and like so much debate nowadays, discussion can become a heated interchange of unreflected opinion that is nonetheless essential to the individuals’ sense of identity. What has been particularly difficult is to persuade any interlocutor that the Bible is very important to me, but after Christ and the Spirit. I consult it in both Hebrew and Greek. I am fascinated by it, but I am convinced that those who say it is the Word of God don’t read it with fresh eyes but through the tradition of the group they belong to. Shaking off the traditio is no easy feat, and if you are happy in the group you belong to, why bother. So important conversations tend not to take place.


Well I think we should bother because I think the place of the Bible in relation to Christian understanding and faith needs to be reviewed. The meta narrative it reveals has been superseded, whether we like it or not, if Christ followers are going to stay with our culture. A new Origin Story has emerged and is being worked on and is fast becoming our new myth of how we got here. Either we take up the great apologetic challenge of putting Christ in the centre of this new myth or we fail, I believe, Christ’s mission. At the same time, however, we continue to honour and treasure the Bible in our apologetics, but we see it in history, just as we need so much to see Christ in history. In other words we come to see the Bible as a very important story within the Story, a meta-narrative within a Meta-Narrative.


The question then is how do we do that, and how do we use the Bible in the life of our congregations. And for us Protestants there is the even bigger question, Where does authority ultimately lie for us if not in the Bible? This is the big one.


I don’t think for a moment I have all the answers but I do live with the questions. I have been helped in part by the work of the great Old Testament student and scholar, Richard Elliot Friedman. Friedman is Professor of Jewish 
Studies at the University of Georgia. One of his great strengths is that he writes as a scholar in a popular and engaging way, giving the reader the sense of joining him in an exciting detective story. This annoys other scholars, but for him it is very important. He wants to be heard by us punters. His books that have helped me most are Who Wrote the Bible?, and his latest The Exodus: How it Happened and Why it Matters. But where Friedman is so good for me is that he treasures the Bible personally (which includes the New Testament). Let me give you a few quotes from Who Wrote the Bible?:
The first and last pages of this book recognize the greatness of the Bible, its beauty and its power. What comes in between is a picture of how critical biblical scholarship accounts for this greatness. (Kindle Locations 91-92)

Above all, this book is meant to enhance people’s appreciation of the Bible: to understand better the world in which it was born and how inextricably connected it was to that world; to appreciate the wonder of how it came together; to appreciate that literary study and historical study of the Bible are not enemies, or even alternatives to one another. Rather, they enrich one another. Whether one is a Christian or a Jew or from another religion or no religion, whether one is religious or not, the more one knows of the Bible the more one stands in awe of it. (Kindle Locations 141-142).


So Friedman has a very high view of the Bible but an historical one. I think we need to develop this in relation to Christ and our witness to him.


I don’t intend to go into great detail about the Documentary Hypothesis itself, or other aspects of his critical engagement of the ancient texts. He has published the J,E,D and P documents separately in his 
The Bible with Sources Revealed: A New View into the Five Books of Moses, and he did a particular study of the J source earlier in The Hidden Book of the Bible: The Discovery of the First Prose Masterpiece, where he argues for the J document to be considered one of the first pieces of prose ever written.

But I do want to draw heavily on him in setting out how I am seeing the Bible and its relation to Christ, and in this I am thinking particularly of the Old Testament.


What I am getting from Professor Friedman is that in thinking and 
teaching about the Bible historically, we have to begin with Ezra. This turns our approach to the Bible on its head. Ezra is rarely mentioned in the life of the church, and only makes it into the text at the very end of the Biblical period. But his importance in Judaism is second only to Moses, at least in relation to the Torah. But Friedman believes Ezra’s influence extends over the final form of the whole Old Testament because he is the final Redactor or editor of all that had gone before, with the possible exception of the post exilic prophets. Although this may never be finally proved, the evidence that does exist points very strongly to this being the case. In relation to the Torah, which includes of course D and hence the Deuteronomic history also, Friedman wrote:

The first time that we find the full Torah of Moses in Judah, it is in Ezra’s possession. He sought it out, he was a scribe who worked with it, he personally carried it to Jerusalem, and he personally gave it its first public reading. And when he read it to the people, they heard things that they had never heard before. This does not prove that it absolutely had to be Ezra who fashioned the Five Books of Moses. But he was in the right priestly family, in the right profession, in the right place, in the right time, with the authority, and with the first known copy of the book in his hand. If it was not Ezra himself who composed the work, then it was someone close to him—a relative, a colleague in the priesthood, a fellow scribe—because it could not have been produced very long before he arrived with it in Judah. The Temple had been standing for only about one generation when he came to Jerusalem. (Friedman 2011: Kindle Locations 3728-3732).


This final redaction is an extraordinary piece of work because the redactor had to weave strands of text written from different periods by different individuals belonging to different groups telling the stories from their different perspectives and theological understandings, into one more or less coherent story. It became, in the minds of all who followed, the history of the Hebrews who became the Jews, and their God who lived in a dynamic tension between his great love and compassion for those he had chosen, and his great regret and anger at how they responded or failed to respond to him.

Why did [Ezra or the final Redactor] do it? Why commit this extraordinary
irony, combining texts that were diametrically opposed to each other? He did it, presumably, for the same reasons that J and E had been combined about 250 years earlier. By this time, all of his source texts were famous. J and E had been around for centuries and were quoted in D. P had been around since Hezekiah’s days, it had been associated with a national reform, and it had the support of the priesthood that was in power. D had been read publicly in the days of Josiah, and it contained a law requiring that it be read again publicly every seven years. How could the redactor have left any of these out? The issue again was successful promulgation. Who would have believed that it was the Torah of Moses if it did not include the famous stories of Adam and Eve (J), the golden calf (E), Phinehas (P), and Moses’ farewell speech (D)?(Friedman 2011: Kindle Locations 3752-3757).
It is clear the final redactor was an Aaronid priest or someone closely associated to such a group. Ezra was such a person, a Levite in descent from Aaron, a group who had been closely associated with Jerusalem from the days of Solomon.
This is the next key for Friedman in thinking about the Bible afresh, the central role of the Levites in the history. It begins for Friedman with the Exodus, an argument he introduces in Who Wrote the Bible?, but which he develops fully in The Exodus. Unlike many current Biblical scholars who take the archeology of the period seriously, Friedman believes there was an actual Exodus. But it was the Levites who came up out of Egypt with their god Yahweh, who was possibly originally a Midianite god. They settled in amongst the existing indigenous tribes who worshipped El, but without ever having land of their own, but still exerting great influence. As Friedman discusses in detail, El and Yahweh became identified as the same God, and the Levites acted as priests of this God. Some Levites traced their ancestry to Aaron, some to Moses, and there was significant tension between the two.
The Aaronid Levites became associated with Jerusalem, the Mushites with Shiloh, with Judah on the one hand and Israel on the other.
In Friedman’s analysis, E, P and D, and the final redaction, which of course included J are all the work of Levites. They were all written before the Exile, J and E before the Assyrian destruction of Israel, as was JE. P dates from the time of Hezekiah and D from the time of Josiah. J was an unknown advocate
of the Davidic royal house and is centred in Jerusalem. There is no evidence he was a Levite. E was produced at Shiloh in the north by Levites descended from Moses. It was taken south and combined with J. This composite text threatened the Jerusalem Aaronid Levites who responded with P. Then at the time of Josiah, D was produced along with DH. Friedman is convinced the writer of D was Jeremiah, probably with his scribe Baruch. All these sacred documents were then taken into exile to be finally redacted into one text by Ezra. It was this final redaction that produced the God of the Bible, so called.
Let me quote Friedman now to give you a taste of the significance of all this, and some of the differences in the sources, both at cosmic and personal levels, which nonetheless were redacted into one final form.
P never once uses the word “mercy.” It also never uses the words “grace” or “repentance.” It never refers to the faithfulness of Yahweh. The priest who wrote it rather emphasized the divine aspect of justice. That is, you get what you deserve. Obedience is rewarded. Transgression is punished. There is no throwing oneself on the mercy of the divine judge. J and E are virtually the opposite. They emphasize the divine aspect of mercy. Transgression can be forgiven through repentance. God is gracious and generously faithful to his covenant. In J’s depiction of the ultimate human experience of the divine, when Moses actually sees God on Sinai, Yahweh declares that he is Yahweh, merciful and gracious God, long-forbearing, and abundant in faithfulness.....The words that P never mentions occur about seventy times in J, E, and D. (Friedman 2011: Kindle Locations 3978-3984).
The redactor combined them. When he did that, he created a new formula, in which justice and mercy stood in a balance in which they had never been before. They were more nearly equal than they had been in any of the source texts. God was both just and merciful, angry and compassionate, strict and forgiving. It became a powerful tension in the God of the Bible. It was a new and exceedingly complex formula. But that was the formula that became a crucial part of Judaism and of Christianity for two and a half millennia. The justice-and-mercy balance is more charged—psychologically as well as theologically—than the cosmic-and-personal balance. There is a constant tension in Yahweh between his justice and his mercy. They are not easily reconcilable. When should one predominate, and when should the other?
(Friedman 2011: Kindle Locations 3993-3999).
Reading the Bible will never be quite the same. Aware of the Bible’s extraordinary history and its resulting complexity, we can—and probably must—read the book with a new depth of appreciation. We can read a page of the Bible and know that three or even four persons, all artists, all writing from their own experience, in their own historical moments, separated by centuries, contributed to composing that page. And, at the same time, we can read the page as it is, to enjoy the story, to learn from it, to find out how others interpreted it over millennia. (Friedman 2011: Kindle Locations 4081-4086).
One of the great strengths of Friedman’s analysis is that while he takes serious account of the archeological background, the bulk of the evidence for his analysis is taken from the Biblical text itself. He has learnt to read it critically but lovingly, and hence historically. I think this is the only future for an intelligent approach to the Bible. And it is in this intelligent approach to the Bible as this intersects with us and our life in the Spirit that the Word of God manifests in the here and now.
Let me tell you two stories. I have run training groups for chaplains and pastoral carers for many years. Quite some time ago a discussion arose in a group that led me to say something about the discovery of the book of Deuteronomy, at least the proto-version, in the temple at the time of Josiah. A number in the group, good Protestant church members as I recall, were upset with me. They thought I was attacking the integrity of the Bible by suggesting such a thing. They had in fact never read the story in 2 Kings. Like so many, they had been schooled in the beliefs that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible and that the Bible is the Word of God. They had little or no historical sense at all.
The second story is far more recent. I was speaking to a Catholic couple who had once been very active in the Church but had become disillusioned and no longer attended. They are well educated and highly intelligent people. In the course of the conversation I mentioned Friedman’s book. There was immediate interest. It then came out that they had little knowledge of the Bible at all, even very simple things. They had been brought up on the
catechism and attending Mass. St Paul and the Spirit was a closed book to them, never opened. What was delightful was the sense of excitement, particularly in the husband, to go off and read ‘Who Wrote the Bible?’ It was as if something had been switched on.
It is something we need to face: the Bible is little known now, not only in the wider community, but within the Church, and where it is taught the teaching is actually aimed at affirming constantly the tradition of the group, and especially the belief that the Bible is the Word of God. This is a Biblianity, not a Christianity.
I think that what is now needed is an easily read history of Israel taken from both archeology and scripture but beginning with Ezra and the enormity of what he did as the final redactor of the traditions and the emergence of the God of the Bible. Then what came before can be traced back both through the final redaction and/or through each of the traditions, with their different feel for God. Just as we take authorship seriously in looking at the New Testament so we take authorship seriously in looking at the Old. We focus on the writers and their experience of the times in which they lived and wrote, the personal and political tensions they lived under, and most of all their experience of the Spirit and their feel for God. This is nothing else really than the process of exegesis writ large for the benefit of people in the pews.
What Friedman excels in, it seems to me, is to bring alive the cultural and political context in which the authors of the Bible lived. So for example the writer or writers of the P tradition, which was once thought to be post exilic but Friedman argues convincingly against this, seemed to be motivated in part by feeling threatened by the northern Levites whose E document had come to Jerusalem and been combined with the J document. The P document strongly affirms the Aaronid tradition and the centralisation of worship in Jerusalem against E. There is certainly political tension in all this, and rivalry between key Levite groups. It is an exciting story. What can be discerned here of the Spirit?
To put this another way, to what degree can we discern the Spirit both in each of the traditions, over and perhaps against other factors such as political
self-interest, and also in the form of the final redaction. The preacher at the church in Lancaster believed that the Spirit was very much involved in the final redaction. Let’s not doubt that, but the implication is that for this reason we can trust what the Bible says. But of course, but let’s really read the Bible, and not just make the same sort of assumption that has been made in fundamentalism but only now applied to the redactor. What if we don’t go there but rather stay with the Spirit. What this does is bring us to focus primarily on our experience of God here and now, not as something fixed in concrete in texts that we try to relate to objectively, but as a living experience in which we make decisions about our actions and relationships. It is our discernment of the Spirt in our own lives over and against all the other factors and spirits that seek to influence us that really matters. And we read the Bible and listen to preaching to help us with this. It is the Word of God in the here and now that we so desperately need to hear.
This brings us to Christ and the Spirit. However much we may struggle to discern the Spirit in the traditions of the Old Testament, there can be no doubt in my mind that the Spirit is central to Christ and the New Testament. The presence of the Spirit is the Kingdom of God. And yet as we shall see in my next talk, the Spirit has not faired well in the history and life of the Church. The same political and personal tensions can be seen between the ecclesiastical structures that developed as can be seen in the Old Testament struggle between different groups of Levites. So also in relationship with the secular authorities. Discerning the Spirit in all this is the challenge. Can we take it up. Our next author thinks we can and must.
Talk Four: The Age of the Spirit
One of the most important questions asked in the New Testament, in my opinion, was asked by St Paul when he first went to Ephesus.
While Apollos was
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Talk 4: The Age of the Spirit

6/12/2019

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Talk Four: The Age of the Spirit
One of the most important questions asked in the New Testament, in my opinion, was asked by St Paul when he first went to Ephesus.

While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul took the road through the interior and arrived at Ephesus. There he found some disciples and asked them, ‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?’ They answered, ‘No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit’. So Paul asked them, ‘Then what baptism did you receive?’ ‘John’s baptism’, they replied. Paul said, ‘John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in one coming after him, that is in Jesus’. On hearing this, they were baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus. When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied. There were about twelve men in all. (Acts 19 NIV)

This passage, and others like it, highlight how fundamental the obvious presence of the Spirit was to the early Christians. In the modern period this has been debated at great length, as you well know, having begun in Methodism and the doctrine of the second blessing, through the evangelical awakening, so called, and coming to a climax in our time with Pentecostalism. During all this the traditional institutional church, in the main, has carried on, effected by the charismatic movement to some extent, but remaining at least remote if not critical of any emphasis on the Spirit in terms of obvious, objective evidence of the Spirit’s presence. At the same time any inner subjective experience has rarely been brought forward for reflection either; the Spirit has, in many ways, remained a formal concept. Given the fact that the Pentecostal church continues to grow, and the traditional institutional church seems to decrease, there does seem to be an issue here that is really important to reflect on.

This was driven home to me yet again quite unexpectedly recently. I was talking to a senior, high churchman who epitomised the established church in all its liturgy and ritual, fine music and intellectual preaching, operating in the heart of a great city. To my amazement he offered that he was beginning to think the future belonged to the Pentecostals because of their emphasis on actual experience; and clearly he meant something other or more than the sort of religious experience to be had in liturgy and ritual, fine music and intellectual preaching. This latter had been the core of his church life. Part of my amazement was that I know that this particular person is no intellectual lightweight, and he would have been fully aware that at this stage at least, Pentecostalism is not known for its intellectual rigour. But its starting point is real experience and not abstract metaphysics. In our secular, scientific, materialistic culture that makes all the difference. I thought I could sense in my friend a sadness about all this; the church he understood and loved is failing and the experiential alternative, as far as he could see it in others, held little attraction. Time to retire.

I think a more nuanced but very definite turn to the Spirit is what Phyllis Tickle is concerned about in her book, The Age of the Spirit: How the Ghost of an Ancient Controversy Is Shaping the Church. Phyllis Tickle died in 2015, a bestselling author and expert in religion and a leading light in the Emerging Church. She wants to take the Spirit very seriously, not just the Church’s theological deliberations about this ‘orphan of the Trinity’, so called by Adolf Harnack, but also the obvious manifestations in history of the Spirit, including those the mainstream church was suspicious of, such as the Montanists, Joachim of Fiore, and the Azuza Street Revival which is usually thought of as the beginning of modern Pentecostalism. Here is some intellectual rigour from Tickle being brought to real experience of the Spirit.
Her presentation is premised on the idea that every half millennium or so, the latinised cultures of the world go through a century of enormous upheaval that affects every part of their existence... semi-millennial uproars that shift and toss every part of themselves so violently as to reconfigure the whole into new -sometimes almost unrecognisably new - ways of being and thinking. (98/2776)

So we had the Great Reformation which gave us amongst other things Protestantism, and before that The Great Schism that finally split the East and the West. Around 500 CE we had The Great Decline and Fall which gave birth to monastic and conciliar Christianity; and originally The Great Transformation and the spread of a variant of Judaism that eventually became the religion of the West around Rome and Constantinople in the East. We are now experiencing in our day The Great Emergence, Tickle believes. It is necessarily a time of turmoil and great change. In all these transitions the overarching question, Tickle believes, is: ‘Where now our authority?’ Or ‘How now shall we live?’ These are the questions we must face.

From the very beginning, authority has been the central issue in the Church and remains so today; but not only the Church, in all human community. To live in community we need to establish authority. In a community of love and goodwill authority is barely visible. In a community that fragments, authority becomes apparent and can need to enforce itself; it takes on power. It is now believed hunter/gatherer groups were largely egalitarian, with women taking leading roles as well as men. Gods, as symbols of authority, appeared when human groups settled and became bigger. Institutions formed, embedding authority and hence decision making.

The original authority in the life of the Church had been the Spirit, as it had been in the lives of the great prophets, individuals with their own strong sense of God’s real presence. Immediately institutionalising processes however came into play to help contain the growing community; the election of a replacement for Judas to make twelve apostles, the disciplining deaths of Ananias and Sapphira, the election of deacons, the need for apostolic authority to receive the Spirit in Samaria, the vetting of Paul, the Jerusalem Council and so on. The answer to ’Where now our authority’ was a shifting sand between the Spirit and the emerging institution with its newly established authorities. And so it has always remained, but with each development of institutional authority so the Spirit became less needed to be immediately experienced or directly related to, a movement eventually capped off by the Church coming directly under the Empire and the Emperor.

Coupled with this institutionalising process was the shift in focus. Originally the focus was the carpenter from Nazareth, murdered by legitimate authority, risen from the dead, declared Son of God, the baptiser in the Holy Spirit, a fellow human being. The more the growing Church took on institutional authority and its reflection widened on just who Jesus was, the focus moved to the eternal Godhead, to God the Son and the Holy Trinity. This was now where real authority lay, in metaphysical ideas of the Godhead given earthly expression and affirmation in the liturgy through the hierarchy of the clergy and ultimately the Bishop of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople. The tension between Church and State was now set for more than a thousand years. We may hope the Spirit had some influence in this, but it is not hard to imagine that it may have been minor, if at all at times. The life of the Spirit went to the periphery, always at risk of being snuffed out by the institutional Church. Dostoyevski’s scene in The Brothers Karamazov between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor so wonderfully captures this tension.

The Reformation of course brought a major shift in the answer to the question ‘Where now our authority?’. I remember Professor Yule at the United Faculty in Melbourne claiming that for Luther authority lay in the preached Word, but such concession to the Spirit gave way generally to the written Word. Here was the new ground upon which to stand, augmented by various confessions, and articles of faith. The conscience and experience of the individual had been brought back into contention, but subject to the popular authority of preachers and the elucidation of doctrine garnered from the Bible. Nonetheless, in all this the Spirit in people’s everyday lives could manifest in quite overt ways, and not only in the individual’s subjective experience, as was the case in some of the preaching of John Wesley.

The last 500 years has been about the gradual questioning of biblical authority, on the one hand, by biblical studies and theology committed to the great cultural shifts we have undergone, and on the other the tightening of biblical authority, including the intellectual support for this by the original fundamentalists such as Hodge and Warfield. Culturally in the West this way of understanding ‘where now our authority’ reached a popular zenith in the world crusades of Billy Graham. But I wonder if it was also its end in any universal or global sense.

This then is now our dilemma in approaching our questions, ‘Where now our authority?’, or, ‘How now do we live?’ Do we remain ambivalent about the Spirit and stay with the great shifts in our culture and face an authority vacuum? Or do we put our lot in entirely with the Pentecostals and return to the Bible as the basis of our authority? Or do we all return to Mother Church and look to the Pope to give us our authority?

Or do we stay with the culture, on the one hand, but really take the Spirit seriously as well, on the other, but resisting fundamentalism and claiming our capacity to think for ourselves and act in the Spirit? I mean really taking the Spirit seriously. Can we who are drawn to liberality really do this? What would it mean?

I think this is what the Emerging Church is about or can be about. I think this is what Phyllis Tickle is about, and the shift is very big. It is The Great Emergence. How now do we live? Can we give up our argumentation and self righteousness; can we genuinely love and respect each other; can we seek the Spirit and the Spirit’s authority and place this above any other? Can we put everything on the table and yet honour and respect all that has gone before?Can we allow ourselves to be crucified rather than deny the truth of the Spirit? So many questions; so big a challenge.

Some may say, but isn’t this approach how the Quakers have been trying to live for centuries? Yes and No. Yes in that the Quakers have tried to give priority to the Spirit in everyday life and in their gatherings, at least at the inner, subjective level. But No in that they have not tried to interpret the whole Story in terms of the Spirit; more than that the crucifixion is not central in their approach to the Spirit. In that sense they have not taken the Spirit seriously enough. This is where Phyllis Tickle is different in what she is advocating. The Great Emergence includes re-thinking the whole Story from the point of view of the Spirit. God is back on the table in a radical way.
Who can tell the Spirit’s story? Who, indeed, would dare to attempt to? Of all the pieces and parts of theology and religion, faith and belief, talking and wondering, it is the nature, substance, and function of the Spirit that are sacrosanct and the most fraught with danger, should error be committed. Our forefathers and mothers have threaded their way very cautiously over the centuries, and we would do well to remember that. Yet there is a story to be told here— or better said, there is the beginning of a story, and it wants telling, albeit carefully. (Tickle 2014: Kindle postions 1852-1856)

In my Introduction I proposed that the great intellectual challenge we face is finding a new meta-narrative in which to understand ourselves, a meta- narrative that embraces science but understands its boundaries, that considers all spiritual and religious traditions seriously and which in effect provides a universal story in which we can all fit as players, including the Christ and the Buddha and the Prophet and other great spiritual figures. And also the despots, the Hitlers, the Herods and the multitudes that rarely see beyond their sense-certainty existence.

I think that this meta narrative needs to be the Spirit’s story. Can we begin to dare to tell it.
We should not underestimate the shift required in our thinking here. It means seeing the Spirit as the main player in creation and history, not only as a nice little post resurrection gift to believers within the Christian tradition. Only Hegel has ever really attempted this before at this grand level; but he got it wrong in the end, or so I think. He failed to see the centrality of Christ’s death and resurrection in the story of the Spirit in creation and history, although I think he alludes to it as we shall see in my last talk. Absolute knowledge for Hegel in the end was the philosophy he was expounding. But he had grasped the big picture, and he had grappled with the Spirit in a way the Church has never done. It was his philosophical assumptions that won the day for him, however, rather than the possibilities of experience in our evolved psyches. In any further attempt to tell the Spirit’s story we need to stay within the boundaries of human experience. This means finding what those boundaries are.

It means also re-interpreting Christ’s death and resurrection as the work of the Spirit, which amongst other things may lead to a quite new understanding of the atonement. It is this possibility that I am introducing in these talks. Regaining real meaning for these central events is at the heart of any new meta-narrative that is to be true to Christ.

It means bracketing the metaphysics the Church worked so hard at in the first centuries and is so historically committed to even now, and focussing on God as Spirit, and all that can be drawn into this in terms of the point and purpose of creation and life. The importance of this metaphysics is not being doubted, just bracketed so that we can approach it all afresh from the point of view of the Spirit.

It means embracing the authority of the crucifixion as our authority, mediated to us by the Spirit. There is no ecclesiastical hierarchy in this; but there is the trust of little children however. The power of the Spirit comes only to a broken spirit.

It also means trying to understand the Spirit as both an experience and a concept in relation to our scientific, materialist culture; and I want to finish this talk looking very briefly at just that.

Jesus was very wary of people who sought miracles for their own sake. I remember in my early days being told of people who witnessed miracles of healing yet went away as dead to God, to the reality of the Spirit, as ever. No sense of the Spirit’s presence had occurred for them regardless of what they had witnessed with their eyes. And although, as I have already said, the obvious manifestation of Spirit in the early church was very important, something bystanders could witness, the really crucial thing was what was actually happening within these people. What were they experiencing within themselves? What was their subjective experience? It is the conscious reality of the Spirit within the psyche that makes all the difference. This can be sometimes a sensing of energy and power, sometimes strong imagery, sometimes gentle words, sometimes a strong conviction of uncleanness and sin, sometimes ‘a dusting over the pit’, sometimes a deep peace, sometimes overwhelming joy. It is as if something quite new and different has come into consciousness. The most general word that makes sense to me in describing these subjective experiences is Presence.

There have been some significant attempts to be scientific about this approach to inner subjective spiritual or religious experience. To do so means collecting data, analysing it, theorising about it, and trying to verify any hypotheses. The first significant attempt was by the philosopher/ psychologist William James, published as the Varieties of Religious Experience. In more recent times the biologist Alistair Hardy established the Religious Experience Research Unit (later Centre) at Oxford, which eventually moved to the University of Wales. Hardy’s early efforts were interesting. He approached the churches first, expecting this to be the most fruitful ground to find data. He got almost no response. This is so worth reflecting on. So he went to the general media and was inundated. Food for serious reflection here. Some of his later colleagues have estimated that some 70 to 80% of people in the general community have had experiences they are prepared to declare as religious or spiritual. Few take these experiences to church. Does this maybe match the hard time the institutional church has given the Spirit over the centuries?

While research approaches to such subjective experiences can be deemed scientific in principle, nothing concrete or objective can be asserted about what might lie behind such experiences. Individuals may have strong beliefs arising from these experiences, but they remain individual and subjective. Various explanations can be brought forward, or the validity of the experiences denied and dismissed outright. This is particularly so in our time when ‘evidence based’ science prevails at all levels. Anything that can’t be replicated on demand in an objective way is denied, or worse still is deemed supernatural nonsense and hence entirely rejected.

Even Jung hesitates at this point. In his famous paper Spirit and Life, published in 1926, he upholds Spirit as something psychologically real, but as a psychologist he would not go beyond this and posit any necessarily objective reality behind these psychological experiences. This was a professional boundary. But personally he could and did. When toward the end of his life he was asked did he believe God exists, he answered: I do not believe God exists, I know He does.

How he knew this was through his subjective experience. This is the rub we need to come to terms with in telling the Spirit’s story. God as Spirit is pure subjectivity. I think Hegel was the first to say this in this way. Here is a real boundary for science, and I and many others believe it is fundamentally important this boundary is culturally recognised. Our subjectivity is increasingly under threat from science and technology. The reality of our inner being is being denied.

Science’s need for objectivity in relation to God can only answered if, for instance, a human being is God; and of course Christianity is saying just that. Or perhaps the Universe or the Multiverse. But God as Spirit can only be subjective, even if we objectively see its effects like ‘the wind in the trees’ as Jesus said.

​So in telling the Spirit’s story I believe we have to start taking our own spiritual and psychic nature seriously, to focus on our subjectivity and develop this focus. Who I am as an experiencing person is known by me only in the flow of psychic images. We are ourselves spirits. I do not even experience my own body except as images in spirit and psyche. To tell the story of Spirit we have to really come to terms with our spiritual nature as human subjects. I am happy to prophesy that this is the most urgent issue emerging in the world today. May we who would follow Christ stop trying to think of God as Object and start living God as Subject.

To do this we have to start valuing our inner experiences and sharing them together in our gathering and worship. One such central and vital experience of the inner life is the subject of my next talk.
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Talk 5: Recognising the Abyss

6/12/2019

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Talk Five: Recognising the Abyss
I begin this talk with part of a video by Jordan Peterson entitled What Talking to Sam Harris Made Me Realize in the Past Few Month. There is an edited transcript of the relevant parts in the appendix.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_ENmvKoV8&feature=youtu.be

As mentioned in my Introduction, Peterson has emerged in the last few years as a lecturing and media phenomenon able to creatively engage with the best minds on the planet. One of those is Sam Harris, the most articulate of the Four Apocalyptic Horsemen of the New Atheism, the other three being Dawkins, Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens. Peterson is a clinical psychologist, interested in myths and religion and spirituality. He is able to engage the world of ideas in a way I think no churchman could I think. We are far too defensive and concerned for our authority. A comment published with this video reads, ‘The Peterson-Harris debates are a perfect example of how people who don't agree with one another can have excellent conversations simply by not assuming bad faith on the part of their rhetorical opponent.’ How different western history might have been if that capacity had prevailed earlier in the Church and society generally. Hopefully it is not too late.


The point in playing this video is to show that a very ancient mythological trope, and its importance to the human condition, is alive and well in the minds of some people in our day, despite the efforts of evidence based medicine and our materialistic culture. Certainly the examples Peterson uses, Simba the lion and Pinnochio, are hardly earth shattering. But he uses them to bring out the underlying popular psychology version of what is a very ancient process, at least for men but also for modern women. Gaining our self hood in the world can involve, depending perhaps on what has gone before in our lives, facing ‘the abyss’ in which we encounter the dark side of life and our own mortality. If we prevail, we become a self in the world that can make a difference; we can take on, to varying degrees, the role of the hero and responsibility for ourselves.


Facing the abyss, or going into the underworld is referred to as a katabasis.


Simba and Pinocchio both experienced a 
katabasis, or descensus, and in each case this was followed by an anabasis, a descent and a rising, a going down and a coming up. So also did Odysseus, Aeneus, Juno, Proserpina, Orpheus, Enlil, Ishtar, Gilgamesh, Baal, Osiris, Re, Kirdir, Inanna, Dante, to name a few; and the sun descended to the netherworld each day, as well, only to rise again in the morning, renewed and victorious. In the words of the Wikipedia article on katabasis,
The trip to the underworld is a mytheme of comparative mythology found in a diverse number of religions from around the world.

This underworld has been known by many names, Hades, Sheol, the Shades, the Abyss, the netherworld, Hell, the place of the dead, the Grave, and so on; a universal myth that took in both the heroes of traditions and the everyday reality of people growing up and engaging the world responsibly.

But whereas the trip to the underworld for the ancients was to a place that was believed to actually and objectively exist, somewhere under the earth, for Simba and Pinocchio the underlying assumption in Peterson’s mind, and for us moderns generally, is that katabasis is psychological, real mind you, but not objectively so in any scientific sense.

There is something here very important I think for a modern understanding of Christ’s death and resurrection, and the period in between, traditionally referred to as Holy Saturday and taken very seriously by Catholics and the Orthodox, but largely neglected or ignored by Protestants until quite recently.


At the time of Christ, it was generally accepted that when you died your soul descended to the dead, to one of a number of possible compartments, paradise (Abraham’s bosum) for instance, or the abyss or Tartarus, and so on. So of course when Christ died he descended to the dead. According to Matthew, Jesus himself spoke about this descent.


It is only in Matthew that Jesus himself speaks of his descent into the underworld between his death and resurrection. The Scribes and the Pharisees demand a “sign” from Jesus and he tells them that the only sign that will be given to them is “the sign of the Prophet Jonah”. Jesus further

explains this sign. “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt 12: 40). Therefore, the origin of the doctrine of the Descensus may be able to be traced to the very ipsissima verba of Christ. (Bass 2274-2281 Kindle edition)

Other references to Christ’s descent in the New Testament are still argued about by scholars, but what does seem clear is that at least from the time of 1 Peter, much reflection was put into just what Christ might have been doing in this descent, between his death and resurrection.


All in all, the historical argument for the doctrine of Christ’s Descensus is one of the most primitive and most agreed upon teachings of the ancient church. We have found that from Ignatius on, the Fathers believed that Christ had released the OT saints from Hades and most of them also mention his preaching to them. In the late third and fourth century, the battle imagery receives vivid detail as Christ destroys the gates of Hades, defeats Satan, rescues Adam, and tramples on Death and Hades. (Bass, Kindle Locations 649-652).


The sealing of Christ’s destiny as in fact a descent into Hell came when the original words ‘descensus ad inferos’ in the Apostles’ Creed was changed to ‘descendit ad inferna’ possibly to counter the heresy of Apollinarianism. It has been this version of the Creed that has prevailed to our day, but now some modern translations have returned to the original and declare that Christ ‘descended to the dead’, as is the case in 
Uniting in Worship 2. But as many scholars have pointed out, when the ancients said ‘descended to the dead’, they meant a whole lot more than that he was buried. So paradoxically, this return to the original Greek in our day in some translations misrepresents the ancient tradition and would be repudiated by the Church Fathers. To descend to the dead was to descend into the netherworld. For which moderns does the netherworld still exist.

The Reformers fully embraced the traditional descensus to Hell, with two notable exceptions.

Calvin is the first to understand the phrase metaphorically for Christ 
experiencing (descending into) hell on the cross before his burial instead of after his burial, but Calvin is still affirming that the Descensus is taught in the Scriptures. (Bass, Kindle Locations 632-634)

The descent on the cross for Calvin is to a place of punishment, God’s wrath, something Christ was taking on for us. This was very different from the tradition. But perhaps more significantly for the current debate, at least two of the Reformers denied a literal descent.


Zwingli’s Zurich colleague Leo Jud (AD 1482– 1542) in a 1534 catechism and Martin Bucer (AD 1491– 1551) were the first to argue that the Descensus meant merely that Christ descended to the grave (burial) and thus rejecting this doctrine of a literal descent after fifteen centuries of the church affirming it. (Bass, Justin. Kindle Locations 637-639). 
Justin Bass, one of the leading Protestant thinkers reasserting the importance of the descensus in our day said this about Bucer.

To equate the Descensus with Christ’s burial was nothing more than a pre- Bultmannian attempt to demythologize the NT text because Bucer and those who followed him could no longer accept an underworld beneath the earth. (Bass, Justin. Kindle Locations 644-646).


Nonetheless, this denial has been reaffirmed in our day by theologian Wayne Grudem in his much discussed paper 
Christ did not Descend into Hell published in 1991. My sense in Grudem’s case is that he is not so much wanting to demythologize the text because of no longer accepting an underworld beneath the earth, but rather because he is offended by the idea that God the Son could ever possibly enter Hell, a place of punishment. At the same time he seems to hold a Calvinist substitutionary understanding of Christ’s death as a bearing of our sins. He argues his case from the original version of the Apostles’ Creed and his own interpretations of the relevant biblical texts. As indicated above, he negates the ancient tradition and understanding.

Interestingly, however, Grudem’s difficulty in thinking God the Son might enter Hell in any sort of negative way is reflected in the Catholic Church and 
always has been. The traditions of Holy Saturday have been a very important part of Catholic doctrine, carefully enunciated in the two major Catechisms still used. It is referred to as the Harrowing of Hell, a triumphant descent into the netherworld to release Adam and Eve and all the saints of antiquity, completely reflecting the received tradition. However, the Catholic Church’s most distinguished twentieth century theologican, Hans Urs von Balthasar has challenged this.

Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar has attempted to synthesize the RCC view and the Calvinian position, arguing that Christ’s descent occurs on Holy Saturday and that in it Jesus in his hypostatically unified divinity and humanity experiences the final judgment, separation from the Father, on behalf of humanity. This has been met with serious opposition from many fronts, but has also been argued by at least one RCC theologian to be a legitimate interpretation of Catholic doctrine. (Emerson)


It may interest you to know that the debate around Balthasar’s understanding of Christ’s death and descent is being actively pursued at the moment in Catholic circles. The strongest criticism and some of the strongest support has come from women. Lyra Pitstick in 2016 attacked Balthasar’s interpretation as heretical, only to be countered in 2018 by Riyako Hikota. Traditionally the descent in Catholic circles was entirely victorious, as taught in the Catechisms. For Balthasar it was the complete isolation of Christ from God in Hell for our sakes, to be then followed by the ascent.


I will have succeeded in this talk if I have left you feeling a little confused. I am wanting to leave you with the thought that the idea of the abyss is alive and well psychologically in our modern world, even at a popular level, as attested to by the likes of Jordan Peterson; and that this reflects a universal myth in the ancient world of descent into the underworld followed by an ascent; and that the Church from its earliest days attested to this experience for Christ, but with significant differences from the myth and with some claim to historical certainty. That the netherworld or place of the dead was a real place somewhere was assumed. With many variations, this descent was seen as triumphant, followed by the resurrection. Not so for Calvin and Balthasar.


For them the descent was dark and horrific, redeemed by the ascent.


Another significant Protestant thinker who is reflecting on all this is Matthew Emerson. Let him have the last say, and I intentionally emphasize the last sentence.

Although the doctrine, and even the event itself, is questioned today, it is clear that the early Christian theologians, and subsequently most of historic Christianity, have affirmed that Jesus descended to the dead and accomplished something there. The question throughout the history of doctrine has been what exactly Christ accomplished in his descent.(Emerson)

Like the atonement, it is still an open question.


In my next talk, I am going to suggest what that accomplishment might have been. This suggestion comes directly out of my own experience that started me on my journey with God, and my reading of our modern world.
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Talk 6: The Triumph of the Spirit

6/12/2019

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Talk Six: The Triumph of the Spirit
We come now to the last talk in this series. In Talk Two, following an Introduction, I advocated for myself that in thinking about God and Christ I fully accept the modern cosmology of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, and the evolution of Life on Planet Earth beginning around 4 billion years ago. And instead of trying to establish doctrine and dogma in talking about this, I rather adopt the flexible methodology of Theodrama. And in thinking about the evolution of Life within this Theodrama, I give equal weight to the evolution of our psychic structures as to our bodies, our minds as to our brains.
In Talk Three I admitted that in doing this it was very important to place the scriptures of my own tradition of Christianity into this Theodrama in a way that was honouring of the Bible but which looked at it historically and archeologically. In other words, while at times I may simply read the Bible devotionally without any questions, my study of it would as much as possible be through the eyes of its authors and the context in which they wrote. In this I largely accepted the scholarship of R.E.Friedman. The Bible is a story within the Story, a theodrama from another time within the Theodrama in our Time, with immediate and vital links between the two.
In Talk Four, I suggested the long orphanage of the Holy Spirit in relation to the Father and the Son in the history of the Church be brought to an end, and we truly accept, with all its challenges, that we live in the Age of the Spirit. What happens to our thinking if we give priority to the Spirit of God in our modern Theodrama and see it as the Spirit’s story? As the Spirit was there in the Big Bang and the act of Creation, so the Spirit has been there throughout all the evolutionary processes, and throughout human history. In scope we are approaching a vision as big as Hegel’s vision of the Spirit, but with the climax and resolution, as we shall see, in the Spirit’s action in Christ rather than the thought of Hegel.
In Talk Five, after listening to part of a video by Jordan Peterson, I suggested that the modern psychological idea of facing the abyss is connected to the universal mythological theme of katabasis or the descent to the
underworld. Christ’s death was so interpreted as a descent, possibly even by Jesus himself, and eventually became fixed in the Church’s mind as a descent into Hell. But this has been a victorious and glorious descent in the mind of the Church that freed the saints in Hades and broke the gates of Hell, to be questioned only at the Reformation by one Reformer who could no longer believe that the underworld existed, and another, namely John Calvin, that Christ’s descent into Hell occurred on the cross and was a punishment for humankind’s sin. And the person to the Catholic Church into dilemma about this was Balthasar, influenced as he had been by Barth. The implication of this, for both Calvin and Balthasar, is that the descent was anything but victorious and glorious, only to be overcome by the resurrection, which was. I left you with a statement at the end from theologian Matthew Emerson: The question throughout the history of doctrine has been what exactly Christ accomplished in his descent.
In other words it is still an open question. As is the atonement generally.
Although I have selected a book to focus this talk, as I have done before, the words that I most want to head this talk are from St Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians.
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. (1Corinthians 2:10b NIV)
I have always loved this passage, but for me now it is central to my understanding of what Christ accomplished in his descent.
Our last book is Jon Mills’ Underworlds: Philosophies of the unconscious from psychoanalysis to metaphysics. This follows on from an earlier work The Unconscious Abyss: Hegel’s Anticipation of Psychoanalysis. As mentioned in the
introductory talk Mills has re-grounded the idea of the unconscious back into the western philosophical tradition in a new way, at a time when materialist science and the technology that is flowing from it seem to be taking over entirely. I think Mill is onto something extremely important.
In my last talk I mentioned that at least one Reformer, Martin Bucer, denied Christ’s descensus because he could no longer accept the idea of a netherworld to descend into. Justin Bass, a modern day Protestant theologian, sees this as a pre-Bultmannian de-mythologization, one that has receives full support from materialistic science. The descent to an underworld for many now in our culture is sheer nonsense. But what was at stake in this de- mythologization was enormous, nothing less than the shaking of the foundations. Get rid of the nether or underworld world and you have undermined the world of everyday life as we had received it from the ancient world. Mills put it this way:
The hidden abyss of the underworld is tantamount to a collective unconsciousness, whether this be a world soul (anima mundi) or the archaic deposit of human experience organized on primordial levels of internalized representations (représentations collectives), desire and conflict as cultural identifications that fuel the mythos of collective peoples. (Mills 2014: 7).
What was unconsciously real as myth had to re-assert its reality more consciously to survive as the modern world dawned. And it did. Philosophy came to rescue and then psychoanalysis.
The Reformation period saw the beginning of a new philosophical tradition beginning with Descartes. Human thought at the beginning of the modern period discovered the idea of consciousness in thinking about the self, a major development on the received tradition dominated by Plato and Aristotle. The English word ‘consciousness’ was first used in 1632. The adjective ‘unconscious’ appeared first in 1712. Writes Jon Mills,
Although all human experience is ultimately mediated by mind, in antiquity they did not have a concept for the unconscious. This was represented by myth, allegory, ritual, religion and anthropomorphic cosmogony, what was deemed to belong to a netherworld that was believed to lie beneath the
material world of telluric appearances. Mills, Jon. Underworlds (p. 2).
Because the notion of consciousness is a modern (not an ancient) concept, early cultures did not have a word for the ‘unconscious’ in the way it is commonly used today; there-fore, the nature of the soul was not examined in this light. But the unconscious depths of the soul were not entirely neglected, as many pre-Socratic philosophers attempted to delineate. Mills, Jon. Underworlds: (p. 8).
In fact, both Plato and Aristotle of course reflected at great length on the human soul and the human condition, and in this the idea of an unknown world having influence on a known world is fully implied.
Plato not only anticipates the Freudian unconscious, he also stipulates how desire can override reason and a sense of shame belonging to our ethical compass. It is here that we may see how Plato was the first psyche-analyst when he articulates the intimate relationship between desire, reason and morality, how the soul possesses a natural constitution that is instinctually driven, develops habits in relating to others and the environment, and that our true characters awaken during sleep when the soul is at rest, whether this be the ‘rational, gentle and dominate part’ (9:571c) or disquieted passion, unruliness, and anger (9:572). Mills, Jon. Underworlds: (p. 9).
Mills makes a similar reflection on Aristotle with the major addition that for Aristotle the soul is bound to the body but not reducible to matter. He is possibly the first Monist. The Mind/Body issue has been around for a long time.
But once the idea of consciousness had emerged, followed by the adjective ‘unconscious’ that eventually became a noun, the nature of reflection on the mind and soul took on a new objectivity that gave us Leibnitz, Kant, and the German idealists, and, especially for Mills, Hegel. The underworld had been reborn but now as the basis and foundation of the human psyche. Our consciousness and our capacity to feel and think and be aware of ourselves was all built over an inner psychic structure, which for all intents and purposes can be thought of as at bottom an abyss, an underworld but now in the individual’s own soul or being. And from Hegel, we had von Hartmann,
and then Freud, and Jung, and Adler, and Fairbairn, and Kohut and Stolorow, and so on. For Mills this new conception of the human soul coming fully to light for the first time however was in the ideas of Hegel, building on Kant.
As an arch-rationalist, Hegel provides one of the first attempts in the history of Western metaphysics to show how unconscious psychic forces precede reason, and how the abyss is an indispensable aspect of his entire philosophy. Mills, Jon. Underworlds: (p. 18).
The abyss had returned, no longer ‘out there’ but ‘in here’.
Now there is a much easier way to begin to see this amazing transition from an external, supposedly objective under or netherworld, that undergirded traditional society and culture, re-emerging for modern consciousness into the nature and structure of the human psyche. Remember that Hegel wrote well before Darwin persuaded us that biologically we were all evolved from the primordial first living cells. Once we really accept biological evolution, and it certainly does not have to be the Neo-Darwinian version of Richard Dawkins, we are bound I believe to accept also that our psychic structures, the basis of our capacity to be conscious and self- conscious, must necessarily also be deemed to have evolved. Remember we are not talking brain, although brain is all part of it, we are talking psyche, soul, mind and spirit. We are talking with the concepts of our subjectivity.
Freud was not the first to see the soul as an evolved structure. It was Jung. According to Hall and Nordby.
The placing of the psyche within the evolutionary process was Jung’s preeminent achievement. (Hall and Nordby :.39)
The psyche goes back to the first inner registering of life, possibly back to LUCA. Jung saw this.
The deeper ‘layers’ of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. ‘Lower down’, that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly
collective until they are universalized and extinguised in the body’s materiality, ie. in chemical substances. The body’s carbon is simply carbon. Hence ‘at bottom’ the psyche is simply ‘world’. (Jung 1979:420)
My consciousness is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic non-ego that fills them with non-spatial images. And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors.... Besides this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche. (Jung 1979:418)
In the broadest terms, for example, psyche in the universe possibly started as vague inner awareness, then stronger awareness, then objective awareness, then feeling, then soul, then complex feeling, then perception, then thought, then conscious thought, then mind, then self-conscious thought, then intentionality, then spirit; inner structure building upon itself, evolving with the evolution of the material body. And at the centre of this vast reservoir of collective images formed over billions of years, is Nothing - Carbon, the abyss, not dissimilar to David Christian’s clayton’s ‘God’ I mentioned in the second talk: a sort of nothingness full of potential.
What if we think of this as the hell Christ descended into, the abyss that was in his soul and is also in ours. When we say he descended we mean that he, in his consciousness, descended into his unconscious to as many levels as possible. Or alternatively, amounting to the same thing, his unconscious was brought progressively to consciousness, as he died.
But why would this be necessary, and how could it happen?
We are so used, particular in Protestantism to think of Christ’s death as punishment for our sins. What happens though if we think of it from the point of view of the Spirit. Here again Hegel is so helpful. For Hegel, nature and history are about the unfolding of Spirit, the implicate into the explicate, to be re-capitulated and come back to itself eventually into human consciousness. In terms of human consciousness, the omega point in the
process he called absolute Spirit and knowledge, where subject and object are One. In Christ’s death the psychic history of the race became conscious, and the energy to do this was and is the Spirit. He has a remarkable passage with which he ends the Phenomenology of Spirit that points to the Spirit coming to itself in Christ’s death in Absolute Knowing.
The goal, Absolute Knowing, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the recollection of the Spirits as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their realm. Their preservation, regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History; but regarded from the side of their [philosophically] comprehended organization, it is the Science of Knowing in the sphere of appearance: the two together, comprehended History, form alike the inwardizing and the Calvary of absolute Spirit, the actuality, truth and certainty of his throne, without which he would be lifeless and alone. Only ‘from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth for Him his own infinitude’. (Hegel 1977:493)
So in this understanding, as I interpret it, Christ’s descent into the abyss is a recapitulation into his consciousness of all that has gone before in the psychical history of the race, to the first structures of the psyche, and the Nothingness of the abyss. And the energy and power required to do this, to take Christ down, or to bring his psyche up into consciousness, is the power of the Holy Spirit searching the depths of both God and human being.
For Hegel, the abyss is the ultimate ground from which consciousness emerges, and is pure determinate negation which is present throughout the development of spirit. By virtue of its unconscious ontology, the realm of the abyss is a central principle in the phenomenology of spirit. (Mills 2014: 26).
Christ’s death, his descent into the abyss, and his resurrection is the great triumph of the Spirit of God. The whole of the story of life is recapitulated into Christ’s consciousness and the Spirit of God is now the Spirit of Christ, as St Paul says. The human race and all life has been completely spiritualised in Christ. Christ is truly the Man who is God. The new Creation is born.
This is my answer to Emerson’s question: this is what Christ accomplished
in his death, descent and resurrection.
So much more to say of course. This is only the bare bones. Much remains for me to be working on in preparation for my book No Ordinary Death: Re- Thinking Christ for the Twenty First Century, non less than showing the depth of Hegel’s thought about the Spirit and how the foundations for this in his thought came from Luther. Jon Mills shows that Hegel’s dialectic can be used to further Freud’s psychoanalysis in understanding the movement of spirit in consciousness. The challenge for me is to show how the Spirit engages with our spirits and anyone touched by and open to the Spirit of God
There is no time at this point to look in any detail into the implications of this understanding of Christ’s death, descent and resurrection for the life of the Church. But I want to raise a few points that could have implications for us.
1. This view of the death and resurrection of Christ is certainly about Christ but also fundamentally about what happened to his spirit through the Presence of the Holy Spirit within him. It is about recapitulating the story of life into the consciousness of Christ, and taking humanity into the eternal and spiritual dimension of the new creation. So it is not primarily about sin at all. The God behind this is entirely positive and loving and to be celebrated as such. Embracing or resisting the Spirit does however remain central, and there’s the rub.
2. I think it means also re-thinking building Christian community around Christ the crucified and resurrected man, not God the Son the second person of the Holy Trinity. This is of course highly controversial if not contentious. The sense of authority we need is the authority of the Spirit not the authority of the ecclesiastical structure. A whole new way of thinking and acting has to come out of this.
3. Coupled with this is the taking of the Holy Spirit seriously and being renewed in prayer and conviction. The Spirit is not an optional add on to ecclesiastical religion. He is front and centre in thought and practice. He is God to be experienced and followed in real and intentional ways.
4. How we use the Bible, how we introduce it and teach it. This is a wide open field. Bible ignorance, even in the church, is flourishing, along with an extraordinary lack of a sense of history.
5. Learning to communicate about soul and spirit and the unconscious, which includes overcoming the fear of these things that seems to grip many church people. Defining these terms clearly in our scientific culture is no longer difficult. But it does require moving on from the sort of sense certainty that materialism encourages and which we have increasingly assumed in the Church.
But this whole Theodrama is not only about the Church. It is about the whole of humanity. That is the point of this whole apologetic. And it is not about religion, as such; it is primarily about spirituality. In the end it is about our freedom as self determining human beings moving rapidly into a world increasingly controlled by other human beings through artificial intelligence and technology. If we who would follow Christ as someone central to the whole race, we have to be able to witness to this conviction in a much more convincing and all embracing way than that the Bible is the Word of God, or Christ died for us to keep us from a wrathful God. For me, his death has the most profound meaning as a triumph of the Spirit in nature and history, nothing can lie outside it, and we need the witness of this same Spirit in our lives now as never before.
Last Saturday the ABC published an article of a very large grant of money to study further the starry heavens.
The universe has a dark secret and an Australian astrophysicist is at the vanguard of a worldwide effort to try and unravel it. Professor Tamara Davis of the University of Queensland has just been given five years and a multi- million-dollar Laureate Fellowship from the federal government to explore the dark side of the universe. To help her she has an international coterie of the some of the smartest minds on planet earth and two phenomenally powered cameras on huge telescopes. The secret hiding from us in plain sight
is called dark energy, a mysterious anti-gravitational force that is pushing the universe to expand at an accelerated rate. It's the abyss between the stars — making up 70 per cent of everything. Combined with dark matter, which in contrast pulls things towards it, they make up 95 per cent of everything. Understanding dark energy may be the key to figuring out the most vexing issue in physics, the problem Albert Einstein spent the last 50 years of his life trying to solve; the fact that two fundamental theories don't make sense together. If that makes your head hurt a bit, don't worry. Professor Davis is good at explaining ridiculously complex concepts to people with non- astrophysicist-sized brains.
There is abyss everywhere it seems. Would not it be great if such funding was make available for exploring the dark side of the soul as well. Although Jung ended up with a system many think is complete, it is quite clear from some of his last writings that he believed he had only started exploring the unconscious and the ways it becomes conscious. And it seems clear also, that both he and Freud had little knowledge of the foundational work that had been laid by Hegel.
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Appendix

6/12/2019

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Appendix:
Transcript of the Jordan Peterson video referred to in Talk 5: What Talking to Sam Harris Made Me Realize in the Past Few Months. (Edited)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_ENmvKoV8&feature=youtu.be
What new wisdom have you acquired in the past few months that you want to share with us?
Well I've got one I think. I thought up a bunch of new things but this one I'm really happy with. Some of you know that there's a mythological trope that I discussed fairly frequently about ‘rescuing your father from the belly of the Dragon or the belly of the beast’. It's a motif that you can see in the Lion King. You see it when Simba is being initiated by the baboon after Neljä humiliates him because he's still a pathetic adolescent. He follows the baboon, I think it's a mandrill actually, down underground, essentially through a long tunnel. There's a lot of kind of scary music in the background and he ends up contemplating himself in a dark pool. And then his father appears in the sky. So that's one example of the reconstruction of the mythology of encountering your father in the abyss. You look into the abyss and you see your father.
And then in the Pinocchio story when he's trying to become a genuine human being instead of a marionette pulled by other people's strings; or an erotic(?) or a liar or a jackass, as those are his alternate destinies. He goes down to the darkest place he could find at the bottom of the ocean and finds the biggest monster he can look at and inside he finds his father and then he rescues him. The question is ‘why do you find your father when you look into the abyss?’
I really do think I figured this out and it's quite exciting to me. It's such a brilliant image. So we know as clinicians and also I would say as sensible people, and there's good clinical documentation of this, that if you imagine someone's pursuing a goal and some of the things they have to accomplish or confront on the way to that goal frighten them and they start to avoid and then they get more afraid and of course their ability to pursue their goal or to
accomplish the goal deteriorates because they're avoiding. If you're a psychotherapist or even a friend or a supportive loved one, let's say, you're going to encourage the person to face the challenges that are making them afraid, to face them voluntarily and what happens as a consequence of that is that the person usually is able to overcome those fears and develop the necessary skills and to prevail and that's partly because not so much because they get less afraid but because they get more skilled and more courageous.
So imagine that if you bite off a little more than you can chew you get stronger as a consequence and you do that in the gym for example when you go lift weights. You lift weights that are a little heavier all the time and as a consequence you develop yourself physically and you turn into who you could be. You turn into more than you are. Okay, so if you face fears a little bit at a time, fears and challenges, and you do that voluntarily then you become more than who you are.
Now let's recast that in archetypal language and make it into a kind of ultimate. So if you want to become everything that you could be then you look into the abyss itself, which is the darkest place that you can possibly contemplate and that would be the terror of mortality and insanity and of suffering and of malevolence, all of those. It would be like looking into hell I suppose, to some degree. By voluntarily doing that then you call upon the strongest part of yourself to respond and the strongest part of yourself is symbolised as the sleeping father nested inside the beast. So the fundamental truth when you look into an abyss is that you don't see the abyss if you look long enough. It's like the answer to Nietzsche's conundrum: if you look long enough into the abyss then the abyss looks into you. If you look long enough into an abyss, past when the abyss looks into you, you see who you could become in the form of your great ancestral figures nested inside the catastrophe of life and then you can join them so to speak. You can incorporate that and become stronger and you do that partly by taking on the challenge voluntarily and that informs you because you learn when you take on challenges voluntarily, you also do that as a consequence of psycho- physiological transformation when you place yourself in challenging situations.
Let's say the abyss is the archetype of the ultimately challenging situation, then you turn on new genes in your nervous system and in your body that code for new proteins and you build new structures inside of you and none of that's going to happen without the demand that's placed on you by willing to confront the full terror of life. I would say the full terror of life is something like the reality of suffering and death and the ever-present and the ever looming presence of malevolence in your own heart and in the heart of other people. So it's evil and suffering and to confront that is really, well, you risk blindness by confronting that. That's also a very old story. You risk damaging your vision, but if you do it forthrightly then you discover who you could be as a consequence and who you could be is the solution to malevolence and suffering. So that just blew me away when I figured that out. It was partly a consequence of having lengthy discussions with Sam Harris and thinking this through more and more and being pushed to think it through. I don't know if I've articulated it fully but articulating it more fully really had a profound effect on me
I think that's it's such a brilliant conceptualisation, that inside the darkest place is the heroic ancestor whose identity you could incorporate. Perfect it's perfect and I really believe it's true and what it does is it says that a human being is actually stronger than the greatest challenge that can be set before him or her and that's really something. The other thing that's so interesting about that is that it it transforms pessimism into optimism. It's like well the world is a very dark place it's full of suffering and it's full of malevolence and it might even be so full of suffering and malevolence that a reasonable person could question the justification of its being, as Ivan Karamazov does in theBrothers Karamazov which I would highly recommend by the way. That's an absolutely great book by Dostoevsky, but the truth of the matter seems to me that if you face the pessimism full-frontal so to speak then you find something in you that's strong enough to take it on and that's really saying something about the relationship between human beings and divinity, I would say, because it takes something of a transcendent power to be able to rise above the genuine suffering and malevolence of life and I do think that we have that within us if we don't shy away from the challenge. So you know there's in the
story of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. So the Holy Grail is one of two things; it's a cup that either held the wine that Christ drank at the Last Supper or that was used to catch his blood when he was speared on the cross. Either one but it's the reservoir let's say of the fluid that eternally nourishes. It's something like that and when you go to look for the Holy Grail you don't know where to look because you don't know where the Holy Grail is and so King Arthur and his knights who all sit at a round table because they're essentially equals. Each goes off to find the Holy Grail and each of them enters the forest to begin the quest at the place that looks darkest to him and that's another example of the same idea. It's another example of a dictum from Carl Jung which he extracted from the alchemical literature which was [quote in Latin] which means roughly speaking ‘what will be found’ or more to the point, ‘what you most need will be found where you least want to look’. But you have to look purposefully. If it chases you you are prey. If you confront it, then you are the thing that can transcend it and that's a unbelievably optimistic message because it suggests that if you're willing to take on the burden of being with its suffering and malevolence that you can awaken that which is within you that will allow you to prevail and God only knows how deep an idea that is. It might be the deepest of ideas because who knows what the limit of a human being is. So well that's some of the wisdom so to speak that I've acquired in the last few months and there's quite a bit more too. I'm gonna write all this down and hopefully publish a bunch of it in my next book. I figured out a bunch about hierarchies too and how they function and I've developed a whole new way of conceptualising one of the things I was arguing with Sam Harris was the relationship between facts and values...............
Bibliography
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Christian, D. (2018) Origin Story: A Big History of Everything. Penguin, Random House, UK.
Friedman, R.E. (2011) Who Wrote the Bible? E-book available on Amazon.
Friedman, R.E. (2017) The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters.HarperOne, New York.
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Jung, C.G. (1969) The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW Voume 8. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Henley.
Jung, C.G. (1979) Memories, Dreams and Reflections. Collins Fount Paperback, Glasgow.
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Nagel, T. (2012) Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
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Peterson, J. (2018) What Sam Harris Made Me Realise in the Past Few Months. YouTube video https://youtu.be/Mc_ENmvKoV8
Pitstick, L. (2016) Christ’s Descent into Hell: John Paul II, Joseph Ratzinger,
and Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Theology of Holy Saturday. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Tickle, P. (2014) The Age of the Spirit: How the Ghost of an Ancient Controversy is Shaping the Church. Baker Books, Grand Rapids Michigan.
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