Tombs For Gods Who Once Spoke

Temples, churches, mosques,
you great piles of stones
gathered against entropy,
the fruits of hard labour,
gathering moss in the rain and
reaching, always reaching
high to poke the underbelly
of heaven.
In all my travels, in all
the steps I’ve climbed
and candle-lit interiors,
heavy with incense and ghee,
I’ve bowed into,
in all the reverent silent spaces
I’ve hushed through,
I’ve heard only this:
‘We are a people who once knew something,
who once understood and had revelation.
And in high excitement
at our divine selection and elevated status
we built these tombs for
the gods who once spoke,
and have since heard
nothing.’

A friend of mine is travelling, and got me thinking about some of the ‘holy places’ I have visited across the world… many of which just have that sense of a room that someone has just left. And sometimes I wonder that’s what temple-building does. God just doesn’t like enclosed spaces; I guess she’s claustrophobic.

Great piece in The Guardian today about trying to get God out of a funeral… and finding that ‘He’ (sic) turns up nonetheless.

She may not have wanted Him at her funeral, but she needed Him. My sister, born in England in 1949, a singer of hymns in her primary school, grew up with Him. She knew that He elevates. God is the man for the big occasion…We are not a religiously observant nation – except when it really counts.

It made me wonder (very quickly) about the place we leave for ‘God’ and whether the following was too broad a generalisation: ‘higher’ churches have emphasised God in the grand and the luminous, while ‘lower’ churches have tended to preach about God in the mundane – the everyday boring stuff of our lives some way below the great rites of passage.

In other words, in its attempt to be ‘relevant’ evangelicalism has reduced God to tinkering with the small things: whether I find a parking space, or what a particular verse might mean. In talking of a personal relationship with God it has become all cuddly, and in doing so it has abandoned something more serious.

Nice bit of banter going on between Tony Jones and Pete Rollins, where Tony challenged Pete to ‘give up atheism for Lent’. Outlining what this might look like, he requests:

I’d like Pete to post some beautiful, flowery prayers on his blog.

I’d like Pete to make some conclusive claims about the characteristics of God.

I’d like Pete to answer some questions. I mean actually answer them, without telling a parable.

Beneath the humour I think there’s something interesting here. We’ve been talking about an ‘emerging church’ for some years now – but when, if ever, might we see something that is emerged?

I think Tony’s second point is actually very incisive, and begs a key question: can we make conclusive claims about the characteristics of God? I’ve been challenged in the comments on a previous post to ‘leave the whole Christian narrative behind’:

I can understand if you want to see the Christian narrative as a helpful aid towards looking at the world through certain themes, but do you really think there is anything more to it than that? Do you really think the Christian God exists and Jesus was his only begotten son sent to save us?

These are ‘core’ questions. And yet I find myself unable to give simple answers to them and tempted to move into parable a la Pete. It seems that there has been a period of unbinding, of critique and deconstruction. But at some point that has to stop, and something has to be, rather than be in opposition to something else.

Somewhere on my shelves I have a copy of Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology, and I wondered this morning – will we hit solid ground and be able to publish a systematic emerged theology any time soon? If so, what would it contain?

In ‘Other‘ I set out how a parallel situation in quantum physics, with its uncertainty principles, precipitated a huge crisis in what was ‘knowable’ about our universe:

In 1926 Werner Heisenberg outlined his ‘uncertainty principle’, which requires that ‘when the position of an atom is measured, the measurement process will leave the momentum of the atom changed by an uncertain amount inversely proportional to the accuracy of the measurement.’ Simply put: you can’t at the same time completely accurately measure both the position and velocity of a particle. Why? Because in order to observe anything, our eyes, or some other recording instrument, need to respond to the photons of light bouncing off the thing we are observing. The problem that Heisenberg established was that at the sub-atomic level, a photon bouncing off a particle would actually cause that particle to change direction. In fact, this phenomenon is occurring all the time: every time we shine a light on something we are moving it ever so slightly, it’s just that in the visible world of everyday objects the effects are totally negligible. But at the quantum level, these ‘observer effects’ are significant – and, without delving into the complex mechanical reasoning, lead to an basic level of uncertainty about a particle’s state.

Physicists did not like what Heisenberg had to say, because of the suggestion when this theory is extrapolated that there is actually no objective reality at all – things only ‘exist’ when we actually look at them. It was this that Einstein objected to; this that led to major arguments with Bohr over many years.

Regardless of this division, one key implication of Heisenberg’s work remains: as we attempt to look closer and closer into the structure of matter, matter itself becomes more and more elusive. In other words, though it may actually objectively exist, at some zoom level the world is no longer fully observable. [...]

For those of us who claim faith, there is a zoom level beyond which talk of God becomes impossible. This is the realm of faith. Our languages, our metaphors, simply break down in the face of some deeper, invisible reality. Though that reality may exist, we cannot observe it, and nor can it fully be put to the test.

The uncomfortable realisation that the physical world was, at its core, ‘strange’ seems paralleled in the church by what we might call the ‘crisis in divine immanence’ over the past twenty years. As the crisis in physics gave birth to an iconoclastic movement of quantum theorists, reacting against what they perceived as the failings of classical theory, so the crisis of immanence in the western church has perhaps precipitated the movement known as the emerging church – who in turn I see as reacting against the failings of what we might call ‘classical theology.’

Perhaps a systematic ‘emerged theology’ is never going to happen precisely because the key tenet of such a theology is that systematic analysis cannot apply. If so, where would that leave us? Is a completely relativistic world all we have left?

Very interesting story creeping up the ‘most read’ lists on the BBC today: David Beckham stopped to help someone who’s car had broken down on the A10.

The man blessed by this appearance professed to be ‘in absolute awe’ that Beckham himself had stooped to help him when his Nissan Primera broke down:

He asked if we were OK and I said: ‘David Beckham, I love you, mate’. All the way through he was smiling.

This, it seems, counts for news, for the man was subsequently interviewed on Radio 5Live, and the story, as I’ve said, has been put on the BBC News site.

So why blog about it? Well, I think that this is symbolic of a couple of things. Firstly the triviality of so much of our ‘news.’ The pressures of the 24 news cycle demand new stories, and this sort event – which is utterly insignificant – suddenly has airtime.

Secondly, I think it suggests something about our news consumption. I’m finding that I’m reading less and less news online, simply because it’s become so tiresome trawling through the banal and ridiculous every time I log on. Better to wait for a properly edited news bulletin in the evening where the dross has had time to boil off.

But thirdly, I think it says something about the extent to which we have become unhealthily infatuated with celebrity. Jonny blogged recently about Pete Ward’s new book Gods Behaving Badly, which looks to be a fascinating exploration of the way in which celebrities have replaced the divine in our lives. And looking that the comments the driver made above, this serves as a perfect example of that. He has experienced a ‘visitation’ from someone beyond, and will tell the tale in awe to his grandchildren.

As Jonny comments:

The conversation about celebrity is at its heart a conversation about the possible self – who am I and who do I aspire to be? Madonna, Paris Hilton, Tiger Woods, Princess Di and Michael Jackson turn out not to (just) be trashy but to be an arena in which contested notions of what it means to be human are being negotiated. Ward suggests that theological language and themes are at play in the conversation but transcendence has collapsed into the self – a sure sign that notions of the sacred are shifting.

Looks like a good read. More fulfilling than what counts for ‘news’ at the moment, anyway.

Whilst doing some sessions at St John’s College in Durham recently, the question of what community is was raised. There’s a whole lot of talk about ‘living in community’ and ‘faith communities’ and going out to plant ‘missional communities’ – but whilst a lot is written about what faith and mission may be, there seems to be a tacit understanding of community, and the word is often used without much thought – something I’ll admit I’m guilty of too.

Community is, at its most basic, people sharing something in common. This ‘life together’ might be geographical – sharing the same place – or tied to some other interest, like a local club or society. The strength of community is proportional to the importance of the thing held in common.

Christian community is, however, called to be something different. Where community draws people into commonality around a shared place or interest, Christianity draws people around…an absence. At the centre is an ascended, transformed, disappeared figure.

Let’s be clear about this: as Christians we do not gather around Christ. Though we may metaphorically talk about Christ being present with us, this is not physically true. Remember: it could have been. Jesus appeaered in flesh and blood after the resurrection, and shared life with his followers for a short period of time. There is no reason why this could not have continued, but it didn’t: Jesus left.

The Zizekian understanding of this – which I think fails to deal with the post-resurrection appearances properly – is that on the cross God really did die: we are left to take responsibility for our actions in the absence of a Big Other, and this draws us into community.

I’d want to modify that in the light of the resurrection: God has not died, but has chosen to be paradoxically present-absent, and thus chosen to leave us to gather around an absence. Why? Because it is only by gathering around absence that we begin to care for the other.

Communities that form around a present commons tend to work to protect and enclose that commons. This is the history of priestly religion: we gather in the holy temple because this is where our special common grail is. What is distinctive about Christian community is that it gathers around this paradoxically present absence. The resurrection thus entitles us to hope, to faith in the Big Other, but denies us the opportunity to collapse this into an enclosed religion that simply serves those on the inside. It is the absence – the divine ‘black hole’ as it were – that creates the gravity around which we gather, but with nothing at the centre we cannot enclose it, and are thus urged on by the present/absent spirit of Christ to serving those who are other.

To be honest, I think this is something that has been very rarely modelled as it is too challenging. It requires us to be the true atheists – to live as if there were no God – and thus to be the god that the other requires.

Always interested to hear from people who’ve read the book – and I’m always pleased to respond to questions it may have raised too. One from the other day:

I was very intrigued by your premise of a linear narrative of the way humanity’s relationship with God changes over time and even more by the idea that God could be learning along the way. I’ve long had a theological black hole in trying to reconcile the “Alpha & Omega” God who is outside of space and time with the narrative we read which seems to show the jealous and often cruel and bloodthirsty dictator of the OT find a better way in the end. I’d really be interested for you to expand your thoughts on this…

It may seem like the blagger in me to say this, but this is something I covered in more depth in The Complex Christ - so definitely have a read!

What I try to unpack there is the impossibility of separating the ‘truth‘ about God from our embedded-in-history perceptions of God. Because God is fundamentally abstract – despite what some choruses say we cannot meet God and explore God’s character in the same way we might do another person – we are left having to look back on God’s actions in history through the lens of the perceptions about God that our antecendents had.

In other words, it is impossible to pare apart saying that ‘God has matured over time’ and ‘our perceptions of what God is like have matured over time.’

I think this helps us to deal with the apparent paradox of a timeless God who behaved like a violent teenager in the Old Testament, and then tries to be all peaceable and loving in the New. It’s not that God has changed, but rather that society changed. This of course raises some very interesting questions about the nature of religion and the way in which cultures project their desires onto an invisible deity – and how we can ever discern the ‘truth’ about God.

In the previous post we considered the adage that ‘an enemy is simply a friend whose story I have not yet heard.’ In his book First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, Zizek critiques this, using the example of Hitler, questioning whether it would be right to befriend him:

“Is one then also ready to affirm that Hitler was an enemy only because his story had not been heard? Do the details of his personal life redeem the horrors that resulted from his reign?”

My arguement is that the adage does hold true, but pivots on the definition of friendship. Unless there is the possibility of empathy flowing both ways, then friendship cannot be a possibility. If it were possible to befriend Hitler, one would hope to be able to dissuade him from his actions. If there was no possibility of change within him (lack of regret or empathy is a hallmark of psychopatic behaviour) then friendship is not possible.

Connectedly, friendship is not possible unless there is some symmetry in power-relations. The soldier who is on duty to see a Palestinian home demolished may appear to be friendly in showing the family photos of his children, but cannot be deemed a friend if they then go ahead and carry out their duties.

Where does this leave this theologically? Clearly we are not framing God as enemy, but it is important to consider what we might mean if we are claiming ‘friendship’ with God. Is there any sense of symmetry in our relationship, and is there any possibility of a two-way empathetic flow? If God is unchanging, does this mean God displays sociopathic tendencies?

If we look at the list of symptoms, we get a pretty interesting picture:

Superficial charm, irrititable, impatient, prone to threats, angry, sense of extreme entitlement, child conduct issues, recurring difficulties with the law…

Doesn’t this read a little like the character we find in the early Old Testament? And if God is unchanging, why should this be any different now – as we see in the attitude in the picture above. We read Zizek’s comment again in this light: Do the details of his personal life redeem the horrors that resulted from his reign?

In the comments on the previous post, Clare wondered: suppose the Israeli soldier dumped his weapon and uniform and renounced his part in oppressing Palestinians. Would there be any chance of a relationship? It seems to me that this is the only way in which genuine relationship could occur, though this would be hugely personally costly to that soldier under Israeli law. This seems to resonate with the beginning of Philippians 2:

Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus, who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.

So the only possibility of friendship is if this stripping away of power occurs. But, as in the case of the soldier, this can only make sense if power is genuinely removed… Our enmity with God is thus not overcome through God’s anger or might, but only through God’s weakness. A weakness that not only lays down weapons, but ends up crucified for it.

Whenever we engage ‘the other’ we have to overcome our fear of doing so. Engagement that holds no such fear is not engagement with an ‘other’; it is easy to love what is lovely – we are called to overcome our fear and love that which is not.

As we consider the grounds of the divine empathy that gave rise to the Incarnation, I’ve suggested that we need to consider what God’s fears about engaging ‘the other’ of humanity might have been. In an earlier Advent[ure] I put the case that it was the fact that the ‘mystery of humanity is a mystery to humanity itself‘ that would have been God’s concern. Would we even understand what God was doing?

If this is right, then God needed to reflect on what God might look like from our perspective. This is the root of all proper empathy. Not that we see the other clearly, but that we get close enough to the other to see what they see of us.

As Zizek notes in The Monstrosity of Christ:

For Hegel the Incarnation is not a move by means of which God makes himself accessible/visible to humans, but a move by means of which God looks at himself from the (distorting) human perspective.

This is a truly stunning insight into the why the incarnation is so vital to our faith. It is only through becoming human that God could actually reflect on what God looked like from this distorting human perspective. It is not that God became man simply in order to know what it was to be human, to know our human failings. God became man in order that God would be able to look back on Godself and see just why humanity had rejected and distorted the nature of God. As Zizek continues:

Christ had to emerge to reveal God not only to humanity, but to God himself.

This is the epicentre of the earthquake that is the incarnation event. And this then should be our central concern of any incarnational practice: we engage the other not because we believe that we need to help them become whole, but because we believe that we need them to help us become whole too.

In the previous two posts I’ve been trying to explore some of the implications that the ‘new physics’ might have on our theology. It is worth emphasising that I strongly believe that the new physics must have an impact on our theology. If it, or indeed any new scientific discovery, does not then we are failing in our task as theologians. Which is why there may be an announcement forthcoming about a new venture some of us may be beginning in London to address this specifically: technology/meta/physics – we need to be working to co-evolve these disciplines.

In the previous post I shared some thoughts regarding dimensions, and the impossibility of creating an experiment in one dimensional universe to show the existence of a higher dimensional one. It is, however, possible to show what shaped universe we live in. Imagine a flat piece of paper, representing the space-time we exist in. We could fold that paper into a cylinder, and then (and this is lovely flexible paper!) connect the two ends of that cylinder together… to create a hollow donut shape, called a torus. Theoretically, two spaceships could be sent out on perpendicular paths and, if our universe was of this ‘shape’ they would not meet at any point other than the point of departure.

But, while it’s possible for us observing the animation above to consider the space outside of the torus, the space within which the torus exists, for those living within the dimensional space of the torus this is totally impossible. They cannot leave the dimensions they are in to become external observers.

Incarnation: Entering the Maze

This is fairly standard stuff, but it is the converse of this fact that I think is of interest to us theologically. Those within the torus cannot properly concieve of life outside of it, but nor can those in a higher dimension properly conceive what life is like within it.

Walking in the gardens of a large country house the other day I was struck by the parallels with solving a maze. To the external observer, looking from above, solving a maze may take time, but is essentially a trivial task: you just look for the route to the middle. But this big-picture perspective is totally unavailable to those who are in the maze on the ground. For them the only possible way to solve it is to engage with it and experience it, to walk it step by step. There can be no abstract solution.

This, I think, is a profound truth about the incarnation: it was necessary for God to enter our dimensional space, because the ‘abstract solution’ from above was insufficient. It was only by walking the maze himself that God in Christ could empathise fully with the human situation. Or, as Zizek has put it in The Monstrosity of Christ:

“Christ had to emerge to reveal God not only to humanity, but to God himself.”

Human experience, God learns, has no abstract solution. It must be lived to be understood. So the incarnation is not simply essential for us, but, strangely, essential for God too.

What this required, put in quantum terms, was the ‘collapse of the divine wave function’ into a specific space-time. And as to what the hell that means, I’ll try an explanation in the next post.