At the end of this month an American charismatic superstar is to visit Britain and is to lead a big event in the South West in connection with the God Channel.  There are some who will be able to guess who I am talking about but I find it easier to discuss my thoughts on the man and his visit without mentioning an actual name.  That way I am able to discuss the phenomenon of charismatic superstars generally without limiting myself to a single individual.  There may also be search machines on the look-out for mentions of this particular name so that legal action can be taken against any disparaging remarks.  The world of charismatic superstars is full of such involvement with the law.

Our charismatic superstar, henceforth to be called HB, is notorious on both sides of the Atlantic.  He is known for so-called Miracle Crusades which have taken place in every part of the world.  HB emerges out of the so-called Word of Faith tradition which declares that it is God’s will for us to have material abundance.  He himself is a vivid example of this belief system, dressing extravagantly and flamboyantly at all his meetings.  His hair is always immaculate and he exudes a style and over-confidence that is culturally alien in this country.  Nevertheless the over the top style does appear to have an attraction for some people in the same way as the excesses of the God Channel.  For our particular individual the most notorious and chilling example of excess was the appeal via a mass mailing to supporters to send in money for a Gulfstream jet.  Apparently this money was raised in less than a year.

The evidence for miracles at the hands of HB has been examined by various researchers, journalists and students.  The evidence for actual miracles turns out to be extremely thin.  Not only have few miracles been verified but there have well-attested examples of fraud uncovered.  Individuals going into meetings have been questioned at the door and then their symptoms are ‘miraculously’ described by HB during the course of the meeting through ‘words of knowledge’.   Also the very obviously sick, the brain damaged and those with severe physical complaints are prevented from coming anywhere near the stage by the ushers.

I have probably said enough to indicate my own position over HB which is that it is highly regrettable that he has been given a visa to visit this country.  What is worse is that there are people in this country who feel moved to sponsor him and take care of his considerable entourage not to mention his extravagant requirements for hotel accommodation.  Such people seem blind to the appalling suffering that is caused by extravagant claims to be able to heal the sick.  This issue is not that it is impossible for such healings to take place but the crass exploitation of a very, very few instances to make a lot of money at the expense of the hopes of countless others is obscene.  We are back to the familiar theme of this blog which is that it is the most vulnerable that suffer the most at the hands of spiritual abusers.  The refusal of HB even to touch the most severely afflicted on the grounds that they will harm the PR of the organisation makes one wince.  What are the adjectives to describe such behaviour – callous, cruel, cynical, exploitative?  I am sure there are other adjectives but they all involve the denial of Christian love.  This behaviour all suggests an individual who is totally addicted to wealth and self-importance.

I will be returning to the psychological profile of people like HB because it is a subject on which I have done a fair amount of reading.  Meanwhile I just want to make one or two observations.  The apparent cynical exploitation of huge numbers of sick people to make a lot of money for HB is indicative of a complete absence of empathy and imaginative identification with other people.  This lack of empathy and excessive cultivation of image is a pointer to a full blown personality disorder, particularly that known at the Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  This affliction of NPD is fed and encouraged by all the razzmatazz of big crusades which convinces the leading speaker that he or she is above ordinary people.  They believe ‘we are special, anointed by God himself’.  This grandiosity or messiah complex is precisely something that our abusive Christian cultures seem to encourage.  In short, areas of Christian life are creating monsters with severe personality disorders who are able to wreak havoc on other people’s lives, particularly the most vulnerable.

My final comment is to question the whole crusade enterprise and to ask who benefits.  It is not God who is hardly presented amid all the loud music and appeals for money.  It is not the sick who come normally to be cruelly disappointed.  The person who benefits is the speaker whose massive need of money, adulation and attention is being gratified.  In short charismatic events, not to mention charismatic organisations are all designed ultimately to benefit a single person, the one at the top.  HB is no exception and it may be that the large numbers of people supporting him will eventually come to this same depressing insight.  But the nature of Christian abuse is that it hides this insight from us as long as possible.  It is up to us in different ways to open our eyes and those of other people to see what is really going at these events.  This blog will continue to provide material to help the reader to have clearer vision.

The idea that the earth is 6000 years old and that humans lived alongside dinosaurs in times past is not something that I ever heard about in my younger days.  Indeed the vast majority of Christians in this country, even the most conservative, would not subscribe to such notions.  But it does appear from recent press stories that the so called ‘young creation’ theory is alive and well in certain churches and some Christian schools which operate outside the State system.

For most people in our society and indeed among Christians, the calculations of Archbishop Ussher in the 17^th century that date the moment of Creation to October 4004 BC are fanciful nonsense.   And yet such nonsense never entirely goes away.  The existence of Creationist schools in Britain has been once again brought to our attention by Professor Alice Roberts, the television presenter and president of the Association for Science Education.  She would claim that the teaching of a theory that the science of creation is set out the first chapters of Genesis is ‘indoctrination’ and has absolutely nothing to do with scientific education.

Chris reminds me that there are many individuals in the churches who have been exposed to such theories.  For them the idea that God created the world in six days is all part of the package they have bought into when they became Christians.  They are either people of relatively poor education or else they have succeeded in sealing off their Christian beliefs from everything else they have learnt at school and elsewhere.  In a recent conversation Chris also mentioned how difficult it is to debate with individuals who have bought into this body of ideas.  They follow such speakers as the Australian Ken Hamm, an individual linked to Creationist groups in the States.  Because these ideas are so counter-cultural, the defences that are erected to defend them are massive and hard to dislodge.

As part of my scrutiny of some Internet material on this topic last night, I found mention of an encounter between the eminent sceptic Richard Dawkins and a group of Australian Creationists in his Oxford home.  They filmed an interview which was then edited to suggest that the Creationists had outwitted Dawkins in a particular question about evolution.  This, what can only be called manipulation of the debate, is perhaps a clue to the way we should respond to the Creationists.  The detail of whether Professor Dawkins did or did not answer the technical  question put to him can be laid aside for the moment.  The important thing is that we name and challenge illegitimate forms of argument in the so-called debate between Creationists and those who oppose their ideas from whatever perspective.

The essence of any productive discussion is that two people agree to share their different views on a given topic. There also has to be an implicit agreement about the rules of discussion and these are going to vary according to the subject.  To discuss politics we must be agreed that we are talking about the same thing, whether it is theoretical politics or the political arrangements that apply to a particular country.  We would not think an argument of much value if for example one side was talking about politics in China and the other side was disagreeing with them by giving examples of  politics in the NHS for example.  Over the years certain conventions have grown to determine how political and historical debates take place, what counts as evidence and how rumour or propaganda, for example, are not valid tools of argument.  Both sides will know these rules and any deviation from them will be quickly challenged.  Within science as well there is a long tradition of agreement as to how we establish what is true and what is false.  Truth obviously is not only to be sought in science but science can rightly claim to make truth statements within its areas of competence.  The competence of science is found in the area of detailed measurement and in experiments that can be repeated over and over again.  Occasionally science discovers that it needs new theories to account for new phenomena.  The old mechanical physics outlined by Newton was inadequate to describe new phenomena thrown up by quantum physics.  The old theories were not shown to be wrong, merely incomplete.

The trick used by Creationists to claim a certain plausibility for their arguments is very clever but it remains a deceitful ruse.  When the creationists invaded the home of Richard Dawkins to ask him certain questions, they were able to give the impression in their video that two rival scientific theories of truth were being articulated and expressed alongside one another. Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether there is anything of value in the Creationist arguments, it has to be said that the two sides are starting from such different places that there is no possibility of real contact or communication.  Creationism is not a scientific theory, whatever else it might be.  It fails to follow contemporary scientific convention on any score.  It is not based on evidence, experiment or rigorous observation.  To say that it is based on faith also does not make it a scientific claim.  It is as though we are describing a debate between a child who believes in Father Christmas and an astronaut.  The points of contact simply do exist.  No one would argue that the child’s understanding of reality should be placed alongside the training of the astronaut as though somehow they have equal status in the debate.  Nor do we want to crush the child’s beliefs as of no value.  They do have value within certain limited parameters.  The so-called debate between Dawkins and the Creationists was in fact a non debate because it simply did not fulfil any of the unwritten rules governing proper debate or discussion.

To summarise, the issue over Creationism is to recognise that it is not grounded in a theory of knowledge or fact that is part of conventional modern understanding.  It thus logically has to be placed in a category of unproveable statements because it does not touch any other area of knowledge or discourse.   Few would even describe it as theology.   Thus it cannot form part of a modern education which has as its aims the disciplined understanding and interpretation of various recognised bodies of knowledge, including art, science and history.  If a group of individuals choose to believe in the ideas of Creationism, we may want to allow them to do so but a modern society should resist allowing these ideas to be part of a normal education.  Normal education is to expose a child to the canon of agreed knowledge.  Alice Roberts is right.  The teaching of Creationism in any school is ‘indoctrination’.  It may also seriously harm the child in his or her intellectual formation and their ability to absorb the values and understandings needed to make normal citizens who participate in their society.  Absorbing totally extraordinary ideas may also drive individuals into despair when they discover how little currency these ideas actually possess beyond the small group  that holds on to them.  The Creationist is thus destined for ever to be cut off from various aspects of ordinary public discourse and culture, unable to understand or fully participate in wider society.  Is this really what we expect from Christians?  Does this resonate with the kind of life that Jesus wanted for his followers?

The blog post about hierarchy and the responses to it have made me realise that this is an important topic to which we need to return.  As always I am drawn to thinking about the groups for whom Chris is an advocate, the poorly paid, the mentally ill and those working in low status and demeaning jobs.  In any hierarchy, in any society there are always going to be people who for various reasons are at the bottom of the pile.  However we describe such people who do not succeed, we need to be aware of them, the large number of people who occupy a place of disempowerment.  These disadvantaged may suffer in various ways, poor education, indifferent health and an upbringing that may have been inadequate in some way.

It is the issue of poor health and low life expectancy that I want to focus on today.  In some reading I did in the past year or two, I came across some fascinating research by one Sir Michael Marmot, an epidemiologist (one who researches issues of public health).  He had a commission from the Government to study ill-health and life expectancy among civil servants.  A Google search will provide further details of this research so I will limit my comments to the broad outlines.  Marmot had the health histories of some eighty thousand civil servants to study, what illnesses they contracted and the age at which they died.  None of the subjects for study was poor in a material sense and their medical histories were carefully screened to take out of the calculation any genetic factors leading to ill-health.  His conclusions were startling and alarming.  The lower down the civil service hierarchy an individual worked, the more they were susceptible to ill health and relatively early death.  The ones who lived the longest and who enjoyed the highest standards of health were those who had reached the top levels of the Civil Service.  The ones below the top did not achieve the same levels of health and this pattern was repeated right down the pay grades to the least paid and those with the lowest status.   Marmot and his fellow researchers tried to test this observation again and again but it seemed every time that high rank in the Civil Service predicted good health.  It was far more important than diet, exercise and other healthy life-styles.  Only smoking seemed to be a greater hazard than low rank.

The reader is invited to look at the research for themselves to check that I have represented the findings accurately.  But it is the speculation about the reasons for this imbalance in health between those of high and low status that is the intriguing part of the research.  Marmot surmised that the one factor that could account for the mismatch of health between the different levels within the Civil Service was stress.  It would appear that he identified a particular type of stress associated with looking over your shoulder at your boss.  In short having your work priorities determined by someone else and also having to work following other people’s orders is deemed to be stressful in a way that is different from simply working hard.  It is only when you are the boss that you escape this particular threat to your health.

Giving and receiving orders is no doubt  a normal working out of the dynamics of a hierarchical organisation.     Marmot’s research in a nutshell suggested that the stress caused by a constant need to obey orders and to please those set over you is not only unpleasant but is also a physical threat to your health.  We can surmise that when the ordinary giving of orders has added to it actual abusing of power, we have a very stressful and toxic mix.

The word ‘stress’ is a slippery word but we all have experience of it.  It is one of the privileges of retirement that for the first time in my life I can control the external stressors on my life as I have the power to use the word ‘no’ if something comes up and I do not want to do it.  Speaking personally I also find that opportunities for taking extra exercise also help to counter any residual stress in my life.

But to return to Marmot’s research.  It confirms how serious is a situation when power manipulation and even the simple giving of orders can be experienced by the vulnerable, those at or near the bottom of the hierarchy, whether in a church, the workplace or as a member of a despised social group.  The conclusion of the research indicates that those at the bottom do not just suffer indignity, they also suffer severe threats to their long-term physical health.  That observation should compound our concern for any group that lies at the bottom of a social hierarchy.

One of the ‘good news’ stories of 2013 was Pope Francis’ decision to speak up for the poor.  By the poor, no doubt, he meant not only those who have little money, but also all those who come at the bottom of the hierarchies in societies across the world.  His example may help in identifying those who suffer, emotionally and physically, from the experience of disempowerment and bring them properly to the attention of the ‘powerful’.  Those of us who follow this blog, although we are only a tiny number of people, can play our part in firstly becoming aware of the powerless people around us but also by helping in small ways to help lift them up.  The words of the Magnificat come to mind.  ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek’.  Would that the church became a place where exalting the humble and meek was a reality.

‘aloof complacency’

In today’s Times there is an intriguing story about the efforts of Mr Xi, the Chinese President, to curb extravagance on the part of those who work for the State and occupy important posts within it.  A decree has gone out that this elite is no longer going to be allowed to drive foreign imported cars, particularly those from Germany, such as Audis and Mercedes.  They will be required to drive Chinese made models instead.  The problem for the Chinese officials is that Chinese cars are not known for their reliability.  But there is also a problem for their perceived status in the eyes of their fellow citizens.  ‘How,’ remarked one tweeter, ‘can a senior PLA officer possibly maintain his usual expression of aloof complacency at the wheel of a Geely? (local car)’  It is these two words ‘aloof complacency’ that seems to capture aspects of hierarchical behaviour the world over.  My younger daughter, who spent a year in China, tells me that for a country who is wedded to Communism, the Chinese have developed a remarkable variety of marks of status, including the size and shape of their spectacles!

What do these two words, ‘aloof complacency’ imply?  They imply that people who occupy a high position within a hierarchical structure often develop a body language and pose that proclaims their position at all times.  Aloof is a word that describes a self-important pose, an expression around the mouth accompanied by a straight back.  It says two things.  Look at me and be impressed and simultaneously keep out of my way because I am too important to be bothered with the likes of you.  It is not difficult to convey that message from the driving seat of a large imported foreign car.

The other word, complacency, picks the part of the attitude that wants nothing to do with lower forms of life.  In any hierarchy one way of asserting your position and keeping your status is by disregarding or dominating those below you.  They are simply not worth your attention.  People below you in the hierarchy do not just get ignored, they do not engage your compassion or what Christians would call love.  Complacency thus involves detachment and such detachment seems part of the pose adopted by many who occupy high places within hierarchies the world over.

Another story parallel to the Chinese report leapt at me from the pages of this week’s Tablet, the Catholic weekly.  This is the news that Catholic clergy, with a few exceptions, may no longer expect to achieve the honorary title of monsignor.  This title was given to clergy by the bishops for such things as long service or loyalty to the bishop.  Pope Francis has spotted no doubt a kind of careerism and ambition for titles among the clergy which involved a certain preening themselves as somehow more important than their fellows who were doing identical jobs.  The Church of England has a similar system which rewards clergy who have stayed loyal to the system for a long time in one place, by awarding them the honorary title of Canon.  The title has virtually no duties or extra responsibilities but allows some of these clergy concerned to make minor alterations to their robes as well as inviting his parishioners to alter their term of address to him from ‘Vicar’ to ‘Canon’.

These examples from China and from the Catholic and Anglican churches can probably be paralleled by the reader through countless other examples from a variety of walks of life.  In my school days I can remember the way that promotion to becoming a prefect meant that one instantly stopped speaking to boys who were not prefects.  In short, hierarchy, whether political or religious, has a horrible capacity to corrupt people and make them less human, compassionate and loving.  There are some telling words in the gospels when Jesus comes in on a conversation among his disciples about who was the most important.  He said and I paraphrase, ‘Kings and Lords exercise authority and lord it over others, but it shall not be so among you.  Whoever wants to be great must be the servant of all’.  There is a long sermon that could be preached on these few words.   We may comment that the undergirding message of this passage seems to have been completely lost over the centuries.  Few people criticise constructively the malign effect of hierarchy on some individuals.  They do not see that although it is necessary to have different levels of responsibility in government and church as well as in every other form of human organisation, it does not necessitate the ‘aloof complacency’ that quite often accompanies it.  Christians follow a master who saw right through power games in society and so should we.  Jesus spoke some memorable words in Matthew 23. 5 when talking about the teachers of the law and the Pharisees.  ‘Everything they do is done for men to see.  They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long; they love the place of honour at banquets …..’  How little things have changed!

To return to the theme of this blog overall and the relevance of these news stories, we can finish by simply noting that ‘aloof complacency’ is a temptation always inherent in hierarchical organisations and this will increase the likelihood that power over others will be abused.  An increase of responsibility within a hierarchical structure is not sufficient reward for some.  They have to gild the lily by behaving in self-important ways that ultimately seem to be pointless and self-defeating.  It is particularly disappointing to find church organisations sometimes drawn into the same vanity power games as others.  The abuse of power wherever it is found is also often going to be rooted in this kind of vanity and superior attitude.  That is a good reason for us to be alert to notice it and resist it.  Although ‘aloof complacency’ is not easy to withstand when we are pushed down by it, we can at least recognise its ultimate futility and even see in this futility aspects of humour.    Perhaps ultimately pomposity and vanity are best defeated by humour and ridicule.  No doubt the Chinese tweeter raised a few wry smiles when describing the behaviour of the Government officials in his country!

Reflections on power abuse

Today marks the beginning of an inquiry in Northern Ireland of abuse against children over a seventy three year period between 1922 – 1995 in public and religious institutions.  The type of abuse being investigated covers not only sexual abuse but also gratuitous physical and mental cruelty.  The BBC news today reported children being scalded in their bath as well as other kinds of physical torments.  Worst of all was the statement that no affection of any kind was ever offered to some of the young children sent to these institutions.

The sexual abuse of children, which has been in the news for a number of years, has no doubt been studied at depth and involves a pathology that experts would understand and be able to some extent to explain.  Gratuitous violence towards children and the withholding of any kind of affection takes us, in some ways, into a still darker place.  The normal healthy instinctive response to a child, whether one’s own or that of a stranger, is a desire to protect and cherish as appropriate.  The human race has been hard-wired to see children as the vulnerable part of the species and also the custodians of the future of the race.  If they are not cared for, then the genes, whether our own or those of the group, do not flourish.  Without children doing well in our families and in our society, our own well-being is compromised.  We all know this at a gut level and to act against it in any way is deeply perverse.

The question why nuns or children’s homes workers should act cruelly against their charges is a deeply troubling one.  The same question could be asked of those who abuse the elderly or those sent to special hospitals for the mentally and physically handicapped.  The easiest answer to come up with is to point to a desire, even need, on the part of some to exercise total control over other human beings.  Looking at it from another direction, the abusing individual is unable to deal with others as a subject only as an object.  We may speculate that this kind of relating was the only one that the abuser had ever known.  All relationships had been ones where he or she had been used.  Any idea of mutuality in relationships is unknown to them.  Finally the chance is given them to exercise power over others weaker than themselves and treat them as objects for power gratification.  They have no other internal model for relating except as someone abused or as an abuser.

It is hard to imagine the family and church dynamics that caused ordinary Irish women to become nuns and then child abusers.  Clearly there was something profoundly unhealthy at work in both home and church that created individuals who could only treat others as objects for perverse gratification.  Speculations can be made but I would offer only one thought.    A domestic or religious culture where obedience is put very high on the agenda will work against the flourishing of mind and spirit.  Obedience to parents must always be balanced alongside the need of every child to find their own personality and creativity.  Conforming to the will of another at every point does little to allow the flowering of spirit or the nurturing of altruistic love and compassion.

What is the relevance of this discussion of the Northern Ireland Inquiry to our blog?  The relevance is that the Inquiry touches on something deeper than sex or even cruelty towards children, however horrific these may be.  At the heart of the Inquiry is an investigation of an epidemic of abuse of power, manifesting itself a variety of terrible ways.  The manifestation of the abuse of power is particularly horrible when directed against children, but we would claim that abuse of power is rampant in society at large.  To reflect on the Northern Irish situation helps us become a little more sensitised to abuses of power in our own situation.  We will not normally encounter such dramatic examples as child sexual abuse, but if we look carefully at the power abuse around us we will find the same fundamental ingredients at work.  Person A pulls rank over Person B and treats them badly.  The reason that Person A behaves in this way is because he or she has herself been treated badly by person G.  This may be a dramatic over-simplification of the causes of power-abuse in our society but it has enough truth about it to be useful to state.

When we come back to the church we find that it too is invaded by these same power dynamics.  People routinely work out their past humiliations by seeking to dominate others in petty power games.  If their position in a church is one of authority the temptation to abuse their power is greater and potentially more damaging.  The leader may subconsciously have sought this position of power precisely because their past traumas needed to be afforded some sort of palliative relief, that afforded by a gratuitous exercise of power.  I will be speaking further about this pattern of behaviour as it is covered in some reading I have recently done into what is known as ‘traumatic narcissism’.    Meanwhile I am asking my readers to reflect on power games, not only insofar as they are the victims of them, but also as they may contribute to them so that other people are affected.  While these are less severe by far than those revealed at work in Northern Ireland, let us at least recognise a functioning of similar human weaknesses and foibles.   All of us fit somewhere into the webs of power dynamics that go on around us.  Sometimes our participation is benign, sometimes less helpful.  Our conscience and capacity for self-reflection should guide us in the way we deal with these.  An imaginative identification with the victims in Northern Ireland may help to understand, albeit in an extreme form, the dynamics of power abuse.   In a lesser way these are manifested in the people and situations around us day by day.   Understanding and identifying them is the key to dealing with them successfully.

Recently there has been a news story about a Bible theme park in Kentucky which is to have as its center a large reproduction of Noah’s Ark built to accord with the Biblical measurements.  The Bible talks about God’s detailed instructions to Noah in the sixth chapter of Genesis.  The measurements are given in cubits but my NIV has helpfully translated these measurements into feet and inches.  The story that is breaking, as I write, is whether the Kentucky project will ever be finished.  Clearly they are in need of  more ‘bond holders’, people who believe in the literal truth of the story to dig deep into their pockets so that the project can continue.

The great problem about all those who want to make a case for the literal truth of this story is that they never appear to have faced up to some of the problems inherent in the Genesis text.  Those who preach on the Ark story presumably have read the text and they will have noticed that the story changes direction when we go from chapter 6 into chapter 7.  In chapter 6 the account declares that God tells Noah to ‘bring into the ark two of all living creatures’.  The chapter rounds off with the statement that ‘Noah did everything just as God had commanded him’.    The account changes direction in chapter 7.  Suddenly the word for God changes to the word  ‘the Lord’ and the number of each of the animals to be taken into the ark also changes.  Instead of pairs of animals to be allowed access to the ark, suddenly the Lord commands Noah to take ‘seven of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate and two of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate’.  What is going on here?  The student of Genesis who is not committed to the literal truth of the story will have no problem explaining this enormous discrepancy with the resources of critical scholarship.  I will reveal all in a moment.  But the literalist is going to have enormous problems reconciling this change of gear within the story.  The shift in style is more apparent when the original Hebrew is consulted.  The word Elohim translated as God is found in chapter 6 while in chapter 7 the more familiar word Yahweh (translated as the Lord) starts to be used.

I do not possess any conservative commentaries on this passage so I do not know how the discrepancies are explained for a fundamentalist audience.  Perhaps there were eight pairs of certain animals in the ark but I have never heard this offered as an explanation!  But I think I would be right to guess that most conservative preachers would not own up to there being any problem.  It is easier simply to leave out the ‘difficult’ section in chapter 7 and carry on with the story after the offending passage.

For those unfamiliar with the critical interpretation of the book of Genesis let me explain what main-stream scholarship has had to say about the discrepancies in the Genesis story of the Ark for the past 150 years.  My summary, while new to some, will be a massive over-simplification to others.  The discrepancies in the story can be accounted for by recognising that there is more than one source for the story.  Two different versions are given, one after the other. The first version in chapter 6 is from a early source known a E on account of the word used for God, Elohim.  The second version comes from a source known as P on account of the sensitivity over the presence of unclean animals being given equal status with the clean ones in the earlier version.  The account is called P because there is evidence that the interests of the writer reflect the concerns of priests and those devoted to the maintenance of purity laws.  The P account was probably written many centuries after the E version.  The name Yahweh for God had become normative by the 4^th – 3^rd century BC when the P account was written.

Liberal scholarship allows itself the privilege of reading the Old Testament as ancient literature as well as a revelation of a story of God’s self revelation to a nation.  As ancient literature, contradictions in the text can be faced and to a considerable extent explained and understood.  Without these scholarly insights we are often left with impossible conundrums and contradictions.  The conservative preacher on the other hand may have had to deceive his people and pretend that problems are solved when in reality all that has happened is that they have been censored out of sight.

If I am right that problems inherent in this Biblical text are ignored by many fundamentalist preachers, then that implies a readiness by some Christian leaders to short-change their members.  At worst it can be described as dishonesty.  Either way it arises out of the fundamentalist fantasy that sees the Bible, in spite of any contradictory evidence, as infallible and able be taken as authoritative on matters of history and fact.   This examination of the story of the Ark is given as an example of just one passage where people in the pew are not being given the full picture of what the Bible actually says.

The Kentucky theme park is no doubt the vision of people who believe they are taking the story of Noah literally and thus they have given energy, money and time to its completion.  The question has to be asked.  Did the sponsors of this massive project ever sit down and actually read the account of the story of Noah as it is set out in the Bible?  Was their understanding based on that reading or had they simply picked up a tidied-up version such as that put in a children’s version of the Bible?  It would be an interesting question to ask but I rather suspect that for the sponsors and their supporters the Bible has been read not in its original form but in a version pre-packaged  for easy consumption.   It is only in that form that a doctrine of ‘infallibility’ can be sustained and promoted with any possibility of success.

A few weeks ago I attended a funeral in the south of England.  The deceased was a faithful Christian lady who had planned her own funeral with great care.   For me the service jarred in one place where the congregation were required to sing the controversial hymn ‘In Christ alone’.  This hymn is missing from many hymn books because of the words ‘Till on that cross as Jesus died , the wrath of God was satisfied.’  Many people have found these words upsetting and even offensive, as it implies that God could forgive humankind only through an event of supreme violence – the death of Jesus on the cross.

To understand the theology being put forward in this hymn, we have to recognise that Paul does in fact use the word that is translated as ‘anger’ or ‘wrath’ referring to God as well as another Greek word translated as ‘propitiate’.  This use of these words might imply support for the words of the hymn but as we shall see there is far more to be found in the New Testament on the sacrifice and the death of Christ than just these ideas of Paul.   Even if we take Paul’s thoughts as normative, scholars have indicated that these word ‘anger’ does not imply, as the English translations do, any suggestion of passion or feeling on the part of God.  Also as we shall see below, the word ‘propitiate’ does not imply an averting of anger of a vengeful God.

To go a bit deeper into this question of how Christ’s death can be spoken of as a sacrifice, we need first of all to look at what the early Christians thought about sacrifice and how we can understanding the connections they made between the sacrificial system and the death of Christ.  To have this understanding  we also have to go back further to see what they inherited from Judaism.

In the Old Testament we find three main types of sacrifice.  These are all set out in the Book of Leviticus.  In the first place we have what are known as communion sacrifices, eating and drinking in the context of a religious rite of sacrifice.  These are not prominent in New Testament times.  The second type is the whole burnt offering, an expensive type of offering which seems to have had its origins in the idea of feeding a god.  The third type of sacrifice is the one that dominates in the Book of Leviticus – the rite of expiation.  Expiation was predominantly about dealing the effects of sin by the use of blood rituals.  Blood with its associations with the life-force was believed to be particularly effective in cleansing and purifying human sin.  There was here no sense of offering anything to God.  The sacrifice was simply complying with an ordinance given by God himself to deal with sin, whether moral or to do with cultic impurity.  It is argued by scholars that the word for ‘propitiation’ has a meaning very close to that of expiation.

Alongside these three types of sacrifice were two Jewish feasts of particular importance to early Christian thought  and which involved sacrifice – the Passover and the Day of Atonement.  The feast of Passover was of course originally associated with the Exodus from Egypt and at its heart involved the use of blood smeared on doorposts to avert the Angel of Destruction.  Later the feast became one that had to be celebrated in Jerusalem and thus was the occasion of pilgrimage.  By the time of the New Testament the most important part of the ceremony was the celebration of thanksgiving for the Exodus and an occasion for the family to come together.

The Day of Atonement is, according to scholars, a very late festival.  The book of Leviticus, where it is described, only came into its present form in the 3^rd century BC.  The best known part of the ceremony involved the ‘scapegoat’ ceremony, the confessing the sins of the whole community and transferring them onto a goat which was sent off into the desert.  The other part of the ceremony takes the High Priest into the Holy of Holies to pray for the entire nation.  Once again the efficacy of these rituals arises from the fact that they are rites given to the community by Yahweh for this purpose of removing sin.

What are we to make of the idea that the death of Jesus was in some way a ‘substitute’ for human-kind, a sacrifice that God needed in order to forgive sin?   For the ‘substitution’ idea to work, it would have to be shown that there was an understanding that Jesus was like the scapegoat carrying the sins of the world on his shoulders.  But the only author to use the imagery of the Day of Atonement is the Epistle to the Hebrews (not written by Paul) and mention of the scapegoat is entirely absent.   Hebrews 9.22 reinforces the idea that the shedding of blood and the forgiveness of sins are linked together in this God-given rite and there is no suggestion of ‘satisfying the wrath of God’.

The passages in the Old Testament that best illuminate a link between sacrifice and forgiveness are those describing the Suffering Servant in Isaiah.  Here the life of an innocent man (who may represent the whole nation) is described and his life and innocent death are seen as having the power to expiate or wash away sin.  God lays the iniquity of all on him so that he becomes a sin offering, which will cleanse the people.  The dynamic at work seems to be that an innocent good man can in some way allow his innocent suffering to effect a washing away (expiation) of sin on behalf of others.  All through their history the Jews had noticed that sin separated them from God and in these chapters of Isaiah they caught a glimpse of a new way that the suffering of the Exile might be used in some way to effect a washing away of sin.  This they linked to the old blood sacrifices of the Temple.  Although God allows this suffering, there is nothing to suggest that the Servant is ‘satisfying God’s wrath’ in any sense.

In my first attempt at this blog post I went on in more detail to discuss the Epistle to the Hebrews and the way that he understands the death of Christ to fulfil the Day of Atonement ceremony .   But neither the language of Hebrews nor the allusions to Suffering Servant narratives that are picked up in the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper point to the ‘substitutionary sacrifice’ ideas that can be read out of Paul.  The conclusion of this blog post is to say that there is not one idea in the New Testament to explain the death of Christ in the language of sacrifice but several.  To say that there is one Biblical view on this topic does violence to the Biblical  text.  For myself I far prefer the Hebrews image of Christ entering heaven with humankind in his train to Paul’s language of anger and propitiation.  We have those glorious words that used to be in the Anglican ASB.  ‘Since we have a Great High Priest who has passed into the heavens …. let us draw near with confidence with boldness to approach the throne of grace’.

Let us rejoice in the diversity of ideas and images that a close reading of the New Testament gives us to have an insight into the deeper meaning of Christ’s death.  The Bible, as I shall never tire of saying, is a far more complex and diverse document than sloganised (ignorant!) preaching would indicate.  Let us celebrate this nuance and not be trapped by a preaching that wants to trap us into believing that there is only one way of talking about any particular doctrine.  The Bible in fact gives us a glorious diversity of ways of expressing truth.

To return to the theology of the death of Christ, we have, I believe, in the theology of Hebrews a well rounded and coherent symbolic account of its significance.   For all its complexity, the book has little truck with the idea that God ‘needs’ a death in order to forgive sin.  The idea is also alien to the gospel of St John.   Jesus’ words, according to John, sum up a vision close to that set forth in Hebrews.  ‘But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.’   The risen ascended Jesus represents humanity and embodies it in himself.  Thus he can lift it up to God to be ‘ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’.  That sentiment is a deeply resonant message and could be said to be normative for the whole of the New Testament.

Note:  I am taking it as read that Paul is not the author of Hebrews.  With 99% of scholars I understand this book to be a theological treatise, probably written in Alexandria in Egypt in around 65 AD.  The mention of Paul’s name in the beginning is not of itself evidence of anything, unless you hold on to a theory that all versions of scripture are protected from being corrupted by later editors.  I do not hold this view!

I have already used the word ‘vulnerability’ in one of my blog posts and no doubt I shall return to it again.  The big question that hangs over cult studies and studies of abusive groups is the question: How did the individual get drawn into the group to be abused in the first place?  It is a question that will continue to puzzle some of those reading this blog post as they have been there themselves and are still unable to work how they became victims of power games by religious leaders.

The short answer to the question as to how they were drawn into the group in the first place is to say that the group or its leader were able to exploit their vulnerabilities.  They provided an answer to what was then perceived to be an acute need.  What are these vulnerabilities and needs that religious (and political) groups are able to exploit?  The first thing to be said about them is that they are very ordinary and common for the most part.  In the first place everyone alive has a need to know their value as a person.  The common expression is self-esteem.  Few people escape attacks to their self-esteem during the process of growing up and the journey into adulthood.  These attacks may come from parents who may for deeply complicated reasons resent their children and want to put them down.  Undermining of self-esteem may come from failures in the deeply competitive of world of exams, earning power and success in relationships.  For young women self-esteem may depend on success in achieving some unrealistic body shape or standard of good looks.   For any number of reasons an individual may arrive in early adulthood with a self-esteem which is less than complete.

The second area of potential vulnerability is in their success or failure in the task of belonging.  The need to belong is hard-wired into the infant and although the nature of belonging changes over the years, it is still part of everyone alive.  For many people the transition between membership of the birth-family and a wider belonging to groups in society is messy.  In the first place the birth-family may be unwilling to let the individual go and so there is a period of conflict and possibly estrangement before equilibrium is restored.  This may be a healthy rebellion of a teenager wanting to establish his or her identity.  More complicated and potentially tragic is the young person who never experienced a core experience of belonging in the birth-family.  They may have stumbled through childhood with a series of attachments which may have been violent or abusive.  The need to belong was still there but all they have to model their desire for adult belonging is a memory of being used by other people whether sexually or emotionally.

This piece would claim that everyone needs to be affirmed, to have self-esteem and to belong.  Few people alive achieve a perfect balance in these marks of identity and most people, when you scratch below the surface can be said to be wounded or vulnerable in one or both of these areas.  Of all the groups in society the most vulnerable group of all is the cohort of young people, newly making their way in the world after leaving the family home.  Many of these young people find their way to colleges and universities where the usual props of support are no longer there.  Such young people are vulnerable to the groups that promise them a solution to the pain that is caused by the cracks to their self-esteem and their lack of rootedness in this new strange world of adulthood.

The religious and political groups that recruit new members among university students are by no means all malign in their purposes.  But one does worry about any group that effectively ‘swallows-up’ an individual by offering total solutions to any areas of pain that are experienced.   Christian evangelical groups pounce on lonely disoriented students and thrust them into the totality of a social life where they no longer have to work to meet new people but are presented with an instant group of friends.  The teaching of the Fellowship may be very controlling and strict so that the student begins not only to feel ‘safe’ among the group but also to begin to share a paranoia about those outside the group, the ‘unsaved’.  Apart from anything else the full rich exploratory experience of university is snatched away from that individual almost from the first day, in favour of a group of people who think and feel alike in ways that are not healthy.   Eventually the individuals may find themselves becoming first engaged and then married to someone from within that close-knit group.  In my limited enquiries into this area of university life, I found myself questioning more than once whether these marriages could be said to have been arranged by the group rather than freely chosen.

I have given the example of students at university to illustrate what I believe to be a process whereby a religious group uses the vulnerability of individuals to draw them into a ‘total’ group.  Chris has spoken to me about the way he was drawn into his group.  In his case the group latched on to the idealism of youth and fairly swiftly exploited it to become a means of control.  I have more to say on the subject of the historical context of Chris’ conversion.  Here but also especially in America idealistic flower children were transformed into the victims of cults and hardline Christian groups.  This has been studied in an American context and is a fascinating story.

I want to finish by saying that perhaps everyone who has become a Christian as an adult has probably passed through a point of need and vulnerability.  Christian faith has been part of the answer to a problem, whether intellectual or emotional.  It is not this fact which creates a problem.  The problem is in the fact leaders of religious groups and cults are gathering groups of people together to weld them into fellowships etc without appearing to have any understanding of the vulnerabilities that are being played with and manipulated.  Of course there are times when the Christian faith has a positive part to play in helping an individual move forward spiritually and emotionally.  I will have more to say about the way that Christianity is an agent for wholeness and healing.  But equally the experience of some is that far from moving them forward, the religious leader or group has in fact caused them to regress.  They have been encouraged, effectively, to return to the safety of their birth family, a place without conflict.  This has been chosen above the realistic demands of growing up, a process that involves facing up to and dealing with conflict, uncertainty and ambiguity.  It is only by growing through uncertainty and experiment that one can reach eventually the place of maturity.  In this case it is a maturity of spirit and emotion.  That is a place well worth fighting for.  Christianity should be helping and supporting this process not getting in its way.

Of all the failures of teaching by fundamentalist preachers, perhaps the most striking is when a congregation is encouraged to believe that the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament is an example of biblical prophecy.  There are two massive misunderstandings at work in such teaching.  One is to perpetuate the belief that the word ‘prophecy’ in the Bible is all about the future and being able to foretell it.  The second misunderstanding is to believe that the Jews themselves believed the book of Daniel to be a prophet.

To take the second point first.  The Old Testament in its Hebrew version is divided into three sections – the Law, the Prophets and the Writings.  The book of Daniel is firmly placed in the third section – the Writings.  In ancient times it was understood to be a mysterious collection of oracles and stories with little relation to the classical prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah.  Modern scholars agree that the book was written in around 160 BC at the time of the Maccabean revolt against the Syrian kings.  The story of this revolt is set out in the Books of Maccabees in the Apocrypha.  More serious than an ignorance of what the Jews themselves thought about Daniel is a refusal to engage with what the Old Testament understood as the nature of prophecy.  When we actually read the early prophets, writing in period from 725 – 530 BC, we find a genre of literature that is quite distinctive in type.  What it does not possess in general is an obsession about the remote future.  Whatever the use of the prophets made by Matthew in his gospel, the prophets were far more interested in what was going on in their present as well as a concern for the immediate future.

How can we typify the extensive writings of Amos, Hosea, Isaiah etc?  These writings are not easy and relatively few Christians are familiar with more than selected passages which appear of relevance to sermons heard in church.  Thus we have all heard countless times the passage about a young woman bearing a child, which is read at Christmas, but we know little about the original context of the utterance.  I find that the best and simplest way to describe prophecy is to say that it is a perspective on the events of the time in the context of an understanding of the will and mind of God.  When we use the word prophecy today in relation to the Church, we also understand it like this.  We expect that Church to interpret what is going in our society and political life and offer a critique and perspective that comes out of faith and spiritual reflection.  This is what the classical prophets in the Old Testament were about.  For many people the social comments of the prophet Amos about the behaviour of the rich in Israel towards the poor are some of the most powerful verses in the Bible.  ‘Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land  … buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.’  Amos 8.4ff.  The whole of the book of Amos is unremitting in its condemnation of an unjust society as demonstrated by the people of the northern Kingdom of Israel in the years leading up to the Assyrian invasion in 721 BC.  Amos as well as the other prophets were talking about the future but it was a future firmly rooted in the present.  Israel and Judah were both failing to live according the laws of their God.  Because of this failure the message delivered was much of the time pessimistic – society as they knew it was to be utterly destroyed.  While hope was not entirely absent (2 Isaiah), more typical is an unrelenting announcing of doom and destruction.

When we grasp that the prophets were about announcing the consequences of injustice, idolatry and greed to their own contemporaries, we begin to get a glimpse of how incredible the achievement of these individuals was.  They had stumbled across an understanding of what we today would call ‘ethics’, the secret of good behaviour grounded and rooted in their faith in Yahweh their God.  The earlier followers had been given the Ten Commandments but these rules did not reach deep into a person’s conscience but rather represent a rule for a relatively ordered society.  The prophets began to articulate something new, a way of behaviour which drew people to reflect in their personal behaviour something of the holiness of the God they sought to worship.

The ethical genius, if we can call it that, of the classical Old Testament prophets helps us to understand more clearly that Daniel is not to be counted among them.  The book is a tale of the events of the exile, told 400 years later by an author who was keen to bolster up flagging morale in the midst of a terrifying war.  It attempts to indicate that history is in the hands of God by pretending to give an accurate foretelling of the future.  No prophet from the previous period had ever attempted to set out the future history of the world in this way.  The fact that the book of Daniel does indulge in this kind of writing has meant, tragically, that many Christian apologists have assumed that all the prophets think in this way.  There are no grounds for such an assumption.  But wait, I hear someone say, does not the evangelist Matthew also see the prophets foretelling the future in his gospel?  It is true that we do of course read in Matthew’s gospel several times the phrase ‘in order that the prophet ….. might be fulfilled’.  It is thus apparent that Matthew was following a particular tradition within early Christianity that wanted to find Christ in particular passages of the Old Testament.  But just because there was this tradition does not make it wrong for us to study the Old Testament prophets in their original historical and social context.  This combining of historical and literary scholarship when applied to the prophets has given to them an amazing vitality to modern students and readers.  The prophets are seen to be what they are – living breathing witnesses of a powerful transforming religious tradition, one which is of tremendous relevance and applicability today.

The prophets, the central swathe of the Old Testament, are read by scholars and all who study them properly as revealing a genius for religious experience as well as ethical thinking.  Let us celebrate them in this way and learn from them.  It may be that the message of Jesus should also be heard today through the prism of his readiness to be a continuity of Old Testament prophecy.  Perhaps if we have the eyes to see, we will find that he does not just fulfil the Law but he is also a living embodiment of the will of God first revealed in the writing of the classical prophets of the Old Testament.

I was talking to someone about Christians – the impression that many of them give to the outside world.  According to the person I was talking to, ‘Christians’ often come over as judgemental, defensive and deeply suspicious.   There is a hesitancy about them and a complete lack of humour.  They appear to live on an alien planet and appear resentful in having to visit another world where they are not in control of the topics under discussion.  This may touch on things which cause embarrassment or even a sense of shame.  Above all, this person told me, if you look into their eyes, there is a kind of emptiness there.  It is as though the original personality has fled and they have been taken over by a kind of phantom identity, marked by an anxiety to please and be ‘right’ and ‘good’ like a nervous child seeking the approval of their teachers and parents.

This description of a Christian is not of course fair to all Christians by any means but I imagine my reader can bring to mind an encounter which fits this description more or less.  In my psychological commentary on fundamentalism I commented on the way that social identity theory indicates how certain people hand over their personal identity to the group identity.  Such individuals existing in and through the group will have virtually nothing of their own personality left to them.  They find their aliveness only when they are part of the group, the ‘we’.

In the English language we speak about individuals having a powerful presence.  By that we mean that when they are around people are all aware of them.  Their presence somehow exudes itself outwards even without any words being spoken or any actions done.  This word ‘presence’ should be balanced by the opposite which is ‘absence’.  Sometimes we find ourselves with someone about whom all that can be said is that they display a complete ‘absence’.  There is nothing about their posture or facial expression that shows any engagement with what is going on, the words being spoken or the dynamics of the encounter.  The ability to be in a place and yet absent from all that is going on seems to be a sad extreme manifestation of what happens to some individuals who sacrifice vivacity, humour, personality and a general aliveness in exchange for the doubtful privilege of being part of a tight knit group who have been ‘saved’.  Such individuals, it could be argued, have gone in the opposite direction to the path indicated by Jesus when he said, ‘I have come that they may have life, life in all its abundance.’

Way back in the Middle Ages in the 1330s, the Franciscans arrived in England and set up a house in the part of Oxford now known as St Ebbes.  They lived very austere lives with little in the way of creature comforts.  And yet these young men were known for their radiant joy and happiness.  This was expressed by their unending capacity for laughter.  We don’t know exactly the source of their laughter, whether it was because they saw the absurdities of life or whether it was simply an overflowing of inner joy.  But whatever the cause of this laughter it indicated a closeness, I believe, to the ‘fullness of life’ that Jesus had commended.  Humour does indeed play a part in the Christian life.  For us too it indicates an ability not to take ourselves too seriously and also to see through the pomposities of hypocrisy and power.  Laughter is also deeply social and binds us with other people in a way that few other things can.  I would like to think of heaven as a place of unending joy and humour and I am sure that when we speak about everlasting joy, we are also referring to everlasting laughter.

One aim for the Christian life whether for ourselves or for others is to find all that promotes abundant life.  We speak of helping life to flourish and this must always be our aim.  Simultaneously we must work to prevent all that narrows life and that takes from it zest, energy and light.  That will mean that we are not content to allow or promote life-denying forms of belief and practice within the Christian life.  This blog is perhaps playing a small part in communicating what ‘fullness of life’ might mean.  It is a way of life that encourages joy, humour, happiness and mutuality.  It is also a way of life that wars against narrowness, meanness, suppression of spirit and all that denies human flourishing.  May that deadness of spirit never be seen in us as we try to follow the example of Christ who calls us to experience life in all its  fullness.