I have mentioned on one of the blog posts that one of the weapons of Christian abuse is the Bible itself.  Verses which have the effect of putting another person down are quoted to enhance an existing sense of shame or guilt in the victim.  Other verses to emphasise the position of the leader and his (normally a his) authority are trotted out so that the Bible, as I mentioned before, has become used as a powerful bludgeon against which the recipient has little or no defence.

While a discussion of these issues of the Bible as a weapon will come up again, no doubt, there is another weapon used by Christian abusers that I want to discuss.  The weapon is rhetoric that mentions the Devil.  An individual who may disagree with an authority figure in the Church, can easily be accused of being afflicted with the devil.  Anything that challenges the person of power can be interpreted as caused by a devil of deceit or devil of ignorance.  The literature that describes the way that the devil operates conveniently allows a leader or powerful Christian to belittle an opponent by making this accusation.  If you live in a universe where the Devil goes round corrupting anyone who speaks against power and influence in the church, then you will be able to see that such an accusation is a very telling one indeed.  To be accused of such a thing, and to believe it, is to be cast into a very dark place.  It is indeed a kind of blasphemy to suggest that a person with a different perspective on life has in some way been taken over by a devil.  I am not sure whether there is any way that you can humiliate them or beat them down more, especially if they actually accept in any way the truth of this accusation.

The devil’s power in the imagination of Christian evangelicals has waned somewhat over the past fifteen years.  There are in fact some factual historical reasons for this.  The roots of the modern phase of interest in demons, Satan etc among evangelicals finds its origins with the publication of a particular book in 1981, Michelle Remembers.  This book was a lurid account of the recovered memories of a young woman called Michelle who claimed that she had been abused as a child in Satanic ritual.  The book was fairly quickly shown to be a tissue of fantasy and lies but the impact of the book was enormous.  If a story is a good one it will be believed regardless of whether it is true.  Evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic started introducing satanic and demonic rhetoric into their preaching and the situation soon got out of hand.  By the early 90s in Britain ‘satanic panic’ had gripped other institutions beyond the church and there were always ‘experts’ who could brought be brought over from the States to teach the signs of the devil’s influence within the domain of social work and education.

The UK government was alarmed and commissioned a study by a retired Professor of Anthropology . Jean La Fontaine.  Her report, appearing in 1995, concluded that there was no evidence for satanic abuse or any other demonic infestation.  The panic subsided very quickly and one could claim that the devil had been found in the paranoia created by the rhetoric and the need for many evangelical preachers to preach against something, using military imagery.   The damage caused by this ‘demonic abuse’ was massive and still today there are people who were genuinely convinced that they had been possessed by demons and then had experienced the abusive practice of exorcism.  The whole process was encouraged by certain Christian centres who ‘taught’ ordinary Christians to be involved in spiritual warfare as it was called.  Every form of distress, especially psychological, was interpreted as an incursion of the devil.  It is hard to see how you can do anything worse than tell a disturbed person that they have a devil inside them.

No doubt I shall return to this theme again in the future as I feel quite deeply on the folly and cruelty of telling a mentally vulnerable person that they are possessed.  It would be interesting to know if anyone who reads this blog has experience of this particular expression of spiritual abuse.

These are some words that I have recently found on the internet but they express very well how my position within theology differs from that of conservative Christians.  I talked in the last blog post about ‘propositionalism’, the idea that valid truth has to be expressed in words, concepts or propositions.  Although I rejected the idea, my argument did not draw out a point which Gregory of Nyssa, the 4^th century author of my quote, understood well.  His insight reminds us of the power of wonder, the contemplation of that which cannot be reduced to words.  The word contemplation also has a currency within Christian spirituality and prayer.  It indicates that prayer is not about asking but involves watching, waiting and listening.  To contemplate allows us to reach into the essence of something, whether it be beauty, the sublime or God himself.

I do not think that it would be exaggerating to suggest that some Christians have made the Bible into an idol.  It is held up on a pedestal and claimed to be a source of truth and guidance but the way it is actually used seems to hold it at arm’s length.  Quite often the words of scripture are used not to edify or spiritually feed but as weapons with which to beat an opponent.  To wonder at something can never objectify it in this way.  Just as objectifying another person makes it impossible for us to relate to them properly, so objectifying the words of scripture makes them into ‘idols’.

Approaching the words of Scripture with a sense of wonder is in no way to downgrade or devalue them.  But it does require us to let go of the attitude that wants to prove something or reinforce a position when we read it.  Wonder is open to the unexpected or surprising that can come from a perusal of Scripture.  Speaking personally as someone who has fairly regularly to find something new to say about a familiar passage of the Bible when preparing sermons, I find myself amazed that Scripture does go on finding new things to say to me.  Any attempt to articulate an idea in a sermon nearly always results in my having a new insight based on the passage in front of me.  Scripture is in this sense ‘inspired’, because it goes on being capable of producing new insights in me.  Because the Bible is a source of such insight, I can respect it as in some way as the ‘Word of God’.  But from all that has been said, it can be seen that that Word can particularly be grasped through this faculty of wonder.  The Psalmist captured something of this when he said: Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. Ps 119: 105

Chris and I recently shared some thoughts on the word ‘doubt’.  For me the word is not a threatening one because I find myself with many others to be an heir to the liberal tradition of the 18^th  century Enlightenment where doubt was seen as a key to knowledge.  If you did not doubt, then new truth was impossible.  The motto of this great movement of the Enlightenment was ‘dare to doubt’.  In this way doubt comes to be a tool for discovery and  for learning new things which go beyond the old certainties.  Because doubt challenges the old certainties and traditions that were around in the 18^th century as well as today,  it is highly subversive to the vested interests and those who guard them.  These interests include religion, politics, philosophy and even science.

In contrast with this somewhat radical view held by the followers of the Enlightenment, the vast majority of people even today have little patience with this 250 year old intellectual revolution.  This fundamental idea that doubt is part of a creative process of questioning and discovery is unknown to most people.  People prefer to have certainties and they find these in facts that their minds can grasp.  Some facts are grasped in the course of life’s experience and others are transmitted as part of  the educational process  that most people are exposed to.  It is today a cause of regret that at school level facts are the mainstay of the educational process.  Religious education is not immune from this process and  teachers of religion, past and present, have focussed on imparting facts and making rote learning the highest form of understanding.  Knowledge of the Bible in the sense of being able to recite it and quote it has come to be seen as the mark of an educated Christian.  This way of teaching the factual content of the faith and requiring people to accept it has traditionally been understood to be the task of the Church.  The facts of the Bible and of  traditional Christian teaching have been handed on and in this understanding, doubt is seen as an enemy of the process.  Facts and the certainties they bring are the traditional currency of the Church.

The problem of this kind of teaching facts is that it is a trap.  It is a trap for people both within and outside Christianity.  Some people on the outside of faith have been taught that certain facts make it impossible for Christianity to be true.  T he ‘facts’ of science contradict the statements of the Bible eg the Creation story.  Others within the orbit of traditional Christian teaching and who are taught the ‘facts’ of Christianity are trapped in a equally mind-numbing place.  They are taught the entire body of Scripture and the Creeds are all ‘facts’ because that is the only one possible way to understand them.  Conservative scholars spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to reconcile conflicting facts in Scripture

Both sides of this argument have been thoroughly betrayed through this kind of teaching.  Behind this emphasis on fact is a philosophy known as ‘propositionalism’.  Put simply it says that truth is only contained in statements of provable fact.  This philosophy is a variation of materialism, the idea that matter is the only reality we can know.

Before I go on to criticise these philosophies, whether used to attack Christianity or trying to stay within it, I must come back first to the way that people have been let down by this false teaching.  Chris has communicated in his writing his own experience of betrayal and ‘agonies of despair’ when he discovered that faith and salvation presented as a series of facts and the Bible as a text of true fact were not as they seemed.  He recognised that his own position as a barely literate young man in the 1960s had been taken advantage of by Christian leaders with a gift of words.  He had been sucked into a system which fed on people’s longing for certainty.  The evangelical machine reassured him of various things.  He knew truth, his longing for certainty could be satisfied and he was ‘safe’ in this world and in the one to come.  The moment that the bubble of this certainty was pricked, Chris had nothing with which to replace it.  He had been living in a binary universe where truth and falsehood, black and white were presented in stark contrasts.

This blog is wanting to talk about a place where we can find a place to stand which does not insist that we have to be certain about everything all of the time.  The blog also maintains that Christianity is always about a becoming and not an arriving at a destination.  The journeying image seems so much more biblical than any other and I (SP) am much happier with the journey analogy complete with the attendant doubts and grey areas of as-yet undiscovered reality.

To return to the ideas of materialism which seem to lie behind the false teaching which Chris has imbibed and have been the source of so much pain and suffering to him and many that he knows.  Materialism is inadequate on two fronts at the very least.  First it cannot make any sense of ideas of value, beauty and love.  It is a description of a universe without what we would call ‘soul’.  Facts of course exist, but as we humans experience them, they come packaged with value, meaning and sometimes beauty.  To isolate them from these attachments is to do violence to their real significance.   In this way materialism and ‘facts’ are a shallow and incomplete description of the world as we know and experience it.

Materialism is also undermined by what we are discovering of the sub-atomic universe.  Matter simply does behave in a common-sense fashion when we enter the quantum dimension.  I am not proposing to do more than hint at the way the discoveries of quantum physics undermine many of the old certainties that were grasped by classical physics.  The implication of these findings are relevant to our pursuit of truth whether as a Christian or not.  At the very least the post-modern quantum world is one where words should only be used  and statements made with a degree of hesitancy and humility.

So the 21^st century world has returned to the 18^th century in a significant way.  It is a world where people ‘dare to doubt’.  They do not do this in a negative spirit but in a way that allows reality to impinge on us gradually and in a many faceted way.  If Christianity is ‘true’, it is not true as a list of provable facts about life.  It is true because it brings us into touch with a reality that transforms us in some way.  The faith is something which combines a knowledge of story, experience and inner stillness that resonates with the Christ event as found in Scripture.  More of this in a future blog.

This blog is concerned with many examples of abuse that happen and have happened in churches up and down the land (not to mention across the world).  I am concerned not only by the fact that it happens but also to offer some reflections as to why it happens.

The word abuse is one that is often associated with sex and indeed sexual exploitation with members of the congregation or pastoral clients is unhappily fairly common in the church.  I leave the abuse of children to one side because although it does happen, its occurrence is dwarfed by the incidence of so called ‘affairs’ in the church.  Estimating from guesswork and some American research I would maintain that while one clergyman or minister in forty may have sexually abused a child, up to one in eight may have behaved inappropriately with an adult member under their pastoral care.  A perusal on the Web will produce some confirmation of whether my figures are more or less accurate.

While abuse of power in a sexual way happens in the church (and I will return to this topic in another blog) , more common is the simple use of power games to bolster up a flagging ego within a Christian leader.  In summary power is abused for one of three reasons.  These are sex, money or the desire to make the abuser feel important.  When we talk about power abuse in church, we are normally talking about the third one of these.  It is a phenomenon which is similar to bullying by children.  Why do children bully?  The short answer is that they themselves have little esteem and if they can put someone else down using physical threats or dominating behaviour they get a sense of being important.  That sense of being important temporarily relieves their inner sense of insignificance and not mattering to others.  Clergy play the power game in rather more subtle ways than children in the playground but it would seem that the fundamental reasons are the same.  For whatever reason, clergy sometimes suffer a crisis of confidence and experience threats to their well-being.  The reason for this may be located in the individual’s remote past or it may be a consequence  of demoralising conditions of their work in the present.

The abuse of power by the clergy can take many forms and readers of this blog will have their own stories to tell.  The abuse of power is often accompanied by a constant reminding by the clergyperson of their ‘superior’ status or education.  The clergy who have extra titles may insist of having these used on every occasion.  Often clergy will only want to associate with the socially significant among their congregation and ignore others of less importance.  This need constantly to be in a superior place to the people ‘below’ them can be seen on examination to be an expression of inadequacy verging on paranoia.  If it were not hurtful to those affected by it, it could be almost seem as comic.  But being subtly put down by a ‘superior’ person is never funny and congregations where this happens are unlikely to flourish.  But just as the abuser may be a victim in some way of the past or present and finds it difficult to change, so the abused find it difficult to walk away because they do not know how to reclaim their power.

Recovering from Evangelical rhetoric

Having had over 40 years of exposure to the evangelical rhetoric and sermons, Chris rings me (the editor) up from time to time to try and ask if I can make sense of the issues that still bother him to this day.

My part of the conversation is to listen and try and understand the issues and ideas that he has encountered.   I then try and reflect these back to him in a restated way so that he can re-assimilate them into his thinking or reject them, whichever is more appropriate.

Recently Chris mentioned the phrase that he had heard a lot of when he was younger  ‘work out your salvation with fear and trembling;’  This passage from Philippians had encouraged him to take a very inward almost selfish attitude to faith.  The passage seemed to imply that his personal salvation was the idea of key importance and took precedence over any ideas of social responsibility.

Other passages quoted and drummed into his consciousness were those which talked about personal holiness.  ‘Be ye holy as I am holy’ and ‘keep yourself unspotted from the world’, are two passages that come to mind and reinforce the idea of personal purity above other responsibilities.

Chris grasped very quickly that these passages and others were being used in a way that would help to isolate the Christian group from others.  In other words the Bible was being used to create what most of us would call a cultic group.  This effect was particularly apparent when, as in his experience, the idea of purity was linked to personal salvation.  In other words unless you kept yourself apart from the contaminating effects of non-Christians your eternal destiny is in peril.

Responding to Chris I pointed out that purity doctrines were very much a feature of Old Testament morality.  Separation from paganism was a major area of teaching implicit in the sacrificial system as revealed in the early Law books.  One of the horrific episodes of the Old Testament, and there are many, is the event in the Book of Ezra when the Israelite men are commanded to cast out their non-Jewish wives and children.  It is hard for us to identity with the cruelty that such separation involved.  Purity ideas, even when they lingered on into the Christian period do not seem to have preoccupied Jesus, although the encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman shows even Jesus sometimes struggled to make sense of the strong Jewish traditions about personal purity.

Whatever we think about the Syro-Phoenician woman story, the story of the Good Samaritan shows that by the time this story was told ideas about ritual contamination were firmly on the back burner.  The way we treat people and our responsibility to help others can be clearly seen from this story to outweigh any ritual obligations placed on us.  I could of course continue to point out the way in which that the story of the Samaritan is deeply subversive on the ritual obligations of the Jewish faith but I am sure most of my readers have heard enough sermons on the topic.

To summarise, Chris is correct to notice that certain passages from Scripture are being manipulated to create the impression that Christianity is all about getting into small groups and shutting out the world and all its problems.

What I have written does not make the passages that were made important to Chris in his early days go away.  They still exist but they need to be balanced against other passages which speak of a wider fuller way of dealing with the world.  These passages might be summarized by the texts in the Sermon on the Mount which speak of the importance of being salt and light.  Such salt and light was destined for the ‘earth’ and to shine ‘before men’.  It is hard to suggest that this teaching was a request to be active only in the context of a special closed group.