Mystery is one of those words that is incredibly useful when talking about the Christian faith.  Or perhaps I should say that it is particularly useful to Christians who do not want, or expect, their grasp of the faith to be tightly defined by words and concepts.  It is a word that allows flexibility, room for movement and the prospect of change and growth.

As part of my personal background in the church, I can mention here that I spent ten months studying the Orthodox church in Greece in the 1960s.  It was not an easy period to be in Greece as the country was going through some difficult political upheavals.  In charge of the government were a group of army officers, claiming the hand of God for their ultra right-wing political ideals.  This political scenario had the effect of preventing me making contact with some otherwise important individuals for fear, on their part, that association with a foreigner might endanger them in some way.

Nevertheless, the exposure to Orthodoxy was an important part of my Christian formation.  Many of the theological debates of the West, such as the debates between Catholic and Protestant, simply never travelled east.  The theological controversies they live with tended to be much older – the debates of Ecumenical Councils for example.  These Councils belong to the first eight centuries of the Christian era.  None of the English speaking Orthodox theologians that I met were able to make much sense of the things that divide Christians in the West.

The word ‘mystery’ is of course a Greek word.  Its root is a verb, which means to be silent.  Behind the word is the memory of a very different way of doing religion, the so-called mystery religions.  In these pagan mysteries, the worshipper was initiated by seeing a drama enacted in a context of highly charged emotion.  There is a lot we do not know about these mysteries as they were secret, even then.  But the Orthodox took from these pagan mysteries one central thing.  They understood that worship was about participation in the transcendent through seeing a sacred drama.  The typical Orthodox church is filled, top to bottom, with lights, paintings and icons.  The drama in the Orthodox liturgy is of course the representation of the life, death and resurrection of Christ.  The worshipper is a witness and participant in this drama.  The receiving of the elements enables the worshipper to be every Sunday, in some way, a contemporary of the Gospel events.  Time can be collapsed in this way so that all that is contained in the ‘saving’ events of the Passion and Resurrection can be made accessible in the here and now.  This is one of the undergirding insights and principles of Orthodox worship.  This idea may sound novel even to those who have studied Orthodoxy but it is my subjective reading and understanding of what I saw in Orthodoxy at its very best.  But as with everything else, the day to day reality of Orthodoxy was often rather grubby, with over-politicised bishops and some poorly educated, even ignorant clergy.

To return to the word with which I started – mystery.  It allows a Christian to admit that there is a lot that they simply do not understand and certainly cannot put into words.  It allows for an approach to faith which honours silence and beauty.  These are things that do not require articulation in logical structure or concepts.  The Western approach to theology, in contrast, likes its theology wrapped up in tightly defined packages.  This would be true in both Catholic and Protestant circles.  Definitions of God are so much easier to police and heretics easier to spot if you have your faith defined in statements that are logically coherent.

Why do I write about mystery in a blog that is dedicated to the subject of Christian abuse?  The answer is that talking the language of mystery allows us to escape the tyranny of words.  Many Christians, in defending their theological positions, batter other Christians with the accusation that they are not using the right words.  We spoke in an earlier blog about the energy with which some Christians defended the doctrine of ‘substitutionary atonement’  In the doctrinal definitions that are compulsory for Christian Union leaders to sign there are strict words that define the ‘correct’ position to hold.  I am not here arguing for words to have no place in Christian doctrine.  I would want, however, to maintain that theological definitions are only useful up to a point.  Beyond that point we all have to live with approximation and even guess-work as to the nature of reality.  When Christians accuse one another of not using the right words, then there is often a failure of love and imagination as well as an inappropriate use of power to enforce the will of one person over another.

‘No one has seen God at any time.’  This statement undergirds what we mean by mystery.  Mystery implies a tentative seeking after truth in order to find a reality that goes beyond words, concepts or formulations. In a church that fully understands mystery, there will be fewer witch hunts to enforce orthodoxy and intolerance towards those who think differently.  Let us learn deeper tolerance and better ways of listening to others.  In this way there will be less reason for Christians ever to want to shout others down for holding ‘incorrect’ beliefs.  Ecumenism, true ecumenism, might be a pilgrimage towards truth, bringing the insights we already have but recognising that we will together discover much that has not yet been revealed.

There is a verse from the Psalms which used to haunt me as a child.  It is about the terrible experience of being betrayed by someone close to you.  The Psalmist is in a situation of conflict and he says that he could bear it if it was an enemy responsible for putting him through pain and insult.  ‘But’ he goes on to say, ‘it is you, a man like myself, my companion, my close friend, with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship…’  Ps. 55.13-14.  The whole psalm is a gloomy one, full of indignation at the terrible behaviour of the Psalmist’s ‘enemies’.  It is also a prayer that God will protect the Psalmist from these attacks and allow him to escape to a far away place.

The connection that I want to make between this psalm verse and something we might experience now is not to compare it with a falling out with a friend, however much this may happen.  I wish rather to compare it with an experience known to many Christians who, for whatever reason, want to leave the Christian fellowship of which they have been faithful members.   Certain conservative Christian groups will close ranks totally in this situation, shun the individual leaver and make them feel as though they had never existed.  As long as the member remained in the ‘fold’, they were lavished with affection, attention and Christian love.  But then a situation arises which might involve a sense of growing unease with the integrity of the leaders.  The individual member realises that they have to question what they have been taught and make plans to withdraw from the community.  The so-called friends, the former sharers of fellowship and love, are then nowhere to be seen.  No recognition of the pain and sense of isolation is afforded to the leaver nor any kind of understanding.  All that remains is an emptiness and cold rejection.

When I was researching my book, Ungodly Fear, I met a couple who described the raw pain of rejection when they left their church.  They told me that people would cross over to the other side of the road when they saw them coming.  It took quite a long time for this couple to accept that Christian fellowship was not in fact about earning love.  There are Christians out there, I wanted to explain,  who were prepared to love them without making conditions.  Families, at any rate good ones, are bound together with bonds of affection that are unconditional.  Love and fellowship are not things that are turned on and off according to our behaviour.  While there are actions that can crack relationships, every Christian is, or should be, committed to the idea that the bonds of peace should be fought for.  The idea that we can turn from love to hate in the flash of an eye because someone does not conform totally to the will of the leader or group, is appalling.

Why do some Christians behave in this way?  From a psychological point of view I think the answer is not hard to find.  The Christianity that they have embraced is the black/white variety.  They have allowed themselves to believe that they have the unadulterated truth, the correct interpretation of the Bible and the perfect version of Church life and fellowship.  Overseeing this ‘perfect’ environment is a leader who has their complete loyalty.  In this universe there is no room for discussion or debate.  The answers are all there in the Scriptures and the leader can always be trusted to provide the answer as to ‘what we think’.  The black/white mentality does not allow for compromise or questioning and so everyone who has doubts has to be rejected forthwith.  Doubts undermine the perfect oasis of truth that they have had created for themselves.  Any doubts expressed by others are taken as a personal attack and have to be fought off.  A single doubt about the perfection of Scripture also has to be fiercely driven away and the best way to drive away doubt is to utterly scorn and reject the individual.  Thus the love that binds this kind of paranoid Church is one which is conditional.  Unless you believe in the way we tell you and follow the dictates of our group, we will reject you and cast you out.

Christian betrayal, in simple terms, is the discovery that the fellowship and love that one had enjoyed up till that point had always been conditional.  It was what we can call cultic love.  Cultic love, wherever it is found, is the sort of love that will be instantly withdrawn the moment one questions or in any way rocks the boat in the group.  This instant change of attitude leads to pain and a sense of  total bewilderment.  How can people who had shown real love and understanding one moment then turn around and push one away?  Many people never recover their ability to enter Christian fellowship again.  They have been too severely hurt.

Out in society there are numberless people who have been through this experience of Christian betrayal.  We don’t know how many because they seldom come to the attention of church members.  But at least let us be aware of them and when we meet them be able to show some understanding of their sense of having been let down.  This blog has all such people very much in its sights.  The material in the posts and in our discussions are designed to help such people.  While few are reading it at this point, one hopes that the material will eventually be read by some of them and that they may come to know that Christian love is not conditional but unconditional as it pours out from God and from those who worship him.

Some years ago I was asked to write a short piece on the topic of touch in connection with the healing ministry.  It was requested at the time when serious stories of abuse within the healing ministry were beginning to emerge.  I was also personally hearing of cases of sexual abuse perpetrated by individuals who were claiming to be exercising a healing ministry. There was dilemma to be faced as  it is difficult to exclude touch completely from a healing ministry.  This ministry after all is sometimes called ‘the laying on of hands’.

Parallel to the issue of how the laying on of hands should be exercised in prayer for healing was another problem for many churches –the advent of the ‘Peace’.  Depending on the church you attended, this could consist of a solemn handshake, a smile or a full-blooded embrace.  Churches which went in for the more extensive forms of greeting, tended to be more at the conservative end of churchmanship.  If you were able to enter into this kind of intimate greeting with a fellow member of your Christian community, so the thinking might go, then this implied that you possessed a greater ‘freedom in the Spirit’.  I personally have no problem with ‘liturgical embrace’ or whatever we might want to call it, but equally I feel it important to be sensitive to the needs of those who are uncomfortable with this gesture.  I used to know an elderly retired clergyman who insisted on embracing every female in the congregation as they left church.  Because he had been doing it for a number of years no one asked the question as to whether it was sensitive or appropriate.  My take on the situation was that it was in itself in his case an innocent gesture but that It was not demonstrating sensitivity.  The embrace of a stranger is invasive and may in fact stir up memories  of an episode of actual abuse in the person submitting to the embrace.  Just because it does none of this in the vast majority of cases does not mean that this possibility must not always be at the back of our minds.

In thinking about healing ministry, I know from my own experience that it is totally intuitive to ask to hold the hand of the person being prayed for.  Physical touch, whether holding a hand or placing a hand on the shoulder seems to me a natural part of what it means to pray for another person.  It is an outward sign of the connection that is set up when two people opens themselves up to each other in trust and love.  It also expresses symbolically that one person, the one who ministers, is alongside the other as they approach God together in prayer.  Praying with and for another person brings out something which I have never seen fully discussed in books on pastoral care.   This is the fact that when people prays in twos, threes or small groups, they can touch the reality mentioned in the New Testament and which Jesus speaks about when he says-  ‘When two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.’  I have found this little discussed passage of great significance in trying to understand the dynamics of the healing ministry.  People who pray together are for a brief moment brought into a more intimate connection than at any other time.  It is as if, in Christ, they touch one another with a greater closeness than they may have ever known before.  This moment of closeness has to be allowed to pass as there is no room in the healing ministry for clingy, potentially exploitative relationships.  This may happen if the person prayed for feels attached to the one prays and the ‘minister’ encourages that connection.

Anything that is holy and good, such as what I have been trying to describe, always has the potential to be turned upside down and made cheap, exploitative and abusive.  That is, sadly, a constant theme of this blog.  Healing can be something spiritual, transformative and pure; equally it can be the prelude to dependency, exploitation and worse.  The same thing can be said about touch.  At its best it can express the connection that two (or more) people feel belongs to them as disciples of Christ.  It can be an effective symbol for expression of ‘koinonia’ or communion.  Equally it can be a grubby, sexualised action and a symbol of one person’s desire to dominate and exploit another.  The Christian faith is always going to have these alarming contrasts between good things and good things that have been twisted by selfish and corrupted individuals.  It is perhaps the aim of this blog to sensitise the reader to the reality of these contrasts.  Most Christian abuse will be presented in the wrapping of Biblical texts and apparently normal behaviour.  It is for the informed (educated by this Blog?) Christian to be able to sense and name all forms of spiritual abuse that are encountered in the day to day lives of our churches.  No doubt we will be returning to this theme again.

I used to know an old lady, now dead, who was the proud owner of no less than  five university degrees.  She seemed to be alert and extremely intelligent but there was one thing she could not do which was to spot a scam artist.  So she would be sending money off to all kinds of companies who promised her that she had won or was about to win a large prize in a foreign lottery.  She would tell her relatives that when this money arrived she would give it to them.  The relatives pleaded with her to stop sending off all this money but the letters she received were so convincing that she could not help herself.  It was only when her relatives found a way of censoring her post that the nuisance finally subsided.

In many ways the quality that drew this old lady to be taken advantage by the scam artists was an attractive quality, the ability to trust another human being.  We think of Jesus commending the capacity of the child to trust as being something worth striving for.  We might commend this quality in our churches.  It is certainly a more attractive quality than the opposite, the ability to question, to be cynical and mistrust others.  Christians somehow, we think, are meant to be people who love, are kind and extend the hand of friendship to others.  But sadly the same qualities are easily turned into a naivety, gullibility and vulnerability to every charlatan around.

This ready cross-over from something essentially good to something that is sad and unfortunate is a dilemma for Christians.  Christians are themselves victims to their own special brand of scam-artists.  At Chris’ suggestion, I psyched myself up to watch on the God Channel some of the people whom I would call Christian scammers.  It was a creepy experience.  How anyone would want to give money to some of the people who speak on the God Channel, I do not know.  Clearly they are skilled practitioners as loosing the heart and purse strings of those who watch.  Chris spoke to me about a lady he knows who in spite of living on very little was sending every spare bit of money to a Television evangelist in the belief that she was somehow serving God.  This is very sad as no doubt she was depriving herself of comforts in order to enrich an evangelist.  He was then using the money to ‘prove’  that God was blessing him by allowing him to have every kind of luxury and indulgence.  There is something deeply offensive about this scenario.

In talking about this pattern of exploitation that affects many Christian individuals up and down the country, Chris reminded me of another pattern of persuasion that is freely used.  This is the ‘parading’ of Christian celebrities in churches, large and small to give their testimonies.  The celebrities are individuals who have become household names in, for example, acting or sport who are also Christians.  By arriving at a small church to share their story of how they became a Christian, the celebrity scatters a little star-dust over the congregation.  But other things seem to be going on as well.  By being brought face to face with a ‘successful’ individual who is a Christian, the church member is given the message ‘you too can be like me’.  Of course this subliminal message is total nonsense but many people buy into it.  They take on the belief that by being a Christian like the celebrity, they too can be rich and famous.  Their feelings of well-being through being Christian men and women are enhanced.  ‘We can be winners like you, because we are on the same side’ is the thought that is given.

Celebrity testimonies given in church apparently cost the churches concerned a great deal in financial terms.  I have heard of fees of £1 -£2,000 being paid out for a 20 minute witness.  Clearly the leadership believe the investment to be worth-while.  But their investment can ultimately be seen to be buying into something that is a fantasy.  By allowing the congregation to boost their self-esteem through contact with these Christian celebrities and the subliminal messages they bring, the leaders are in fact colluding in a scam.  To repeat, the scam that is being sold is not directly a financial one.  It is selling to people the idea that being a Christian can lead to earthly riches and success like that of  the celebrities.  It is a scam because it is a message that has no basis in reality but feeds frustrated ambition and a sense that life may not have delivered all that was promised.

One of the things that retirement and increasing age gives to one is the sense that you do not need to look up to other people as though they are ‘superheroes’.    Most people, even though they may have extra responsibilities in life are no better or worse than you are.  Their extra status, if they have it, brings added burdens. The life of a ‘celebrity’ whether in the church or in any other walk of life is not one to be envied.  The further up one climbs a particular ladder, the more difficult it is to climb down again.  There is an old joke about a man who spent his whole life climbing a ladder of success and recognition only to discover when he reached the top that he had set the ladder against the wrong wall.  Fame brings isolation, not to mention the envy of people who may resent your success.  Perhaps Christian leaders, who are tempted to ‘buy-in’ Christian celebrities to speak to their congregations, should use their time and energy of helping their members to celebrate the ordinary but immensely valuable gifts of compassion, empathy and the ability to listen to others.  These gifts are far more needed in our divided world than the capacity to be a celebrity.

Entertainment attracts but it does not educate.

It was a passing remark made by Chris in one of our phone conversations that made me think.  He said something along the lines of: ‘If you are being entertained in church, you are not thinking’.  He was in fact talking about Christian music of the kind that fills festivals like Spring Harvest.  Such music fills the brain with its noise and rhythm, banishing any possibility of reflection or rational thought.  But then my thinking about this topic went further and began to sense a conspiracy.  Suppose this driving out of thought and reflection is actually a deliberate ploy.  Christian leaders perhaps don’t want their people to think, so they turn worship times to non-stop entertainment.  It is this link between entertainment and worship that I want to try to explore.

Those of us who are older can remember the church worship of childhood before the advent of modern language or music.  We listened to long prayers interspersed with hymns and readings.  Often our attention wandered but we tried to pray, to absorb atmosphere and ideas that made some sort of sense.  I suspect that none of us would have dreamt that this activity was meant to resemble entertainment.    It was later during the 60s and 70s that modern language crept in at the same time as modern music.  At first the music was gentle and melodious but still it hardly fitted the description of entertainment.  It merely lightened up the atmosphere and made the experience more pleasant.  But then in the 70s something called ‘youth culture’ invaded worship and this was supposed to bring the young people back into church.  This new music, being related to popular music would always have had a strong rhythm.  The rhythm and beat came to be the dominant feature and we found our brains totally mesmerised by the thunder of this beat hammering away inside our minds.  It is in fact impossible to engage in any kind of thought when this primal beat is at work around us.

I suspect that many older people did not in fact survive many exposures to this kind of music.  We retreated either to another church or to an early service totally free of primal music and rhythm.  Many churches up and down the country are indeed divided between a small group of older people who cling to an early service and a younger set who revel in ‘relevant’ worship with its mesmerising music.  The question arises then as to what is going on in such ‘youth’ services.  If, as I would suggest, all rational thought is impossible in this environment , then we have to accept that such music makes the worship at the very least deficient.  The person who enjoys such an experience is not in all probability loving God with the mind, even though he or she might claim to be engaging God with the heart , soul and strength.  The cynic might call it entertainment with a pious wrapping.

Some people would argue that the sorts of service which have modern music attract young people and that we must leave them alone.  But the serious question remains.  If the type of music actually prevents normal thought processes happening, what kind of future in the Christian faith awaits these young people?   Can we really expect any long term evolution of faith if the minds of the participants have never been really engaged?  Entertainment attracts but it does not educate.  Has music been used to suppress rationality and thus growth of understanding?.

These thoughts are meant to be  genuine questions and I stand to be contradicted on my insinuations about the use of Christian ‘pop’.  But the point made by Chris at the beginning that entertainment suppresses thought and by implication rationality has serious consequences for the future of the Church.  My comments probably do not apply to all music in church as I believe that there is a case for the type of reflective music that has grown up in the Anglican tradition and elsewhere that makes mediation and prayer somehow more accessible.  I am well aware of the effect that well-sung Taizé choruses can have on the sense of peace and stillness in a church building lit only by candles.  The thinking test has to be applied.  Does this or that music allow thought or does it banish it out of the brain?  When thought is banished and entertainment dominates during worship, we must question what is really going on.  It may even be that people are drawn to church, to come under the influence of charismatic preachers and listen to catchy entertaining music as a way of being controlled by them.  Readers of this blog will know from several of my earlier posts that I wonder at the motives of some churches and church leaders.     Because the church is an institution that does sometimes exploit and corrupt its members, we must be alert to the means by which this is done.  It may be that music of a particular kind is one such method of drawing in people to become in due course victims of an abusive Christianity.  Let us at least be always alert to this possibility.

In 2002 I was asked to give the Annual Lecture for a cult watch organisation in London called FAIR.  It was soon after my book on fundamentalist churches had come out so I was expected to speak on these.  I am reminded of that lecture after posting a response to haikusinenomine mentioning my frustration at the fact that my researches at the time did not reveal a single article about the religious development of young adults.  This was in contrast to the copious literature to cover the religious development of young children.

My concern in that lecture was to speak about the particular vulnerability of young adults, particularly those going to University, to the blandishments of Christian Unions and indeed other cultic groups.  Linking Christian Unions to cultic organisations may seem unfair but my observations suggested that the same dynamics to draw young people into these groups were at work in both cases.  It could of course be argued that the legacy of full-blown cult involvement was far more potentially serious but the same initial vulnerabilities could be observed in both cases.

As I am trying to shorten my blog posts to under a 1000 words, I shall not recite all my detailed points.  Suffice to say I borrowed the psychological thinking of Erik Erickson to describe the point of transition between late childhood and early adulthood.  He speaks about the desire of adolescents to find identity and a proper sense of self.  One of the false trails towards this sense of identity is the attraction of ‘totalism’.  For Erickson in his historical context, totalism meant attachment to Hitler Youth or the  equivalent in Stalinist Russia.  Political totalitarianism, allowing oneself to be identified with an overarching worldview,  was, in short, a substitute for the wholeness or integration that Erickson felt to be the target for the balanced mature adult.

In my lecture I suggested that attractiveness of cults and Christian Unions for young university students was because it offered them a painless method of resolving the maturity issue through embracing the ‘totalism’ offered in the all or nothing groups.    Totalism, the resolution of inner conflict by attaching oneself to a cause or ideology, offers the young person a sense that he or she has achieved that longed for identity and a sense of wholeness by attaching themselves to a cause.  The noble self-sacrificial  behaviour of the young people of Kiev comes out of the same longing.  Such idealism is not wrong, it is merely incomplete and there needs to be a gradual weaning off this totalism so that a more mature identity can be taken on.  The problem for the cults is that the dynamic and maintenance of the group depends on keeping young people at this point of immaturity for a long time.   This will involve them in maintaining their slavish devotion to leaders and the cause far longer than is healthy or desirable.

When I reflected on this Ericksonian interpretation of Christian Unions and cults at university at the end of the lecture, I concluded that for most people who passed through it, the damage was limited.  One great loss for Christian Union university students is in many cases a failure to engage with the wider social opportunities of the university, the exposure to a myriad of ideas and people.  By the age of 30 the vast majority of ex-students have moved on to embrace their adult identity, the process having been delayed.  For a few, the damage is permanent.  They have internalised a fear of people and institutions so that they can only live in ghetto-like environments and these permanently restrict their horizons.

Research on these issues is almost non-existent and so one has to rely on anecdote and impression.  One piece of ad-hoc research has come to my attention which does not merit inclusion in any learned article, but remains interesting in spite of that.  An individual noted the names of Christian Union officials over a number of years at Cambridge University.  He then checked up a few years later and found that not one of these people was still in any way involved in a Christian body.  They had apparently grown above and beyond the enthusiasms of their late teens and no branch of the Christian faith now attracted them. It would have been good if these same individuals could have been interviewed but once again there seems little appetite for this kind of research.

Writing this blog has brought home to me how little interest there is in the ‘corruption’ of young impressionable people in their university years.  In July I shall be attending a conference in the States on cultic studies.  In among the lecturers, there will be a tiny presence of Church based people who are concerned that cultic issues are a problem in the church as well.  I shall of course be reporting about this conference in due time, but meanwhile I continue to express the thought that the Church has a big problem in not owning up to cultic behaviour in and around its life and work.

I have been pondering on the question of why individuals believe certain things in the Bible as true when they defy  rationality and common sense.  Or perhaps I should put it another way – that they feel they have to believe in such things as the great fish of Jonah or accept the tale of the Tower of Babel as explaining the origin of language diversity.  I do not, in fact, have a problem in recognising that ordinary people who belong to large churches, which have these ideas as part of their belief systems, will also believe them.  They believe them because it is an act of obedience and loyalty to their leaders whom they trust.  They want to follow them because they believe them reliable guides in finding their way to God. So the decision they have made is not necessarily anything to do with the Bible; it is rather to follow a preacher or teacher who has touched them with persuasive rhetoric. They do not feel it necessary to agonise about this belief system because it is just the way it is and part of belonging to a particular church.  Trust overcomes puzzlement or the temptation to doubt.

Those of us who do not belong to such authoritarian systems of belief and practice may find this kind of acquiescence strange and far from the way that we may think about religious faith.  We might rightly question whether this trust in leaders to do the thinking on behalf of others is an appropriate or even valid way of practising the Christian faith.  But whether or not it is right, we still have to ask ourselves how the ability to believe extremely difficult things works out for those leaders who have been to college and studied the Bible at depth.  How do people who know that there are two accounts of creation and two accounts of the Noah story in the early chapters of Genesis manage?  It is, we might think, one thing to harmonise these accounts by using a conservative commentary.  It is however quite another thing to study the passages at depth in the original Hebrew and not feel a tug of acute dissonance.

My readers may well have sat at the feet of prominent fundamentalist preachers and wonder, like me, how they are able to sustain a consistent conservative interpretation over a lifetime.  When I was an undergraduate, Dr Jim Packer was a regular preacher at Christian Union meetings.  I would sometimes go to listen, fascinated by his rhetoric combined with his unwillingness to concede a single point to those who disagreed with him on a matter of Bible interpretation.  I challenged a member of the Christian Union on this complete certainty.  I asked whether Jim Packer would ever concede even one critical point in Bible interpretation put forward by someone involved in so-called’ higher criticism.  No, I was told, the conservative interpretation is always right.

I have asked myself over the years whether a refusal to concede a single point in Bible understanding did not create some kind of inner tension or stress.  I came across some words of Oliver Cromwell who said (I quote from memory) ‘I beseech you in the bowels of Christ to consider whether you may be mistaken’.  The leaders of conservative interpretation seemed to have no doubts whatsoever.

About 15 years ago I did come across a book which describes the inner tension of an individual who does his conservative thinking and teaching against the background of constant challenge and even ridicule.  The book called The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind: The case of Edward Carnell  by Rudolph Nelson is a description of the devastating dissonance inside a conservative scholar.  No one else has written on the topic of what goes on inside the psyche of a conservative teacher who faces professional ridicule and constant challenge for teaching and writing ideas which go against the mainstream of Biblical scholarship and of society.  Carnell born in 1917 was one of the handful of scholars who emerged in the 40s and 50s who wished to place fundamentalist doctrine and Biblical interpretation at the centre of theological discussion and give the revived evangelical movement some intellectual respectability.  He wanted to do this by studying at depth both in conservative colleges as well as at Harvard Divinity School.  Harvard was in no sense a natural home for a young fundamentalist theologian but there was the sense that unless you did face up to the ‘Beast’ of critical scholarship, you could never challenge it.

Carnell entered Harvard in 1944 for his doctorate studies. Harvard was to be generous to this bright dedicated student.  The institution cared nothing for the belief systems of its students as long as the work submitted fulfilled the rules of intellectual rigour and detail.  His doctorate studies concerned the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr and these focussed on the area of philosophy rather than biblical studies.  He then in 1948 accepted a teaching post in the newly founded Fuller seminary.  For the next 11 years, first as Lecturer and then as President of Fuller, Carnell continued his task of combining rigorous scholarship with fundamentalist beliefs.  The dissonance between these two was not easy to maintain, and his biographer speaks of the enormous personal cost in holding these two sides, the philosopher and the conservative theologian, together.  As President of a notable conservative institution with a reputation for learning, he was expected to participate in many of the issues and debates of the day.  It is not hard to understand his breakdown in 1959 as a failure to sustain a structure of belief which allows no questions to be considered by someone with a lively trained mind.    Perhaps Carnell’s predicament shows that a refusal to engage with questions is impossible. In the last resort something had to give and it was his mental health.

Carnell’s death in 1967 from an overdose of sleeping pills was either an accident or suicide.  There was no definite verdict on the matter but the biographer shows him to have been a broken man.  As a member of the theological elite in the States he was always under scrutiny from the academic fraternity for putting conservative theological ideas before the demands of scholarship.  At the same time there were vicious conservative groupings always ready to try and catch him out when he strayed from the dictates of strict conservative teaching.  The place he occupied was clearly an impossible one, not dissimilar to that of our own Archbishop of Canterbury.  Everyone wants to hear statements that coincide with their own beliefs.  They fail to understand that an individual needs to integrate a large number of positions within themselves.  Some will come from personal belief and others from  institutional loyalties.

The word ‘dissonance’ is one that sums up the life of Edward Carnell and no doubt it also affects many of those who use their intellectual gifts to hold to the idea that the conservative narrative is the only correct one to sum up the Christian faith.  Although the inner mental workings and motives of these individuals is not open to us, we have to be grateful for this biography which gives some account of a single individual who lived with this dilemma.  Edward Carnell is perhaps a prophet for our time.  Conservative beliefs about the Bible and an intellectual Western education will almost inevitably create dissonance and inner disharmony.  The Christian leaders who live with this dissonance need to be challenged.  Their ability to persuade large numbers of others to believe the same things who do not have their advantages of education and knowledge is a huge responsibility.  It also means that they have created something, which because of its inner contradictions, may well fail.  Chris has described the sense of betrayal when he found that the edifice of ‘Bible truth’ had feet of clay.  Perhaps Edward Carnell knew that his failure as well as inability to teach with total integrity meant that he had let his students down.  In recognising this his life ended in despair.

The latest round of a debate concerning ethics within the Anglican Church in England has taken a new twist.  After the ‘agreement to disagree’ on the subject of gay sex, which I reported a few posts back, the Archbishops and Bishops of the Church of England have now forbidden Anglican clergy to enter into the married state if their partner is of the same sex.  This becomes legally possible for everyone else after March 29^th in Britain.  It will be possible for lay people in the same situation to remain in good standing as far as communicant status is concerned.  Lay people who enter into a same sex marriage can also accept office within the congregation, such as the post of churchwarden or Reader.  It would seem that the clergy may not do something that has become more or less acceptable to most Church people and possible in a legal sense for 99% of them.

In commenting on this situation we can see that a situation of absurdity has arisen which will in the medium and long term do damage to the Church.  In the first place we can see that if a clergyperson defies the ban, the law and most public opinion would be on their side.  It is unlikely that the Bishops would have any real power to discipline him or her.  The attitudes of people have changed very fast in this area and it is strikingly clear that even in the past twenty years opinions have shifted dramatically.  It would be tempting to say, as some do, that standards of morality have collapsed and there are some things that should never be allowed to change.  But it could be argued that the acceptance of gay marriage has come about, not through some ghastly descent into loose and corrupt morals but because individuals who are gay want it to be possible to live openly and decently in society.  To ask for marriage is to make a request for the possibility of stability and permanence in their relationships rather than the pattern of promiscuity that many people thought was inevitable in gay sex. Gay marriage is, if you like, a demand for a better more wholesome morality rather than the opposite.

Why are the Anglican bishops rowing against the tide, even though they suspect, many of them, that their stand can only be short-lived at best?  It is because of politics.  The political reality of the Anglican Communion at present  is the recognition of the enormous power and numbers of Anglican Christians in Africa.  For various reasons, the Anglican Church in Africa and in various other parts of the world has come out clearly against any expression of gay sex.  As I mentioned in an earlier blog, the leaders of these churches have actively campaigned for the imprisonment of gay individuals.  A further point is that the African bishops are, for cultural reasons, able effectively to articulate the thinking of their people.  If the Archbishop of Nigeria decides that the entire province believes something then he has the means to enforce it as official policy.  Whether or not ordinary Christians in the pew care in the slightest about these and other, for them, remote moral issues is probably beside the point.  The African Bishops speak and in doing so they speak on behalf of their people in a way that is not possible in Britain.

In previous posts I have discussed the way in which the African Church has become indebted to and entangled with the politics and theology of conservative America.  Right Wing Foundations have bought influence and power in Africa and elsewhere and it can be seen that the disputes between American conservatives and liberals are being fought overseas where comparatively small amounts of money buy a lot of power and influence.  Taking a strong line on these issues is the way that African Christians can play their part in extending the power of the Right Wing in America across the world.

When the Anglican bishops in this country worry about the pressure that spills over into Britain from Africa, they are effectively surrendering, not to African opinion, but to the Religious Right in the States.  Nigerian and Ugandan Anglicans vastly outnumber Anglicans in Britain and so the Archbishop and his advisers fear that the Anglican Communion will collapse unless African opinion can be appeased.  This latest sop to African opinion will not do the trick as the African bishops already realise that the battle to outlaw gay marriage is a lost cause in Britain and our Bishops are no longer fighting it.  When the ban on Anglican  gay clergy marrying collapses as unworkable, the African church will want to walk apart from the formal Anglican structures  in this country, while retaining links to theologically conservative groups who hold the line on ‘biblical’ values.

The Church of England may yet get the leadership it deserves and be able to clearly state that it is not, and never has been a sectarian body of people who can only live with one set of ‘correct’ opinions.  Traditionally, liberals, catholics and evangelicals have coexisted together in the same church and have been able to respect each other and tolerate their differences.  If we live in a church which has to declare a political and theological position which is favourable to a conservative/fundamentalist stance, then the Anglican church will be considerably poorer.

How does all this relate to our topic of abuse?  It is because abuse will always be experienced in a church, an institution or a family where only one position is tolerated.  In politics we call the imposition of one ideology, totalitarianism and it is the same if only one position is tolerated in the church.  Totalitarianism will eventually involve the suppression of alternative viewpoints and that clearly involves abuse and the abandonment of democratic values. When these traditions of democracy are abandoned, people will suffer pressure, not only to abandon their existing opinions, but also to adopt ideas which are alien and hostile to their inner integrity.  There is an old saying about good debate and the rules governing it which the democrat will always agree with. The saying goes:  ‘I may disagree with your position passionately, but I will defend just as passionately your right to hold these views.’   If the Anglican Church surrenders its integrity in order to try to appease a Right Wing non-negotiable ideology that comes to us from America via Africa, then my church is descending away from its old tolerant inclusive roots.  This blog cares passionately about the way the Bishops speak to their clergy on these matters of justice and freedom. The alternative path towards strict conformity and exclusive patterns of belief will take away from us sooner or later the right to think freely and to believe that Christianity possesses a rainbow of possibilities as to how it is practised and believed.  That would be a tragic outcome.

Readers of this blog will note that I quite often speak about the tension between liberals and conservatives within the church.  If we were to draw a line to represent the two opposite ends of opinion among Christians I do not believe that I would be quite as close to the liberal end of the continuum as some might assume.  Although I accept ‘higher’ criticism of Scripture and am relaxed about certain definitions within doctrine, there is one particular place where I part company with many liberal Christians.  The point of issue is the question of healing miracles and the possibility of healing today.  Many liberals do not accept the reality of miracles either in Jesus’ day or today. Because this is something I have studied and experienced for myself I personally have little problem with the miracles in the Bible and can accept that they still take place in some settings.   A belief in the fundamental reliability of the healing stories is not the same as saying that we must always understand mental illness as being the result of demonic possession!  I see however no problem in believing that Jesus was a healer and that this was a crucial way in which he proclaimed the reality of God’s kingdom.  Healing has always formed a large part of traditional religious practice in cultures across the world and I see no reason not to believe that Jesus made a considerable impact on his contemporaries through his practice of healing.

Clearly this subject is a vast one and I will not be able to start more than a preliminary discussion in this first blog post on the subject.  But it is important to our overall theme of abuse in the church because while the church does in some situations have a highly effective ministry of healing, it also paradoxically sometimes allows this area of activity to be one where people are damaged.

The context where ‘healing’ may well have been met by readers of this blog will probably have been a charismatic/Pentecostal setting.  Although I am not uncritical of this style of worship and church life, I do recognise that the ‘energy’ released within this setting can sometimes be powerful and transformative.  Phenomena like speaking in tongues and ecstatic states are met in many religious contexts across the world.  When looked at objectively these phenomena do often have a significant effect on those caught up in them and in certain situations that might involve physical or emotional healing.  Charismatic ‘energy’ when practised in a Christian setting is also the context for the discovery of distinctive forms of spirituality.  Prayer seems often to be rediscovered in a vital way in those who have been exposed to charismatic events.  The problem arises when Christian groups insist that everyone who has had one of these experience must subscribe to a particular theology –normally of a very conservative type.

Back in the 1970s when I first encountered charismatic phenomena and the healing that sometimes went with it, it was not associated exclusively with any particular strand of theology.  Indeed early writing on the topic in the 60s was by one Denis Bennett who came from an Anglo-Catholic Anglican background.  It was only gradually over the late 70s and 80s that the Charismatic Movement came to be dominated by conservative and fundamentalist ideology.  I am told that there are places where this stranglehold is not to be found but if it exists it is rare.  The point of this brief historical digression is to note that the healing that sometimes comes as part of the charismatic culture also gets entangled with the power games that are common within the fundamentalist styles of church life.  Thus it is perfectly possible, as has happened, for a thoroughly corrupt Christian leader who exploits his people financially and sexually nevertheless to preside over a miraculous healing event.  Morality and healing do not necessarily go together, even if it would be much tidier for our thinking if evil people were never associated with an apparently spiritual event such as healing.

What are the phenomena within the charismatic culture that sometimes result in healing, mental or physical, whether or not these are combined with a strong grasp of Christian values and belief?  The answer at its most simple is that we are meeting a type of healing that allows an individual to encounter what is known as a primal experience.  It might be a very powerful event to be connected to a long forgotten trauma through a process known to psychologists as abreaction.   Although some people might regard the process, which sometimes causes tears and laughter, as somewhat childish, there is no doubt that healing can be found sometimes within it.  But, as I have suggested in a previous post, there is enormous pressure on the charismatic leader to make sure that these events occur every time that he is on stage.  ‘Outpourings of the Spirit’ are expected night after night to prove that the speaker is an anointed man of God, and, more  cynically, it is only when healings are thought to take place that people open their wallets.  In this situation there is the temptation to fabricate healings to bolster the power and authority of the leader.  A forced, even mechanical use of charismatic gifts is seldom productive.  All too easily you have the potential for abuse as well as a great sense of let-down for those who come for healing.

In this first post on the subject of healing I am trying to present a case for the reality of healing within the charismatic/Pentecostal culture of worship and practise.  I see no reason from experience to doubt that this style of spirituality can on occasion provide the opportunity for someone to be changed from within, spiritually, emotionally and physically.  They encounter a power which can move them in such a way that age-old issues are dealt with in a carthartic or abreactive moment. Simultaneously I note that insofar as the charismatic culture has been corrupted in many places by individuals who want power for themselves, the healing events are not straightforwardly simple.  The ‘healed’ individual may for example find themselves psychologically entangled with the ‘healer’, and there may be financial or other obligations to be paid back over a period of time.  Healing sometimes happens but unless there is a strong ethical context for its occurrence we might find that the ‘healed’ sometimes move from one form of bondage into another.

Since writing about the contrast between ‘pilgrim’ Christian and conservative Christian I have been pondering about this tension that runs through the heart of the Christian faith.  I suggested then that conservative Christians were often ‘stuck’ with their understanding of what they believed.  It was presented to them in such a way that they could neither go forward nor develop what they believed.  Logically that which is perfect, in this case the conversion experience, is incapable of improvement.  Pilgrim Christians on the other hand saw the gradual discovery of truth as a never-ending journey or an adventure.

In thinking about this contrast I have come back to thinking about the slippery word in Christian vocabulary, ‘salvation’.  Salvation has of course a long history.  It is biblical and appears in both testaments.  I cannot, being away from home, look up the words in any commentaries or concordance so what I will say will be general but reasonably accurate, I trust.  The word at its most basic level of meaning has the idea of rescue.  Someone needs saving from exile, from drowning and they need to be put back on dry land.  ‘Save me from the lion’s mouth’ is a quotation that comes to mind.  ‘Save me or I perish’ is another quote that comes to me from the New Testament.  In both these quotations there is the idea of salvation being taking someone out of a situation of danger or crisis and making them safe.  This kind of salvation is the first part of a process.  We could, as conservative Christians do, see this stage of salvation as being the moment when they pass from darkness to light, when they pass from a life of despair to one of meaning.  The moment of conversion is identified with that moment of salvation.  ‘Once I was blind, now I can see.’  But as I pointed out in the earlier blog post on this topic, the individual who has this moment of conversion sees it very much in the past and typically has very little to say about what happens after that moment.  To use the language of salvation, the Christian is able to talk at length about what he/she was saved from but not a lot about what might have happened after that event.  Salvation/conversion is ‘the’ moment in the Christian life.

If we go back to our picture of salvation being equivalent to a rescue we can see that the person so rescued is lying gasping at the bottom of the boat but desperately grateful for being saved from drowning.  Nevertheless the process is somewhat incomplete.  Being rescued is important, whether from exile, drowning or from a life of sin but the state of being rescued needs to be followed up in some way.  The person so rescued needs at some point to decide what he is going to do with the life that has been given back or set on a new path.  This salvation from a terrible threat needs to be followed up with another question.  What is the life so rescued going to be for in the future?  The Christian has been saved from something but he now needs to decide what he has been saved for.

The pilgrim Christian, whether or not he/she has been through the classic conversion experience of salvation, will have a lot to say about this second stage of salvation, ‘salvation for’.  Typically the pilgrim Christian will want to talk about all the insights and new understanding of what life is for when lived in the Christian way.  My own language would want to include an ever deeper understanding of the particular pattern of life that God reveals me to follow.  God wants me to discover my gifts, talents and uniqueness and live them out in such a way that I discover myself fully.  Being ‘saved for’ is, to quote John’s gospel, to ‘live life in all its fullness’.

There is an old story told about Bishop Wescott of Durham in the 19^th century.  He was asked on a train by an earnest student as to whether he had been saved.  His answer was to quote back to the student the various words in Greek that could be translated as ‘saved’.  They represented the past, the future and the present tenses of the verb ‘sozo’ which is the Greek word for save.  I won’t complete the anecdote in case I get it wrong, but suffice to say one answer to the student from what I have said above, might be this.  ‘Do you mean what has God saved you from?’  or ‘do you mean what has God saved you for?’.  I suspect that the second part of the answer is in the long term far more vital than the first.

A complete presentation of the Christian faith should always include some idea of what is to be expected of the individual after the moment of conversion.  Many practising Christians have not in fact had the conversion moment of light and change but their faith is arguably equally strong and committed, having been imbibed gradually over a lifetime.  For various reasons some Christian groups will not recognise an individual as having a proper faith without the classic marks of a ‘proper’ conversion.  This is an attack on the integrity of faithful people and the problem is not easily resolved.  Perhaps, if conditions make it possible, a discussion might be had about the topic of salvation.  The non-conservative might point out, as I have tried to in the post, that there is more than one stage in the process of salvation.  Within the discussion, we might legitimately ask, are they speaking about ‘salvation from’ or ‘salvation for’?  Both surely have a crucial part to play in the crucial process of bringing an individual from darkness into the presence of God who wants us to flourish and live life to the full.