In the sermon Life Abundant or Life Resisting? published in The True Wilderness Harry Williams asks whether our Christianity makes for a better and happier world or does not. He believed that quite often it does not - that Christianity in many of its forms is not a good but an evil thing. He speculated that the root of the trouble might be
“the habit of mind which makes us think of God as one item in His universe, as one object among other objects. Thinking in this way, God is conceived of as one being among a multitude of other beings, who stand over against us and is this and not that, here and not there.”
Williams thinks this is fundamentally a failure not in intelligence but in love. If God is one item in God’s universe, then religion becomes a departmental activity, a recreation or a task among other recreations and tasks, and this drives a thick wedge between religion and life. The God who is a being standing over against us, because he is our own invention, is made in our own image, becomes an object onto which we project our own feelings of insecurity. Our images and ideas of God, our theologies and traditions, the Bible text, is always to a greater or lesser degree describing the God of our invention. I understand ‘the work of the Holy Spirit’ to be integral to the image of God we create, describe and worship. If we believe the orthodox view that Jesus is fully human and fully divine, integrating in his being these two dimensions that are both equally the essence of creation and evolution, then human consciousness, experience and wisdom must be integral to the formation of images and the ideas of God.
Williams, who spent years in therapy, noted that our traditional ideas of God are now threatened by new knowledge, by the discoveries about the emotional roots of human character and behaviour. This is still as true, and perhaps even more true, in 2022 than it was in 1965.
Williams says we so often think of this idol, the creator, as only a part of us, the respectable civilised part of us.
“God is not, we think, responsible for those instinctive drives which are the strongest things we know. Indeed, he is somehow in competition with them. As an omnipotent competitor, he is able to beat us from the start by saying, ‘Thou shalt not,’ and backing up his prohibitions by the most absolute of all sanctions: eternal torment.”
However much I was liberated from such immature thoughts when I first read The True Wilderness I am still infected by them. I still find myself wondering if God is observing me, judging me, ashamed of or disgusted by some of the things I think and do. It’s hard to get rid of our internal judge, a judge that Christianity continues to place very successfully in our minds. No wonder people walk away from Christianity or avoid it altogether.
The Living in Love and Faith book draws on an unhealthy projection of God. The Christian story, it says, “is about our rebellion, disobedience and refusal to depend on one another and on God – a disorder which has infected the whole of creation; It is a story about Jesus … who gave himself to death for us so that we and the whole of creation could be set free from the bonds of sin, the forces of evil and the judgement we deserve.” [p165] “Jesus suffers the condemnation that should be ours, enduring the consequences of our sin.” [170] The theology of LLF is founded on an unhealthy projection of a God whose involvement with our lives cultivates a powerful idea of sin, failure and guilt.
As a gay man who is most definitely not unconditionally loved and accepted by the Church of England it’s hard to believe that the authors of the LLF book mean what they say when they write about “the lavish love that God bestows upon creation (that) is meant to cascade through human lives.” That’s the problem with the Christian focus on sin, guilt and redemption. We human beings find it so much more difficult to believe and trust in our created, primary goodness and love than in our failures.
Divine unconditional love
Harry Williams says Divine love is difficult to talk about, since love surpasses knowledge.
“It transcends theological definition. It is not a piece of information which can be handed on like a mathematical formula. We can know it only in so far as we have experience of it. But then we have, all of us, had experience of it. We all have experience of two types of feeling. There is the feeling which unites us to our world and makes us rejoice in it – an experience of love, of acceptance, of communion. And there is the other kind of feeling which separates us from our world and makes us hate it – an experience of fear, exile, of discord. The first convinces us that things are right with us. The second convinces us that things are wrong with us.
“But then, everything we are is God imparting Himself to us, and therefore in everything we are we feel after Him and find Him. The whole of us flows from the one fountain of life, and it is by means of the whole of us that we return to the source from which we have sprung.”
“Love is the power to accept, to accept ourselves and other people and the world as the presence of God. Love is the power not to deny but to affirm experience, not to shrink away from it in frozen or indignant alarm but to go out and meet it, because, in spite of the apparent threats and dangers, it is our creator, come, not to steal, nor to kill, nor to destroy, but that we might have life and have it more abundantly.”
Revelation in Christ
In another sermon, Revelation, Williams outlines two aspects of our belief about God’s revelation of himself in Christ.
“The first is the belief that the one and only God is the Creator and that it was this same God who was made man in Jesus Christ. The second is that when God thus took manhood to Himself, the human nature he assumed was not stifled or destroyed by His Divinity, but came to its full and perfect expression.”
While we may indeed believe in the God of love as the Creator of all things, thanks to the enduring fall, sin, guilt, redemption theology of salvation underpinning LLF, we may at the same time “regard this Creator as a powerfully sinister force of which it behoves us to be extremely cautious, if not downright afraid.” Today our greater fear may not be so much of the “savage judge with power to condemn and punish” but the unconditionally loving God “as the fount of vitality, as the source of impulses and instincts within us which, we fear, will sweep us off our feet” because we fail to distinguish between our ‘sinful’ impulses and the energies and drives which are healthy and creative. I am still uncertain whether to encourage streamings of energy within my body that are intensely pleasurable and release creative energies.
Williams believes we all too easily live with a frightened fantasy of the Creator who works not for our good but for our destruction. We are, he says, encouraged in the Church to seek protection from the all-powerful, ever-present, all-seeing God by pacing ourselves in what we may describe as the safe arms of Christ, whose Holy Spirit will enable us to fight and conquer our enemy. It matters not that this dualistic view has been condemned from early days by the Church, says Williams. He says “people smell extermination in Church, Christianity being summarised for them in the great Commandment, ‘You must on no account be you. That is wicked. You must be what we tell you, for that is God’s Word and Law.’” I smell this in the theology of LLF. LLF is unable to affirm and argue for equality and justice for LGBTIQ+ people because God doesn’t allow equality for those who fail to follow his Laws as written in the Bible.
As a result, self too easily becomes the enemy. We must choose between self and God, or we may be accused of being selfish. Williams wisely knows that “such self-sacrifice and self-surrender as Christ suffered is only possible when selfhood has been achieved. It is in fact an affirmation of self, not a denial of it.” “It is by means of our being ourselves to the fullest possible extent that God reigns. God is not our rival. God is the ground of our being. And only when we begin to reign with Him in the full possession of our human selfhood can we begin also to suffer with Him and to die.” Behind these ideas “there lies a common distrust of what God has made, a hidden, unseen vote by some of no confidence in the Creator.”
Individuation
Williams writes of a phase of growth in the human individual which demands isolation of the self from the herd and the fostering of egoism. Only by doing so, he says, can we become more fully ourselves. This requires a certain courage and may involve a certain ruthless assertiveness. He’s talking about Carl Jung’s idea of individuation. Jung recognises the necessity for each of us to confront our innate distrust of the need to more fully realise the self, moving toward an (ideal) state where our latent potentials are actualized and elements of our unconscious brought to the light of consciousness and integrated harmoniously into our character structure. In life, we can only ever approach, but never fully reach the condition of psychological wholeness. But moving in this direction generates fulfilment and leads to the cultivation of a character that is rooted in our individuality and which transcends mere social roles and the expectations of our peer group and society at large.
Redemption
The Christian story of our rebellion, disobedience and refusal to depend on one another and on God – a disorder which has infected the whole of creation, I understand as a necessary rebellion against our human reluctance to confront truth and life-giving energy. We habitually live and half live in anxiety, restraining the urge to live fully. In another sermon, Redemption, Williams concludes that God’s love first tears us apart in order to recreate us into a richer, fuller being. God’s love harmonises by convincing us that we are accepted as a whole and giving us the ability, the nerve, to accept ourselves because we discover that we have already been fully accepted. God’s love is mediated to us through the whole of creation and the drama of our living and relating. The task of the Church is to give us the courage to take the risk, break free from conventions and the prison of our inhibitions and the Christian teachings and practices that hold us in chains in contrast to Jesus the Christ who opens the door to life in all its fulness.