This might be the last in the series of blogs I have posted recently. The drama of the latter stages of the LLF process are going to overtake other concerns, but for me, laying foundational questions ahead of the November Synod about our understandings of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and the Bible are essential. The Synod debate may still be conducted amid a welter of prejudice and fantasy but some members will have a more robust theology and conviction about divine unconditional love and they will bring their passion and conviction to the debate.

Two things difficult to talk about

Here are a two questions (amongst many) that are often too difficult to think and write about publicly in today’s Church of England. Why is it so difficult to represent Jesus as a women, a gay man, a lesbian, black, brown, yellow? Why is it so difficult to think about Jesus as an embodied, sexual human being? The result of this inhibition is that we suppress sexual desire, erotic energy, the pleasure of naked bodies, of sex, of the intensity and release of an orgasm, of masturbation. All these things are somewhat taboo, sometimes difficult to think about let alone publish thoughts about.-Why?

Both of these questions relate to the humanity of Jesus. I suggest that today’s primary theological trends emphasise the divinity of Jesus over against his humanity. The HTB model of theology and the theology of LLF that is heavily dependent on HTB thinking emphasises salvation theology above anything else. Salvation theology is dependent on Jesus as a divine person. The problem for me is that the debate about the divinity and humanity of Jesus only began within the early church, post the death of Jesus. It begs the question whether Jesus experienced himself as divine. Not of God, but as God.

In a comment on Thinking Anglicans about my previous blog someone said that Honest to God is a boring book. I’ve never found it boring. I rely on it as an easy reference point to name the theologies and era that have deeply affected my Christian life and vision. In writing this blog, it was my last port of call to look for a quote.

Honest to God, Chapter 4, p64:

“The doctrine of the Incarnation and Divinity of Christ is on any count central to the entire Christian message and crucial therefore for any reinterpretation of it. It is also the point where resistance to interpretation is likely to be at its maximum and where orthodoxy has it5s heaviest investment in traditional categories. This is true both at the level of technical theology, where any restatement6 must run the gauntlet of the Chalcedonian Definition and the Athanasian Creed, and at trhe popular level, where one will quickly be accused of destroying the Christmas story. But if it is necessary in our thinking about God to move to a position ‘beyond naturalism and supranaturalism’, this is no less important in our thinking about Christ, Otherwise we shall be shut up, as we have been hitherto, to an increasingly sterile choice between the two.”

We have been shut up

Yesterday I looked for other books on my shelves that have contributed to my theological awareness and my passions as a contemplative Christian gay activist, books about Christology, exploring the humanity and divinity of Jesus. Here’s a list, a sample of books on my shelves covering five decades.

1966. Guide to the Debate about God. Ed. David Jenkins
1972. True Resurrection. Harry Williams
1977. The Myth of God Incarnate. Ed. John Hick
1985. God in Fragments. Jacques Pohier.
1988. Jesus; The Unanswered Questions. John Bowden
1994. Jesus; A Revolutionary Biography. John Dominic Crossan
1995. The Jesus I Never Knew. Philip Yancey
1986. What is God?: John Haught
1997. The God We Never Knew. Marcus Borg
2003. The First Christians. Paul F. M. Zahl
2007. The Existential Jesus. John Carroll
2014. How Jesus Became God. Bart D. Ehrman
2017. Incarnation; A New Evolutionary Threshold. Diarmuid O’Murchu
2019. The Universal Christ. Richard Rohr
2022. God After Einstein. John Haught

I began to glance through some of these books. I’m going to quote from two of them and allow them to express the ideas that reside in me as a result of reading Honest to God and having my early theological ideas confirmed. Doing this might be a lazy way of expressing my own thoughts, and it might also be a way of saying, “don’t blame me for these ideas, I got them from these books”. But that isn’t true, of course. I read these authors and I’m quoting them now because their ideas resonate deeply with my own thinking and feelings about God.

Firstly, quotes from Incarnation, A New Evolutionary Threshold written by Diarmuid O’Murchu, a Catholic priest, missioner, contemplative, visionary and social psychologist. It was published in 2017.

“Why did Jesus come on earth about two thousand years ago? To the best of my knowledge, Christian theology has not discerned a good response to this question. Since most theologians (even today) have been schooled within the context of formal religion, they tend to contextualize Jesus within that frame of reference and do so solely in terms of the Jewish religion, viewing Jesus as a fulfilment of the liberation promised in the Hebrew scriptures. But why do we confine Jesus to that context? Surely, the breakthrough wisdom of the gospels – Sermon on the Mount, Parables, Miracles – transcends religion in a range of significant ways.
“The gospel encounters with the risen Jesus may be more indicative of what was happening to the followers rather than what happened to Jesus himself. Literalists in the past used the empty tomb as proof for the resurrection of Jesus, but those who continued to follow Jesus did not base their faith on the evidence of an empty tomb, but rather on the new awakening of God’s living Spirit in their midst.
“As a species, we need to take seriously God’s unconditional affirmation of all that is created. Jesus also can be seen as a bridge-builder to our next evolutionary stage, currently taking place within and around us. Incarnation is about the fullness of life, an evolutionary aspiration always beckoning us from the future, in the luring awakening of the Spirit who forever energises fresh breakthrough and possibility.”

And secondly, quotes from an earlier book, Jesus, the Unanswered Questions by John Bowden, an Anglican priest who was Editor and Managing Director of SCM Press, published in 1988.

“The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, like The Myth of God Incarnate before it, is notable not so much for the completely new insights it brings as for the way in which it can be seen as a summary and emphasising of a debate already in progress for some time.
“The usual assumption made by those involved in the dialogue is that the discussion is taking place between the representatives of relatively solid, relatively coherent religious traditions, and that, for example, on the Christian side there is an agreed Christianity for which a Christian representative can speak. But for Christians the very identity of Christianity is a problem.
“In fact the Christian identity is disintegrating, and disintegrating in a particularly complicated way. Christianity has become bound up with a post-religious, secular, technological attitude to the world which is steadily spreading. This secularised version of Christianity can be seen as a threat to any form of traditional religion, including Christianity itself.
“Many of the questions that I have been asking do make deep inroads into Christian tradition, and if they are accepted and followed through cannot leave traditional Christianity as it has been; they are deeply disturbing. But by their existence they also provide a positive safeguard against Christian imperialism, institutionalism, the tradition in its worst, quasi-totalitarian form, and the ideological dangers that go with it (p182).
“The symbols of Jesus and Christ, these to some degree separate figures in the tradition have come to be associated with two very different sets of values and occupy too prominent a place in Christianity. They have accumulated too much power; so much power indeed that in many contexts the figure of Jesus has come to eclipse that of God (p182).
“Jesus has become a distorting factor, an irrational element which, rather than exercising influence that comes from the person of Jesus of Nazareth himself (we have seen how difficult it is to know anything for certain about him), is in fact a symbol that is used to dominate and manipulate (p182).
“So the supreme function of men and women is to receive God’s gifts, the light of heaven, as fully as they can. Some people are congenitally attuned to the will of God, more permeable to heaven’s light; but all of us can work continually to make ourselves more receptive – by encouraging whatever we can find in ourselves of faith and hope; by prayer and meditation; by reading; by self-attrition; by alert attention to even the most familiar and everyday experiences. But above all, by practicing the art of love. “I am come that you may have life and that you may have it more abundantly. (p.193)
“The model for the theologian of the future is the wise person. The wise person does not force themselves on others and does not want to overwhelm them with what they think and know. They are concerned with clarification and understanding. They want to act as a catalyst rather than convince, because they have more confidence in the Spirit of God than in the human capacity for knowledge. But they differ from the hermit by the passion of their involvement in the social life of their time. Here they also incur guilt and appear to many people to be unwise.” (p.205)

The development of the person of Jesus of Nazareth as a symbol that is used to dominate and manipulate, the development that John Bowden identified and warned about thirty five years ago, wasn’t heeded. It has continued to expand until it dominates the Church of England’s life today. It is one of the reasons why abuse and discrimination are common within the Church. Historical and contemporary reports of abuse and the failings of the safeguarding regime are manifestations of this unhealthy conception and caricature of Jesus. And today, thirty five years later, the identity of Christianity is an even bigger problem.