Introduction.
This longish essay tries to find a way of talking and thinking about the Christian salvation in concrete terms, which is to say how it pertains to us as human beings who both love our life in the world, but also have times when we would want to be free of it, especially from other people. It looks at us as creatures confined in time, under the shadow of death, and having a constantly underlying longing to flee into immortality, away from the tragedy of separation from others and the possibility of extinction. It tries to think of us in the joy and anxiety of being embodied and with other embodied creatures; being finite, perspectively limited, knowing some but ignorant of the whole picture and having to make decisions about our relations with others that can go very wrong. We will be concerned with what it is like to know, deep within, that though we are strong and comprehending we are also fragile, vulnerable before other things and people and dependent on them. We want to think about what Christian salvation addresses itself to as this contradictory, concrete human experience.
It employs natural theology and philosophy to attempt to tease out some understanding of Christian revelation for our time. The significance of this has to do with the attitude of many conservative Christians to using philosophy or reasoned theology to tease out a meaning of revelation: they would basically keep well away from it as something idolatrous and in danger of placing limitations on God’s sovereign freedom and the way God speaks to humanity. And this is largely the case with the teaching of lay people in the Church of England. However, you could argue that not including philosophy or natural theology as those disciplines which, crudely speaking, attempt to move from human experience up to God, and just employing some ‘purer’ Theology which is concerned with organising revelation without interpretations, ends up leaving revelation too abstract.
In ministry it is noticeable how often the lay reception of teaching is as though the latter is one complete, self contained block that has fallen out of the sky all of a piece, handed to the higher clergy, they to the parochial clergy, and the parochial clergy to the laity. Many ordinary congregation members have , then, little sense of the struggle through history, within the faith, to work out its own meaning and become what it has become up to this present generation. This may suit some of the more unregenerate instincts of many people for supernaturalism in place of religion, but it is unhealthy for the propagation of the faith of the Christian God.
What is also true is that any generation that chooses not to think through the possibility that its faith is built, as well, from philosophical assumptions, will always be in danger from the importation of philosophical ideas which distort the faith, perhaps distort its essential message to make it manipulable by worldly political agendas and make the people of God their unknowing accomplices.
Finally, in employing philosophy and natural theology as well as Theology proper, one of the aims of this essay is to try and show how what Christians call revelation could be of interest to those who do not make Christian religious confession as well as those who do.
The essay has two parts. The first is to try and compose a way of speaking and thinking about the concrete experience of God’s intersection with humanity that both does justice to orthodox Christianity and provides a point of identification for people outside the Church, with the Christian faith. It therefore tries to discuss Christian salvation in terms of being delivered over into a freedom wherein there is more than enough material security for humanity to be freed up to explore the meaning of Love and in this way to develop their lives together and their personal self actualisation, for all eternity. Otherwise put, we find a way of discussing human salvation in terms of the sort of freedom in Love that all human organisms long for.
With this mention of the ‘human organism’, it is important to bear in mind that this is the creature that the God of Jesus Christ deals with, the one that evolved from the primal soup and needs to eat and sleep, that requires warmth and security, even to play. This is the one for whom salvation was designed. Whatever salvation is, therefore, it is about the freeng up of this biological, psychological, as well as spiritual, creature. So, we will have to look at what God has made humanity in the light of the paradigm of the human, Jesus Christ, so a thing both of nature and supernature. And that means we have to discuss humanity in terms of the creature that needs to eat, find shelter, work and play, as well as the creature that has to worship something, has a notion of the sacred and is drawn to something beyond the natural confines of time and space.
To talk about God with us and what that means in terms of salvation, the saving of us all into a longed for Liberty I, of course, want to lock into wisdom inside the Church, but also outside. In accord with the acceptance of philosophy as a tool for bringing out the meaning of salvation for our particular time and place, I accept that there are sources of wisdom outside the confines of scripture and tradition that help us to understand how God relates to humanity and how humanity may be drawn into God. This is the same spirit that induced the Fathers to look about the pagan texts as tools facilitating the unravelling of revelation from scripture, It is an acceptance of the notion that there might be wisdom pertaining to a path to knowing, and being reconciled to, God, outside the Church as well as within.
It is important to say these things since it is still the case that people in the Church consider it their duty to take their message out into the community and, in various face to face encounters, lecture others about the need to make a confession of faith and join the Church. An assumption that clearly underpins this is that the Church is the only place in which salvation is found; the Church has all the answers. There is, therefore, no humility by the Church in the sense that they have any need to engage thoughtfully with anything coming to it from those outside the believing community. There is no conversation, the Church alone stewards and understands the formula of salvation and the rest of the world must accept it as the Church presents it or remain considered unregenerate. This authoritarianism is sometimes backed up with threat. We know that at the extremes of the conservative mindset it is thought that those outside the believing community may well find that they have to spend eternity in hell either for their lack of contrition and obduracy, or for their ignorance (having the misfortune to be born into a non-Christian culture). All those who do not assert a faith and trust in Jesus Christ – and of course trust in Jesus Christ are alienated from God and if they die still having failed to ’give their heart to the Lord’, they will spend eternity alienated from God.
This notion, then, tends to take it for granted that the only people who are really following God are those inside the Church, those who have made some form of verbal confession. The repeating of verbal confession in the midst of the Christian community is central to this. You must confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord. But what if the Church has made a bit of a botch of explaining what Jesus is Lord, is. What if it has gone off on a tangent somewhere? It wouldn’t be the first time. And then the confession, if it is genuinely about the hankering after God, could still be one couched in a very different language outside the Church.
What is more, what we are encountering in this attire is a level of certainty that ordinary humanity is not subject to. The more conservative of our brethren will speak about a kind of special status of the Christian as inhabited by the Holy Spirit. It seems that what is suggested is that in the Christian Faith one may be abstracted out of the ordinary run of humanity that normally has to deal with limited, finite knowing in its understanding of what it is for and where it is going to. And this has always been one of the ‘ordinary’ pathologies of human existence, that is, to have absolute certainty in one’s belief in God bestows identity, purpose and moral rightness, that no longer has to be struggled over with others, no longer needs fretting over anxiously since such discussion may involve having to make fundamental shifts with one’s truth and identity and this is an inveterate and irreducible burden of being a finite human being in the world with other human beings. So this is not so much Christian belief as the pursuit of an age old fantasy of being released from the limitations of being a finite human being. And it could be argued against by pointing out that in Jesus Christ God has demonstrated his intention to speak to humanity in a revelation that, however eternal in itself, is mediated to us in time and space. This means that there might be aspects of it that must be learnt and relearnt, and our learning keep having to develop, over and over again.
Instead of this I want to draw up a picture of where God and humanity meet that not only leaves humanity in its state of finite limitation, but takes us deeper into those conditions, and that this is partof the healing that salvation involves. I suggest that the very sense of God, and salvation as something somehow resting in God, begins in an experience of being addressed by the source of existing things, the Being of beings.
Invoking the term, the ‘Being’ of beings often brings much air of mystery to the discussion but precious little comprehension. But by my using the term I want to draw our attention to the very down to earth nature of the encounter between God and human beings. The Being of beings is simply Existence in itself as opposed to this existing thing or that. It is the whole. Now much philosophy over the last 400 years has been dedicated to the erosion of the notion of the Being of beings as some entity itself apart from the sum total of all things everywhere. But Christianity has often understood the Being of beings as that of God himself, a ‘separable’ personality, or presence pervading things, albeit invisible and deductible only by thinking, feeling human beings in their soul. And it is in this sense that Paul says that God is that in which we ‘live and move and have our being’.
Ever since humanity has been self conscious and capable of thinking and communicating, and even as these creatures wandered in tribal groups hunting and gathering, they have felt this Being of beings as not only the reality in which they live and have their being, but as something that addresses them through their most distinctive capabilities, thought and language. Before we talk about the God of dogmatic Christianity, then, we need to get down into the earth and the struggle for a living that human beings undertake for survival. And begin here to lay a foundation for what we might understand by the very term ‘God’ and the meaning of His salvation.
To begin with, then, before any language of confession existed, there was the life of human beings with one another in the world and in the effort to survive and thrive. And it was in this state that they perhaps experienced, in some inchoate fashion, something that drew them to it, to utter it, draw it, dance it or something. It all begins with an awakening to something recognised, again incompletely, but nevertheless registered, as the Origin and the End of everything, where all things come from and where they are going to. It is the life of Existence itself as opposed to this existing thing or that, as though the Existence of existing things be a life and a personality in itself. This would be a life both similar but also very different from human personality. It is very different from things that we experience in time and in space but as so very different it is also very close.
As the Being of beings this is the pre-condition of things and not a thing in itself, which is possibly why some mystical, spiritual writers talk about the enigmatic Nothingness; ie, no-thing-ness. The Being of beings is unlike a being and therefore it does not compete with existing things for a time and a place to Be. It is not a thing, but much bigger, pushing other things out if its way. It does not appear alongside things in the world as a temporal, spatially circumscribed entity but much, much bigger. What this also means is that the Being of beings does not present in any other way to humanity than via the existing things that it has brought into Being.
Being brings human consciousness and things that human beings are conscious of, together. In its essence, then, there is some kinship between the thinking sensuality of human beings with their fundamentally poetic, liturgical soul, and Being, God Himself, as Existence in the world. When we are in our highest, most sensually thoughtful and most meditative self, we are channelling something of God in the world. Our rational sensibility articulated and developed through language is both of God and the essence of ourselves. Being is the Thinking Sensuality that is the precondition of the human thinking sensuality, the interactive/meditative consciousness. And just to note: the term ‘meditative’ here, as we shall see, does not refer to human beings in some state of reflective repose, but in their active state, in their interactions and struggles with each other to create a home for a distinctive human life. Perhaps we mean especially something like civilisation: a realm of meaningful, symbolism that might be understood as that of objective verbal and non verbal language and thought.
The experience of the Being of beings is first an awakening to an enigmatic and beautiful presence, a Holiness that may also be experienced, perhaps initially, as terrifying and as arousing a sense of diminution and vulnerability. But it arouses wonder as well as sometimes fear, and within the sense of being ‘under its gaze’ can provoke the need to turn our eyes away in shame and hide.
The experience of Being is that of the Sublime, which is overpowering, both lovely and terrifying. It’s like trying to stand in the hurricane, and the religious struggle of humanity has always been to find some mediator of the Sublime that allies human beings to stand safely and enjoy sacred sublimity as wonderful – ie, as evoking of wonder. Thereafter we want it, or want to approach it, possess it, and some have even spoken of uniting with it.
What all this means is something most important: humanity has an anxious sense of itself as incomplete, but the experience of Being is that of the life that shall complete us somehow and make us whole. This means that human beings have a sense of their origin, and the purpose for which they are, as lying outside the ordinary mundane world, outside the conglomeration of beings and in Being itself. In the contemporary world it is important to make this point since it has been the case since the scientific revolution that the Aristotelian notion, that everything has an beginning and end outside the world of finite causes, has gone. We have long been taught to think of everything as having a beginning and an end within the realm of finite causes and not outside it. The profane gaze of science reducing everything to a mundane, isolated and banal thing is the predominant way that we all, in contemporary western culture, intuitively perceive everything, including ourselves.
This life of Being that mediated the Sublime to us I have called, ‘the beautiful life’. Whereas the life of humanity is contingent rather than necessary, the beautiful life is necessary, having no contingent aspect to it. It is complete unto itself and our being brought into its life is the closest in this life that human beings come to feeling whole and complete.
Nevertheless the beautiful life also feels, somehow, the reality of being finite and contingent. Humanity, therefore has long had conceptions of the god-man, either in myth or in the form of kings. The human in this is generally experienced at a distance from the divine element, and the divine element is not the One God, the Elohim, El Shaddai or Yahweh Saboath of the Jews but some lower order divinity like in an avatar. Nevertheless some mediating being between the realms of the divine and the human is not new.
The Beautiful life is the life of what human beings call the gods or God present in the earth, perhaps also in the heroes, such as those of Ancient Greece. The distinctively Christian characteristic that would be added to this from revelation is that this Beautiful life is the High God of the Jews, Yahweh, identified finally through the preaching of the Christ, as Love: not your love or mine – which are but pale imitations – but Love in itself, incarnate and exemplified in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The sense of what addresses us is quite overpowering and must, somehow, be mediated in order to present in proportions that human beings can live with, though without compromising its integrity or reality as something wondrous, startling, astonishing and passionately inspiring. The Beautiful life is a mediation of the Sublime which allows it to strike a wound of longing into a person rather than terror , and there is then a need to seek it and get closer to it as that in which alone the soul will find its rest and completeness.
This may all very well precede explicit religious affiliation. It marks an original special intersection of the divine with the human. Some people may subsequently articulate their experience in terms of religious confessional formula, whilst others, particularly in a contemporary modern, western environment, simply may not see the connection between those words and the experience at all.
Nevertheless, I am suggesting that this experience is what makes sense of the Christian confession and gives it concrete grounding.
This essay is meant to lay out a way of thinking about the experience of the Christian God, at least in the beginning, in these terms. It must be recognised as such in order to give meaning to revelation. It is the attempt to lay out in such terms what is the great ambition of Christian pilgrimage, that is – to put it in the mytho-poetics of Christian Faith – to have ‘Christ’ born in the soul by being taken up into the life of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit.
The second part of this essay wants to talk about what, then, the pursuit of this Beautiful life must amount to.
Is the pursuit of this life primarily an individual, private matter? Is it somehow purely an inner, hidden matter? In my time in parish ministry I rarely met anyone, lay or ordained, that I had the temerity to think was not genuinely, within the confines of a variety of weaknesses that we all possess, trying to ‘get closer to Christ’. But people’s understanding of what might be entailed by this was frankly all a bit of a mess. The lay reception of Christian teaching in something like the Church of England comes in a mixture of influences out of its history: there is the soft, fideistic Pietism that places emphasis on the individual and their inner wrestling with God, their eschewal, not so much of public, objective orders of religion (though outside the Church we often find this), as an aversion to objective, reasoned articulations in the form of theology, especially natural theology or philosophical theology. This is something that one finds, in a slightly more reflective form, in many of the clergy. It may degenerate into a more straightforward, dry moralist version of Christian Churchgoing, a business-like rehearsal of the liturgical life of the Church or as a ‘tending toward the deist’ version, which has God as some metaphysical, monadic and monolithic, mega-object outside time and space. These forms invariably slot into a kind of unreflective dualism which has the pure, invisible realm of spirit directly acting in upon the pure, Spiritual soul, so hidden away. It’s all vaguely gnostic and a little bit occult. But certainly private and individualistic.
But in scripture, though God communicates through individuals – and if we think of the experience we have recounted with its wonder and terror this tends to be only very pronounced in the prophets amongst us – those individuals nevertheless tend to become spokespeople for whole communities, the pre eminent example being Moses. Prior to the reformation (and for some time after in many respects), Christian Faith was certainly a public matter and before the bourgeois separation of disciplines and division of labour, was explicitly tied up with political culture.
The pursuit of Love in the form of the beautiful life may well not be simply an individual and internal matter. Rather, I will suggest, the only way to realise it in the life of humanity to any degree is by a whole community co-operating with God in the creation of societies and cultures that are a continual effort to approximate to the Kingdom of God on earth; to cooperate in the Divine project to establish God’s will on earth as it is in heaven.
When we talk of human salvation, we are talking about that from which the human creature has always wanted to be saved. And I would suggest that this has never been a saving into some life other than life as an embodied creature in the world with other embodied creatures. It is rather a liberation from all that impedes and bears down on the enjoyment of life with one another, all that violently oppresses and limits it. And salvation then becomes being saved as liberated to a life of material security and enjoyment, freed up to love Love and to love each other. In this there is a permanent evolution of the human, a permanent actualisation into newer, greater forms of life, being stronger, having expanding intelligence and greater sensitivity to enjoy God as Love forever.
I want to suggest that this cooperative endeavour involves human effort to realise the Kingdom through their own societies. This suggestion is anathema to conservatives but also worries the generality of Christians. The problem is that it would seem to suggest a constriction upon God’s freedom to be what He will be. Mainstream Protestantism tends toward fideism, to proceed by faith alone and without necessarily having to understand. There is an eschewal of natural theology, certainly philosophy and its natural scientific children trying to interfere with working out the meaning of the faith. This seems to the fideist to be human beings trying to rationalise God, to confine Him in their concepts and sidestep the demands of revelation and faith.
This is a valid and important point and one that should encourage anyone employing any human discipline in trying to render faith intelligible, to proceed with caution. Nevertheless philosophy has been employed in the construction of central Christian doctrines since the earliest days of the post Apostolic Church. Plato was regarded as a proto-Christian, a Christian before Christ, and scripture is replete with references to the importance of the Sophia, wisdom, in getting to know the God who longs to be known. Wisdom certainly begins with fear of the Lord which can easily be understood in terms of giving faithful deference to revelation; an approach to God by faith alone. As Tertullian famously put it ‘what has Athens to do with Jerusalem’. But wisdom beginning there should not necessarily end there and as the old dictum fides quarens intellectum suggests there is no hubris in starting with faith and proceeding to try and understand that faith better thereafter.
Human beings establish their first civilisations in the light that is cast by the Beautiful life on the meaning of what is good and true. They had known the sweet pressure of Being upon their own hearts to respond to it by articulating it somehow in the world. And this they do through their spiritual, religious, theological, philosophical and aesthetic thinking, and later in their law, constitution, politics and the just management of the resources of the Polis.
The frequent conservative Christian idea that outside Christian culture these meanings are too fallen to become any contribution to understanding the way to God is challenged by a radical interpretation of the meaning of the incarnation, the Logos (the Word, or the spoken mind of God), become a human being. For the Logos as that through which all creation happens can be understood as the underlying rational-sensitivity, the poetic-divine rational-substance of all material reality, manifesting especially in the human soul and including that of other civilisations and their articulation of wisdom. The reconciliation wrought by Christ’s sacrifice points to a redemption in eternity that is applied, therefore, to all human society, all about in space, retrospectively and into the future. That is to say, where human beings endeavour to establish a meaning of Being, even outside of Christian culture, this is sanctified; it is to be taken seriously as possibly telling us something real about God and his salvation.
What is more this may also imply the sanctification of the whole effort of making the ideal notions of Goodness and Truth objective in things like the law and morality and notion of origin and purpose, objective in a human society. The way to God’s salvation in the Kingdom must also include political and economic components as these make concrete sense of the theological meaning of the faith of Jesus Christ’s preaching of the Kingdom that is here and is to come. Those components are not things brought permanently and centrally to stand as part of the faith, like revelatory articles. They are modes of interpretation, making concrete, in a particular time and place, what revelation has to say about the eternal relation between God in Christ and humanity.
What this in turn must mean is that the Church’s pursuit and preaching of God in Christ must begin to have a responsible idea of what the Kingdom would mean here and now in the above terms, even if the solution should need constant re-evaluation and interpretation at later junctures. And that means that theologians must also have a care to say what the Christian form of management of political and economic life in the Kingdom might look like. This would not be definitive, of course, and they would always be careful to say that. It is rather an attempt to say what Live in the world would look like in terms of the organisation of society and the just distribution of resources. And again this would not be to form some political party – heaven forbid! – but to set over the reality of how things are, how they might otherwise be, and to encourage national leaders more in the direction of the Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
Finally, if we take the incarnation seriously to the extent that I have suggested, understanding that humanity participates in the business of making the circumstances in which salvation is realised, by approximating their own societies to the ideal model of the Kingdom of God, this also means that societies have the freedom to move in a different and, in these terms, destructive direction. And so I will suggest that though there are many important things that positively contribute to human liberation in contemporary western liberalism, I also consider that at the extreme end of market capitalism, which constitutes the way western modernity has been making its living now for over 40 years, there have formed significant cultural models, shaping the psychology of the west, in a way injurious to a proper understanding of the Spiritual generally let alone Christianity. This essay is going to try to give an account of this and to encourage the Church to take greater notice of these things. It could be said, and I would not be the first to say it, that the Church in the west in all its denominations, has been too casual in its tolerance of capitalism in its rawest aspects and has certainly had never been heard to advocate a fundamental political and economic transformation because hitherto it has not considered this a part of its business. Liberation theologians have, of course, has things to say about this as priests working in communities in South America, under the cosh of, and made impoverished by, oppressive regimes have that were being sponsored by capitalist governments in order to safeguard private enterprises and private capital generally in those countries. Individualist, internalised Spirituality is of no threat to Capitalism, it never seriously challenges it, and since an institution like the Church of England is overwhelming middle class it would not take much to suggest that the reason why the Church fails to constitute such a challenge is that its members are too comfortable within capitalism to see it as a problem. This is no conscious quietism, but is simply like the men who never understood why women objected to certain ways they were treated because it was never a problem for them.
