08 November 1998 (& later revision)
Dear reader,
This is one of a series of letters touching on important issues. While the views expressed are my own, the intent is not that you should believe as I do, but seeing my track in the sand you may explore with a little more confidence. Your world is different from mine so you cannot copy, you must find your own way.
Sitting in Church recently I was prompted by the thought that I had not written to you about matters of faith. Thoughts like these often come to me while sitting in Church, as a church (at least any that I have attended) is perhaps the last place one should go to learn the sort of discriminations which I believe are important.
I write as an adherent of the faith which Jesus of Nazareth preached. I am an adherent to that faith partly because that was the faith in which I was first schooled. That schooling included the instruction that this was the only true faith and all others were false. I have since learned that my schooling was misleading in this and many other respects, but I have learned too that it was the schooling and not the faith which owned the error.
I might have arrived at similar position from an education in Islam or Shinto or whatever, and I think that these observations are also probably just as true (in general terms) for one who comes from such beginnings as they are for me.
Umbrella, light, landscape, sky---
There is no language of the holy.
The Sacred lies in the ordinary.”
Deng Ming-Dao
It fascinates me that the clergy will present themselves as professionals. Of course they have their degrees and their academies and in all visible respects the nature of the job complies with the model of a profession. We also tend to presume that if a person has higher qualifications or wears the mitre of a bishop (or equivalent trappings of office) that they have a correspondingly profound understanding of the Gospel.
Regrettably all this is on its head. Matthew 23:11 is quite direct in this regard
"The greatest among you will be your servant. [12] For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted."
The verses following that are just as relevant to the established ecclesiastical hierarchy today as ever they were, though I suspect the parallels are not often preached upon in churches. Do not suppose for a moment that it is humility which wins senior church positions, rather one must be of the opposite motivation.
I suggest that the Church is essentially anti-Christian, and I am not just being dissentient. The Church is an organisation and has all the qualities of an association of humans (I know The Pope of Trevallyn would disagree with me). A group works only to the extent that the members conform. A congregation may assemble to discuss issues of life and truth. Doing so with a clear individual objective focus on searching for the uncomfortable truth is a constructive exercise.
As soon as the congregation becomes a group, with group objectives, the focus on uncomfortable truth (God) disappears. My experience is that the discussion of the group avoids the uncomfortable issues, the issue becomes less important than the management of the group and the group becomes indifferent from any of the myriad other social organisations we enjoy or ignore. There is nothing Christian about such a group, whatever its name.
Our churches often say much about the need to protect the rights of the poor and the less fortunate. Understanding who are the poor and why they fall into that classification is fundamental, but that is not the subject of this letter. It is proclaimed that we must change society, to become fairer, more equitable, more just, and to protect the basic human rights of all people. It is an open question whether our concepts of fairness, equity, justice and our rights (whatever this might subsume) are in fact God's plan for this earth, given the brutal way in which His creation manages most other aspects of life.
What concerns me is that the Church proclaims the need to change government policy and thus the behaviour of other people, not ourselves. The Gospel is far removed from that – it deals with personal responsibility and our personal mission to exhibit those merciful qualities in our own lives, without concern at all for the behaviour of others. Nothing Jesus said could be construed as an instruction to change society, but only to change ourselves.
Our honouring of God is a personal not a corporate activity, and that honour is expressed in the way we responsibly use our opportunities, not in mere words. The opportunity to serve and to care for our fellow travellers does not require much income or recognition. The responsibilty imposed by higher income or greater importance is not to change others but of more opportunities for personal service and care.
Another degenerate feature of our churches is the use of cliché. There are many phrases which are widely used and equally confused – examine them carefully and consider what the user thinks or intends. Being ‘born again’ is something which we have all experienced of course (who would dare deny it?). I can guess what most users of the phrase might mean but I find no Biblical support for that.
Do not imagine that, because a phrase is familiar, its meaning is agreed. Think hard about what a cliché means to you (especially one invented in a different culture); it does not necessarily mean the same to others. If you understand a phrase you will be able to express it in two completely independent sets of words – you can state exactly the same idea (perhaps not as succinctly) without using any of the main words of the cliché (this sentence is an example).
The biblical image of the Devil as a hungry lion is dated. When your only weapons are strings and sticks, a lion is a very formidable opponent, however for most of us today a lion is not a particularly threatening idea. A better image for today might be the virus, something which sneaks up on you unseen and destroys you secretly from the inside. Sin is like this.
Sin is another concept which has suffered from a mistaken image. We readily think of a set of religious rules contrived by some historic anachronism with little relevance today. I remember feeling particularly unsatisfied by the second commandment words "for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation" which seemed to deny the most basic concepts of justice.
Let me say that justice is still denied – that is what sin is about. Our greed and self-interest sets us at odds with our creation, and the denial which we use to maintain that conflict with the truth distorts and spoils our understanding of ourselves and each other. It separates us from the truth (God).
The virus of sin distorts our perception of the truth and we teach our children and grandchildren the lies we have preferred. We do not see it and so we cannot fight it. There is nothing we can do by ourselves to overcome the problem. It is as though we are born into a windowless room. We learn our denial from the other people in the room – we learn models for the economy we learn science and literature as it exists in the room. As we have no knowledge of what is outside of the room our science and models cannot take that larger truth into account. We are limited by what we can experience. That limitation is self enforcing. Because we are limited we cannot realise what we do not perceive. The gift to perceive beyond our limitations is not something we can earn – it is a gift which we may be given, or we might not.
So what about Satan? You may be surprised, as I was, to find how few references there are to Satan in the Bible and that (except for the book of Job) the references are simply a name for the power of darkness rather than some theologically more significant construct. For those who wish to believe in an actively evil force it is perhaps necessary, but for myself I find that the potency of our fear and ignorance is quite sufficient to deny God.
I believe Satan is an artefact: an invention of men. Satan is an excuse I am able to blame for my failure to live up to my responsibilities – I can think (or even say) Satan tempted me and I simply was not strong enough to resist. Being not strong enough is merely human – therefore the fault, the sin, the responsibility and the blame lies with Satan; and I am thus able to excuse myself. Our maturity is demonstrated in our ability to face up to our weaknesses and feelings and to own them frankly.
Most religious groups seek to persuade their members that this group has truly received the divinely inspired word of God, and, at least by implication if not explicitly, that all other teachings are at best misleading if not actually satanic.
Well, to the extent that they are mutually exclusive they cannot all be right. In the circumstances that the majority of the earth's population have no possibility of discovering this particular faith, the belief that any such faith has a monopoly on the truth requires also belief in a god who would allow most of the worlds souls to be lost to the truth. While men are likely to behave like this, my God is not that small. The notion of a god who would restrict access to the truth seems to me more like the antichrist.
For many people the truth is a very relative concept, it is sometimes a matter of what they can get away with, and at other times it may be what they would prefer it to be. What is the real truth? I believe we cannot know. We do not have omniscience and so we are not able to know or understand that which remains beyond us. In this situation I am quite confident that there is no clergyman who has it.
It remains to address texts such as Matt 11:27 and John 14:16 in which Jesus says “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”. I believe that these texts must be interpreted in the context of the culture in which they originated – in which the established church (the synagogue) claimed exclusivity, and Jesus sought to directly deny that claim in terms which his listeners could understand.
I believe that a reading of the Bible as a whole does not support the exclusive interpretation which may be drawn from this text, and that Jesus would disown any attempt to restrict access to the truth. The simple requirements of faith expressed at Micah 6:8 and in so many places by Jesus (eg Matt 7:21-23) do not convey any such restriction.
I do not claim to have any perception beyond the walls of the room in which I have lived. What I have discovered is that there is a choice we face: to seek to impose our own terms on our room mates; or to be willing to accept that we are usually wrong and to make frequent discomforting adjustments to admit the truth. May I simply say that my own experience has been that my own terms have shown my limitations more than I like to admit and that there is much less pain in the alternative notwithstanding the immediate discomfort.
The value of this is not something you will accept on my say-so. You must learn it for yourself the hard way, or you will not believe. The grasping of the truth sooner rather than later can save us a great deal of pain, but it is very unpopular; ‘small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.’ Much more popular are self promotion and gentle lies, blaming others for our problems, hiding our deficiencies, pursuing selfish ambition and material goals, denying our shortcomings and weaknesses and pretending about ourselves (they called it sin).
Salvation cannot be taught, it can only be discovered, it is a paradox and a mystery, but of profound simplicity. Unfortunately for most, it remains undiscovered. Salvation is not found by diligent study, but by an open mind seeking truth. The discovery is paradoxical in that when found, nothing else has value (Matthew 13:44, 45).
There is much to be learned and discovered by reading the scriptures for ourselves. It is inappropriate for me to try to tell anybody what may be found there – what you will find is what God will show you and it will be significantly coloured by your own experience which is necessarily different from mine. What I can tell you is that you will discover nothing if you do not look.
The teaching regarding matters of faith has been transmitted to us across the centuries by churches which often display qualities which are in direct conflict with the teaching they would pretend to uphold. It is a beautiful paradox that the church and faith should serve opposite ends, but for their continued survival they depend on each other. The organisation, which in its fabric denies so much of what Jesus teaches, has brought me the Gospel and is committed to its continued proclamation. For this reason alone I continue to support it.
It is important to remember that when Jesus sent out his disciples, his instructions included nothing about theology or doctrine – he was concerned only with lifestyle. The unimportance of doctrine and theory was not first preached by Jesus either, the minor prophets of the Old Testament have never been fashionable books, they are about actions not authorities, behaviour not birth, etc. (go read them for yourself).
What you may learn will be applicable in the long term. It has taken me decades to discover the value of humility. All this for what? Certainly not a popular philosophy, and not for pie-in-the-sky. The benefits of salvation are here and now; personal confidence and strength, delivery from the fear of failure, freedom from envy and release from the denial of trying to have the world on our own terms – in other words salvation from our sins.
Peace.
Peter Hoban
Read what I thought 25 years earlier: A treatise on faith from a then agnostic Australian to my conservative-religious Midwest US ladylove – 1974
Original: December ‘98
This page is part of “Living in the Light”
found at: http://www.tassie.net.au/~phoban/
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