The papal visit to Britain

          Canute-like, Pope Benedict is trying to stem the tide of British public opinion. It can't be done. We have our faults certainly. But we will not, to satisfy some point in theology, revert to the preconceptions of the past. There was time when homosexuality was punishable by law. The scriptures, it seems, would sanction it . . . though it is not entirely clear what was going on in primeval Sodom. But common sense has since prevailed.
          Nor, I think, will we countenance the mediaeval status quo where the church and the state were the twin pillars of society. By the nature of things, rightly or wrongly the state must wield authority. But the church? Surely the problem arose in the Roman Catholic Church when, years ago, it was deemed unnecessary to hand over child-molesting priests to the civil authorities. 
          Also, what is perceived as being the truth is likely to change. After Darwin, the origins of the species does not depend on Adam's naming of the animals. We still talk about the 'heavens above'. But nobody thinks there's an Elysian Fields somewhere the other side of Mars.
          
          

Was there a man called Abraham?

          For the most part, Abraham (originally Abram) is portrayed as a solitary shepherd originating in the mesopotamian valley, setting out from Anatolia on a protracted journey which leads him through the ravine of the Jordan into the hill country of Canaan.
          The archaeology of such places as Ai (the ruin, we don't know what the city was called) corroborates this, indicating a perennial drift of population from the north in the general direction of the Nile delta.
          The saga bears little relationship to reality nevertheless, in particular Abraham's fear that he would not be able to start a family at the age of ninety-nine when his wife was ninety! Had he taken leave of his senses?
          So . . . was there really a man called Abraham? Do we know anything about him at all? Read Genesis 14.
          The chapter bears no relationship whatsoever to the rest of the text. It concerns four marauding kings of the north on an expedition to collect pitch from the Dead Sea to caulk their boats at Tyre. They beat up every city on the way. They get away with it until they take captive Abraham's nephew Lot. The old man will not have it. He raises a posse and smashes them up in  the Huleh valley. So that's what he was really like . . . at least I think so.
                  

The myths and realities of the New Testament

          What, if anything, do we know about Jesus of Nazareth? The answer would appear to be practically nothing. The best part of twenty years had passed before the words and works of Jesus were, in any form, recorded in writing. Events can be distorted in five minutes, so what might have happened in the course of twenty years?
          The first person to write about Jesus was Paul, an enthusiastic ex-pharisee who explains in the Epistle to the Galatians (probably 49 A.D.) that his knowledge of him had come to him not by human agency but by revelation during a period of meditation in the desert. He is the first to assert that Jesus rose from the dead . . . 'the firstfruits of them that slept'.
          But what of Jesus himself? Did he cure the sick? Were the lepers cleansed, did the blind see, were the dead raised up? These claims belong to a pre-scientific world radically different from our own. It is easy to dismiss them, consistent with the modern instinct towards demythologising Christianity. Most people believe things only if they are credible.
          There's more to it than that nevertheless. We need, I think, to separate two things. There are, despite the passage of time, some genuine indications of the character of Jesus of Nazareth. 'Don't you think that man is a fool?' he asked. 'He's throwing away valuable seed.' You can imagine the country people laughing. 'But God is as prodigal with his gifts as a farmer is with his seed,' Jesus said. That, I think, is the original. It's about divine generosity . . . quite different from the New Testament parable of the sower which enjoins perseverance.
          But while we can speculate as to the true nature of Jesus of Nazareth, we must also, I think, appreciate the myths for what they are. Christmas would not be Christmas without the wise men and the shepherds. It celebrates the birth of the child . . . but also of every other child, the perfection of new life. Is not each and every one of us on the journey of the wise men . . . not knowing where or how far our lives will take us? Nor would Easter be Easter without the vision of immortality which the resurrection promotes. Life, it says, is not a meaningless progression of 'birth, copulation and death'.
 

Pastor Terry Jones

         So the pastor is going to burn a copy of the Q'ran on the ninth anniversary 9/11. The burning of any book is a crime.

The existence of God

          Unless your name is Tony Blair or David Beckham, it's difficult to get published these days. 'It would be much easier if you were a bishop,' my literary agent said. So how does John Henry come to see the light of day, at my hand resurrected from his cemetery in northern France, clericalised and surrounded by conundra?  Write a blog like this, certainly. But the world and it's aunty are writing blogs. So how about self-publish? With that, last week I attended part of a two-day discussion of self-publishing at Kingston University . . . I didn't stay for all of it because I was being told things I already knew.
          But among the speakers was a philosopher called Julian Baggini, discussing the rationale of writing. Oddly, it did not occur to him that one might write simply because there is something to say. He was nevertheless engaging . . . if only for his prediction that even such a writer as Shakespeare will finally be forgotten. 'Vanity, vanity, all is vanity,' says the preacher. He then popped up in The Independent the following day, discussing Stephen Hawking's abolition of God as we know him. But Stephen Hawking is merely echoing Genesis when he says that by acquiring knowledge we will become gods.
          It's a misconception. There's only one way of apprehending God . . . and that is by some kind of flight of the imagination, by prayer, poetry or some other sort of art or prophecy. It's what one might call knowledge beyond knowledge, the metaphysics which enables physics to work. At its simplest, it is the logic of arithmetic. At its most complex, it is St John of the Cross' encounter with the unknown on the obscure night.
          For most of us, it is a matter of reaching out beyond whatever we can grasp. People don't notice it. But Shelley's stanza, 'The desire of the moth for the star, the night for the morrow . . .' is followed by a question mark. It's extraordinary. The story of literature, of music, of art involves an instinct towards questing into the unknown . . . bending and reshaping knowledge, a hyperbole of unknowing, of saying, as T.S. Elliot said, more than  we know we're saying.
  

The promised land

          So what can one say about the State of Israel?
          If the great sagas at the beginning of the Old Testament comprise a fiction which developed over many centuries . . . so that the wanderings of Abraham, the leadership of Moses and the exodus from Egypt are not to be taken literally, what price then the promised land? Why, in reaction to the undoubted and very real horrors of the holocaust, should a homeland of the Jews be fostered in that part of the world rather than in any other?
          It did cause a great deal of human misery certainly, with dispossessed Palestinians being herded into refugee camps, to say nothing of the extensive and more recent building of settlements on Palestinian land. It might not so easily have happened elsewhere.
          Supposing at the end of World War 2 the international community told Britain that a long lost tribe and ancient Britons, led by King Arthur newly returned from Avalon, expected their homeland to be restored to them, so that the English must give up all the land between the Wash and the Bristol Channel. Do you think it might cause a few problems? Would not the English Parliament, newly resettled at Doncaster, not foster the terrorist activities of Hereward the Wake and the bloodthirsty Boadicea?
          It's a fantasy, I know. It's relevant, though . . . as the Jews and the Palestinians return once more to the negotiating table.

Religion Clause: US Bishop Laments "Post-Christian" World

Religion Clause: US Bishop Laments "Post-Christian" World

There is so much to say about this, I don't know where to start. Perhaps I should begin with the news that there was collusion between the British government and the Catholic Church in the 1970s so that a Catholic priest/IRA bomber could be transferred to the Irish Republic and thus avoid questioning and possible prosecution. That happened in the days when secular authority pussyfoots around the embedded preconceptions of the Catholic Church. It's no good bishop. Christianity can survive very well in a secular world if we stick to the faith rather than churchianity.