 
#  Global God

How global culture demands a new spirituality

#  David Guthrie

Global God by David Guthrie

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Copyright 2014 by David Guthrie

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A new culture has emerged that is global because the challenges that humanity faces in our age are global. The survival of the human species is dependent on the success of this culture. However, no culture ever succeeds without a spirituality that embeds the values of the culture in the hearts and minds of the people. Religion is essential. The crisis for the contemporary world is that not a single one of the traditional religions, Christianity included, provides currently the basis for a global spirituality. Christianity, however does hold the key to unlocking that spirituality.

In this book, I explore the data, the models, the theology/theory and the practical actions that must be addressed if we are to find the authentic spirituality that can enable humanity to survive and thrive into the indefinite future.

I view this book as a work in progress that will be developed over time, especially in response to reader reactions and evaluations. Readers are welcome to contact the author at david@guthrie.net.nz. In particular, Part VI, which deals with the review and evaluation of practical action, has yet to be written and I am conscious that the section on the theology of Jesus needs further work.

# Table of Contents

Global God 1

David Guthrie 1

Introduction 3

Part I: Thesis 6

Part II: The Data 7

1. Data: Living in the present is a defining characteristic of our culture 8

2. Data: We know nothing 9

3. Data: The global crisis 12

4. Data: The impact of narrative 14

5. Data: The impact of technology and politics 16

6. The data of grace 18

Part III: Models 18

7. Models of Knowing 19

8. Models of Reality 22

9. Models of meta-narrative 24

10. Models of culture and religion 28

11. Models of gospel, grace and salvation 30

12. Models of God, Christ, Spirit and Trinity 32

13. Models of the church 35

Part IV: Theory 38

14. Theory of knowing 38

15. Theory of Reality 47

16. Theory of culture and religion 49

17. Theory of Scripture 53

18. Theory of God 61

19. Theory of Church 64

20. Theory of Jesus 65

Part V – Practice 69

20. Not knowing and certainty 69

22. Knowing and Certainty 71

23. Getting the story straight 73

24. The Big Question 79

Faith Story 84

Walk the Edge 84

Advent Calls 84

Lent Challenge 85

Advent Revelation 85

John in Lent 85

# Introduction

The church today is barely recognisable from the church of my childhood and teenage years. I say this as an Anglican, but this would be even more true if I was a Roman Catholic, a Baptist, a Presbyterian or from another Protestant denomination. The irony is that it is the so-called 'conservative' churches that have changed most radically in that time. Evangelicals of fifty years ago and evangelicals of today share only a name in common.

It is the core thesis of this book that, in the next fifty years, the change will be much more radical. It will embrace not just Christianity but the whole spectrum of religion globally, including Islam and Judaism. We are at the beginning of a global spiritual revolution. I write not to advocate or teach, and certainly not to form any kind of 'new religion', but to clarify what is happening in and around us and, it is my hope, to provide some direction as to a creative response.

I will not live another fifty years, but if I do, I am not sure I would recognise the shape of religious life at that time – until I looked deeper. I am confident that I would know that it is a legitimate and authentic development from what I know now. In fifty years' time, Christianity may not even use that name of itself and the reality of which it is part, yet I am sure that the essence of its life will still be recognisably Christian. The difference, I project, is that I would share a real and deep affinity and communion with those whose roots and identity lie in Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism as well as other belief systems of the present. If this seems unthinkable, it is only necessary to cast our minds back to the state of alienation between Catholic and Protestant that existed until a couple of generations past.

The essence of what is happening is the emergence of a common foundational spirituality. This does not necessarily mean a 'new religion' or even the loss of identity. It does not mean being absorbed into some amorphous syncretism, and, even less, the development of a superchurch. This much we have learned from the experience of the past fifty years. There is no conflict between my embrace of my Catholic or Baptist friends as being one body with me and, at the same time, fully embracing my identity as an Anglican Christian. Nor do I think that the gospel would best served if everyone was to become Anglican and think and act as I do. Having diversity in religious identity is being recognised as important as diversity is in the natural world of species.

That the world is converging of spirituality may seem to be contradicted by the tide of religious conservatism that is sweeping the planet, with its dogmatic and fanatical manifestations generating rising tensions and violence between rival religious groups, pressuring governments into repressive measures against religious and cultural minorities. Far from contradicting the perception, the tide of religious conservatism is testimony to the power and pace of the change, for the conservative forces draw their energy from the resistance to change. In the West, the conservative tide has turned and is now in full retreat. In Islam, it has turned in upon itself, tearing apart its own fabric. The same process of change, resistance, disillusionment and more change is just as real in societies under the influence of Eastern Orthodoxy, Hinduism and Buddhism.

Over the coming decade, we can expect the pace of change to accelerate and intensify. In part, this will be a consequence of the weakening of the conservative resistance and the engulfing disillusionment that will follow its failure. In part, it will reflect the coming-of-age of a generation for which the new global culture is native and, as they gain the status of decision-makers, will bring about changes concordant with their cultural milieu. Most of all, however, the pace and intensity of change will be a product of engulfing global crises, environmental, socio-political and economic. Humanity on a global scale has never faced what the next generation will face. We change or die.

The reality is this. Not one of today's religions, Christianity included in its present form, is native to the new global culture and not a single one – Christianity included – offers a solution to the global human crisis. On the contrary, the world's religions are a central part of the problem and contribute significantly to the crisis.

At this juncture in our history, it is a moot point whether or not humanity will survive the century as a species on earth: or if it does, whether it survives in any form that could be called civilisation. What is certain is that we will not, and cannot, survive living as we are. Underlying everything I write is the clear conviction that not only will human society have to change in every facet of life, but that the nature of its spirituality is indispensable to any creative change and solution. That we find a form of spirituality enabling Christian, Moslem, Hindu and Buddhist to know themselves in fundamental communion with one another is not just a nice objective, not even a religious one: it is a necessity for human survival. At the moment, religion is the major barrier preventing the human community globally from acting in concert to meet its challenges.

It is futile to predict the future. Two stories from my life spring to mind. As a young priest in the 1960s, I asked my bishop for permission to go the United States to study what was then known as automation, because it was going to change the face of society and the church needed to be at the cutting edge of the change. My bishop's response – and he was a man of great wisdom – was to say that I was probably right to see the changes that would come, but that these changes would not come into play until at least the end of the century, so I should not waste my time focusing on them. Even I did not foresee the scale and rapidity of the change that came within the next decade.

To balance the leger, in the mid 90s I was CEO of a computer graphic company that was at the forefront of the technological revolution in the printing world. A client came to me with a business proposition to create pages for something I'd never heard of. After listening to his presentation, I said that it had no future. The World Wide Web.

The only thing certain about the future is that it will look nothing like anything we imagine it might be. This is as true for any prediction about spirituality as it is about any other facet of life. I cannot describe what religious life will be like in fifty years: not even in twenty years. The idea that the essence of church life is to hand on the gospel unchanged to the next generation we have received unchanged from our forebears, who themselves received it unchanged from the time of the apostles, is pure myth and illusion and always has been. We may use formularies unchanged from generation to generation, but what we mean by those formularies changes radically. We may utter Cramner's words at a burial – "in the true and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life", – but what even the most orthodox and conservative Christian today means by those words Cramner would not recognise.

It is futile to predict the future, but that is not what we are about. The way I, as a young priest, envisaged the future in the 1960s was, in the outcome, wildly astray from what did eventuate. At that time, I could not imagine the computer, let alone the internet. But I was fundamentally right in discerning what was happening and that it would change society. I was right in my judgement that the most effective direction for my ministry was to pursue that study and help prepare the church to confront and adapt to the change. If anything characterises the church through the period of my ministry, it is that it has been left behind in the social change, not leading it. It is poorly adapted to the new world and the new culture and so is losing all connection with the rising generation. It is more hindrance than help to the task of living in today's world.

I am not writing about predictions. What is happening, is happening now. The dynamic forces now in play are shaping the world of the future and the spirituality of the future. We cannot predict the future but we can trace the trajectory of the missiles now in the air and make a likely guess about where they will land.

The faith question we cannot help asking is, where is God in all this? The standard conservative response is to deny that God is in the change at all, but stands in condemnation and judgement. To speak of adapting to culture and context is to depart from 'true religion'. It is the way of the world, not of God. It is impossible to argue against this except to point out that the religion espoused by the conservatives, Catholic or evangelical, is very different from the religion of their predecessors even of fifty years ago, let alone the age of the apostles.

My faith, underlying everything I write here, is that God is in the entire process, but always ambiguously, as has always been in the past, even in Jesus himself. Paul changed the face of apostolic Christianity and few would contest that God was in his ministry, yet Paul was as much wrong as he was right and his legacy has been both creative and destructive. The prophetic word today does not come from the bombast of evangelical pulpit, even less from the TV evangelists. It is a call to bring salvation to humanity in a crisis that threatens its existence. That salvation is not to a wished-for life after death nor a wished-for return of the Christ but to a sustainable human life on earth, sustainable not only into the next generation or even the next few generations but into a future that stretches indefinitely. Sharks have been around for over a hundred million years. Humanity needs to think in those terms. The gospel demands nothing less of us.

This is not humanism. Or if it is, then we can claim Jesus as a humanist. This is taking the Incarnation, God in Jesus, seriously. The Incarnation proclaims not just God's love for humanity but the spiritual importance of humanity in the context of the universe. It is taking seriously the continued presence of the incarnate Christ in his body, the church. It is hearing the words that John attributes to Jesus, "I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly."

It is God who is calling us on. If there is one certainty of which I am absolutely confident, it is that if I were to be alive in fifty years from now, even if the spiritual landscape is almost unrecognisable and even if the worst of the futurists predictions about global disasters have materialised, yet I know that the power of grace that I know now will be as real then (and just as ambiguous) as it is now. I am just as confident that, should humans emulate the shark and be around, albeit in a species that has evolved far beyond our present form, a hundred million years from now, grace will be as real then as it is now (and just as ambiguous).

That is why this book is about the present, not the future. In contrast to classical Pauline notions about hope, we hope not for a different world. That is not hope but wish. The certainty of hope is that the world of the future, whether tomorrow or in a hundred million years, will be the same as the present. This is the irony of this book. It is speaking about change, radical change, change that is coming upon us, ready or not. Yet the way to meet the change creatively is to know the grace that does not and will not change.

# Part I: Thesis

By the time the children of today reach old age, Christianity and all the religions of the world will have changed beyond recognition. In one way, this is a statement of the obvious in the sense that such change is always in progress. The priests and pastors who nurtured my generation as youth would barely recognise the Christianity of today, whatever the denomination to which they belonged.

In our day, however, this first quarter of the twenty-first century, the forces of change have become a hurricane, reshaping our mental and physical landscape as never before in human history on such a scale and speed, and impacting just as forcefully upon the religious world – the global religious world. There has been an effort in conservative religion, in evangelical Christianity, in the Vatican of John Paul II and in radical Islam, to resist the force of change. All such resistance is now crumbling, recognised as futile and counterproductive.

It is futile to try to predict what the world of religion will look like in fifty or one hundred years from now, even in twenty years, just as we cannot predict how human society will look in these time-frames. The future is not our concern. The present is. How we respond to the present, however, ultimately determines the future. The future is not our concern with regard to predictions but it is our ethical concern: some would argue it is our primary ethical concern. Humanity is under great threat to its very existence, or, at very least, to its well-being. Whether humanity survives or goes under, whether it mounts a successful cultural response or disintegrates into a primitive subsistence existence, depends in large measure on the decisions and actions we take in the present.

Many say that they do not care what happens to future generations as long as the good life continues for them in the present. Such people have abandoned any pretence at spirituality. Worse, though, morally and spiritually, are those who dismiss concern for future generations either because 'our destiny is in heaven' or because they expect a return of Jesus. Allied to these are they judgmentalists who look to the cataclysms they expect to come as divine judgement upon a sinful world that did not respond to the gospel as they preached it. Religion is, always has been, and always will be, an ambiguous force in human (and divine) affairs. The main battle of the classical Hebrew prophets was against the dominant religion of their day. The struggles of the apostolic church, from Jesus onwards, were primarily against the dominant religions of the first century, Jewish and pagan.

The prophetic call to humanity today is one that pitches it against all the established religions, including Christianity in its traditional forms. The impetus towards radical change is not a betrayal of the gospel but a response to the gospel. What is important to recognise, however, is that this is not a call to change that arises out of any form of idealism. This is not a call to return to an idealised past, certainly not some imagined New Testament model of the church. It does not hold out an image of what we want the church to be like as an aspirational ideal. There is no programme that can be implemented to achieve a defined outcome, because we cannot define the outcome. We can only respond creatively to what we encounter in the present, and do so in the faith that we have the grace to meet whatever the present delivers to us.

As a figure of history, Abraham never existed. The power of the Abraham myth, however, is as great today as it was when it was created in the centuries preceding Jesus. We are called into an unknown land by an unknown God and we move out in trust in that God. We are moving out in response to God's call, but we are not going empty-handed, any more than Abraham of the myth would have left Ur empty-handed. He took with him what he projected he would need for the journey, aware of the conditions he would face.

What I write could be framed in like terms. As we set out, what is it that we need to meet the conditions of our journey? Over the coming chapters I will be saying this. First, we need to understand the conditions we are facing, the essential data. Second, we need models that make sense of what we are experiencing and, from those models, develop a body of theory – theology – that lead us to being able make wise and clear-sighted decisions. Third, we have to develop a whole new set of practical expressions of our faith that both enable us to meet and overcome the situations we face and deliver the gospel of salvation to the world is a form that brings genuine salvation. Finally, we need to be able to know that we are really being faithful to God and be ready for the next stage of our journey.

This, then, is the thesis that we seek to discover that we know. Authentic religious life in the twenty-first century is created by the interaction of our experience of the grace of God with the real-life cultural and environmental conditions of our physical life, each affecting the other in an on-going dynamic that is never still, never capable of being reduced to dogmatic certainties but always driven by the call, arising from both grace and physical states, to ensure humanity survives and knows, for everyone, 'abundant life'. The survival of humanity depends centrally upon the realisation of this authentic spirituality, discovered as a common bond across global society.

# Part II: The Data

Like Abraham, we are called to make a journey to an unknown destination and we step out in faith. The analogy cannot be pressed too far, though. In the Biblical myth, Abraham might not have known whence he was bound but even as he set out, the land was already a defined entity, and when he arrived he was promised it for all time to come. There would be no further moving on. Classical Christianity reinterpreted the myth to make heaven beyond death that final 'promised land' while it also determined that aspects of its concrete institutional and theological existence were also places of arrival beyond which there could be no journeying. In the Abraham myth, the destination was the important part of the story and the conditions Abraham met on the road were so incidental that they do not even rank a mention.

In contrast, the 'conditions' we encounter on our spiritual journey determine where we arrive, not just the condition we are in when we arrive. The 'promised land' is not a predetermined destination but is determined by what we encounter on the way and how we respond to it. The other contrast with the myth is that there is never a place of final destination, no land, whether in this life or some imagined other, that we can lay claim to say that this is our land for ever.

The most effective way of interpreting the Abraham myth today is to recognise, in the moment we are in, and wherever we may be, that this is our place of arrival, this is our promised land. For a great many people, to make such a claim is absurd, because they see their moment as one lacking in the fulfilment they want from life. The myth gives us another clue in the divergent ways of Abraham and Lot. Lot looked on the barren landscape and opted for the lush lowlands and so turned his back on the place of creative grace, finally losing everything. Abraham accepted the place of living in the inhospitable highlands and gained everything. Abraham lived in the now, in the present, and trusted the future because Abraham knew the God of grace and trusted that grace.

The process we are now engaged in is one of coming to a place of knowing whether the thesis presented in the previous part is, for us, 'truth', or not known. The first stage of that process is to assemble the data that presents itself to us.

## 1. Data: Living in the present is a defining characteristic of our culture

To live our lives in the present is one of the fundamental spiritual 'truths' of our time. So much is this one of the shaping perceptions that determines the nature of our spiritual journey and its destinations that it deserves to be addressed first.

Classical Christianity from Paul onwards lived for the future. The definitive expression of this perspective comes from the Letter to the Romans 8:18, For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worth to be compared to the glory which shall be revealed to us. Throughout the New Testament and over the subsequent centuries, the future was imagined in various ways, from the return of Jesus on the clouds to whisk the faithful up into the air to meet him, to the resurrection scenario in heaven, to the thousand year messianic reign on earth. It has been renewed over the centuries in multitudes of re-working: in Dante, in Negro spirituals and many other forms. In the nineteenth century, there emerged the novel idea that the future in heaven was a reunion with loved ones. In the twentieth century, both communism and Nazism were distorted version of the Christian futuristic tradition, but still within the tradition. Common to all these manifestations is the idea that there would be a future in which there would be no more suffering, no more ambiguity, no more doubt and uncertainty, no more injustice or oppression and no more death, loss and grief. The present is a time of waiting for that glorious future to materialise and to take the steps to ensure that it comes to pass. Church life, spiritual life, was completely structured around this desire to obtain such a future for ourselves. Evangelistic passion was driven by the sense that we were under an imperative to see that as many people as possible made it into this wonderful future.

The message of a future that would be radically different from the present, not just in outward form but in ontological reality, delivering freedom from want, suffering, injustice and moral and theological ambiguity still commands a powerful following but now principally among those who are under-educated and those alienated and disenfranchised in the world. While this can be seen in virtuous terms, echoing many statements in the scriptures, the truth is that it is pure wishful thinking and the church's employment of the message is exploitative and, in the end, does the disadvantaged no favour. For the church, the message is primarily about proselytism that delivers power and control to the religious elite.

The wisest pastoral counsel to anyone in any situation is to live fully in the present. It is only in the present that creative salvation can be found. To live for the future, even if that future is envisaged as heaven in the glory of God's presence, is not only to strip the present of value and meaning but also blinds us to the grace of God that is given fully and abundantly in the present.

There has been a huge cultural shift from living in the future to living in the present. In spiritual terms, God is now, not some 'one' or some 'thing' that will some day be known, whether in this life or another. Perhaps the single most important insight of our age is that we will never know God more fully than we know God in the present, though we may grow in intellectual and psychological understanding. A lifetime spent studying the scriptures adds nothing at all to our knowing God – and may often work against knowing God. Grace is now and we will never have 'more' grace than we do at this present moment, even if we pray every minute of every day.

This cultural shift, supported by the living experience of grace, is a seismic event in the life of religion and, even if no other force were at work, would single-handedly change the face of religion. Among its radical impacts is how it changes the entire nature of our relationships with other religions. If God meets me in the now, just as I am, in the fulness of presence and grace, meeting me in all my weakness, inadequacy, ambiguity and with ideas that may be far astray from reality, then God meets the Buddhist who lives across the road, the Moslem I pass in the street, the atheist who shouts his belief from the rooftop. God meets them in their present just as fully, completely – and ambiguously – as God meets me. What we believe may affect how we respond to grace, or even recognise what we encounter as grace, but that does not change the reality that it is grace that we encounter, and encounter it now, in the present.

To live in the present changes the central dynamic of life from doing to being. 'Doing' is the central dynamic when our lives are focussed on future goals. That is why sectarian religion, which is always focussed on future goals, is always more active and energetic and builds bigger churches that those who live more in the present. That is why capitalism has been so successful in building powerful economies and delivering wealth. The 'good life' that has characterised the Western world during the twentieth century was a product of doing. It is, however, that 'doing' that is now the instrument of our undoing. The underlying cause of all the calamities now bearing down now on global humanity has its origins in a society that 'ate its future'. (The Future Eaters, Tim Flannery).

When we live in the present, the central dynamic is 'being' because it is only in being that we can be conscious of the present. The overarching social reality of our time is the emergence of global culture. This is the fundamental framework for understanding life and ongoing values and behaviours that is developing as a consensus across all societies on the planet, even where it is being fiercely resisted by conservative forces and the power of elites whose existence depends upon the old cultural order. The core driver of global culture is the response to the threats to our survival. We can only survive if we respond with a radically new way of living and that this is global, encompassing every society and member of society, admitting no exceptions. The heart of this new way of living will be, and has to be, the shift from doing to being, because it is only in accomplishing that shift that humanity can learn to live in sustainable balance with its planetary environment. Living in the present, with its central dynamic of being, is not a passing fad for New Age tree-huggers. It is the only way humanity can survive long-term on earth.

The theological, spiritual and moral implications of this cultural shift will be explored in a later section of this book. The important point at this stage is that we recognise that we are in the midst of a massive cultural shift and that the only authentic religious life is one that is in lockstep with this change. The converse is true. All forms of religion that continue to play to people's wishful thinking about the future, even if they can quote a book full of scriptural texts, is inauthentic religion.

## 2. Data: We know nothing

One of the major paradoxes of our age is that humanity has never had more knowledge than we have today, yet we, of all societies, are the one that has come to the recognition that we know nothing. This is as true of science and the humanities as it is of religion, and as true of religion as it is of science and the humanities. For religion, though, the recognition has been revolutionary and has turned theology and spirituality upside down. The deepest analysis of the rise of modern evangelical religion and its explosion of sects, the efforts of John Paul II and his Vatican to take the church back to the medieval era, and the tide of Islamic fundamentalism all ultimately relate to this one struggle to contain the recognition that we know nothing finally and definitively. Conversely, it is the ground upon which humanity can build a global community transcending all the divisions that currently pit people against people. This recognition that we know nothing is a grace-gift to the world, a gift of the Spirit, for without it, humanity is doomed. It is gospel good news, yet it is opposed vehemently in the name of religion under the guise of various gods.

That we know nothing is expressed philosophically in manifold popular ways by the term, 'post-modern'. The term is used in many confusing ways but the irreducible heart always comes down to the recognition that we know nothing absolutely. This is not a passing philosophical fad or fashion: it is not speculation based on airy fantasies. It is rooted in our very knowing itself, however paradoxical that may seem. All science leads to the place where we come up against the limits of knowing, not just because we lack the data or relevant theories to explain but because there is a physical boundary to knowing. We cannot know what lay before the Big Bang because time itself came into existence with the Big Bang so we cannot even ask the 'before' question. The nature of quantum physics leads us to a place where all human logic ceases to operate. The nature of our brain is such that it creates illusion and we cannot get behind the illusion because it is our brain that does the penetrating.

In religion, we talk about knowing God. The truth is that we can never, under any circumstances, be intellectually certain about any part of our faith, including the entire existence of the reality we term 'God'. The major alternative to the life of faith today that we embrace the concept that the entire universe is physics and only physics: all religion is psychological and philosophical. Even as I live daily in the sense of grace and the 'knowledge' of God, I do not and cannot know that the world is not purely physical and that everything I sense as spiritually real is not just an illusion. I reverence the Eucharistic elements as body and blood of Christ, but I have absolutely no way of knowing whether this is real or imaginary. I am constantly awed by my experience of what I interpret as the power of prayer, but, again, it could all be imagination. I do not know and I cannot know. I hear a TV evangelist tub-thumping about hell: it is possible he is right, though everything tells me he is not. Every effort to establish certainty, whether through resort to biblical texts or church dogma or the pronouncements of some guru, when examined, is exposed as being without foundation. All the myths that have built up over the years, whether golden plates, plenipotentiary authority as vicar of Christ or the notion that the biblical texts are God's word, have no basis other than that people believed them. It is possible still to believe them, if we are willing to suspend critical thought. Critical thought, however, once admitted, leads inexorably to the recognition that we do not know.

Yet we do 'know'. We can't exist and function without knowing. However, we understand knowing today not in terms of being in possession of propositions that are final and definitive but as a state of having arrived at a place of knowing after going through a process, a journey. Moreover, the instant we affirm we know something, the process starts all over again. Knowing is dynamic, a way-stage in a process that either never ends or reaches a conclusion that a 'knowing' is false or unknowable, putting a stop to the process. Even this is a knowing and therefore potentially able to generate a new round of the process. I am confident in 'knowing' that Joseph Smith's golden plates never existed and the whole Mormon revelation was fraudulent. Hypothetically, however, the plates could turn up and suddenly the process of knowing whether Mormonism is genuine or fraudulent is set in motion, leading to a new state of knowing, whatever that may be. I may 'know' that Joseph Smith was a con man – and at the same time, at the deepest level, I do not know. Perhaps there really are seventy virgins waiting in Paradise to have sex with the Islamic suicide bombers. Perhaps aliens really are abducting humans from earth. New data can completely overturn even the most fervently held 'knowing'. We know, yet we do not know.

It was noted in relation to the data on the shift of focus from the future to the present that if this were the sole piece of new data to emerge, it would alone effect a change in everything. In the same way, if this recognition about knowing were the single influence brought to bear on our religious thinking and practice, it would be revolutionary, changing everything. This is true in particular of Western Christianity that, since the time of Augustine in the sixth century AD, has been shaped by the search for absolute certainty. The fractures with the Eastern church in the eleventh century, and the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, were all about issues of certainty. This today also constitutes the major fracture occurring right across Western Christianity, though this time the fracture is not between certainties but between certainty and uncertainty.

Uncertainty does not mean the end of belief nor even the end of doctrine. It does not mean that we do not 'know' anything. What it means is that, however strongly we believe in something, and even if we cannot imagine anything else being true, yet we recognise that the reality might be something other than what we believe. I would stake my life on the reality of God's grace, and I mean that literally. I do this not because it says so in scripture or church doctrine or because I think that believing it will earn me immortality. I believe it because I experience grace as just as real as my physical space and that grace is what gives meaning to life. However, I also recognise that everything I count as my experience of grace is ambiguous and always has been and always will be. It is fully possible that I am living under an illusion. This is not a case of "Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief". It is not a weakness, a failure, something that a stronger faith could overcome. It is life and the unavoidable reality of life. Belief is the courage to affirm in the face of ambiguity.

There is a startling consequence to this stance, however. It is also legitimate to believe in the opposite direction or to put an entirely different interpretation on the experience that we count as grace. 'Unbelief' is just as legitimate as 'belief'. When and where I see grace, another sees chance or good fortune. The situation bears both interpretations. Classical religion condemned those who did not see grace. Authentic spirituality today recognises that it is legitimate to interpret the situation in a way that does not see grace. There is much more to be said about this, and the point should not be pressed to say that it does not matter which way we see and interpret. What is said here is that, at the level of knowing, belief and unbelief are equally valid.

It is the same with what we call doctrines or dogmas. Everyone forms doctrines, even atheists. In my experience, atheists are much more dogmatic than most Christians, and usually much more committed to the certainty of their dogmas. Doctrines are the distilled expression of the best theories we arrive at that determine how we shall live our lives. What is happening today is that Christians are learning (finally!) to sit lightly on their doctrines, to realise that they are way-stations on a journey, not an arrival point.

As a doctrine, I hold firmly to that which affirms that God was definitively manifest in the life of Jesus, the man from Nazareth. I cannot prove this doctrine and I cannot establish it as a certainty beyond question. I cannot even defend it evidentially against someone who is equally confident that it is not so. I do not understand the incarnation, and when I look at the whole body of the New Testament and the church down through the centuries, I find that nobody does except the sectarians who have all the answers, only each sect has a different answer. Doctrine is simply theory and it does not matter if ecclesiastical authority, whether pope or pastor, puts a stamp of 'right doctrine' on it, it remains theory and nothing more. Any theory is always open to being supplanted by a new and better theory.

That the earth is a sphere is a theory, even if it is so backed by facts that we cannot imagine it being supplanted. We should not forget that centuries ago even the scientists believed the earth was flat and all the data they had at their disposal appeared to support that theory. The theory only changed when new data showed that the old theory was no longer workable. If it should ever be proved by new data that Jesus never existed, the data would send the whole body of Christian doctrine out the window as surely as what happened to flat-earth theory. We have already seen this happen with respect to the doctrine of creation.

Here we come face to face with the revolution foisted on the church by the change in the way we know. To past generations, doctrine was derived from the direct revelation of God and was guaranteed as certain because it was given by God. That understanding was rooted in the cultural concepts of how knowledge was given to humanity. We no longer hold to those cultural concepts and every effort to argue that God gave the doctrines caves in on examination of the evidence. One of the gentle paradoxes of life is that Biblical literalism is perhaps the most obviously man-made doctrine being promulgated in the Christian world.

Everything is ambiguous, that is to say, can be interpreted in multiple ways, without any possibility of knowing, in the act of deciding which interpretation to follow, which is 'right'. Even facts are ambiguous, as every scientist knows and every judge in court knows. Witnesses to the same event rarely agree on the facts they witnessed. Right and wrong are never clear-cut. What is the right and wrong of Israel's existence? Even Hitler may be treated as a more ambiguous figure by later historians than the monster of evil we accept as truth. John Paul II, for all his elevation to sainthood, was one of the most morally ambiguous figures of the twentieth century, at least as much sinner as saint. All the moral issues that ravage the Christian community in our time – abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, capital punishment, immigrant rights – all are ambiguous. Every attempt to cut through the ambiguities and stake out a 'Christian' position is only ever a decision to cut through the ambiguities in one form or another, with Christians deciding in different ways.

Scripture does not help us resolve any of these ambiguities, for scripture can be used to support any doctrine or moral choice we make, whatever it is, even genocide or slavery. In complete contradiction to the stance of every sectarian church, the warrant of scripture is to the fundamental reality of ambiguity because not only is scripture itself always ambiguous but every event that scripture witnesses to is revealed as ambiguous. In other words, the scriptures themselves point to the deep truth that we know nothing.

What we have today, then, is the confluence of the worlds of religion, science and the humanities, each and all finding that at the centre of their world is 'not knowing'. This means that the divergence of these worlds since the eighteenth century has run its course and once again they are finding common ground, that common ground being that they know nothing absolutely and finally. This means that the world of science is open to the world of religion and the humanities: the world of the humanities is open to the world of science and religion: the world of religion is open to the world of science and the humanities. This has not happened in the West since the seventeenth century.

It also means that the Christian world is open to the non-Christian world in a way it has never been before. Beneath the efforts of mullahs and their like to suppress the movement, the global reality is that the non-Christian world is open to Christianity as never before.

The foundation of all this is the mutual recognition that finally we do not 'know' and that every effort by religious authorities of any colour to define what they know as absolute and beyond challenge is false. That is changing the face of global spirituality.

## 3. Data: The global crisis

In the past, individual societies and regions suffered crises that significantly weakened or destroyed them. Sometimes the crisis was environmental, as with the collapse of the ancient Cretan civilisation. Sometimes it was the rise or advent of a more aggressive or technologically advanced society, as when the Spanish overcame the Aztecs. Indigenous societies have been overwhelmed by the modern world, by new customs, by loss of habitat, by loss of language and by colonisation or the diseases brought by contact with the outside world. Sometimes societies have torn themselves apart through internal factions, effectively committing suicide. This has been the norm in human life since the end of the last ice age and the development of settled communities.

What is different in our day is that the crisis is striking the whole planet, affecting every society and region at the same time, if in different levels of intensity. Our crisis is global as never before.

The effects on society at all levels over the coming decades will be major. As I write, Syria and Iraq are being torn apart by sectarian violence and destruction, but the root cause is not religion but climate change, which is striking that region with a speed and intensity that is the highest in the world. Climate change is making the entire region unliveable, creating dislocation and despair that is being translated into social breakdown, violence and conflict. It takes little imagination to see the consequences of rising sea levels that will flood out of existence vast areas of the world, areas such as northern Europe, Bangladesh as well as most of the Pacific Island nations. What happens to the people of the Indian subcontinent when the great glacier-fed rivers dry up that water the subcontinent? Where does the population of Australia go when that continent ceases to support settled life, as may well happen within decades? And all of this is only one of the threats confronting humanity in the present and near future. Syria and Iraq may be just the beginning of what may manifest itself globally.

It is futile to try to predict the future. It is important that we live in the present. However, climate change and rising seas, resource exhaustion, pollution of the air and oceans, destruction of rain forests that are the planet's lungs, the dangers of nuclear conflict or Chernobyl-like catastrophe, the potential of pandemics and the devastations caused by extreme weather: all of these are not future possibilities but real and present dangers, in many instances already in full flight. Our children and grandchildren are present and their future is threatened. There is a difference between 'living in the future' which is when we are governed by wishful thinking or fear, our minds focussed on the future at the expense of the present, and living with an ethical concern for the future, leading us to address the issues we can deal with in the present.

The global threats are shaping the nature of global spirituality in a fundamental way because they raise the issue of authenticity. The judgement about authenticity is one that is made ultimately by the culture of the people. However much religious authorities and teachers may claim that faithfulness to dogma or institutional structures or scriptural texts are the only grounds for judging authenticity, the reality is that it is people as embedded in culture who make the judgements and those judgements often contradict the authorities.

While we cannot predict the future in any detail, we can confidently say that the outcome of the crises bearing down on us will be one of two probabilities, short of extinction. The one alternative is that the threats will overwhelm and disintegrate all ordered and civilised society everywhere, returning humanity to subsistence existence in scattered settlements across what remains liveable on the planet. There will be little hope of recovery inside millennia, if ever at all. If we continue our present trajectory, that is almost the inevitable scenario.

The other alternative is that humanity, across all parts of the globe that remain habitable, finds a new way of living a sustainable and abundant life. This requires a wholly new culture, and a culture that is global. Only if global culture emerges as not just dominant but all-encompassing will humanity have any possibility of surviving in a way that is recognisably a civilised existence and is experienced as worth living at all.

At this juncture in human history we cannot know which of these two alternatives will eventuate. It is clearly too late to reverse climate change, though we may be able to moderate its effect. As is being experienced already in Syria and Iraq, climate change will trigger widespread societal disruption on an epic scale, whatever the eventual outcome.

The spiritual question that is the acid test of authenticity is this: what is the response from religion to what is happening to us and around us? The data challenges spirituality and is effecting a revolution.

As with everything, the spiritual significance of the data is ambiguous. In the spirituality of Eastern religions, the data may be seen as irrelevant because real existence is spiritual, not physical.In classical Buddhism, there is no ultimate reality to the physical. In classical Christianity, in the same manner, the data might be dismissed as irrelevant because our destiny is in heaven. The earth is going to be destroyed anyway. That billions will suffer and die is essentially inconsequential because only their eternal souls matter. One strand of the tradition sees the Messianic return of Jesus as solving all the problems, so we do not need to be bothered by them. Chinese spirituality has the world going round in cycles, consigning the issue to the arena of fatalism. Caught in these traditional perspectives, the religions of the world have offered nothing to the crisis, and, in the conservative reactions of our age, are contributing to the crisis.

The data challenges our religious life in many directions. It raises acutely the issue of the meaning of life and death and the place of humanity and human destiny. What is the gospel of salvation? If the entire concept of life as being fulfilled only in another world is dismissed as wishful thinking, is there any meaning to salvation if confined to 'this' world? Authenticity today is being judged not by conformity to traditions of the past but as to whether the message that is offered brings real answers to the crisis of our age. Will the religious message enable humanity to survive and overcome the challenges we face? Only if the answer to that question is positive will our spirituality be judged as authentic. In the end, all religious life that is judged inauthentic will be weeded out from global life. It has to be, if humanity is to survive.

## 4. Data: The impact of narrative

"Faith Story" is my book (available as an eBook) that explores the way in which the faith narrative has been radically affected and changed. The story we used to tell about creation, about the history of God's acts in Hebrew history, about Jesus and the church and looking ahead to the future – this entire story has changed and in that change alone the religious world is being revolutionised.

Outside of a small group of fundamentalists, there is a widespread acceptance that the Genesis stories of creation and the fall of Adam and Eve have no factual basis and that the origin of the universe and life lie in processes initiated billions of years ago in a cosmic explosion from an infinitely small beginning. Everything in the universe as we know it today once occupied 'space' (space and time as we know it only originated with this initial explosion) less than a pinhead. We can even analyse the first milliseconds of that explosion. Whatever we make of the relationship between God and the material universe, this has to be the beginning of the story. Any talk of 'God' has to be able to embrace this and make sense of its context. Equally, it has to make sense of a universe of 600 billion galaxies, each with billions of stars like our sun: a universe in which there may be millions if not billions of planets capable of sustaining life like earth. This is the basic reason why the theistic model of a human-like Being, located in a place called 'heaven', has ceased to be a credible model for God in our day. The next stage in the traditional story, the Fall, has dropped out of the modern telling altogether.

The Old Testament narrative has imploded in recent years. The accounts of Abraham, Moses, the Egyptian sojourn and escape, the giving of the Law and covenant on Sinai, the empire of David and the temple and wealth of Solomon, the existence of a northern state of 'Israel' and the ten tribes that were said to occupy it: all fictional. Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon never existed. Elijah and Elisha never existed. Jerusalem as a city never existed until only a few decades before the Babylonians destroyed it. The temple in Jerusalem, far from being Solomon's glorious construction dedicated to Yahweh's glory was, in reality, a cultic building, probably quite humble, that was used by all the many cults of the Hebrew people who were as polytheistic as any of their neighbours. There is a real and inspirational story to be told about the Hebrew people, and it is a story of grace, of God, but the real story bears little relationship to the story the Old Testament purports to tell.

For Christianity, this revision of the Old Testament narrative has significant implications but it is not totally shattering. From the early centuries onward, the church community has had an ambivalent relationship with the Old Testament, and especially with the Torah. On the other hand, the impact on Judaism and Islam is overwhelming. Judaism, in its current form, is so wedded to the Torah it may seem inconceivable that it might exist without it. Yet it is now apparent that the Torah is a late development in pre-Jesus Hebrew life, dating from as late as the second century BC. Hebrew religion, from Jeremiah to the second century BC, was based elsewhere than in the Torah. I suspect that the future path of Judaism will lead to rediscovery of its prophetic roots and effect a revolution in its life. The collapse of the narrative removes the religious underpinning for the modern state of Israel.

Although Islam rests on the foundation of the words of Mohammed, not only does Islam recognise the Torah, accepting the Mosaic covenant story, but also the whole concept of a given law, that is the substance of the Koran, is rooted in the Mosaic narrative. Even if critical analysis is deflected (for the present) from addressing the text of the Koran, the collapse of the Mosaic story has massive implications for Islam.

The Christian narrative revolves around the Jesus event and is unthinkable without it. Unlike the story of Moses and the covenant on Sinai, the Jesus story is based in a real historical event. Jesus lived, taught, ministered, formed a body of disciples and was executed as a criminal. This much can be taken as foundational fact and remains at the core of the faith narrative. Beyond that, however, all the old certainties that attach to the faith story are deeply in question. It is significant that Paul appears to have known little about Jesus' earthly life and had no interest in knowing more. His letters betray no sense that the wider church was any different or called his lack of knowledge and interest into question. It may well be that until Mark's gospel appeared after Paul's death, no one in the church thought much about Jesus' life. Mark doesn't even show a great deal of interest in his teaching. By the time the interest surfaced, and especially when the next gospel, Matthew, was written, all those who had known Jesus in person were probably dead. When Luke, in the Acts of the Apostles, records the story of the Day of Pentecost – a story that had not appeared before that time – some fifty years had passed since that purported day and the events he writes about regarding the first Christian generation. John's gospel, writing a very different account of Jesus' life and words, does not appear for further twenty years.

We cannot tell the story of Jesus and the early church in the way accustomed to in the tradition. At least, we cannot tell it with any confidence as an account of what actually happened. Yet our church life, especially in the catholic tradition of festivals and liturgical readings of the gospel, has been completely structured around the sequence of 'events' from the Virgin Birth to the Day of Pentecost. The three-year lectionary cycle plays the story of Jesus in each of the synoptic accounts as straight narrative. Whatever the tradition we belong to, it is hard to imagine Christian life that is not built around the life of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels. It is little wonder that the response of a large section of the church to the challenge of the Jesus story has been to retreat into a shell that allows no questioning of the narrative.

The challenge to our sense of the narrative of Jesus goes deeper than this, however. We realise that all our most cherished interpretations of the meaning of Jesus are speculative, culture-based, imaginative models – and not necessarily meaningful to us at all. From the theological concepts of Paul to the sublime prologue of John: from the high Christology of Ephesians and Colossians to the priestly vision of Hebrews: these are all models and theories, not divine revelations. The models and theories might still be meaningful and useful – or they might not and can be ignored or discarded. This changes the entire relationship of theology to the scriptures and therefore the outcome of the theological enterprise itself.

The story of faith moves on from Jesus and the apostolic times to encompass the life of the church, not only in historic times but as we are in this moment. This is what characterises the faith story from ordinary narratives. It is our story, not only in that it tells how we came to be as we are, but in the sense that we are living within the story as we tell it.

The change that has taken place in our story of the church lies in the recognition that the traditional story involved myths that were usually far from factual truth. The Petrine myth underlying the claims of the Roman church is an example. The Protestant Reformation was galvanized by the myth of modelling church life according to the supposed ways of the church in the first century, especially as Luke portrays these in Acts. Pentecostalism is built on the myth of charismatic gifts in the early church, and especially the story of the Day of Pentecost. The mega-churches of today are built upon the myth of the Prosperity Gospel.

While myth-based religion still has a wide appeal, it is always a house built on sand, exposed by real data as having no solid foundation. The undermining of myths that have supported aspects of religious life in the past is one of the fundamental realities of today. When these myths die, we have three choices. One is to affirm the myth into the face of the data, as the biblical literalists do. One is to abandon religious belief altogether, as the New Atheists do. Alternatively, we can change and adapt, creating a new narrative that embraces the data, which is the path to authenticity.

The climax of the traditional faith narrative was the future consummation, variously imagined as heaven or the messianic age. There is no direct data on this one way or the other, which is the core issue. It exists only in the imagination and as such needs no data but is as real as any other imagining of the future. On the other hand, there is indirect data relating to the cultural origins of all these ideas, origins that should make us question their validity as being in any way connected with reality. For most people, the traditional projection of the faith story into the future has disappeared from view. If it exists at all in our day it is either as folk religion and its beliefs about being reunited with loved ones after death (death's reality is denied), or wishful imaginings of a world without suffering. At the same time, our culture has created a scenario for the continuing story of humanity and the physical world, a story that bears little resemblance to the traditional narrative. It is this that is believed.

As with each of the data sets we have explored, if these changes to the narrative of faith were the lone force acting upon the life of the faith community, they would be sufficient to effect a change going right down to the roots of the church's existence.

## 5. Data: The impact of technology and politics

The impact of technological and political changes upon the theology and practice of religion should never be underestimated. The start of the whole Hebrew/Christian tradition dates from the end of the seventh century BC and the prophet Jeremiah. Writing had been around for quite a while, but it is only in this era that the art of writing evolved into extended literary works and gave birth to law, history, written stories, poetry and prophecy. When Jeremiah caused his words to be written down by the scribe Baruch, he commenced a tradition that completely transformed Hebrew society and religion and ultimately changed the world. Writing technology revolutionised religion.

If we call language a technology, which it is, then the spread of Greek as the universal language of the Roman empire, and later, Latin, changed the face of Christianity. Not only did it facilitate the spread of the gospel beyond the confines of Palestine, but also it enabled the interplay of a wide range of cultures that would come together to wrestle with the issues of the church and so shape its life.

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century and its focus on scripture as interpreted by the people was a direct consequence of the technology of the printing press. If the people had not been able to access the scriptures physically, the Reformation would not have happened.

We are living today in yet another era of technological transformation of communication that parallels the development of writing, of common language and of the printing press. The rise of electronic media, however it may develop in the future, is having a revolutionary impact not only on the way we communicate but on the way we think. New theological issues arise, such as the spiritual validity of fellowship that exists only in cyberspace.

In the same manner, politics has always shaped religion, and is the present is no different. All the developments of Hebrew religion in the crucial seventh and sixth centuries BC were a consequence of the political rise and dominance of the Mesopotamian and later the Persian empires. The model of God as king of kings is a direct reflection of the Persian monarchy and court. The second part of the book of Isaiah, chapters 40 to 55, are often described as the introduction of monotheism but it is not so. Isaiah's Yahweh is still as polytheistic as in the past but he is imaged on the model of the Persian king who rules over all, including other kings, and is so dominant that, in effect, there is only one ruler and his word is absolute. The crucial era in shaping Christian theology, from the apostolic time to the sixth century AD, was one dominated again by the absolute rule of the Roman emperor. The Christian concept of God developed in relation to this model.

Western Christianity values the individual. While it is possible to find scriptural warrant for this value, its origin as a core value in Western Christianity was political, born of the struggle between church and state during the medieval era. It is that struggle that was to give rise, eventually, to the Reformation. Politics shaped theology.

Our era is also being changed by our political concepts. Language that refers to God as King, Lord, Judge, Lawgiver, Warrior all reflect political conditions that the modern world finds difficult to relate to. The idea of absolute obedience, of being disciplined for getting out of line or for questioning the divine 'word', of having no independence of judgement in moral choice: all these are ideas that belong to a particular political system that is alien to our way of living. However much they may be the way of thinking enshrined in scripture, they are still just models, and models that no longer work for most people.

Even our concepts of worship, and especially praise, are based in the political system of absolute rule. Eastern potentates and autocratic rulers through the ages demanded lavish praise from their subjects. The modern example is the dictators of North Korea. Outside of North Korea, the whole notion of extravagant praise and worship of rulers is seen as ridiculous and false. To outsiders, Christian praise of God can look little different. If we are honest, the way we relate to God in our day reflects the political realities of the way we relate to our 'rulers', including all the ambivalence embraced in that relationship. If we follow that line of thought, we arrive at the point where we ask whether the model of democratic government, where the ultimate source of power lies at least theoretically with the people, has implications for our own model of God.

## 6. The data of grace

We cannot predict the future except in one respect: that the future will be outwardly different but inwardly the same as the present. We see clearly the data that is impacting upon the world of global religion. Each element of that data, separately, will generate a revolutionary change in religion. Cumulatively, they constitute a tsunami of titanic proportions. Outwardly, religious life across every faith community in the globe will change radically in the next fifty years.

Yet nothing will change: that is, nothing fundamental. This is our 'sure and certain hope'. The grace and love that we know now is grounded in the nature of reality, not a passing religious concept. Our understanding of it, the models and theology we use to interpret and make sense of it, the way in which it is communicated and outwardly celebrated, all these will change and may change out of all recognition, but the inner reality will be unchanged and is unchangeable. The data that tells us this is within our daily experience of grace as reflected upon from our past and lived in the present.

This is the centre of the message of salvation, the gospel proclamation to the world. It is a theme that will be explored more fully in later sections of the book, but the focus here is that for critical data we look not just to what is happening in the global world but within ourselves, individually and as faith communities. The change that has happened in the life of the church is that we no longer look to authorities from the past, whether ecclesiastical or biblical, as guaranteeing the validity of our faith. The evidence of the past, even the scriptures, are witnesses to grace as they experienced it in their time, but the rock on which modern faith is built is the reflection on our own encounter with grace in our time.

Our experience of grace is always ambiguous. We know it, yet the moment we try to make it definitive and clear we find we know it not at all. We believe in grace and base our lives upon it, yet every time we step out trusting in grace we doubt its reality. Every vision of the church as a grace community is confronted with its living contradiction of grace. The bread and wine of the eucharist is body and blood of Christ – and simultaneously just plain bread and wine. But then, and this is extremely significant, all of that can be reversed and grace seen in everything mundane. Ordinary bread and wine is vehicle for the extraordinary presence of Christ. This squabbling, divided religious community is the Body of Christ. This weak, sinful, vacillating person that I am is filled with all the grace of God, transforming everything I do. Humanity, broken, fighting, greedy and all the rest, is the species in which God became incarnate.

In the final analysis, it is the data of grace that is the most revolutionary force of all impacting upon the world. The spiritual revolution of our age is the shift in the centre of gravity for religion from looking to the past to seeing the presence of grace in the now. That changes everything.

# Part III: Models

We do not lack for data. We are awash with data in our world, whether we are talking religious questions, as in Part II, or scientific, historical, psychological or cosmological questions. The problem we face is one of making sense of all the data we possess, and this is the same whatever area of life we are engaged in. The key to making sense of data is models.

## 7. Models of Knowing

At the intellectual centre of global culture lies the issue of knowing, as it is in every culture. It is not what we claim to know that is the centre but how we know what we know. For most traditional cultures, what is known is what has been handed down from earlier generations. The ancient classical world went as far as to locate the only true sources of knowledge and wisdom as being in the past, the distant past. The world of the present possesses only degraded and largely valueless wisdom. If a writer wanted to be taken seriously, he had to write as if he was someone who lived long ago. In the past, however variously conceived, there had been a time when wisdom and truth had been conveyed directly by the divine or though especially gifted men. That that no longer occurred.

Traditional Christianity fell into the same way of thinking with respect to the scriptures and, if to a lesser degree, with respect to the early church Fathers. It was a model of knowing that God effectively dictated the words of scripture so that they were not human words but 'God's word'. As God word, the text could not be questioned or challenged, even at a factual level. The words had to be accepted as defining what was known about God, about Jesus, about the church and about moral choices. If we want to know what God thinks about anything, the text of scripture gives us the answer, because God dictated it.

This was a model and ever only a model. The model is a human one, not a divine one. Biblical literalism is par excellence a man-made doctrine. However, the whole of Western European society was built on the back of this model.

It is a model that has crumbled over the last two centuries in the West, not only in secular society but also within the life of the church community. Evangelicism is fighting a last-ditch stance to preserve the model but even that stand is retreating fast. The erosion of the model is what lies at the heart of the crisis in the Islamic world and the desperate effort of its conservative elements to hold back the tide.

We have to 'know', however. No person or society can exist for more than a fleeting moment without arriving at a place of knowing for it is only as we know that we are able to take any action. This is the flaw in the understanding of people who call themselves agnostic. At one level, everyone who embraces global culture is agnostic because 'not knowing' is the intellectual centre of the culture. However, everyone, in every situation, comes to the place of knowing, even the self-confessed agnostic.

This still leaves us with the questions: what is 'knowing'? How do we arrive at knowing?

As with everything, we can only arrive at answers to both questions by using models, and therefore the answers will ever only be as good as the models we use to obtain the answers. Here lies the paradox: we can only 'know' by employing the model that enables us to know, and we can never be sure and certain that the model is accurate and accords with reality. The question takes us round in circles from which there is no escape. All we can ever say is that this is the best model that we can come up with in the present state of the world and the answers it delivers satisfies us, at least for the present. One day a new and different (not necessarily better) model may arise and lead to different conclusions but that is beyond our control or field of view.

When I wrestle with the question of what is knowing, I utilise two models of which I am using one as the structure for this book and will also utilise the other in the development of the theory. The first of the models is drawn from the field of psychodrama and envisages a council of six individuals. All six have to contribute to the consideration before anything can be said to be known. The six individuals consist of an observer, a wise person, a clear seer, a theoretician, a believer and an analyst. The quality of the outcome, what is known after the 'consultation', is in direct proportion to the strength of each contributor separately. The outcome is modelled on multiplication, not addition. If one or more of the six contributors is weak, the outcome is weak: more, if one or more of the contributors is absent, or contributes nothing, the outcome is zero knowing. Creationism, for example, cuts out any contribution from the 'observer', denying all facts, and therefore its knowing is zero. I find the model exceptionally useful and dynamic and utilise it frequently, yet I have never satisfactorily resolved the question of who is the 'knower'.

The second model underlies this book and is, I sense, the really vital model for today's world. This is the model of process, and the power of the model in the contemporary world is that we see everything in nature and history as the outcome of process.

The process of knowing can be seen as a system in which the input is hypothesis and the output is knowing (which might be that the hypothesis is 'not known' or false, which in itself is a knowing). Everything begins with hypothesis, which is a statement of something that we do not know whether it is true or not. The process itself begins with the accumulation of data, because when we are confronted with a hypothesis, at least one that grabs us as significant, the immediate impulse is to look for the data that either supports or rebuts the hypothesis.

The data on its own, as all data, is incoherent and means nothing. It just is. It generates the next phase of the process, which is the discovery of models that make sense of the data.

We routine work with many different models. There can be 'master models' that seek to comprehensively interpret the totality of the data. The Darwinian model of evolution (and evolution is only a model in itself) was and is such a master model that encompasses all the data of the living world. If ever some data emerged that could not be fitted into the evolutionary model, a new master model would have to be found. However, we utilise a great many models within the master model that illuminate certain specific aspects. Today, theism, that used to be the master model for Christianity (as it remains for Islam at the present), is still useful, even necessary, as a sub-model, illuminating vital aspects of our relationship with God that cannot be captured by any other model accessible to us. Most models are drawn from the world of everyday life, like the model of theism, which is based simply upon our everyday interactions with other people. Models are also frequently drawn from political and social structures common in the society creating the models. Thus the model of God as King, especially as King of kings, was one drawn initially from the political experience of kingship in the middle east of the millennium before Jesus, and especially shaped by the encounter with the magnificence of the Persian court. The flights of poetry extolling the greatness of God that we find in the Isaiah of chapters 40 to 55 are based on the impact of the Persian conquest of the Babylon where Isaiah lived and directly image the nature of the Persian court. If the Persian emperor was so magnificent, then Yahweh had to be even more magnificent and powerful. The problem with models drawn from social and political structures is that these models may endure long after the living foundation for the model has passed out of existence. So many of our models in religious use were formed in patriarchal societies and have become not only outmoded today but even counterproductive.

Once we grasp viable models that make at least some sense of the data, the process moves to the creation of theory. Only when the process has generated theory is any practical action of a considered kind possible. The shepherd model (itself no longer a living model) has generated a whole body of theory about the nature of care to be expressed by and through the church, and that model is then expressed in practice. I act as a locum hospital chaplain, and everything I do in practice as a chaplain arises out of this theoretical foundation that has been developed from the model of the shepherd and the sheep.

Even when we act out of theory, and our actions conform closely to the theory, we still do not 'know'. It is only as we evaluate the outcome of our actions that we are able to compare the outcome against the hypothesis we started with that we can say, boldly or tentatively, 'This we now know'. Analysis, observation, clear seeing, wisdom all come into play as we look at our actions and ask whether they confirm, deny or modify our starting hypothesis. What is significant, however, is that the final stamp of all knowing is the act of the believer. Even when all the evaluating process is done to the best of our ability, ambiguity always remains and it is the contribution of the Believer role that cuts through the ambiguity and says, 'This I know'.

The act of knowing, then, is the act of confirming, denying or modifying a starting hypothesis. Even the conclusion that the hypothesis is false is itself a knowing. However, the instant we modify a hypothesis we are in fact generating a new hypothesis, and the entire process begins all over again. Even when we think that we have confirmed the starting hypothesis without modification, the inherent ambiguity is always asking questions, challenging the conclusion we think we have arrived at, while new data is constantly emerging that demands the recommencement of the process. Thus our knowing is never settled, never reaching a definitive point where it can remain unchanged.

That we reach this conclusion illustrates how dramatically our choice of model impacts upon the way we live life. The model, when adopted, makes a nonsense of all claims to have definitive knowing, whether it be the claim of the papacy, the claim of the Islamists or the claim of the biblical literalists. It also makes nonsense of the claims of the so-called New Atheists.

The hypothesis that this book has advanced is that there is emerging a global 'God', a new spirituality that is destined, if humanity survives in any settled form, to form the basis of global society. The data that supports the hypothesis was gathered in Part II. The models, including this model of knowing, that make sense to us of the data supporting the hypothesis, is what this part is all about. In the next part, the knowing process goes on to explore the theories that can be drawn out of the models, followed by Part IV that outlines where the theory takes us in practice. The process continues in Part V with a discussion of how we can evaluate the practice to come to a place of knowing whether the hypothesis is valid, invalid or needs modifying.

There are two other elements in our model of knowing that are important: paradox and ambiguity. Paradox is when we hold two contradictory things to be true though logically only one can be true. The classical theological paradox is the nature of Christ as fully human and fully divine. The impulse to sectarian religion is always towards the dissolution of paradox. The paradox in the act of knowing is that we both know and know nothing.

Ambiguity is the state where anything can have more than one way of understanding it, more than one way of acting on it, more than one potential outcome. We never know what is the 'right' way, even in hindsight. As with paradox, the impulse behind sectarian religion is the denial of ambiguity. The model of knowing as process inevitably creates ambiguity about everything that we may seek to know, whether it is God, or sexual conduct, or the size of the universe, or what to have for dinner. Everything is ambiguous. If we have to make a single word to describe the character of spirituality in the twenty-first century, it would probably be the word, ambiguity. This has theoretical (and beyond that, practical) implications that have yet to be explored.

## 8. Models of Reality

More fundamental than any model we might have of God or gods is the model we have of reality. It is that model that provides the context in which any model of God makes sense, or does not make sense. There are and have been as many models of reality as there are and have been cultures in the world, for every culture is a reflection of its underlying model of reality. In our contemporary world, we are presented with a variety of different models but what marks this age of global culture is that we are aware of the existence of a range of models and that the ambiguity of reality is such that we can make a choice among them without any certainty that our choice is 'right'.

The dominant model in Christianity, Western and Eastern, for most of its existence to date, has been the theistic model, not just of God but also of the whole of reality. In this model, reality is dualistic in that there is a spiritual/divine reality and a radically different and separate material reality, the material reality being an artefact made by the divine but utterly other than the divine. It is the model of artisan and product shaped by the artisan. God created the material world out of nothing, is sovereign Lord of this creation, free to change it and ultimately to discard it. The only eternal and true reality is the spiritual. This model may have been enshrined in dogma and taken by the majority of Christians, past and living, as being divinely revealed truth, but the truth is that it is, and ever has been, only a model of reality. Theology extrapolated a vast body of theory from the model that in turn led to the practical shaping of the church and its life. With the collapse of the theistic model not just of God but also of the nature of reality, the rug has been pulled from under that whole body of theology, with huge practical consequences.

The major alternative model to theism has been the emergence of scientific materialism, the model of reality that says that everything is physics and nothing but physics. In knowing physics (allowing for limitations in our scientific understanding), we know the reality of everything that exists. There is no room in this model for anything remotely resembling the spiritual except as a branch of psychology. The church is a sociological artefact.

The Buddhist model of reality, in its classical form, is that nothing is real. The ultimate state of enlightenment is reached when we know this. In classical Buddhism, as in scientific materialism, there is no room for divinity. In the Chinese model of reality, everything goes in circles, endless circles, while the outward form of everything is determined by the balance of ying and yang. The Islamic model of reality is a variant of the theistic model with an even more radical distinction made than in Christianity between a strictly monotheistic Allah and the created universe.

The problem facing the world today is that none of these models, nor any of their variations or minor alternatives, is meeting the needs of the present crisis facing humanity: nor do they make sense of the data we have. Almost all, if not all, of the models are negative in their ability to generate creative solutions to the human crisis. Theism created a framework for the exploitation of nature and projections about the future that are wishful thinking, detracting from the energy to address the real issues of our day. Buddhism and Chinese models of reality create a fatalistic approach that drains the energy from the urgency of our situation. Scientific materialism, by stripping reality of all meaning, purpose and value, creates a climate of hopelessness in the face of mounting challenges or wishful thinking about the capacity of technology.

If we ignore or discount the data of grace, scientific materialism does provide a coherent model to account for the data of reality. If we are talking just physics, the universe needs no God-hypothesis either to explain the evidence of its existence or to understand any natural phenomena. What the model does not satisfactorily interpret is the data of grace, the sense of meaning and purpose or the entire gamut of values and ethics. It interprets even 'spiritual' experiences as being physical, either psychological or chemical. Furthermore, every single instance that may be interpreted as data of grace can also be interpreted as a physical phenomenon, even if we do not understand the physics involved. Everything we may see as grace, bringing good, is likely to be experienced by someone else as being negative, painful or destructive – and visa versa. Every moral choice we make creates pain and loss in some other value.

Yet for all the ambiguity, the greater part of the church community across the whole spectrum of traditions still affirms the validity of the data of grace. The question, then, is this: what kind of universe do we live in that enables grace to be known as real? To experience grace is to find that reality is 'personal' in the sense that our whole encounter with life is that we are valued, cared for, provided for and guided through every challenge. This cannot be understood in impersonal terms. It cannot be understood though the study of physics. A computer may be programmed to meet our needs but could never be said to be 'caring' about us. Grace is not experienced as a programme in which we make right inputs and can expect specific outputs. On the contrary, in the encounter with grace we can never predict the outcome except with the confidence that it is always positive and creative and caring for us, even when the outward experience is negative and involves suffering and loss.

So what model of reality, of the universe, allows for grace? The theistic model did but the model is no longer viable as a basic model of reality in our world. This does not mean that theism is no longer a usable model in any way. It is often not only helpful but also necessary in some circumstances to model God as a human-like Being. I am unashamedly theistic in times of prayer, for the only way I can model prayer as an encounter with 'person' is by the modality of God as Being with who I can relate. However, as a model to grasp the nature of the totality of reality, theism no longer works. In the first place, the idea of a single mind, even if conceived as 'infinite', controlling the universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies in all the minutiae we know of physical reality is a model shattered by sheer incomprehension. Second, the model presumes that the 'created universe' runs largely by itself according to laws and that the theistic God tinkers with these laws to achieve his ends, changing outcomes at will so that it is never possible genuinely to know whether the laws of physics will apply in a particular case or not.

Most importantly, the theistic model does not do justice to the way in which we experience grace as being a total encounter with reality, not an occasional 'miracle' where sometimes God works and sometimes doesn't. The theistic model required 'means of grace' and particular channels though which grace might be encountered. It reserved grace for only the 'redeemed'.

There may be many and complex reasons why Christianity has declined, and continues to decline, in the West but a critically important reason is the widespread perception that Christianity utilises an outmoded and unsustainable model of reality that no longer connects with how people perceive life and the universe. If there is a single principal challenge to Christianity today (and this can be extended to all religions), it is that we have to come up with a credible model of reality that makes sense to people and enables the data of grace to be grasped.

At a personal level, I have developed a model of reality that makes sense of the data of both physics and grace. This does not mean that there are no other models. There most certainly are, or will be. The model I use would not have made sense to anyone a generation ago because the data that supports it was then unknown. It may not work in another generation. It is a model for our time.

The thing about a good model is not only that it makes sense of the data of which we are aware but also that we can push into territory that is unfamiliar. The model that I have found 'works' is based on the experimentally verified understanding of physical reality at the quantum level, that is, at the level of the smallest particles of physical matter. At his quantum level, how particles are observed to behave depends upon the question the researcher asks. Ask one question, research for the answer, and the answer will confirm the question. Ask of exactly the same particle the opposite and logically contradictory question and the answer confirms the contradiction. There is no logical way for the human brain to hold both answers together, yet both are experimentally true. The nature of physical reality at the quantum level defies human logic.

That is the model. Its use to interpret the totality of reality is this: that if we ask the universe the physical question we obtain an answer that the universe is totally physical (just as the scientific materialists assert). Everything comes about from natural causes in an unbroken sequence that goes back to the Big Bang. Even anything and everything that we account as grace is explained physically. All religion, whatever it is, including Christianity, can be traced to psychological and sociological causes. Nowhere does 'God' appear. When we ask the physical question of life and the universe, the answer is physical and nothing more.

When we ask the spiritual question, the grace question, however, the entire universe, every aspect of reality, presents itself to us as wholly grace. God is in everything, of everything, the direct 'cause' of everything and there is no necessary connection between physical causes and effects. Time and space itself ceases to exist. When we ask the spiritual question of life and the universe, the answer is spiritual and nothing more.

These two perceptions of reality are logically incompatible. The model is not saying that there is a physical universe and a spiritual one: it is saying that the same 'reality', in its entirety, presents itself to us as either physical or spiritual depending upon the question we ask of it. This is not a speculative, philosophical assertion about the nature of the cosmos. It is only a model, a way of making sense of reality as we experience it. What the model does give us is a framework for practical living, and later parts of this book will explore this in theory and in practice. What I want to say at this point is that it is my personal experience that the model does work at the level of practical action. It has become for me the model I live by – and enables me to be a Christian.

My personal story is that I experienced, after being ordained for over twenty years, the catastrophic collapse of faith because I could no longer buy in to the theistic model. I came to the conclusion that the totality of all reality was physics and only physics. I lived that way for the next fifteen years. Then circumstances changed disastrously and I was reduced physically and materially to utter weakness, with death looming. In that place, I began to experience the surprise of grace, gradually moving to relying upon grace to meet the need of each day. Then came the moment when I was shocked into confronting the question: what kind of universe do I live in that grace is possible? My physical materialism model collapsed and yet I knew that I could not return to the discarded theistic model. Everything changed. The new model did not just provide a framework for understanding the data of grace I was experiencing. It provided the platform for moving forward in faith and, in the years that have followed, the model has, for me at least, never proved inadequate as a basis for living.

## 9. Models of meta-narrative

If the twentieth century was rightly described by theologian Paul Tillich as the age of meaninglessness, there were two dimensions to this crisis. It was, and is, a crisis, for without a sense of meaning, life loses all its flavour and resilience in the face of challenges that threaten to overwhelm us. It is in finding meaning in the face of suffering and negativity that we are able to endure and have at least some change of survival. Given the scale and number of the threats confronting the global community in the twenty-first century and beyond, our failure to know meaning, or in the discovery that our sense of meaning does not hold up in the face of the challenges, is going to ensure our failure as whole humanity.

The collapse of meaning, at least in Western society, has its roots, first, in the uncritical embrace of scientific materialism as the model of reality. A world that is just physics has no meaning, no purpose and no direction. Species come and go: humanity has come and it will go: the universe neither knows nor cares because there is nothing in the nature of the universe to know or care.

The other source of the collapse of meaning has been the implosion of the meta-narrative of Christianity, not only for those who have discarded Christianity but also within the Christian community itself. It is from our sense of story that we derive our gasp of meaning, purpose, values and direction for the future. Without a story, ether personal or as a community, nation or world, we are nothing. The basis of all enduring community is shared story.

This is different from 'stories'. That is why it is best to use the word 'meta-narrative'. The story or meta-narrative that gives meaning to our lives is one that tells how we began; how we came into being; how we came to be as we are now, illuminating the present; projects into the future and tells us our destiny. That is meta-narrative and every strong, resilient person, family, community or nation has such a meta-narrative. That meta-narrative shapes the way we live, our values, our institutions, our moral norms, our politics and our relationships with other entities. The resources of a community are allocated according to the perceptions of priorities created by the meta-narrative. For centuries, the meta-narrative of all European nations, and their colonial extensions, saw the church, in whatever form, and the Christian faith, as being embedded in the essential nature of its life as a people. Considerable resources were devoted to the building of churches and cathedrals, the support of the clergy and church institutions and the embodiment of church-endorsed values into the legislative fabric. To tell the story of the nation and to tell the story of Christianity were inseparably intertwined. Few would still see either the story of nation or Christianity in that light today, and this is reflected by the way in which resources that once flowed into the churches are now drying up. Christianity is being steadily pushed out from the story of communities, national or local, and certainly from the majority of families and individuals.

At the core of this failure in the Christian meta-narrative is that Christianity's own confidence in its traditional meta-narrative has largely disappeared. It holds on only in insular conservative sects that have developed a fortress mentality against the influences corroding the traditional narrative. The traditional meta-narrative began with an act of creation, happening in six days, climaxing in the creation of the first humans. The two humans rebelled and sin and death entered the world. The story of faith began with the call of Abraham, the patriarchs, the escape through the Red Sea, Moses and the giving of the law, the stories of David and Solomon and so on. Then the story comes to Jesus; moves on through the era of the church, ast which stage in the story we are caught up in the telling and become part of the story. The traditional meta-narrative came to its climax in various projections about the future.

Today, every part of that traditional Christian meta-narrative is being challenged and has changed, as we explored in Part II. The tensions within our Christian community are about how we respond to and cope with the change in the Christian story. Some take their stand firmly in saying that the old story is set in stone as revealed truth and cannot be changed. At the opposite end of the scale are those who, recognising that the old narrative is no longer sustainable, throw over faith altogether and reject the Christian message. There are those of us who muddle along, going through the motions of telling the story as if nothing has changed but simultaneously not believing it.

The fourth way of responding is to recognise that the traditional meta-narrative has indeed lost its credibility, but that we do have a faith story to tell that is real and powerful and makes sense not only of our lives but of the whole universe. If the church is to live and grow it has only two options. Either it stands uncompromisingly on the affirmation of the old story and draws energy from the struggle to maintain this in the face of all the evidence: or we embrace a new meta-narrative and draw our energy from the excitement of seeing the gospel become relevant and important once more to the life of the world, especially into the gathering crises of our age.

The traditional meta-narrative does still provide the basic model upon which we construct a new narrative. What we need now is a model that enables us to construct that model in such a way that it can genuinely form the basis of a meta-narrative that is able to not only shape our personal lives but also give a foundation for a global spirituality.

The meta-narrative of Christianity today - The anchor points

The new meta-narrative of Christianity has five anchor points. The first is the experience of grace in our own life and the community of the church: God in our lives now. The second is our embrace of the world of the natural sciences: faith does not ask that we deny the truth about the natural world. The third anchor is the definitive revelation of grace, climaxing in the cross. The fourth anchor is the church, because grace that is authentic always creates community. The fifth anchor lies in knowing why we tell the story all all.

The first anchor: grace in our lives now

If we are to tell a credible story of faith today, the central core of the story has to be our own experience of the grace of God working in our lives now. If we have nothing in our lives that we can look to and say, I know God, then we have nothing upon which to build a story. If the world does not see the grace of God manifest in our community, then nothing we say, no story we tell, can have any credibility. It is only in the light of what we experience immediately in our lives that anything we say about the past has any power, credibility, even for ourselves, and authenticity. That is why the telling of our meta-narrative has always to proceed from our experience of prayer and liturgy.

The second anchor: our knowledge of the natural world

Our meta-narrative is one in which we look back and see the grace of God as we know it now being manifest in the world from the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, the formation of stars, through the evolution of life, through the emergence of homo sapiens. We tell the same story as that of the scientists but we see that story through the lens of the grace we know in our lives and we see that same grace in everything that has happened throughout the universe over billions of years. Even though the essence of the story is one of grace, the narrative has always to be anchored in the facts of the natural world. If Jerusalem never existed in the time of 'David', then it cannot form part of our story. If the sun cannot stand still in the sky, it does not form part of our story.

The third anchor: the revelation of grace, climaxing in the cross

We tell today a story of humanity finding the consciousness and understanding of grace. The story embraces the Hebrews, even if the story we tell of the Hebrews is radically different from the version we read in the Old Testament. It is a story that recognises that the awakening of grace came through other religions and peoples, especially the Babylonians. We see grace not confined to one people but universally encountered, and that echoes what we see in the world today.

The lynchpin of our story remains Jesus, even if the story we tell about Jesus may differ from the accounts in the gospels or as seen through the eyes of Paul. That we know grace at all, able to recognise grace in our lives as grace, is because of the life and death of Jesus. The cross stands at the centre of our story and anchors it.

The fourth anchor: the community of the church

Our story continues through the life of the church, but also the broader human story and it is a story of unfolding understanding both of the nature of the universe and of the reality of grace. It is a story that embraces the unfolding of moral consciousness in the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women, the confrontation with racism and, for our own generation, liberation of gender identity and orientation. It is a story that recognises the ambiguity of everything human, including the church. It is a story that recognises how every generation changes the story and has always done so. It is a story of the dynamic of the Spirit of God in human society. Always the anchor is in the way we encounter the grace of God in our lives. The way we know God in our lives now illuminates the entire history of humanity.

That our story is anchored in the community of the church also means that the story is always, if it is authentic, about how the barriers that divide human from human are overcome though grace. A story that serves to divide, to break communion, to set community against community is never authentic to the faith story of grace, however zealous the religious profession.

The fifth anchor: why we tell the story

To know why we tell the story, why it is important to us and the world that we tell the story, is a critical anchor point. It is the anchor that has been almost completely lost outside of the sects. It is why we cannot communicate a gospel message to the world. The anchor has to be grounded into the reality of the crises facing our lives as persons and communities. It has to speak of salvation, real salvation. The meta-narrative has to be literally and figuratively a matter of life and death.

Present, past and future

In essence, the meta-narrative of today begins by grasping the wonder of God's grace in our lives now. It looks back and tells the story of how it came to be that we experience the wonder of God now, and when we tell that story, it is with the knowledge that with respect both to the nature of grace and the nature of the physical world, that the past is as the present is. That perception radically alters the way we understand and tell the story of faith, but it does not make it any the less powerful.

Our story, our meta-narrative, projects into the future but still it is anchored in our experience of God in the present. The traditional meta-narrative projected a time when the universe would be an utterly different place than it is now, not in the sense that we know the world is always changing, but in the sense that it will be qualitatively different – that there will be no more suffering, no more ambiguity, no more evil. We recognise today that this is pure wishful thinking, escapism and unreal, whatever the Bible might have to say.

But the power of the Christian story is that the world of the future will be exactly the same as the world of the present. Of course it will change outwardly, and those changes may be experienced outwardly as chaotic and catastrophic. But the sure hope we have is that the grace we know now will never change, never be lost, never diminish, never be withdrawn. We will have the grace to face anything and everything the future holds for us – just as we know now in this moment that we have the grace to face anything and everything that the present holds for us.

## 10. Models of culture and religion

Whatever our religious persuasion, we have to have models that relate faith to the life of the world. The models humanity uses are many and varied, even within any particular religion, and they are always a source of tension and conflict with those operating by different models. The entirety of Western culture was formed by the great clash of models about the relationship of church and state, each modelling themselves as dominant and the other as subservient. It was out of this clash of models that the Western value of liberty and of the value of individuals grew. Islam seems to be going through a parallel clash of models in our day.

The change in our thinking has been governed by a number of factors, not least by the change in our meta-narrative explored in the previous section. There is the recognition of models itself, which shifts the debate away from right and wrong to one of resolving which model is most effective, recognising that every model is defective in one or more dimensions and all are ambiguous. Further, we recognise that the way such models arise is out of current experience of the political realm and are therefore constantly shifting with our political ideas. We are aware of culture as the determining dynamic of human life and how culture is always adaptive to circumstances. Culture is the way the human species meets its challenges that it confronts in specific times and places.

The model of the relationship of faith to life is therefore never fixed and stable but is always the best we can find and adopt in any particular circumstance. The worst case scenario is where the faith community or the secular authorities have fixed ideas about what model must be observed, based on either traditions from the past or idealised images of a perfect society to be achieved in the future by rigid adherence to the model prescribed. The most obvious examples of this thinking today are offered by the theocracy of Iran and the autocracy of North Korea. The mentality is echoed by social and religious conservative voices in the West and is played out intensely in Israel. The increasingly dominant secularism of the West is working to a model that pushes religion out of public life altogether, which is yet another model.

The model I propose is not the 'right' model for there is no such entity, but it is, in my view, the best and most effective model for today.

This model begins with the recognition that human culture is the way our species responds to its environment, as true of an African hunter-gatherer society as the citizens of New York. Without culture, we cannot survive. At the heart of culture lies its core values, the 'sacred' values, that a human society needs to hold together and maintain its culture to adapt to ever-changing circumstances. If these values are lost, the culture dies because it cannot meet its challenges. As an example, a core value in most, if not all, human societies is justice, even if the concept of what constitutes justice varies. Justice is the protection of society and individuals from the forces that would destroy it or at least rob it of quality of life. When justice breaks down in any society, it is doomed. It is not just the systems of justice that are important; it is the value of justice. At the root of most apocalyptic Hollywood blockbusters lies the loss of the value of justice (except, of course, in the hero/heroine).

In the model that I work with, religion is the servant of culture in this context of exploring the nature of the relationship between faith and society. Behind the model lies a theology, which will be explored later, but the model at this point is unashamedly humanistic. Religion serves culture by being the source vision from which it can draw its values (which gives them their 'sacred' character). Religion articulates the vision and draws out its implications. It creates the structures that serve to communicate the vision and its values to the people of the culture and – this is the crucial element – facilitate their internalisation.

Internalisation is the key. A culture needs the consensus of the people in order to make an effective response to its challenges. The pharaohs of Egypt might dream of building great pyramids but they only succeeded for as long as they achieved a consensus among the people as to the value of that objective, justifying in their eyes the enormous cost and sacrifice. As stunning as the pyramids of Egypt are today, they were only achieved over a relatively short period of the nation's history, after which the consensus no longer existed and pyramid building ceased. The value died.

Consensus can be obtained by one of two ways. It can be achieved by force and authority, commanding consensus by fear, binding people to outward observance of the value and the actions that arise from it. Communism sustained its control over Russia and Eastern Europe by the power of fear. An apparent inner consensus can be achieved by psychological manipulation, propaganda and isolation from alternative visions, as evidenced today by North Korea and by various religious sects and cults. Nazism swept Germany during the 1930s by such methods. Even the German evangelical church was caught up in the enthusiasm for the Nazis, swathing their cathedrals with the swastika flag.

Consensus obtained by coercion, manipulation and propaganda can be very successful in building and maintaining a culture, but only for a limited time. When people lose their fear of coercive power or when disillusionment sets in with manipulated perspectives, then the culture collapses and often does so in a spectacularly rapid circumstance. The swift unravelling of Soviet power in the late 80s and early 90s was a dramatic example of this process in action. The Iranian and Korean situations today are inherently unstable for the same reason and will, at some point, unravel and implode the instant the people lose their fear of the coercing authorities. When that collapse happens, as in the Soviet Union, the values of the old regime are overthrown and discarded.

The only path to long-term cultural stability is through the internalisation of cultural values so that the people believe the values from the heart, not because the state or religious authority tells them they must conform but because the value comes from within themselves. This internalisation is the key role that religion plays in society and it is why every enduring culture, in every age, has a religion at its core. Religion is as important to a culture as lungs are to a mammal. That is why authoritarian regimes always try to co-opt religion to serve their purpose, and why they try to exclude or persecute those religions that are seen to undermine the sacred values upon which the society is based. It is why no culture can exist on a pluralistic foundation, despite the mantras of some modern Western states. This is the agonising situation that much of Western Europe now finds itself in, as it becomes more and more apparent that it cannot maintain its values and, at the same time, integrate its Muslim population. The two value systems are fundamentally incompatible in that they cannot both be internalised, not at least in their present form.

It is also the fundamental problem of secular society. For the present, secularism has been able to ride upon the humanistic values that were derived from its Christian heritage. For all the tensions today between the advocacy of gay rights by secular society and the passionate opposition manifest from conservative religion, the vision of gay equality, as with the vision of women's equality, the abhorrence of slavery and other humanist values, are all rooted in the Christian vision and value system and will fade and die if not continually nourished by that vision. While it is very true that not every human value owes its origin to Christianity, every human value owes its origins to religious vision of one form or another. Furthermore, those values only became embedded in the human psyche through the internalisation process that is religion, whatever that religion may be.

The essence of the model, then, is that religion and culture are inseparable entities, two sides of one coin and neither can exist without the other. It does not matter what the society or what the religion, but the authenticity of the religion is related to the role it plays in relation to the culture it serves. However much the dogmatists may say that the authenticity of religion is whether it is true to 'God's word', the real truth is that religion's authenticity is always relative to the culture it serves. This does not mean a subservient role: often quite the contrary. The evangelical church of Germany in the 1930s 'served' the Nazi regime but was not authentic because it was engaged in fact in the destructive process that brought Germany and its culture to its knees. It was the confessing Christians of people like Dietrick Bonheoffer who were the authentic religion of that age in Germany. Many parallels can be drawn to our own era. The symbol of the cross stands as a reminder that servanthood may lead the very society that it seeks to serve destroying it. The role of religion that is authentic in any culture involves prophetic protest against the distortions, the demonisations, and the exploitation that take a grip in every situation. Religion often has to stand against the dominance not only of external powers but also of popular opinion and practice. The origin of the Hebrew religious revolution that began with Jeremiah was a confrontation with the values of the whole of Hebrew society of that day.

There is one implication of the model that has far-reaching consequences as we recognise that human survival in the twenty-first century calls for the emergence of a single global culture embracing the entire planet. Only as such a culture emerges (and it is emerging rapidly) will humanity have the capacity to rise to confront creatively the many challenges that threaten our existence. The model tells us that no society can hold together unless it is bonded by a common religion. Global culture can only succeed if the reverse side of its coin is a global religion.

That, in a nutshell, is what this book ultimately is all about. How can we find our way to an expression of religion that can embrace the world? It is a life and death issue for humanity, but not one that will be solved by any imperialistic takeover by one for the existing forms of religion, not even Christianity, nor will it be solved by the synchronistic fusion of existing religions, let alone the invention of a new one. It belongs to a later part of this book to explore the issue in theory and practice, but at this point it is important to face the implications of the model – unless, of course, the model itself is rejected or denied.

## 11. Models of gospel, grace and salvation

Gospel, salvation and grace are all key words for Christians. Our spiritual life would seem meaningless apart from them. Yet they are all models, attempts to interpret something not understood.

The concept of 'gospel' is that of a message, born by a messenger, bearing news that is received by someone as good news. It is a model drawn from everyday life and its power lies largely in its universality to every people, every culture, every place. It is a common, every day experience that is easily grasped and understood. From that model, we ask a range of questions. Who gave the message to the messenger? Is the source trustworthy? How was the message given? What is the content of the message? Who was it given to? Why was it given? What was the objective in giving it? Who is it addressed to? What, if anything, is special about the messenger – why was the messenger chosen? How is the message transmitted? Can we rely on the message as it is heard being the message as it was given? Why is it good news or supposed to be good news? Is it in fact good news? Is it news at all? What is the receiver supposed to do with the message? And so on. We tease out the questions by exploring the model as we experience it in everyday life.

There is a deeper question. Is the message itself authentic? In the past, the question could not even be asked by anyone within the faith community because the model was a given and to question it and the 'giver' or even the message itself, was to be outside the community of faith. Now, however, we can ask the question and must ask the question. The problem focuses for us in large measure upon our understanding of the message we convey.

'Salvation' is the code-word used for the content of the gospel message. Sadly, the coinage of the word has been heavily debased by its abuse. Salvation is yet another model. It is one drawn not so much from everyday life but from experiences of crises that threaten to destroy us. My life was saved when I was a child and drowning. It was salvation, but the ambiguity of that salvation is that it cost the life of the person who saved me, creating tragedy. Salvation, therefore, is not something to be taken lightly but involves the alternative of catastrophic loss. It is important, in the context of the gospel, to recognise that the message of salvation is meaningless if the news relates to something I don't care about. It is a model, and only a model, for coming to grips with what faith means.

The reality today is that very few people see their faith realistically through the salvation model. The days have long gone when what happens after death matters greatly. Evangelical religion may still pump up enthusiasm for visions of a future glory that is to be obtained only if we invite Jesus into our hearts, but this working less and less and generally only among those disenfranchised in society. Even this form of religion is finding its real power not in eschatological promises but in the promise of charismatic gifts and powers in the present. The growth industry sector of the Christian community today lie with the retailers of the Prosperity Gospel offering material salvation in return for enriching the church. Outside these circles, the question of what salvation means to the person being asked will usually be met with a blank stare and silence.

Yet it may be that the model of salvation is more real and vital today than it has been for centuries. We are living in a world walking into a wall of catastrophic crises that threaten our existence, and at this point of time we appear to have no answer to any of the challenges we face, or where we know the answer, lack the political will to take the necessary action. In this context, unless the religious community, Christian or otherwise, holds the key that may save humanity from the approaching disaster, the religious community has nothing relevant to say, nothing to offer, and may as well pack up all its churches, mosques, synagogues and temples and save a great deal of time, money and energy – all of which might be put to more creative uses in the struggle to survive.

Some people might think that Christianity is worth having because it makes people better, gives them a sense of belonging, motivates charitable works and so on. It can be a comfort in times of stress and loss. Frankly, any club, association or friendly society could do as much and in many cases do better, without creating the divisions and conflicts generated by religion. The power of the model of salvation is that it says to us that either our existence as a church is one that delivers salvation to the world or it has no reason to exist at all.

As with the gospel model, when we explore it, we find a whole range of questions confronting us. What is the crisis that threatens us? It is 'spiritual' in the sense that it has nothing to do with the physical life, or is it in the physical life? What does it mean to be saved? What would life look like to be able to say, "I/we am/are saved?" How is salvation effected? How do I find that salvation? What does it cost? And so on. The model becomes a filter through which we extract some answers about something we cannot see and touch. The answers are always ambiguous. There is never any definitive answer.

The third term is 'grace', which is a word I probably use of my life of faith more than any other. 'Grace' too, is a model, drawn from personal relationships. This, perhaps, is its central difficulty. I personally have not the slightest difficulty grasping the model of grace because my upbringing and life has been suffused from infancy in human relationships that have been gracious, kind, generous and trustworthy. For all the ambiguity of the church, those qualities dominate every part of my experience of church life, from the top of the hierarchy to the ordinary layperson. My years in commerce were, perhaps, more ambiguous in this respect, but I would still say that the most important relationships overall, with staff and clients and suppliers, was still characterised by grace. I have been blessed with an abundance of personal experience that vitalises my spiritual experience with the model of grace. Had I been brought up in a brutalised environment, lacking all this modelling, could I make sense of the model of grace in relation to faith? I cannot answer that except from a perspective of faith itself that says grace is universal and everyone in every situation can know grace. It has become a very important part of understanding the Christian message that Christians model grace wherever they are and whoever they are with.

We should never, however, forget that grace is a model, drawn from everyday experience. From that model of human relationships we ask a whole series of questions. What is the origin of grace? Is it part of the fabric of the universe or is it an irruption into the life of the universe from some 'external' source? Is it experienced universally or only by a select few? How do we respond to grace? And so on.

We could take this exploration of key words as models and go on for ever. Even 'God' is a model as, clearly, 'Lord'. 'Worship' is a model. If we want to understand any of these things, the starting point is always to identify the models that gave rise to them and then tease out the questions from the model. When we do this, we always find ourselves asking whether the model is relevant any longer and whether we have better models that can be adopted.

## 12. Models of God, Christ, Spirit and Trinity

As noted, even the word, 'God' is a model, based on the manifold gods of the ancient world – which, in the turn, were based on human life. Originally, Yahweh was one of these middle eastern gods and not even one of the principal gods of the pantheon, nor one acknowledged outside Palestine. Yahweh was Palestine's protector god, and even then, possibly only among the Hebrew ethnic group, one of the many ethnic populations inhabiting the region. Before the exile, the Hebrew people gave cultic tribute to Yahweh alongside all their other gods, each one of which was responsible of a specific area of life. Yahweh was the god of battles. The Jerusalem temple (which was never Solomon's temple, that being a figure of imagination created in later centuries) was the cultic centre for the worship of all the gods, as represented in the Book of Ezekiel, chapter 8. The preaching of the prophet Jeremiah appears to have initiated a fundamental change in the Hebrew understanding of Yahweh. Although his message was rejected during his lifetime, Jeremiah's concept of Yahweh gained credence from the fulfilment of his prediction that Jerusalem would be destroyed. Under the conventional religion of his time, Yahweh would protect the city so that it could never be destroyed (exemplified by Psalm 46), whereas Jeremiah said Yahweh himself would be the destroyer. All the great classical Hebrew prophets belong to this era, from Jeremiah, whose ministry commenced around 620BC, to Isaiah, the last chapters of which book come from around 520BC. It has often been asserted that the middle chapters of Isaiah (40-55) proclaimed monotheism, but this is not so. Isaiah was a polytheist, like all the other prophets and in all probability, the whole of Hebrew religion right up to shortly before the time of Jesus. It was just that Isaiah modelled his concept of Yahweh on his experience of the Persian monarchy, politically so dominant over his vast empire that lesser kings paled into insignificance. The Persian emperor was ' king of kings': and that became the description of Yahweh. The model was political. The model enabled Isaiah to make the extraordinary leap of intuition and see Yahweh as the creator of everything that exists. Neither Jeremiah nor any of the other prophets made such a leap of the imagination. Isaiah expressed his vision in poems that thrill us even today. It is hard to recognise that Isaiah's vision was only a model and he was expressing where the imaginings based upon the model led him.

Given that the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, together with the histories from Joshua to II Kings, were put together very late in Hebrew history, it is clear that the Hebrews continued to be a polytheistic society right down through the centuries and that the adherents of Yahweh's dominance had a hard struggle to maintain their model in the face of other models. It seems likely that this conflict was still going on in Hebrew society in Jesus' time. We can witness Paul's struggle with this issue in I Corinthians 10 and his contortions around sacrifice to idols and the integrity of the Eucharist. What are 'demons' but a way of describing these 'other gods'? When modern Christians talk of 'Satan' as having reality they are essentially in this polytheistic mode, whatever their insistence otherwise. It seems that is was only in the first century of the Christian era that monotheism really begins to take hold and we can talk of the model of theism as becoming the dominant model. Christianity embraced theism as its controlling model most likely as an accident of the historical era in which it was forming its theology.

We do not have sufficient evidence from the first century AD to make any definitive determinations on how models of God developed during the century, or even know with any certainty what Jesus' own model of God was. What is clear, however, is that the various New Testament writers employed a lot of different models of God. There is no one model that controls them all, not even theism, which was in its early stages during this century. Thus it was that the apostolic writers were not troubled by the difficulties that later theism experienced in trying to reconcile the divine attributes accorded to Jesus and the Spirit. It is only later, when theism becomes the all-controlling model, that the church struggled to accommodate the singleness of theism with the accord of divine status to the transcendent 'Father' (itself a model), Jesus and the Spirit. The outcome was the tortuous dogma of the Trinity.

Preachers today still struggle manfully each year when the festival of Trinity appears in the calendar, endeavouring to convey in meaningful terms the model of the Trinity to their congregations. The preachers use models of all kinds – water, ice, steam, etc – but generally overlook the recognition that 'Trinity' itself is just a model and no more than a model. It is not even a particularly good or relevant model, at least not for today. It was made necessary by the dominance of the theistic model, but once theism ceased to be the controlling model, as has happened over the course of the twentieth century, the model of Trinity became redundant.

For all that, I still call myself Trinitarian, through and through. The difference is that I do not think of God as a Being who is ontologically 'three in one'. Trinity is no longer part of my belief system but a useful model, in some circumstances.

Much more relevant than any arcane effort to explain how a divine Being can be three in one is the question of how we can model God in a way that makes any sense at all in our science-orientated world. If we rule out as being inadequate any idea that God is as SuperBeing, existing outside of and independent of the physical universe, what kind of model makes sense of the data of grace? While the basic key may be given by the 'two question' model of reality with which this part began, it does not answer the question of God. There is no definitive answer to the question of God at any intellectual level. Yet we have to have a working answer, a model that makes sense of our experience of grace, even if only partially.

I can only offer the model that I use and which works for me. That model embraces the two question model of reality and the scientific evidence that all matter is ultimately pure energy. I suspect, though I have not seen any scientific data on this, that pure energy transcends time and space. There is at least some evidence that quantum particles do transcend time and space.

My model of God is that energy is pure physics, if we ask of it the physical question. If, however, we ask of energy the grace question, it is pure grace, is 'God'. I cannot stress too strongly that this is a model, not a cosmological speculation. What this does as a model is that it enables us to relate our experiences of 'God' to the entire universe and to everything and everyone – human and non-human, animal or plant, animate and inanimate. The model works to protect the integrity of the natural world and the parallel experience that everything is grace. It says to us that all reality is 'personal', recognising that 'personal' in this context is also a model.

How then are we to model the person of Jesus? The concepts used in the New Testament for Jesus are all, every one of them, models. This is especially true of models of sonship, lordship, servant, messiah and priest. Even the attribution to Jesus of divinity was a model based on the claims surrounding the emperor in Rome. Yet the fact that the apostolic era reached into all these models is a witness to the fact that they were convinced that the significance of Jesus could not be contained in a model of someone who was 'just a man.

A core problem for us today is that nearly all the New Testament models for Jesus are no longer meaningful or intelligible and only survive because of hallowed association or the conviction that these models are divinely inspired. 'Messiah' carries no meaning that we can relate to as a model, except that it is sometimes applied to people with pretensions to save society and then only with negative connotations. 'Christ' has become utterly without reference to anything, even when transliterated as 'the anointed one'. 'Lord' is archaic and socially unacceptable as a model in most circumstances so it has become an anachronism in religious use. Although 'priest' can be related to experiences of priesthood in everyday life, our application of the word to an order of the Christian ministry is itself a reference to Jesus' priesthood, so the model goes round in circles. The model of Jesus as priest derives largely from the Letter to the Hebrews, which is a document almost entirely incomprehensible to a modern reader.

What model today can we use that makes sense of Jesus, both of his person and of his accomplishments? The model that makes sense to me relates to the concept that grace definitively revealed itself as grace in the person and death of Jesus. The model says that, outside of this life and death, all we have is subjective ideas and philosophies and ideological mantras. There are, and always will be, a million different religious teachers and their various ideas. What Jesus did, or better, was, is to provide a touchstone that every idea and teaching has to be measured against. This is the sense in which I affirm in faith the truth of the Incarnation: God was in Jesus. The model does not require any form of ontological exposition about the nature of Jesus as divine. It allows for all the ambiguity we know exists around the evidence about his life, and especially about his resurrection. Although I do not buy into Paul's eschatological ideas about Jesus' return, I resonate to his affirmation that he knows only Jesus and him crucified. That Jesus gave his life on the cross is for me the central fact that reveals the nature of grace, and every religious claim has to be viewed in the light of the cross. That even anchors all our understanding of God in an event, not a teaching or concept or philosophy. That the event of the cross carries such cosmic significance demands an understanding of Jesus as much more than just another human being.

The model does not stop with Jesus being a figure in history, however much significance we might attach to him as the definitive revelation of grace. When we ask the physical question of the life of Jesus, he presents to us as completely human, meaning that he did not perform miracles that defy physics, was not transfigured on the mount, was not infallible about fact or knowledge of God and did not come back from death. He breathed, defecated and had sexual feelings like any other human being. If we were to board a time machine to take us back to first century Galilee, we would probably experience a shattering disillusionment. We might even be tempted to abandon Christianity. We would certainly not encounter the version of Jesus retailed in our churches.

However, when we ask the grace question of the Jesus event, the entire event presents itself to us as grace. As a grace event, the scope transcends the physical details of Jesus' day-by-day life and death. The grace event embraces the effect Jesus had not only on his contemporaries but also on all subsequent generations. The Jesus we encounter in grace is a mythic figure. The Jesus event, seen as grace, encompasses every Eucharist and every time we pray. It encompasses our being as church. The Jesus event, seen as grace, is, in this model, inseparable from who I am, who we are as persons and as community. The Jesus event as grace becomes inseparable from our relationship with God. If you want to touch Jesus, touch your knee. If you want to know Jesus, speak to the person next to you on the bus.

This brings me to the 'third person' of the Trinity, the Spirit. Outside of the theistic model, there is no need to model the Spirit as any kind of separate and independent Being or entity. Even when the various New Testament writers make reference to the Spirit, their understandings differ so radically from one another that it is impossible to extract a coherent model, let alone a theology, that embraces them all. Yet there is a vital dimension to the data of grace that demands a model. This is the immediacy of grace in our lives and in every detail of our lives. When we do not have a model of something akin to the Spirit, God becomes a remote lawgiver, as exemplified in Islam. It is not Jesus that marks the defining difference between Christianity and Islam; it is the model of the Spirit, and all that this model conveys about the immediacy and dynamic impact of the divine in the present. In my view, the model of God as energy supplies that dimension of immediacy. It takes energy to move my little finger just as it took energy to create the Big Bang – and it is the same energy in both instances. It takes energy to grow. It takes energy to think. God modelled as energy seen as grace makes God immediate in everything at all times. Energy seen as physics is impersonal and inseparable form cause and effect and chance. Energy seen as grace is personal, caring, purposeful, and intimate. As with each of our models, the exploration of the model will create a body of theory.

## 13. Models of the church

The Nicene Creed has the faith community affirming that "we believe in" "one, holy, catholic and apostolic church". For the Nicene fathers, the 'church' was an ontological reality, alongside of the ontological reality of the Being in Trinity, God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit. To say "I/we believe in" was not an intellectual assent, it was an act of total trust of life. A scientist today might say, "I believe in evolution", but although the sentence structure is the same, the content is different and not just because the subject is evolution. The scientist is really saying, ' evolution is the best theory I have to work with at the moment, at least until a better theory emerges'. That is not what the Nicene fathers were saying. They were saying, 'We entrust our lives, our entire lives, our guidance for this life and our salvation to the life to come to the existence of the church'.

But church – 'ecclesia' - is just a model and all our structures, institutions and ministry orders are just models or extensions from models. There is no historical substance to any claim that the models, even the model of 'church', is divinely sanctioned or given by God. It stretches credibility to believe that Matthew's words, "You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church", accurately relate to anything Jesus said, just as the rules for the management of the ecclesia that Matthew lays down as words of Jesus would have originated with him, at least in the form Matthew quotes. They are much more likely to be inventions of Matthew or the church for which he wrote, responding to the acute situation the church found itself in at that time.

Luke's account of the early days of the church, in the Acts of the Apostles, up until he relates the mission of Paul, is almost certainly largely if not wholly creative fiction in fulfilment of his objective to portray the Christian community in a good light to the Roman authorities. There was certainly a community of disciples from the days of Jesus and after his death, but it would have looked nothing like the portrayal in Acts. There was no Day of Pentecost. If that had happened in actual history, it would have not been left to a single account, written over fifty years later, to record it. Given Paul's theology of the Spirit in Romans 8, it is beyond imagining that he would have overlooked or been in ignorance of, such an event as Pentecost.

Our concept of 'church', like so much else, probably owes its origin to Paul and his establishment of 'gatherings' - ecclesia - in the various towns to which he paid missionary visits. Paul pioneered a new way of living by faith, not just in his theology but in his practical organisation, and that organisation manifest itself in the establishment of churches. There is no doubt that he also had a global sense of the Christian community as 'church' also.

One of my important models for understanding the scriptures is that they are our written charter from God for breaking out into new ways of thinking and acting. If we trace the formation of scripture down through the centuries, Old Testament and New Testament, the pattern repeats over and over again: the pattern of a new way of thinking and acting that emerges from stress and disaster. The father of this tradition is undoubtedly Jeremiah, followed closely by Ezekiel and the remainder of the exilic prophets, probably paralleled in time and place by those among the exiles who were absorbing the culture and religion of Babylon, with its character of law, history, prophecy, wisdom, sacrifice and temple ritual. The time in exile integrated all these into a new form of Hebrew religion that had, for the first time, the god Yahweh at its centre. Hebrew religion and culture was transformed.

Centuries later, struggling against the dominance of Hellenistic culture, Hebrew religion shaped a new story and a new focus, expressed though the Torah and histories, and out of this, in the second century BC, emerged Judaism as a law-focused religion, a radically new direction.

We only see Jesus though the eyes that are post-Pauline, but Mark, at least, portrays Jesus as throwing over the old regime of law and proclaiming grace as the key to life. (Matthew contradicts Mark on this, but that gospel was written under circumstances in which the need for law was reasserting itself). Whether the shift from law to grace was original to Jesus (which I think most likely) or originated with Paul, the decisive break with the past that the early Christian movement brought was this movement from law to grace. It was an utterly new model for living.

The Letter to the Hebrews, written probably towards the end of the century, was in its time yet another radically new model, of Jesus as priest. John's gospel was such a radical break with the past that it was the best part of a century before it was even accepted as a Christian writing.

To be a 'Bible-believing' community, therefore, is not to embrace biblical literalism but to be one that recognises that the word of God that comes to us through the scriptures is one that says to us that we are chartered to pioneer new ways of thinking and acting, create new models and derive new theologies from those models.

The challenge today is presented by our global situation. That challenge calls us to find a model that can provide the spiritual 'side of the coin' to global culture, a model that will facilitate the whole of humanity to know the spiritual bond, transcending all our divisions. This is not an unattainable ideal but a necessity for continued human existence, for the viability of global culture and therefore of human survival.

It cannot be a model of Christian dominance and imperialistic conquest by proselytism. Nor can it be a model of synchronistic amalgamation of present religions, nor the invention of a new religion. It has to be a model that peoples from a wide range of different traditions are able to internalise.

The witness of scripture, taken as a whole across both Testaments is that such a radical reconstruction of faith and the faith community comes about through what appears on the surface to be an annihilating catastrophe. That catastrophe itself is preceded by an illumination of its inner meaning and saving faith. One of the most important ways of grasping the importance of the scriptures is to model them as a this totality. In this model, both Testaments in parallel revolve around an annihilating catastrophe but out of the disasters arise a new faith and a new community. In this model, the Old Testament revolves around the destruction of Jerusalem at the beginning of the sixth century BC and everything in all the books of the Old Testament relate to this event directly or indirectly. Out of Jerusalem's annihilation arose a radically new faith and, when the nation was restored to Palestine after the exile, a radically changed community – if an ambiguous one. The entirety of the New Testament relates to and flows from the disaster of Jesus' crucifixion, but from out of that event, which must have been experienced by the disciples of Jesus as an event that annihilated all hope, came a new faith and the church, a radically new community, albeit an ambiguous one.

If we extend the model to our own day, we recognise that humanity faces a potentially annihilating crisis. Our faith into this situation is that the scriptural model will hold good for us: that we will not only come through the catastrophe but that it will result in a new faith and a new community. The gospel records Jesus as both warning what was going to happen to him and that there would be a 'resurrection' and a new community. We do not know how accurate this is to the historical truth but I am prepared to accept that Jesus knew clearly that the path he was treading could lead only to his execution. Not only did he choose to walk that path but that he was confident that, because of his faith, new life would spring from his death.

I doubt that even Jesus could have been able to imagine what did in fact eventuate. The model given to us in the Old Testament, about the imaginings that the prophets had about the way the community would develop, display the vast gap that exists between what we can imagine and what actually eventuates. Likewise, Paul's imaginings about the future were far astray from the reality that happened. That is a warning to us not to get caught up in future imaginings. It is enough to affirm faith that there will be a creative outcome.

One dimension to both the Old Testament prophetic message and the message of Jesus is that they embraced not only a warning about what was to come, but also an urging to make changes now that could avert the catastrophe. That message remains as important today as it was in Jeremiah's time. It might be said that had the nation of Judah embraced Jesus' teaching during his lifetime that it would have been able to avoid the destruction of 70AD when the Romans levelled the city of Jerusalem and scattered the Jews.

If we follow this model, there is a prophetic word to be spoken to our global world. It is a word that calls us to a common recognition of 'God', of the spiritual dimension to all life and the spiritual bond that unites us and calls us together. It is a prophetic word that tells us that the catastrophe we face is itself an act of grace, a creative moment, and that humanity will not only survive but will raise again with a new faith and a new community. It is a word that tells us the catastrophe is not inevitable, but that we can change the course by finding now our new faith and our new community.

The models also tells us that the fundamentals of the new faith and the new community are hammered out in the time before the catastrophe, for when it happens it is too late. The Hebrews would not have survived the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile had it not been for the words of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The disciples would not have survived and held together after Jesus' crucifixion had he not instilled in them a vision of a future 'resurrection' (I doubt Jesus actually thought in these terms).

It defies our imagination, we who live at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to see how humanity could ever find a common spirituality. In contrast, the world appears to be even more deeply divided along religious and sectarian lines. But neither could the Hebrew prophets nor Jesus see what would arise, but it did. The fundamental faith for our era is based in the scriptural witness that God brings about not just survival but salvation, and salvation is expressed in new faith and new community.

# Part IV: Theory

The traditional role of theology was to make sense of the various texts of scripture and to derive theories that made the statements in scripture into a coherent whole. Even when interpreted as giving a theoretical base to church teaching, the presumption still existed that church teaching was derived from the text of scripture. In this tradition, these texts were taken as divinely inspired and 'word of God'. Theology was the exercise of knowing the mind of God as revealed authoritatively through the texts. Insofar, then, as the theory was faithful to the texts, theology was 'God's truth'. To know our theology was to know God. Many churches, both Catholic and Protestant, elevated theological statements to a place beyond question or challenge. One had to adhere without question to the theology if one wanted to belong to the church in question.

Within the context of global culture, that traditional position is no longer possible or defensible and this is the core intellectual crisis of the whole Western church across both Catholic and non-Catholic ecclesia.

What we are faced with, then, is two major challenges. The first is that the traditional approach to theology, to Christian theorising, is no longer tenable, while on the other hand, the desperate need is for a theoretical foundation that will enable a genuine global spirituality to emerge. Traditional Christian systematic theology began with the doctrine of God, but long before we can even begin to approach theory about God we have to have a body of theory that makes sense of even asking the question of God. The starting point is a theory of knowing.

## 14. Theory of knowing

The theory of knowing has always been at the heart of theology and lies at the heart of scripture. The nature of the Hebrew/Christian tradition from its beginning was as a message from God, so the question was and remains, 'How do you know?'

The progenitors of the Hebrew tradition were, most importantly, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, together with their contemporary, Habakkuk. Their response to the question was, 'God told me', or 'God showed me'. Behind this claim lay a theory that God (or the gods) was a Being who communicated essentially like human-to -human interaction, choosing particular persons as spokespeople and these spokespeople had absolute authority to declare this message.

That this theory was potent for around a hundred years from the late seventh century BC to the late sixth century BC says a great deal about not only their particular theory of knowing but of every theory of knowing, including the theory being explored here. Knowing is always embedded in culture and shaped by culture.

The tradition of Hebrew prophecy began, so far as our recorded evidence is concerned, with Jeremiah, together with his contemporaries Habakkuk, Naham and later, Ezekiel. But they were only able to claim that Yahweh had spoken through them because, from its cultural origins in Assyria, which was the dominant superpower of its age, not only militarily but also culturally, prophecy had become an element in the cultural thinking of that generation. Although Biblical records purport that there were prophets in the eighth century BC, specifically the prophets Amos, Hosea and Micah and Isaiah, this is almost certainly a pious fiction. The historical context in which these 'earlier' prophets were set did not exist historically.

In other words, Jeremiah and his prophetic contemporaries and those who followed over the next hundred years worked in a cultural framework in which the prophetic word was accepted as at least a potentially authentic word from the divine. That was not an exclusively Hebrew outlook but one found generally at the time in the Assyrian sphere of cultural influence. There is a striking parallel today in the sub-culture of Pentecostalism where a prophetic utterance can be heard as giving knowledge of the divine mind of God, where hearers who do not share that sub-culture hear nothing but wishful thinking. The culture provides the theory of what is and can be known.

Lest we think that this is just a religious quirk, it is important to recognise that scientific enquiry itself is a product of a specific cultural viewpoint, as culturally determined as the Assyrian/Hebrew embrace of prophecy or the Pentecostalist's embrace of charismata. If (when!) the culture of our time changes, all our vaunted scientific knowledge and achievements may appear to a future society as the building of the pyramids does to us: admired but the 'why' is not something that we share. It could be said that Jeremiah and his prophetic contemporaries were as much 'prophecy' minded as our world is scientifically minded. When the Hebrew world, at the end of the sixth century BC, moved from the Assyrian/Babylonian world of culture to that of the Persians, the world of prophetic knowing died out. The culture changed and the 'knowing' changed.

The issue with this is that it is impossible for anyone to stand aside from his or her culture and 'know' objectively. However much we may be able to recognise that the scientific viewpoint is a cultural artifact, only meaningful in a particular cultural context, it is impossible for us, if we have embraced the scientific culture, to stand aside and imagine 'knowing' that does not embrace science. The most we can imagine is a world in which society has abandoned science. We have models for non-scientific societies– but what we cannot do is authenticate such as being one of 'knowing' reality.

A further illumination from the study of Jeremiah and the Hebrew prophets is found in the role that myth plays in knowing. Jeremiah, and even more for his younger contemporary, Ezekiel, was possessed by the vision of a united Hebrew nation which would be numerous and strong. They believed, seemly implicitly, that there had once been a Yahweh-believing nation to the north of Judah, called Israel, with its capital in Samaria. A century before the emergence of Jeremiah in Judah, in this belief, this nation of Israel and its capital had been captured by the Assyrians, the city destroyed and the Hebrew people of the nation exiled to other parts of the Assyrian empire. Over the following century, the 'Israelites', all ten tribes, had disappeared from sight and were currently nowhere to be found. Now, though, in Jeremiah's myth, as and if Judah would abandon its polytheism and embrace Yahweh as its sole God, centering its cultic worship solely on Jerusalem and its temple, Yahweh would miraculously find and bring back to Palestine all these scattered exiles. Yahweh would join the Israelite exiles with the people of Judah and from them build a mighty nation that would dominate the world. This is the basis of the messianic myth that was to emerge centuries later so that, to this extent, it can be said that the prophets foretold the messiah.

While it is historically true that the city of Samaria and its kingdom did fall to the Assyrians in the late eighth century BC, all the rest is pure myth. There never was a state of Israel to the north of Judah, just as there never was a nation under David and Solomon that embraced the whole of Palestine. The Samaritan kingdom would have had Yahweh among its pantheon of gods, but beyond that it was no more a Yahweh-believing community than any other part of the middle eastern community of kingdoms. The whole 'history' of the books of Samuel and Kings/Chronicles is fictional. This 'history' did not materialise in the form we have it today until centuries after Jeremiah, but the core of the record lay in the myth of his time that Samaria had once been a northern state of 'Israel'. Jeremiah and Ezekiel and the whole Hebrew tradition from the exile onward embraced the myth as hard, incontrovertible truth. Later generations were to further develop the tradition by weaving the story into a sequence of events that went back to origins in Abraham and Moses (both also non-historical, mythical figures). Not a single part of that Old Testament narrative has any ground in history prior to the advent of Jeremiah and the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, late seventh century and early sixth century BC. Yet this myth has exercised a mighty power in human history and this because it was taken as 'known'. The existence of the modern state of Israel, with all its geo-political ramifications for today, is a direct outcome of the Abraham/Israel myth. It has no basis whatsoever in historical fact yet millions are prepared to go to war or commit atrocities in the defence of the myth. It was the same for Nazi Germany and today in North Korea. Myth defines what is 'known'.

It is easy to see the myths that others live by as being myths when we ourselves do not share those myths. The problem is that we rarely see and acknowledge the myths that we ourselves live by and which determine what and who we are, confident we 'know'. Not only is democracy a myth, but the idea we live in a democratic society is also a myth. Marriage is a mythic institution, surrounded by a host of myths. Even family/whanau is a mythic construct, reflected in the very different understandings of family in different cultures. Market capitalism (and socialism) is a myth. The reality is that we cannot live without myths, but it is difficult for us to see our own myths as such.

In many, if not most, societies, it is dangerous to question or challenge the dominant myths, especially if the power of elites rest upon the unchallenged myth. People in Thailand, even if just passing through as transit travellers, run severe risk of harsh punishment if they are even suspected of criticising the Thai monarchy, let alone challenge its mythic basis. Even in moderate Islamic countries, and especially in the new breed of extremist Islamist states, it is impossible to question or challenge the myths of Islam. It can be difficult for anyone in the US to seriously challenge the myths of American society, while in my own country of New Zealand it is impossible to hold a position in public service or teaching without adherence to the current myths surrounding the place of Maori in New Zealand society. To even suggest that these are myths is to place oneself outside the pale. These things we 'know' and anyone who does not 'know' is ignorant – even subversive.

Western liberalism and humanism is totally myth-based. The idea that there are universal and inalienable human 'rights' is a mythic concept. We may 'know' beyond a shadow of doubt that slavery is wrong, that women should be the equal of males, that colour, ethnicity or gender identity should never be the basis for discrimination, but all these 'knowings' are myths. That it is important for us to know the origins of the universe is based upon myth.

We cannot escape this as Christians. It is impossible for us to know how much of what we take as certainty, even to our experience of grace, is myth without foundation in reality, and how much is hard, core reality. We cannot stand outside of our fundamental conviction of the goodness of God and therefore of the totality of reality even though we know that everything we perceive is entangled in myth.

The next issue that challenges our theory of knowing is that of witness. The concept of knowing through the testimony of witnesses is a tradition deeply interwoven with the Hebrew/Christian tradition. It surfaces strongly in the New Testament both in the claim to be witnesses to the life of Jesus that many of the writings make and for the charge upon Christians to be witnesses to the gospel.

The problem with the concept of witness is that we are called to make a judgement call on whether we believe the witness or not, and we never know whether we have made the right call even after we have made our choice. The history of the legal system is full of records of people convicted or set free on the basis of flawed witness. For theology, the problem has become particularly acute. Traditional theology accepted the witness statements of the scriptures, both Testaments, as being essentially accurate. Even the fact that they differed among themselves was taken as proof of their authenticity.

As indicated earlier, we can be confident that the 'witness' to the Hebrew history is wholly unreliable. The actual history of the Hebrews, and the emergence of faith, bears almost no resemblance whatsoever to the story being 'witnessed to' in the Old Testament. The witnesses to Jesus in the gospels are second, third and even fourth generations removed. We have no first-hand record of Jesus, though it is possible that the writer of Mark's gospel may have been the young man, probably just a teenager, who ran away naked from the arrest of Jesus. Even granted that this was the case, the gospel account is the memory of a man recalling an event of his youth thirty years later, and all the earlier accounts of Jesus' life before that last week would be from hearsay. Despite the claim by the writer of John's gospel, writing sixty to seventy years after Jesus' death, to be recording the account of one of the Twelve, it is next to impossible to believe that to be true. The closest witness in time that we have to Jesus is the apostle Paul, but he shows no interest in the man Jesus in his early life. We have no contemporary witnesses to Jesus that have left any record so we have no idea whatsoever whether anything he is recorded by those later generations as what he said or did is accurate in substance or detail to what he actually said or did. In the case of Matthew and Luke and especially John there is strong reason to believe that most of what they recorded that differs from Mark was their invention – and we do not know how much Mark invented.

It is not that these writers were being dishonest, as they would be deemed were they to have taken such liberties according to the standards of our own time. They wrote in an environment in which invention of events and speeches in the service of a message was an accepted norm of literature. What it means for us, though, is that we cannot trust our key witnesses as to their facts; not only that, but it turns out that they were not witnesses at all but at best were retailing hearsay. Their witness would never stand up in a modern court of law or in a serious academic debate. Even if we take the dogmatic stance that their material was divinely inspired, even to the point of infallibility, this is still only our position to adopt. We cannot 'know' that it is the truth, just as we cannot 'know' that it is not the truth. Taking an absolutist stance does not liberate us from the dilemma of not knowing.

Then there is the matter of whose interests are serviced by maintaining certainties. Religious authorities have a vested interest in maintaining certainties that support them in power. Whether it is the Vatican, evangelical pastors or Islamic Mullahs, all their pronouncements are tainted with self-interest and the pursuit of power and control. It is impossible to gauge the extent of their sincerity. They are not necessarily deliberately deceitful (though they frequently are) but that they, too, are driven by myths about themselves and their importance, even to the point of self-justification of deceit and fraud. Lord Acton's dictum, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely", is as true in the religious realm as it is of political or economic power. In other words, the greater the power of religious authority, the less it is to be trusted to know what is true and right. It is one of the ironies of the modern world that just as trust has eroded, justifiably, in the traditional religious authorities, we are awash with a new wave of authorities inhabited by celebrities, academics and pastors who set up independent churches. These new authorities use smoke and mirrors with an abandon that even the traditional authorities would have been ashamed to use.

That we know nothing in any final or absolute way is no passing fad of post-modern philosophy. It is inherent in reality. The paradox, of course, is that we cannot know for certain that even that statement is true. It may well be that the biblical literalists do indeed possess the absolute truth they claim to have. It may well be that there is a personal being that goes by the name of Satan. It may well be that all the lurid projections of the Book of Revelation will come to pass just as predicted. It may well be that some day Jesus will return, riding upon the clouds, and all true believers (I doubt I would be counted among them) will fly through the air, rising to meet their Lord in the clouds. Equally, it may well be that the New Atheists are right and that there is nothing to reality except physics. Oddly, if I had to choose between the Pauline rapture to the clouds and the New Atheist's version of reality, I would plumb for the latter. However, the interesting situation I find when I dialogue with atheists is that I always have to say to them that I am much less a believer than they. Modern atheists are certain they 'know', whereas I have to say I don't know.

The problem we face is that there is increasing and widespread embrace of the concept that we know nothing finally and absolutely: the intellectual basis of global culture. What we lack is a compelling theory of knowing, one that we can utilise both at the highest intellectual level and that serves us in our daily lives: one that satisfies both scientist and theologian.

Whatever form religion takes in the global age, the very first task it has to undertake is to develop and propagate a viable theory of knowing that does not rest on the ambiguities of ancient texts or modern celebrity authority.

The theory of knowing has to address these issues.

  1. Why do we need certainties in some areas of our lives and how to we arrive at these certainties?

  2. Why do we need to have provisional knowing and how do we arrive at provisional knowing?

  3. What are the boundaries of knowing?

  4. What does it mean to 'know'?

The last question would seem by logic to be the first, yet it is part of the dilemma of knowing that we can really only address it properly at the end of the enquiry. Christian theologians and teachers are fond of pointing out that 'to know' in biblical terms did not primarily mean an intellectual assent but was an act of profound personal interaction. The verb 'to know' is used of sexual connection. Even in the common language of today, 'to know' transcends intellectual content when used of personal relationships.

In the context of what we are about at this point in our exploration, however, the focus is on theory and therefore primarily meaning 'to know' as intellectual. The theory itself may take us beyond the rational.

Certainty in knowing

For all that we may culturally embrace the recognition that we know nothing, we live at a practical level on the basis of certainties. Even the claim to recognise that we know nothing absolutely and finally is a statement of certainty even if we hedge it about with formal qualifications. For all practical purposes and most intellectual purposes, we are certain that we know nothing certainly.

This, of course, is the primary line of critique from those who take the stand on religious certainty, and at a formal level suffers the same weakness as the 1960s assertion of the verification principle.

Thinking of myself, there are many things about which I am certain and some of those I would lay down my life to defend rather than deny. So there are both degrees of certainty and there is a difference between operational certainties that are open to change and certainties that are integral to our being and identity.

Let me start with certainties that are integral to our identity and being, such that we cannot imagine life being whole and lived with integrity if these certainties are lost or abandoned. Analytically, there are seven areas of awareness (of which I will address just four) and each has its foundational certainties. The first area is the natural world. The certainty here for me and for most of the Western world is the integrity of the processes of nature. The natural world is neither a product of the divine will nor that what happens in nature is subject at all times to divine whim. Consequence follows on cause, even if specific consequences cannot always be predicted or causes understood. When an event occurs, we can always, under every circumstance, trace it at least potentially to a natural cause. Nothing in nature occurs that has no cause. This constitutes a certainty upon which modern society is built.

Not everyone shares that certainty. Traditionally, Christianity saw everything that happened and happens in the natural world as caused by God, either in totality, as in the dogma of creation, or as divine intervention overriding normal processes of nature. Any given occurrence in nature was always open to the possibility that God could/would override physics and do what would be impossible within physics. The whole tradition from the Genesis account of creation though to the miraculous birth, healings and resurrection of Jesus; through the centuries of claims to miraculous events and the daily/weekly miracle of the transubstantiation of bread and wine into body and blood: all based upon the certainty that every element and process of nature was subject to change driven by the divine will and outside the scope of physical laws. There could never be any physical certainty in any situation. It was rather like playing a game of football in which the referee is free to make up or change rules as the game progresses without need to explain or justify the actions, or even tell the players about the changes.

The paradox of spirituality is that there is an element of truth in the traditional position: it remains a fundamental certainty, even if understood in a radically different way. There is a certainty that grace rules, that the world is not governed by inflexible laws and chance. I live my whole life in that certainty, even as I am equally certain about the integrity of nature. At the heart of Christian spirituality lies thanksgiving, and thanksgiving is only meaningful in the context of the sovereignty of grace. The theoretical basis for this paradox is something to be explored in the next section, but the certainty needs to be registered at this point.

The second area of awareness is of human society and culture, and this awareness is rife with certainties because here we engage with all our core values. Speaking only for myself, I could create a very long list of certainties that govern my awareness in this area and some of those certainties I would defend with my life. When I see paraded before my eyes nightly the atrocities committed by the Islamic State, I am certain with every fibre of my being that these are evil, to be resisted with all one's might.

What this is saying is that there are existential limits to the intellectual centre of 'not knowing'. It is not an option to say to the Islamists that we know nothing and that therefore they might be right, so we'll go along with their actions without challenge. This was the dilemma and fatal weakness of Western liberalism. In exalting non-judgementalism and respect for all cultures and viewpoints, liberalism opened the door to violence and discrimination that contradicted all the values that Western liberalism stood for.

Rather than abandon all certainty, the challenge is to be aware of what our certainties are, how we arrived at them, and how ambiguous they are. We may be certain that self-giving love is the foundation for all human relationships, yet also know that it is a profoundly ambiguous concept that defies both definition and definitive practice. We may be certain that democracy is the best form of government, yet be aware of how ambiguous it is not only in practice but also in theory. As the social debates have raged over the last decade, we may be certain about the institution of marriage but discover that every effort to define that institution becomes mired in ambiguity. A moral rule or principle, however firmly we may hold to it, is always ambiguous the instant we endeavour to act upon it.

The third area of awareness is of our own self and person. Here again there is a raft of certainties. There is the classic certainty of death, but here our certainty differs markedly from that of previous generations. Our generation is certain of death as death, not as a transition to another life that will be experienced as a continuation of our present consciousness but stripped of all physical limitations. That is a change in certainty that has radically altered the religious scene because it has shifted the centre of religious attention from some conception of a future life beyond death, to life in the present.

Equally profound for its spiritual implications has been the change in certainties relating to the sense of sin. For classical Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, the overwhelming certainty was of having committed sins and that, if unrepented, these sins destroyed our relationship with God and ultimately threatened our eternal salvation. Constant confession was required, amounting to severe abasement, as evidenced in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. No such certainties afflict contemporary Christians. Even where confession remains as a liturgical element, it barely registers as important except in exceptional circumstances. Furthermore, a vast array of actions that the church used to categorise as sins are no longer regarded as such. The old certainties have vanished. New certainties have arisen in their place.

Then there are the certainties that relate to God or whatever fills the 'God-shaped' hole in our lives. The certainty can be that there is no reality at all to any claim to be aware of the spiritual dimension. For a fifteen-year period, I lived with such a certainty, completely convinced that there was nothing but physical reality. I did see an important place for religion even through that time, certain that religion served a vital cultural function (and so I retained my connection with the church, even if tenuously). Then came a complete set of data that could not be interpreted in purely physical terms and I was faced with generating a new model. Out of that time came a new certainty about spiritual reality that to me has the quality of absolute certainty, even in its ambiguity, and with full recognition of the fundamental of 'not knowing'.

In each and every area of awareness, there are certainties that are fundamental and out of which we live and find our being. When these certainties are challenged, we experience a threat to who we are and our whole way of life. We would be prepared to die rather than relinquish some of these certainties because to relinquish them would be to strip our lives of all meaning. There are other knowings, however, that we may act upon as certainties yet hold them provisionally and are aware that they are provisional. Many of our moral and social judgements are of this kind. Here we recognise that our knowings are always subject to change, especially as we look back over our lives. I am aware that, had I been able in ,say, the 1960s, to look ahead to my present stance on innumerable issues, I would have been horrified. Should I be granted another thirty years of life, the probability is that I will hold a great many things as certain very differently to what I hold today. Even in 'knowing', we do not know.

What we have to deal with, then, as we develop a theory of knowing is that we have two diametrically opposite principles at work in paradoxical tension in our lives. The theory has to do justice to both. On the one hand, we know nothing absolutely and finally, and, on the other hand, our lives are a mass of certainties that are, for practical purposes, held absolutely and finally in many cases and provisionally in others. Some certainties are held so fundamentally that we would be prepared to die rather than relinquish them..

The 1960s was the flood-tide of theories of knowing built around verifiability. Anything that could not be verified objectively was meaningless. Specifically, all talk of 'God' was meaningless. 'God is dead' became the catchphrase of the generation. The backlash began in the 1980s, reached its climax a decade later and has been receding ever since but the verification theories never did justice to the complex reality of knowing. As critics of the time pointed out, the theory itself was unverifiable and therefore, on its own terms, meaningless. The era was also one in which religious language was analysed, often with creative results, but equally often used to declare all such language was meaningless. It signified nothing real.

Over the decades since the 1980s, the religious world has been largely dominated by intellectual conservatism. In the Catholic Church, John Paul II's long reign was one of repression of all critical thought in the Roman church that in the prior decades had been revitalised and recreated but is now a stagnant swampland. The Protestant world was annihilated by the intellectual collapse of its core principle of sola scriptura. Classical Protestantism has vanished off the ecclesiastical map, its place taken by a vast array of evangelical and Pentecostal/charismatic churches, all committed to denial of the changing cultural landscape. The marked decline of Christianity in the West has been frequently noted. Of equal, if not greater, significance has been the loss of the intellectual world. The intellectual world has almost entirely abandoned Christianity. There is not a single theologian of major status anywhere in the Western church today. There is no one of significance bridging the gap to global culture.

The theory of knowing is the central theological issue of our age, for everything else flows from that theory. Where the church stands on the alternative theories rests ultimately on its stance towards global culture. What is happening is that the majority of churches, East and West, are committed to being counter to global culture. The Church of Rome could not exist in anything like its current form if it was to embrace a culture that recognised not knowing anything finally as its core intellectual value. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches exist solely as counters to the culture, and draw their energy and their constituency from the counter-culture population. Protestantism in its classic form has disappeared altogether.

Across the ecclesiastical spectrum, however, there is a growing body of Christians who are making the transition to the new cultural era. The Roman church may be institutionally locked into the old culture but in Europe and North America and Australasia, the majority of Catholic lay people have made the transition or are making it. The transition is widespread in the Anglican Church, a change generating enormous tensions in the worldwide communion. I am not in a position to comment on the state of the Eastern Orthodox churches, but I am confident that, because the culture is global, beneath the surface of the Eastern churches the same process of transition is occurring.

In all of this transition, the central and critical movement is in relation to the theory of knowing. This is the Rubicon, the crossing of which involves a change in the totality. Nor is it a crossing that can be unmade: it is irreversible, as it involves a fundamental mind shift that amounts to a paradigm shift. Like Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon River, it creates an irreversible socio-political statement that cannot be undone.

We can express our theories of knowing in the form of an equation. The traditional form of the theory of knowing could be expressed very simply as K=S, where S denoted the authority of scripture or, more generally, ancient authorities or tradition. It could stand for the magisterium of the Catholic Church that saw its ultimate authority as being based in scripture.

Anglicanism modified the equation to add in R, for 'reason', so its theory of knowing could be expressed as K=SR. This created a highly unstable intellectual environment for Anglicans because it meant that K could never be known because R was an indefinable factor. Over the last few centuries, Anglicanism has constantly struggled with expectations that K be a certainty, an outcome that could not be delivered. What in the past, however, was regarded as the weakness in Anglicanism has now, in the new cultural age become its strength. It may well be, indeed, that constitutionally, the Anglican Church is the only major ecclesiastical construct capable to making the cultural transition relatively intact.

The new theory of knowing can be expressed as a formula:

K=D x T x I x B x J x A

where

D stands for Data

T stands for Theory

I stands for Intuition

B stands for Belief

J stands for Judgement

A stands for analysis.

The formula is characterised by multiplication, not addition, so that a weakness in any single factor exponentially affects the total outcome to the point that a zero equates to a zero outcome: i.e., zero knowing. A single or uneven number of negative values (for example, contrary data, believing the opposite) produces a negative outcome, i.e., knowing the opposite.

"Data" is defined by the question being asked. If the outcome sought is the size of the moon, the data is from physical observation. Myth plays no part. If the outcome sought is the nature of grace, a whole range of data comes into play that lies outside the bounds of physically measurable phenomena. This was the basic weakness of the verification theories of the 1960s that sought to define data by what could be externally verified.

"Theory" is a completely wide-open field. At a formal level, the theories of Ron Hubbard are as valid for the equation as those of Einstein. The integrity of the outcome is protected by the multiplications. A wonky theory has either little value or is taken out by a zero value in the data, belief or some other field.

"Intuition" can never be discounted in the outcome of knowing and in many instances is the dominant factor, either positively or negatively. In arriving at our knowing in moral choice, for example, intuition about right or wrong is often a strong element in the outcome. Even when every other factor lines up to indicate a positive outcome, intuition about 'wrong' can make the outcome zero. Intuition, on the other hand, can be so strong that it overrides weak values in all or some of the other factors. Intuition plays a huge role in commercial and military outcomes, often with disastrous results but sometimes with brilliance.

"Belief" plays a major role in knowing, and this is the weakness of the modern penchant for dismissing all belief. In its simplest form, we can envisage B as a binary switch, on or off. In the off position, it does not matter how strong is every other element in the equation, nothing is known. We see this being played out in debates such as climate change and evolution vis creationism. It is as real and as valid in science as in religion.

In religion, B has traditionally played a key part, with the demand, hedged about with threats and promises, that B be set to the on position in response to some questions and the off position in response to others. External religious authority determines the setting. Reality is more complex than a simple on/off state because of the nature of ambiguity. It is as if there is a 'stand by' setting that is not 'on' but doesn't trigger the zero that negates the entire process. It is also possible to have a 'conditional belief', while existentialism would argue for a kind of 'leap into the dark' belief that says 'I believe' into the heart of mystery and uncertainty, even risk.

"Judgement" (J) brings into play wisdom based on experience. If we are engaged, for example, in a commercial venture, our experience of the market place plays an important role in knowing whether our venture is likely or not likely to succeed. The importance of J comes into focus when we perceive that K is genuinely realised only when it is expressed in some practical form. Any claim to 'know God' that is not expressed in any practical form in life is not genuine knowing. This is the issue with the large number of people in our Western society who respond to any survey of their belief by saying that they believe in God, yet in no part of their life does that appear to have any practical consequence. Nothing would change for them if they admitted that they did not believe in God. The belief has no expression except in words. J = 0, therefore K = 0.

"Analysis" (A): without analysis, the data, and everything else, is just a chaotic mess that could mean anything or nothing. If there is no analysis, K=0.

So the theory of knowing can be expressed verbally as the outcome of a complex interaction of data, theory, intuition, belief, judgement and analysis. The outcome is always in a dynamic state as the factors affecting the outcome change. Furthermore, knowing is always circular, as the value and content of each of the factors is itself the result of its own knowing process.

## 15. Theory of Reality

What is reality? It is a question that has troubled the finest philosophers from ancient times, but it is not just a question for intellectuals. For every person, constantly through life and on a daily basis, the question materialises in manifest forms.

What is real? What is illusion? The basic answer is that we do not know and cannot know. The eighteenth century bishop and philosopher, George Berkeley, famously postulated that reality existed only in our minds, to which Samuel Johnson responded to Boswell by "striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."" (Boswell: Life) Yet Berkeley may have been closer to the truth than Johnson gave him credit for, because one consequence of neuroscience in our day is the recognition of the extent to which our brains create artificial constructs of reality. At any given instance of time, for example, our eyes send to the brain only a tiny fraction of the scene we think we are seeing and the brain constructs what we think we see largely from memory, so that most of what we think we are seeing is not real to that moment. We function as if our person is a single individual, yet the two halves of our brain are dealing with the world in different ways, and somehow our mind fashions these two halves into an illusion of singleness. We cannot get behind the illusion to know what it is like to live as two identities simultaneously. If the evolutionary process has delivered a bifocal brain, and it is the dynamic interaction between our two 'selves' that delivers us our sense of what is real, what is to prevent the evolution of tri-focal or quad-focal brains sometime in the future. What would reality look like if processed by such a brain? We cannot even begin to imagine. We do not and cannot know.

If all of that lies in the realm of science fiction, the issue of not knowing what is real is for us an everyday question at multiple levels in our lives and always the answer at the fundamental level is that we do not know.

I recall the excitement, for those of us using computers back in the early 1990s, when Google search was launched. At that time, no one knew any way it could possibly make money. That one day it might be involved in constructing a driverless car or marketing glasses with inbuilt computer and screen would, if projected at that time, be regarded as beyond the bounds of any reality.

We do not know what is real in any absolute or final way and this is a fundamental insight for the whole of global humanity and the basis for global spirituality that must emerge if humanity is to survive. As a Christian, I have deep convictions about what is real yet I am also aware that, from within my own lived history, I could be equally convinced in opposite directions. To me, grace is reality, yet at times when my faith calls me to the edge of risk-taking, a section of my brain tells me strongly that there is no reality in grace and that the world is purely physical. At that moment, I have no way of knowing what is genuinely real.

Even in my convictions about the reality of grace, I recognise that other cultures, and peoples with different views about religion, experience reality in a different way to myself. The Islamist living under sharia law has an experience of what is real that differs radically from my own, as does someone embedded in Buddhist or Chinese culture. Yet the imperative of our crises demands that we live together and work together. We can do this through our recognition, mutually, of the provisionality of even our most basic concepts of what is real.

The essential line in the sand is defined by this approach to reality. On the one side of the line is gathered all those who, across the whole spectrum of cultures and religions, are clear to themselves that their concept of reality is right, the only right, and everyone who differs is wrong. Here we have gathered together a collection of Islamists, conservative Christians, New Atheists, communists and a host of others, including the social conservatives.

Those who have crossed the line include many Christians, Muslims and others. They remain Christians, Muslims and other for the most part (though some abandon their old religious identity). Now, though, they recognise the ambiguity of their hold on reality.

Just as with the whole field of knowing, however, we function at a practical level as people who know what is real and know it for certain. Not only that, but we cannot seriously imagine that other culture's sense of reality is 'real' at all, even when we engage with them at a relational level. I have a significant degree of contact with the Maori people of my country, often involving entering into their world of spiritual and ancestral reality. I can identify with what is happening and immerse myself in imagination, but I cannot, in myself, enter their realm of reality. It is beyond my power to do so even by the strongest act of will.

This is the major barrier confronting all proselytising. Evangelistic campaigning is always accompanied by high emotional temperature because it is only at high temperature that people's minds can be manipulated into paradigmatic change. A shift in our concept of reality is always a shift in our paradigm of life. If our concept of what is real changes, everything in every part of life changes accordingly, if only in the way we view it. The entire universe changes in our sight.

Reality, then, is what we perceive it to be. There is no objective stance that any person or culture can take and declare, beyond challenge, 'this is real'. The only way of achieving that end is to define reality in terms you believe it to be then exclude anything or any concept that does not fit the definition. This is what we do in fact, because whatever culture in which we are grounded, that culture's concept of reality appears to us to be as naturally right as the air we breath.

Yet we can and do change. In my own experience, I underwent two major shifts in my understanding of reality, paradigmatic shifts, each of them quite traumatic because all reality changed in an instant of time. The first occurred in the late 1980s when the model of a theistic God finally imploded for me. I can still recall the time and place when it hit me with overwhelming force that there was no God and reality was defined purely and wholly by physics.

The second shift occurred fifteen years later when circumstances, raw data of life, confronted me with the inadequacy of this physics-only interpretation of reality and forced me to confront the equal reality of grace. Once again, I can recall vividly time and place when I cried out, 'What kind of universe do I live in that grace is possible?' For a second time, reality changed utterly and completely, not just at a theoretical level but also in ways that affected and continue to affect every moment of my life.

Experience, then is a factor in our understanding of reality, yet experience itself is highly ambiguous, even to understanding what constitutes experience. It may be easy enough to put down as experience the act of tripping over a doorstep, but what of the experience of love, especially erotic love? Am I in love with this man/woman or am I just experiencing a chemical surge? At the theological/spiritual level, what is the experience of God, of grace, of the power of prayer, of the presence of Jesus?

I have an untested theoretical hypothesis that the universe presents itself in large measure according to our expectation of what is real. In other words, because I expect to find grace in and through everything I encounter, including all negative experiences, that is what I find (and this is what, personally, I do find). When, however, during those fifteen years of seeing no possibility of grace, I saw no grace. By that I do not mean that I was blind to the grace that was present but that I encountered reality as I expected it to be, purely physical. What I am suggesting is that the difference was not just psychological but ontological. The reality I encountered was just physical.

So I take this a step further. If my concept is that the divine is evil or the world is inhabited by evil spirits or under the dominion of Satan, then this is how I encounter reality. The world, ontologically, is full of evil. I am suggesting that the ontology of reality is that it shapes itself according to the question we ask of it. If I expect reality to be circular, with four recurring years as in Chinese culture, reality as experienced conforms to that expectation. The entire scientific enterprise is built upon an expectation of reality and reality conforms to the expectation. If my theology of God is one of a demanding Judge, one who has laid down inflexible laws and punishes infringements, then that is how reality presents, in complete contradiction to reality experienced as grace.

Reduced to a formula, we can express a theory of reality as R=Ee, where E stands for Expectation and e stands for experience.

Expressed verbally, the theory of reality is that reality presents itself to our minds from the interaction of what we expect it to be and as our experience confirms those expectations, recognising that expectation significantly shapes our experience. Reality, then, can never be objectively determined but is always relative to the subject asking the question.

## 16. Theory of culture and religion

If I look back on the early years of my life, I would never have thought of myself, or that part of society in which I grew up, as having 'culture'. Ethnic people had 'culture', not us. Going to a symphony orchestra concert or opera or art gallery was 'culture' as opposed to ordinary life. People who didn't read much were 'uncultured'. That our expression of religious faith and practice was cultural never entered our heads, even though people who went to different churches thought and acted differently. To be honest, the others who did not think and act our way were wrong or did not know the right way. That the scriptures were a product of culture was also not appreciated. I can recall being taught that the importance of Christianity was that it had truth that lay beyond culture and was independent of culture. One of the more important breakthroughs in scriptural understanding and perception at the level of the general population occurred in the 1950s when the issue that women wear hats in church was challenged on the ground that Paul's injunction was a cultural statement not applicable to our own time. Minor and inconsequential as this may appear to us from the perspective of today, at the time this was a revolutionary thought. Not only did it raise questions about what else was cultural, but it was a change that affected the vast proportion of churchgoers in an era when it was rare to see a male in church. The change in practice led to a change in the way the scriptures were perceived as a whole, not just by the theologically educated elite, but also by the ordinary Christian.

One of the consequences of that early shift in perception is being played out today with regard to attitudes towards homosexuality. Paul was homophobic to an intense degree and he may well have had social justification for his stance in his own time. If Paul's words in his letters are taken as divinely given law, then it is difficult to break with his homophobia. However, if his injunctions are seen as arising out of his culture and spoken into the culture of his time, then they fall into the same category as his injunctions about women having their heads covered in church. They are relative to the cultural context and not necessarily relevant to our time and circumstances.

The intense moral debates of our era are all about this issue of culture, and this, too, is at the heart of the tensions exploding across the Islamic world. On the one side of the line of conflict, whatever the religion or tradition, and whatever the subject, lie those who place the traditional moral rules, whether expressed in scripture, canon law or sharia law, as being above culture and not subject to change or modification by any society or culture. On the other side lie those who see that all the moral norms are products of culture, past and present, and always subject to re-examination and re-evaluation. They may be modified and even reversed. This is not, as sometimes portrayed, a secular vs Christian conflict. There are many secularists on the side of moral conservatism and many Christians who recognise cultural relativism.

If, in my early years, I could not see myself or my family or my church as being products of culture, that perception today is reversed. Setting aside the influence of genetics, everything is culture, down to the way we think, see reality, practice religion, view marriage and child-rearing, play sport – everything. We cannot think outside our culture, and even if we could imagine ourselves living within another culture and even adopting its outward forms, it can ever only be as an alien to that culture. Culture is who we are as people, total people.

This does not mean that we cannot and do not change. Culture is always changing and sometimes we change with the culture and sometimes we either set ourselves against change – become actively counterculture – or we opt out of swimming in the culture of our time and become 'left behind'. Culture is always dynamic, in some societies more so than in others , but it is the dynamic societies that survive when conditions change.

The base theory of culture is that it is the facility by which the human species adapts to its physical and social environment in order to survive and thrive. Culture is to homo sapiens what size is to the elephant, strength to the lion and speed to the cheetah. It is therefore of the very essence of culture that it is capable of adapting to changing conditions in the physical and social environment.

Because humanity is a social animal, shared culture is a necessity. Human community cannot exist where cultural perceptions lead the community in opposite directions. Democracy is a cultural artifact as is absolute monarchy. Each is a way of surviving and thriving, but they cannot co-exist within a single society. A marriage cannot hold together if one partner is monogamous and the other polygamous. A Christian church cannot live according to the culture of a criminal gang. Most cultures can tolerate limited departure from its cultural norms but only to the point where the departures threaten the integrity of the whole. Tolerance always has its limits. The concept of a pluralistic society that has been strong in some Western countries in recent years is an illusion, and a dangerous one that disintegrates that society.

The most elemental dynamic in any and every society, then, whether it be between friends or lovers, a family, a workplace, a church, a city, nation or ultimately the global community, is the formation of cultural norms that enables that society to survive and thrive. All our moral norms, whatever our society and whatever our religion, have been or are being formed out of this dynamic. At the factual level, there never has been any point in human history where divine fiat entered into that dynamic and laid down divine norms that were above this cultural process and intended to be always above it. The Mosaic Law is a fiction of history, arising out of the social dynamics in 3rd/2nd century BC Judea. It is a cultural artifact of no more determinative control over cultural determination of today than the code of Hammurabi or the laws of ancient Rome.

The critical issue for every society in every time and place is not only to find the cultural norms that will enable survival and thriving, but how to create the broad consensus between or among the members of that society that these are indeed the norms and agree to actively live by them. Community instability is always related to that issue. Teenagers are notorious for making and breaking friendships and the root cause of the breaking up is always related to failure to establish the mutual norms. Marriages break up for the same reason. In an age of rapidly changing social norms, churches are splintering along these cultural fault lines.

The dominant reality of today's world is the vast change happening as, on the one hand, global culture rises in response to the threats in human existence, and, on the other hand, new understanding of the world emerge, and the change threatens all established religions and cultures. The tensions are being experienced in everything from the 'culture wars' in the United States to the dramatic rise of Islamic extremism.

The question as to whether humanity can survive as a species, or at least as a globally dominant species, is a critical one for our age. It will be solved, or fail to be solved, by culture. The emergence of global culture is not just another option for humanity to adopt. It is the only option for survival and thriving. But it will change everything. In a hundred years' time, if human society is still in existence, it will be on the basis of a global culture and every part of the way everyone lives will be radically different. This will include religion. If humanity does not change, it will not survive.

The theory of culture, then, is that this is how humans adapt life in order to survive and thrive, and this occurs at individual and communal levels without regard to the size or scale of the community involved. How, then, do we understand religion? To answer this question, it is important to invoke the model of the two-question understanding of reality. We can ask two questions of religion. The one is the physical question and the other is the grace question. The grace question produces an answer that sees the hand of God directly in every facet of who and what we are and our journey to this point. I put my stake in the ground and say that I see the faith that I hold as being a gift of grace not only in my personal experience but also throughout history, and not just in the linear Hebrew/church story.

That is not the question I am asking here. I am asking the physical question, the question of what is the theory of religion in relation to humanity in its cultural context. In this theory, religion is a function of culture and an indispensible function. Religion is how culture solves the problem of social coherence with the norms that enable it to survive and thrive. The service that religion uniquely delivers to culture is that it facilitates the interiorisation of the norms and values essential to the culture's success. The alternatives to religion are coercive force or social manipulation or engineering, always as decided by the elite in power. Both are inherently unstable over time as the twentieth century experience with communism, fascism and Vatican centralism demonstrated. Whatever the short term gains of the Islamic State extremists and however spectacular their territorial success, the same fate will befall them even though they act in the name of religion.

What is emerging is the concept of authentic religion. The theory of authentic religion is that it is a system of belief that serves the culture to which it is related by facilitating the interiorisation of its core values and norms, nurtures and transmits those values and norms to each new generation, guards and protects the values and norms from external and internal threats, distortion or demonisation and provides the culture with the articulation of its norms and values by words and symbols.

Every person has a religion in the sense that they have a belief is what is ultimately true, and a value system that reflects that belief. To be an atheist is simply a rejection of the theist system but always in embrace of an alternative because life is disintegrating chaos without a religious foundation, whatever that may be. No one is non-religious.

However, 'religion' in the context of culture is the collective self-awareness of a system of belief and associated values. It is not necessarily about God or gods or spirits. It can be useful to distinguish between 'religious' and 'religion'. Every individual, in one form or another, is 'religious', having a system of belief and values. When two or more people associate with each other in conscious awareness and shared experience of their system of belief and values, then we have 'religion'.

It is hard to know whether culture is the product of religion or religion the product of culture. It can be argued that Western culture is a creation of the Catholic Church of the tenth century AD, while most of the dominant features of modern Western society can be traced to the impact of the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation. Islamic societies are unquestionably products of the beliefs and values inherent in Islam.

Logically, however, the theory of culture makes it the primary generator because it is the essential adaptation to the physical and social environment. Being human means that the culture that enables us to survive and thrive requires a collective response and a collective response requires a shared structure of belief and values. Religion emerges as that part of the collective culture that is openly aware of the system of beliefs and values. If the culture itself is going to survive and thrive, it has to have this religion component.

This is where the concept of authentic religion comes into play. The human reality is that we generate a multiplicity of religious systems and variations of systems. Putting aside the issue of any direct revelation of spiritual reality, the differences arise from many sources, often from our imagination or reasoning, often from the drive for power and control, sometimes from the influence of some extraordinary individual. Within a wider culture, different sub-cultures develop variations on the wider culture and express those differences in variations of belief and values.

The major theoretical question, however, and one that is crucial for global culture, is the question of authenticity. Authenticity is about the service of the needs of a culture that enables it to survive and thrive. It has noting to do, in the context of the 'physical' question, with ultimate truth, whatever that may be. Authenticity, therefore, is relative to the culture, not an absolute standard. The religion of Pharonic Egypt was authentic (presumably) to the culture of that age and place but inauthentic in Mesopotamia or in Britain of that time. Islam has been the authentic religion for large parts of the world for centuries but may not be authentic in the modern world. Catholic Christianity was authentic to medieval Europe. In each case, allowing for the inevitable ambiguity and distortions and demonisations that affect all facets of life, religion no more or less that politics or commerce – or sport for that matter –, the religion serviced the life of the culture in that time and place.

Service does not mean servitude. Authentic religion is as creative of culture as culture is of religion. Furthermore, religion that is authentic also stands apart from the manner in which a culture manifests itself in a particular time and place. It becomes not a slave of culture but a critic, a challenger, a focus of opposition to prevailing powers and ethics. As has been too often demonstrated throughout history, when religion is co-opted as the obedient servant of the ruling powers or dominant elite in any culture, it fails in its function to the culture and becomes a travesty of itself.

Being servant of a culture means being servant of the fundamental aims and values of that culture, not serving the interests of whatever elite may be holding power at any one time. The enduring problem affecting all religion, but especially any religion with a genuine claim to authenticity, is that it becomes the target of political and economic powers that seek to harness the influence of religion to serve its own ends. Religion frequently becomes caught into this trap because the alliance seems to promote greater power and influence for religion. The late twentieth century world saw such an alliance develop between American evangelicals and the Republican Party, Putin's alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church and Iran's rulers with Islam. In every instance, both politics and religion became corrupted and the religion loses its authenticity. The mega-churches of North America and their global offshoots are an alliance between capitalism and religion as a way of making money, and lots of it, corrupting both commerce and religion. Liberal churches are just as likely to be captured by the political left to become ventriloquist dolls with similar consequences.

There is also a wide gulf between authentic religion and the folk religion current in the general population. Folk religion in Western society dances around ideas about life after death that still live the nineteenth century idea about 'joining mum in heaven', with fake spirituality that makes no demands or presents no challenges. Folk religion, even when pursued zealously and intensely, is all about wish fulfilment. It is ultimately about pursuit of individual ends, reflected in the "I" focus of its expressions.

The most vigorous opposition to authentic religion is always inauthentic religion, whether it be religions in alliance with secular powers or folk religion based on wishful thinking. The problem is compounded by the fact that every expression of authentic religion is inherently ambiguous. This is part of what the scriptures, old and new, witness to. The entire Hebrew/Christian story is one of the battle between authenticity and inauthenticity, yet the battle lines are blurred. Jeremiah and Ezekiel and the prophetic movement that followed them during the years of the Hebrew exile in Babylon can be taken as representing an authentic religious response to the cultural challenge the Hebrews faced in exile. Without the genesis of the prophetic vision, the Hebrews would not have survived the exile and would long ago have disappeared from historical view. Yet the prophets were wrong in a multitude of ways, factually and theologically. The prophetic influence disappeared after the return of the Hebrews to Palestine, replaced by an adaption of Babylonian temple religion that dominated Hebrew life for the next few centuries. The religion of Isaiah did not prove authentic in the post-return society of Judah. The temple religion of the Babylonians, expressed in the books of Chronicles, did. But this new form was also based on mythical history. It too was highly ambiguous even as if was successful for a long period of time.

We may judge that the apostle Paul presented an authentic response to the challenge of his society. Yet Paul was wrong in a large number of areas, even fundamental to the way he preached the gospel.

It is the central irony of Christianity that we are followers of Jesus yet we know nothing for certain about what Jesus did or taught. This may in practice turn out to be Christianity's trump card. The authenticity of Christianity rests in being the Body of Christ, the servant who gives his life for the other. How that works out is not controlled by words or laws laid down in a long-gone cultural milieu but is governed by the need of culture in the immediate context in which we find ourselves.

What the theory of authentic religion gives us is an ability, within the framework of ambiguity, to exercise some judgement about particular religious manifestations, and identify within ourselves what authenticity means as we struggle to express ourselves religiously.

To sum up, then, authentic religion

  * Recognises itself as servant of the culture in which it is embedded;

  * Identifies and articulates the issues and the challenges confronting the culture it serves;

  * Identifies and articulates the values that lie at the heart of the culture;

  * Seeks to embody these in its own community life and support, encourage and promote those values to the cultural community as a whole;

  * Facilitates the interiorisation of the culture's core values so that those values do not need legislative /coercive powers to ensure their implementation

  * Takes responsibility for the transmission of the core values to each new generation and to those who join the culture as immigrants;

  * Takes a lead in responding to each new cultural challenge that arises;

  * Identifies threats, distortions, demonisation and complacency that may cause the culture to weaken its response to challenges;

  * Acts as guardian of the culture's core values;

  * Takes care of the casualties that every culture generates, seeking justice for the weak and vulnerable, standing against the corruptions of power and wealth;

  * Provides the source of hope and resilience in the face of discouragement and failure.

It can be argued that everything I have developed here about the theory of religion, and authentic religion in particular, is a secular perception and not a theological one. I would dispute that. On the contrary, I would say emphatically that the prophetic call from God to the church today is to be the authentic servant of global culture, because it is with global culture, and only with global culture, that humanity can survive and thrive.

## 17. Theory of Scripture

One of the most urgent needs of the Christian community today relates to the theory of the nature and place of the Bible. This theoretical exploration will need to go on at some point in Islam but that is, for the present largely a closed door so far as public discussion is concerned. I am confident that the door will open at some point in the future, revealing that a great deal has been going on behind the closed door. The spread and increasing violence of extremist Islam is providing the impetus to break down that door and release a radical new approach to the Islamic scripture within Islam itself.

For the present, though, the focus of the theoretical exploration must be on the Hebrew and Christian writings that form the canon of sacred scripture. It is a debate that is centrally important for both Christianity and Judaism.

Every form of Christianity and Judaism rests upon a foundation of a theory about scripture. Protestantism in its classical Reformation form rested upon the theory of sola scriptura, the theory that everything was to be found in scripture because it was God's words to humanity. Since the rise of Biblical criticism, that theory became increasingly untenable until, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, classical Protestantism disappeared altogether, replaced, on the one hand, by dogmatic evangelicism that closed its mind and, on the other hand, by dissolution into theologically weak 'community-centred' churches of various degrees of liberalism.

The Catholic Church in the West is an inverted pyramid, its base in the air shadowing the earth but its apex resting on a single text from Matthew's gospel. That theory is as untenable as sola scriptura but the sheer physical power of the institution keeps the pyramid balanced – for the moment. The fabric of the entire Catholic Church is built upon a particular theory of scripture.

Pentecostalism, in the same way, is built upon a few passages from the Acts of the Apostles, especially that of the Day of Pentecost, these passages being almost certainly fictional from a historical point of view. Once again, the entire church structure rests on a theory of scripture.

Judaism, in all its various forms and sects, rests upon the foundation of the inviolability of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew canon, the so-called Books of Moses. The divine law was given directly from God, according to these books, and the Hebrew people are commanded to observe them strictly. The theory essential to Judaism is that this is what happened. The facts say otherwise and that these are very late writings in the Hebrew religious development.

Protestantism vanished when its theory of scripture was no longer embraced. Evangelicism is in decline as young people in particular become aware that it is an intellectual gnat. Pentecostalism has ever only appealed to those vulnerable to wishful thinking so it is more or less insulated against the questioning of its theory. But what happens to Catholicism when its theory is seen as having no substance? The answer to that is becoming clearer by the year in Europe and North America. And Judaism? Because Judaism is a culture as much as it is a religion, it will not collapse but it will likely undergo radical change: and the agency of its change will be the theory of scripture. For what the Hebrew canon testifies to is that Hebrew religious life and understanding underwent a whole series of major shifts in the centuries from the exile to the time of Jesus and the diaspora following the sack of Jerusalem by the Romans. A shift in their theory of scripture can (and likely will) generate a further massive shift in their understanding of their faith. It is even conceivable that such a shift in Judaism, paralleled by a major shift in theory being experienced within Christianity, may see the two branches of the common religious tradition flow back together again. It is possible to interpret Jesus and Paul as the regeneration of the Hebrew line of prophets that died out after the return from the exile. The clarity with which it can be seen today that the Torah is a fictional creation is, furthermore, the Achilles heel of Islam. If the theory that undergirds the Torah is demolished, the whole structure of Koranic authority cracks.

Biblical literalism, the theory that God divinely inspired the various writers of the biblical books such that that they could not be factually, theologically or morally wrong, is not a defensible theory in any way, shape or form. It requires a totally closed mind against all factual evidence and a dogmatic stance that allows blind belief to override everything to the contrary. In today's world, it is willfully dishonest, the dishonesty in startling contrast to the stance of moral integrity central to the gospel message. It is solely about power and control and the vulnerability of a section of the population to being unethically manipulated.

The Catholic Church has probably less excuse for its dishonesty because it has a long and honoured tradition of intellectual analysis and integrity. At its highest level, it is fully aware that its single text of justification does not bear the weight of the institutional interpretation placed upon it. It is paralysed by its own rigid tradition of papal pronouncements, so questioning the Petrine text brings down the entire structure of the church, tumbling like a house of cards.

Putting aside all the various expression of the Judaic/Christian tradition, can Christianity itself survive if theory fatally undermines the scriptures? While it can be argued that the early centuries of the Christian church were lived without the New Testament as we know it today, I think it is doubtful if Christianity in any recognisable form could survive if the theory caused the wholesale abandonment of the New Testament. A case can (and probably should) be made for the removing all or most of the Old Testament from the Christian canon, but, for all its ambiguity, the New Testament is indispensable. What can be argued, however, is that the canon should not be closed: that decisions about inclusion of some writings should be reopened, and that the canon should be open to the inclusion of new documents both from history and from our (and future) contemporary world. That argument, too, rests upon a theory of scripture.

The first essential in approaching a viable theory of scripture is to separate the two questions: the physical question from the spiritual question. In the liturgy of the Anglican Church, the lections other than the Gospel are followed by the injunction, "Hear what the Spirit is saying to the church." That injunction arises out of having asked the spiritual question of the scriptures. It proceeds from the theory, amply if ambiguously reflected in practice, that God speaks to us in a uniquely powerful way in and through the scriptures. This does not mean that we accept the words of the scriptures at their face value or as stating facts, unchallengeable dogma or moral command. The word of the Spirit I often 'hear' is one of saying that the passage is wrong in fact, in theology or in moral direction. Yet even in its wrongness, the passage can speak powerfully in a creative way. Through the structure of the daily prayer offices of the Anglican Church, I read though most of the Old Testament and the whole of the New Testament every year. The Psalms are read several times every year. Rarely can I affirm what I read as being factually true, especially the Old Testament: I frequently question the theology and often reject the morality. Yet the readings command me to the depth of my being. The Spirit speaks to my spirit.

This happens also in the lectionary readings in the Eucharistic liturgy. The spiritual theory behind the scriptural lections is that the church is addressed by God, and this occurs in practice, not just in theory – but always ambiguously.

It is when we ask the physical question of the scriptures that things get interesting. Here we need a theory that explains why we have a canon of scripture in the first place and how that canon was formed: what is the nature of the writings and how they came to be written: why the canon is important to the church in our day: why the canon was closed and whether it can be or should be open. These questions are too large and demanding for me to provide a fully satisfying theory. They are questions the church community has to ask and develop theories that are robust. Nevertheless, so crucial is this theory to the whole these of this book, I am impelled to put forward a theoretical construct.

The concept of the canon of authorised writings goes back to the Hebrew scholars of the second century BC. The fundamental idea was to limit what could be read in public liturgy of the synagogue. There was never a hard and fast definition of what was to be included in the canon. The division continued into Christianity with a disagreement about the range of books to be included in the Old Testament, the Catholic and Reformation Protestant churches falling either side of the divide.

The fundamental theory of scripture, then, was the selection by religious authority of what was and what was not considered to be orthodox writings for liturgical reading. The early church inherited the Hebrew canon (in its various forms), though not without strong voices being raised in protest. The church sought to create its own canon of accepted writings. By the time of the apostolic era, the canon of Hebrew writings had acquired a theory of divine inspiration that exalted the texts to be God's direct words. There was, however, a head-on clash because it is apparent that Jesus saw himself as free to challenge and modify the texts, while Paul took the stance that Jesus replaced the Law with grace. From the very beginning, then, the nascent Christian church had an ambivalent attitude towards the Hebrew canon.

What is abundantly clear is that the Christian community of the first few centuries, including the era following the death of Jesus, was a mass of splintered sects, reflecting their Jewish origin, each sect interpreting the life and teaching of Jesus in its own way. The picture of the early church that Luke paints in Acts 1 to 10 bears little resemblance to the historical reality. That the 'catholic' expression of Christianity came to dominate may be both an accident of history and an example of the writing of history by the victors. The fact that the emperor Constantine secured the catholic dominance by excommunicating ninety percent of North African Christians (and thus paved the way for Islam) is perhaps testimony to this accident of history and to the likelihood that the alternative to catholic Christianity was the more demographically powerful at the time.

The canon of the New Testament as we have it today is a product of this strand of the tradition and its understanding of orthodoxy. Had another stand of the tradition dominated historically, the canon we have would undoubtedly have been different.

Further, the process that formed the canon was governed by a theory that the apostles had left a body of writing in their own hand. The critical question that had to be asked and answered was whether the writing was genuinely from the apostolic hand (Paul being included among the apostles). The gospel accounts were taken as first-hand records by those who had been with Jesus during his earthly ministry. Through all the centuries down to the previous century this was taken to be the basis of the New Testament's authenticity and authority. The resurrection was beyond question because we had eye-witness accounts. That authenticity no longer holds. Paul's letters (if we exclude the question marks over Colossians and Ephesians and the late date of the so-called 'Pastoral' epistles of I and II Timothy and Titus) are genuine, but no other writing is first-hand to the apostles and none is from anyone who knew Jesus personally during his ministry. Several of the documents date late into the second century. With the exception of Paul's genuine letters, the factual situation is that none of the New Testament writings fit the criterion the church set for inclusion in its canon: not even the gospels.

The situation is even murkier when we consider the documents of the Old Testament canon. We probably have the writings more or less intact of Jeremiah and Ezekiel but even these are liberally interlaced with material dated from later centuries. The prophets Micah, Amos, Hosea and Isaiah (chapters 1-39) were ostensibly written in the eighth century BC but come from the period of the exile or in the case of Hosea, centuries later. Not a scrap of the 'history' from Genesis, through Exodus, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings/Chronicles and including Nehemiah/Ezra, with the exception of the penultimate chapters of II Kings, has any historical credence whatsoever. The Exodus, Sinai and its covenant and law, David and Solomon, with Solomon's temple, the entire story of the nation of Israel and its ten tribes – all fiction.

Given all of this, can we possibly conceive a theory of scripture relevant and important to us today?

The answer to that question cannot lie in any of the traditional theories about the scriptures. Indeed, the answer lies in taking a wholly new approach, not just to the scriptures but also to the meta-narrative of faith. The scriptures, however, do provide the charter of our freedom to take that approach, because that is what the scriptures themselves witness to.

So far as we have any recorded evidence, the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel were the first to commence a meta-narrative that involved the Hebrew people. Their narrative postulated the existence of a Yahweh- worshipping northern state of 'Israel' that had Samaria as its capital. There is no trace in those prophets of any story of how Samaria/Israel came to be a Yahwist state, and by the time of their telling the story, the kingdom of Samaria had disappeared for over a century. In the Jeremiah/Ezekiel meta-narrative, however, Yahweh was going to bring back the exiled 'Israelites' once Judah had adopted Yahweh as their sole god and create from these two states one powerful people that would be a dominant political power in the region. Ezekiel went so far as to envisage the restored land, with a single glorious temple in Jerusalem modelled after the Babylonian temples but even more magnificent. That all this was pure fantasy from beginning to end is not the point. This meta-narrative captured the imagination of at least some of the Hebrew exiles in Babylon and regenerated hope and began to affect a profound change in religious attitudes and beliefs.

During the exile, under the influence of the Babylonian cultural development of historical consciousness, stories of the Hebrew past began to emerge. The prophetic books from the exile show hints of these stories as they emerged, though we can never be certain of what is original to the prophets and what are later interpolations. By the end of the exile it would appear that the figure of Abraham had been created, though not in the elaborate form that emerged centuries later. There is the emergence, too, of the story that the Hebrews came originally from Egypt and it is even possible, judging by Isaiah 63, if it is original, that, by the end of the exile, something of the story of Moses had been formed, though there is no hint of a Sinai covenant. The most powerful development of the meta-narrative in the last period of the exile, however, was the figure of David as a model of kingship, the model on which the future restored state of Judah should be based upon, according to its advocates. The exilic change had produced a sense of the people as being governed by Yahweh, as being an ethical community, centred on the worship of Yahweh alone, and fulfilment of this dream would require a leadership dedicated to its implementation. There is no Samuel, Saul or Solomon in the exiles meta-narrative as far as can be discerned, nor a story of a miraculous exodus from Egypt.

The next dramatic development in the Hebrew meta-narrative occurred after the Persian conquest of Babylon in 639BC. The generation of this development was the prophet Isaiah, the writings of chapters 40 to 56 of the Book of Isaiah, whoever was their author. Two developments found in these chapters are of particular importance to the meta-narrative and effected a major shift in thinking. The first was the emergence of a cosmic vision, Yahweh the Creator God, the King of all the kings, King of all the gods, Creator and Ruler of the world. The political model for Isaiah's great vision was undoubtedly the awesome splendour of the 'cosmic' power of the Persian court. The Persian emperor was 'king of kings'. From this time comes the model of exuberant and unbridled praise of God's monarchical power and splendour, a reflection of the behaviour of the Persian court. Yahweh could not be any less than the Persian emperor! So Isaiah locates the commencement of his meta-narrative in the creation of the universe, and this is a new development in Hebrew religion.

The other development of the story that Isaiah initiated was God's present saving acts, to be worked out in history that the people were to experience first-hand. Isaiah here was building upon the earlier visions of Jeremiah and Ezekiel as they envisaged the 'return' of the Samarian exiles, but now Isaiah was saying to this concrete, specific community of exiles in Babylon (remember these people would have been third generation after the initial exiles, themselves and probably most of their parents born in Babylon with no personal memory of Palestine): to these people Isaiah said that they were to be part of a miraculous act of God, not just in their return to Palestine but in the wonderful manner of their return. Once the state was restored by their return, Yahweh would do wonderful things through them. All this was guaranteed because Yahweh was the Creator of the world, of everything and all nations and nature was subject to him just as all nations were subject to the emperor of the Persians. Isaiah went so far as to enroll the emperor himself as Yahweh's servant, doing his will.

The return, when it happened, was a crushing disappointment and disillusionment. Isaiah, or one of his disciples, made one last valiant effort at creating a meta-narrative that projected a glorious future (Isaiah 60-61) but the disillusionment spelled the end of the prophetic era of influence in Hebrew religion and life. It suffered the fate of every religious revival from that time to the present, fuelling expectations that were divorced from reality and led to rejection.

As far as we can piece together the evidence, the next two hundred-odd years saw the Hebrew people disappear from political view, Jerusalem as backwater city of no significance to the empire, located in the high country of Judah where it was left to go about its own business. The Hebrew people developed a temple-based religion, with animal sacrifices, essentially in all respects a Babylonian cult but centred upon Yahweh primarily. That the Hebrews never gave up their polytheism, however, is very evident from the later texts. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah are unlikely to be any reflection on what happened during the mid-fifth century as they were composed around 150 years later as part of the next wave of Hebrew literature preserved in the canon. These years, however, may have seen the progressive development of the stories of the people's past that were later to be woven together into the narrative familiar to us today.

It was in the last years of the fourth century BC that the Hebrew's comfortable temple-centred world was to be blown apart. Alexander's conquest of the region destroyed the Persian Empire. Instead of bringing peace, however, the splintering of Alexander's empire among his generals after his death pitched the world into conflict and the position of Jerusalem as a prime fortification site made it a pawn in the power games of the era. Alexander brought, however, not just a new overlord to Judah: he brought a whole new culture and one utterly alien to the Hebrew's established way of life. Their world was challenged to its depths. Out of this challenge arose a new wave of meta-narrative creation, embodied in the books of Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah and prophetic books such as Zechariah and Haggai. Central to this wave was the temple, with the emergence of the idea, which was completely mythical, that Solomon had built a great and glorious temple in Jerusalem and that the city was, at a time in the past, the centre of the richest and most powerful empire the world had seen. The climax of the Chronicler's narrative was the discovery and reading of the book of the Law by the scribe Ezra, a story probably as fictional as that of Solomon and his temple. The concept of a 'law of Yahweh' had been around since the time of Jeremiah, the idea originating in Assyria, but had never been developed into a systematic code. The central idea of the shift in Hebrew religion that took place in the seventh century BC was that Yahweh was an ethical god demanding an ethical life from his people. As strong as the prophets were in making ethical statements, sometimes expressed as 'law', the statements about ethics were broad and unsystematic. Micah 6:8 is a prime example, words written somewhere around 550BC in Babylon:

You have already been told what is right  
and what Yahweh wants of you.  
Only this, to do what is right,  
to love loyalty  
and to walk humbly with your God.

There was no code of law, not even the Ten Commandments. The story of the finding of a book of the law in the temple in the reign of King Josiah (around 620BC) is a fiction of later centuries. A reading of the prophets indicates that they were far more energised by reform of the cult than by ethical considerations.

By 300BC, however, such a code must have been created, possibly the material that now forms the heart of the Book of Deuteronomy (chapters 12 to 26). The meta-narrative of the Chronicler, writing at that time, set the scene for the gigantic step for Hebrew religion from one centred on temple ritual and animal sacrifice, essentially a Babylonian religion, to one focused on living by ethical rules; from a people whose lives were centred on the cult to a people whose lives were centred on written words (not yet in any organised canonical form).

This reworking of the meta-narrative, hammered out against the increasingly dominant and aggressive Hellenistic culture, came to its classic expression in the formulation of the books from Genesis to II Kings, together with the prophetic book of Hosea, and the formulation of all this material into an authorised canon. All this occurred over the next one hundred and fifty years to about the middle of the second century BC. Hebrew religion became Judaism, centred on this supposedly Mosaic Law. It had become a religion of the book.

The development of the meta-narrative, although fixed in a form that was to endure and dominate until recent years, was far from ended. From the middle of the second century BC, beginning as far as records are concerned with the Book of Daniel and climaxing in the Revelation to John at the end of the first century AD, the meta-narrative suddenly transcended time and space and entered the realm of apocalyptic imagination. These writings are the equivalent of today's fantasy literature and had a fascination for the popular imagination in their time as the fantasy literature and cinema has for our own. They were believed just as millions in our day believe in alien abductions and the like. The advent of the apocalyptic changed the meta-narrative in multiple ways, and because its cultural apex coincided with the advent of Jesus and early Christianity, played an enormous part in shaping the early Christian meta-narrative. The most important impact of the apocalyptic is that it took the narrative into a future that transcended the conditions of the present world. The precursor of the apocalyptic was the prophecies of the 'third' Isaiah, especially chapters 60 and 61, where his vision breaks all possible physical bounds. With the apocalyptic, the future was a world in which the present conditions, physical and human, would be done away with by an act of God. Its place would be taken by a perfect world shaped wholly by God's will, devoid of all the ambiguities of the present life.

In at least one powerful strand of the apocalyptic tradition, the transformation was to be effected by the coming of a messiah, and the narrative enlisted the words of the ancient prophets to read as if predicting such a messiah, to be preceded and announced by the return of Elijah.

By the first century, another variant had arisen in Judaism, espoused by the Pharisees, one of two dominant sects in first century Judaism. This was the idea of a personal resurrection and survival after death, something never embraced by classical Hebrew religion except in the common cultural form of the idea of descent into the shadows of Hades. The scene was set of another major development in the Hebrew meta-narrative and this occurred out of the life and ministry of an obscure Galilean peasant, Jesus from Nazareth.

As has been said before, we have no first-hand knowledge of Jesus but only as he was imaged by later generations who were seeing him through the eyes of a meta-narrative that placed him at the centre of the story. Whatever the real, historical truth about Jesus' life, truth about which we will never know, the fact is inescapable that his short ministry was so powerful it launched a revolutionary new dynamic that created not just one but a multiplicity of meta-narratives, each with Jesus as its central figure.

Luke's account of how the early church exploded into Jewish society with a new meta-narrative based around Jesus' resurrection from the dead is almost certainly fictional. We do not know clearly what the first generation of Jesus' disciples thought and said and did after the crucifixion but the evidence of Paul's letters suggests that they saw Jesus as a modifier of the Mosaic Law and therefore a figure that stood above Moses such that he could overrule and modify what had been given by God. This is probably the core origin of the concept of Jesus as Lord, as having divine stature, because only God could overrule God.

What we do know from his letters is that Paul created a radically new meta-narrative of Jesus. He was probably able to gain the endorsement of the Jerusalem leadership, as he did, because his vision started to make sense of this conundrum of the stature of Jesus. Paul's radical vision, however, soon generated a powerful opposition from those wedded to the old interpretation, people for whom the Law remained central and commanding, even if modified by Jesus. That Paul was from the sect of the Pharisees and not from the Sadducees was an accident of history that was to shape Christianity from that day to the present. Paul was fully into apocalyptic thinking and especially the Pharisaic belief in resurrection. Paul's meta-narrative almost completely ignores every facet of Jesus' earthly life, focusing on his death and proclaiming his resurrection from death, the messianic figure of apocalyptic meta-narrative. Paul transformed Jesus into a mythic figure heralding an end to the physical universe, to happen immanently. Only those who believed Paul's meta-narrative would be saved to live in this new world, a world characterised by glory and the end to all ambiguity.

Although Paul's re-interpretation of the meta-narrative was destined to become orthodoxy over the centuries to come, and is still viewed as such by many today, his vision did not conclude the process or go unchallenged. Published immediately after Paul's death, the gospel of Mark endorsed elements of Paul's meta-narrative, especially the replacement of the law by grace and the apocalyptic vision of chapter 13, but refocused the narrative back onto Jesus' earthly life. It was not an eyewitness account, although many think that the young man, probably a teenager, who ran away naked at Jesus' arrest, may have been the writer. This possibility becomes significant as it means, if true, that the detail of that last week in Jesus' life as reported in Mark was indeed an eye-witness account, though recalled thirty years later. It also lends special significance to Mark's reluctance to refer to the resurrection. Was this because he knew first-hand that it had not happened? He may not have wanted to directly contradict the weighty authority of Paul in this matter so brushed over it lightly. Maybe. Mark portrays Jesus' ministry, which he did not directly witness, as one of being a miracle worker.

Mark's gospel appears to have effected a huge shift in the Christian meta-narrative of the first century, a shift that has been determinative to our own day and, for the most part, more influential than Paul's apocalyptic story. Both Matthew and Luke were to substantially modify Mark's narrative to suit their own agendas but they did not break with the foundation laid by Mark.

In contrast, the end-of-the-century gospel of John seems not to have known Mark, Matthew or Luke and tells a quite different story of Jesus. Over all the centuries subsequently, the Christian community has struggled to create a coherent narrative of Jesus, not only of the details of his life but also of the meaning of his life. All the core documents tell a different story, often radically at odds with one another.

Although most scholarly and historical attention over recent times has focused on the battles of the church of the Greek and Latin Fathers to resolve the issues of Trinitarian and Christological theology, the real focus of these centuries was upon getting conformity and accepted clarity to the meta-narrative of Christianity from creation to consummation. The classical creeds are crystalised statements of the outcome of that process. Essentially, that outcome was the statement that 'this is the story and you must believe the story given here to be true if you want to be accepted as part of the orthodox Christian community'.

Just as the development of the orthodox meta-narrative was the principal work and achievement of the church of the first six centuries, so the principal development in our own time is the unworking and collapse of that meta-narrative in every aspect of the story.

This has been a long excursion in the context of a theory of scripture, but a necessary one. The scriptural theory that emerges is that we relate to the scriptures as a whole, and to each and every part separately, through the portal of the meta-narrative that governs our understanding of what has happened, what is happening and what will happen. The most basic difference separating us from our forbears is that we bring our meta-narrative to scripture, not derive it from scripture. This changes everything. It is also the heart of the deep divisions and internal conflicts within the worldwide Christian community.

Our meta-narrative has changed because of basic cultural changes that are integral to our lives. We require our meta-narrative to have at least some credible grounding in factual reality, physical and historical. That David and Solomon and Moses never existed in history takes them out of our meta-narrative except their importance to the meta-narrative of the past, for the existence of that past story forms part of our meta-narrative. If turning water into wine or raising a dead body back to life, or a virgin conception are beyond the bounds of physical capability, at least with first century technology, then it did not happen: it forms no part of our meta-narrative.

Further, we recognise that speculative and intuitive theology and images are products of imagination and not necessarily divine revelation, even if enshrined in sacred text and hallowed by centuries of celebration. We do not have to buy into the cosmic visions of Ephesians and Colossians, of Hebrews or the Revelation to John. We do not even have to embrace the sublime vision of the Prologue to John's gospel. Theories of substitutionary sacrifice make no sense to us and do not have to. Nor do we have to embrace the moral injunctions of Paul, or even those attributed to Jesus, such as his apparent words about adultery and divorce. That does not mean we cannot embrace them: it means we are not compelled to embrace them; they do not have the force of 'God's word'. The judgement call is ours to make.

We are increasingly aware of the forced and artificial nature of the orthodox meta-narrative. The earlier Christian generations were driven into this artifice by the conviction that everything recorded had to be true, so there had to be a single line that integrated all the evidence. We know now that was never the case, so the need for a fixed meta-narrative that is orthodox has disappeared. The evidence of scripture itself is that the creation of meta-narrative is an ongoing and fluid exercise that never stops and never settles. What fascinates me personally is that here scripture theory can cycle right back to the concept that it is 'God's word'. If God speaks uniquely and powerfully through the scriptures (and this is my experience and the experience of the church), then the core word is that every generation and culture is permitted to shape its own meta-narrative. Grace is found not in being 'right' about the narrative, because there never can be gold standard backing any narrative as right, but that the meta-narrative enables its holders to make sense of their life in a way that is creative and positive and leads to ethical outcomes.

There is a fourth question that needs to be addressed regarding a theory of scripture and that is whether the canon is closed and must remain closed. To that question, the answer as I see it is that, at a theoretical level, there is no case to regard the canon as closed. At any time, the church may reopen the canon to include new material or even exclude documents currently included. At a practical level, it might seem inconceivable that any such development would attain consensus from the spectrum of the Christian community but yet, if I had to make a prediction of the future, I would say that the accepted canon of the community of the twenty-second century is likely to look very different from the canon of today. I would go further and predict that the bulk of the new material forming that future canon has yet to be written.

Those predictions may be far astray from what eventuates but the core point is that theoretically they are possible. Scripture is what we make scripture. It is not a given, set in stone for all time. Further, there is already an existing model, in the different canons of the Old Testament as accepted by Catholics and by Protestants, to suggest that there is no reason why elements of the church that have moved into the culture of the global era may not forge for themselves a new canon, leaving the counter-culture churches to continue with the old.

## 18. Theory of God

I hear a good joke and I laugh spontaneously. I take the joke and analyse it to explore and understand and theorise why I found it funny. The theory I come up with is sound and solid. The joke, however, no longer strikes me as funny. I do not laugh when I hear it so it has ceased to be a joke for me.

That is the essence of the dilemma we face when we theorise about God. The instant we make God an object to analyse and examine, however sound and solid the result of our theorizing, we have lost our 'knowing' of God. That is why there is a world of difference between the theologian and the saint: an illiterate peasant may know more that a doctor of divinity. As a young parish priest, it came as a shock to recognise that many of my parishioners 'knew' God much more than I did. This is the point of the message buried in the story of Jesus: it was articulated in the opening chapter of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians.

Yet we cannot escape the challenge to theorise our understanding of God. The issue is not our personal relationship with God but how this relationship is communicated to the world. The model, perhaps, is that of the stand-up comedian who has to keep an audience laughing continuously for an hour or more, night after night. To achieve that, the comedian has to understand first what it is that makes people laugh. Behind the light-hearted performance lies serious theorising.

Behind the theorising, however, lies something of immense importance. I would draw a parallel to writing for publication a book of analysis and theory about my half-a-century relationship with my wife. The first and immediate issue is permission, for I would be violating that nature of our relationship if I were to expose it to public scrutiny without her permission. The second is that I could never, even with all the most sophisticated tools of analysis, capture what that relationship means and convey it in a way that expresses it fully. Third, I cannot stand outside the relationship and see it with an objective eye. I cannot even distinguish between the relationship and my sense of self. Finally, the entire relationship itself rests upon a bed of belief that is so integral to who I am, who we are, that I cannot imagine the relationship outside of that belief system.

First, then, the permission. This is to be found partly in the tradition itself because, from its beginnings with Jeremiah just over six centuries before Christ, to the present, the driving imperative has been to tell people about God. To tell requires an understanding, a theory. The permission is also in part experienced in the relationship itself. In fact, it is experienced as more than permission but as commission and an empowering with its heart being both in prayer and in the facility to theorise and express. For me, the act of theorizing is something that transcends an objectifying of God and becomes a core part of my relationship with God, and engagement with self-revelation.

As to any idea of being able to reduce God to a theory, forget it. I would not even dare to try to express the theory of God in an equation. The most profound set of words ever written of the nature of God are to be found in the book of Exodus, "I am who I am". When John's gospel puts into Jesus' mouth the words, "to have seen me is to have seen the Father", we have the encapsulated the issue that is especially acute in our time as we recognize that we know next to nothing with any factual confidence of the person of Jesus. John wrote more than he knew.

The third issue is objectivity. There is no place to stand whereby we can exercise objective judgment about what is and what is not a valid theory of God. Neither the scriptures nor the teaching of any church authority, however strong and august, can provide such an objective place of judgment.

Returning to the theory of marriage, if I was charged with producing a theory, I know I could only generate a theory that both did justice to my experience of marriage but was also limited by that experience. It is possible to stretch those limits in that I could see a way to embrace same-sex marriage at least to a point. I could embrace a theory that allows a marriage to end and free partners to enter a new relationship even though both of these situations go beyond my immediate experience. What I cannot do, by any stretch of the imagination, is conceive a theory of marriage that was polygamous or multi-partnered. I can formally recognise that a theory can be constructed to embrace polygamy or even group marriage, but any such theory I cold not reconcile with my personal experience of the intimacy of marriage, so, for me, it could never be a legitimate theory.

So with anything about God: it is this that makes theology so very different from theories about the world of nature, at least above the quantum level. It is quite possible to develop a theory of God that is wholly impersonal or some kind of abstract life-force: "May the Force be with you". Because my experience of God is intensely personal, I cannot embrace such a theory as encompassing my experience, my 'data'. It is possible to theorise, as does Islam, that God/Allah is a remote law-giver, demanding absolute obedience to a set of rules, but, again, this does not accord with my experience of God. And so on. This is not saying that I am right, any more that I am saying that my theory of marriage is right. It is saying that each and every person comes to the theory with a perspective and can only embrace a theory that encompasses their perspective.

The huge challenge that faces global humanity is to find a theory of God that can be embraced communally that allows for all the different perspectives. This has to be far more than a glib overriding of differences often heard – "We're all going to the same place", "We all worship the one God".

As the murderous progress of the Islamic State testifies, or the people impoverished by the predations of the Prosperity Gospel, or those preyed upon by Scientology, it does matter what people believe about God. The state of Israel could never have come into existence without a belief that God had promised this land to the Hebrews in perpetuity. Statistically, there is a direct relationship between the abandonment of Christian commitment and the decline in voluntary service in the community.

Theologian Paul Tillich used the language of 'ultimate concern' to express his theory of God and this may seem a remote and intellectual concept, meaning little in practice. In practice, though, it may indeed prove to be the key to a viable global theory. I served as the sole chaplain to a psychiatric hospital for around ten years. In that situation, I was called to relate to every patient in the hospital, whatever their religious belief or non-belief. It was in this environment that I found a workable theory, the concept that 'God' was whatever a person held as the central, core value in their lives. Every person, every society, has such a central value. That value is 'God/god', however it is identified and whatever its content. It is that person's 'ultimate concern' and shapes everything else in life.

The theory is useful at a pastoral level and does provide us with a means to theorise a universal 'religious' centre in all people. However, its limitation is that is does not confer legitimacy. A mother may see her children as her central value, her 'god', but that does not mean that I have to acknowledge that her value is valid, either theoretically or pastorally. In fact, its main value in the pastoral setting of the chaplaincy lay in exposing how destructive such values could be to a person's well-being and often lay at the heart of psychiatric conditions. Equally, that mother may see my central value as meaningless.

There is no possible theory of God that can ever command universal acceptance and unite global humanity. We have to come back to the cultural grasp of not knowing, even behind our certainties. The only answer is one that arises out of our culture and that serves the culture. In a sense, my experience in the psychiatric hospital does provide that answer. For the majority of patients, the hospital was their long-term living environment, their 'culture' (such hospitals no longer exist in New Zealand) and that culture demanded from the chaplaincy a universal embrace. To serve the hospital demanded a theory of God that enabled the chaplain to relate personally to all (leaving open the right of any patient to refuse and reject that relationship). The culture of the institution both demanded a theory of this universal nature and authenticated my delivery.

It is global culture that demands and authenticates a theory of God that serves the imperatives that drive global culture. We are already seeing the process in action on a global scale. The world of global culture rejects as inauthentic, even among most Muslims, the exclusiveness of the radicals fighting for the Islamic State. A generation ago, this occurred, also, with the world's rejection of South Africa's apartheid, a race theory that was rooted in the Calvinistic theology of the Dutch Reformed Church. The rejection of apartheid was a global rejection of a theory of God. It is culture that ultimately decides what theories are authenticated and what are not. This is the painful lesson that both the Catholic Church and the evangelicals are discovering today. It matters not a whit what the Bible or canon law says.

## 19. Theory of Church

Among Christians worldwide, there is no agreement as to the theory of the church even if there is agreement that 'church' is a fundamental element in being Christian. To some, 'church' and 'the church' as a visible organized institution, are one and the same, meaning that non-members of 'the church' are not members of 'church' and therefore not Christian. For others, church is just a convenient collection of individual Christians who go where they are best served. As with the theory of God, it is culture that decides what theory of church is authenticated. In the global world, the very concept of a religious collective of any kind may be meaningless, while religious assemblies of a permanent or temporary nature may be understood in manifold ways.

Global culture, then, will resolve the question of what concept of church may be seen as authentic. The emergence of global culture will see the emergence of a broad consensus about the form in which its religious spirituality manifests itself. The culture needs religion to serve its needs, as explored earlier. This cannot be done by exclusivist religious bodies, whatever their theology, for they divide the cultural community and work to dominate it rather than serve it. On the other hand, individualistic religion, which is always about serving self rather than the community, is intrinsically inauthentic to global culture.

Christianity has traditionally taken its various theories of being church from the New Testament with some references back to the Old Testament. Many of these theories may continue to be deeply meaningful, as, for example, the theory of the Body of Christ. Many of the traditional theories, however, do not stand up to scrutiny or are meaningless metaphors in the contemporary world.

What the global world calls for today as a matter of high urgency is a theory of 'church' (whatever term we use for it) that can form the foundation for a global spiritual community that can serve the needs of the culture. In a real sense, the word to Christians from the global world is, cut out the crap and get on with it.

At its core meaning, church is the translation of ecclesia, Greek for assembly, while 'religion' is derived from the Latin religio meaning, to bind together. Perhaps the most basic meaning of church is the assembly of people who are bound together by spiritual connection.

Essentially, what global culture is demanding, because it is necessary to its survival, is the binding together of the human community that can be expressed in its assembly. This demands more, much more, than a vague, anything goes, religious 'spirituality'. Today's Western penchant for being 'spiritual' accomplishes nothing beyond giving a feel-good factor that emerges as complacency on the one hand or idealism on the other and saps the energy from dealing with the real issues of our day.

For better or for worse (and it is always ambiguous), 'church' needs outward form, institutional presence. Church has to perform critical functions in cultural society and can only do that if it has outward and defined substance. There has been widespread rejection in Western society of institutional religion, a rejection that is continuing. It is understandable and even justified because across the whole spectrum of traditions, the institutions had become alien to the emerging culture, connected to the old culture, were essentially about self-centred aims of its members: dying with the old cultures. Although new forms of Christianity have emerged in recent generations, they have overwhelmingly drawn their constituency and energy from the counter-culture and become identified with the rejection of global culture. Catholicism appeared to open up to the new under the leadership of John XXIII but that opening was shut down by his successors, until the advent of Francis, who may yet re-open that church to the new culture, but is facing still opposition from powerful elements in the hierarchy.

The fundamental for any viable theory of the church is that the community is bonded together by some transcendental reality that creates community, a community that breaks down the barriers that divide person from person, community from community. This, and only this, can be authentic 'church' in a global community. That global community is comprised of a vast spectrum of regional cultures, ethnicities, economic disparities and social mores and institutions. 'Church' has to be the place where all can assemble and know their oneness, their global identity, and the fundamental aims and values they share. That oneness has to allow for a wide variety of beliefs and practices, not an imposed uniformity of rule and authority.

Perhaps the most controversial element in the theory is that it demands global unity, raising the feared scepter of super-church and of the corruption of religion when it becomes powerful and supreme. The theory, therefore, challenges the notions of religious authority as being 'lord' over social order, over the culture. The theory of church says it exists to serve the culture not be lord over the culture.

For Christianity, that thinking is already deeply embedded in its self-understanding, even if needing to be taken to new depths of appreciation. Servanthood is a key element in its self-understanding of being church. However, Christianity has a major challenge to align itself to the new culture.

What does 'church' need to provide to culture?

  1. It has to provide a sense of bond that transcends all outward divisions, and symbols and rituals that manifest that unity in outward form.

  2. It has to be the place where the core values that are essential to the survival and thriving of the culture are articulated, defended and transmitted to each new generation, by internalising those core values in the participants in the culture.

  3. It has to provide community modeling for the values of the culture for what cannot be achieved in this modeling is unlikely to be achieved in the wider society.

  4. It has to be the primary source of wisdom, reflection and far-seeing in society, able to look beyond the immediate pressures and see clearly what is happening at the deeper levels of life.

  5. It is the generator of the meta-narrative of global society, the place where its story is recounted and celebrated.

  6. It is the core of resilience in crisis and tough times, the source of hope, the support of values that are under attack, the care of victims not only of injustice but also of the hard decisions that every society has to make and inevitably creates those who lose.

  7. It has to be the prophetic body standing against abuse of power and privilege, caring for the weak and vulnerable. It also stands against the tides of popular will fed by wishful thinking, idealism, ideology or demagoguery. To be church is always to be in opposition to one form or another for these manifestations, rarely 'popular', constantly subject to rejection, despised and even crucified.

## 20. Theory of Jesus

It may seem odd, in terms of the kind of structure created by traditional systematic theology, to be placing the theory of Jesus after the theory of the church and at the end of the whole exposition. From the perspective of culture, and specifically from global culture, the issue of a need for a spiritual community that serves the culture and binds the people together precedes the question about the nature of that community. I am well aware that, in classical Christian theology, it is the Christ who creates the church, not culture. Which way round we see the process depends upon the question we ask of reality. The question we are asking comes from the perspective of culture and seeks a theory that may govern the nature of a global spiritual community.

If we follow the theoretical constructs to this point, we have a single global culture emerging, created by the need for a global response to the threats to humanity coupled with new knowledge that has made the old cultures redundant: that such a single culture can only be sustained by a consensus about spirituality: that spirituality necessarily takes on an outward and visible form because it has a functional role as servant to the culture and that role can only be met by some form of organised institutional shape. The critical question then arises as to what character can/will such a form take. The question as to the 'can' and the 'will' are logically distinct, yet in practice not so clearly distinguishable.

In abstract, 'can' is wide open as seen from the perspective of culture. The limits of the 'can' are the limits of authenticity to the needs of the culture, the ability to service the requirements outlined in the previous section. That humanity has generated many religious forms over the last few thousand years means that theoretically the question of what can be humanity's spiritual underpinning is able to be resolved in many ways, including ways beyond our current imagination.

When we bring together 'can' and 'will', however, we recognise that the issue as we face it puts practical limitations on 'can'. The first and dominant limitation is time. Essentially, global humanity faces just five possibilities regarding its spirituality. One is the imperial victory of one religion over all others, Christianity and Islam being the only real contenders for this particular throne. The second is that one of today's minor religions suddenly enters and captures the world stage: Bahai or Hare Krishna or Mormonism, for examples. The third option is a syncretic merger of all major religions, a project often attempted, never with any success. The fourth option is the creation of an entirely new religion and the fifth is the triumph of a non-religious ideology that is itself, in reality, a religion, or apes religion in that it has to serve the purposes for a culture that religion provides.

The problem is that none of these solutions can succeed, even if they were to prove themselves authentic, in the time-frame that humanity has if it is going to turn back the catastrophe threatening to engulf it. The Islamic world is not going to turn Christian in a generation, nor the Christian world Islamic. It may take generations for a new religion to take root, even if its appearance on the historical stage may be dramatic. Ideologies such as communism and materialism may dominate for a period but their essential shallowness and abuse eventually undermines them and they vanish.

What is happening, however, is that traditional religions are disintegrating from within as the cultures to which they have been attached disintegrate and their inability to provide answers to contemporary dilemmas becomes more and more apparent. The process of internal disintegration is already well advanced in Christianity and has been going on for centuries. The movements that tried to reverse the process in the last third of the twentieth century have all but burned out. The rise of Christianity in Africa and Asia, for a while hailed as the future dynamic for Christianity, is looking more and more like a sociological phenomenon that will not endure, being built on foundations of wishful thinking.

While Islam experienced an explosion of energy over the last generations, fueled by anger at the Palestinian situation and by massive funding from oil, it is becoming more and more apparent that it is experiencing the same challenging forces that reshaped Christianity, as millions of Islamic young people now access material on the internet and through social media that was never previously available. Islam may be going through a process that Christianity has undergone, but doing it in decades, even years, not centuries. The Islam that today's young people will eventually lead and determine will be different in every fundamental aspect from the Islam as practiced today; as different as today's Christians are from their eighteenth century predecessors. The same dynamics will be happening in Eastern Orthodoxy and in Indian and Chinese religions.

So what we are observing is that, on the one hand, no realistic possibility appears to be on that can offer the global world a unifying spirituality, and, on the other hand, the spiritual foundations across all societies are decaying and collapsing. In the West, the vacuum is being largely filled by shallow and vacuous ideological materialism that can prove no foundation of any enduring cultural response.

Of all the possibilities facing humanity, only from within Christianity is there any possibility of a creative answer. This has nothing whatever to do with 'rightness', whatever Christians (and I include myself) may think that it is 'the truth'. It holds the answer because it has a history of cultural adaptation and because it has discovered within itself the secret of change and adaption.

Christianity was born into the world of Semitic culture and thought and its key documents are cast in that culture. Yet even its pre-Jesus manifestation in Hebrew life embraced a history of radical change and adaption, the most dramatic being the adoption of Babylonian religion during the exile. Virtually every aspect of Hebrew religion from the exile onward is of Babylonian/Assyrian origin: worship, prophecy, law, history, wisdom – all are Babylonian/Assyrian, overlaid with Persian concepts.

From the end of the fourth century BC, the struggle was with Hellenism, the reaction taking the form of the emergence of the Torah and its central place in Hebrew life. In this context, Christianity can be seen as the triumph of Hellenistic culture, the act of cultural adaptation of the Semitic world-view to the new cultural milieu, in the process breaking out from the constrictions of the old culture and generating something new. The apostolic era that gave rise to most of the New Testament documents was the period of transition and this was completed over the new few centuries including further cultural modifications as the church moved from the Greek to the Latin era in the West. In the East, Christianity underwent a transition to the culture of Byzantium and Eastern Orthodoxy, while in the West the great shift occurred in the tenth century to the cultural world of Western Europe. Each of these shifts involved a profound reshaping of Christianity as it adapted to serve the new cultural environment. Over recent generations, Christianity has been changing once again to adapt to global culture. In this, it is doing nothing more than it has always done since its inception in seventh century BC Palestine.

When we recognise this, two things immediately stand out. The first is that both Judaism and Islam, together with their various offshoots, share the same origins and walked for many centuries the same path. Christianity's capacity to change was not born after these paths separated but before, at the very outset of the journey together. The 'genes' of change are as much in Judaism and Islam as they are in Christianity. Although I will enter here into a highly speculative and unproved area of historical research, I will push the thought a crucial step further. It appears highly probable that the impulse to radical change that gripped the Yahwists of mid-seventh century BC Palestine came from India and the momentous change that was taking place in thought on the sub-continent as the idea of the divine as ethical took hold, transforming Indian religion. The gene of change may be as inherent in Eastern as in Western religion, the same gene.

The second thing is that Christianity holds a key that unlocks the door of a global spirituality and that key is the figure of Jesus. The person of Jesus, if we put aside the many different interpretations of his life, is significant not only in Christianity but in Judaism and Islam and recognised as a teacher in many Eastern religions. Jesus is the one common factor creating a connection across most of the world's spiritual manifestations. If there is ever going to emerge in practice a common spirituality – and the survival of humanity rests on that possibility – it is the figure of Jesus that will create a common bond and community.

What is needed, then, above all else, is a theory of Jesus that can facilitate global community.

The revolution in the theory of Jesus stems from the reality that we can no longer extrapolate any theory from the scriptural texts as being in any way determinative. Nor may we take any historical resolution as governing our theory, not even that of the Ecumenical Councils. We have no option but to ask, separately, the two questions, physical and spiritual, without expecting a single coherent theory to meerge that embraces both answers.

The physical question can only be answered by physical inquiry, recognising the limits of our ability ever to kow the past, especially the ancient past. We also have to be aware of our presuppositions when we make factual judgements of the past. We may instinctively reject stories of virgin birth, miracles and resurrection, yet if we do so, it is only because we bring a set of presuppositions to the table. It is possible to arrive at much more conservative judgements and still be authentic. What is inauthentic to our present culture is where we insist that such judgements are governed by authorities.

When we ask the physical question, the answer has not only to embrace the life of Jesus, but the impact he made on his society and on subsequent societies. Of high significance to global spirituality is the issue of the extent to which the figure of Jesus is to be found across a wide range of religious traditions outside the standard Christian fold.

When we ask the spiritual question of Jesus, and seek to develop theory out of the data that emerges, an entirely different set of data and issues is engaged. The anchor to that question cannot be the scriptural texts of what any specific form of the ecclesia has adopted as its orthodox teaching. It can only be our inner experience of 'Jesus', though that experience is illuminated by scripture and teaching. This illuminative process means, however, that people embedded in different traditions will internally 'experience Jesus' differently. This fact has to be a bed-rock of any theory of Jesus. We cannot extrapolate the 'Jesus we know', however real and powerful it may be to us, and make it a starting pint for orthodoxy in others.

Over the centuries, Christianity has had many different spiritual theories of Jesus. The Jesus of the late medieval era is unrecognisable to us today, even to conservative Catholicism. We are not, however, in any position to challenge the authenticity of the medieval theory for its own time.

In our modern experience, different ecclesiastical traditions, even within a single congregation, generate very different understandings of Jesus. For myself, I am unable to enter into the inner experience of Jesus as held by my Baptist, Pentecostal, some Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox co-religionists. Whatever theory I may hold of Jesus may not resonate as authentic to them, in return. In the past, we argued incessantly as to who was 'right', with the presumption that anyone not holding that 'right' theory was 'wrong'. This is still the way of the sects today. Perhaps the most extraordinary advance that Christianity has experienced oer the last half century has been in its capacity to find community, and a communality of 'Jesus', that transcends all our various – and sometimes seemingly incompatible – theories of Jesus.

This becomes the fundamental for a theory of Jesus that translates into global culture and can become a foundation for a global spirituality. The path to global spirituality does not lie in conversion to Christianity in its orthodox forms, whatever the sense of evangelistic enterprise and missionary endeavour. It is not going to happen (insofar as we can foretell anything about the future). The imperative of a global spirituality, however, leads through the physical question that exposes the place that the figure of Jesus has in global religion and brings to bear the recognition, practically being worked out today within the Christian community, that the person of Jesus has a unifying power that transcends any specific theory about him. The fact that some one who comes from an Islamic or Jewish or Buddhist tradition interprets Jesus differently from someone coming from orthodox Christianity is essentially no different from the various ways Christians themselves differ in their theory. Jus as the figure of Jesus, variously understood and experienced, unifies the Christian community across a vast range of traditions, so the figure of Jesus, variously understood and experienced, stands as a unifying figure across the spectrum of global spirituality.

# Part V – Practice

Having a theory is not 'knowing'. If theory is never put into practice or put to a practical test, it remains for ever and only a theory. We can only say that we know a theory, but we cannot determine whether the theory is or is not valid. This is the core problem with much traditional theology, especially with all theology that has to do with eschatology. If we discount the post-resurrection narratives of the gospels as being factually flawed, and the various 'back from death' stories that surface from time to time as more likely to have a physical than a spiritual explanation, no one has come back from death to provide any real data on what, if anything, lies beyond death that may involve our consciousness. All we have to go on is the many and varied theories / theologies and speculations of life beyond the grave, including the theory that asserts there is nothing beyond death other than physical decomposition. We have no practical implementation against which we can test the credibility of any of our theories. We know nothing about what may or may not lie beyond death.

It is, perhaps, the next most radical impact upon theology, following the fundamental perception that we know nothing absolutely and finally, that we cannot say we 'know' anything that cannot be demonstrated in practice, even allowing for the inevitable ambiguities. The old notion that knowing could be based on conformity to scripture or orthodox church teachings is no longer sustainable in any form, so the only theology that is able to move from theory towards being known is what can be translated into practice, however ambiguous the practice, analysis and interpretation. The implications flowing from this perception are vast, and not only in the area of eschatology. They touch on every aspect of traditional theology.

The next part of the development of the thesis is focused, then, on putting the theories that have been developed into practice. The thesis is that global culture requires a global spirituality if it is to be successful in enabling humanity to face the challenges of today and the future. The process began with gathering data, proceeded to generate models that made sense of the data, then to theories that developed out of the models.

Now we must face the question of what can be done to put the theory into practice. In doing that, I take it as axiomatic that, from whatever strand of tradition and ecclesiology we come from, we are seeking to maintain continuity with the community of which we are currently part and not seeking to establish some new religious body or organisation, still less, a new religion. It may well be that the theoretical and practical direction in which we are travelling is in radical discontinuity to the orthodoxy or formal structures of our faith community, even to our cultural community. However, the tide of change is happening within the traditional structures and communities and the most effective and important changes are what happens within.

## 20. Not knowing and certainty

The most basic 'action' is the recognition that we know nothing: that we are culturally connected to global culture, whatever that may be. That does not mean a physical disconnection with the community of the old culture, still less that we abandon the old traditions. It is first and foremost a change in our thinking, the embrace of a new paradigm. Within ourselves, this will already have occurred, if only for the reason that anyone who has reached this point in the process has long since embraced the paradigm of global culture.

The challenge, though, is to effect this reorientation in the institutional forms that religions take. In Western Christianity in particular, Catholic and Protestant, the basic heritage has been derived from St Augustine and has resulted in a 'closed mind' approach to religious truth and that truth has been embodied in dogmatic propositions. That tradition is crumbling from within. The great moral debates of the last generation around sexual and gender relationships and abortion have not really turned on the issues themselves but upon the question of knowing. The conservative camp, evangelical and Catholic, have fought for the absoluteness of knowing, the church, variously understood by different sectors, being the institution that 'knows' absolutely. It is a much wider debate that the authority of the Bible, as demonstrated by the stance on abortion which rests only tenuously on the Bible and is fundamentally about the authority of the Vatican magisterium. The Catholic Church has put its entire theological credibility on the table over the abortion issue. When and where it loses the battle it loses everything. The vast majority of Catholics in the Western world have already abandoned any pretense of embracing the orthodox line, not only on abortion but the entirety of absolutist claim. Evangelicism, meanwhile, is in sharp decline from its peak of influence and energy in the last decade of the twentieth century. The young, even when they continue to identify as evangelicals, are rejecting the idea of rigid certainty.

Anglicanism world wide has struggled over the last generation to hold its communion together, the fault line being the issue of knowing. The effort to create a covenant that fixed the boundaries of knowing and not knowing failed to gain a consensus and lapsed. Of all the various institutional forms of Christianity, Anglicanism is now most effectively a church that embraces 'not knowing'.

The shift from knowing to not knowing has immense practical consequences at every level. At the personal level, it changes the whole character of our spirituality. Doubt now becomes a fundamental and central element in faith and all forms of personal spirituality and vocation: not something to overcome, controlled, beaten and suppressed, even a sin, but part of the spiritual air we breath. We do not know there is anything corresponding to 'God'. Even our certainty about encountering God, about grace, could be a complete illusion, a product of wish fulfilment and selective interpretation. At a practical, day-by-day, level, the active Christian is constantly stepping out and trusting in God's grace, and every time the question is, is this for real? In reality, we don't have a clue about whether prayer has any effect whatsoever, and if it does, how, why, what, where? We have no answers. Even if we are confident that, as historical fact, the man Jesus lived, we do not know what he said or did, whether he really rose from the dead and even whether he has any significance whatsoever. We do not know.

This turns traditional Christianity in all its forms upside-down. The central idea of the past was that entry to heaven when we died was wholly dependent on believing these things, knowing them to be true, committing our whole lives to that absolute truth. Everything rested on belief. Now we don't even know if there is a heaven at all, anything of an eschatological nature, so the traditional evangel no longer has any meaning or power. It may well be true. Yet here is the critical point: is it conceivable that 'God' would make eternal salvation to heaven dependent upon a cultural framework that predicated certainty in knowing? To maintain the old certainty, we have to deny validity to our culture, global culture. This is a mental impossibility once we have made the paradigm shift, for we cannot re-enter a paradigm from which we have shifted. It is a one-way road. The only possible way of maintaining the illusion of belonging to the old paradigm and its culture is through fanaticism or through the investment of immense energy in propping up the illusion by means of intense and ongoing religiosity.

Religiously today, we are in a transitional mode. We may have made the move through the paradigm portal, but the institutions to which we belong still express themselves in the forms and language of the old culture, especially in liturgy and hymnody. The scriptures, meanwhile, are rooted in cultures that are many times removed from where we are. Most clergy sermons in church show little awareness of the culture shift that has occurred.

Moral and political debates, where religious perspectives are involved, still tend to revolve around variant interpretations about what the scriptures say, so that even proponents of change seek to justify their positions by connecting them to the authority of scripture as if the scriptures are determinative. The radical break that needs to happen will come when we can be open to the recognition that none of the writers in the Bible had any more knowing than we possess. They have no more authority to determine right and wrong than we have within ourselves. This determination embraces everything attributed to Jesus himself. It is one of the great grace-gifts of the Holy Spirit, as I see it, that we have no direct record of Jesus. It is conceivable that nothing he is recorded as having said and done bears any resemblance to what he actually and historically said and dd. We do not know. The ancient texts do not control us, either in our beliefs or in our moral choices.

So the church today is faced with a basic issue of honesty and integrity. There is today, in the institutional churches of every kind, from shop-front sect to the global reach of Catholicism, a lack of integrity and honesty. This is a basic contradiction to everything it seeks to say about God and the gospel. Anyone in the church with an education, especially a theological and scriptural education, knows inherently that there is no certainty and no knowing, yet they maintain the pretence of knowing because that is where the energy has been, where the bums on seats come from and the money to keep the churches functioning.

The cost of the church's cynical manipulation of the vulnerable has been the loss of respect from the people in society who see through the church and recognise its lack of integrity. The crisis created by the pedophile issues in the Catholic Church was an opportunity for the bulk of the population to give focus and expression to its recognition that, at a much deeper level than the pedophile scandal, the church had lost its moral authority because it was dishonest at its most basic levels. The root of its dishonesty lies in its inability to come to terms with the cultural change than now governs society.

The first and most basic change the church must address, therefore, is to face, with honesty and integrity, the cultural shift that has taken place around it and within it. We cannot any longer pretend that we have the old certainties. There is no past authority, whether scripture, council or church court, that ever had the power to determine anything as certain and beyond challenge or question.

Equally, however, we ourselves know nothing. If absolutism of past authority is one danger, absolutism of present determinations is an equal danger. We can fall under the illusion that we have arrived at absolute certainties, thinking that we can bind the future because we, unlike our predecessors 'know'.

## 22. Knowing and Certainty

If the intellectual foundation of our culture and any religious expression that is authentic to that culture is that we know nothing absolutely, it is equally true that in our practical living we have to 'know' and have confidence in our knowing. We have to have certainty. The apparent contradiction is not real in practice. At a formal level, the scientist does not know absolutely that planet earth is a sphere, but for practical purposes there is neither doubt nor serious question.

Life is lived around certainties, not uncertainties, whether we are speaking of individuals, communities or churches. Some certainties are close to being absolutes for us, while at the other end of the spectrum, they tremble at the brink of paralysing uncertainty. We live with the whole spectrum.

The core problem for the church in our day is that most of the old certainties have been downgraded to uncertainty. In some situations, the certainties have even reversed completely in that what previously believed or practiced with certainty we now believe or practice the opposite, with equal certainty. We are not talking just about peripheral issues or changes in moral choices. The shift in certainties goes to the heart of the entire theological and spiritual structure. Certainty about heaven as the destiny for Christian 'souls' after death has been replaced by a widespread rejection of the entire concept of soul and by disbelief in any form of afterlife, changing the whole concept of the gospel message in the process. Belief in the Virgin Birth, the miracles of Jesus, the factual bodily resurrection and ascension, have almost completely disappeared. Certainty about a theistic God who lives 'beyond the sky' has turned into certainty that there is no such Being, a certainty as prevalent within the Christian community as it is outside its boundaries.

For the last two generations, conservative religions, evangelical, Pentecostal, Catholic and Islamic, have thrived on maintaining the old certainties in the face of emerging global culture. They have drawn energy from resistance to change and exploitation of the anxieties that the change has been producing. The root of those anxieties relates to the collapse of the certainties around which people, individually and communally, have built their lives for generations. We cannot live without certainty and the initial impact of the cultural change and the religious developments associated with it, was to undermine the certainties and seemly to cast all adrift on the featureless ocean of relativity.

The second key action, then, as the church adjusts to the new cultural milieu, is that we find our new certainties while not losing hold on the recognition of radical uncertainty. The path to that end lies in the grasp of the knowing process.

The challenge we face as a church is to rethink our theology and practice in every area, from our theology of God to our moral, liturgical, pastoral, social and spiritual theology. Nothing stands as certain, known, unchallengeable, even if it is embodied in creed, conciliar decisions, scripture or canon law. We have to rethink everything from top to bottom.

This is the work of a generation and not of any individual alone. It is a work that can only be done in and by the church. By that, I mean that it cannot be undertaken by academics who stand outside the church community, whatever their status and qualifications. It is a process that requires the best of scholarship but is not a product of scholarship.

The process is what has been sketched out through each section of this book and underlies its whole structure. Everything we think we know, including everything we are told we should know, needs to be seen as hypothesis and no more than hypothesis, initiating a process of accumulating data, generating models, theorising from the models, exploring in practice, evaluating what comes out of the practice – and only then can we come to a place of knowing. Yet the instant we know, the process recommences because the knowing generates new data, leading to new or refined models ... without end. The new data may even lead us eventually to reject the knowing we originally arrived at.

The most dramatic practical difference between the old and the new approach to theology and spirituality is that the new can never rest on any sense of attaining unchallengeable certitude. Everything is always in process.

There is, however, a paradox in this. The first task of the theological and spiritual rebuilding is one of finding the bedrock of certainty upon which the foundations for a new theological structure can be built. The old theology found its bedrock in certainty about the revelatory authority of ancient texts, creeds, councils and, for some traditions, canon law or confessional statements. These sources may still command respect (I read most of the Bible through every year), and they can even inspire and challenge and provide wisdom, but they have all been stripped of their old commanding authority. An authentic theology can no longer be built upon them or justified by appeal to them.

The only authenticating foundation for theology today lies in what we know within ourselves, within our own lives and the life of the community. This comes back to the core issue that we can only know anything if it has been tested in practice. This is why authentic theology can only happen in the church community and by the church community. Theology is developed by living it, not by thinking it. Theology is only valid if it is manifest in life.

For myself, the bedrock of everything is the lived experience of grace. By grace, I mean that, parallel to living life in the physical realm of natural cause and effect, I experience the whole of life as being given what I need, when and where and how I need it, and always creatively, even in the negativities of experience. Grace is not an occasional gift, still less something to be received after death, but characterises the entirety of life in the universe, of my life, and always in overflowing abundance.

I could say that I have two certainties that are close to being absolutes. So close are they to being absolutes that I cannot conceive of the possibility of abandoning these certainties. The one is my sureness of the 'nature of nature' as revealed in the scientific enterprise and consistent with every moment of living. The other certainty, lived in parallel even though radically distinct from the physical perspective, is of grace. Whatever theology I may construct, it has no authenticity if it violates either of those certainties. While I cannot embrace creationism because it violates the physical integrity of the universe, neither can I embrace secular materialism that denies the reality of grace. Nor can my certainty of grace be dismissed as mere 'belief' because it has been tested over and over again, endlessly, in practical life experience. It is as fully 'data' as anything in the physical realm.

Theology cannot be delivered full-grown and mature. It emerges incrementally over time, both in individuals and communities. This is what we seen happening in history, from the first glimmering of religious perceptions, glimmerings that date back hundreds of thousands of years, through the real story of the Hebrew people and the wider story of world religions, to the church though the ages and the experiences of the last century. Theology builds on cycle upon cycle of knowing, often going down paths that lead to dead ends, to 'not knowing'. It has become one of our basic learnings that we find ourselves able to trust the process and not get hung up on being 'right'. Even dead-ends always have their creative side – become manifestations of grace.

Grace is always ambiguous. Everything we may count as grace can also be interpreted in other ways. Grace is never self-evident as grace. There are no miracles that demand belief because they have no other explanation than God. This ambiguity is why we cannot build a mature theology upon the basis of a single experience such as a conversion moment or an ecstatic vision. For any and every individual experience there is always an alternative explanation, either or both physical and spiritual. God, if there is a God, could just be playing games with us, or have a secret malevolent purpose. The God of the creationists is, after all, a game-playing God who hides fossils in rocks to fool and confuse disbelieving scientists. Knowing grace is something that builds up over time and many experiences.

The second key path, then, in the process of change for the churches is that we bring every aspect of our theology and spirituality back into the knowing process, seeing everything as hypothesis and rebuilding what we know. The starting point for this process is the rediscovery of the bedrock upon which we can lay a new foundation.

## 23. Getting the story straight

If there is a measure of how great is the change that our cultural shift is creating for the Christian community, it lies in the story we have to tell. I recall a sermon, well-delivered and intelligent, that spoke of how "we Christians believe that Jesus will come again": "God's kingdom is going to be established in all its fullness." Which is absolute hooey in the realistic sense that the preacher meant it. The old story does not have any credibility and I doubt whether anyone present genuinely believed the eschatological story. Meanwhile, large sections of the Christian church continues to insist on the beginning of the story being in a 'Creator God', the theistic Being who snapped his (sic) fingers and everything came to be.

Bluntly stated, the traditional story of faith – creation, fall, revelation through the Hebrews, centred on the theophany at Sinai, the Virgin Birth of Jesus, his life of miracle working, his resurrection and ascension, the era of the church and the consummation at the end of time – this entire story has become radically unstuck. It no longer works. When preachers speak as I heard today, working on the assumption that Christian listeners are saying 'Amen' to the story, the church is living in la-la land, totally disconnected not only to the 'world' but also to where the majority of the believing community is in reality.

The preacher did recognise that we do not today live with anything approaching the urgency of the recipients of Paul's letters but in doing so the preacher completely missed the point. Whatever formal credence we may accord the eschaton, it has no practical impact or consequence for our lives or our faith, and that goes for any of us, conservative or otherwise. The story carries no weight.

The practical implications of this weightlessness is that we have no message that carries any weight or credibility in general society. We can preach what we think is the gospel until our face is blue and our lungs exhausted – or use up all our allocated data allowance – and we will have made no impact, except negatively, because our story has no credibility.

So the next practical step that the Christian community has to take is to get its story straight. To have any credibility whatsoever, our story today has to relate to what our hearers know to be true, knowing that has emerged from their knowing process.

#### The beginning

We do not need to waste time on the spurious idea of creationism. Intelligent Design (ID) is a more sophisticated notion but it is still an exercise aimed at rescuing theism and is in no way related to science nor is it an alternative to evolution. It is just an idea, noting more and should be treated as we may treat ideas such as reincarnation.

The basic shift that has taken place in our idea of God is that we no longer find it credible that there is a Being, a SuperBeing, with a reality external to the physical world. This does not mean that we do not utilise the concept of a Being for many purposes. Speaking for myself, I cannot imagine my spirituality in prayer and worship and my constant sense of presence and companionship, my trusting in grace, without resorting to the model of God as Being with whom I engage as I would with another human being. There are many occasions when I utilise the concept of the Creator God and I suspect it will remain a viable model for the indefinite future.

What no longer works or bears credibility is when we tell the story of our faith as embracing the universe with a central role assigned to a Creator God, whether or not we think of creation in a single moment of time or as happening continuously. The reason why this way of telling the story no longer works is that the vastness and complexity, and the minuteness of detail, in the universe defeats any credible notion of a 'mind' that creates each element like a craftsman, remaining external to the crafted object but responsible for everything. No one with any grasp of the evolutionary process can accord believability to the traditional Creator God concept except by the development of a schizoid mindset that puts scientific understanding and faith understanding in separate compartments.

In an earlier part of this book, I sketched out a model I utilise to resolve this dilemma. This model, and the theory that can be developed from it, may or may not connect with others, but that is not the point, at least for the present purpose. Whatever model the community embraces in encasing its story of the beginning, it has to achieve two things.

First, it has to make sense in the context of our knowing about the universe, its age, its vastness, its origins and its complexity, as well as the story of evolution, including how life began. Any story that we may concoct that does not ring true to this complex of knowing will carry no authority.

Second, it has to do justice to the world as we experience it today, not just in physics but also in grace. That I am physically and mentally (essentially the same thing) writing what I am writing has to be related to the nature of everything from the beginning. How we conceive the beginning shapes how we conceive the relationship of God to everything in the present.

The essence of the issue is this: we need to tell a story that, from the beginning of the universe, intimately integrates the spiritual and physical in such a way that, when we see the world as it is today, we can grasp the inherent integration of the physical and spiritual in ways that preserves the integrity of both.

#### The problem of evil

It has been said that the test of the power of any religion rests on how it deals with sorrow. I think the point is valid, both for the past but especially as going into our projected global future in which the scale of sorrow may exceed anything humanity has ever encountered. When times are good, as overall they have been for the Western world for the last two centuries, even given two world wars, the scale of sorrow lessens and the power of religion decreases in tandem. Over the past few generations, statistically Christianity has appealed mostly to the poor, the undereducated and the alienated and while this is partly due to their vulnerability to be exploited by religious proselytism, it also reflects the scale of sorrow that they experience relative to the rest of society.

However the faith story is told, one imperative is that it encompasses an understanding of suffering and sorrow and what meaning it has. Every religion that exercises any power within human life addresses this problem. The address does not come in the form of intellectual dissertation or philosophical reasoning. It comes first and foremost in the form of story. The theories follow.

The traditional Christian story placed the origin of suffering and sorrow in the sin of disobedience by our primal parents in the Garden of Eden. Hebrew tradition does not seem to have made very much of this story, which only appears very late in Hebrew history. Its prominence in the Christian story may date from Paul's exposition in the Letter to the Romans. Thereafter, it became an inherent element in the Christian faith story, explaining why the world created by God was not perfect, providing the basis for an analysis of what went wrong. From there, the 'Fall' story provided the basis for the next stages of the story, the path of redemption through the Abrahamic promise and its fulfilment in Jesus, leading to the restoration of the state of paradise at the end of the ages.

Outside the community of the biblical literalists, the Eden story has ceased to be of any account as part of the faith narrative and the consequences of this are severe. What has happened is that the entire structure of the story as one of redemption and restoration of paradise and immortality has been fatally undermined. The whole set of ideas that underpinned the traditional gospel has effectively disappeared, for the Adam and Eve story was an essential component of the narrative. That it is no longer believed means that nothing else stands up. We no longer credit the concept that humankind was created to be immortal, especially now that the idea of a 'soul' or a 'spirit' within out body has been discarded as a product of Greek philosophy, not even Biblical. We no longer believe in either an original or a future state of paradise. We do not believe that there was ever a time when humanity was unblemished in innocence, free from any taint of moral ambiguity, living in perfect harmony. We do not believe 'sin' entered the world through some event. In fact, we find it difficult in any shape or form to give reality to the concept of sin, let alone 'original sin'. The idea that an unbaptized baby is condemned by original sin to eternal damnation is an abomination. That God subjects the entirety of humanity to his wrath and judgement, as Paul makes out in Romans, make no sense to us at all.

All of this comes about because the story of Adam and Eve no longer has a place in the Christian faith story.

However we reshape the faith story today, it is imperative that it is able to embrace the reality and depth of suffering. It has to give us the framework for understanding suffering, provide a sense of meaning to suffering, but most of all, the path by which we can overcome suffering so that it does not destroy us.

The most critical element in the reshaped story lies in the importance of embedding the interpretation of suffering within the nature of reality, both physical and spiritual. It is no longer workable to tell the story in a mythical framework, not only the serpent in the garden myth but also the myth of Satan/devil or in terms of a dualistic theism or the battle between forces of 'light' and 'darkness'. There is no need to formulate any form of evil as an ontological reality. When we ask the physical question of the universe, suffering is clearly inherent in the process of the whole of reality and it could not be otherwise. There must be death in order for there to be life, whether we are talking in organic forms or the death and birth of stars. In physical reality there is no value, no good or bad, no forces of light and darkness. Everything just is and every physical manifestation is fleeting, even the stars and galaxies in the dimension of cosmic time and space. While there is no meaning, purpose or direction to the universe as physical, we can be captured by the vision that loss and death frees matter and energy to form something new in the universe. As a dying friend once said to me, 'I gazed at the Franz Joseph glacier in awe and imagined that one day an atom of me might form part of that glacier, and I thrilled at the thought.'

The so-called 'problem of suffering', captured so poignantly in the dialogues of the book of Job, is today barely a real problem at all because it was related to the conundrum posed by the incompatibility of the concept of the all-powerful and all-good theistic God, on the one hand, and the manifest state of the world and its suffering on the other. The problem was intensified by the dogma of a vengeful, wrathful God who visits terrible punishment on humans who dared to disobey his word, contrasting incompatibly with the vision of God as love.

When the story is told in its theistic form, the response from the world is one of dismissal, and this dismissal is not willful disbelief in 'God's word' but fully justified refusal to be taken in by what today is little short of being a con. The God that is so often put forward by Christians is 'less than human', and large swaths of the Bible convey ideas of God that need to be positively and strongly rejected by the church today. The story of Noah and the Flood is dearly loved by evangelicals and promoted as a children's story: this story of a genocidal God who makes Hitler look like a paradigm of virtue. Noah's God is the archetype for the evil genius of science fiction or the alien space invader of blockbuster movies.

#### The emergence of faith

The next stage in the faith story is the narrative of how our faith came into being. This element in the story is as important as any other part and a key to its credibility. For non-Mormons, whatever validity there may be to the insights contained in the Book of Mormon, the story of its creation so stretches credulity that the entirety suffers from incredulity. The whole of Judaism today is being undercut by the recognition that its foundational narratives, both the Abraham story and the Moses/Sinai/Covenant story have no historical basis. Islam is increasingly vulnerable to historical analysis of its origins in Mohammed, while Christianity has suffered the double blow of radical questioning of the Virgin Birth and the resurrection. What is happening to the narratives of the origins of faith today is parallel to what happened when the natural sciences challenged the tradition of the six-day creation.

We are aware today that barely a single element of the Old Testament narrative survives as history, with perhaps the single exception of the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and the subsequent exile. While fragments of historical memory may well be embedded in the tradition, for all practical purposes not a single event or description prior to the end of the seventh century and the advent of Jeremiah can be taken as other than fiction.

We can no longer tell the faith narrative within the framework of the story the Old Testament supposedly narrates. It may well be that the time has come for the Christian community to 'de-canonise' the Old Testament. It remains a sourcebook for scholars but little of it, beyond perhaps some of the classical prophets and a few of the psalms, has any genuine place in the liturgical lections.

If the Old Testament does not contain our faith story, it does play a central part in the telling, however. The story of the Hebrew people in history remains an essential element in our narrative even if the story we have to tell is vastly different from that projected in the Old Testament.

The story as we reshape it in our generation has three touchstones, of equal importance. The first of these is our understanding of history, natural processes and human dynamics, for the credibility of the story has to measured against credible factual bases. What emerges very strongly from this element of the narrative is the inseparable connection between the line of the story we may trace and the whole context of human culture, a story that embraces the cave art of 40,000 years ago to all the myths and legends of the manifold cultures of the world. More specifically, the story of our faith embraces the probability of its origins in India and the certainty that it was given its basic shape and content by the religion and cultures of Assyria, Babylon and Persia.

The second touchstone is the centrality of Jesus to our story. This is a faith story, not an objective 'history', even a history of religion. (There is no such beast, incidentally, as an objective history: historians are always telling a version of their faith story, however academic their standing). The image of Jesus as the keystone in an arch is relevant here if we imagine the progression of the story towards Jesus as the stones of an archway building towards the apex, the two sides of the arch locked together by the central keystone. If the keystone is absent, the whole archway collapses: equally, though, the keystone cannot hang suspended in the air, unsupported by the side-stones of the arch. The faith story that holds Jesus as central cannot stand unless the archway stones that support the keystone are in place. So the faith story does not stand without Jesus as its keystone but neither does the keystone of Jesus have any meaning without the story that leads into him and flows from him.

We can push the image a little further. If the stones of the archway leading up to the keystone are poorly placed or badly shaped, improperly cemented together – or indeed, missing altogether – then the keystone falls because it is not properly supported. If the story of Jesus is to have any authority in the message we speak to the world, the story not just of his life but what produced him has to stand up. Without Jesus, however, the structure does not stand at all.

The third touchstone is our inner experience of grace in our lives, in our personal and communal life story. This has two dimensions. The first is that the way we construct and tell the story needs to resonate with our own life experience of both grace and physics. If, in our experience, iron axe-heads do not float on water, the sun does not reverse its path across the sky and people do not walk on water, then we have no mandate to make such happenings part of our story of faith. More deeply, if our experience of grace tells us that God is not the avenging, wrathful, punishing potentate of many biblical texts, then these texts have no place in our story.

The reverse dimension is also true. My experience of grace is of constant surprise at what can only be called 'miracle', of the extraordinary nature of God's revelation, and the way in which stories, perceptions, theologies and moral imperatives do not have to be 'true' to be powerful, illuminating and means of grace. What is more, the grace I know makes it entirely credible that the Hebrew people, weak, vulnerable, wrong-headed and all the rest, would become the vehicle for God's revelation to the world.

Further, my experience of grace illuminates the way in which the revelation of grace comes constantly through non-religious, non-Christian channels, making the element in the story that tells of how non-Hebrew cultures and religions shaped and determined the Hebrew understanding as not only credible but essential.

#### Jesus

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the way we are challenged to rework our faith story lies in how we are needing to retell the story of Jesus. One of the unfortunate side-effects of the ecumenical adoption of the three-year cycle of liturgical readings has become the obsession of preachers with the exposition of the gospel narrative and the fixed position that the sermon has to be such an exposition. Preaching in the liturgy has become an endless and essentially boring sequence of "Jesus said" or "Jesus did", often stretching the imagination and the intellectual prowess to somehow relate these readings to reality. Apart from the boredom and the predictability, the issues are manifold beginning with the concept of the keystone unsupported in mid-air. Jesus has no relevance, either as a teacher or as a redeemer, if his story has no context before or after. The second problem is that the very events of the story in large measure carry no credibility as having happened in real time. It may still work with a small group of the faithful to speak of Jesus walking on water, turning water into wine and raising Lazarus, but when we build these into our 'witness' to the world we are laughed out of court.

The most decisive issue today, however, is that the world recognises that the accounts we have of Jesus' life are second, third and even fourth hand. Christians make much of being witnesses and we understand that for a witness to be credible the report he or she gives has to be first-hand. Hearsay is inadmissible. In times past, the view prevailed that the gospel writings were first-hand accounts from Jesus' disciples. Over the coming generation, a new story of Jesus will emerge that will drastically affect Christian understanding and practice. This is the 'stand or fall' issue for the entire Christian faith story, for this is the keystone holding everything together.

#### The time of the church

In the way the traditional faith story was told, from Jesus to the present and on through to the end of time, the only important story was and is the story of the church. The church is the ark of salvation, the gateway to eternity and ultimately the vehicle for the only thing of worth in life. Everything else is of no real worth at all. Humanity is being judged by its response to the story of the church and its message.

That entire concept rested on the foundation of eschatology, the end of the story, and of that we will address shortly. The world was sharply divided into Christians and pagans, the latter condemned to eternal damnation. The job of the church was to save the pagans from this fate.

Like every other part of the traditional faith story, the story of the church no longer stacks up. Leaving aside the issue of the eschatological perspective, we are far too conscious today of the ambiguity of the church, the manifest lack of integrity it displays at every level, the cynicism created by the abundance of sects on the one hand and the self-serving hierarchies on the other: the blind identification of the church with the mores and values of the old culture, stripping it of relevance and authority in the new cultural milieu. The myths by which it has operated and controlled power, Petrine or Protestant, have been exposed as being without foundation. Increasingly, people have come to the view that religion does more harm than good. Pedophile and financial scandals have robbed the church of moral authority.

The stunning success of Pentecostalism during the last century was largely because the Pentecostalists came up with a new narrative of the church that, for a time, seemed to bypass the old framework and filled the void created by the disillusionment with the old story. Unfortunately, the Pentecostal narrative itself was a distortion of history, both New Testament and subsequent, and has proved shallow and inadequate in practice.

The practical challenge for the church in our time is to tell a story that genuinely reflects reality, physical and spiritual, and with which people in the new culture can identify. For with the telling of the story of the church comes an entirely new dimension to the story itself. Until this point, the story has always been of the past, on what has lain outside our experience and present life. When we tell the story of the church, however, the narrative catches up our present life and becomes, intimately, 'our story'/'my story'. It has to make sense of world events, of commercial enterprise, or artistic endeavour, scientific research, of birth and death and everything in-between. When we tell the story of the church, the outcome is that we know who we are, where we are, why we are, and where we are going. The traditional narrative of the church did achieve this for past generations, in the context of the old culture. It no longer connects and serves that function in the context of the new culture. That is why the church is deemed to be of no relevance to general society: and insofar as it regurgitates the old story, that judgement is correct. Until we are able to tell our story in and to the new culture, the church has, in reality, no story at all to tell.

#### The End

The traditional story always had an eschatological perspective, even if that was expressed in many different ways, from resurrection to heaven with the saints to a messianic age on earth. Although ideas of eschatology live on in our formal belief systems and liturgical/hymnic formulae, and surface constantly in folk religion in times of grief (and thereafter shelved until the next funeral), they have ceased to be or any genuine relevance in life or form any dynamic aspect of our faith story. Eschatology is now solely the preserve of wishful thinking and escape from reality. At the core is always the longing for a world free of ambiguity. When Christians resort to eschatological concepts to support their message and their theories, they invite not just indifference or rejection but derision. The derision is well-founded and cannot be dismissed as the world's 'hostility to the gospel'.

The story of faith does have to project into the future: this is inescapable. But how we make that projection and for what end is the crucial question. If we tell the story with an ending that is plainly unsatisfactory or false, the credibility of the entire story from its beginning disintegrates.

The huge challenge that confronts the faith story today is our awareness of the physical future to a degree beyond any earlier generation. This extends out so something like pentatrillion years to the end of the universe itself, but it also embraces scientific models of the effects of climate change. We recognise that humanity in its current form is not the end and ultimate point of evolution, let alone a unique creation of God; humanity itself may well become extinct (and that is a possibility in the not too distant future if we stay our current course); we may evolve into an entirely new species, perhaps even into silicon-based robotic forms. Any relevant faith story today has to be able to encompass all the possibilities of the future, even human extinction and enfold all possibilities in the context of grace.

The essence of all projections into the future, so far as the faith story is concerned, is always around meeting the issues of fear and anxiety in the present. The eyes of genuine faith are never focused on the future and never wrapped up in speculation or trying to work out what the Bible says is going to happen. The focus of the faith story is always the present, something that is true also when we are dealing with the past.

The point of the faith story as it projects the future is about hope. Hope is different from wish. Wish is future focused, longing for something we do not possess that we think will bring us fulfilment. All traditional notions of eschatology, even the ideas of resurrection and heaven, were essentially wish, not hope, even when endorsed by scriptural authority. Hope, in contrast to wish, is fully open to whatever the future brings because it is confident in being able to meet whatever comes. Hope has as its foundation the sureness of fulfilment in the present, even in ambiguity and suffering. It tells a very different story of the future than does a wish-based narrative.

It may be instructive to return to the image of the stone archway. The traditional faith story was an arch in which the foundation on one side was the theistic Creator God and on the other the various eschatological projections. From those foundations there had been constructed an arch of stones: on one side, the story of the Hebrew people through Abraham, Moses, David and the prophets, while, on the other side, the story of the Spirit-inspired church. Locking the whole together was the keystone of Jesus. What we see today, however, is that the foundations have been washed away on both sides of the arch, the stones on both sides are fallen and smashed, while the keystone lies discarded and disregarded because it serves no function.

If we are going to have an archway at all, it needs to be entirely rebuilt, including laying new foundations. However, that poses the question. Do we need to build it at all? Does it serve any function other than decorative or nostalgic? Or, if we are going to build it, should we not do something entirely different? Those are the questions that have to be answered if we are to move forward at all.

## 24. The Big Question

So the archway has fallen: is it really worth the effort of rebuilding? What is the point? If we are going to rebuild, should we not be looking at doing something different?

These are the questions raised by the last section and are inherent in the whole exercise. Look at what we face in this practical challenge. First there is the task of shifting the mindset of the church from the old culture and its certainty to the new culture and its foundation in not knowing. For the majority of the established Christian churches, their entire institutional structure of ecclesiology and theology is so rooted in the culture of certainty that the shift in culture would bring them tumbling to the ground. It doesn't take much imagination to visualise what would happen if Pope Francis was to rule that the Catholic church knew nothing finally and absolutely and all its teaching and canon law was provisional! No evangelical sect can survive the transition to the new culture. What is happening is that people are making the cultural transition and simply leaving the churches. The chances of changing them in the short to medium term are remote and most judge that it is not worth the effort to try.

The next section confronted us with the challenge to completely reconstruct every aspect of the church's teaching and practice, processing everything through the knower cycle. The last section exposed the ruin of the traditional faith story and the need to reconstruct it in its entirety, including laying new foundations. Even given the fact that this is a work of at least a whole generation, is it worth it? Would we not be better to allow the Christian church to fade away into oblivion, to take its place among the myriad of religions the world has seen over thousands of years and discarded? More, would the world be a better place if Christianity ceased to exist? Recent surveys in the United Kingdom suggest that a majority of the people there do think so.

So the question, the intensely practical question, is whether we do anything at all to try to rebuild the Christian church. The answer to that, if there is an answer, cannot arise out of the tradition itself. It is no good quoting the Bible or church teaching. The answer can only come from within ourselves. The question we have to ask ourselves is, first, whether Christianity is so important to me that I would not personally surrender it? There is a rider to that question: is there a limit to which I would go to hold on to my faith?

The second question is this: is my experience of faith such that it is an imperative for all humanity to know it?

A core dilemma for the church today is that fewer and fewer people are answering even the first question in the affirmative or, even if answering in the affirmative, with the bar to surrender faith set to a low or moderate height. Moreover, even regular churchgoers are finding it next to impossible to convey to anyone outside the church any good reason why those outsiders should consider becoming a member of the church. Now that the bulk of people put little of no store on any notion of the afterlife, the traditional message and rationale for church membership cuts no ice.. Few look to the church for moral guidance or example, seeing Christians not as shining lights but as moral cripples.

What are the churches today offering? For the last generation, the Catholic Church has offered itself as a fortress against cultural change but the new pope may be lowering the drawbridge. During that time, fortress Catholicism was reinforced by militant evangelicism, mobilising the disenfranchised and the alienated who were gripped by anxiety at a changing world that seemed to leave them behind. As people are adjusting to the new milieu, the energy is draining from the evangelical movement and it has less and less to offer.

Two forms of Christianity arose during the twentieth century that have been numerically very successful in adapting to the new environment. The first of these is the Pentecostal/charismatic movement. The heart of this development lay in the adaptation of the faith narrative to focus on the present and on the power of God experienced immediately in everyday life. If Christianity survives at all into the future, it will be thanks to the Pentecostalists and charismatics. The tragedy of that movement is that it divorced itself from the processes of critical analysis and became hostile to any form of intellectual engagement that did not unquestioningly accept its assumptions and dogmas. From the 1980s, it became part of the evangelical fortress and resistance to cultural change and so lost the opportunity to spearhead the church's creative response to its new challenges.

The other powerful adaptation of the traditional narrative came from the so-called Prosperity Gospel, the force that has built huge mega-churches in North America and Asia. Like Pentecostalism, the power of the Prosperity Gospel is that it centres its message upon life in the present world. It is, however, more future-orientated that Pentecostalism. Its message is that if you give money, lots of money, to the church today, God will make you rich and prosperous tomorrow – or perhaps the next day. It is easy to dismiss the purveyors of the Prosperity Gospel as charlatans and exploiters of the poor and vulnerable. They reduce religion to a business transaction, and a very profitable one for the pastors. Yet it may well be that, like the Pentecostalists, the Prosperity Gospel movement may hold a significant key to the future.

The point is that both Pentecostalism and the Prosperity Gospel give people a reason for committing themselves to the church. Few Catholics, Protestants and Anglicans can give such a rationale for themselves, let alone convince others. This issue is magnified a hundredfold when we confront the challenge to make the kind of changes that have been identified. Most regular churchgoers want little more than maintenance of the status quo, with the wish that a few more like-minded people would join them.

The first question is whether it would make any difference to our lives if we were to abandon Christianity. I said that we can only answer that question from within ourselves. I cannot answer, therefore, for anyone other than myself, so I share what I have personally arrived at. It may or may not resonate with others.

For me, the centre and core of my existence is the experience of grace, grace in everything, everywhere and at all times. My favourite psalm is 139 (Where could I go to escape your presence?) I have shared the model by which I live, whereby I move freely from seeing the world, the totality of reality, as purely physical and seeing the world, the totality of reality, as purely and wholly grace. These are not two separate and distinct worlds, nature and supernature, but one single reality that reveals itself differently according to the question we ask of it. When I 'live' in the natural world, I cannot see grace but know that the physical world in which I live is saturated with grace. When I 'live' in the world as grace, I cannot see nature in any scientific sense – seamless cause and effect – but I know that grace is always manifest in physics.

My experience is that this is not just a philosophical approach to life, like 'positive thinking', nor is it wishful thinking – and certainly not fatalism. It is an intensely practical working model that in my experience never fails. It is not, however, a mechanistic model: do this and that will follow. It is a model that is inseparable from the Christian gospel of grace. It can only be understood and worked with as seen through the crucifixion of Jesus. It is integral to an active spirituality and the narrative that supports it.

It is absolutely Christ-centred – Christ the keystone. Knowing grace requires trust because you become aware of immense power, power beyond imagining. I sometimes frame it this way: the power at work in my life is nothing less than the power behind the whole vast universe, the power behind the birth and death of stars and galaxies, the power behind the smallest particle. To be aware of grace is to be awed to silence, and day after day this is just what I experience. It is a power way beyond any thought of control or manipulation, of bargaining or negotiation, even by prayer. The instant you try to capture grace to serve your own ends, wishes or desires, even when those are, in your eyes, 'right' or what God surely wants, grace evaporates to our awareness. This is why the Prosperity Gospel is ultimately a con job. How, though, do we know that this power is 'good' and 'caring'? In terms of the physical world, we know that the power of the sun, for example, even though it is the source of our life, yet has no quality of love or caring. It just is. Is this power we know as grace in fact evil, or whimsical, playing games with humanity, manipulating us like puppets? We have no objective way of knowing. In fact, I suspect that the model that sees the nature of the universe revealing itself according to the question we ask of it can be pressed further, in that, if we ask if the spiritual power is evil, as some forms of religion do, then reality may well reveal itself as evil. Manipulative people may well experience reality as manipulative. In this light, to experience spiritual reality as grace, we have to approach the question through the revelation of Jesus, centred upon the cross. The Jesus event is the keystone that, if not in place, causes the whole structure to collapse.

In the second place, the life of grace requires a spirituality that is focused on perception and response in thanksgiving. The essence of grace is that everything is given, and given freely, unconditionally and abundantly, always sufficient for our needs. To live life in the freedom of grace calls for openness of mind and heart, a willingness to receive, and an acknowledgement in thanksgiving. It also calls for a life that imposes no boundaries on grace. The key to living by grace lies in prayer, not just the occasional winged request when we find ourselves in a corner but daily, as the topmost priority of every day, overruling all other claims on our time, however busy we may think ourselves to be. Prayer is to living in grace what having petrol in the tank means to driving my car.

Such a life of prayer is inseparable from the gospel message of grace, of the love of God, in knowing ourselves as forgiven sinners; it is inseparable from theology that gives us understanding, even if provisional. It is inseparable from the narrative of faith. What this means is that the life of grace requires active engagement in the liturgical life of the church, even if that life is poor and inadequate and highly ambiguous. The mantra of the 1960s that ' I don't need to go to church to be a Christian' has proved totally false in practice. If by 'being Christian' we mean living in grace, then this is sustainable only in the framework of a faith community and its liturgical life. I say this not out of theory but from personal experience.

This, then, is my experience of the life of grace. In terms of the faith narrative, I look to the future and I know that it does not matter what the future holds, to the nth degree of death and destruction, suffering and sorrow, the abundance of grace will never desert me. That abundance, incidentally, is not dependent upon my state of mind, belief or even my 'goodness'. It is given, always, even if I cannot see it or appreciate it.

What of death itself, my own death? If there is no afterlife, then death surely is a statement of ultimate meaninglessness? I do not believe that there is an afterlife as if time and awareness just continues after death but free of all physics and free of ambiguity. All this, however sanctified by the tradition, is pure illusion based on wishful thinking. Time itself we know to be a physical phenomenon, so to even begin to think of 'days in purgatory', for example, is absurd, while the folk religion idea of 'mum's up there waiting for me to join her' is nonsense. The idea that we have a 'soul' distinct from our body is a Greek philosophical idea and nothing more than an idea from ancient times. It has no substance. The person I am is so intimately connected with my body, my genes, my culture, my web of influences that it is impossible to extract 'me' from all of that and think that 'me' survives.

So is death the end? Not in my understanding, despite rejecting any notion of an afterlife. If I ask the physical question, what I see is that death is the necessity for new life. Our sun and plant would not exist had it not been for the death of multitudes of stars over eons past. That our planet is even able to sustain life may be due to the fact that another planet, around the size of Mars, once collided with earth, 'dying' in the process, so liquefying the whole combined mass that the iron sank to the central core, creating the magnetic field that now protects us from the sun's radiation. We die so that others may live. That is as true of the death I must eventually face is of any other death.

When I ask the grace question, the answer of death takes on a very different visage. For the universe experienced as grace is one that transcends time and space, and in that it transcends death. In the universe as grace, the 'communion of saints' is a spiritual reality because everything is 'present'. The Big Bang itself is 'present'. This is one of the ways in which I understand the eucharistic liturgy, especially when I am celebrating. Time and space, separating me, and the community, from the Jesus event, from the Last Supper, is eliminated. This is the way in which I make sense of the resurrection of Jesus because his life is as real and as present to me and the community as ever it was to the disciples who accompanied him in Galilee. Of course this is just a mental construct, not to be turned into any form of dogma or teaching. But it is a real and valid extension of the lived experience of life as grace.

Reduced to its essence, for me, face to face with death (and I have been in that place), I trust totally that the grace I know in life now does not desert me in death. I know nothing more than that, just as I do not know what grace will give to me tomorrow. I trust, and that is sufficient. To want to know more is to lose hold of the life of grace, however religiously we cast the objective.

This, then, is the meaning of the salvation brought by the gospel of Christ. To the age-old question, "Are you saved?, my response is, "Yes, I am saved." It means that, whatever the circumstances I may face in life, including face to face with my own death, I know without doubt that I will be given whatever I need to meet the challenge. The Lord is my shepherd: I lack nothing. Salvation means I can look to the future, even a terrifying future of personal and/or global catastrophe and know that grace will never fail me. Therefore I am free from fear: that is what it means to be saved.

So is there a point at which the price of sustaining such a faith becomes too high and is abandoned? The question creates acute discomfort because physically and psychologically everyone has his or her breaking point, while the onset of a depression can radically distort our perception of reality. No one dare pride themselves on never failing. In determination, however, for me that bar does not exist. To let go of faith is to render the whole of life meaningless and pointless and therefore not worth living. There is not a single value in life, even the people most precious to us, which is not rendered worthless if we sacrifice the life of grace in order to preserve. It is grace that gives everything its meaning and value.

The second question posed at the beginning was whether what we have in the church is important for all humanity. To that I can only make a resounding statement of affirmation. I go so far as to assert that the whole survival of the human species is today dependent upon the attainment of a global spirituality that is based upon grace. The church is literally the salvation-bearer for humanity.

Crucially, the spirituality of grace is the powerhouse of hope that will sustain humanity through whatever trials that are to come. I express it this way. Imagine a world shattered by climate change, economic and social collapse, resource exhaustion, disorder and violence, famine and disease: a terrible prospect but one all too real in the potential for the future in our own lifetime. Given this scenario, and if I am still alive, I am confident that, week after week, the faith community will gather and celebrate the eucharist: "Let us give thanks.", "It is right to offer thanks and praise." "It is right indeed, it is our joy and our salvation, at all times and in all places to give you thanks..." This is salvation. This is hope. This is freedom. From this, a new society will spring because, with this faith, the community can face and overcome anything.

Further, I am confident that the grace-gifts available to humanity are as sufficient to meet humanity's global challenges as they are to meet my personal challenges. This is not mere wishful thinking – "O, something will turn up to save us: technology will find the answer". It is a deep trust that we will be given, not just as individuals but as global humanity, what we need when we need. This does not mean that we will not be exposed to catastrophe. The core model remains the crucifixion of Jesus, the destruction of what might be thought of as the ultimate value in human existence. Belief that God is going to ride in on the clouds to save us from disaster is a delusion, and a dangerous and destructive one. The spirituality that saves is one that is open to whatever the future holds, without qualification, confident that we can meet it because we have the resources, the creativity, to meet it. The greatest enemy we have to face is fear. Grace overcomes fear.

The final point I would make is that humanity's survival into the indefinite future (and we should be thinking ahead to thousands, if not millions, of generations), will require a change in culture that is so radical as to be beyond our current imagination to conceive in practice. That change has to be global, excluding no society or nation. It has to be more that a superficial adjustment to the way we do things. Recycling plastic bags may make us feel virtuous but in reality achieves nothing. What will be required is a fundamental reorientation of human life from doing to being. Since the rise of civilisation, humanity has lived life focused on doing, on achieving, on being dominant over nature and other humans. We have undoubtedly achieved much, and what we have achieved is remarkable, but it is also our undoing. Humanity cannot continue this path and survive. It is as simple as that. We have to find a wholly new way of living, of being human: a new culture. The core of that survival culture has to be in being, not doing.

To live as being requires spirituality. It is as simple as that. Global culture will never achieve its objective of enabling humanity to survive unless it is undergirded by a spirituality that sustains it.

Also by David Guthrie

# Faith Story

How a new faith narrative is revolutionising Christianity

_Faith Story:_ How a new faith narrative is revolutionising Christianity is an exploration of the way in which the traditional faith narrative of Christianity has changed radically and is therefore changing our entire concept of Christianity and what it means to be Christian.

Faith Story is available from all ebook distributors.

#  Walk the Edge

Walk the Edge is a novel written by David Guthrie at a time when he was facing his own probable death from cancer, and the writing of the novel was a way in which he confronted the meaning of death (and life). It was the experience of grace and the consequent rediscovery of a credible faith story that led to the writing of Faith Story.

Walk the Edge is available from all ebook distributors.

#  Advent Calls

Daily Readings for Advent and Christmas: mainly from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. Foreword by the Archbishop of Polynesia

Available from Maygen Press: email: rperth2008@gmail.com

#  Lent Challenge

Daily Readings for Lent and Holy Week: mainly from the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah. Foreword by the Archbishop of New Zealand

Available from Maygen Press: email: rperth2008@gmail.com

#  Advent Revelation

Daily Readings from All Saints to Epiphany: mainly from the Book of Revelation to John. Foreword by the Archbishop of Te Pihopatanga o Aotearoa

Available from Maygen Press: email: rperth2008@gmail.com

#  John in Lent

Daily Readings for Lent and Holy Weekfrom the Gospel of John. Foreword by Bishop John Paterson

Available from Maygen Press: email: rperth2008@gmail.com

About the author

David Guthrie is a resident of Auckland, New Zealand. Ordained into the ministry of the Anglican (Episcopalian) church in 1966, married in 1967, he has served as parish priest and hospital chaplain before undertaking a major project for the Auckland health authority in 1990 and subsequently into commercial life. In 2003, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer from which he was given only a small chance of recovery. He survived, however, and now lives in the Auckland suburb of Titirangi.

David's email is david@guthrie.net.nz

