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Faith Story

How a new faith narrative is revolutionising Christianity

David Guthrie

Faith Story by David Guthrie

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 by David Guthrie

All rights reserved

No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, recording, by information storage and retrieval or photocopied, without permission in writing from David Guthrie.

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Our faith story is the upper meta-narrative of our lives, whether as individuals or communities. Without a faith story, we are nothing. The central crisis in Christianity today is that its traditional faith story has failed. The central imperative for the Christian community is to rediscover of a credible faith narrative.

# Table of Contents

Introduction 3

Chapter 1: The Prophetic Word 8

Chapter 2: Ambiguity 12

Chapter 3: Knowing 17

The circle of knowing 18

Hypothesis 19

Data 20

Model 22

Theory 27

Action 28

Review 29

Chapter 4: The Traditional Faith Story 30

Chapter 5: Legitimacy 40

 Chapter 6: In the beginning – no beginning 47

Chapter 7: What is the world? 54

Chapter 8: The Ape becomes naked 61

Chapter 9: The Hebrews 67

Chapter 10: Jesus 82

Chapter 11: The Human Story 93

Chapter 12: The Future 103

Chapter 13: New Stories 111

Case Study 122

Conclusion 125

Walk the Edge 126

Advent Calls 127

Lent Challenge 127

Advent Revelation 127

John in Lent 127

# Introduction

At the heart of being human is a story that says who we are, how we came to be and where we are going. Every culture has its story: every religion has its story: every family and individual has their/his/her story. Without our story, we are nothing. That is why dementia is such a tragedy. The individual ceases to know past, present or imagine the future and effectively ceases to be a person at all.

We experience alienation when we lose confidence in our story or we live among a culture that does not recognise our story. It is the deepest definition of 'tribe' that it comprises people who share the same story. The greatest offence one can commit against one's tribe is to call the tribe's story into question or denigrate the story in the eyes of other tribes.

We live our lives with many different stories, running simultaneously. There is our faith story, upon which I will shortly focus. There is our culture story, which may be broad (Western European, Maori, Chinese, etc.) or narrow (our gang, our football club). There is our national story, our family story, extended or nuclear; then there is the host of stories around the many dimensions of our life such as our work, our golf or our sex.

Some stories live and die with us (some we dare not tell!). Others we share in the wish that people might be interested or learn from them. There are stories, however, that we believe it is imperative to share. They convey essential identity, values, information or principles that others, and especially the upcoming generations, must hear and embrace.

Faith stories belong to that last category. Faith story is the top-level meta-narrative of life, the story that encompasses how the universe and everything in it came to be as it is, including the story teller and the story hearer. It positions the story teller and hearer in the world, defining our place, our nature, what we are and should be, and how we relate to everything and everybody else. It states where we are going to end up, with respect to the universe and life, and specifically the destiny of the story teller and hearer.

Every person, every culture, every tribe, every family and every individual person has such a faith story. Only the very young and the intellectually disabled or demented lack such a story. 'Religion' is a word we use to describe adherence to a faith story, and in this sense everyone who has a faith story has a 'religion'. The secular world has become almost obsessed with building its faith story which is why accounts of the origins and evolution of the universe and life command such attention and energy; why history interests us; why we want to know what is going to happen in the future to our planet.

Christianity, like every faith community, has its faith story and cannot exist without such a story. The story tells us how we came to be, who we are, what we are meant to do and how we are to live, and what is our destiny. This book is about the Christian faith story.

The greatest crises we face in life occur when our stories, and especially our faith stories, come under threat or collapse. We can no longer tell them because we no longer believe them. This is the real meaning of what happens when we say we lose faith. What has happened is that we have lost our connection to the faith story that used to give us our identity. In losing the story, we also lose our connection with our 'tribe'.

This loss of story may happen suddenly, when a new fact emerges that overturns a story we had previously believed in. This happens, for example, when an adult learns that he or she was adopted as a child and not the natural offspring of his/her 'parents'. At other times, the loss of the story may take place over a long period of gradual but progressive decay until the day comes when it is apparent that not only is the story no longer believed but also that in reality it hasn't been believed for a long time. The outward form had been professed but the inside flesh had vanished some time in the past.

Sometimes it is just details of the story that change. We adapt to the modification, leaving the meta-narrative essentially intact. Over time, however, modifications accumulate that start to stretch the outer fabric of the meta-narrative. The fabric stretches and stretches until one day it fails, spilling all its contents into a heap of chaos, never to be restored to the old order.

Faith stories are always intimately connected to power. Within a group, a 'tribe', it is those who hold the keys to the faith story who wield the power. They are the ones who control who is in and who is out of the tribe. They are the ones who shape what is and what is not acceptable behaviour, what the priorities are for action. The source of all power lies in faith story. The most power resides with those who are able to command the inner adherence of the whole group to the faith story that they control. Even when power over the group rests on coercive might, the exercise of that power still demands a corps of adherents to the faith story who are willing to be agents of coercion on behalf of the power centre. The greatest threat to power comes not so much from external enemies but from erosion of belief in the faith story within the tribe. When a faith story changes, the centre of power shifts.

What is happening within Christianity today is that its traditional faith story has changed, and changed dramatically. The tensions within the faith community globally are a direct response to this change. On the one hand, there is the division between those who hold determinedly to the old story in the belief that it was divinely given and therefore cannot be changed, and those who embrace change or have lost faith in the old story. On the other hand, there is an immense power struggle as the centres that once controlled the faith story make a determined effort to retain their old power, while new power centres are growing up around new faith stories. Especially in the West, vast numbers of Christians are giving up altogether, walking way from any version of a Christian faith story.

In this book, I address the state of the Christian faith story. Put baldly, the old faith story is dead. The future of Christianity rests on whether a new faith story can be found. It is the contention here that such a new faith story can be found. It is already in existence.

Christianity tells a story and that story is the centre of our faith. It is a story that begins at the beginning of all things because it embraces the entire universe, all life, the whole of humanity. It is a story of how God came to be known to humans and, in the telling the story, establishes for us the nature of God, God's relationship with us and presence in the world. It is our story, because we are in it, the present actors, so the story places our own lives in the context of what the universe means. Finally, it is a story of what the future holds for us and for the universe. When we tell this story, we tell our faith story.

This story as told by past generations, however, is no longer our story. The traditional story has five great 'acts: Creation, the Hebrews (Old Testament), Jesus, the time of the Church, and finally, the Consummation and the end of all things material. In the course of the following chapters, it becomes clear that the narrative of each of these acts has changed, such that the whole story no longer looks anything like the traditional narrative.

Outside of the circle of fundamentalism, we no longer tell the story of creation as something that happened 6000 years ago, every species appearing in six days. We do not even tell the story as if some Being, 14 billion years ago, waved a wand and created matter out of nothing. We tell the story differently and out of that difference has emerged such a changed understanding of God that it has become an anachronism even to use the word, Creator.

The traditional story of the Hebrews, the narrative embodied in the Old Testament, is now seen in a completely different light and told differently. We see the way the Hebrews adopted all the elements of their faith and religious practice from other religions and cultures, especially from Babylonia but even possibly from India. Such a perception changes the way we tell the story with relation to other religions and cultures. Most dramatically, we understand the whole Hebrew story in a vastly different factual light that changes every facet of the story.

While the gospel story of Jesus remains central to the Christian narrative and our understanding of faith, yet we recognise that we see Jesus only through the eyes of later generations, not even those who knew him directly, and that they wrote, each of them, with specific agendas and points of view. We know nothing about Jesus, not even what he taught, in such a way that we can make his words and actions absolute and unambiguous. The Jesus of our contemporary faith story would barely be recognised by earlier generations.

The story of the time of the Church, the fourth great act, has been transformed by our understanding of the ambiguity of historical actions, the realities of power, the distortions of culture and the ubiquity of change. Old myths are exposed. We cannot now see the Church as once it was viewed. More particularly, however, our sense of this act of the narrative has expanded to embrace the whole of humanity, not just the church.

The most dramatic change of all is what has occurred in relation to the story as it projects into the future. Although the language of heaven may still be used, it is no longer believed. If there is a single focus to the faith crisis of the present, it is that Christianity is seen as offering nothing with respect to the future. There are no consequences that follow from whether or not we embrace or reject Christianity. Unless Christianity can recover a future dimension to its story it is finished, period.

In the chapters that follow, I will still take the structure of the 'acts', though adding a sixth, coming between the Beginning and the Hebrews. Before considering these acts, however, there are some critical issues to be addressed. I begin with what I believe to be the core prophetic word of God to the contemporary world and especially the Church: the overriding priority is to save humanity. In other words, this book is not about some arcane doctrinal dispute, it is not about a power struggle. It is not about the kind of right belief to get a reward from God. It is not even about whether Christianity survives or not. It is about whether humanity survives or not. The core conviction behind everything I write is that the faith story is critical to whether humanity makes it through the immense and threatening challenges of the coming century or goes under, even becomes extinct.

This is not a humanistic exercise. I am not a humanist. At the centre of the whole presentation is the life of Jesus, the God-revealer. The inescapable implication of the incarnation (if that is any more an appropriate term) is the affirmation of the place and meaning of humanity in the cosmos-as-grace. The survival of humanity is not a humanistic exercise but a mission of grace, an imperative of God.

I always have difficulty when it comes to acknowledgements because it is impossible to know where to draw a line. Decades of influences have gone into shaping the thoughts behind the words in this book. Most of those influences have so integrated themselves into my whole conceptual universe, that the connections with their sources have been lost or they have become so modified by interaction that they have become unrecognisable. Just as life itself seems to have arisen from a primeval soup of chemicals, so do our thoughts from a million influences. I thank God for my particular primeval intellectual soup!

And I thank the many, many people who have contributed to this outcome, some known to me and know me, but the vast majority unknown to me and me to them.

In particular, though, I want to acknowledge my Anglican church and the bishops and people of the Diocese of Auckland among whom I have had the privilege to serve as priest.

#  Chapter 1: The Prophetic Word

If we have to define one single word from God addressed to the Christian community it is this: save humanity. Across the whole face of the globe, excepting nowhere, humanity faces a tsunami of threats that can destroy all vestige of civilised society as we know it today, and potentially wipe out our entire species. This we know even if we do everything we can to avoid facing the facts. The word to save humanity is not a secular cry to save the planet. It is not an environmentalist political agenda. It is a prophetic word and it is rooted in the gospel vision.

At the centre of Christianity stands the vision of the incarnate Christ – God in human flesh. The gospel message is that God becomes human. There are billions of species on the planet, let alone what might exist throughout the universe. Of all those billions of species, present or extinct, God manifested grace in one – homo sapiens.

We do not know the purpose of the physical world, if indeed it has a purpose. All we can affirm is that grace was made known to the universe in the human species. Humanity plays a significant role in whatever the universe means. If, in our stupidity and willfulness, the human species becomes extinct, grace will not be defeated. In another billion or so years, there may yet evolve a new species capable of revealing grace. But at this moment, we are who we are. Our destiny, our calling, is to be the bearer of grace to the universe, a calling that is centred on the incarnate Jesus.

This book is about the narrative of faith. It is a crucial theme, because everywhere Christianity is in decline. It may appear on the surface that this decline is only in the West and Christianity is growing in Africa and Asia. The African/Asian growth is most likely a short-term phenomenon, a product of particular socio-economic conditions. Those who know the situation more intimately point to the shallowness of the embrace, born more of wishful thinking that the Christian God will deliver them a better life than any real, deep-seated and understood faith. Religion rooted in wishful thinking always leads to disillusionment and the rejection of the messenger of false hope. African and Asian religion may well be confronted with such a tide of disillusionment in the coming generation.

The hard reality is that everywhere Christianity is in decline. The fundamental reason for its decline is because its narrative, as traditionally stated, no longer connects as real. The story Christianity has told to authenticate its message no longer connects as legitimate. In the West in particular, the statistics are clear. Apart from immigrants, for whom churches are both a means of integration into new cultures and a framework for holding onto their homeland ties, by and large only the poorly educated or those whose education is primarily technical are following Christianity. The thinking population, including almost the entire intellectual elite, has abandoned Christianity. They have a cast-iron justification for doing so: the story that the churches tell is no longer credible.

The standard response from the church is that the story has to be taken on faith. We have to believe it even if we doubt its truth – even if we know it to be not true. Fewer and fewer are buying into that. It is a demand that rests upon the credibility of the authority proclaiming it, and that credibility has all but vanished under the scandals and corruption that have beset the churches over the past generation. As year passes year, the facts accumulate against the credibility. The whole framework of the world-view that enabled the old narrative to be sustained has all but disappeared. The Christian community is in the position of a witness whose story no one believes. The evidence at every point undermines the credibility of the witness's story so that it does not stack up. This is the central crisis of the Christian church. Outside a core of dogmatists, the world no longer recognises the traditionally-told Christian story as being a legitimate narrative of reality.

And the world is right. The traditional story does no longer have legitimacy and this is not just a secular judgement from those outside the community of faith. It is the judgement of a very large proportion, if not the majority, of those who still call themselves Christian. The story we were brought up to believe in is no longer recognised as truth.

How this has come about and what it means, and how we may go about recovering an authentic and legitimate story of faith is the subject of the body of the book. For the moment the focus is on the prophetic message to save humanity.

This crisis we face is a conglomeration of crises that we confront all at once. We have to meet every single one of them and overcome them, for any single one has the capacity to overwhelm and destroy us.

The prevailing wisdom has for long been that science and technology will defeat each and every threat, whether it be an incoming asteroid, the end of oil, the exhaustion of the earth's resources or global warming. The hope is not well founded. For all the colossal benefits science and technology have conferred upon humanity, they have brought about the mess we are in. Any and every solution that science and technology comes up with creates as many problems as it solves. If there is any hope for humanity, it does not lie with science and technology, whatever positive contribution they may have to offer. This is the core of the psychological crisis the world is experiencing. It had put its hope in science and now sees that science has created a Frankenstein monster.

If not in science, where is hope to be found? Without hope, there is no future. When we face, as our world does face, seemingly overwhelming catastrophe, hope achieves two things. The first is that hope sparks creativity that may hold the key to overcoming the crisis. When we lose hope, creativity dies, crushed by despair and disillusionment, turning into destructive anger and panic. People without hope become the raw material for demagogues offering all kinds of fake remedies and hopes. Genuine hope, on the other hand, stills the panic, despair and fear and allows space in which some real solutions may emerge.

The second gift of hope lies in endurance and resilience that enables people to go through the gates of hell itself and be confident of emerging out the other side victorious. Genuine hope can confront great loss, even the apparent loss of everything, including even faith itself, and remain confident.

Providing such hope to humanity has always been the role of religion, whatever that religion may be or have been in the many cultures and societies through all ages. The spread and growth of Christianity across the world was fuelled by the success of its message of hope.

The problem is that few people in the West believe the Christian message of hope any more. I am in no position to assess other religions of the world, but there is not a single one that, in such understanding as I do have, offers any glimmer of hope to humanity. For the most part, they are more destructive than creative, as is Christianity in its traditional forms.

This book is about the narrative of faith. Hope is the end-product of a real faith story, whatever that story may be. The faith story reduces to three simple sentences. The story tells where we come from. The story tells us where we are going. The story tells us where we are now. Reduced to these simple statements it is easy to state the situation in which the Christian community finds itself. People no longer believe the story of where we came from. They no longer believe the story of where we are going. They do not believe that Christianity has any idea of where we are.

Without a faith story, there is no hope. The traditional faith story has died and it will not resurrect.

I have three objectives in writing this book. The first is to confront the Christian community with the reality that its traditional narrative has died and that maintaining the pretence of ongoing life is neither healthy for its life nor conducive to its real message as it rapidly loses both credibility and respect.

The second objective is to show that an authentic and legitimate faith story is possible and actual for the Christian faith community. With a new faith story, the gospel can again ring out and again carry credibility. That gospel has the power to bring hope – real hope – to the world.

This leads to my third and ultimate objective. It is to respond in some small manner to the prophetic imperative laid upon the church to save humanity. Without a faith story that is believed within the faith community and credible when told, the church has no power to save. We must find a new and authentic faith story or Christianity will fade away into oblivion – and into that oblivion, in all probability, it will drag the human species.

# Chapter 2: Ambiguity

If there is a single dominant keynote for the nature of authentic religion in the twenty-first century, it is in the note of ambiguity. Throughout the whole of this book, the term ambiguity reoccurs constantly. Ambiguity is the state where something can be understood or interpreted in more than one way and there is no way of knowing whether any option is 'right'. Ambiguity is an opposite of certainty.

There is and can be no certainty in any religious concept, theology, confessional statement, creed, church teaching, scriptural interpretation or philosophy. Neither can there be any certainty regarding claims to factual knowledge. There is no unchallengeable dogma. There is no infallibility, either magisterial or scriptural. In this, religion is being consistent with every other branch of human knowledge, including science. It is one of the epoch-making discoveries of the science of quantum theory that ambiguity lies at the very centre of physical existence and is unresolvable (at least by any known science or logic).

All human enterprise is ambiguous. No one can ever be 'pure and undefiled'; no one can act from unmixed motives. The pressure to beatify John Paul II, one of the most morally ambiguous figures of the twentieth century, is symbol of a central struggle of our time. It is the effort to deny ambiguity and elevate certainty and absoluteness. This is the cultural battle taking place across all forms of the church, as many try to make certain 'truths' and institutions absolute and unambiguous. It is the battle being raged within Islam, and by Islamic authorities against the rest of the world; that there are absolute, unambiguous and inflexible rules that govern human life. It is the battle being waged about moral issues such as abortion, sexual relationships, gender identity, patriarchalism and marriage. All these debates revolve around the issue of certainty vis ambiguity. To the advocates of certainty there is only one way of understanding the issue that is 'right'. In contrast, the advocates of ambiguity see that everything can be understood in more than one way. All convictions about certainty are decisions made between options that have acquired the force of tradition or the backing of authority. This is more than a contest between 'conservative' and 'liberal'. Classic Western liberals can be as dogmatic about what is right as any moral conservative. The very term 'human rights', so important to liberal thinking, is based upon assumptions about certainty.

Like anyone else, I am a person inseparable from my culture, from my upbringing and social context, from my ecclesiastical tradition, from the influences that have come from life experiences and reading. Any and every 'certainty' I know is rendered ambiguous by this context. I am confident and certain that I 'know' God and live by grace: yet every time I step out to act on this confidence, even to committing words to print, I find myself doubting it all: God, grace, whatever insights I may have, whatever truth I may know; ambiguity so interpenetrates everything that every action is a stepping out into an unknown and uncharted darkness.

That is the nature of all life. It is the nature of all spirituality and theology, even of scholarship. Ambiguity is the mark of authenticity in the contemporary world.

This book is about the narrative of faith, the story of who we are and how we came to be, where we are in the story of faith and where the story is taking us into the future. It is not just an outward account of historical process but also a narrative of inner life, of grace.

The issue of ambiguity and the role it plays in our life and spirituality is to be seen clearly in this exercise. The old faith story commenced with a seven-day creation only a few thousand years in the past. It continued through Adam and Eve and their fall into sin, the Flood, the call of Abraham, the lives of the patriarchs, the sojourn in and escape from Egypt, the giving of the Law and Covenant on Sinai and the vicissitudes of Hebrew history. It climaxed to the coming of Jesus, Son of God, his death and resurrection and ascension followed by the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost commencing the life of the church. It concluded in the great consummation at the end of time.

This great narrative was once regarded as God-revealed, certain beyond challenge, unambiguous in fact and theology. Over the last two centuries, that certainty progressively dissolved and the sense of ambiguity rose until, at the beginning of this century, with the archeological evidence that the city of Jerusalem did not exist at all during most of the pre-exilic era, the whole fabric of the Old Testament 'history' collapsed. With that collapse, the heart of the traditional narrative caved in.

What we have now is an extremely ambiguous relationship with the whole of the Old Testament narrative, with the ambiguity coming out in a myriad of ways. We still refer to God as Creator even though the Genesis stories are no longer taken literally and the Creator references in Isaiah seen as poetic visions rooted in Babylonian religion. There is a vast ambiguity surrounding the whole concept of creation and Creator. We have many different paths we can follow in making sense of the concept – and we are increasingly feeling ourselves free to abandon the concept altogether, radically revising the narrative at its very start. It is not just at the beginning of the Old Testament narrative that we encounter radical ambiguity. Almost no part of the pre-exilic story of the Hebrew people stands up to scrutiny.

If the traditional Hebrew narrative is clearly ambiguous, it is the ambiguity of the New Testament narrative that is causing deep disturb in the church. We know little for certain about Jesus, neither his teachings nor his actions. The details of his death are open to question, while the evidence of his resurrection and ascension is so ambiguous that their very place in the narrative has become seriously undermined. The Day of Pentecost is unlikely to have any factual basis, as generally with the Luke's version of the life of the early church. Paul, recognised as the great creative genius of the early church, is yet seen as an ambiguous figure leading the community into ideas of apocalyptic that have plagued the Christian community ever since.

All the myths that used to surround the history of the church in succeeding centuries, myths of apostolic succession, of the role of Peter, of the authority of the ecumenical councils: all these myths, too, are seen as ambiguous, history written by the victor and generated to authenticate and bolster the authority of Catholic orthodoxy. It is not that they myths are 'wrong' but that they can be interpreted other than the way religious authorities have long insisted they should be.

It is when the narrative moves from the past into the future that the issue of ambiguity comes to a head. The liturgical formula from the funeral rite may say, "in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life", but so ambiguous has that become that, "sure and certain", it is no longer. This ambiguity is not just in liberal circles but also across the spectrum of Christian traditions, even in the most conservative, whatever their official statements of belief may say.

What I am attempting to achieve with this present work is to create a story of faith that can stand as a credible alternative to the traditional faith story. The attempt has to be made. The traditional narrative is no longer credible. Few today can state the traditional narrative as being 'our story', the story with which we can identify ourselves as living within. Yet without a story we lose all sense of identity. We understand nothing. Without a credible narrative, the Christian community has nowhere to go but to embrace the secular narrative, marginalising faith and the church to be a social and cultural phenomenon of no lasting significance.

What I have constructed is ambiguous, and always will be. It can never be certain. It is open to challenge at every point. No one can achieve a certain, unambiguous narrative that lies beyond challenge at every point. We can never again fall into the trap of enshrining a narrative in a creedal or confessional statement such as the Apostle's or Nicene' creeds or the Reformation confessions. Even when a narrative is widely accepted, any specific part or detail can be the subject of debate and revision, even radical alteration or abandonment. We can never be satisfied that we have 'got the story right'.

It is perhaps appropriate here to take the issue of ambiguity a stage further. Because ambiguity is always an uncomfortable experience, in every aspect of life we long for what is unambiguous. I have a theory about the instability of modern marriage and the ubiquity of separation and divorce. The dominant romantic ideal of love does not take into account the ambiguity of all relationships and especially those closest to us where we are most emotionally involved. Relationships break down because partners cannot deal with the ambiguity of the other, seeking always for that ideal unambiguous relationship. So it is, too, that many people never do form a lifelong attachment to anyone because the unambiguous Mr or Mrs Right does not appear.

In religion, the search for an end to ambiguity has taken many shapes over the years. The magisterium of the Church of Rome is one such search: another form of that search is the endless divisions of Protestantism, accelerated by the explosion of independent sects in our own day. Individuals move from church to church, parish to parish, this pastor to that pastor, looking always for the unambiguous, the right and the certain way.

In the traditional narrative, all that desire for an end to ambiguity became focused on the idea of heaven, reinforced by images such as Paul's famous thirteenth chapter of I Corinthians in the King James words, For now we see through a glass, darkly: but then face to face. Heaven, where the faithful go after death, is where all will be made known, with no further uncertainty. Justice and peace will reign untrammelled. There will be no more suffering, loss or death; no more oppression and injustice; no more sin; just perfection in everything and everyone.

All of this is pure wishful thinking, even when it can draw upon scriptural texts to justify it. It has no reality whatsoever. It arises from the wish to be free of ambiguity. It proceeds from the notion that ambiguity is not what God intended for the world.

The same perception falls upon all the concepts of an apocalyptic return of Jesus. They arise from a longing to be free of having to deal with the world as ambiguous. It is part of our ambiguous relationship to scripture today that we recognise that in all these writings, from both Testaments, that their projections of the future were driven by wishful thinking even when dressed up as revelation or prophetic word.

It has become a commonplace of present discourse to talk about the 'culture war'. The debates may rage around specific issues such as abortion, homosexuality, patriarchal authority, religious teachings and many other subjects, but at the heart of them all is the issue of ambiguity. On the one side of the culture war is the denial of ambiguity: on the other side, the embrace of ambiguity. There is no possibility of straddling of this boundary. Everyone stands on one side or the other.

Today the world is changing culturally across the whole globe. What is emerging is a single culture, global culture. It will have within in immense diversity, because the value of diversity is one of the core values of the culture. Diversity, however, is different from plurality. The idea of a plurality of cultures comprising a national or world community is a misunderstanding of what is happening. Behind the diversity is rising a communality of cultural perspective and the key to that perspective is ambiguity. The Rubicon that people cross that takes them from traditional to global culture occurs at the point at which they recognise that everything is ambiguous. Only then does knowing begin as grasped within global culture.

# Chapter 3: Knowing

If everything is ambiguous, then we can know nothing finally and with certainty. Therefore, in any absolute way, we know nothing about anything. This is the intellectual core of the new cultural milieu that has arisen globally over the last two generations. It is at the centre of what has now become global culture. At the same time, the rejection of ambiguity lies at the heart of the intense conservative reaction that has materialised across all parts of human society.

We know nothing: yet we have 'to know' in order to live. No individual or community can exist in any practical way without 'knowing'. For the most part, we act as if our knowing was certain. Everything is ambiguous, yet at a practical level we generally live as if issues were unambiguous. To live in radical uncertainty, or forever caught in the web of ambiguity, is to be paralysed from taking action, making decisions or moving with confidence.

There is immense value in recognising ambiguity and uncertainty. It gives us humility in the judgements we make in the face of others who make quite different judgements. It provides the essential foundation upon which different communities can live together in harmony, even when they make very different decisions about life issues. If human society globally is to exist long term, it can only be upon this foundation of recognising ambiguity. Yet we have to know. We cannot live without knowing.

This is crucial for any life of faith. The question as to whether there is reality behind the word 'God', or whether life is purely physical, is governed by ambiguity. Every time I am challenged to step out and commit myself in an act of faith, I find myself suspended over this abyss of ambiguity. There is no possible intellectual resolution, no way of knowing whether or not there is any substance to the grace to which I am committing myself. This is the real meaning of 'agnostic'. The experience of 'not knowing' that is the experience of the agnostic is a daily encounter for anyone living the life of faith.

It is the same with every single element in the narrative of faith that we may seek to unfold. It does not matter whether this enterprise is being undertaken here or by any person at any time, whatever their theological or scholarly qualification or ecclesiastical standing. It matters not whether such a person claims the authority of the Bible or magisterium. We cannot know any part of the faith story with any degree of absolute certainty.

So do we know anything? This is the central faith question of our age and the one that governs every religion.

In attempting to interpret how we know anything, we are caught in a loop. It is the classic response to the assertion that we know nothing absolutely to ask, "You are quite certain of that?". To explore how we know anything is to be confronted with the uncertainty that the process is genuinely valid. There is no escape from this circle. To 'know' is always, in everything, an act of faith, of stepping into the circle.

###  The circle of knowing

It is at this point that we encounter the most fundamental reason why the traditional faith narrative no longer connects with our world. It is all about knowing. The traditional narrative rested upon the foundation that we know something is true because trusted authority told us it was true. That authority might be an institution or a sacred writing. The point is that we trusted it. Today, two things have happened. The first is that we no longer trust the authorities that used to declare to us what is true. We recognise that they are as ambiguous as every other part of the world we know. Secondly, we have a different model about how we come to know anything.

The model has established its credentials in the world of science. In that field, we recognise it works. What we have come to further recognise is that the model also works in what we call the 'spiritual' area of life.

The essence of the model is that the process of knowing is circular and continuous, only ceasing to turn when we come to the point where the process concludes we do 'not know' or there is insufficient momentum at some point in the process to go further.

The model in its simplest form is a circle with six 'stations': hypothesis, data, model, theory, practice and evaluation – the last leading back to hypothesis.

### Hypothesis

The point at which we step into the circle of the process of knowing is called 'hypothesis'. Hypothesis is any kind of statement, whether clearly formulated or grasped intuitively, that we think might or might not be 'true' or 'real'. That the cycle of knowing begins with hypothesis is like saying that the life cycle of hens begins with an egg. No hypothesis materialises out of nothing but has some form of antecedent life. Even when a 'new' thought materialises in our brain, one that no other person has ever thought before, yet still that thought has emerged out of a confluence of experiences, intuitions, theories and reflections that at some point come together to generate this new thought, this new hypothesis. In other words, a hypothesis is always a continuation of an existing knowing process.

The essential point about a hypothesis is that we do not 'know' whether it is true or not for us. Our confidence in the hypothesis may be strong, so strong that it may stand up in our mind as an unchallengeable fact. As a matter of analysis, for example, it is only a hypothesis that the planet is a sphere, but our confidence in the hypothesis is so strong we have ceased to regard it as a hypothesis and see it as fact. At the other end of the scale, it is a hypothesis, which theoretically we should consider, that the Book of Mormon was written on golden plates delivered by an angel to Joseph Smith and translated by using a stone in a hat: but the strength of the hypothesis is so weak that outside the circle of the Mormon faithful it commands no respect or energy. Yet, if we have to give either of these hypotheses some attention, the process applying to them is the same.

For the sake of exploration, I shall take as the sample hypothesis that which Paul advances in II Corinthians 12:10, that grace is revealed most clearly in weakness. Paul's statement is no more than a hypothesis to us when we encounter it. For Paul, when he wrote it, it was not for him a hypothesis but something he 'knew' from his life of faith. For us, though, at first encounter, it can be nothing but a hypothesis. Unlike Paul, we do not 'know' whether or not it is true. This is one of the great departure points for our world over previous generations, for whom such words were seen not as hypotheses but as revealed Word of God, divinely inspired and therefore imbued with absoluteness and finality, beyond questioning. To us they can be no more than a hypothesis at first encounter. The question is, how can we know whether these words reflect reality? Are they true?

The question as to whether the hypothesis is true or not is no mere intellectual exercise but upon it being known whether it is true or false rests an entire way of living life. The hypothesis is pivotal to the whole of life, not just as individuals but also for communities, for global humanity.

### Data

Perceiving the hypothesis leads us to the next step in the knowing process, which is to look for the data that supports or undermines the hypothesis. Supporting data for some hypotheses, such as that the planet is a sphere, is so abundant that it hits us like a river in full flood the moment we ask the question. It is important to remind ourselves that a thousand years ago the hypothesis would have found such little supporting data that the sphere hypothesis was dismissed as false. On the contrary, the alternative hypothesis, that the earth was flat, would have seemed to have abundant support. It was likewise with the debate about the relation of the earth to the sun before the time of Galileo.

What kind of data relates to a hypothesis such as Paul offers? It is not data derived from nature, where the weak fall victim to more powerful predators. It is not data from the realms of politics, commerce or sport. In fact, most 'hard' data says the opposite of Paul's hypothesis, so immediately we are confronted with the ambiguity. But Paul is speaking about grace, and here we encounter the complexity about how we 'know' anything. To know the truth or falsity of Paul's hypothesis we have to know the truth or otherwise of grace. To know grace is to first know much else. This is why it is such a challenge to bring the Christian message to people who have lost contact with their religious heritage. The gospel hypothesis (and the gospel when proclaimed is nothing more than an hypothesis to the person hearing it) means nothing because the layers of knowing through which it makes any sense are no longer present.

Assuming for the present exploration that 'grace' is known, it is from within that knowing that the data emerges supporting the hypothesis. Part of this data is the witness of others; part arises from our own experiences. Paul himself supplies data from his own life and mission and the life of the churches he nurtures. Other data arises from reflection upon the wider scriptural testimony. The nativity narratives my not be historical but they do express the core fact that Jesus was born to peasant (and therefore socially weak) parents in a politically weak state; grace manifest in weakness. His death by crucifixion is the ultimate and most powerful symbol of grace at its strongest in weakness. The data of grace in weakness can be seen even in the world of nature and politics. That the mammalian line survived the catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs was due to the contemporary weakness of a tiny mammal line that then existed, which survived because it lived largely underground. The evolution into homo sapiens was not one that arose from physical strength or prowess but weakness. The greatness of Nelson Mandela and the profound influence he has exercised not only on South Africa but on the whole world was forged in the utter weakness of twenty-six years of imprisonment. All of that is data supporting Paul's hypothesis.

Then there is the reflection on our own experience of life. I cannot speak for the inner experience of others, but it is my own experience that whenever I have thought myself strong, and acted from that sense of strength, my actions have either come to nothing or been more destructive than creative. Constantly throughout my life, it has been that grace has flowed most freely and creatively when I have known myself to be without strength. Time and time again, I have put Paul's hypothesis to the test and found the data supports it.

The process of knowing begins with hypothesis and the hypothesis causes us to look for data that supports or refutes the hypothesis. The refuting data may be so strong that the knowing process goes no further. Or there may be no data at all, or the data may be so ambiguous as to carry no path of conviction in any direction, and again, the knowing process comes to a halt. It is not that we have arrived at knowing the hypothesis is false: it is that we cannot progress at all towards any knowing, whichever way. If, however, the data carries us along, even when it is ambiguous (and the data for Paul's hypothesis is ambiguous), the process of knowing moves to a new stage, the phase in which we find or construct a model to interpret the data.

### Model

'Model' is a key concept in understanding knowing. Most knowing that is important to us is about things that are invisible, things that cannot be known by direct observation. It is not just God that is invisible and cannot be 'proved'. We cannot know love directly. We cannot know directly the right way to educate. These and almost everything else of importance in life are invisible to the eye. We hypothesise: we gather data: we build models that make sense of the data. When my cats gaze at me with their large, round blue eyes (they are Birmans), my hypothesis is that they feel affection for me, the data being in purrs, rubs and cuddles. The data is ambiguous: they may be just manipulating their food source. What makes me think that the data points to affection? It is that I interpret the cat's actions through the model of human interactions. I model what I see based on my experience of a human brain and human relationships. I have no other way of understanding the mind processes of my cats than to use a model within my experience. Even if I were to use the data of a CAT scan (no pun intended), the images on the screen would still only be a model, albeit a visual model, and I could even then only interpret the information by putting the data through the model of human experience. There is no way of knowing directly what is going on in the cat's brain. (As a male, I do have a similar problem with understanding my wife's brain.)

If I am a teacher faced with a classroom of students, how – and even what – I teach has been formed by many hypotheses. These have been supported by data but only come together in a frame that I can use and put into practice when the data has generated a model of education. Some models focus on rote learning, others on questioning, and we may have judgements one way or the other about the value of various models, but models they all are. There is no path that directs how education must take place independent of a model.

All data is intrinsically chaotic. To know only data is to know nothing. It is as we start to make sense of the data through putting it into the context of a model that the data starts to make any sense so that we can make progress towards knowing.

So what is a model? Models are structures in the visible world that we use to make sense of the invisible world. The effectiveness and power of a model rests on two platforms. The first is our ability to visualise the model. Thus I can, for example, grasp something of the nature of atoms and molecular structures because I can utilise the model of the solar system. I cannot, on the other hand, gasp anything of the mathematical models that atomic physicists use for a much more advanced understanding. I cannot even begin to visualise such models and so, for me, they afford nothing.

The second platform that gives a model effectiveness and power is that it captures in some way the nature of the invisible reality such that it makes sense of our experience of the invisible. A model does not have to make sense of every facet of the invisible but enough to become a lens through which we can 'see' the invisible to the extent that we need to for our purposes. Thus, for many, though not for all, purposes, the model of the solar system, of the planets orbiting the sun has provided an effective working model through which we can 'see' the workings of atoms.

We cannot know anything about all the realms that are invisible to us without utilising models. Models, however, have their problems. The first problem is when models are embraced that fail to do justice to the data, as if the nuclear scientist might utilise the solar system model to solve the splitting of the atom. History is full of problems created by such models. Communism was a model of historical determinism based on Hegelian philosophy and proved a model so out of touch with reality that it wrecked havoc wherever it was embraced.

A further problem arises when we do not recognise that we are working with a model and confuse the model with reality. Before Darwin, religious thought worked upon the model of the artisan God in his heavenly workshop fashioning the earth and sky and sea and everything in them, and doing so only a few thousand years ago. The religious tragedy is that they did not recognise that they were operating with a model. When we do know that we are working with a model, we know we are free to change the model, even abandon it when it is clear that it no longer interprets the data adequately. It is our human tragedy, not confined to religion, that we make our models into idols, into absolutes, into 'eternal verities' and cling to them long past their used-by date, often with devastating consequences.

Another problem with models is that we can push them too far. The Catholic bishop in my city has stated that female priesthood is impossible because the church is the bride of Christ and a priest represents the person of Christ. The priest therefore must be male, to symbolise the joining of Christ and his Bride.

Models can become entrenched in a tradition such that they are utilised long after they have ceased to have any meaning, or may run contrary to operative meaning. Religious discourse, liturgy and hymnody are saturated with models that make no connection at all with their hearers. This is an issue of rising intensity as fewer and fewer people have any background in the scriptures or the traditional images and models. There are very few hymns that I would sing in the congregation on a Sunday morning that, if I look at the words analytically, convey any meaning whatsoever. I may sing them with pleasure because they resonate emotionally from down the years, but I am acutely conscious that they mean nothing intellectually or emotionally to anyone new coming into the gathering. The vast majority of 'new' hymns are little better, incidentally, mostly majoring in sentiment untroubled by concern about banality.

It is of no value whatsoever that anything said or sung in liturgy, or read from the scriptures, may be solidly orthodox, rooted in tradition and scripturally warranted. If the words do not form into a model in the mind that makes sense in terms that can be visualised imaginatively from life, then the content is meaningless.

It is saying nothing new to observe that Christianity is in decline. The reasons are many and complex, but at the heart of all the reasons lies the crisis of knowing. The reality is that the vast majority of people, at least in the Western world, have lost any confidence that Christianity 'knows' anything worth attending to. At the centre of this crisis lies the failure of the traditional models to capture any longer the imagination or inspire confidence that they can interpret invisible reality.

What we think we experience as a loss of faith is often the recognition that the model of God we have been using is no longer credible. From the 1960s onwards, the previously dominant model of theism, through which Christians had interpreted their spiritual data about God for centuries, crumbled and fell apart. When this happened, it left a huge 'God-shaped' hole in thinking. So dominant had the theistic model been that virtually any other model had been crushed out of existence, so the implosion of the theistic model created the sense that it was not possible to believe in God, at least not with a belief credible in a Christian context. This collapse produced a reaction over the last 40 years in which theism was placed in the role of an idol and worshipped as God itself, though that reaction is now running out of steam and fading. If Christianity is ever again to become the religious foundation for the life of society, it will only be on the back of a completely new model for understanding God, one that can capture the imagination of the people both in a widespread manner and also be intelligible at the highest intellectual level.

This brings the exploration of the process of knowing back to the hypothesis that grace is known most fully in weakness. When we realise that we are experiencing grace, it is most frequently at times when we are acutely aware of our weakness, inadequacy and vulnerability. When we are feeling strong, in control and rich in resources, we habitually credit these with everything we achieve. The surprise that reveals grace in power comes from times and places where we cannot give such credit. It is not that grace is only present in weakness but that it is when we are weak that we most clearly see grace.

If this is the raw data of spiritual knowing, however, it raises the critical issue of what kind of world it is that we live in. My observation about the effect of the collapse of theism as a model, and consequent interpretation of the collapse as the end of faith in God, is one rooted in my own experience. For fifteen years, after going through my own spasm of collapsed model, I resolutely refused to acknowledge that there was or could be any reality behind the word 'God'. Then I was hit with a crisis in life in which I was stripped of health and material resources, facing probable death from cancer. The treatment for the disease triggered an almost catatonic depression that lasted around eighteen months, a time when I could do almost nothing. In the extremity of weakness, even as I continued to 'know nothing' of God, I discovered that each day the needs of that day were met, even to the unexpected and unplanned arrival of exactly the amount of money needed to pay a bill. I began to rely upon this 'grace' to provide for need even when nothing positive seemed possible. Never once did it fail. I lay the stress on 'need', not 'want'. Gradually I became overtaken by a sense of awe and wonder. Then came the day when I was forced to ask, what kind of universe do I live in that I can receive, indeed rely upon, such grace? What happened was classic: the data accumulated that meant the model of a purely physical universe was no longer adequate. It could not interpret the data of grace. The model was broken. What, however, could replace it? The traditional theistic model continued to be broken. That model could not be utilised to interpret what I was experiencing.

A new model, however, was at hand and in it I found the key that unlocked then, and still does today, the interpretation of the data of grace while interpreting also all the data from the natural world. This was a model based upon the discovery within the science of quantum theory that the physical nature of the universe at the quantum level reveals itself according to the question asked of it. Ask two different questions of the same phenomena and you get two different answers, and the answers are not compatible with one another. In other words, the one who is looking to understand what that reality is determines the universe of reality.

What this model enabled me to see is that if we ask the physical question of the universe, looking for cause and effect answers, the entire universe in every respect reveals itself as physical, with everything governed by seamless cause and effect, going right the way back to the Big Bang. Everything is wholly and purely physics. There is no rom for 'super nature'; no room for divine intervention or miracle that cannot be tracked to physical cause. However, if we ask if the universe is characterised by grace, the entire universe, in every aspect and part, reveals itself as grace; everything is grace. Grace is not just something added to the physical world: the physical world is grace. The experience of grace completely transcends the limitations of cause and effect. It lies outside time and space so that the present and the Big Bang are contemporaneous: the crucifixion of Jesus happens today; the outer limit of the universe is as close as my backyard. There is no way of connecting logically these two experiences of reality and they cannot be held together. As in the scientist's encounter with quantum reality, we can only move from one to the other. When engaged with one side, we cannot see the other; we can only know in our mind that it is there. It is like when we hold our arms out to each side of our body: we can see only one hand at a time. We have to turn our head to see the other.

This, then, was the model that emerged for me that made sense of my experience of life. It contained within it my sureness of the integrity of the physical world and my confidence in the ability of the scientific enterprise to uncover the reality of the natural world. But it also enabled me to embrace my logically incompatible experience of grace, of being provided for and resourced, of being directed (and prevented), of being loved and cherished. A model of a purely physical universe could explain none of this: yet it was just as real, not just in my mind but in concrete experience, as real as anything I could touch with my hands or see with my eyes.

My point is not that this model is the 'right' one the church, or for anyone else for that matter. It was and remains 'right' for me: it interprets the fundamental data I experience. It interprets the hypothesis that grace manifests itself in weakness. But the basic point is that, with the demise of the old theistic model and a whole raft of models that depended upon the model of theism, Christian knowing requires that we find new and viable models for our time.

### Theory

Finding a model that makes sense of the data we experience as we seek to explore the hypothesis is, then, the third stage in the process of knowing. But having found a model that works for us, we still do not 'know'. Just as the existence of data leads to the creation of models that makes sense of the data, so the generation of a model leads on without a break in momentum to the development of a body of theory (in religion, called theology). On its own, a model means nothing. The value of a model lies in the way it enables us to theorise. The essence of theory, all theory, is that we reason, on the basis of the model that we have adopted as explaining the data, that if we do one thing, then an outcome can be predicted. This is an extreme simplification and does not take into account ambiguities, variables and unknown factors. But this is the essence of what theory is all about. Sometimes it works in reverse, whereby we theorise about what causes a known outcome.

The model of the universe that enables us to see that reality presents itself as grace if we ask the grace question leads to the development of a whole body of theory. For the purposes of the path being explored as our example, it gives us a theory as to why grace is revealed most clearly in weakness. It leads to a theory about the nature of God, about the nature of grace and how grace works: to theory about how we are to respond appropriately to grace. The model creates a raft of new questions. Can grace be manipulated to serve our own ends and deliver on what we wish for? Is grace universal or only reserved for the spiritual elite? Is grace confined to Christians? Or born-again Christians? Have all religions been the product of grace? The questions the model generates are endless, and this is true of whatever model we adopt. Inevitably, as the questions surface, we develop theories in relation to them all and so a whole body of theory is built up over time. But the basis of all the theory/theology remains the model, and the theory/theology is only as good as the model. If at some point, for whatever reason, the model is abandoned or ceases to interpret the data satisfactorily, the body of theory/theology built upon the basis of the model goes the same way as the model. This is what has happened to Christian theology over the last two generations following the death of theism as a working model of God. There is not a single significant theologian in the whole Christian community at the present time because there remains this great vacuum where theology might begin to reconstruct something meaningful. On the other hand, when in the near future, a model surfaces that the community recognises as interpreting its grace data as well as its experience of the physical world, then the world will see an explosion of creative theology such as has not been witnessed since the early centuries of the Christian era.

### Action

Theory, however, is still not knowing. One of the great tragedies of Christian history was that theory became equated with knowing, so it was thought that we would 'know God', if we embraced the 'right' theory. This was the bane of both medieval Catholicism and Reformation Protestantism (with its counterpart in post-Reformation Catholicism). It is the curse of all the sectarian churches today with their statements of what they believe. 'Salvation' through accepting certain dogmatic truths then lead inevitably to the endless conflicts, schisms, bloodshed and sectarian hatreds that has characterised the religious scene in history and still today. The battle around abortion revolves solely around theories about when a fetus acquires a 'soul', while even the notion of acquiring a soul at all is a theory, and one owing to Greek and not Biblical models. I am not advocating for or against abortion except to note that the entire debate is about theory that is based upon models and the variance of the positions is wholly dependent upon the variance in theory and the underlying model.

Theory does not enable us to know anything. In terms of 'knowing God', the university professor of theology knows nothing more by reason of academic learning than does a little child. As has been endlessly demonstrated in life, theory can work in the opposite direction and take us into paths of destruction. The exaltation of theology into 'right belief' has been a key element in the disintegration of Christianity. To make progress into knowing, theory has to be put into practice and then evaluated. The question always has to be asked of any and every theory, is it real? Does it work?

Traditionally, religion fudged the practical outcome question by putting off the proof that the theory 'worked' until after death, so that there was never any possibility that a challenge to the theory could even be mounted in the physical span of life. This is still the way Islamist extremists are able to convince young people to strap bombs to themselves. No one can gainsay that the seventy virgins will not be waiting in heaven. What the traditional Christian narrative projected about heaven may not have been so crass but essentially was no different.

One of the most far-reaching changes that have taken place in contemporary religion is that theoretical outcomes that cannot be demonstrated because they are postposed until after death are no longer credible. The theories were based upon the theistic model and have died with that model. Theories that cannot be demonstrated to work remain always and only in the realm of theory and do not progress to the realm of what can be 'known'. In the past, the step from theory to 'knowing' may still have been taken on the foundation of believing that the religious authorities did know the absolute truth and if they said some theory was truth, then that was good enough to be embraced as known. Outside a narrow circle of dogmatists and fundamentalists, that kind of respect for religious authority no longer exists. In complete contrast to the dogmatics of the old orthodoxy, it is the contemporary position that what cannot be known is of no importance. Traditional theology has therefore been consigned to the dustbin of irrelevance.

The body of theory that is derived from the model of grace that I have outlined can, however, be subject to practice. We can try in practice to manipulate grace to serve our own ends. We can try in practice to predict how grace will manifest itself. We can put into practice allowing ourselves to be vulnerable. We can act trusting in the provision of grace. We can explore what happens when we take a negative and destructive experience or a great loss and see grace outworking through it. Even as I write these words I am consciously putting my theories of grace into practice.

### Review

There is no knowing without putting theory into practice, but even when we do this we still do not 'know'. It is only when we reflect upon how the theory has worked, or not worked, wrestling all the time with ambiguity so that we are never certain and never can be certain, yet still the deep perceptions form in us that build towards the point at which we can say, 'this I know'. That 'knowing' is not necessarily an affirmation of the starting hypothesis: it may be that we now 'know' that the hypothesis was false – which is also a knowing. More often than not, the instant of knowing is accompanied by the generation of a fresh hypothesis. The cycle of knowing begins all over again.

The process of knowing begins with a hypothesis; the hypothesis sets in motion the search for data; the data generates the need for a model that makes sense of the data; the model in turn generates theory and the theory demands to be tested; after the testing comes review, assessment, analysis and judgement and only then do we reach the point where we can say we 'know'. Then the cycle recommences.

This book is about a new narrative of faith, a faith story. It is offered in the context of the model of knowing that I have developed in this chapter and is inseparably bound up with the model of grace. As such, the entire presentation is in the nature of a hypothesis, generating data, model and theory. The critical test of the theory is whether the faith story that I present can become a credible narrative able to carry the burden of a spirituality authentic to our time. Only then will it become something known.

#  Chapter 4: The Traditional Faith Story

The traditional faith story was taken from the biblical books, which together formed a generally consistent narrative from creation to consummation. In its simplest form, the faith story comprised five main acts: Creation and Fall, Israel, Jesus, Church, Consummation. Within each of these acts the various biblical books supplied a rich tapestry of stories and detail.

The importance of the narrative to the life of faith was manifold.

1. It told of what God had done, was doing and will do. It was revelation about things that could not be known by human reason or inquiry and was therefore an indispensible foundation for faith.

2. It placed our present generation within the frame of the story. It was not an account of something remote, a record of some ancient and long-gone civilization but the story each of us lived. It foretold our future destiny.

3. It presented a challenge and stated the consequences if we failed to respond to the challenge.

4. It revealed the nature of the God. In knowing the narrative, we could come to know God and how God worked.

5. It was filled with examples of people and situations that illustrated the life of faith, the temptations we face and the blessings that follow from being faithful (or the reverse).

6. It contained the rules God laid down to govern human behaviour. The entire concept of the law of God rests upon the authority of the faith narrative. Without the narrative, the law has no authority or power.

7. It embodied the message of salvation, the gospel, resting upon the foundation of the story of Jesus' life and death.

This chapter explores what has gone wrong with the traditional story. When narratives are challenged, it is not only the issues identified above that are affected. When narratives are challenged and changed the consequences are changes in the fabric of all the institutions of power. The British monarchy is a case study of the effect of narrative change. Under the Stuarts and the dynasties of monarchs preceding them in England, the narrative that governed the relationship of the monarch to subject was that of anointing. The coronation ceremony conferred all the power of God upon the monarch who then ruled with that authority conferred by God. To challenge the monarch was to defy God. Kings had 'divine right'. That narrative has disappeared and with it any possible claim by the reigning monarch that power resides in him or her by fiat of God. The change of narrative transferred political power from king to subject.

I live in New Zealand, a land originally settled by Polynesian sailors, the ancestors of the indigenous Maori people. In the nineteenth century, Europeans colonised the land. The dominant narrative of the mid-to-late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century was that the Europeans were a superior people, the Maori inferior. All power resided with the European colonists. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, that narrative changed and a completely new story arose about the nation's founding and development. The new story shifted the locus of power, changing the political, social and economic landscape. In the next generation, the narrative is likely to shift again, perhaps moving power to the latest wave of immigrants from Asia. It will be a new story and the story will change where power resides in the country.

Stories have tremendous power. They define what we believe is real and that belief shapes our lives, our values and our institutions. We may reject the old story, but the one that now grips us becomes for us a reality beyond question. In New Zealand today, to even suggest that the dominant narrative, of partnership of two peoples around the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, is a story that a new generation may reject and change is virtually unthinkable and politically unmentionable. Even the churches have wholly identified their story, their structures, and their institutional power centres, to conform their existence to the dominant narrative. At whatever point there arises a significant challenge to the story, it will be challenging all the power, privilege, influence and economic control that has been built up around the present story. It is this that defines 'radical' and 'conservative'. The radical is the advocate of a new story, conservative the defender of an old. When radicals achieve the ascendency of their story, they in turn become the new conservatives.

That is what has happened in relation to the traditional faith story. All the ecclesiastical structures, Catholic and non-Catholic, have been built up on the basis of the old narrative. Power, control, even wealth and influence has all been related to the old story. That is why there is such an intense reaction to the change of story. That is why Catholic and evangelical churches are so intensely opposed to changes in laws relating to abortion and homosexuality. The issues themselves are in reality not at all important. The world has vastly more significant issues confronting it. But the changes reflect the change in the narrative of life, and with that change the old church authorities lose all their old power and influence. The moral debate is but a masquerade. The struggle is about power. Maintaining the old traditional narrative is absolutely essential to the structures of church power in the old sense.

The traditional story, however, has failed and a new faith story is taking its place. The fundamental change in the faith story is shifting the centres of power and that has major implications for global society, not just for individual religions. It is not just Christianity within which the traditional faith story is being called into question. The issues that we deal with directly affect both Judaism and Islam. I have nothing to say about the central story of Islam, the story around Mohammed, for I know nothing in that area. But Islam also rests upon the pillar of the Mosaic Law and as that aspect of the traditional narrative unravels so it impacts upon the rest of the Islamic story. In a wider perspective, the energy coming from the Islamic authorities is directed at holding at bay the tide of historical analysis that characterises the thinking of the West. That tide threatens to sweep away the foundations of the Islamic narrative. If that happens, all the power centres implode in Islamic societies. As with the conflicts in the West around abortion and homosexuality, so the issue in Islam is one of power. Controlling the narrative is the key to power and holding on to power.

Nowhere is this issue more starkly portrayed than in the present state of Israel. The colonisation of Palestine in the mid-twentieth century by European Jews was driven entirely by two stories. The first was the Abrahamic story of the land as been given by God to the Hebrews as their own, to be occupied by them for all time. The second story was the holocaust. Without those stories, the entire colonisation loses justification or foundation, a blatant act of injustice devoid of any moral value. The existence of the Israeli state rests upon the narratives, not only in its initial creation but also for its continued existence.

The Roman Catholic Church is yet another illustration of how power is directly related to narrative. The structure of the church is like an inverted pyramid, the point balancing on a single thread of the story that the apostle Peter was given a plenipotentiary authority by Jesus, became the first Bishop of Rome and passed on that authority to his successors, in unbroken line to the present occupant of the see. All the power invested in the Vatican rests upon that single story. If it is called into question, the whole fabric of the church collapses. Maintaining the story is essential to its power.

The last half of the twentieth century saw the disappearance everywhere of classical Protestantism. Although churches with a Protestant heritage continue to exist in name, the reality of Protestant life has disappeared, its place taken by charismatic, evangelical or social liberal manifestations. The kind of Protestant life that existed from the Reformation to the mid-twentieth century is extinct. That happened because the distinctive Protestant narrative of sola scriptura, the scriptures alone, imploded. It could no longer be sustained by the kind of preaching that was the core characteristic of classical Protestantism. Without a central magisterium to maintain the dykes against the tide undermining the defences of the old narrative, Protestantism disappeared. Power shifted to the new forms of independent pastors and teleevangelists.

Where power centres do exist, they cling so tenaciously to their narratives that challenging them can be a risky business. If the words in this book had been written a few hundred years ago, I as author would have been burnt alive at the stake. Today, anyone who seriously challenges the Islamic narrative can be in danger of their lives even if they do not live in an Islamic country. It is not just religious narratives, either. In Thailand, anyone questioning their monarchical narrative is punished under draconian laws. Less harshly, in my own country of New Zealand, it is practically impossible to hold any position in either public service or ecclesiastical office if one calls into question the dominant partnership narrative of this time. The fact that this book can be written at all in the twenty-first century is testimony to the fact that the traditional Christian narrative is truly dead. Yet even now, I would be excommunicated from most evangelical churches, and if I were a Roman Catholic priest, I would be silenced.

So what has gone wrong with the traditional narrative that it can now be called so radically into question? The short answer is that at every point the traditional faith story has lost its legitimacy. It can no longer be seen as rooted in real events or one in which, by placing ourselves within the narrative, we can see what the future holds.

Of the five acts, that of Creation and Fall has long been relegated to the region of myth. Yet while the model of theism remained dominant, the narrative continued to commence with the act of creation by a 'Being', the Creator God. The standard re-interpretation of Genesis 1 was that science provided us with the 'how' and Genesis with the 'why'.

A profound change has occurred now that theism has been dethroned from its place as the controlling model of God. At the same time, our thinking has absorbed the implications of Einstein's relativity theory that time and space are a single continuum and that time itself only came into being with the Big Bang. Added to this has been the recognition that all matter is ultimately energy and that energy is indestructible. What has happened is that the logic that said that the material world had to have a Creator has disappeared, while at the same time new models of God have emerged that do not need that logic. The sheer size, complexity and age of the universe have worked to make the notion of a single act of creation a nonsense. Although Christians may still pay lip service to the notion of a Creator God, all the life has gone out of the model. It no longer rings true.

The second act in the traditional narrative was the Old Testament story. This began with the call of Abraham in Genesis 12 and passed through a succession of patriarchal figures. The critical feature of these stories was the promise of an unending line of descendants and a promise of the land of Palestine to those descendants for all eternity. Then came the sojourn in Egypt, Moses and the escape through the Red Sea, the covenant at Sinai, desert wandering and the conquest of Palestine. A period of Judges climaxed in the appointment of Saul as king, succeeded by David and Solomon. Under their leadership, the Hebrews built a great empire dominating the Middle East. David founded the city of Jerusalem and Solomon built a magnificent temple to Yahweh their God. The nation spit in two after the death of Solomon, with two nations emerging, Judah and Israel. The Assyrians in 722BC destroyed Israel and the Hebrew people of that northern kingdom were sent into exile from which they never returned. The nation of Judah lasted a little over a century until it was conquered and destroyed by the Babylonians at the beginning of the sixth century BC. Most of the Judeans went into exile in Babylon but, after the destruction of the Babylonian empire by the Persians in 539BC, the Hebrews were allowed to return to their homeland, where they built a new temple in Jerusalem. After this, the story somewhat peters out with the only events that surface are the work of the scribe Ezra and the governor Nehemiah in the middle of the fifth century and the rebellion of the Maccabees in the middle of the second century.

This narrative was told as the story of how God dealt with the Hebrew people as his chosen people. Prophets arose at various points from Samuel onwards who spoke the words of God to the people. However, the central point of the traditional narrative of the Hebrews was the giving of the Law to Moses as the eternally binding set of regulations for governing the life of the people. Central to those regulations was the practice of circumcision, the keeping of the Sabbath and the observance of the temple rituals.

Until very recently, that narrative was taken to be broadly true to historical reality and even secular scholarship took the fundamentals of the Davidic empire and the states of Judah and Israel as being facts of history. Today, at any factual level, that story has lost all historical credibility. As an element in the faith narrative, it has lost its legitimacy, at least in the version embraced by the tradition.

The crucial evidence that collapsed the story has been the archeological data that shows that the city of Jerusalem did not exist until three hundred years after the purported time of David and Solomon. The site of the mount of Jerusalem was completely uninhabited for the first two hundred of those years, and even then followed by only a small village. Nothing whatsoever of the story either of David and Solomon and their empire, or of the succeeding accounts of the states of Judah and Israel in the books of the Kings and Chronicles has any foundation in fact. There never was a temple built by Solomon. There never was a nation at all called 'Israel', and the state of Judah and the city of Jerusalem only came into existence in the seventh century, scant decades before the Babylonian conquest. Then, when we start to read the prophets in the light of this new factual unraveling, it is clear that the majority of the canonical prophets lived not in eighth century Israel and Judah but in sixth century Babylonian exile. The prophets knew nothing of Moses, nor of almost any the elements of what became the traditional Hebrew narrative. The Hebrew people prior to the exile in Babylon were a polytheistic society, no different from any of their neighbours. Yahweh was their national god, their protector deity, worshipped in the cult along with all their other many gods.

With this evidence, the Old Testament narrative as it appears in the canon comes tumbling down, including the Mosaic story, the covenant and the giving of the Law. The story has lost its legitimacy as part of the faith narrative. Yet the story of the Hebrews remains important. The challenge is to reconstruct it is such as way that it can regain its legitimacy.

The third act in the traditional narrative is the story of Jesus. One of the features of contemporary church life as I experience it in the Anglican Communion is that, Sunday after Sunday, it is this act and no other part of the narrative that is presented. Almost without exception, every preacher at every Sunday liturgy expounds the gospel reading to the point that it has become a current dogma that this is what has to happen. This development, which has only taken hold in the last generation, puzzled me until I realised that it reflects the fact that none of the other acts are recognised any longer as having legitimacy and that this one act, that of Jesus, is all the preachers have left to cling to.

The problem comes when we read the faces and body language of the preacher's audience and recognise that the Jesus story also is no longer connecting, intensified by the sheer boredom of congregations at the predictability of the preaching.

This is a desperate situation for the church to be in. The Christian enterprise has come to be like the inverted pyramid balancing on a single point, the legitimacy of the Jesus story as part of an authentic faith narrative. And there are major problems with the Jesus 'act'.

The central problem is that we can no longer have confidence around any particular saying or deed that it is a true and accurate record of what Jesus may have said or done. We see Jesus only through the eyes of second, third or even fourth generation Christians. All of them wrote after Paul's ministry and letters. Mark, Matthew and Luke were most probably shaped by Paul's theology both positively (Mark) and negatively (Matthew). John's record of Jesus' life may bear little relationship with what Jesus actually said and did, though the gospel offers profound theological insight into the inner 'being' of Jesus and who he was.

The issue is not that we can dismiss the records. They may well be recording real events, real words of Jesus. It is that we do not know whether any part of the record is what Jesus actually said or did or whether it is a creation of the writer or his community. So when preachers say confidently that, "Jesus said this...", "This is what Jesus was like...", "This is how Jesus acted....", such statements are increasingly met with scepticism, accentuated by the fact that 'Jesus' always embraces the theological convictions of the preacher, whether radical or conservative.

This scepticism is at its most intense with respect to the resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection was the turning point for the whole traditional narrative, I Corinthians 15 being the classic exposition. Today, the resurrection has become an event of such historical ambiguity that it can no longer sustain that hinging place. At best, it is something that might or might not have happened. The life of faith can no longer balance on that narrative.

The fourth act in the traditional narrative was 'the time of the church' with its beginning on the Day of Pentecost and continuing through the present to the commencement of the final act. It is therefore projected as the act in which we live. We become actors in the drama and the narrative embraces the story of our lives as individuals and communities.

The legitimacy of the narrative rests upon several points in the story. The strength of these points varies according to the ecclesiastical tradition that is telling the story. The first narrative point is the Day of Pentecost and the Lukan picture of the early church, filled out by references in Paul's letters. The traditional narrative has a band of around 120 disciples transformed within a few weeks of Jesus' death into a power-filled, vigorous church, led by apostles, spreading the word, with people flocking to their banner of Christ. Then along comes Paul with his missionary journey that takes this dramatic gospel to the gentile world.

The narrative gave Christians in the present age the model for how their church life was intended by God to be like. For generations of Protestant Christians, and now Pentecostal and Evangelical Christians, the ideal was to recreate the life of the early church. For Pentecostalism, this was taken a stage further, building their entire narrative upon the foundation of the story of the Day of Pentecost.

The problem is that Luke's account in the early chapters of Acts is almost certainly a romanticised and largely fictional recreation. It is unlikely that the Day of Pentecost ever happened. A very different picture of the life and events of the early generations of Christians is emerging and it is far from the Lukan idealisation and the traditional narrative.

The second pillar that supported the traditional narrative of the time of the church was the succession of great councils from the fourth to the sixth centuries, the councils that produced the Nicene Creed and the classic statements of orthodox Trinitarian and Christological theology. The narrative was that these councils carried the authority of the undivided church (before it split into East and West) and that the Councils resolved for all time the main issues of our faith, and they did so under the leading of the Holy Spirit. There is no doubt that these Councils were important. However, they are more ambiguous that the traditional narrative allows. Their decisions were dictated primarily by politics and the directions given by Roman emperors, theology playing only a bit role in the drama. The Nicene Creed itself was imposed upon a reluctant church by the emperor Constantine. The emperor was not motivated by faith or theological conviction but by a determination that his subjects had to be unified behind a set of beliefs for the empire's political governance. The liturgical recitation of the creed and its acceptance as the crystalisation of 'right' belief was as much an action of political alignment as it was a statement of faith.

I cannot make any comment upon the churches of Eastern Orthodoxy as I know little of their life, but when we look around at the whole gamut of Western expressions of 'the time of the church' we see all branches in crisis around the traditional narrative. The Protestant tradition has disappeared, shaken to the ground by the collapse of the biblical narrative. Its successors are the evangelical and Pentecostal movements that depend upon the maintenance of the traditional narrative by means of dogma and high-energy religion. The Roman Catholic Church, for all its mighty presence, retains its existence by shutting down any questioning of its precarious and fragile narrative foundation. The Anglican Communion, being in origin an amalgam of Protestantism and Catholicism, is affected by the crisis in both streams.

The effect of the loss of legitimacy for 'the time of the church' in the traditional narrative is that modern Christians, unless they are prepared to cling dogmatically to the old narrative and shut out any challenge by stopping their ears, simply do not know who they are, where they are going or why they are here.

The fifth and final act in the traditional narrative was the Consummation, the end of all things material and the resurrection of the faithful to the glory of heaven. About this, little needs to be said because outside the circle of dogmatists the entire narrative has lost all meaning and legitimacy. Part of the reason for this is that from the beginning the narrative was hopelessly confused and ambiguous, built up from disparate steams of apocalyptic expectations. There was the 'going straight to heaven when you die' idea, the return of Jesus to rapture Christians up into the air as promoted by Paul, the idea of a cataclysmic end to the earth (II Peter) and the thousand year Messianic reign (Revelation). Onto all these was grafted the Platonic idea of the soul. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there grew up the entirely novel idea that heaven was where we are joined up with our loved ones after death.

Essentially, this whole grab bag of ideas has been swept up into a heap and put in the dustbin. Not a shred remains but some fine dust particles that occasionally catch the light at funerals but disappear from sight the moment the grief lessens.

The traditional narrative does not exist any more.

There are many dimensions to the crisis of Christianity and the causes of its decline, but there is little doubt that the loss of legitimacy for every part of its traditional narrative is a key factor in what is happening. There are only two paths by which the situation can be reversed. The first is the path of coercive repression of all questioning of the traditional narrative. This is the path being pursued by Islam. It was the path adopted by the Vatican under John Paul II but the horse had already bolted from their particular stable and the effort is proving fruitless, only accelerating the decline.

The alternative is to discover a new faith narrative, one that can be embraced as legitimate and can become the foundation for rebuilding the faith community. It is this enterprise that engages this book.

Whether what I put forward can capture the mind and imagination of the Christian community sufficiently that it can lead to the creation of such a new faith story is something that remains to be seen. If what I write achieves nothing else, however, my hope is that it can impel the community forward to such discovery. For we cannot live without a story. It is as simple as that. If we do not find an alternative to the traditional story, Christianity will disappear.

# Chapter 5: Legitimacy

What constitutes a legitimate faith narrative? The answer is that it is a narrative that we can affirm as being the story of

how we came to be as we are,

defines who we are,

tells what it is that gives meaning to our lives and

indicates where we are going to end up.

The traditional narrative meets none of these requirements.

To analyse further what makes a narrative legitimate, we need to return to the knowing process explored in Chapter 4. It is that process that legitimises (or not) the narrative both as a whole and with respect to every detail. This means that the activity of legitimisation is an ongoing process, never ceasing. We never arrive at a point where we can crystalise the story into a new creed and make it a standard that the future generations must accept. Hard as it may be for us to recognise, whatever new narrative we may generate and affirm for ourselves, the next generation may change, even reject.

The one seemingly unshakeable foundation for the legitimacy of any faith narrative is recognition of ambiguity and provisionality. It is this that fundamentally separates our world from that of our forebears. For them, the faith narrative was about certainty: this was absolute truth, even if there was some scope for uncertainty with respect to details. The five acts were inalienable and final truth. Today, no narrative can make that claim to final truth and be embraced as legitimate.

Putting this into the context of the knowing process, our initial statement of a faith story can only be a hypothesis. That is the character of the narrative as developed in the following chapters of this book. The narrative I expound can only come to readers as something that might or might not be legitimate. It is not that I am flying kites to see the direction of the wind. I put the narrative forward as something that, from my own process of knowing, I 'know' to be legitimate, even in all its ambiguity and provisionality. Its reception, however, can only be as a hypothesis.

This is the dynamic of the Christian message in every aspect, not just with regard to the faith narrative. The Christian community 'knows' God, knows the power of the gospel, and knows the liberation of the Spirit and the wonder of grace. This community witnesses to what it knows when it proclaims the gospel. To hearers, however, the gospel message can never be anything but a hypothesis, something that might or might not be true, be legitimate. If the message is communicated with power and clarity, then it may kick start the knowing process in the hearer but it is only when the process has worked through the whole cycle is it possible for any person genuinely to say that they 'know' what the gospel has to say to them.

So it is with the story of faith. It begins as a hypothesis. If legitimacy is to be found, the hypothesis has to be backed up with data. The question is then, what kind of data can serve to support the faith story? This again is one of the great dividing points that separate us from the past. Religious orthodoxy in the past insisted that the narrative had to be accepted on pure faith. It became the litmus test of faith that we accepted what evidence suggested was not true. The resurrection of Jesus, the Virgin Birth, the ascension, the miracles, life beyond death: all had to be accepted as articles of faith. Behind all this insistence lay religious authority that dictated what had to be accepted. For the Church of Rome, that authority was the magisterium: for Protestants, the Bible. What these authorities said was never hypothesis but a declaration of knowing. There was no question of a knowing process taking place in the recipients. It was truth: end of story.

To be legitimate today, a narrative has to begin as a hypothesis and be backed up with data. The key data is two-fold.

First, whenever this narrative makes a claim to be rooted in events of actual history, then the claim has to be supported by evidence that it did really happen and happen in much the way the narrative claims for it. Inevitably, as in every historical claim, there is ambiguity and often the evidence is slender and circumstantial. If the hypothesis is ever dogmatic about the actuality or the interpretation, the whole claim to legitimacy is fatally weakened.

In constructing a new narrative, a key issue is the historical believability of the elements of the narrative. That Jesus lived and died a criminal's death, leaving behind a group of disciples out of which emerged the church is a fully credible historical element of the story. That he was born of a virgin following an annunciation by an archangel and was visited by shepherds and wise men is not. That Peter was a principal leader in that early band of disciples is historically credible: that he was the first bishop of Rome, accorded the role as Vicar of Christ with plenipotentiary power and with the authority to pass on that role to his successors, is not. Elements in the Mormon story are certainly credible: the story of the delivery of the Book of Mormon is not.

Historical credibility is one essential element in legitimising data but it is not the whole. The second element significantly modifies the issue as compared to how the secular world may exercise its judgement. For the faith community, that we know and understand the universe as grace is part of the data. For contemporary Christians, this is the core foundation for an active, mature faith. That foundation can no longer rely upon dogmas sanctioned as orthodox by authorities. Faith is built upon the experience of knowing grace. That process lies outside the scope of the present book. What it does tell us, however, is that a grasp of the faith narrative is not the same as the gospel. The gospel is the message that leads to the exploration and knowing of grace. The faith narrative can only be legitimised from within the knowledge of grace. For the faith story is not a secular history even when it draws upon the resources of secular history. The narrative may track through billions of years of evolution, yet it is not a narrative of chance and natural selection but a story of grace operating alongside the mechanisms of evolution, whatever they may be in the world seen physically.

The grace story is built upon the model of reality that was developed in Chapter 3, and that model is not pure speculation (it is not speculation at all in my understanding) but is grounded in our living experience of grace in our daily life and community. The key issues about grace as we so experience it, apart from its essential ambiguity, is, first, that it is always creative in the direction of love and goodness, even when the external experience appears to be negative, even evil: and that creativity is always directional, purposeful and meaningful. The second fact about grace is that it is full of surprises and rarely, if ever, predictable. The third is that the element of the miraculous is ever present.

This last point needs further development because it arises as a key issue with respect to the faith narrative. I will only speak of my own experience of grace for it is all that I can speak of with any authority. Living within the universe as grace is to live in a constant sense of miracle. Miracle is not something rare or only happens to others or in remote antiquity. Miracle is an every day and constant experience of the unlikely or even what seems the impossible. However, the character of every such miracle is always ambiguous, in the sense that we can take any isolated event that fills us with the wonder and awe of the grace of God and always it is possible to trace the physical path by which the miracle came to be. Miracle is never a violation of the integrity of the physical world.

Perhaps the supreme manifestation of grace in my experience is communication with God. Again, it is important to recognise the ambiguity, that we never know whether the communication is real or illusory or a mixture of both. It is only the fool or the charlatan who says, "God told me", without acknowledging the ambiguity. Yet my experience of grace is of constant, daily communication that is two-way. Sometimes the word is a clear and ringing voice (no, I am not schizophrenic). More often it is the kind of communication experienced in normal human relationships of intimacy such as happens between life partners. The majority of the communication that takes place between my wife and myself is non-verbal to the point of being hardly aware that we are communicating at all. That non-verbal communication, however, is the essence of the relationship and its quality.

It is this whole experience of grace that each of us brings to bear as data that supports or does not support the hypothetical faith narrative. That grace can be traced through several billion years of the universe and the evolution of life is an insight into the physical processes that is validated by the experience of grace as we know it in our lives. That God may have spoken through the Hebrew prophets – and others – is validated by our own grace experience of encounter with the way God communicates with us. That God could be manifest in Jesus may be validated by the wonder of our total encounter with grace.

On the other hand, while keeping an awareness of the ambiguity of everything and the provisionality of our knowledge in the contemporary world, our experience of grace is such that we cannot validate claims to events that violate the integrity of the physical world – calling into question such elements as the virgin birth, the physical resurrection of Jesus and the languages of the Day of Pentecost.

So far, I have drawn attention to two sources of data that serve to validate or otherwise the hypothesis of the faith narrative. The next source of data is also critical, for without it the narrative has no meaning. This is the data of personal identification. A faith narrative can only be legitimate if it enables us, as individuals and communities, local or global, to be within the story and recognise ourselves as current actors in the drama. The narrative has to be able to tell me who I am and what the meaning of my life is and how I am to live that life. Unless it does that, the narrative has no legitimacy whatsoever, at least for the person to whom it provides no identity. I can recognise the faith narrative of Islam but I cannot put myself into their story and identify who I am and how I am to live by knowing their story. This has become a core issue with the traditional narrative. It is no longer a story in which we can place ourselves. It no longer gives meaning to our lives. The weekly recitation of the creed has become an empty ritual because it no longer embodies our life story.

There is one further source of data that is important to the process of legitimisation and that is what we may broadly call, witness. What this is saying is that the source of data does not rest wholly upon the shoulders of our own personal and limited experience but takes into account the witness to the power of grace among the wider community. The experience of others is constantly challenging the boundaries of our own limited understanding and experience. I could not count the number of times that the witness of others has forced me to completely or partially re-evaluate my own understanding, sometimes leading to a complete reversal.

In particular, it is in this respect that the Hebrew and Christian scriptures have an enormously important role in validating a faith narrative. No faith story that ignores the witness of the Hebrews and the apostolic-era writers can have legitimacy in a Christian faith narrative.

The data we gather as we engage with the hypothesis of the faith story does not in itself legitimise the narrative. The data is always ambiguous and often conflicting. It is only a stage, even if a crucial stage, in the process of knowing whether or not the story carries legitimacy.

The next stage in the process is model. Can the hypothesis be accommodated within a model that makes sense of all the data accumulated around it? The traditional narrative was bound up with the model of a theistic God who "in the beginning" created matter out of nothing and man out of dust; who acted on this world over which he had free and sovereign control to favour a single ethnic group, promise them land in perpetuity, parted the sea, gave them tables of stone, and so on.

The inescapable question for any new narrative is whether there can be a model of God and the universe that can accommodate the narrative. If no such model exists to take the place of the old theism, then the narrative fails. It can do nothing more than be a fanciful story, a folk tale.

Assuming that such a model can be found, the process moves to theology/theory. The narrative has no value if it does not enable us to develop theories that may guide our decisions, priorities and beliefs. The Pentecostal narrative, for example, has spawned a vast theological development about the power of the Spirit, spiritual gifts, the significance of speaking in tongues, the mission of the church and how the gospel is preached. If a story does not lead to theology it goes nowhere. It can be said that the whole point of the faith narrative is to provoke theory/theology. If it does not do so, it looses legitimacy and becomes pointless.

Theology that does not lead to practice is also meaningless, like the debate medieval schoolmen were supposed to have had about how many angels could fit upon a pinhead. Pentecostal theology, for example, led to the practice of glossolalia being taken as a sign of being Christian, of having the Spirit. The knowing process, and therefore the legitimisation or otherwise of the faith story only comes when the practical implementation of the theology is evaluated. Once again, here as everywhere, there is ambiguity. Pentecostals can point to the immense liberating power that can be experienced when one gives over to glossolalia. At a personal level, I have spoken in tongues and even now can do so at will and I can back the testimony to power. In terms of my personal story, I know that the encounter with the Pentecostal/charismatic movement laid the foundations for my whole present experience of grace. Through all its ambiguity, I have no hesitation in affirming that the advent of the charismatic movement in the church life in the last quarter of the twentieth century literally saved the church from complete extinction. Its advent belongs as part of the great faith narrative.

Yet the theology also became utterly distorted and in its distortion did (and still does) great harm. The theology failed in practice in a whole range of areas. The failure in practice strips the Pentecostal faith narrative of legitimacy (a judgement the remaining adherents would not agree with).

It is only at the conclusion of the whole process that we can affirm or deny legitimacy to the faith narrative as put forward as a hypothesis. The process, however, will have modified the original hypothesis even if it is basically affirmed as known. It is the modifications that inevitably set the whole process in motion once again. As the process recommences, however, the fact that we 'know' the faith narrative to be legitimate has a profound effect upon the data that becomes visible to us and it is this new data that feeds the next and successive rounds of the process of knowing. Every cycle further modifies the faith story, so that it is never, and never can be, a static, 'orthodox' story that can be solidified in a confessional statement or creed.

Nor can its legitimacy ever be taken as decided for all time. The faith story is always a work in progress. A critical factor in the ongoing modification of the narrative is that it is exposed at all times to the advances in the secular sciences and historical research. So it is, for example, that the faith narrative of the recent past was turned on its head by the archaeological evidence regarding Jerusalem and how it did not exist through the centuries when it was supposed to have played such a major part in Hebrew history. If ever the world of science discovers sentient life on another planet, or makes concrete the speculative realm of multi-universes, the faith story would reshape dramatically to embrace the new data.

It is this that is the ultimate test of legitimacy in the contemporary world. The old narrative proclaimed itself as fixed and permanent, the revealed story of God and the world, valid for all time. It is that assertion, above all else, that has delegitimised the traditional narrative. The essence of legitimacy in any new narrative is its openness to new data and ability to modify in response.

#  Chapter 6: In the beginning – no beginning

God created the world, natural and spiritual: the traditional Christian narrative took this as axiomatic. Even when the first chapter of Genesis came to be recognised as poetic and mythic rather than factual, yet still the dogma of a Creator God remained unchallenged. I found it interesting that when my local city newspaper published a Christmas message in 2012, signed by all the church leaders of the city, it began with the affirmation that we believe in a Creator God, as if this was an axiom fundamental to Christianity.

The reality is that there is no dogmatic reason at all why Christians must believe in a Creator God. The dogma rests on the foundation of Genesis 1 and the chapters in Isaiah from 40 to 44. What the traditional dogma failed to recognise is that the concept of God as Creator is a model drawn from human experience of artisanship, like Jeremiah's imagery of God as potter and the people as clay. There is no question that the artisan model proved useful for centuries, but it rested within a larger model of God as a Being, the theistic model. To speak of a Creator God today is to employ the theistic model in an environment in which the model has lost its meaning. The situation is that if we ask either ordinary Christians or theologians, outside the circle of fundamentalists and creationists, to give an account of God as Creator, the response is either silence or garbled nonsense. The test is this: we could stop all our language of the Creator God and nothing would change practically in the way we live our lives. It no longer has any real meaning other than being a test of orthodoxy.

There are no grounds whatsoever for making the beginning of the world any part of our article of faith and belief. In some form, however, it is a necessary element in the narrative of faith. The faith story has to be about total reality or it has no meaning at all. Therefore the narrative has to begin at the earliest moment of time, both with respect to the material universe and the advent of humanity. But this does not mean we have to postulate a Being as Creator: or if we do so, then it is only as a model, not an assertion of ultimate reality.

The difference is this: the traditional narrative required us to believe, as an act of faith that defined us as Christians, that a Being called God formed the material world out of nothing, whether that be in a seven-day act or at a Big Bang. To be a genuine Christian believer, we had to affirm this Creator Being. In contrast, what we have today is knowledge of the natural world, recognition that all matter is ultimately energy, that energy pre-existed the Big Bang and that time and space only came into existence with the Big Bang. We do not need a theory of a Creator Being to explain how the world is as it is, and any such theory is impossible to match up with the complexity of the universe. The orthodox theory is nonsense when we try to apply it. If we say that God set everything in motion fourteen billion years ago and then let processes take their course, such a God is so remote to us as to be of no use. If we think that the Creator God hand-makes each facet of the universe, animate and inanimate, a look inside our brain makes the notion a mockery. The National Geographic's recent excellent booklet on the brain crystalises the issue. "The human brain contains perhaps 100 billion neurons. Each links to so many others that the entire network forges literally trillions of connections...." (Your Brain, National Geographic 2013, page 27)

The traditional faith narrative of a Creator God breaks down at every point, when we think about it and not parrot the old dogma without thought.

* There is no sustainable scriptural foundation for the dogma as distinct from model.

* We understand matter as energy, not 'something made from nothing'.

* We understand energy as pre-existing the initial moment when matter forms; that energy is indestructible, 'eternal'.

* We understand that processes worked over billions of years, through formations and deaths of stars, to being about the world as we know it, and we do not need the hypothesis of a creating Being to explain it.

* The sheer size and complexity of the universe makes nonsense of any image of a single mind forming each element of the whole.

* We recognise how models are formed and are necessary, and that the idea of a Creator God is a model and nothing more than a model. Historically, it proved a useful model and even today, in some circumstances, it remains useful. It is not, and can never be, dogma.

This said, the problem for the life of faith is two-fold. First, our grace experience of the living in this world is such that we cannot 'explain' our grace experience in purely physical terms. If the orthodox Creator God model does not stack up for us, neither does the secular scientific model. Our experience of grace manifests itself in physical ways that cannot be attributed to blind chance or luck. And our experience of grace does see into the immeasurable complexity, even of our human brain, and knows the wonder at the very heart of that complexity that inescapably says, this is God's doing. Second, the life of grace points to meaningfulness and direction, not only in personal life but also in the whole universe. But there can only be meaning and purpose, at least as we understand it, if there is 'mind'. That grace is experienced as love, as personal and intimate care for me as a person in every facet of life: this requires 'mind'; this requires something akin to what I understand as 'person'.

It is this tension that drives the current obsession with the idea of a Creator God. The faith community is confronted with a world that asserts that everything is 'non-personal'; no meaning, no direction, no 'love'. The assertion of a Creator is above all else an assertion that this is not the full reality of the world. There is meaning, there is direction and there is love. What we have to say, however, is that the model of the Creator is no longer an appropriate model to use in making the assertion: above all, we have to recognise that it is and always has been just a model, not a description of ultimate reality. It is no longer a viable way of starting the faith narrative.

We need a new model of God that makes sense of both sides of our experience: the world as physical and the world as grace. In constructing such a model, we must never confuse 'reality' with model. Whatever model we arrive at will never be adequate and can never be translated into dogma. Its test of 'rightness' is whether or not it helps us understand the spectrum of our experience and so make appropriate faith decisions. Furthermore, any model we arrive at is likely to be of value to only some people, unlikely to be universal. By this I mean that one major reason why the artisan model of God became so universal is that it employed an image that everyone had some experience of. There would be hardly a person alive who has not encountered a workman (or woman), so the image readily connected across all peoples. The models I advance here are drawn mainly from the world of science, and this may immediately limit their usefulness for many people. For such, other models may need to be found; it may even be that the artisan model continues to be effective in these environments. There is nothing inherently wrong with the artisan model. If it works for a person, then it works: end of story. The essential point is not any specific model but that we recognise that we think in models and that orthodoxy cannot be defined by affirming any model as 'right'.

Although models are neither right nor wrong, they can be judged as to whether they are useful or not useful with respect to what theory and practice we seek to draw from them. I will cheerfully thank God for rain after a drought, and that is a frank employment of the artisan model, and there is nothing wrong in that. If, however, I think that I can end the drought by asking the artisan God to cause it to rain, then I am using the model in a way that is not useful and, in high probability, dangerous to faith because it leads almost invariably to disillusionment, which in turn can lead to the collapse of faith altogether.

What I am offering here is a model that draws its inspiration from the world of science. It is a model that works for me in that I find it helpful in understanding how I can experience both the physical world in full integrity of physics and, at the same time, the world of grace in all the integrity of grace; even though these two aspects of experience are logically impossible to hold together. I offer the model as something that for me I 'know' because it has generated a theology that stands for me the test of practical living. I advance it as a hypothesis that may or may not prove 'true' for others. That can only be grasped, one way or the other, through the knowing process.

The hypothesis to start the faith narrative, I suggest, is this: God and energy are the two sides of one reality and this God/energy is eternal, existing outside of time and space and therefore has no beginning. The beginning of time and space occurred at the Big Bang and is therefore this moment that begins the narrative of faith.

The essential data is not Biblical but scientific, on the one hand, and our experience of grace on the other (which, of course, is grounded in the scriptural witness). The essence is that everything that exists is energy and energy is indestructible. Energy preceded the Big Bang and therefore lies outside of time and space: it has no 'beginning' because beginning makes sense only in the framework of time and space. There is no 'before' the Big Bang. It is also of the essence that time and space are a single continuum (Relativity Theory) and that, theoretically at least, we can bend time and space to take us back in time, or make the furthest star our immediate neighbour. The Big Bang itself becomes (theoretically) part of our present. Even the future (theoretically), to the end of the universe, becomes part of our present. The ordered world of Newtonian scientific thinking, with its seamless sequence of cause and effect flowing in unalterable time from a beginning eons ago, has been turned on its head.

Within the boundaries of recognising the provisionality of this science, as in all science, this is the real world in which we live. The picture is deepened as we come to grips with the strangeness of the universe as it appears in quantum theory, the science of the world at its minutest. Time and space does indeed appear no longer to exist at the experimental level and human logic is defied.

If the science were all we have to go on, then there would be no room at all for any talk of God. But our observations and theories of the natural world are not all the data we have to go on. There is our experience of grace.

To make sense of all this data, we have to find a model that resolves the question: what kind of universe do we live in that grace is possible yet scientific knowledge can be affirmed?

Such a model exists in the 'two natures' model of reality developed in Chapter 3. It builds upon the quantum discovery that the question the researcher asks determines what the physics reveals at the quantum level. The answers to different questions contradict each other, with no possible way, by current science at least, of reconciling the answers.

On this model, if we ask the universe if it is completely physical, the whole of reality presents itself to us as completely physical. Everything that we experience has a cause in the physical world, and there is nothing else but the physical. There is no 'supernature', no power outside the physical realm that imposes an influence upon the physical world. This is the world of nature as it presents to Christian as well as non-Christian. It is the real world in which we live, Christian as well as non-Christian.

However, if we ask of the universe if it is 'grace', the whole of reality, everything, the entire universe, reveals itself as grace, unconditionally. In the experience of grace, everything is directly related not to prior cause but to purpose. Everything is 'caused' by God: everything is characterised by grace, even when the outward circumstances appear negative and destructive. This is the universe as grace as it appears to the Christian and in that appearance is just as real for the non-Christian but simply not recognised. The world of quantum physics has been the reality of the universe since the Big Bang. It was just not recognised. So with reality as grace.

My experience is that living by this model works in practice but this is not my focus at this point. Rather it is the extension of the model to understanding the reality we call 'God' and the physical universe. For this is what the model of the artisan God, the Creator God, was all about. It was a model, one that worked for a long time, that enabled people to grasp a connection between the two realities they knew, the spiritual and the material. The Creator God model resolved the nature of the relationship by postulating a Being, superhuman in power, one who made and governed the material world. So successful was the model, that it became confused with dogmatic certainty in just the same way as the earth-centred cosmic model became dogmatic certainty prior to Copernicus and Galileo.

The key thought is energy and the scientific understanding that ultimately everything is pure energy. Energy is indestructible and therefore is, even in a Biblical sense, 'eternal'. In itself, energy never changes though it is expressed in manifold ways in the physical world. Furthermore, there are not multiple 'energies', or competing energies, like forces on the 'dark' side and others on the 'light' side. Energy ultimately is one and therefore all matter is ultimately one. The energy in my little finger is one with the energy in the furthest galaxy. At this ultimate point, time and space disappear.

The model is that energy has a two-fold nature (echoes of classical Christology!). If we ask of energy the physical question, energy is physics with all the properties of energy that science explores. But ask a different question and energy is God: in other words, all reality is God and that is a perception, too, that has deep roots in classical theology. This model is not to be confused with old ideas about pantheism, which modified the idea of God within the physical world but preserved two separate realities. Even more insistently, it is not a spiritualising of the world so that we are encouraged to live as though the physical world was not 'real' reality. It has nothing in common with the hazy notions of the tired old 'New Age' ideations. When we are dealing with the physical reality we are dealing with the whole of reality, not simply one part. For all practical purposes, we are dealing with time and space, limited resources and processes that need to be respected. We live most of our lives in this way, even the most ardent Christian, even Jesus himself. There is nothing inferior, second-class or 'non-spiritual' about living in the physical reality. It is not the realm of the devil or 'not-God'. It is nothing from which we need to escape in order to be people of faith. And it will last. It is not going to be brought to an end by any apocalyptic act of God (which is not to say that something cataclysmic cannot happen to planet Earth).

Equally, however, we can ask the spiritual question of reality and then all reality is seen in an completely different light, existing outside time and space, limitless in resource and governed by meaning and purpose. We cannot live for any length of time in this dimension of the nature of reality but we can move freely in and out of it at will. It is this ability to move freely in and out of each side of the nature of reality that is the single most important 'skill' of the Christian life lived in faith.

Both sides of this dual nature of reality are important to us. We can in principle live exclusively in the realm of physical reality for it is in the physical that we derive the means for staying alive. But as post-modernism has made abundantly clear also, the physical world in itself has no meaning, no values, no direction, no ethics. To live asking only the physical question is to live like a pack of dogs in the wild. It is only when we ask the spiritual question that we find meaning, ethics, inspiration and resources of inner strength to meet life's challenges. The very survival of humanity rests upon our capacity to ask the spiritual question and see the universe through the eyes of grace.

The traditional faith story began with an 'act' but the significance of the act lay not so much in the activity as in the model it gave that set up the relationship between the physical world and 'God'. This remains an essential starting point for any new faith narrative and is it is the start of this faith narrative.

In the opening chapters of Genesis, in both versions of the creation story, the narrative goes on immediately to develop the relationship between humans and God. It is a characteristic of the data that we now have to work with that his relationship stands a little further down the storyline from the traditional narrative.

#  Chapter 7: What is the world?

The conventional way in which the science vis religion debate is resolved is to say that science tells us 'what' and Genesis tells us 'why'. The answer is meaningless. It has more meaning if we reverse it. Science tells us 'why' the universe is as it is: that is, it can describe with some accuracy and credibility why the world is as it is in physical reality. Science cannot tell us 'what' we are dealing with in total. It cannot explain reality experienced as grace and if we have no model for understanding grace then we do not know 'what' is reality.

Unlike the traditional faith story, the new narrative affirms no beginning in an artisan-like act of creation. However, the creation 'act' in the tradition did not just assert a beginning moment but accounted for the whole world being as we now experience it to be, at least outwardly. Heaven and earth, sun, moon and stars, plants, animals and finally and supremely man, male and female.

Outside a relatively small group of fundamentalist, mostly American or American influenced, few if any give any factual credibility to the Genesis account. Yet for over a century, fierce debate has revolved around the issue of creation vis evolution, and as the debate continues ad nauseam, the consequences for the credibility of Christianity, especially among the young, has been catastrophic. The problem is that while the greater part of the Christian community recognises the 'poetic' nature of the Genesis narrative, it has not generated an alternative story that puts faith in the context of the world as it is physically.

In recent years there has been an attempt at a new narrative under the name of Intelligent Design (ID). ID is able to recognise cosmic and geological facts, which is an advance on the creationists, but asserts that behind all the cosmic/evolutionary development there was and is an intelligent Being who directs and governs all processes to bring about a planned result. The universe is as it is now through a product of sustained artisanship.

This concept is, first, an attempt to rescue the creationist narrative from oblivion because the facts have so stacked up against it and, second, to counter the secularist dogma that the universe is as it is by pure chance and inflexible process, without meaning or direction. The core problem for the Christian community is that because it has not been able to generate a credible narrative of the world that puts faith in context, secular ideology has been sweeping the field clean.

If the universe is simply chance and process, then there is no room or point in having any kind of faith. This is the stark reality. The majority of people in most Western countries have abandoned any real connection with Christianity. This is rooted in the loss of a narrative that credibly connects faith with the real world.

Does ID provide such a credible narrative? Not at all, if only for the reason that it is still based on the model of the artisan Being, a model that itself no longer has credibility. The real crux of the issue, however, is that ID tries to present itself as an alternative to Darwinian evolutionary theory and be taught as science. It is following the creationist agenda of trying to make science conform to religious dogma.

ID is a lazy concept, produced by lazy minds for lazy minds. It is not science at all, nor is it a theory of how the world comes to be as it is. The point about scientific theory is that it can be put to the test and evaluated by the results of the test. If the results do not match the theory then the theory needs to be abandoned or modified. There is no possible way of putting ID to the test and evaluating results. It cannot even be used to predict future outcomes in any area. ID is not a theory but idle and lazy speculation without value.

Yet the issue that ID attempts to address remains important, a vitally important issue for Christianity. Unless our narrative can bridge the gap between the world of scientific understanding of how the world comes to be as it is and the world of our faith then Christianity is doomed to extinction.

Here then, is the next phase in the new narrative of faith, the hypothesis of such a narrative. As we explored in the previous chapter, if we ask the physical question of how the universe comes to be as it is, the answer is wholly and unconditionally that it is a result of processes set in motion at the first milli-second of the Big Bang, and chance. We cannot know or find any direction or purpose in the universe. It just is. That we humans are who we are and achieve what we achieve is pure process and accident. The best popular explanation that I have ever read of the way things are from the perspective of being human is Richard Dawkins, 'An Ancestor's Tale'. As a Christian I have no difficulty whatsoever in embracing Dawkin's account, even with all its speculative conclusions.

When we ask the spiritual question, the grace question, the data presents itself entirely differently. Because time and space do not govern the universe as grace, process and chance are taken out of play. Everything that is becomes a direct encounter with grace. In fact, we cannot even objectify the universe and look at it analytically as if we were observers, an "I" and "It" relationship with the world. "I" am energy, my mind is energy, there is no "me" that is not part of the universe of grace such that I can critically observe the world of grace.

It is at this point that our experience of the universe as grace, as an element of the faith narrative, is dependent upon a later stage of the narrative, the story of Jesus, and I will pick up this theme of the experience of the universe as grace at that point.

The narrative being advanced at this stage is the hypothesis that the universe presents itself according to the question we ask of it. If we ask the physical question, the whole of everything that is real unfolds in terms of Big Bang, star formation and death, formation of our solar system, the beginning of the earth, the beginning and evolution of life, and so on. We have no need spiritually to compromise that story. However, when we ask the spiritual question, the entire universe of reality becomes an expression of grace. We cannot even say we 'encounter God' when we ask the question because, in asking it, the differential between what we think of as "God", and what we think of as "me" or "us", is transcended.

If that is the hypothesis, is there any supporting data? There is no question about the data supporting the physical presentation of the universe. But the reality of the universe as grace? Is it just pure fantasy, or vague philosophising?

The point of the narrative is that it makes sense of the spiritual experience that arises from out of living the life of faith. The faith narrative is not the gospel but arises from life lived in response to the gospel. Someone who has no experience of prayer, worship and the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit cannot understand the faith narrative as legitimate. The narrative can never, therefore, be advanced as a theory to compete with established scientific theory on the plane of time and space.

Grace experience is real and it is outward in its manifestation, not just 'in the head' fantasy. I am continually stunned by the power of prayer and in awe of the miracles of grace that I experience daily. The experience of grace is not explicable by any physical theory, or by 'good luck', 'kind fortune' or blind chance. It is certainly not explicable as reward for good behaviour – or right belief. In other words, the experience of life lived in grace cannot be explained by asking the physical question of the universe.

We live, then, as a matter of daily data, with two incompatible experiences of reality. Each, within its own 'question', is wholly true of the entirety of reality.

What are the theories that develop from this model and where do these theories lead us in practice?

The theoretical implications are manifold. From my own experience, the most important theory relates to how we live the life of faith in practice. The secret of living the life of faith lies in the ability to move between asking the physical question and asking the spiritual question. This leads to a very different theory of living to the dominant theories of the past. The traditional theory is that we were called to live spiritually, and the thrust of the faith life was to live as little as possible 'in the world' and as much as possible 'in the Spirit'. The ultimate objective of the spiritual life, classically expressed in Paul's apocalyptic theology, was to come to the place where the physical life was completely shed and we would rise as purely spiritual beings in a purely spiritual universe. Withdrawing 'from the world' into a monastic life or lives of dedicated and sacrificial service to God was the expression in this life of this theory. Sex, being a physical act, was a necessary function for human procreation but, being purely physical, was inherently 'not of God'. All of this theory, with its practical implication, was an outworking of models based upon the traditional narrative. Changing the narrative leads to change of model, which leads to change of theory and therefore change of practice.

The theory that emerges from the new model says that the life of faith is one in which both sides of reality, physics and grace, are necessary to life and neither has precedence over the other. Neither can they be lived together in harmonious (or disharmonious) connection. We move from one to the other and back again. All practical existence, decisions, and actions take place in the physical realm. We cannot live at all without living physically. There is no 'soul' that is non-physical that resides within our physical body: that was an idea imported from Greek philosophy, specifically Platonism, and is pure fantasy and speculation. There is no 'spirit' in us, which is simply another term for 'soul'. There is no 'me' that is not inextricably caught up with all my physical attributes and culture. Paul instinctively understood this even in his apocalyptic imagining, for in Thessalonians he has the believers floating up into the air to join Jesus in the clouds: in other words, they were taking themselves and all their physical body with them. In I Corinthians 15, he is at pains to stress that it is the 'body' that is resurrected and then tries to fit that into the idea of spiritualisation. So the one side of the life of faith is the validity of living wholly in the physical world. The physical world in itself contains no moral values, no meaning, no determinative direction as to how life is to be lived other than what has to be in order to survive.

That is the real point for us of Jesus' words about man cannot live by bread alone. If we ask only the physical question of life then there is no moral compass, nothing to guide us ethically apart from what it takes to survive. All of life is meaningless. The brutal honesty of post-modern thinking is that it has exposed the stark reality of life as purely physical.

When we shift question and see life as grace, then the vision of all life changes. The facts of the physical existence remain intact but the dynamic behind and within them is seen differently. We not only see differently while within the universe as grace, we act differently. We can act to offer the situation to God, we can even dialogue with God about what we are to do or what the ethical issues are and how we should resolve them. We can express our feelings and wrestle with our conscience and inadequacies. All of this constitutes what the tradition calls the life of prayer. What we cannot do is remain on this plane. When we move back to seeing the world as physical, then our practical actions are illuminated by what we have seen and understood from our seeing the world as grace. This moving between the different ways of seeing is not just an occasional process: it is an everyday and constant experience, much of it instinctive and beneath our conscious awareness.

That is the theory, but does it work? For me, as I write these words, the experience is one of continual movement between the two ways of seeing the world. When something happens, great or small, that I experience as loss, I have to deal with it at the physical level, but how I deal with it is governed by what I understand when I look at the situation by asking the grace question.

I can illustrate this with an example. I am deeply troubled with concern for a particular person. The circumstances surrounding him and the prospects that lie in his future appear bleak, and that is a tragedy both for him and for his family. He has so many talents, so much to offer, but I fear that he will realise none of it, that he may even take his own life. I am of little practical help to him, other than to continue to accept him, be available to him, whatever happens. At the physical level, I am close to despair.

It is easy and conventional to say, pray for him. I do this, every day. But it is here that the issue of model comes into play. God appears to be doing nothing; the artisan God is failing to do his thing, perhaps powerless, just as I am. If my friend takes his life or otherwise disintegrates as a person, has God done nothing? This is where the artisan God model lets us down, over and over again.

The transformation occurs when I reframe the whole situation and see the world as grace. The turning point comes when I see my friend, even in his state as he is, as a manifestation of grace, and I offer thanks to God for him just as he is – and for whatever he becomes. This is an act of trust that grace is always positive, creative, loving and good and that, whatever the outcome, it will be positive, creative, loving and good. What I might wish to happen gets taken right out of the picture. The very worst I may imagine might yet happen: but grace will prevail whatever. The model enables me to see into the depths of the situation, even at its worst, and see creative love.

The practical change that occurs when I bring the new model to bear is extraordinary. The despair lifts, the calm returns, love is freed to flow because it is not bound up by fear. There is no fear, even of the worst. The transformation carries over into the practical sphere. As I have said earlier, we cannot live permanently in the world seen as grace. If all that happened is that I vanished into such a world then the outcome would be worse than useless. So heavenly minded he is no earthly use is the classical way of expressing this. The secret lies in moving freely between the two ways of seeing the world. Seeing the situation in grace leads back into seeing the physical situation, with all the practical issues still apparent and still unresolved. But what the 'grace seeing' has done is to change the way I approach the practical issues. The fear and anxiety is stripped from the situation, the ethical issues become clear, even clarifying the ambiguities; the choices become open and the freedom given to make choices without fear of condemnation. We are enabled to let go and stand back where that is the wise thing to do. Most creatively of all, in so many situations, we are freed from the sense that we have to 'do' anything at all. And time and time again, in my experience, it is when we so let go, when we walk into the abyss of powerlessness with the person, which is when the real resolution occurs.

It is my experience that when we live this way, the most extraordinary things happen. Things that seemed impossible occur. What has seemed to be disaster turns into glorious opportunity bringing new life. Light fills the darkest recesses of life.

The key is how we model the relationship of God to the physical world.

What is happening at this point is that we are allowing two radically different narratives to appear, each in its own sphere, each 'true'. We are able to tell the physical story of the universe, from Big Bang to the present state without concern that it undermines our faith story. We are able to start the faith story with embracing the world as it is, free from having to give a time-ordered account for the universe as grace transcends time. We can see it as if everything is as if 'created' afresh in our every encounter with it, everything direct from God, everything a gift of grace, an act of love. We move from one narrative to the other, freely.

#  Chapter 8: The Ape becomes naked

The next phase in the faith narrative places humanity into the story. It is a universal human imperative to want to know our place in the world. A handful of biologists aside, we are not interested in knowing the evolutionary ancestry of ants or know the place of seagulls in the world. We are extremely interested in where we fit in as humans and how we came to be who we are.

The traditional narrative located human beings as part of the initial act of creation. Genesis 1 says God created us, male and female, in the image of God. These words have been made to bear the weight of a theological skyscraper through the original meaning carried little of that weight. The writer of this chapter of Genesis, in the third or second century BC, was focused upon producing a justification of the rule of the Sabbath observance by portraying God himself as observing the seventh day as a day of rest. Humanity, being made in image of God, was bound to follow God's own example in this matter. The creation narrative was incidental to his objective.

Genesis 2, an earlier story than Genesis 1, but still a late development in Hebrew thought, has male humanity formed from the dust of the ground and the female formed out of the male (and therefore subservient). The intention of God was for humans to be immortal and so we would be today if only Adam and Eve had not been disobedient to the command not to eat of the tree of good and evil. Their single act of disobedience stripped them of their innocence, condemned them, and all humans subsequently, to a life of toil leading to death; for women, pain in childbirth.

Paradise was lost, barred forever to humanity. However, the narrative gave to humanity control over the natural world. We were to be the dominant and dominating species. Humanity was therefore special and unique in the universe, the only creature capable of relating to God.

The next stage in the traditional narrative portrayed the murder of Abel by Cain, the two sons of Adam and Eve. The import is that even outside Paradise, humanity had an obligation to live ethically. The narrative then went on to relate the growth of the human population and its spread over the earth, but that it became universally corrupt, the ethical rules neglected. The consequence was the earth-engulfing flood from which only Noah and his family, with the animals in the ark, survived. Thus the narrative drove home the seriousness of the ethical life and the message that infractions would not be tolerated.

In the traditional model, God is free to commit genocide if that is what he wills. God is above the ethical rules that govern humanity in the same way as an eastern potentate was free to rule unbound by restrictions of law. Humanity, however, has to live by ethical standards. Even the 'new start' by Noah and his family, with God now promising never again to destroy the earth, does not change the outcome. Recovered humanity reverts to type. This phase of the traditional story closes by explaining how it came about that the human community was scattered, fragmented and could not communicate with one another because of different languages. God made that happen because his supremacy could be under threat from the growing power and technological expertise of a united human community.

Such was the traditional narrative of faith as it embraced the whole of humanity. Outside the fundamentalist community, not a trace of this story remains credible. As with the creation scenario, the crisis of the faith community is that it has no credible replacement to tell a different story. With no competition, the field has been swept clear by the secular narrative.

The secular narrative is that the human species arose from evolutionary forces interacting with environmental conditions. We are a naked ape, no more or no less than any other species on the planet. Homo sapiens is of no more significance that the flea, the individual human life of no more account than that of the ant we squash. Although some biologists have tried to identify something like an 'altruism gene', essentially the secular narrative has no place for ethics other than what the community happens to decide at any one time is 'right' or 'wrong', and that can be decided in any way. We owe our domination for the time being to our large brains and the ability to create cultural solutions to our environmental challenge. As a species, like all species, we are driven to survive and pass on our genes. We may evolve in time into a new species altogether, though the greater likelihood is that we will become extinct. If and when extinction happens, life on the planet will go on and eventually all trace that humans existed will disappear. None of it has any meaning.

It is an interesting observation of contemporary life that the human community is trying desperately not to face up to the implications of the secular narrative. Fundamentalism and religious conservatism of all varieties flourish as an escape from the barren vision of this narrative, as do all the manifold expressions of 'being spiritual but not religious'. The latter group is a growing phenomenon in Western society as people discover that they can no longer give credit to the traditional Christian narrative but cannot bring themselves to embrace the only other credible option open to the world at the present.

For the secular narrative is credible. When the universe is addressed as physical, it is as near to truth as we can get in our current state of knowledge. Not to embrace the secular narrative is just escapism and wishful thinking.

The path for the Christian community to come back to credibility lies in the two-nature model, until such time as a better model may emerge. If we ask the physical question, the nature of the human species is as the scientific data and theories describe. It is as we ask the grace question that a different narrative emerges. The two narratives cannot be reconciled. We can only move between them, and move freely between them. Each is a whole in itself and each in itself wholly true (with the provisionality proviso).

Each phase in the narrative can only be fully understood by reference to later phases. This is true for any faith understanding of the place of humanity in the universe as grace. The Jesus story is pivotal for this understanding. The Jesus story revolves around the definitive revelation of God in the person of Jesus. The implication of this is that humanity stands at the centre of the universe seen as grace.

The new narrative, therefore, does not undermine the scientific account of the origins in evolution and environmental interaction. It does not challenge that we are but one species among millions, nor does it discount the threat of extinction. The narrative embraces all this: but when we turn to seeing realty as grace, humanity is revealed as the one creature in the universe (at least on earth) that is open consciously to know the grace of God and to choose to be living expressions of that grace. This is not to deny grace to and through every other creature, even inanimate matter. The extension of the model of grace seen as energy, by asking the grace question, is that grace is everywhere, in everything, of everything in existence – matter and anti-matter. Humanity, however, has a consciousness of grace and can make choices on the basis of this consciousness.

The narrative does not have to make exclusive claim to such consciousness. The data of animal research, especially of other primates, indicates levels of consciousness that can in many ways approach the human experience. My two cats have an extremely close affinity and relationship to each other, highly unusual in cats, and I am sure they show many dimensions of ethical choice in that relationship that may say something about consciousness of grace. In today's world, we cannot rule out sentient, conscious extraterrestrial life. So the narrative need not be extended to give humanity the kind of precedence and supremacy that the traditional story accorded us, nor does it give us scope for a narrative of dominance over nature or the idea that nature is there for our use and exploitation. Rather the opposite, if grace is known as the grace revealed in Jesus.

In the last section of the narrative, the future comes into the story. It can be said here, however, that the narrative of humanity's place does not guarantee our survival as a species. If humanity does become an extinct species, grace will continue and emerge to consciousness in another species – perhaps cats.

The core, then, of the narrative about humanity lies in the consciousness of grace. The supporting data lies principally in our living experience of grace. This highlights the dramatic difference between the traditional and the new narrative. The traditional narrative derived its story from piecing together elements from the Bible, connecting the dots, as it were. The dots were taken as definitive revelation so the story arose by putting the dots into sequence.

The new narrative arises from having feet in two worlds, the world of hard physical data and theories that make sense of that data on the one hand, and our living experience of grace on the other hand. The narrative is making sense of these twin streams.

From the model that emerges, we may develop theory in many different directions. One direction is in relation to culture and religion on a universal scale. The sociological analysis of human society and behaviour is that culture is the human cutting edge that has enabled it to survive. Culture is the entire pattern of beliefs and behaviours we develop in community that enables that community to meet its environmental and socio-political challenges and survive and thrive. Culture is to the human specie what strength is to the lion, speed is to the cheetah and the intricacies of the hive is to bees. Cultures vary because challenges are different for different communities. The culture of Chinese cooking is built around the wok. The wok is a cultural response to an environment where fuel for burning is scarce, so food has to be cooked fast. Or take the whole Western cultural emphasis on liberty: this was a cultural development that arose out of the early medieval struggle between state and church for political and social supremacy. Today's women's movement traces back to the Protestant Reformation and the emphasis on reading the Bible, causing women for the first time to learn to read. We are, all of us, creatures of culture and cannot survive without culture.

When all the world's successful cultures are examined, they are found to have a religion at their core. Religion and culture are inseparable, whatever the culture. The functional reason for this is that it is religion that acts as the internalising agent for cultural values, lodging the key values for survival in the minds and hearts of the people so that they act out the key values not from external compulsion but from internal motivation. Religion acts to transmit the values from generation to generation, and as guardian against distortion and demonisation of those values. A culture remains strong only as long as its religion remains strong and fulfills its cultural function within that society.

The traditional narrative, although it was inextricably bound up with that universal religious function, yet took no account of culture. There was a right way of living and a wrong way of living and these were universal. As Christian missionaries spread the gospel to peoples of non-European cultures, conversion to Christianity meant embracing European culture and its values. As for other religions, the traditional narrative consigned them all to the 'false' basket. There was only one truth and that was the revealed truth of Christianity as expressed propositionally in the Bible.

This tension will always be with us and is emotionally inescapable. However much we may intellectualise the relativity of our cultural norms, they will always be for us 'right' and their rejection 'wrong'. Most Westerners today embrace the cultural value of the equality of women (and increasingly of gays) and the wrongness of male domination. It has become impossible for us even to consider that it might be 'right' for a man to own his wife as a chattel. Yet the intellectual reality is that this judgement is a purely cultural perception having no basis other than the cultural values we embrace. This is why Christians stand at opposite ends of almost every moral debate, yet each side is convinced they it is they who have the truth.

Whatever the narrative form we embrace as telling the story of our faith today, the story has to embrace and account for both culture and religion. Once again, it is the two-fold nature of the reality that is the key. We have to be able to see both culture, in all the endless forms it takes in global humanity, and the many forms of religion, and recognise how and why they arose. In the next phase of the narrative, the focus is on the Hebrew experience, but the Hebrew experience has first to be understood in a global context. The history and sociology of religion is part of the faith narrative.

What is crucial, though, is how we approach the grace perception of this diversity of culture and religion. Here I put forward the hypothesis that grace is experienced equally by every community, every society without exception. That grace is made manifest as and when communities find a cultural response and develop a religion that functions to support them.

The hypothesis is a huge step away from the position of the traditional narrative. It says that a culture that works to enable a people to survive and thrive is an authentic culture, whatever its values: and a religion that functions creatively to enable that culture to survive and thrive is authentic religion, whatever its belief structure.

Can such a narrative be sustained by the data? It certainly can, and not only with relation to communal cultures locally and globally but within our own faith experience. I look back on my own experience, currently spanning over 50 years from when I commenced my theological training. During that time, I have experienced within myself massive cultural change, while my religious life has gone through many phases, including years of rejecting God and faith. Was I, before I am where I am now, culturally and religiously 'wrong'? Was my faith inauthentic in the past? Most radically, was I separated from grace during the years I rejected faith? My answer to all of those questions is a clear, no. In contrast, my perception is that the fifteen years of 'no faith' were as fully grace-filled as anything I know now and was an authentic place for me at that time.

The theological implications of this phase of the narrative are huge. It changes altogether our judgement about other cultures and their values and religion. Most terribly, though, it exposes where religion is no longer authentic because it bears no relationship to the culture – and that is precisely the place that traditional Christianity has now in relation to the Western world today. The narrative delegitimises Christianity in its traditional form because it now bears no supporting role in the cultural world in which we live.

The practical outworking of the theory that develops from the model is of momentous consequence for the world in our day. I will develop the theme of humanity's future in the last chapter. Put simply, we face a choice between embracing a global culture or disintegration as a species, perhaps even extinction. Our challenges are global and can only be met globally. They can only be met globally by a common culture globally. A common culture means a common spiritual foundation, a shared narrative of what it means to be human.

What we are doing, in this redefining of our spiritual narrative, is nothing less that forming the basis around which humanity can gather, in the coming generations, to tell a story with which we can all identify. It is a story that affirms and embraces our diverse cultures of the past, our diverse religious heritages, our diverse values and ethical choices. It forms the foundation upon which we can build a new culture, a global culture, the path to survival.

# Chapter 9: The Hebrews

The traditional narrative quickly passed over the global scene to focus solely upon a single people, the Hebrew nation. They were the chosen people, the elect of God, the holy nation.

The story began with the call of Abraham and the period of the patriarchs, the chief point being the promise of the land of Palestine in perpetuity to Abraham's descendants. Then came centuries of sojourn in Egypt, eventually as slaves of the pharaoh. Moses was born and emerged as the freedom leader of the people after being called to the task and empowered by Yahweh. After a plague-induced crisis, visited upon the Egyptians by God, the Hebrews escaped and were rescued from the pursuing army by a miraculous parting of the Red Sea.

The Hebrews under Moses then set off into the desert of Sinai, being led at all times by God in a pillar of fire by night and cloud by day. They came to Mount Sinai, and God delivered to Moses, on tablets of stone, laws and regulations that were to govern every aspect of the community's life. These were absolute commandments, valid for all time. Their ethical imperative was crystalised in the Ten Commandments, of which the first was that the people were to have no other god but Yahweh.

The wilderness journey led the people to the border with Palestine, but fear held them back from taking possession of the land. God, in anger at their lack of faith, drove them back into the wilderness until an entire generation had died out. Eventually, the host found their way back to the border of Palestine where Moses, after delivering a long address to the people, died and was succeeded by Joshua. Under Joshua, the Hebrew's invaded Palestine.

There followed a long period of chaotic conditions, with the Hebrews struggling against external and internal enemies. God occasionally raised up champions, 'judges', to rescue the people. The issues came to a head in the kingship of Saul. After Saul came David, the definitive ruler, though the record is ambiguous as to his character. David it was who conquered the mountain city of Jerusalem and made it the capital not only of the Hebrew nation, covering all of Palestine, but the capital of an empire that, under his son Solomon, was to dominate the whole of the Middle East. Solomon's empire was the most powerful and wealthy the world had ever seen. His reign was unrivalled in its material glory and he built a magnificent, gold-encrusted temple dedicated to Yahweh and Yahweh alone.

For all Solomon's fabled wisdom, his politics of enforced labour was deeply resented. Under his son, who attempted to continue and even intensify his policy, the nation split in two and the empire was lost. Two Hebrew nations emerged. In the north was the nation of Israel, with its capital in Samaria: in the south, the mountainous part of the land, Judah and its capital, Jerusalem. Each state had its own line of kings and rival temples. Over the next couple of centuries, the two states engaged with one another, sometimes in cooperation but often in war, always aware that they were fellow Hebrews. Prophets arose in the eighth century both in Israel and Judah.

In the eighth century BC, there arose an aggressive militaristic empire in Assyria. In the last quarter of the century, the Assyrians captured and destroyed the city of Samaria and the nation of Israel, sending the Hebrews off into captivity in other parts of their empire. Ten of the eleven territorial tribes of the Hebrews (the twelfth tribe, the Levites, were not a territorial tribe) were exiled and only the tribe of Judah was left still free. The ten tribes were absorbed into the life of the empire and disappeared, leaving no trace. Assyria briefly threatened Jerusalem but was turned back by God's intervention as foretold to the Judean king by the prophet Isaiah.

Judah, during the seventh century BC, was left to face the might of the Assyrian empire alone. However, Judah's kings, through most of this century, abandoned Yahweh's way and laws and the people turned to polytheism like all their Middle Eastern neighbours.

Towards the end of the seventh century, however, a significant and dramatic development took place.

At this point, before going on with the traditional Hebrew narrative, it is time to pause. Because with the single exception of the fact that Assyria captured and destroyed the city of Samaria in 722BC, not a single element of this entire story has one iota of factual truth. In historical reality, there was no Abraham, no Egyptian sojourn, no Moses, no Red Sea miracle, no desert wandering, no law given on Mount Sinai, no Hebrew conquest of Palestine, no Samuel or Saul, no David and Hebrew empire, no Solomon and his glorious temple. There never was a state of "Israel" and there were no prophets in the eighth century. There were no ten tribes that disappeared. With the sole exception of the reality of the empire of Assyria, and its destruction of the kingdom of Samaria, every part of this story is pious fiction.

The foundation for confidence that no part of the above is factual history rests primarily on the basis that the archeological evidence shows that the site of the city of Jerusalem was completely uninhabited not only in the time ascribed to David but for two centuries after. When it did become inhabited, it was only by a small village. The city on the site did not grow up until part way through the seventh century BC, after the destruction of Samaria and only decades before it was itself destroyed by the Babylonians in the early sixth century. Furthermore, when the prophetic writings of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and other prophets of the exile are looked at in this light, it is clear that they knew nothing of this great 'history'. At the most, the stories were just beginning to merge during the exile but not in the developed form they were to assume and as we have them today. The prophets knew nothing of Moses. Even though the prophets talk about the law of God, they had no codified form of that law. The form in which we have the Biblical history and law today dates most likely to the third or even second century BC. Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah and most of Zechariah date from the end of the fourth century BC.

Whatever value for moral teaching that all this material may have, it has no credibility whatsoever as a narrative of faith: not a single part of it.

To return to the traditional narrative where we broke off, in the late seventh century BC, it is at this point in the traditional narrative that a firm connection is made with real history. In the life of the prophet Jeremiah and the events surrounding the last few decades of old Jerusalem, we are for the first time on firm historical ground. Although some of the book of Jeremiah comes from a later date, the extraordinary fact is that in Jeremiah's authentic poetic prophecies we have his actual words and witness to his times. (This is more than we have for Jesus, over 600 years later.) In the last third of the century, the prophet Jeremiah emerges, joined later by Habakkuk and Naham, and they exercise a prophetic ministry leading up to the Babylonian capture of the city in 598 and its eventual destruction in 587BC. After the initial capture of the city, a number of the Hebrew leaders are taken off to Babylon in exile, and a much larger number follow into exile after the city's final destruction.

The great prophet of the exile is Ezekiel. After Ezekiel, the traditional narrative throws a veil over the exile until, set free by the Persians who conquered the Babylonians, the Persian king, Cyrus, permits the Hebrews to return to Palestine. The books of Daniel and Esther are set in Babylon during the exile but were written centuries later and have no factual connection to the conditions of the exile itself. In factual history, there never was a Daniel thrown into the lion's den.

The traditional narrative then has the returned exiles building a new temple in Jerusalem at the end of the sixth century, recorded by the prophets Zechariah and Malachi. The next episode in the narrative dates to the middle of the fifth century and the events surrounding Ezra the scribe and Nehemiah the governor and how the people renew their commitment to the Law of Moses. Then there is virtually nothing down to the second century rebellion of the Maccabees. The Hebrew story just peters out.

How much of all this latter part of the story is factual? The events surrounding the destruction of Jerusalem and the sending of the people into exile are well grounded. Ezekiel's prophetic ministry in Babylon is likewise. At some point, a number of Hebrews certainly returned to Jerusalem, their escape from captivity facilitated by the fall of Babylon to the Persians. After that? Until the Maccabees in the second century, we are probably once again in the realm of pious fiction. A temple would have been built at some point in Jerusalem but whether it occurred as recorded in Zechariah and Malachi is unlikely, that book being written some two centuries later, as were the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.

When we take in the Old Testament in its entirety, hardly any of it stands up to historical scrutiny as a reliable story of faith. It cannot be told today with any legitimacy. The questions this raises are many, and some of them have huge geo-political implications for the world today. How Judaism and Islam, for whom this narrative in whole or in part is crucial, adjust to its historical deligitimisation is something those communities will have to work out over the coming years.

For Christianity, there are three fundamental questions. One is what to do with all that Old Testament material. Another is, what narrative do we tell? We cannot simply abandon the Hebrew story, because Jesus is an integral part of that story. We cannot understand Jesus at all without an account that leads up to him. The third question, and perhaps the most crucial is this: is the story of the Hebrews an important faith story in itself? In which case, what is that story such that it can be told with credibility?

It is crucial to any new narrative of faith that we are able to tell the story of the Hebrews. Yes, it is important that we are able to place the Jesus story in a continuum, but more significantly, the story of the Hebrews in itself is a story that is central to the witness of faith today. But it is a story that differs substantially from the traditional narrative.

We begin the new Hebrew story with what we can piece together of the picture of the people in the centuries leading up to the pivotal seventh century BC. We can forget all the stories in the Bible about patriarchs, Moses and kings. If we were able to take a snapshot of the Hebrew people in the eighth century BC, nothing special would have marked them out from any other ethnic group inhabiting the Middle East of the time. Palestine was a melting pot of many different ethnic groups of which the Hebrew people were one. They were polytheistic like all other peoples of their time, worshipping their many gods by means of cultic practices in shrines, high places, sacred groves or unusual geographic features. Their one distinguishing feature was that they had a particular national god called Yahweh, who was their protector – just as each ethnic group had such a particular national god. The population of Palestine, Hebrews included, were mostly located in the north of the country within the independent state of Samaria, with the city of Samaria as its capital. The mountainous country area of Judah, to the south, was sparsely inhabited and had no state.

Such would have been the picture of life in the eighth century BC. Palestine was a spit of land with the sea on one side and desert on the other. To the north lay the regions of the Mesopotamian rivers and the highlands of what is now Turkey, where in earlier centuries great powers had been located, and to the south, Egypt. Over the centuries, north and south had contended for power, the control of Palestine and Syria being the strategic key. For two centuries, however, these great power centres had been weak, so a number of independent kingdoms such as Syria, Tyre and Sidon and Samaria had arisen. Now, however, in the eighth century BC, a new power had arisen in the north, Assyria, and it was determined to dominate and rule Egypt. That objective required them to rule Palestine and Syria. The independent kingdoms, Samaria included, were crushed.

Samaria was not a Hebrew state, nor a Yahweh-worshipping state except that its Hebrew component would have observed the cult of Yahweh along with their other gods. There is no evidence that the Samarians were subject to exile, but what is apparent is that a large number of them, with perhaps the Hebrews as their dominant component, headed south into the barren Judean highlands to escape Assyria's overlordship. There they discovered a defensible site for a city on the mountain of Jerusalem and built themselves a well-defended city. It had a temple, but that temple was used by the cults of all the gods, Yahweh being but one (the situation reflected in Ezekiel 8). So during the seventh century BC, a state of Judah arose, a polytheistic community, with its own king. There would still have been nothing to mark this story out as anything out of the ordinary in the socio-political scene of the seventh century.

Far away in India, however, a development was taking place of extraordinary consequence. Until this point in the history of religion, the gods as recognised anywhere were divorced from the everyday life of humans and had no ethical dimension to their conduct with one another or with humans. Religion and ethics had no connection. In India, that connection was being made. The divine was ethical. This was a revolutionary concept and somehow that idea travelled to the Middle East, probably percolating slowly along the trade routes. No people seem to have taken it up until it found a home among the priests of the cult of Yahweh in Jerusalem. How or why we do not know, but at some point around the middle of the seventh century BC, a reforming group arose among the Yahwists. They came up with the notion that Yahweh was an ethical god and that his adherents were supposed to act ethically. They modelled their idea of ethics by drawing on the dominant Assyrian culture, which was the most advanced and sophisticated culture of its day. Assyria has a 'bad press' today, but it was an attractive culture to everyone in its age who looked to be 'advanced'. The Assyrians had come up with a concept of 'law', which was a quite radical development at the time. So the reformers expressed their idea of the ethical requirements of Yahweh as the god's 'law': but they had no codified form or even clear idea of what that meant in any concrete manner. What they did major in, however, was the even more radical and outrageous concept that Yahweh alone was to be worshipped in the cult. They did not deny the existence of all the other gods: that was an idea that would only come to the fore many centuries later. For them, Yahweh was taking over all the roles performed by all the other gods. Furthermore, all the local shrines, high places and sacred groves throughout the country were to be closed down and everything in the cult was to be centralised in one place, the temple in Jerusalem. The reformers were more focused on the cultic reform than on the ethical notion.

It is unlikely that these radical reformers were ever more than an handful of people, probably disowned by most of their colleagues in the cult, and the Yahweh cult only one of many. The people and all the other religious cults were having nothing of this reform, which they regarded as dangerous heresy. The danger was not so much about heterodox thinking but that keeping the various gods sweet was essential. Unless the fertility god, Baal, had his cult fulfilled, there would be no crops to harvest. Had nothing else happened, the vision of the Yahwist reformers would have come to nothing and Hebrew religion would have gone on as all others. But something did happen. That something was Jeremiah.

The notion of prophecy was another of the cultural imports from Assyria and it was probably religiously in the air around the last decades of the seventh century. It was in this context that Jeremiah had an extraordinary experience of Yahweh recorded in Jeremiah 1. This chapter may well be regarded as the opening chapter in the Bible, for this is the start of everything that was to follow. This is the real start of the Hebrew story as the 'people of God'. Jeremiah is the father of the Hebrew people, not Abraham, who is a fictional figure. Jeremiah is firmly an historical figure.

We have the original, authentic words of Jeremiah, which in itself is an extraordinary event in history. I do not know of any parallel to his poetry at this time in history from anywhere. Jeremiah was one of the Yahwist reforming group but it seems he took the message way beyond the rest of the group because over the subsequent years he was isolated and universally rejected even by his fellow Yahwists. In the early years of his prophetic ministry, he was buoyed by hope, probably because the Judean king, Josiah, was endeavouring to institute the reformist programme. By this time, the myth had taken hold, at least among the adherents of Yahweh, that the kingdom of Samaria was a Yahweh-worshipping state, its people scattered in exile. The myth was that God was about to bring the exiles back and create a new state, a powerful Yahwist state that combined Samaria, now transmuted by name into "Israel", and Judah.

Despite this hope, it was a time of deep, if unfocused, anxiety because the ascendency of Assyria was a symptom that radical change was in the air. Then Assyria itself was conquered and destroyed by Babylon in 612BC, producing two very opposite reactions from two new prophets on the scene that were Jeremiah's contemporaries. Naham saw the destruction of Assyria as the advent of a new age of peace, the end of all troubles: Yahweh had proved victorious. Habakkuk saw the terrible violence and cruelty of the new conqueror and asked the question, where is justice?

Babylon's ascendency made the Assyrians look like kind old gentlemen. They took violence to new levels. At the same time, the death of King Josiah, killed in battle, brought to an end the efforts at reforming the cult. The new rulers of Judah immediately restored the old polytheistic order. From that point onwards, Jeremiah pronounced doom on the city and the state, doom without reservation or possible survival. At the same time, he became more focused on the ethical failings of the rulers and people, whereas earlier his focus had been almost completely on cultic reform.

What was happening in all of this was, for Jeremiah, a wholly new vision of God, one that was radically different from anything that had gone before. Yahweh was a god of great power, power over the nation of the Hebrews but power that extended to all the nations and over the natural world. Yahweh was a god involved with the life and destiny of the people, specifically the Hebrew people, in a way that had never been conceived for the old cultic gods. Jeremiah revolutionised the concept of God. No one listened to him. No one followed him. He was alone and rejected. For the people, Yahweh was their protector god, the one who guaranteed their survival. To see Yahweh as their destroyer was unthinkable.

Then the unthinkable happened. Jerusalem was captured and in the next decade, destroyed. To the people, led into exile in Babylon, this was the defeat of Yahweh by the stronger, mightier Babylonian gods. Yahweh could be counted upon no longer. Not only that, but Yahweh had no authority, no presence, outside the boundaries of Palestine, so the exile was a definitive separation from Yahweh. This god could not be found in Babylon. It was the end of the Yahwist cult. Given that Yahweh was simply one among their many gods, it is unlikely that the people grieved that much about the loss of such a god.

The scene now shifts to Babylon. While not everyone from Judah was shipped off into exile, all the leaders and influential people were taken, so the whole dynamic of community life, such as it remained in its shattered state, went with them into exile. While the traditional narrative says little about the exilic period, this was the forging house that created the future Hebrew and Christian religion. It is not an exaggeration to say that almost every element that we count as essential to our life as Christian has its roots in Babylon and its culture and religion. The Hebrew faith that emerged from the seven decades of exile was in reality a variant of the religion of Babylon, but a religion of Babylon transformed by the dynamic vision of God brought about through Jeremiah and his prophetic successors.

The experience of going into exile in Babylon would have come as a massive culture shock to the Judeans. Judah and Jerusalem was a cultural backwater in its day. It had a single temple and that temple was not very grand. All the cults used it, so it was chaotic. The people would have been basically rustic and unsophisticated.

Their arrival in Babylon can perhaps be understood by conceiving how someone from a small rural town might feel transported suddenly to the middle of Manhattan. Think of such a person as having never seen TV or film of what Manhattan is like. Babylon is reputed to have had 6000 temples, covered in gold, a city of immeasurable wealth and power, culturally sophisticated to a degree unimaginable to the Hebrew mind. Its walls, so thick that at the top there was a carriage-way broad enough for two chariots to travel abreast, extended round the city an astonishing 100 kilometers. The city was huge. As the ancient religious centre of the whole region, the streets and temples were constantly full of magnificent ritual. Intellectually, it was like rolling all our top universities into one place. This was the environment in which the Hebrew people spent seventy years and completely reshaped their life, culture and religion.

From within their own life came a steam of great prophetic figures, starting with Ezekiel, who was one of the body of people taken to Babylon at the first wave in 598. He was a young priest-in-training for the cult of Yahweh and would have known Jeremiah before the exile, at least as a figure in the community but not necessarily sympathetic to his message. Then five years into the exile he received an extraordinary vision of God that paralleled Jeremiah's experience a generation earlier. Apart from the strange nature of the vision (its visual elements formed out of what he was seeing in Babylon), the shocking nature of the vision was that it occurred at all, for Yahweh was not thought to have had any presence in Babylon. So the first and mightiest impact of Ezekiel's vision was that Yahweh was God in Babylon, was God over Babylon. From that time, Ezekiel embraced Jeremiah's message of the judgement of God upon the people for their ethical and cultic failure. His prophecy, as with Jeremiah's, of doom for the city came true. It was this fulfilment that made credible the prophets' words. There was a new awakening of spiritual vision. Yahweh began to be seen as a god of great power, even within the Babylonian context.

In 573BC, Ezekiel experienced another powerful vision, recorded in the last eight chapters of the book of Ezekiel. It was a vision of the temple restored in Jerusalem and the whole nation recreated. This vision may well have been the great turning point in Hebrew spirituality during the exile. First, it envisaged the return of the people to Palestine, an eventuality that would have seemed impossible to the people. It was a return that would be accomplished through the power of Yahweh.

The second element of the vision was that it contained at its core the conception of a great temple, built along the lines of the Babylonian temples but even grander. Unlike Babylon's thousands of temples, though, the restored Palestine land would have only the one temple, dedicated to Yahweh, and to Yahweh alone. The whole life of the nation would revolve around the temple and Yahweh. Ezekiel, in this vision, brought together the experience of the sovereign power of Yahweh, which Jeremiah and the reformers conceived, with the richness of Babylonian temple worship.

Ezekiel as prophet was followed during the exile by a number of other great prophetic figures, and they took the developing Hebrew faith to even new heights. Amos, Micah and Isaiah (chapters 1-29) belong to the exile in its Babylonian phase, before the Persian conquest. To understand why it was that they projected their prophetic ministry as having occurred in the eighth century (i.e., two centuries earlier), we turn to another of the great influences that Babylon had upon the Hebrews. For the Babylonians had discovered history; were perhaps the discoverers of history. They sought to know where they had come from, what events had happened that lead up to their present supremacy. The Hebrew people absorbed this and, through the pages of the prophets, it is possible to see the gradual emergence of some of the stories that were, in subsequent centuries, to shape themselves into the narrative from Genesis to II Kings and Chronicles. The process had begun before the exile as the myth arose regarding the imagined northern Hebrew kingdom of "Israel", and this provided the foundation for the creation of a history that developed before and after the exile. For the prophetic figures that followed Ezekiel, this history enabled them to cast their writings as having been composed far back in time and so shared in the credibility of fulfilled judgement that had given such power to the words of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. To recognise this does not detract from the authenticity of their message: they were addressing the exiled community, rebuilding its faith on new foundations and in the process transforming the life of that community.

The words of the exilic prophets, Amos, Micah and Isaiah, display yet another of the major influences that Babylonia was having upon the Hebrews. Babylonian religion was rich in sacrificial ritual and in festivals, processions and great displays, all focused on their many temples. The Hebrew exiles were deeply attracted to this temple-based worship, with its sacrifices and festivals and adapted and reshaped their own religious practices to adopt these patterns. The prophets were far from happy about this and attacked it vigorously.

In 539BC, everything changed. The Persian army swept away the Babylonian empire and established their own empire, which was to last for two centuries. Suddenly, it became politically conceivable that the exiles could return to Palestine. By this time, however, few if any were alive who had made the original exodus from Judea. Many would be third generation 'Babylonians', would have put down roots in that land, adopted its culture, intermarried with the locals and established commercial ties. The thought of the long and dangerous journey back to Jerusalem, to a cultural and economic backwater, an impoverished nation at best, would not have been attractive. It is possible that only a minority of the people embraced the new form of Hebrew religion as developed by the prophets. It seems that it took a great deal of persuasion to bring about the return when it happened and even then it may have been only a relatively small number, composed overwhelmingly of the 'new religionists', who made the journey.

The great persuader was Isaiah, in the words recorded in chapters 50 to 55. He may have been a different person from the one who wrote under the guise of being an eighth century prophet, but it is more than possible that he was one and the same, now writing with an immediate and direct message, the old pretense dropped. His message took the vision of God to new and majestic heights that still command our awe. Even here, though, the influence of Babylonia is seen. Yahweh's majesty and his heavenly court was a direct reflection of the experience of the majesty of the Babylonian (and Persian) political presence. Yahweh was the absolute eastern potentate writ very large. And as the Babylonian/Persian empire appeared to embrace all the world and be all-powerful, so much greater was the rule of God. Isaiah made the leap that even Jeremiah and Ezekiel had not done: Yahweh was the Creator of the universe. All of that vision was focused on encouraging this little band to make a difficult decision and return to Jerusalem.

It may also have been a perilous decision to make. The traditional narrative projected that this return, when it happened, occurred with the blessing of the Persian king. I suspect that this was not true. The story of Moses and the escape from Egypt, the desert wandering and the hostile reception when the people arrived in Palestine did not arise until after the exile. My hypothesis, that someday someone more qualified that I might explore in depth, is that the Egypt/Moses/desert/conquest story is a coded account of the way the escape from Babylon took place. Looked at through this lens, the Persians did not want to lose their labour force of Hebrews and refused their departure. The band that escaped took advantage of a crisis in the city (a plague?) and escaped without permission. The Persian army chased them but they got away. The journey through the desert to Palestine was long, dangerous and constantly cursed with rebelliousness, and when they finally arrived in Jerusalem, the resident inhabitants greeted them with hostility and resentment.

The return occurred sometime in the early or mid-520s and what the returnees found was a ruined city, devoid of fortifications, impoverished, with a population that had not gone though the extraordinary transformation that had affected the exiles culturally and religiously. The outcome was intense disillusionment and disappointment, reflected in the writings of the third part of Isaiah. Some of the most inspiring words in all the Old Testament, chapters 60 and 61 of Isaiah, were addressed into this disillusionment. For Isaiah and the prophetic movement, too, the experience of the return was devastating. The returnees turned their backs on the prophetic movement and embraced the temple ritual of Babylonia as the spiritual way that the Hebrew nation developed. Isaiah was bitter in his denunciation but to no avail. Although there are later prophetic writings that became incorporated in the canon, the age of the prophets was now over and remained so until the advent of Jesus 500 years later.

There is another development that occurred during the last years of exile that became important. Once the prospect of a return to Judea became a conceivable possibility, minds turned to the issue of what kind of state would be re-established there, and, in particular, how it should be governed. It was inconceivable that the old pre-exilic ways would be restored. The new king/ruler had to be one made in the image of the new kind of community of Yahweh that was now being envisaged. This was the context in which the myth of David as a model king grew up. "David" was to be the archetype for how the new state was to be ruled. In historical terms, there never was a Davidic kingship, but the myth served a powerful purpose in its time, a grace gift not to be denigrated.

The story of the Hebrews, as far as we are able to construct it with any credibility, has taken us now to the end of the sixth century BC. For the next few hundred years, the story almost disappears from sight. The traditional narrative appears to give us a glimpse of life in the middle of the next century, with the accounts of Ezra and Nehemiah, but these date to the end of the fourth century and are almost certainly imaginative reconstructions designed to legitimise developments of that time. What we can say with some confidence is that, under the relatively benign governorship of the Persians, Jerusalem puddled along as an almost unnoticed backwater. The city was up in the mountains, far from the major travel routes and not considered important by anyone outside the Judean region. The people developed a settled temple-based spirituality, built around sacrifice, and were probably largely Yahweh-only in their religious adherence. The writing of the Chronicles reflects this settled, largely untroubled community as seen in hindsight when the time came that it all fell apart.

The hammer blow was delivered by Alexander. From the last years of the fourth century all the way through to the time of Jesus, Judea was under the rule of Hellenists and Romans and in constant turmoil and conflict with the cultural norms that challenged the Hebrew religion and culture. It was in this cauldron of fire that the final stages of the Hebrew evolution pre-Jesus were forged. This was the emergence of the law, the Torah, its formulation, its rules of Sabbath observance and circumcision, and all the mythic history that the Law was given by God to Moses on the mountain, the shaping of the traditional narrative from Genesis through to the end of II Kings. The development was a response to the challenge of Hellenism and a creative way of standing against the tide that threatened to sweep away everything that the Hebrews believed in and stood for. The forces arrayed against the Hebrew life were overwhelming in power. In their despair at ever overcoming them, the religion developed its messianic and apocalyptic hopes that were at their peak when Jesus entered the scene and deeply affected the way in which Christianity itself was to develop in the following century.

Such is a reasonably credible account of the Hebrew narrative as far as we can piece it together today. It is the story of how our faith came into being. It is certain that specialist scholars will question and challenge and want to modify most of the details of the story at some point, and that questioning and challenge is both normal and right. New evidence will undoubtedly emerge over time that will throw different light on parts of the narrative. I am confident, however, that in broad terms, this is the most credible account that we can achieve today.

We need such an account, however it may be modified in the light of fuller knowledge. The traditional narrative is no longer sustainable, but without some credible alternative we are left stranded. Without a credible story of the Hebrews, no other part of the faith narrative stands. Christianity is as much dependent upon the story of the Hebrews as it is upon the story of Jesus. The story of Jesus makes no sense at all without the story of the Hebrews.

But beyond the issue of context, the theological implications of a credible narrative are huge. In the first place, it becomes a template that points to the way the life of faith works out, not just for the Hebrews but also for our own world. The most fundamental witness of the Hebrew people is that God saves them in their hours of crisis, not because they are a special people but because this is the nature of God experienced by all who rely upon grace. Most particularly, the Hebrew story witnesses to the experience that grace is to be found most clearly in weakness and most fully when all seems to be turning to ruin and destruction. That witness is fundamental to our world as we face the prospects of what the planet is likely to deliver to us in the coming century.

In the second place, the Hebrew story, when seen in this way, displays the grace of God as found in all cultures and religions. The Hebrew faith, while undoubtedly shaped by the vision and words of the prophets (remembering that the concept of prophecy itself was an Assyrian cultural import), was almost wholly derived from the religions of the neighbours, from as far away as India for the most basic vision of all, that Yahweh was an ethical god. The Hebrew history becomes a lens through which we look at all the cultures and religions of our world, because if this was true for the Hebrews it is true still for us today.

It is also a history of huge change as the people adapted to the external forces with which they had to cope. Their vision of God, their spiritual practice, their manner of living all changed many times over the course of seven hundred years to the time of Jesus. Each adaptation enabled them to survive under the circumstances they faced; survived where most other cultures and religions would have gone under. Again, the witness to us today is powerful.

The traditional narrative of the Hebrew story has lost its credibility outside the arena of dogmatic certainty about Biblical infallibility. In its place, though, we have not just a credible story that can be told, but also a story that has dynamic power in the modern world. In a strange way, the Old Testament is about to experience a resurrection, and once again, but in a radically different manner, become a sourcebook for understanding the grace of God.

# Chapter 10: Jesus

The hallmark of twenty-first century spirituality is ambiguity and at the core of ambiguity lies the intellectual centre of twenty-first century understanding of the world: that we know nothing absolutely. That Christianity has ambiguity at the very centre of its faith and theology is its most fundamental connection to the contemporary world.

Everything in Christianity revolves around the person of Jesus. It is through the person of Jesus that we understand God, the world, the church, our selves. He is the lens in the camera. Remove the lens from a camera and it does not matter if you have the most expensive, sophisticated equipment in the world, operated by a National Geographic photographer, you have nothing. For the Christian, Jesus is the lens in the camera.

Yet the instant that we set out to place Jesus within the narrative of faith, we strike ambiguity. It is as if we pick up the lens – to find we have nothing between our fingers. Yet the camera works!

The problem is that when we try to lay hold of Jesus, to fit him into our faith narrative, we find we know next to nothing about him of which we can be certain. We do not have anything from him directly, not even a contemporary record by a third person. Our first glimpse of Jesus is in Paul's letter to the Thessalonians, dated to 50AD, around 20 years after Jesus' death. Paul's letters tell us nothing concrete about Jesus' life other than that he lived and died. The only specific reference is to the Last Supper and the institution of the Eucharist. Paul never knew Jesus in person and showed little or no interest in the facts of his life. Moreover, he may have had little or no information from the church itself about the life of Jesus. If that was the case, it may reflect the fact that the first generation of Christians did not focus on Jesus' life.

The first cohesive account of Jesus' life comes from Mark's gospel, usually dated in the mid-60s. It is possible that Mark was the young man, maybe just a teenager, whom he records as running away naked in the arrest scene. That would place Mark as a witness to the events of the arrest and death of Jesus, but otherwise it is clear that Mark relied upon third party information for the events leading up to those last days. It used to be assumed that Mark was codifying the general oral tradition of preaching about Jesus, or even that his words were those of the apostle Peter and therefore a first-hand account. However, when we put Mark's work in the context of Paul's letters, which they follow (Paul was dead by the time Mark wrote), these assumptions or speculations seem less likely. There are many theories about how Mark came to be written and from what sources he obtained his knowledge of Jesus' life and works. My own hypothesis is that Mark was indeed that young man at the arrest. The reason why he devoted a third of the entire gospel to the events of the last week may be because this is what he knew directly. In this hypothesis, Mark became Paul's companion, the 'John Mark' of Acts, and absorbed Paul's theology, especially Paul's view that Jesus overthrew the authority of the Law. However, Mark was aware of Jesus the person as Paul was not. After Paul's death, Mark wrote his account that remained true to Paul's theology but anchored it in the concrete life of the man, Jesus.

All this is no more than a hypothesis, one that appears to me to make more sense of the evidence than the many alternatives. The point, however, is that we do not know with any degree of certainty what the real-time situation was, either about Mark or about Jesus. The picture Mark paints may be utterly accurate – or it may be far from historical truth. All our knowing is ambiguous. We know nothing absolutely.

Matthew and Luke, and even more so, John, deepen the ambiguity. If we had only Mark, we might feel, rightly or wrongly, more certain about what we know. Matthew, Luke and John muddy the waters considerably.

Matthew' gospel is generally thought to have been written after 70AD, the year when the Roman army destroyed Jerusalem. The city to that point had been the centre of the Christian world and its leadership. To gauge the situation into which Matthew's gospel was written, imagine the effect on the Roman Catholic Church if today, suddenly, the Vatican, the pope and all the apparatus of the curia were wiped out. Such a crisis would provoke a radical reappraisal of the life of the church, its traditions and structure.

Matthew (whoever he was) belongs to the second generation of Christians. He took the text of Mark but turned Mark's picture of Jesus upside down. Matthew's Jesus is the upholder of the Law in every detail; he is the supreme organisation man, laying down extensive regulations for the management of an organised church. It was Matthew's version of Jesus' life, not Mark's, that became the standard text to the point of becoming the 'first' of the gospels. This was because Matthew spoke to the need of the time to find a way of organising the church in its time of crisis. So we have great slabs of teaching in Matthew purportedly coming from Jesus but more likely being creations of that later generation. Again, we do not know anything for certain.

Furthermore, Matthew introduced a whole raft of new material other than Jesus' teaching. He developed the idea that the Old Testament prophets foretold the coming of the messiah, fulfilled in Jesus. Matthew introduced strong elements of the supernatural, most dramatically in the way he elaborated the story of the resurrection, with the dead running through the streets of the city, and the like. The story takes on dimensions of unreality that intensifies our sense of ambiguity. In many instances, we simply do not believe what Matthew is portraying. It is Matthew who first introduced a birth narrative. Neither Paul nor Mark knew anything about the birth of Jesus. Once again, we do not know anything for certain, but it is probably the surest of all bets that Matthew (and Luke's) nativity narrative is pure fiction. They were writing in an era when it was expected that the births of great men would have been accompanied by cosmic and supernatural signs. It is Matthew, too, who introduced the story of the ascension, something again that neither Paul nor Mark knew anything about.

With Matthew's account of the life of Jesus, we confront the issue of his physical resurrection. This is something Mark avoids, though in a strange manner that perhaps showed a discomfort with the tradition that he would have received from Paul. If Mark had been in fact an eye witness of Jesus' final week, it is beyond credibility to think that he would not have been full of the resurrection event, had it happened.

The question as to whether Jesus physically rose from the dead is much debated. That it has been, and continues to be so, is rooted in the ambiguity of the evidence. Until the 1960s, it would have been generally true to say that belief in the resurrection as a physical act was nearly universal in the Christian community and seen as the central validating 'miracle' of Jesus's person as divine Son of God. To deny the resurrection was to place oneself outside the orbit of being Christian. Half a century later, that is no longer the case and, dogmatists aside, Christians are learning to live with the ambiguity. We do not know one way or the other. The situation is very different from that posed by the nativity stories, which can be dismissed as fiction without seriously changing our spiritual perceptions. The resurrection is something so integral to the entire fabric of Christian spiritual life that it cannot be dismissed in the same way as the nativity without serious dislocation. Unlike the nativity, the inner life of grace witnesses powerfully to the reality of the resurrection hope, not necessarily as life after death, but in victory over all the negative and destructive elements of life. The witness of grace is to the living presence of Jesus in our midst. 'Christ is alive!', echoes even when we do not connect with the story of a physical rising from the dead.

This ambiguity has, however, deeply affected the life of the church. The raw power has gone out of the proclamation of resurrection. The celebration of Easter has lost its heart. You can feel this in the church as it struggles year by year to 'put on the show'. The conviction is no longer there. We no longer believe like Christians used to believe. If Easter is a fading power, the festival of Ascension is now all but invisible, a shadow ghost of a former belief. Here, the ambiguity itself has reached almost vanishing point.

The crisis for the life of the church comes into focus when we move to the next gospel to be written, Luke's two-volume work of his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. Luke gives yet another account of Jesus' life that is different again, although still drawing on Mark's text and, for the latter chapters of the Acts, upon an account of Paul's ministry that appears to be from an eye witness, a companion of Paul. Luke, like Matthew, had an agenda and Luke's agenda is apparently that of presenting the Christian community in the best possible light to the Roman authorities. He seems to be saying to the Romans that Christianity deserves recognition and support by the empire because they are and, from Jesus onwards always have been, good citizens of the empire. Jesus is presented in a way that would be attractive to the Romans, who are portrayed as not being responsible for his death but recognise his innocence. Paul was portrayed as a good Roman citizen. Everywhere Paul went, he received the support and protection of the Roman authorities. It may well be that the reason why Luke stopped his account short of recording Paul's execution in Rome was because that rather destroyed his case!

Luke's picture of Jesus is undoubtedly the one that strikes the most responsive chord in us, too, and probably for much the same reason as Luke had in mind for the Romans. But then the question arises just as with Matthew's account: how much credibility can we place in Luke's picture of Jesus? This was an age in which it was normal for writers to invent facts that supported their thesis. It was not a scandalous thing to do as it would be today.

The question comes to a head with the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles and especially the story of the Day of Pentecost. Once again, ambiguity reigns and we can know nothing for certain. It is highly probable that the whole account Luke gives of the early years of the church is a pious fiction, created to serve his master purpose of convincing the Romans. Had the Day of Pentecost really happened, it is unthinkable that Paul would have known nothing about it, especially as he had to deal with the charismatics of the Corinthian church and his own developed theology of the Spirit. Had Pentecost happened, it would surely have formed part of Mark's story. No writer other than Luke has any reference to the event that Luke portrays as the start of everything for the church. As to Luke's overall picture of those early years, they do not accord with the life of the church that is apparent in Paul's letters.

The crisis for the traditional narrative of Jesus now takes shape. That traditional narrative has for centuries, and still in outward form today, been celebrated in a series of festivals: Christmas, Epiphany, Holy Week and Easter, Ascension and Pentecost. The heart of the Christmas festival has vanished, buoyed up today by sentimentality, public holidays and the investment of the commercial world in its financial bonanza. The nativity narrative itself has lost all credibility. With respect to Easter, joy now has to be manufactured, whipped up by worship leaders because it is no longer spontaneous in the hearts of the people.

The climax of the traditional narrative, expressed in festivals, was the Feast of Pentecost, proclaimed as the birthday of the church, the great moment when the disciples were transformed by the promised Holy Spirit and were filled with power to witness boldly and effectively to the world. The power of the Pentecost narrative lay in the conviction that this same power remained in the church from that day forward to the present.

Except that the Day of Pentecost probably never happened. As with the resurrection story, the grace experience of the Christian community speaks to the indwelling power of the Spirit. As a narrative, however, the Day of Pentecost has lost its power. All five of the narrative festivals were built upon traditional stories that at every point have been gutted of the power to carry conviction as an account of what happened.

Does it matter?

The problem is that if we reduce the Jesus narrative to the core of what we can confidently say about him, all we are left with is that he lived, having been born to peasant parents, taught and made disciples, created an impact upon his local scene, and died a criminal death at the hands of the Roman authorities. There is hardly enough there to warrant his life appearing even as a footnote to history let alone support the weight of Christian belief. That is the crisis Christianity faces today.

Christian faith cannot exist without a narrative that is rooted in historical fact. It is not a mythological religion like Hinduism where the narrative rests in the cosmic realm of the gods. It is not a philosophically-based religion like Buddhism. It stands or falls on the narrative that God acts within history, within the real-time lives of human beings. Above all, it stands or falls on the story of Jesus.

There is the ambiguity. We know next to nothing of the man Jesus apart from what we see through the eyes of later generations, yet everything rests upon him.

The key to rebuilding the narrative of Jesus lies in the nature of witness. The early centuries of the Christian era saw the church select four gospels out of a number of alternatives because they were thought to be the records of eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus. We recognise today that this was not the case, yet the four evangelists and all the other New Testament writers were, genuinely, powerful witnesses.

First, however, the primary witness to the Jesus narrative is not to be found in the apostolic era writers but closer to home – in ourselves. This signals the next change that has taken place in our spiritual understanding over the last couple of generations. The ground of faith assurance no longer rests in the words of scripture but in the ambiguous depths of our own lives lived in grace.

Our testimony in grace is that we have an immediate, intimate relationship with God, a relationship that can have the extraordinary quality of a meeting of equals, a face to face encounter devoid of intimidation, and characterised by the equally extraordinary flow of grace-gifts. It is a relationship no human being can dare claim in and of ourselves. It is not a relationship earned by good deeds or spiritual effort, even if approaching the status of sainthood. It is a gifted relationship, freely given, and rests solely upon knowing ourselves as being "in Christ", and being completely and comprehensively forgiven. This is not just a belief, a dogma: it is the core of our Christian existence that is as fully real as the earth we walk upon, manifest not just in some wished-for destiny in heaven after death but in the daily lived encounter with life. This relationship is ambiguous: it cannot be otherwise. But it is real.

In the same manner, it is our lived experience of grace that through all the ambiguities of life, grace is unambiguously creative love. The universe as grace is not a battlefield between good and evil, especially one in which the outcome is uncertain so our lives are always lived under a cloud of existential uncertainty. We never have to wonder whether God is really evil, or a manipulator, or plays whimsical games with us. We are never uncertain as to whether God loves or hates us or is indifferent. Of course, there are times when all such thoughts break in upon us and the ambiguities loom large in our imagination. When, however, we find ourselves again able to ground our lives in grace, the uncertainty is cleared away. We may not be able to affirm the physical story of the resurrection today as in the past, yet our witness of grace is to the positive reality of the resurrection life in ourselves.

What this is saying is that when we look to see the narrative of the life of Jesus, that life is illuminated by the witness of our own grace experience. It is therefore through the portal of our own grace experience that we read and view the witness of the apostolic writers. They were testifying to the electrifying power that the life and death of Jesus had upon the community of the disciples and subsequent generations. They used models to interpret what they were experiencing and they theologised extensively, as they had to. They put their theories/theologies to the practical test. Some did not stand the test and had to be radically revised. Paul's apocalyptic vision of the gospel proved to be one such dead end and led to the radical revision of theology evidenced in the last writings of the first century. None of the first century models have to be our models. We do not have to embrace the models of sonship, Father God, messiah/Christ or of the apocalyptic coming 'on the clouds of glory'. We do not have to accept that Jesus was of the line of David (especially as we recognise that David never existed in the first place), nor that the prophets foretold his coming. We do not have to embrace the model of priesthood that the writer of the letter to the Hebrews introduced to Christian thinking late in the century. All these things were models that the people of a particular time and culture found meaningful in their attempt to interpret the central wonder of their existence – life with Jesus, a Jesus known in grace.

Evidence from writings outside the New Testament coming from this period point to a dominant strand in the early church that was one in which this "Jesus in the Spirit" was such that people were claiming to speak in the name of Jesus without any anchor to assess or validate their authenticity. The importance of the gospel records is that they rooted the claims back into the concrete earthly life of Jesus. This seems especially true of the gospel of John, even though John's account of the life of Jesus is probably more fiction than fact.

All the gospels, through all the uncertainty and ambiguity about historical reliability, witness to the manifestation of grace in a human life, a manifestation that was definitive for knowing and understanding the nature of grace in our lives.

So where does this leave us in our search for a credible narrative of Jesus? First, we do have to bedrock in real-time history. Jesus lived and died. We then have to bring to bear on this historical core the full force of our grace experience and the witness of the apostolic-era church, as well as the centuries of Christian life and reflection in the intervening centuries. We bring our own models to all of this, our own ways of interpreting the data that opens for us. It is meaningless to us to speak of Jesus as 'Son of God', however sanctified by the tradition and incorporated into Trinitarian dogma and creedal statements. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, three persons in one God: this is a model, and nothing more than a model. Don't get me wrong. I am through and through a Trinitarian believer. It is the model that comes into question, not the reality behind the model. The model drew on the patriarchal family system that not only no longer makes sense but also is deeply offensive in today's society.

We have to come up with our own models that provide us with interpretive frameworks that relate Jesus to the life and culture we know. These models, objectively speaking, will be no more valid that those generated in the early centuries. In time, the best models we can come up with will be as inauthentic as Sonship is for us today. That next generation will have to do the work for themselves. We do not bind them to our models, just as we are not bound to the models of the past, even when sanctified by their use in the New Testament.

There is, however, one model that does go back to the early centuries, is still central, and conceivably will remain a core of Christian perception. The model is captured in the Eucharistic action. It was the tragedy of the medieval era that the Eucharist transformed into a semi-magical rite, the spell being cast by saying the words of institution. The classical Eucharist was not a work of magic, semi or otherwise, but a four-fold action that simultaneously modelled the life of Jesus and the life of the worshipping community. The four-fold action is (a) the offering, (b) the grace transformation of the offered self by God in blessing given in thanksgiving, (c) the breaking/pouring action that proclaims the willingness to suffer and be broken in service, and (d) the giving/sharing of the offered, transformed, broken self to the whole community, bringing new life.

Here, then, in our weekly celebration of the Eucharistic liturgy, is the framework for our narrative of Jesus. It is a framework that lends itself to an infinite range of models and theories, so it endures, as it has endured, over the centuries, through a myriad of model changes. It is the simplicity of the acts that captures our imagination and impels us forward to find new models.

There will never again be a static, 'orthodox' and authoritative narrative of Jesus. Even if there arises an era in which some religious or imperial authority wields the power to impose a narrative on the collective life of humanity, such an effort will ever only be a short-term solution, resting upon a base of temporal power. We live with the ambiguity – and rejoice in the ambiguity because we no longer have to believe we are 'right' and that there will be terrible, eternal consequences if we are 'wrong'. We are able to say, this is the narrative that makes sense to me, makes sense in our culture. It is of no consequence that the next or later generation will come up with a different narrative or that others in our own time are gripped by a variation of the narrative that is not ours.

What kind of narrative of Jesus does make sense to us? I can at this point do nothing more than put forward a narrative that makes sense to me at this time, recognising that even for me the narrative is fluid and sometimes changes its course of flow.

Jesus was fully and unconditionally a human being, born in the normal way, from conception to delivery, subject to all the ambiguities of being human: the weaknesses, the ignorance, the cultural myopias and prejudices, and the endless moral dilemmas and compromises which is the inescapable stuff of being human. To think he was "tempted as we are yet without sin" is a piece of mythological projection.

Yet this particular human was unique. It is only a model that categorises him as Son of God, even that he was God Incarnate, the Word made flesh. These are all models trying to grapple with the central mystery of the apostolic experience – and our grace experience. That experience was (and is) that this man Jesus uniquely manifested the nature of the grace of God. Moreover, it is the inescapable core of our grace experience that we live in Christ and he in us. It is in this relationship that lies our whole 'connection' with God. We will never be able to penetrate that mystery. We can only apply our models.

Part of the penetration by model comes from our own experience of grace. Living the life of grace is an experience of constantly transcending time and occasions. It is this that gives life and power to the model of being members of the Body of Christ. The most persuasive model I can bring to bear is the two-fold nature of all reality. Ask the physical question of Jesus, whatever the historical facts, and the answer is that he was fully and wholly human. Ask the grace question of that life and his life is revealed as wholly and unconditionally grace, the definitive revelation of God. Ask the physical question of ourselves, personally and communally in the church, and the answer is that we are an ordinary bunch of humans in society. Ask the grace question and we see ourselves as Body of Christ, a spiritual life that transcends time and space.

For in this narrative, Jesus, in his life and death – and victory over death – stands as the definitive revelation of God. This is the pivotal point. It is upon the life and death of Jesus that our 'knowing' of God is based. Take Jesus away and we are left with ideas, notions, theories, but no core, no bedrock, no touchstone. It is the death of Jesus that constitutes that core. We echo Paul: I know only Jesus and him crucified. Jesus' willingness to embrace death as an act of self-giving love is the cornerstone for understanding the nature of grace.

Although at the physical level of life, everything is ambiguous and can mean many different things, the death of Jesus says that there is no ambiguity about the universe as grace. It is love, unconditional love. It has no element of revenge or hate: it has no element of uncertainty about the creative goodness of grace. When we come before God we are never uncertain about our reception or the standing we have.

The cross, seen through the model of the Eucharistic action, was the prelude to a new life. This is the truth of the resurrection. I strongly suspect that the narrative of the resurrection as a physical happening was a Pauline invention, coming as he did from the sect of the Pharisees who believed in resurrection (which was a novelty concept in Judaism). Paul's concept of resurrection struck a powerful chord because the experience of the apostolic church was that of a bursting new life, a radical transformation of all reality as they lived it.

In my narrative of Jesus, the life and crucifixion of the man was an event on the plane of time that led to consequences that have changed the course of history and shaped the life of all humanity. On the plane of grace, however, my narrative is that the cross and the new life that flowed from it changed our encounter with the universe as grace. My model for this is one of transparency, which is not quite adequate but works. Human beings are now able to 'see' the universe as grace: the physical universe has become transparent as grace. The great symbol of this transparency is the Eucharist elements of bread and wine. Beneath the physical appearance of the elements we 'see' the grace of Jesus present. More than just seeing, however, we now 'become' grace. In the Christian life, the physical world is transparent to grace and the universe of grace transparent to the physical world. "We are the Body of Christ": words from the Eucharistic liturgy. Look at us and you see an ordinary collection of people (and not a very prepossessing bunch at that!). Look at us and you see Jesus. This collection of people is totally and unconditionally transparent to grace.

In this narrative, the whole long story of the universe from the Big Bang, through the constitution of life and through the history of humanity comes to its centre point when Jesus dies on the cross. Two thousand years have passed two or more thousand millennia to come: the cross is the point from which all new life transparent to grace flows. It is the still turning point around which the universe revolves, to the very limits of the physical universe.

To which I can only add, Amen.

#  Chapter 11: The Human Story

The story of Jesus is pivotal to the faith narrative but the narrative does not stop there. If it does, then the whole is meaningless.

The next stage of the faith story connects the storytellers and hearers into the narrative. I am a storyteller, but the faith story is nothing like any of the stories I tell. Only if I tell the story of my own life, when, as story-teller, I live within the narrative, can I come close to the nature of the faith story.

In the Eucharistic liturgy, the faith story is captured in various ways. The reading of the scriptures, accompanied by expository preaching is one way: the creeds another. The core telling of the story, however, is captured in what is called the 'Preface' to the great Thanksgiving Prayer; that is, the section of the prayer that follows the call to give thanks (Lift up your hearts) and leads to the Sanctus (Holy, Holy, Holy). The statement of the Preface always climaxes with words that embrace the immediate and present gathering (You have made us a holy people... or similar words). We live the story, not just tell the story. This is not something that happened only in the remote past. It is happening now and what is occurring in this liturgical gathering is the latest moment in the story. Unless we recognise ourselves within the narrative it is not a faith story, whatever else it may be.

This is also why theology cannot be undertaken in a secular academic environment. In my own country of New Zealand, the Anglican and Methodist churches (which train their ministry students jointly) moved their theological training into the secular university to give their theological qualification the standing of an academic degree. The problem is that, by its nature, the secular university can only teach the faith narrative and consequent theology as an objective field of study. It cannot, without compromising its own integrity, allow either teachers or students to see the study as a personal story. The university can provide a scholarly environment but not a theological environment.

The story cannot be objectified without loosing its dimension of grace. The story cannot be told as a succession of facts and events, even with the most sophisticated tools of interpretation and analysis. That does not mean that the universities and scholars who undertake such a task are not important: they are vital. Scholarship as such is certainly within the realm of academia and can be done fully within a secular environment.

However, the narrative is only faith story when it is identified as my/our own story, catching up our lives within the story. It is only possible to tell the faith story from within the faith community. It is only within the faith community that theology can be done. It is only within the faith community that the faith story can be understood.

What, then, is the faith story that connects the Jesus event to our present time?

The traditional narrative begins with the assertion that we humans are made in the image of God. We were made, male and female, to be immortal and live in Paradise. We fell from that state and lost our immortality and our place in Paradise, consigned to live our lives in toil and trouble. God made one attempt to 'start again'' by destroying everyone and everything in a great Flood, saving only Noah, his family, and breeding stock of every species, but the attempt failed and humanity resumed business as usual, living under the universal condemnation of God. So God sent his Son, Jesus, who, through the cross, created a new and living way for humans to be restored to relationship with God. The narrative thereafter focuses upon the church because, from Jesus onwards, only the church matters. Only the believing community will be 'saved' in the future climax and consummation of the world. Everybody outside the church will be consigned to the flames. This life, our life now, was and is about ensuring that we are part of the saved company.

The traditional narrative focused all fulfilment of value as something to be found in the future, whether conceived of as a heaven entered after death or as an eschatological transformation of the world. The classic expression was made by Paul in Romans 8:...all that we suffer in the present time is nothing in comparison to the glory which is destined to be disclosed to us.... This life is to be lived as being empty of value in order to gain the immeasurable values promised in the future. The present is a 'vale of tears and sorrow': the future, glorious. In that future, all the ambiguity of the present experience of life will be done away with; no more loss, death or suffering; no more moral dilemmas; no more struggle to understand meaning; no more moral weakness; no more threats making us anxious or afraid; no more doubt or disbelief; no more challenges to test faith and endurance; God would be visible and all ambiguity will be at an end.

The traditional narrative even saw itself as unambiguous. The Bible conveyed the very words of God and was therefore infallible truth. The church itself had a divine guarantee that it could not be in error on matters of faith. The church's structure was divinely ordained and therefore fixed for all time and beyond question; the sacraments were instituted by Jesus himself and therefore also absolute in their authority. From the seventh century, the Roman papacy claimed the unambiguous authority of magisterium. Marriage was another institution, monogamous and heterosexual, that was divinely instituted and therefore absolute beyond ambiguity or change.

In the traditional narrative, our present place in the story is, first, to receive the teaching that has been handed down unchanged from the saints and apostles; second, to ensure our salvation by uncritically believing and by attending church; third, to do what we can to bring others into the salvation fold; fourth, to hand on the teaching unchanged to the next generation.

Each of the various ecclesiastical traditions – Catholic, Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, Pentecostal, or Evangelical had their particular variation but broadly adhered to this story.

The story no longer works. It does not gel with the way we experience the universe or our own lives. It rings false at every step. That Christianity is in retreat everywhere is a testimony that its story is not connecting to life as we know it and live it. It is not our story.

The problem with the traditional narrative begins with the mantra that humans were made in the image of God, a statement affirmed even when the idea of a seven-day creation has been abandoned. Divorced from the mythological tale, made in the image of God is an entirely meaningless statement, the words able to be filled with whatever imaginative content the speaker has in mind, It signifies nothing.

Then the narrative both ignores and dismisses every other part of humanity outside the church (and often 'the church' is identified with a particular sect). It ignores the fact that everything we count as Christian has its roots in other cultures and religions.

Most telling, however, is that we no longer buy into a message that strips value from the present and locates in the future the place where we find our values, whether in heaven or on earth. The entire concept of heaven has totally disappeared from real belief (as distinct from what we might say we believe or official dogma proclaims as orthodox belief). We may, if challenged, feel we have to affirm belief in heaven: we may sing lustily of the glory to come: but we believe none of it. I mean that universally. In fifty-plus years, I have never met anyone of any Christian tradition who believes in the sense that such a belief affects their lives and governs their choices. We no longer embrace the traditional idea that the present life is a time of preparation for the next and that it is only in the next life that we will possess what we truly value. The implications of this are, first, that whatever values are worth living for are present now; second, that the traditional concept of 'salvation' has been rendered meaningless.

Further, the traditional narrative rings false with respect to ambiguity. This is in two ways. The first is that there is no belief, no institution, no moral principle, that is unambiguous. This is the real debate that lies behind the abortion controversy. The Roman Church maintains that there is an unambiguous rule, governing all humanity, that abortion under all circumstances is wrong, is a sin against God. The debate, however, is not about abortion. This issue is simply the chosen battle ground, a field of conflict chosen to be the test of wills with the world. The reason for the battleground is that the church's rule against abortion rests on nothing other than the fact that it says so. There is no scriptural warrant, nor an incontrovertible argument from logic. The entire issue rests upon the authority of the papal magisterium to make the rules for humanity. The debate is therefore, in perhaps the most pure form possible, about the authority of the church and specifically the Roman magisterium. In a larger sense, the debate is about whether any rule (or institution) can be unambiguous, and who gets to rule what is deemed unambiguous. The passion generated by this debate, bordering on and often crossing the border of violence and manipulation, is because it is a life-and-death struggle with the last bastion of the traditional narrative. Once abortion is accepted, the traditional narrative, and the traditional authority of the church, is lost forever. The Roman church as put all its chips on the table in this challenge. A parallel debate is taking place around homosexuality and marriage. The issues are only the surface: the real movement is in the abandonment of the traditional notion that some things are unambiguous.

The other side is the positive embrace of ambiguity and that ambiguity has become the keynote of contemporary spirituality. Everything, including all our understanding of God, of institutions, of moral judgements, of meaning to life, of relationships: all are ambiguous. This is celebrated as positive. To live in a world without ambiguity is not only an impossible dream – it is the stuff of nightmare. The last thing we would wish for in real life is the experience of the traditional heaven. It is more a description of hell. If we ever arrived at the Pearly Gates, we would find everyone inside beating at the door to get out.

If we look at most of the non-environmental problems in the world, it is not too far from the truth to recognise them as products of attempts to deny or escape from ambiguity. The terrorism of militant Islam is a direct denial of ambiguity. Political turmoil follows idealism which is a belief in unambiguous solutions, whether of the right or of the left. So much of the conflict within churches, leading to separation and schism, is about an unwillingness to accept that ambiguity is inherent in the religious enterprise and everyone engaged in it.

Healthy living, healthy spirituality, healthy community life, healthy politics, healthy whatever – the core secret lies in embracing ambiguity and learning to live comfortably within it.

The traditional narrative is no longer sustainable, yet we cannot survive spiritually without a replacement. We have to be able to make the concrete connection between the story and our own lives in the present in such a way that gives meaning to our present existence. For meaning is the key. When the traditional narrative disappeared for most people during the last century, the result was what theologian Paul Tillich labeled as 'the age of meaninglessness'. The problem was that the alternative secular narrative inherently stripped all meaning from life, all life. The dominant narrative became one of cosmic process and evolution by natural selection. We are just another species, no different from the ants – or the sabre-toothed tiger. We are probably bound for extinction but whatever way the story of life turns, it means nothing. Earth is of less consequence in the cosmos than a speck of dust in the air caught in the sunlight streaming through our window.

The Christian faith narrative has to confront this. In one sense, it has also to embrace it, because the secular narrative is not some Hindu story of the gods but is rooted in hard, scientific fact. What was said and explored in the first part of this narrative returns again here as critical. The difference is that the first phase was fully cosmic in its focus. This phase of the narrative is focused upon humanity. We need such a story, but we will never again come to a place where such a story can be dogmatically enshrined. This is not a 'revealed' story that has the stamp of divine authorisation, but the sense we arrive at, given what we 'know', that we have a credible account of the human story, one with which we can identify and one that gives meaning to our lives.

We can ever only find such a narrative by going through the knowing process. It is not found by piecing together texts from the Bible, even from such cosmic visions as found in Ephesians.

We start, then, with a hypothesis (and no more than a hypothesis).

The human species is unique among all the species of life on earth in that we possess the capacity to be aware of grace and to choose to live in relationship with grace, even to be grace. This is the human calling and it is this that gives human life its meaning. The Christian community, centred on Jesus and the cross and building upon the experience of the Hebrew people, is charged with the task of witnessing to all the world about the nature of grace that is universal in all matter, in every human being and human society. The faith story is how this awareness of grace transforms human life at every level.

Such a faith story differs considerably from the traditional narrative. It is rooted in the twin observations of the universe: the world of nature and the world of grace experience. It embraces all humanity, recognising grace in all peoples, all societies and all religions. It contains the seeds of a vision of a fulfilled life in this world. It allows for the recognition of culture and diversity. It does not lay down institutions or rules for living. It allows for ambiguity.

What data supports such a hypothesis and makes it credible?

The primary data comes not from perusal of scriptures but from our own lived experience of grace. Whatever narrative we form, it has to do justice to our lived experience. For Christians, this lived experience arises from how we encounter the world when we ask the grace question. It is true that the traditional narrative is not inconsistent with our grace experience to a degree, except that it is radically inconsistent to the extent that it exalts unambiguity whereas our grace experience is within ambiguity and celebrates ambiguity. Also, our grace experience fills the present, not empties the present. It is the secular narrative that our grace experience exposes as totally inadequate. The story cannot be squeezed into the narrow confines of a purely physical universe and at the same time do justice to the full spectrum of our experience of life.

However, the second stream of the data undoubtedly arises from what we know of the natural world and human society. That we humans evolved from primate ancestors is beyond rational dispute. That culture shapes all that we are and do, and that the vast regional differences in culture and associated religion is traceable to the different environmental and socio-political challenges different groups faced is also beyond rational dispute. It does not make any sense to confine 'right' spiritual understanding to only one people and culture and religion. Added to that is the fact that everything we think we 'know' about God can be traced to other religions in one form or another.

Yet the story of the Hebrew people, particularly when shorn of the fictional framework and allowed to shine to some degree in historical light, does become a powerful stream of data to the story. It is from the Hebrew that the clear sense of vocation to the world emerges. It is from the Hebrew that the witness to the transformation by grace emerges.

Nor may we ignore the stream of the story of the church within human society. An excellent BBC documentary series, The Protestant Revolution, explored how the sixteenth century Reformation, which many today see as a largely irrelevant piece of ancient history, has totally shaped the world we live in today, in both Protestant and Catholic societies. The women's movement that has so reshaped the modern world has its roots in the Reformation and its well-spring in the imperative to read the Bible. For the first time, women began to read and so set in train the sequence that has led today to the overthrow of patriarchalism in the West and is similarly challenging traditional societies in Islam, India and African and indigenous societies everywhere. The political demands for liberty in countries all around the globe has its roots in the gospel. The instances are inexhaustible of situations in the social fabric of humanity where the impact of the Christian message, in all its ambiguity, has creatively transformed the quality of life. The ambiguity needs acknowledgement because there are equally too many examples of the uncreative and destructive influence of Christians. We do not have to look to the past for an abundance of examples. That the influence of Christianity can be destructive as well as creative is an important element in the credibility of the narrative. To uphold the Christian witness as a pure and shining light in a corrupt world is to invite derision.

Once again, in the search for a model that makes sense of the data in the light of the hypothesis, it is the model of the two sides of energy that presents itself to us as that which, in the present world, does best justice to the full range of data.

Take it from the pint of view of our selves, our 'me', and place ourselves at the centre of the model. I am fully human in every aspect, not just part human and part 'spirit' or 'soul'. Apart from any other consideration, that division of persons into body and soul/spirit is of Greek philosophical origin and not in any way part of the Semitic world-view of the biblical writers. There is no 'me' that is free from my genetic makeup nor is there any 'me' that is not embedded in my culture, whatever that culture may be. It is as impossible for 'me' to cease to be Western and become Chinese, however I may make superficial changes in the way I live. The difference between the 'me' that is rooted in genetics and the 'me' that is rooted in culture is the dynamic, evolving nature of the latter that does present us with areas of individual and societal choice.

What is extraordinary about myself is that I can be consciously aware that the whole of who I am is simultaneously grace. Everything I think, feel, believe and act is a manifestation of grace and that grace is the very 'being' of God. In contrast to the dichotomy inherent in theism, that draws an absolute distinction between Creator and creature, we recognise that we cannot even draw a line between 'self' and 'God', or between the physical world and God. All reality has this ultimate ambiguity and that ambiguity goes to the centre of who I am.

When we see the universe as grace, we are not looking at something created, and then from that to the Creator. We are directly engaged with God. Yet we are part of that universe, physics and grace.

Standing within this model of the two-fold nature of the universe enables us to tell two very different stories and know that both of them are 'true' in that they make sense of our experience. The one tells the physical story of humanity meeting great challenges in all parts of the world and surmounting those challenges by developing appropriate cultures, and those cultures that are successful are supported by a religion. Religions are authentic not by absolute or universal truth but by their creative relationship to their culture, to the extent they enable their societies to rise to the challenges they face. Pharonic religion was authentic in the context of ancient Egypt and its particular circumstances.

The story traces the impact of Christianity and how it changed the world, yet how it has ceased to be related authentically to late Western culture and the struggles that are now occurring as Christianity seeks to re-orientate itself and recover its authenticity. The telling of this story has no need to hide behind myth or force facts to conform to dogma or try to pretend that ambiguity does not exist. It can stand free of all that because alongside of the physical/historical narrative can stand the grace narrative. The two stories do not mesh and they resist being forced into a common story. In this model, we are able to move freely from one story to the other and back again.

The faith narrative in grace can take many forms. We are working in the realm of imagination for it is only in imagination that we can penetrate the universe as grace. What we are searching for, however we construct the story, is a narrative that makes sense of our grace experience in the present. I shall tell the grace narrative as it strikes me.

Humanity is the supreme grace-gift within the physical universe. In our species, grace emerges into conscious awareness in the physical realm. Grace is in all things but the human species has the capacity to not only know and interpret grace but to make the active choice to live by grace, even to be grace. That creative grace is manifest in all human society in all ages. It was the role of the Hebrew people, culminating in Jesus, to make the spiritual nature of the universe open and apparent and to provide the framework through which humanity could live fully, if always ambiguously, in the light of grace. Our role today is to live within the flexibility, to move between seeing the world as physical and seeing the world as grace, with grace illuminating the physical world and filling it with meaning and ethical significance. Our calling is to bring all humanity into this place of knowing grace.

The moment I set such a statement of the faith narrative down, I am conscious that it does not do justice to the fullness of the grace experience and I want to expand it, qualify it, fill it out – and I will do none of that. It is not my point to supply a ready-made faith story but to call attention to the dynamic capacity we have within the model to see two pathways and know the freedom to explore both.

The new approach to this phase of the faith story can have major theological implications and through the theology lead to significant practical outcomes. The most vital of these outcomes relates how Christianity responds to the vast cultural change that is taking place in the world of the twenty-first century. Culture is always a response to a specific set of challenges that confront a group of people. The challenges may be from the physical environment, from the political situation, from social and economic conditions or the challenge of confrontation with other cultures. Culture is the complex of beliefs, behaviours, myths, stories and values that the group develops in response to the challenges. If the response is successful, the group survives: if the culture is inadequate, the group does not survive.

Over the 12,000-odd years since the last ice age, or on a wider perspective, over the 50,000-odd years since modern humans emerged in the path of our evolution, the relative isolation of large groupings of societies has led to the development of a number of broad cultural responses. Western European, Chinese, Islamic, Indian, Polynesian cultures are some such groupings and each has become, in its own region, 'traditional' society and culture. Each was a response to a particular combination of challenges they confronted.

Today, the challenges are global and the circumstances of our lives have created a global consciousness. The responses that have to meet the challenges are global. Yet not a single one of the existing traditional societies, including traditional Western society, has the ability to provide the answers to the global challenge. What is happening to our world is that a completely new cultural milieu is arising, a new global culture that is a radical break with all the traditional cultures, the West included.

Humanity is facing a veritable tsunami of threats as this century progresses: global warming, resource exhaustion, pollution, death of the oceans, overpopulation and the dependencies created by globalisation – and this does not exhaust the list. We have to meet and overcome every single one of these challenges if we are to survive: any one of them, unchecked, will end us as a species or, at very least, wipe out sophisticated human society. Only a vast culture change can save humanity, and that change has to be in and of every society on earth, barring none. It has to embrace everyone. Every individual on the face of the planet has to change.

In the present world, the greatest roadblocks preventing a creative response are to be found in the religions, not excluding Christianity. If humanity fails, and there is a there is still a future capacity to write a history of our time, the lion's share of the blame for the failure will be laid at the door of the world's religions, with Christianity standing at the forefront of the judgement.

A prime theological importance of grasping a new faith story is that it can free us to make and support a creative response to the global challenges. The most important insight is the freedom to change and adapt, able to loose us from the absolutenesses and certainties of the past and the myths of institutional sanctity.

It is, however, to the theological implications of the faith story as grace that I turn at this point. The faith story of humanity affirms the meaningfulness of human life, its 'vocation' in the universe. Furthermore, we have the witness of the Biblical testaments, that God's grace brings new life out of what seems to be the loss of everything.

The theology of the new faith narrative enables us to face the tsunami in complete confidence that whatever happens at the physical level, the outcome will be creative, positive, meaningful and lead to new life – new faith. The new human faith narrative generates a new approach to theology that leads to new ways of living, new ways of being Christian, new expressions of faith. This is where grace is manifest in our world, in our time.

# Chapter 12: The Future

The faith story has tracked through five phases: origin, the universe, the Hebrews, Jesus and humanity. In each of the five phases, the traditional narrative no longer works and the very survival of faith urgently demands a new narrative.

The sixth and final phase, in which the narrative projects the future, is no different; if anything, the demise of the traditional narrative is more dramatic in that it is not believed either inside or outside the church. Whatever official formulations may say and we may recite, whatever hymns we may sing however vigorously, whatever we may say we believe, we do not. If we measure belief by the way it governs practical decisions of life – the only real measure of belief as genuine – the most startling thing about the contemporary Christian community is that right across the whole spectrum of traditions, including the Catholic and fundamentalist communities, no one genuinely believes that part of the traditional narrative that projects into the future.

If there is a single issue propelling the decline of Christianity, it would be this rejection of the future as traditionally conceived, because it leaves the entire Christian narrative up in the air. There appears to be no point or reason in being Christian because there are no consequences that follow: in market terms, you pay your money and get nothing in return. In storytelling terms, the story ends without climax or punch line and we are left wondering what it was all about.

Although orthodoxy tried to create a single narrative of the future, in reality the tradition was made up of several stories that were quite at variance with one another. One strand of the narrative was that a Last Judgement came after death, when we appear before the throne of the Supreme Being, called to account for the way we have lived our lives. We will be rewarded with heaven or punished in hell, depending upon the verdict of the Judge. The sentence is for all eternity: no remission, no mercy for the convicted. The story depended upon the idea of a continuation of conscious, individual existence after death, together with the ability to experience pleasure and pain. Time was continued indefinitely in this after-death realm. (When we've been there 10,000 years...)

A second tradition focused on a return of Jesus to bring the ambiguous world of the present to an end. There were variations on this story. One, initiated by Paul, had Christians raptured up into the air to meet Jesus in the clouds. The physical universe will be destroyed and all non-Christians perish.

Another variant has Jesus establishing a new messianic order on earth for a millennium, an order in which everything in life is perfect. The most extreme exponents of this variation embrace literal interpretations of the Book of Revelation.

That the traditional narrative, especially about heaven and hell and judgement, has died out is not a modern phenomenon but occurred as far back as the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, a completely novel variant of the narrative emerged that drew its power from the Victorians' obsession with death. The variant captured the imagination of the Western world, effecting major changes in society and driving the revival of religion in that age. The variant was that, after death, we would be joined with our loved ones who had died before us, envisaged as now living in heaven and awaiting our reunion with them, even looking down on us, aware of our lives as we continue to live them. Death, for the faithful who would be admitted to heaven, would be a joyful celebration of being reunited with the loves we had lost. The idea of judgement was watered down to 'being good', and since this standard was extremely flexible so that no one fell outside of it except for those society regarded as rejects, in practice everyone 'got there'.

It was all pure fantasy and wishful thinking. Although gathered into the fold of Christian thinking because of its power to make people think that religion played a part in 'getting there', the Victorian 'heaven' was never related in any real way to the Christian gospel or narrative. However, it grabbed the minds of the nineteenth century and retained its power into almost the middle of the twentieth century. It still hangs around in some elements of folk religion, surfacing often (but less and less often) at funerals, but never outlasting the acute phases of grief. It has no more foundation than the ancient Egyptian belief that a dead pharaoh lived on.

The world, either inside or outside the church, no longer buys into any form of the traditional narrative. Even the so-called 'Bible believing' sects, while giving lip service to the tradition, find their modern focus in the power of God found in present life. This is why, essentially, they are more successful in communicating their message than the orthodox churches. They have adapted to the realities that life is present-focused, whereas by and large the orthodox churches have not.

Many things have changed to contribute to this state of affairs. As already noted, the 'heaven/hell' message of the old orthodoxy died out over two centuries ago, the death disguised by the embrace of the nineteenth century idea of heaven. As people grasped that this idea was pure fantasy, so the last shreds of credibility were lost to the narrative.

As for the return of Jesus, it is a notion that cannot be disproved but is, with justification, dismissed as wishful thinking divorced from any form of credibility. Every time the church in liturgy or hymnody refers to the return, the church's credibility dies a further little death, and not just in the minds of outsiders.

At a deeper level, the roots and origins of the various versions of the apocalyptic vision have become exposed and revealed as cultural perspectives that, however connected they may have been to the cultural conditions of their time, are no longer of any relevance whatsoever. They were not, and are not, revealed truth. We have reached a time when the Christian community needs to say openly that there is neither heaven nor hell in the old narrative sense, or any expected return of Jesus.

However shocking such an open admission may sound to the traditional believer, nothing would change in practice beyond alterations to liturgical expressions and abandonment of some hymn verses. The Christian community no longer lives by this belief in any practical way. The narrative lives only in the mind, no longer in the heart or in living.

On the other side, our world does look to the future and one of the major transformations in human consciousness is that we can 'see' the future in a way not possible to earlier generations. The features of what we see are, first, the life-span of the sun/earth and that of the universe. We think now not in terms of some immanent 'end' but in a potential for human life that could span millions, even billions of years into the future. At the same time, we are also aware that all of life could abruptly end at any point. We are subject to cosmic forces. A burst of mega radiation from the sun could, in seconds, eradicate all life on earth. A nearby supernova could wipe out the whole solar system. A giant asteroid could strike earth with catastrophic consequences. We are aware not just of potential longevity but of the fragility of life on earth and how it could all suddenly come to an end, perhaps with little warning.

More immediately, though, our twenty-first century society is aware of the seemingly overwhelming number and magnitude of the crises that confront humanity in our lifetime and beyond. We can contemplate our own extinction as a species, we can track what happens to our planet if it warms by 2,3,4,5,6 degrees. We are aware of the exhaustion of non-renewable – and renewable – resources that may make continuation of civilised society unsustainable.

During the bulk of the twentieth century, society sustained itself on a narrative of endless technological progress and scientific discovery that would meet every challenge and deliver ever-greater material wealth and prosperity to an ever-expanding population. That narrative, too, has died out except in the minds of some who resolutely refuse to address facts. The vision of a society that could meet the needs of all people has likewise perished. The dominant secular narrative is of doom and gloom and with considerable justification. At a factual, physical level, the human future is looking very bleak indeed. The secular crisis of our world is comprised of this scenario of gloomy prediction married to an ideology that nothing has any meaning anyway.

At the physical level, our global world does indeed face great challenges. The real crisis in our society, however, is that there is no narrative of hope, of triumph over the challenges or of life beyond the devastation of global society. The religious world, not only in the Christian community but also in every religion, offers no credible answers to the world, no credible narrative. Such narratives we are offered, to the extent that they are embraced, are everywhere counter-productive with respect to the ability of humanity to meet its challenges. The secular narrative offers no hope either. Whatever scientific / technological breakthrough we achieve will only intensify our problems. Imagine a world with cheap unlimited energy derived from fusion. The consequence would be to accelerate exponentially our consumption of all other resources and the last state would be worse than the first.

Yet without a viable, credible religious narrative, the world of humanity is doomed to failure in meeting its challenges. The secular narrative breeds only wishful thinking or despairing hopelessness. Wishful thinking, and its associated idealism, leads always to disillusionment and the hopelessness saps all energy. It is here that we may awaken to the real meaning of salvation offered through the gospel. The critical ingredient that will enable humanity to survive and sustain its existence lies in a narrative that gives life meaning and is able to sustain that meaning through every kind of vicissitude and loss. It is a narrative that moves the centre of living from doing and achieving to being. From such a new narrative can arise a whole new culture.

Furthermore, the narrative that gives genuine hope is one that infuses confidence that we can confront and overcome any challenge, no matter what, and ground that confidence in an unshakeable inner resource, not in wishful thinking. The narrative of genuine hope allows for an openness to whatever the future may hold, good or bad even death itself. It knows we have what we need to meet the future. It knows that we can change and adapt to meet whatever circumstances the future delivers to us.

Such a narrative can only arise out of faith, from out of the religious community.

Religion fills an absolutely critical role in relation to all culture, whatever the culture and whatever the many ways the religion expresses itself. It is a functional relationship. A culture that endures has to have its participants acting out its values from within themselves, fully identifying themselves with the cultural values. The alternative is imposition by coercion and this can ever only be a short-term solution, thrown off as soon as the power behind the coercion weakens. The failure of communism in Russian and Eastern Europe is an illustrative example.

It is the cultural role of religion to internalise, make 'sacred', those values of a culture that enable it to survive and thrive: those values that enable it to change and adapt to meet each new challenge as it arises. Religion is the indispensible associate of culture, not only internalising, but protecting values and ensuring that they are transmitted to each new generation.

The inescapable logic is that the relationship is essentially monogamous. A culture can be served by only one religion. The ideal of a pluralistic society espoused in recent times is a misunderstanding of how culture functions. Even when, on the surface, there appears to be a plurality of religions in a society, this is only because the religions themselves have reached a deeper level of integration of their values or the one plays a dominant role that fundamentally determines the nature of the culture.

There is emerging all over the world an entirely new culture, global culture. It is rising in response to the threats that are global in scale: arising from the new knowledge of the natural world that does not mesh with the dogmas of the various traditional cultures: arising from the new intellectual foundation, that of recognising that we know nothing absolutely: arising from new understanding of how we know anything: arising from the need to find a new integration of life now that the traditional cultures can no longer provide that.

This new culture is the essential key to human survival. Only as global humanity acts in concert, grounded in common values and common goals, can humanity hope in any way to survive globally. The old cultures are fighting rear-guard actions, militant conservatism is rampant in all cultures, but for humanity it is a life-or-death issue. Either global culture takes roots and becomes the culture of humanity across every part of the globe, or humanity fails to meet its challenges.

On the logic that has been presented, global culture must generate a global religion to serve as its internaliser and sustainer. If humanity comes out the other side of this wave of crises facing us, it will be with only a single global religion. It is not as if, once the challenges are met, we can resume life more or less as it is today. The challenges will not pass. They will, most of them, be with us for as long as human beings walk the earth. So the era of divided cultures and divided religions has come to an end.

Where does this lead us?

What is apparent is that not a single religious expression in its traditional form can supply the need of global culture, and that includes Christianity in the forms we know it today. At the same time, it is equally clear that no new religion is going to arise that will meet the needs either. It is impossible to synthesise a 'new' religion and gain widespread acceptance. Ideologies can arise, like fascism and communism or even ideological secularism, but they fade as they prove illusory. Furthermore, the timeframe is too short.

The answer lies in cultural adaptation, and in this field Christianity has a track record par excellence. Christianity grew up in a Semitic world, transmuted into Greek culture, from there into the Latin world and from there into the dual directions of the world views of Eastern Orthodoxy and Western European Catholicism. It has shown in recent years how it can culturally adapt into African, Asian, Polynesian and other cultural milieu. Christianity can adapt culturally to the new global milieu. In the process of adaptation, each time such an adaptation has taken place, it has transformed itself and adopted new ways of thinking, new expressions of belief and new ways of practice.

Christianity can and will adapt to serve global culture. In a transformed expression of itself, if global culture is successful at enabling humanity to survive by overcoming its challenges, Christianity will emerge as the religious life unifying humanity. This is not an ideal to be striven for or a programme to be enacted. It is identifying of the outcome of what the world is going through, if it comes through at all. Furthermore, it will only come through the trial if the issue of a unified religious base is resolved.

This, then, is the heart of the faith narrative of the Christian community as it confronts the future. It is not a triumphalist narrative: the real experience will be one of living through being broken. The old ways, the old traditions, the old belief structures, the old authorities and, above all, the old narrative will die and many will see this as the extinction of Christianity. It is out of the death of Christianity that Christianity will rise as the religion of global humanity.

Critical to this is the faith story, for it is the faith story that sees the resurrected life. It is the narrative that knows, from the core witness of both Testaments, that grace brings new life out of the experience of total, annihilating loss. It is this narrative that sustains faith when we see the world and our church disintegrating in social, political and economic chaos. It is this narrative that keeps faith alive when all the outward signs are that faith has died too. It is this narrative that keeps faith alive within us when we experience nothing apparent of God, of grace, and feel completely abandoned.

A new narrative of the future contrasts dramatically with what was envisaged in the traditional story. Reduced to its essence, what the traditional story held out was that the future, whether conceived as being after death or arising from an apocalyptic return of Jesus, would be completely different from the present in embodying an end to all ambiguity, moral, intellectual and physical. There would be no more death, no more suffering. The essence of the new narrative of the future, in contrast, is that, at the fundamental level, the hope for the future is that the future is no different from the present. This does not mean that nothing changes in circumstances: that would be both unrealistic and destructive. What it does mean is, that at the level of physical life, we recognise and accept that life will always be ambiguous, that struggle with distortion and corruption never ends, that idealism produces only disillusionment, that suffering and death are always going to be part of life. We recognise this not with despair, not with cynicism, not even with resigned acceptance of the inevitable but with the embrace of reality that not only says that this is how life is and always will be but that it is the very existence of these challenges that makes life so rich and meaningful. The kind of challengeless, changeless, deathless, always loving, always kind, no-conflict existence that many dream of for the future would in fact be the end of life, the reality of hell. Even if humanity at a global level accomplishes the changes that could enable us to survive indefinitely on the planet, the life of such a mature global culture would be no paradise but would have all the same dimensions of tension that we encounter today. And if we understand the alternative, we will not look for it to be any different.

However, the power of hope rests not in that realistic expectation but in the knowledge of present grace. The power of hope comes from the conviction, the faith, that the transforming, redeeming, empowering grace that we experience in the present and enables us to meet every challenge in the present is something that will never, and can never, be destroyed or taken away. The "sure and certain hope" of the Christian story is not one of a future resurrection life when all will be perfected, but of the unshakeable confidence that grace will never desert us, whatever the outward circumstances of life. The creative power to transform and overcome through grace is never lost.

Tremendous challenges face global humanity in the coming century. Without faith, we will succumb. If anything is certain in life, then that is certain. Only faith will bring us through and the only faith that will survive is that which is rooted in a robust faith story, one that gives us a realistic hope as we face the future.

The old faith story is broken and has been broken for a long time. There is a new faith story. In that faith story lies the hope for humanity.

# Chapter 13: New Stories

Christians are storytellers. Everything we say and do, the way we think about ourselves, others and the world is all in the context of story. We live by our faith story.

There is, however, not one single faith story, but multiple faith stories. It is not just that different people, or ecclesiastical traditions, tell different stories. Each person and each group tell multiple stories of themselves and their faith. We move from one story to another story. They are different, they are contradictory in that they cannot be held together or combined into some meta-narrative, but they do intersect so that they affect one another. The most useful model, once again, is that reality presents itself according to the question we ask, and the answers are not logically compatible.

There are four principle ways in which we tell our faith story. The two fundamental ways arise out of the two basic directions of our lives as we move between asking the physical question and the grace question. These two great meta-narratives occur, consciously, when we are thinking theologically. There are two further faith stories that are often much closer to home in the way we live our lives. The first of these is where we see every facet of our lives as being directed. The second is where we see freedom of choice in every facet of our lives. Once again, these two stories do not cohere together. We cannot reconcile them. We move between them.

The first of the four stories arises from asking the physical question – how, in history, did our faith arise? What is our present place? Where are we going? When we ask the physical question, we live alongside all the secular questioners and do not call upon myth and dogma. It is a story that embraces the emergence of matter and life, evolution and all the ambiguities of human history. What we are telling is, first, the story of how we have the faith, the church, the moral judgements and so on that we currently possess and project that story into the future of humanity. More than this, though, it is telling the story of the central place that religion plays, has always played, and will always play in the life of human society. It is the story of the transformational power of the gospel to make humanity 'more human'. It is a story that relativises any and every claim to certainty in dogma, moral judgement and regulation, or claims to divine authorisation of institutions, people, lands or beliefs. It is also a story embodying deep wisdom.

The story is always provisional because it is constantly being challenged by new facts as they emerge, new understanding of the dynamics of human behaviour. It is a story that is provisional because it is always told from a particular cultural, religious or personal perspective. Every person, every variant of the religious community, every cultural group sees and tells the story from its own point of view. There is and can be no definitive, authorised or orthodox version of the story, though within a specific group a variant may be deemed as such because the group gathers its identity around that variant of the narrative.

For all the variations, the bedrock of every telling of the faith narrative in the contemporary world has to lie in the credibility of any and every factual claim. If the facts are not credible, the story does not stack up. Moreover, if the facts are questionable, no authority has the right to demand that they must be accepted as true. Equally, though, everyone is entitled to embrace a fact as true even when it is questionable. There is no rule that says that a Catholic cannot embrace the Petrine story as true; no rule that says that the physical resurrection of Jesus cannot be embraced as true; no rule that prevents Mormons believing that the golden plates were translated by putting a stone in a hat. These are all decisions made to accept a version of what happened from among alternative factual scenarios. Everyone does this about every aspect of life. Every historian does this. Every parent does this.

What is different, however, from all past telling of the factual narrative of faith is that we are aware of making choices and that there are alternatives we could have chosen. Not only that, but we have let go the notion that our relationship with God is affected by our choice about what facts to embrace. This is the most dramatic break from all the past. It does not affect our standing with God whether or not we accept that Jesus rose bodily from the tomb. It does not affect our relationship with God if we reject the Petrine origin of the papacy. It does not affect our relationship with God if we acknowledge that Abraham, Moses, the Red Sea, the Law and the covenant are all mythological constructions without a factual basis.

When we tell the story of the past in this manner, we are enabled to look at the factual state we find ourselves in at the present. We may be enabled to see the reasons and forces behind the decline of Christianity, the paradoxical resurgence of religion, the dislocation of the church from the culture of our time and perhaps ways we may address this situation. As we project the story into the future, we may be enabled to see the central role that Christianity is called upon to play in the survival of humanity and how this calls us to change and adapt to meet that role.

At the level of our personal lives and circumstances, we can tell our faith story as the series of circumstances and events that at the physical level have led to where we now find ourselves. We can see how the way we were brought up by our parents, the social group we belonged and belong to, the friends and teachers who influenced us and they way we reacted to events along our way have all shaped and contributed to the state of faith we find ourselves living. When we tell this story honestly, we recognise how different we would be now had our home life, early church influences, cultural context been different.

That is one level at which we tell our faith story. The second level is what happens when we ask the grace question of reality. This story has a profound ambiguity at its heart. In its essence, the story can hardly be termed a story at all because the nature of grace transcends time and space and therefore stands outside the possibility of story. Furthermore, whatever the nature of the universe as grace, it is not self-evident. There is no path from nature or reason to an understanding of the universe-as-grace. Whatever 'knowing' we have of the nature of grace rests on the dimension of the story in time and space, with its pivot in the execution of a condemned criminal in the city of Jerusalem in the first century AD.

So the ambiguity of the story of grace is that it moves between the universe-as-grace, outside time and space, and the universe as physical, existing in time and space. The essence of the story on this plane is that grace intersects with physical life so that physical life bears the revelatory quality of grace.

We can project that story of grace intersecting physics right back to the Big Bang, even to the fact of the tiny imbalance between matter and anti-matter that enabled the physical universe to come into being. Or the collision of another planet with earth in the early stages of the solar system, the collision creating the magnetic field that today shields life from the lethal radiation from the sun. This is not Intelligent Design: it is not an attempt to explain the universe or offer an alternative physical explanation to secular science. It is a story told in parallel to the factual story and is always ambiguous.

The story told this way comes to its focus in the story of the Hebrews, culminating in the story of Jesus. Here is the heart of the faith story around which the Christian community gathers. For here the story is saying that grace is revealed to humanity. We may not accept the traditional narrative of either the Hebrews or of Jesus but even as retold the message remains the same: we may only know and relate to the nature of the full reality of the world as grace if we see in this story the nature of grace.

When we tell the story in this way, we also see and embrace the ambiguity in the story at every point. At no point in the story does grace shine out pure and unalloyed by culture, uncoloured by interpretation or undistorted in the telling. Even the crucifixion itself does not escape this ambiguity. Much of the story as told is coloured by reading back into the event the words of Psalm 51. The story of the early church is now seen not through the fictions of the early chapters of Acts but as characterised as fully as our present life by sects, rivalries, theological conflict and ethnic/cultural divides.

It is not in spite of but within all these ambiguities that we see the underside of grace with physical life. Far from the idea that the Bible teaches a single line of 'truth', the fact that the Bible, both Testaments, embraces an immensely wide and often contradictory positions on nearly everything is our warrant for the OKness of our present diversity, and acceptance that it will never be any different.

We can see both that Paul's approach to spreading the gospel in the Greek and Roman world through an apocalyptic message was wrong in the way it presented the message yet it was an act of grace with immense consequences. Without that version that Paul developed, it is probable that Christianity would never have penetrated beyond Palestine. Likewise, we see that the array of stories that fill most of the Old Testament, the 'history' of the Hebrew people from Abraham onwards, is largely fiction, yet these stories played a crucial role in enabling the Hebrew people to survive. It is possible that without these stories they would have been swamped by Hellenism and there would have been no framework for the incarnation of Jesus.

When we tell the past as a story of grace intersecting physics, the telling of the story illuminates the present. Grace intersects with time and space now, at this moment, and with all the ambiguity we have seen in the past. When we see this, our entire perspective on what we see happening in our world changes. Even the global crises that threaten our well-being and our very survival are seen as grace. The condition of the church, including its decline, is seen as grace. We take the story up to cosmic dimensions and we see galaxies, or we take it down to the minutiae of this single moment in a person's life and circumstance and at every point see an intersection of grace and life.

When we tell the story in this way, it also becomes one of ever-unfolding revelation of the nature of grace. Though the cornerstone of all revelation of grace remains the cross of Jesus, the image of cornerstone tells us that such a single stone does not constitute the whole building. Nor does even a cornerstone determine definitely the look, shape, character and function of the completed structure. Grace continues to reveal and unfold itself as fully now as at any time in the past, and always just as ambiguously. We might see the whole change in narrative taking place in our generation as a great intersection of grace happening in our time, happening to us.

As we take our grace story into the future, the story projects that there will never be any time or place where such intersection ceases to take place. If we ever travel to a distant planet, we will not travel outside the intersection with grace. If we ever encounter alien life forms, the grace story says that the intersections have been as real on their planet as on ours. Whatever happens if and when such an encounter occurs, it will be an intersection with grace.

The whole Christian story of grace can be crystalised in an image. Imagine a world devastated by global warming, rising sea levels and with civil society in a state of compete collapse, plagued by disease, famine, violence and death: all our worst nightmares for the future. Sunday by Sunday, in the midst of this living hell, the Christian community gathers and says, "Let us give thanks... at all times and in all places...". Hope is this: that we know for a certainty that we can always and will always be able to give thanks for our lives and the life of the world, whatever our circumstances. Grace will always intersect our lives.

Then there is a third way we tell our story. Provided it is told always acknowledging ambiguity, it is a legitimate way. It is certainly the major way I tell the story to myself daily. It can be told of the universe, or of one's own life, but it can never be told as dogma. It is the story of physical existence shorn of all cause and effect. As a friend recently crystalised the concept for me, "nothing ever happens in life by accident." I look back on my own life, in every detail, with all its ups and downs, insights and betrayals, and see everything as a gift of grace, everything meant to be or at least transformed by meaning, redeemed from negative to positive. I have made many decisions in my life I now deeply regret yet I see how creative they have been to the person I am today, the spiritual understanding and wisdom that they led to, and I see them as gifts of God. When I look back, I see nothing that was accidental, nothing that was meaningless, nothing that was fruitless, even the worst of times. When I tell my story like that, I am alerted to everything that happens in this moment, to my ever-changing moods, to experiences of frustration when things go wrong or something precious is lost, to the worst disasters I can imagine – and I see grace, I see meaning, I see that nothing is happening accidentally.

This takes my story into the future. It is the foundation for a confidence that nothing can ever happen to me that is meaningless or destructive. Nothing can ever be a disaster. There is nothing to fear in the future, whatever the future holds outwardly. Everything in the future will be as creative as everything has been in the past.

There is a fourth way we tell our faith story which is held in tension with the previous way. In this way of telling our faith story, either projected across humanity or as our individual narrative, the keynote is choice. In this way of telling, life is a series of choices between two or many options in every situation and if we are to live fully then we must make our choices. To avoid choosing is still a choice.

In the way the traditional faith story was told, there were clearly right and clearly wrong choices and what was right or wrong was what God had decreed. Sometimes the right was stated in laid down moral rules in the Bible or church law. It was 'right' to abstain from sex outside of marriage. It was wrong to commit adultery. Sometimes the issues were not dictated by rules but still, for those faced with the choice, the question was, what would God want them to decide. To choose the right was to win God's approval and blessing: to choose wrong was to sin and put oneself outside of God's blessing, even incur punishment that could threaten gaining heaven. In this approach to the choice narrative, ecclesiastical authorities had the power to dictate actions over a wide array of human activity, declaring what was right and what was wrong.

Overlaying the form of the choice narrative, was the message that God had the right and the power to forgive sin, wrong choices, but the wrongdoer had to actively and consciously seek that forgiveness. The meaning of the cross of Jesus was the way of that forgiveness. In the Roman Catholic version of the story, the power to forgive or withhold forgiveness resided with the ordained priesthood, giving it immense power, especially when allied to the fact that church authority in the first place determined what was right and what was wrong.

The power of the traditional 'choice' narrative has been dramatically undermined over the last half century. The most significant of the changes has been the recognition of ambiguity such that it is rarely clear what is the right and wrong choice, even when there appear to be clear-cut principles of 'right'. In concrete terms, every moral choice involves a choosing between two or more ways where each involves doing some wrong and some right. Every choice we make involves a denial of some good to someone, may do active harm to someone, may violate a deeply held value. There is never, ever, in anything, an unambiguous choice of what is right.

Further, even the notion that the 'right' way is known in principle is now recognised as an empty claim, even when we think it is clear-cut. We can no longer, with any integrity, quote texts from the Bible as being a decisive direction about what is right or what is wrong. So many areas we used to think were clear-cut wrong we now affirm positively. Equally, though this is less readily recognised, so many things that were acceptable fifty years ago are now seen as 'wrong'.

Added to this is the ambiguity, so obvious to the modern world, regarding the religious authorities themselves. John Paul II continually castigated the world for its moral failings. At the same time, he built the Vatican finances through a symbiotic relationship with the mafia, profiting to the tune of billions of dollars annually from every crime imaginable. In the past, the corruption of religious authorities remained largely hidden but today is stripped bare. Their moral authority is broken.

The narrative of choice remains, however, because this is an inescapable reality of life. As we tell this as our faith narrative, we see the faith life not as one in which we must always choose the right but one in which we are called to choose responsibly and with wisdom, recognising that every choice involves some violation of value, some harm to self or others, some dimension of moral wrong. 'Sin' in this context is either our refusal to make any choice at all, dodging responsibility, or else making careless, concernless choice in which we deny responsibility. In some instances, we may even make our choice to deliberately maximize harm.

When we tell the story in this way, we see God as affirming us in our choices when we make our choices responsibly, even when the choice violates some value. In no area of life is there any value that overrides every other value. What is too often overlooked in the embrace of this affirming understanding of God is both the reality of judgement upon irresponsible choice or neglect of choice, on the one hand, and the reality on the other hand that our 'sin' affects every choice because every choice does some harm to someone.

In the great cultural/religious shift from the traditional to the contemporary version of the choice faith story, the reality of 'sin' and the need for forgiveness has become almost buried out of sight. Part of this is that the old concept of sin related to rules and regulations that are no longer given credence. However, a core issue comes back to the faith narrative relating to the future. The power that the sense of sin once exercised was related to the possibility of losing our place in heaven after we die. With that whole concept vanished, there does not appear to be any consequence worth considering should we in any way offend God. There is no meaning to forgiveness because nothing changes.

This is the point at which the telling of the story of life as grace and story of life as choice intersect. Living life in grace is a constant experience of wonder at God's goodness, even in the outwardly worst of circumstances. So it is that we gather week by week as a faith community, and day by day in personal prayer, and give heartfelt thanks for grace.

However, this openness to grace shuts down when we fall into irresponsible decision-making or actually choose to do harm, or when we seek to live only in the physical realm and ignore the realm of grace. The consequences may not be lying beyond death, but consequences follow. In the first place, we shut ourselves off from the flow of grace in our lives, not recognising it when present nor reaping the gifts as offered. More deeply, although always ambiguously, there is a reality to active judgement. For myself, I can look back at my life story and see such judgement at work, painfully at times, confronting me with the consequences of irresponsible choices. I see, too, endless times of frustrated wishes where I had chosen roads that God cut short. When I look back at every one of those instances of judgement. I see them as creative grace, hard as they were to experience at the time. What remains even more amazing is that I have been constantly forgiven, brought back and redeemed.

When we extrapolate the faith narrative as choice to embrace the whole human scene today, we see humanity living with a long history of irresponsible choices, many actively evil choices. We see a world unaware of grace. We see a world racing towards catastrophic consequences, born of our irresponsibility, our evil and our ignorance of grace.

The immediate and primary call to humanity is to 'amend our ways and our doings' (Jeremiah 7), to make responsible choices, choices that well entail a new culture, globally embraced. In this form of the faith narrative, the call to embrace global culture is not a secular movement but a clarion call from God. The spiritual imperative inherent in global culture is to make responsible choices about everything.

In making those choices, we are inevitably going to inflict great harm. We are going to deny or destroy things that are precious. We cannot do otherwise. The economic crisis of Europe in this second decade of the century is illustrative, but barely a beginning. If humanity is to survive at all, the planetary population will probably have to be reduced to a quarter of what it is today, let alone the billions more projected to be in the near future. Our choice is whether we manage the downsizing responsibly or have it happen catastrophically. The choices, the responsibilities, involved in such a move are terrible to contemplate. There is no way we could manage such a challenge without causing suffering and injustice. Every choice will be a moral minefield and can never pass a test of being 'right' because there can be no 'right' choice. To choose to do nothing is to inflict the greatest harm of all. Great as that moral dilemma may seem, it is simply an amplified version of what every one of us face every day in a myriad of ways.

The faith story of choice, whether it works itself out in the minutiae of daily life or projects onto the global stage, is one in which we see God as affirming our ability to make responsible choices, and that is a tremendous development over the past. Humanity had been seen as incapable of making right choices unless directed by God, via authorities, as to what the right choice was in every situation. Human beings were children, in a world where children were subject to the direction of their parents. Today, we see humanity as essentially adult, able to make adult decisions, free of directives, able and willing to live with the negative consequences of any decision.

The key, though, is the knowledge of grace. When the faith story is told as choice, it is always with the knowledge that the world is suffused with grace and no responsible decision can be made that ignores grace. The heart of grace is the cross, self-giving love. Responsible decision-making requires the cross to be at the centre of our vision. The cross radically changes our perspective on what is and what is not the responsible choice.

Four ways of telling the faith story: and though these may be principal ways, they are not exhaustive of the ways we tell our story. There is no one way in which the faith story can be told. We live them all, moving from one to another as the circumstances in which we live dictate. They resist being conflated into a single narrative. They contain too may mutual contradictions for that to happen. Their contradictions cannot be resolved by logical reasoning. We simply move from one story to another.

When we hear another person or group telling their faith story, it is important to grasp which story they are telling. So much of the conflict around religion occurs because we do not recognise the nature of the story being told and impose a canon of judgement applicable to a quite different version of the story. Equally, though, we who tell the story should be clear about what story we are telling and make that clear to our hearers.

The opening chapter asserted that the primary prophetic word to the world in our day is to save humanity. What is it about the way we tell our faith story that responds to this imperative?

We tell the story at the physical level, and as we tell it, we are creating the vision of the critical role that the religious community plays and must play in humanity's future. Without a core religion, we cannot survive. If global culture matures and is able to direct the world through the crises that confront us, the new form of living that will emerge requires an active spiritual centre or it will never thrive and continue long term. If global society collapses under the weight of the challenges, it is the community of faith that will hold the hope that we can endure and finally overcome.

We tell the story as the intersection of grace with life, and in that story we hold out the confident assurance that, whatever the outward circumstances, we will always be given the grace we need to meet every situation. Even the worst imaginable conditions cannot defeat us. We can and will give thanks into the midst of everything. We have hope and nothing can take that hope from us. It is hope that will bring us through.

We can tell the story in a deterministic way, that nothing is accidental, that nothing that happens is without meaning and that everything is creative. Far from being a resigned acceptance of blind fate, this story fills everything with rich possibility, with the sureness of love. Everything works for good. When we tell the story in this way, we find the positive in everything that happens.

We can tell the story as one of choice, the call to responsibility, recognising that all our choices are morally ambiguous but that blessing follow choosing responsibly, and that there is forgiveness always. As we chose responsibly, so we are enabled by grace. We will find the pathways through the challenges confronting us.

In our stories lies the future for humanity.

# Case Study

These four ways of telling our faith story are not abstract ideas, connecting only loosely to daily practice. Let me take a day – an actual day – in my life and, through it, see the outworking of the faith stories.

In the morning, I look ahead to the day and the immediate scene is that I need around 60 working hours to address what I wish to accomplish. It is not just the overburden that troubles me. It is the basic conflict with my chosen way of life that is focused upon being, not doing, with reflection at its core. Yet I cannot avoid the claims on my time and energy that the coming day makes. Some of the tasks are routines of house and health and maintaining my spiritual centre, but the dominant claims are made by the prospect of three meetings, all of which relate to the calls of ministry. Two are products of long preparation now coming to fruition. The third is a new an unexpected initiative about which I have considerable ambivalence.

As I approach the day, the four faith stories are told in anticipation, each throwing a different light on the day. The first telling of the story, proceeding from seeing the world as physical, sees the impossibility of meeting all the calls on my time and identifies the priorities, then plans and orders the day. Behind each item lies a cause and effect narrative that, for the most part, determines what I choose to address and where it lies in my priorities. I plan how I will approach each meeting. Although this process is just common-sense time management, it is, nevertheless, a faith story because every aspect of it, including all the routines, are an aspect of practical ministry, having roots in all the past years of ministry – and of family – and implications for the future. It is where I am at this moment within the great overarching faith story.

Then I look at the day ahead and I see it as one in which I know that grace will continually intersect with the moments and circumstances. Two of the meetings ahead are clearly outcomes of grace that amaze and excite me and I am confident that grace will powerfully intersect them, even if they do not go as I plan them. The third meeting is one in which I struggle with feelings about what might be expected of me, possibly taking me in directions I would rather not go. Telling the faith story gives me the confidence that it will resolve creatively and that, whatever the outcome, it will be positive, resulting in thanksgiving.

The third way of telling the faith story takes the vision of grace a step further, seeing everything that happens, to the smallest detail, including all the disappointments and negative experiences, seeing everything as the outworking of God's grace. So this way of telling the story allows for the unexpected, the unplanned and the things that appear to go wrong. The day could even hold a catastrophe. I look ahead and know with confidence that nothing may happen that is not creative, does not work for good, is not beyond the control of God. There is nothing – nothing at all – to be anxious about.

The fourth way of telling the faith story is the form in which my capacity to make choices, my freedom to choose, is paramount, in everything. The story is important right at the beginning of the day. I have had to choose not to address some issues, and some of those issues conflict with what others see as important or, even for myself, violate important principles. There is even the basic decision to be active where my sense of spiritual imperative is to be 'unbusy' and contemplative. The faith story gives me the permission to make my choices, highlighting the importance of being wise. I am confident that I have the capacity to make the choices responsibly and that is what it means to follow my Lord. Each meeting that I attend today will face me with fresh choices. Every choice will involve a denial of something else. There is no 'right' or 'wrong' in any of them. There is, however, an important dimension to this telling of the faith story, and it shows how the different ways of telling the faith story interact with one another. As I make choices, and make them freely, I know, not just abstractly but from long experience, that if the decision is not the right one, God will block it, and if it is right, God will open the doors. Knowing this is the foundation of being free from fear that, in ignorance of the outcome of what we choose, we may take a path leading to disaster.

At the end of the day, I look back and again I tell the faith story in these four modes.

I can tell the factual story of the events of the day. The three meetings went well and, in particular, the meeting about which I had ambivalent feelings produced a surprising result that I could not have anticipated. Each meeting was a significant step forward in paths of ministry. There had also been a remarkable and unplanned development in my writing, all the more remarkable because it came not out of a time of reflection but from the very pressure of the day.

So I look back on the day and retell the story as one seeing grace at work and identify a sequence of moments when I can discern plainly the intersections of grace with what was happening. The day's story becomes a story of grace.

The third way of telling the story sees how amazingly all the pieces of life, even from may years in the past, come together so that nothing is lacking in the needs of the moment. It is so clear that nothing in my life has been accidental or without meaning. Even the absence of a particular person at one of the meetings, where their presence was logically important, was a creative absence that produced a positive outcome.

It was certainly a day in which I was confronted with a quite significant choice, one that I did not anticipate, and I made a choice. I can tell the story of the day in the light of the freedom God gives me to make such choices.

What I find is that when I have told the four stories, and each way of telling is mutually exclusive of the other ways in that they cannot be reconciled to one another in any logical sense, I can yet see the story as a whole, and it makes sense as a whole. Perhaps the best analogy is that of a length of cloth woven from threads of different colours and textures, web and woof at right angles to each other, yet the whole is a complex that is a single garment.

# Conclusion

Where does this path lead us? Where do we go from here as Christians in faith?

The last thing I expect is that any reader who has reached this point is wholly convinced that in everything I have written, whether factual or theoretical, that I am 'right', and the reader is in agreement with me in all matters. The recognition of the ambiguity inherent in all things, and the provisionality of all knowing, precludes such an embrace.

Nevertheless, there is a clear dividing line and it focuses upon the traditional form of the faith narrative. For many people, in full sincerity of faith, the traditional narrative is God-given, God-sanctioned and unchallengeable by any human mind, individual or corporate. Or in the mind of Catholic orthodoxy, any amendment in the narrative can only be undertaken by the pope, who has the divine authority to do so. (There is a long history of such papal emendations to the narrative.) For many, what I have written places me altogether outside the pale of Christian community, even to being blasphemous.

What I have written should never be taken as a challenge to those whose faith remains locked into the traditional narrative in any of its forms. They are entitled to their faith story. If there is a challenge, it is to the claim that is often made that those holding the traditional narrative are entitled to impose the rules emanating from that narrative on those who do not accept them. That is a different issue. More deeply, though, the challenge is to the assumption that being Christian entails having to accept the traditional narrative.

Our present reality is that very, very few people any longer accept the traditional narrative. I would go further, in fact, and say that, because I have never encountered anyone who genuinely believes the traditional story about heaven, the old faith narrative is truly dead and well beyond resurrection. It is impossible for anyone to embrace the world of science and embrace the traditional faith narrative. Creationism is dishonest fakery, the antithesis of living by faith. In the light of the archeological evidence about the city of Jerusalem, it is impossible to be an honest historian, professional or otherwise, and embrace the traditional narrative of the Hebrew people. Thus, while I am not challenging the right of any person or community to live by the traditional faith story, I do challenge the dishonesty and lack of integrity behind what passes for adherence to the traditional narrative in general experience.

For the greater majority of people in Western society, the old faith narrative is dead and buried and little mourned. What they do not perceive, however, is that without a faith narrative, such a society is doomed. Western society can almost be characterised today as one that desperately scrabbles to find an alternative faith story and is finding every alley that it enters to be a blind alley, a 'no exit' road. The remnant of the Christian community, on the other hand, is floundering. Many churches are generating new versions of the old narrative and proclaiming them as God-given. The mega-churches are being build on such foundations. But that message leads only to disillusionment. The majority of people rightly see these efforts as sophisticated cons.

Without a credible faith narrative, the faith community ceases to be. It is as simple as that. Finding a new faith story to replace the traditional narrative is probably the foremost imperative of the theological and spiritual enterprise of our time. That is the core answer to the question about where we go from here. We must find our feet in a new faith story.

Also by David Guthrie

#  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

