Why so Crypto?

Before leaving the question of politics, I have been wondering why some of the English have such a fascination with secrecy, and such a horror of public discussion? What’s wrong with vigorous public discussion of points of difference?

Why so much crypto and secrecy?

The Bible is full of open disputation. In Galatians Peter and Paul have a technicolor public row. In the Acts various apostles fall out with each other and take their separate ways. In the gospels disciples vie with one another in front of all the others (or at any rate their mothers do) for hot spots in the Kingdom of Heaven.

All this is done without shame, or any particular feeling that it would have been very much better if the elite had stitched everything up behind closed doors. The only attempt to do this (the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15) was a brilliant day out, but its conclusions didn't last five minutes — soon enough Christians were eating non-kosher food anyway, and Peter and Paul arguing as forcibly as ever.

We all, of course, have deeply personal, random and inconsequential thoughts that don’t belong in public. Privacy is precious because it enables us to achieve intimacy and friendship with our friends and families, in a privileged environment where much can be taken for granted. Depth is sometimes only accessible to the solo scholar slogging away in the stacks. we all need space for meditation, solitude and desert experiences.

Also, it is only really possible for to allow particular friends into our full confidence with the security that comes from having invited them. A hot blazing eyeballs world of full exposure disallows this very important aspect of human friendship. So I am not against proper privacy.

However, I suspect we Home Counties Anglicans could allow ourselves a little bit more room for openness, especially about publicly significant issues. Here are some distinct advantages to public discussion, especially if it can be conducted by people who listen to each other with mutual respect and a longing to understand:

• Openness prevents people treating questions as settled before, in fact, they are. Premature closure breeds immaturity in a community, and privileges reductionism.
  
  
• As we discover with open source software, openness is the precondition of collaboration. When I am open I trust others with thoughts that matter to me, and, if they do the same with me, our relationship grows. Modelling a world where you can like and value people with whom you disagree witnesses to the possibility of a kingdom based on transformed relationships.
  
  
• Openness stops people taking hierarchy seriously in the wrong kind of way. In a public discussion peopl's last idea is as good as their last job, which pricks the bubble of hierarchy and gives opportunity to shine to the person with the best idea, which can then be acknowledged
  
  
• As Benedict points out in the rule, the youngest and most improbable person sometimes has the best idea — without being open to this the whole community is stunted.
  
  
• Being open forces me to try and be consistent. If I go round saying to one closed clique that I think the C of E is all washed up and morally bankrupt and to another that I think it’s a marvellous national mission with a big moral message for society, I suggest both cliques going out for a drink together to prick the bubble of hypocrisy and force me to say what I really think to both.
  
  
• being open forces theoretical thinkers to earth their wisdom in human reality, and test it in an open forum. It brings together people who are big on ideas and those big on pragmatism.
  
  
• Open discussion privileges the kinds of people who like to think out loud, indeed cannot develop ideas without sharpening them up in a group discussion. That means it disciminates against reflective learners, who need space to develop their thinking before they feel it worth brining into the light of day. That’s why you need some conventions, disciplines and routines; to protect thinking space, and prevent either kind of thinker from stealing the show.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit sometimes reveals his will, Quaker style, in a gathering of people, when a deep conviction emerges among them through processes of open debate. This communal activity transcends the arrogance of individual primacy, and expresses the corporate nature of authority in the Christian tradition.
  
  
• Public debate builds trust. Stitch ups breed cynicism.
  
  
• What is public belongs to the public. If a community knows not only what was decided but how it came to that conclusion, it can move on to the next decision with understanding, and own what has happened.
  
  
• Public life destroys the myths of perfection. People interacting publicly show their weaknesses and absurdities as well as their shining intellectual process, or lack of it. In a Hungarian public bath earlier this year, splashing around with the family and several hundred people of all sizes, ages, shapes and proclivities, I noticed how everybody is absurd, but everybody is also, in their own way beautiful.
  

The Goodman Philip and the Scoundrel Pullman?

Philip Pullman’s Godman Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is no crude atheist rant, but a perceptive and thoughtful storyteller’s retelling of the Gospels.

It rests on a single artful high concept — that Jesus, like Sherlock Holmes, had a smarter brother. Christ, for it is he, was a kind of shadow side to the authentic Jesus — ISTJ in contrast to the author’s hero Jesus, who is a lovable mop-haired ENFP.

This book is not, in any sense, history. It assumes quaint 19th century demythologising, like Rénan and Co — ‘When the crowd realised how wise Jesus was they all got out the sandwiches they’d forgotten they’d brought, and shared them’ = ‘the feeding of the 5,000.’ No it doesn’t. Therefore this book is historically, er, light as air, but a fascinating contemporary myth about Jesus, a genre that has been spun around him ever since those primitive gnostic infancy miracle stories right up to Kazantzakis Last Temptation.

You have to remember when watching the Life of Brian that actually there wasn’t a man called Brian born in the next stable. Therefore you have to remember this book is storytelling for its own sake, not history. Pullman draws a rigid distinction between history and truth — “Jesus” embodies one, and “Christ” the other, and never the twain shall meet.

The author is a vivid and thoughftul narrative artist, and his accounts of gospel parables, sometimes brought to life as incidents served up with a twist of lemon, deserve serious attention from anyone trying to write a mystery play for today. His lines are models of conciseness, clarity and power. Pullman’s way of framing the perennial “why did Judas do it?” question is especially suggestive. Occasionally he penetrates the heart of the teaching in a really direct way, as when Jesus says:

Marriage is a serious business. So is hell. And that’s where you’ll go if you think that as long as you avoid the big sins, you can get away with the little ones

I hope it won’t spoil the plot for readers to give away its second great twist, a creative touch that is implicit but unmistakeable — ISTJ “Christ” turns out, in fact, to be Judas. Judas/Jesus: what the hell’s the difference? Like Iran and Iraq. However, this Judas is no simple baddie, but a complicated, high-minded and conflicted pragmatist:

‘I love my brother. He has a great task, and I wish I could serve him better than I do. If I sound downcast, it’s perhaps because I’m conscious of the depth of my faiure to be like him.’
‘Do you want to be like him?’
‘More than anything. He does things out of passion, and I do them out of calculation. I can see further than he can; I can see the consequences of things he doesn’t think twice about. But he acts with the whole of himself at every moment, and I’m always holding something back out of caution, or prudence, or because I want to watch and record rather than participate.’
‘If you let go of your caution, you might get carried away by your passion as he is.’
‘No,’ said Christ. ‘There are some who live by every rule and cling tightly to their rectitude because they fear being swept away by a tempest of passion, and there are others who cling to the rules because they fear that there is no passion there at all, and that if they let go they would simply remain where they are, foolish and unmoved; and they could bear that least of all. Living a life of iron control lets them pretend to themselves that only by the mightiest effort of will can they hold great passions at bay. I am one of those. I know it, and I can do nothing about it.’
‘It’s something to know it at least.’

As s/he reads this book and reflects, any good Christian should ask, “Is it I, Lord?” Pullman’s great Bogeyman is his auld enemy — “the Magisterium,” understood as a body of power and control. For the Scoundrel Christ, such an organisation is a cultural necessity without which Jesus’ simple message would be dead in the water. Indeed one can capture the thought by a variant of Winston Churchill’s quip about democracy being an awful form of government, but the alternatives being even worse. ENFP Jesus, the good man, does see the need for something, though. In a garden soliloquy he says:

Lord, if I thought you were listening, I’d pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, and powerless, and modest. That it should weild no authority except that of love. That it should never cast anyone out. That it should own no property and make no laws. That it should not condemn but only forgive. That it should not be like a palace, with marble walls and polished floors, and guards standing at the door, but like a tree with its roots deep in the soil, that shelters every kind of bird and beast and gives blossom in the spring and shade in the hot sun and fruit in the season, and in time gives up its good sound wood to the carpenter, but that sheds many thousands of seeds so that new trees can grow in its place. Does the tree say to the sparrow “Get out, you don’t belong here?” Does the tree say to the hungry man, “That fruit is not for you?” Does the tree test the loyalty of the beasts before it allows them into the shade?’

Amen! This is, culturally, a rather “C of E” style of ecclesology; The Church is anything but perfect, but always in need of necessary reformation. This comes from its interaction with the society it serves, not some infallible magisterium. Its teaching is found to be authoritative insofar as it is authentic and recognizably transmits the story and values of Jesus as fully as possible. The Church is authentic insofar as it allows its every activity to be judged by the Carpenter of Nazareth. Infallibilism, along with other fundamentalisms, neutralizes this discipline to vanishing point, weakens accountability, and thus becomes compelling but dangerous fantasy — a mere playing at Church-by-numbers.

Such a church’s greatest weakness, its provisionality and porous boundaries, are, in fact its greatest strengths. It does not claim always to have been right, but the fact that it is as possible, after two thousand years of this process of transmission, to weed out the golden thread of good news from its accompanying circumstatial dross in such a way that sincere personal response is possible, says something for the activity of the Holy Spirit within it.

So there is much moving material for reflection in this book. Of course history and truth do in the end, relate to ach other. The fact is and was only ever, in fact, one Jesus. The power, richness and complexity of the gospel narrative is such that that pretty much all the dark materials for this book, the ISTJ and the ENFP, could both be quarried sincerely from the same New Testament.

A book with this provocative a title will annoy all sorts of people. Some good and faithful Christians will, like Peter in the garden, draw their weapons to defend the Master. I would bid them put up their swords and reflect: ‘How is your Texas Evangelical Hardball Jesus, “good news” to any but yourself? Specifically what good news does he offer infidels heretics and sinners? And if your Jesus fails to be good news at that point, however internally coherent and compelling your vision may be, it falls short.’

Theologically speaking, this book will especially irritate those whose Jesus is somehow more than fully human for various reasons — Nestorians, Sabellians, and Monophysites — to use geeky terms. It will also annoy Docetists, that is people who absolutize an ideal Christ at the expense of the historical Jesus. It will not appeal to Pelagians, for whom “faith” is actually the only work that matters. It must also mildly annoy historians because it is so shamelessly unhistorical, not only in its central conceit, but also in its willingness to sunder history radically from truth.

This is, however, a thoughtful storyteller’s second take on the gospel story he would have liked. “Going through the gospels carefully and filleting out the bits that work for me” is, indeed, a discipline that could make any discple more self-aware, as long as we don't kid ourselves that just because it we did the filleting, the result is somehow the whole truth.

All reprocessings of the Gospels stand in the same relation to the originals from which they are drawn as a hamburger to a Cow. You have to kill the original to be able to enjoy the derivatve. However this book is one of those high-class hamburgers you buy in sharp City eateries, not a Big Mac. I was glad to have read it.

John Fenton RIP: wonderful man...

Sad to reflect on the death of Canon John Fenton (Times obit). His gentle presence and sharp thinking sparkled, provoked, healed and stimulated on every level and with every kind of person. I only knew him near the end of his ministry, well after his short back and sides days, but remember vividly two occasions in the nineties on which he cheerfully turfed out from Oxford to the far end of the diocese to have lunch with an improbable bunch of bored and slightly stroppy vicars in our deanery chapter.

Wind him up and off he went. We splashed about and played in the text of Mark’s gospel which John knew backwards and inside out (to the level of word counts). John showed how Scripture as is, with all its order and disorder, compexity and subtlety, is far more engaging than attempts to stitch it up into a compendium of proof texts can ever make it. Paranoia drives people to pull out soundbites to buttress their ideas about God, neatly packaged out of the messy text. These are then used as the weapons of zealotry. John showed what you miss when you do that — the glory of the text itself.

Gregory of Nyssa said “Concepts create idols — Only wonder understands!” That’s what I learnt from John Fenton, and I feel poorer in a world without him, and look forward with more anticipation to the life of the world to come, in which we all get to splash and play in the fulness of God’s wisdom; the day on which we all step outside time, but I shall still, I think, have a few questions to ask John...