From Jesus to Church?

How did they get from the simple carpenter of Nazareth to the institutional Church, and why?

Over Easter various UK media have been preparing us breathlessly for the Archbishop of Canterbry to denounce the RC church as having lost all credibility in Ireland, indeed a 14 second soundbite implying this was carefully trailed by the BBC, and some of the ignorant and foolish fell for this advertising puff.

When Andrew Marr’s Start the Week symposium went out yesterday morning it became instantly obvious that one tiny soundbite had been culled for advertising purposes from a small section of a sentence in what was actually a highly intelligent discussion involving a fascinating cast of characters, masterfully chaired by Andrew Marr. In 45 minutes of radio, almost nothing was said about the RC Church and the travails of that particular denomination — I think I counted four sentences. The rest was a brilliant discussion of how a simple message becomes institutionalised, for good and evil — UK public radio, in fact, at its very best!

The notion that all institutionalisation is badis one core idea of Philip Pullman’s new book, and paticpants were Andrew Marr (Political commentator) Rowan Williams (Archbishop of Canterbury), Philip Pullman (novelist and atheist), Mona Siddiqui (Muslim and academic) and David Baddiel (comedian, who describes himself as “10/10 atheist”).

The debate, available for a week on iPlayer and, I believe as a podcast. I found this section fascinating — very much the money shot. It reflects ideas I remember sketching as a possible first chapter for a book twenty years ago, but being rather too busy in my day job of being an urban vicar for it to come to anything...

AM

In many ways Philip Pullman is novelizing or fictionalizing... the institution and the essence?

RW

I think one of the main themes to come out of Philip’s book is that very strong sense that the price you pay for transmitting a spiritual vision in institutional terms can be very high. And the question sometimes is not so much about the nature of the vision as about the price you want to pay for sustaining it. The argument of the book, if I read it rightly, is that Christianity has paid too high a price. I obviously think not, but..

PP
You’re absolutely right. That’s what I’m saying...

AM

Is it possible to have an effective transmitted religious life that doesn’t have large institutional structures around it?

RW
I think it’s quite hard to imagine because you look at movements which try quite systematically to avoid that, and fifty years down the line you see mysteriously that the surface is beginning to harden. You’re beginning to get institutional transmission. Look at even the history of the Society of Friends, which I suppose in the Christian spectrum is the most anti-institutional of all. It still swings inexorably towards that, because you need some way of recognizing from generation to generation that you’re taking about the same vision. What matters is not, to me, so much whether you have the institution or not as whether the institution has in it enough things to rein you in, to draw you back to where you started and give you a real ground for saying ‘wait a minute! That’s not it...’.

DB
It may be the case, though, that the urge to institutionalize is with all parts of human endeavor because even atheists have the Humanist Association... There are atheist schisms, there certainly are. People define themselves as agnostic or atheist or whatever. It might seem like the most individual choice, but there is a need to communicate whatever belief you have.

MS
There is a difference, however, between institutionalized expressions of religion which give context to religious expression and context to people and reference points, and then how sacred the people who are the leaders within that structure become, and I think we need to differentiate between that.

PP

The process seems to me always that there’s a great original visionary who says “a time is coming soon when heaven will be fulfilled and earth will be full of plenty and delight and wonder” and so on, and then it doesn’t happen, and it doesn’t happen and it goes on not happening and eventually the people who want to preserve this vision have to set up institutions to validate their own positions.

AM

but there also have to be rules, don’t there, because all religions have a vision of the good life and what is a good way of living and that requires rules, and therefore somebody to...

RW

That’s a vision that has a shape, and therefore you can’t say anything counts as a good life, but the temptation then is to push that more and more and more towards codes, where you can tick boxes, and.. present your score at the end, and that is one of the things that the Gospels do really try to undermine and, actually not just the gospels. I think that it’s a great fallacy to say that there’s a big difference between Jewish and Christian Scripture on this. Something of this is going on in a lot of what we call the Old Testament, as well.

PP

Bureaucracy always overcomes vision. It’s a tragedy, and it always will be a tragedy.

AM

But if you’ve got stories which have a strong moral or ethical content and people are forced to go back and reading the stories again and reinterpreting the stories, isn’t that part of the answer to the constant fossilization or hardening caused by the structures?

PP

Bureaucracy will always be undermined by stories, but int he end bureaucracy will always win. That’s why I think it’s a tragedy.

RW

In that sense you're saying a tragedy with no possible way out. the bureaucracy always wins. I think I’d say the stories are stronger than that. I hate saying that to a novelist! But I think stories are very very tough...

DB
But isn’t part of the point of Philip's book that the bureaucracy is set up, as it were, to inject another element into the original story. i.e. to preserve what Philip talked about as a greater truth that is nothing to do with history i.e. to take what might be a story of a man who just said some good things, and make it into a much much great more powerful thing. And that’s what the bureaucracy is set up to do.

RW

That seems to me a bit more intentional than the way a lot of these things work. What I see as I read the New Testament is a central event, the life of Jesus, the words of Jesus, the death of Jesus, and for me also the resurrection of Jesus, causing such an... explosion of ideas and puzzles that the language that already exists can’t cope with, that you have a very complicated period during which the language is settling down in new ways, and you then begin to see the emergence of what we’re calling a bureaucracy, an institutional structure to hold it all. But it’s not quite as though someone comes along and says, “That’s a really good idea here, I’ll market it for you...”


All I would add is that the authority of the Church does not lie in itself. There is a dangerous delusory tendency towards what Pullman calls the magisterium, and ultimately it can compromise and can even undermine the source of faith. The Church’s real authority is emergent, and lies in its capacity to transmit the story authentically.

The measure of its success is not that it swells into a mighty institutional empire, but that it is still possible, even after all the refractive and corrupting influence of the human beings who make up the transmission chain, to distinguish Jesus’ message from its original context, and to attempt to live it in another. The story continues to judge the medium through which it is transmitted. This is the key insight of the Reformation, and the essence a Reformed Catholic Church, to hold that the Church is always accountable to the Word and its original founder.

This programme struck me as a very much more interesting and significant dialogue between sincere atheists and Christians/ Muslims than stale idiotic sixth form knockabout...

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.