The Divine Universe

At the Council of Nicea in 325, it was decided to define God as three persons in one God. But we need to recognise that this formula does not objectively define what God is, that would be presumptuous; it describes how we experience God. It is a sophisticated example of making God in our own image.

We get the first Person of the Trinity because we are reflective and philosophical creatures – we wonder about the nature, purpose and meaning of the world. Reason suggests that there must be an ultimate source and essence of all being. Jesus called him “Father”.

Secondly, we experience God as physical, incarnate. Most people see this rather narrowly, focussing only on the man Jesus, but the first Christian theologians, Paul and John, saw Christ much more grandly. They both saw Christ as an eternal being, in and through whom all things exist. They saw God incarnate, embodied in the world around us, the whole universe. They believed in a universal, cosmic Christ, eternal and infinite.

Thirdly, we experience God in our imagination, in our emotions, our thoughts and our desires. In other words, we experience God psychologically. The Greek word psyche means mind, soul or spirit. God’s psyche is the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity.

So we experience God in three ways and we rationalise about God as threefold. We have a spiritual idea of God, a physical idea of God and an abstract, philosophical idea of God. And that reflects our human nature.

Jesus addressed God (the First Person of our Trinity) as Father. Jesus’ God, the Jewish God, was unnamed, unimaginable and incomprehensible, obscurely represented by four consonants, YHVH, deliberately left without vowels because it was not to be spoken. It can mean something like ‘I am’ or ‘the One who is’. It doesn’t tell us anything about God, in fact Judaism doesn’t really have a developed theology like Christianity. They simply refer to God as adoni, Lord in English.

What can we say about the Second Person? Jesus is an enigma. Scholars have spent their working lives trying to discover the man behind the Gospels, but he remains mysterious. There seems to be tremendous diversity in the way people see Jesus. Everyone has his or her own image.

About the cosmic Christ of Paul and John, however, we can say quite a lot because we are talking about the universe, our own environment, mental and material. And, beyond our own little personal world of people and places there is an infinitely mysterious outer space and extended time. Astronomical observation of the wider universe is limited, and we have no idea how far it extends beyond any possibility of seeing. The latest cosmological theories propose that the universe is cyclic and infinite, having no absolute beginning or end and no spatial boundary. This makes good sense if, like Paul and John, we regard the universe as the embodiment of the infinite, eternal cosmic Christ.

The Psalmist and other poets, philosophers, theologians and, more recently, scientists have declared that studying nature is one way of studying God. From microbiology to cosmology, in living organisms, and even in inert things like stars and galaxies, scientists can study God’s way of life. One of the things that strikes me is God’s total and unconditional self-giving in physical nature. No matter how much we abuse our environment, even to our own destruction, God withholds nothing. The universe gives itself to us as Jesus gave himself to his friends at the last supper, and to his enemies on Calvary.

We can also say quite a bit about the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. We feel the presence of God inwardly. Faith, hope and love are mental and emotional experiences. Since the nineteenth century, our psyche or spirit has also been the object of scientific study. Psychology and psychiatry are now respected branches of science. Philosophers have pondered about our feelings and thoughts for thousands of years; they were psychologists too, and the mind is the native environment of the Holy Spirit .

Most people think of mind as a peculiar property of humans and, perhaps, the higher animals. Many believe that the Holy Spirit is confined to humans or even to baptised Christians if you’re really narrow-minded. Many philosophers and scientists, and theologians too, think otherwise. They see the Holy Spirit as the active energy of the universe and cosmic evolution, guiding and forming the universe in growing complexity, beauty and perfection.

Early last century the famous English philosopher and scientist, Alfred North Whitehead argued from a scientific perspective that mind is an innate element in the whole universe. He said that mental energy controlled even the most fundamental activity in the subatomic world. This idea has gained wide acceptance. The latest book on the subject, Science and Soul, is by a senior Australian scientist, Charles Birch. But it is not only philosophers and scientists, theologians too say that the Holy Spirit acts through the whole universe.

The Holy Spirit is also seen as the source of life. Contemporary philosophers and scientists believe life, like mind, is also a cosmic quality, not only manifest in living organisms – plants animals etc. – but, as I suggested earlier, manifest in so-called inert things like stars and galaxies. That may need some explanation. Scientists identify life with certain phenomena: reproduction, growth, evolution and metabolism. (Metabolism is the process of absorbing sustenance from the environment – animals digesting food, plants absorbing sunlight and carbon dioxide for example.) Stars and galaxies do all those things, going through a life cycle of growth and decay, reproducing, feeding on the gas and dust around them and evolving. So the Holy Spirit breathes life into the whole universe, not just plants and animals.

The Holy Spirit is also the source of knowledge and wisdom. Human knowledge of the universe has increased amazingly in the last two hundred years and continues to do so. But even in the unthinking universe there has been a continuous increase in ‘information’. That is the physicist’s way of saying that the universe increases in complexity over time. Some theologians hold that the universe is in the process of becoming more perfectly expressive of the Father’s mind. It is “learning obedience through the things it suffers” as Paul said Jesus did.

In conclusion then: the doctrine of the Trinity is not just for experts in systematic theology; it’s for all of us. With the Trinity formula we can gain new insight into the awesome and incomprehensible mystery of God. 

In 1945 an Arab peasant discovered some big earthenware jars hidden in a cave. They contained thirteen ancient Coptic codices (the first books). Scholars soon identified them as the writings of Christians called ‘Gnostics’, from gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge. The Gnostics’ knowledge was not facts and figures but a form of knowing through mystical experience and intuition.

In the first and second centuries, Irenaeus, Tertulius, Origen and other leaders of the northern Mediterranean Church fiercely opposed these ‘divergent’ Christians, mostly from Egypt and, before about 1970, it was only through their vitriolic writings that scholars knew about Gnosticism. Studying these codices, however, scholars have come to revise their understanding of Gnosticism and indeed of early Christianity.

The theology of our Catholic and Protestant Christianity was basically fixed at the Council of Nicea in 325 CE, largely through the initiative of the newly converted Emperor Constantine. The Nicene chuirch leaders decided by a substantial majority, that Jesus was God. Gnostic Christians did not take so extreme a position. So, by Constantine’s edict, it became a criminal offence to possess any Gnostic literature, and everything they could find was destroyed (but they  missed the manuscripts hidden at Nag Hammadi). So Christendom became divided between those who were part of the Imperial establishment and those who were persecuted by it.

Gnostic writings contain some extravagantly fanciful cosmological and mythical notions, but there is more to them than that. They seem more ‘Eastern’ than Western; more like Hinduism and Buddhism. For example, they emphasise the femininity as well as the masculinity of God, and also the presence of God in physical nature, especially within us. They have much in common with Celtic Christianity, which was also suppressed after Augustine went to England in 597 CE, to establish Roman Christianity there.

Whether we like to admit it or not, both Catholic and Protestant churches originate in and are basically modelled on the religion, polity and structure of imperial Rome: authoritarian, dogmatic, supernaturalist and with an elaborate, mostly male dominated hierarchy. However, what we might call ‘Constantinian Christianity’ has the advantage of being relatively free of extravagant myth and fantasy, and it is, for the most part, rational and coherent.

Western Christianity has adapted to Western culture as a whole, but many people are beginning to realise that we become aridly and even fatally materialistic and, on the other hand, our religion has become too supernaturalistic: focussed on a God who is wholly other, out there in a distant heaven, doing magical things in the sacraments and, for his favourites, by supernatural intervention. However, there has recently been a growing interest in the more nature-centred Celtic Christianity, and also in Eastern religion and philosophy. This has provided a more sympathetic environment for studying the Gnostic writings. Ordinary Christians, including clergy, now read with interest such writings as The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Philip and The Gospel of Truth.

There are significant changes in the secular world too. Very important has been the scientific discoveries of the last hundred years, particularly in physics, cosmology and mathematics. Our understanding of matter has been revolutionised through quantum theory. What we once thought to be a collection of little round things whizzing about now turns out to be a complex dance of energy without anything recognisably substantial at all. It blurs the distinction between the material and non-material or spiritual. Our understanding of space and time has also been radically changed. Instead of a rigid sort of three-dimensional box, grid-like concept of space, and a linear time with a universal ‘now’ flowing from past to future, Einstein has given us a four-dimensional space-time continuum in which space-time is plastic, moulded by matter and energy, and there is no universal ‘now’.

Changed thinking among some theologians and virtually all scientists has coincided with a new rapport between the two. Professor Robert Russell, who occupies chairs in both physics and theology at U.C.L.A, is researching the notion of the bodily resurrection of Jesus as an evolutionary breakthrough, manifesting new laws of nature in the same way that the emergence of living organisms manifested new laws of nature four billion years ago, and the emergence of mind in material brains about 600 million years ago.

It can be argued that life is an essential property of the whole universe from the beginning and that it became materially embodied when the universe reached a certain level of physical complexity. Russell’s theory suggests that life became embodied in a new, immortal form 2000 years ago, beginning with Jesus, and that this is a landmark in cosmic evolution. For 2000 years (a mere tick of the clock in cosmic terms) the universe has been significantly different and more complex. Jesus’ resurrection blurs the absolute distinction between life and death.

In theology, old and forgotten insights are being rediscovered. As early as 1926, Earnest Holmes declared that God is all there is in the universe and that ‘God is not … a person (a discrete entity), but a Universal Presence. Ecological theologian, Sallie McFague, in her 1996 book Body of God, argues, like Paul (Col.1:15-17) and John (1:1-14), that God is incarnate in the whole universe.

Contemporary with Holmes, philosopher and mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead, said that mind is also an essential property of the whole universe from the beginning, even in the smallest particles of matter. Australian physicist, Charles Birch, explains this theory in easier language than Whitehead’s in a new book, Science and Soul, published last year.

To some, all this will seem as fantastic as parts of the Gnostic writings did to their more rationalistic contemporaries. But these are not really new ideas (see my references to Paul and John above). We’ve become so settled with the idea that the incarnation was simply God coming down from heaven in human form for a brief period that the idea of the Cosmic Christ in the New Testament has been ignored. We’ve also become so brainwashed into believing that God is exclusively male that the idea of God’s femininity seems weird to us.

I said above that Gnosticism rested upon mystical experience rather than rational argument or historical evidence. Mystics have never been popular with the Church authorities and they have frequently been accused of heresy. They are introspective and individualistic and are difficult to discipline. There are mystics in every generation; ours is no exception, and some of them are Christian, contributing to what we might call a ‘new age’ Christianity. The mystically inclined authors of the Nag Hammadi codices are contributing significantly to changes in Western Christian thinking.

There have probably been faith healers and exorcists around for thousands of years, and we still have them today. The gospel writers all tried to show that Jesus was the greatest one of all. This was a large part of their argument that he was the Son of God, the Messiah. In fact, the miracles are a significant factor in convincing most Christians of this.

Leaving aside the question of Jesus’ Messiahship for the moment, let’s think a bit about spiritual healing in general because I think a lot of people are curious about that. Some are sympathetic to the idea while others are sceptical, even hostile.

Health has a psychic (psychological or spiritual) as well as a physical dimension and so we may distinguish between medical healing and spiritual healing, although I don’t think they are really separate. Medical healing is based on patiently acquired knowledge of the human body and living organisms in general. This is what medical science is about, and it is advancing at an amazing speed today. The psychic dimension of human nature has also been studied scientifically for more than a century: since the days of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Psychology is a recognised academic discipline now and psychiatry a respected branch of medicine.

Most people agree that physical health and mental health are closely related. We talk about people fighting cancer or some other chronic or terminal illness. Patients themselves have a very important part in their healing. Physicians have marvellous new techniques for treating disease, but their success depends to a great extent on the mental attitude and faith of the patient.

Just as a spirit of optimism and faith can aid healing, so unfaith can work against it. Symptoms of unfaith are anxiety, fear, anger and depression. These can cause all kinds of physical disorders: high blood pressure and stomach ulcers for example. Most of us need to ask God for more faith than we have; with faith we can challenge our anxieties, our anger, our depression.

Sometimes a recovery happens that is so unexpected that we call it a miracle. The word miracle really only means something that causes wonderment, but we more often mean that we think there has been a direct intervention by God. However, Jesus made the point several times that the cure of those he healed was due to their faith. A patient’s faith in their healer, medical or spiritual, is a very important factor in healing.

Healing is not always physical healing. Sometimes there is no medical cure. Healing can sometimes come through acceptance. We know we have to die sometime. Lazarus died again later, and even Jesus had to die. Christian faith holds that death is not a disaster but a consummation. The knowledge that it may be drawing near may initially generate fear, denial, even anger, but, if one can see death the right way, we can become serene and happy – and that is the ultimate healing. That is, ultimately, what Jesus offers.

People with a reputation as healers have a sort of charisma, an ability to inspire faith in others. Jesus was supremely such a person, particularly when it was people in need of some kind. He wasn’t so good at inspiring faith in complacent and comfortable people. An amazing thing is that this charisma still attaches even to his name. The name of Christ still has healing power.

But I would like to make an important point. Jesus was not a superman with magical powers that we don’t have. Some people think of Jesus in those terms, but that would deny that he was really a human being. There is no separation between Jesus and us. He was not 50% human and 50% divine.

In the first four centuries after Jesus ascended there was vigorous and sometimes bitter debate about this.  In AD 325, the Emperor Constantine called the leading Christian disputants to a council in Nicea. They were all gentiles, of course, versed in Greek philosophy and mythology. One party, led by Athanasius, claimed Jesus was God. In the end his party one the day by vote and we recite their declaration every time we say the Creed. We moved on from Jesus of Nazareth to Jesus of Nicea.

The healing miracles no doubt contributed to that momentous decision. We must, however, beware of the temptation to keep Jesus at a safe distance by admitting doubts about his true humanity. When people find Jesus’ example too challenging they sometimes say, “Ah, yes, but he was God.” And that’s a cop-out as well as being false theology.

Jesus didn’t only teach us about God; he taught us about ourselves as well: he demonstrated our own potential. As he said to his disciples: “Greater things than these shall you do.” And we read of the disciples performing healing miracles in the Book of Acts.

The fact that we find ourselves quite unable to reach that potential here and now should not discourage us. God is in the process of making us what we truly are; we’re not finished yet. People often came to Jesus in despair. They’d tried everything. Their faith must have sometimes been no more than a last desperate hope rather than a certainty. But Jesus believed in their essential wellness; his own perfect faith filled the gap I guess.

Although we can’t perform healing miracles, we all have some measure of faith in something, including ourselves. Jesus challenged people to have complete faith, not only in God or in him but in themselves as well.

To demand that something unexpected shall happen, such as a healing that would defy expert medical opinion, is a bold thing to do. Most of us would be afraid to look a fool. Essential to our own faith is believing that our wishes coincide with God’s will; and that’s hard to be sure about. The best we can do is to lay the situation before God in faith and hope. That’s not a cop-out; it’s the only proper attitude. This can greatly fortify the patient’s faith; and that contributes significantly to healing.

All that is not to belittle the marvellous power of medical technology, but my purpose here is to draw attention to the continuing place of faith healing, such as was evidently so powerfully revealed by Jesus, and so dramatically described by the gospel writers. Jesus was not a superman with magical powers, essentially different from us. We are part of the Christ event; we are all sons (and daughters) of God (1 John 3:2).

In the late nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche declared that God was dead. He then argued that, because our morality is based upon belief in God we have no valid reason to be moral. He waxed lyrical about the blessed state of those superior persons who are freed entirely from religion and morality. In Nietzsche’s time Western society knew little of any religion other than Christianity and he directed his attack specifically towards what he understood as the Christian God.

In fact, Western morality is not based entirely on religious belief. For most people it owes a great deal to the pragmatic moral philosophy of the ancient Greeks. To be happy one must live sensibly, nobly and justly[1]. This represents a widely held ‘commonsense’ morality.

But, in any case, was Nietzsche’s God, in fact, the Christian God, the Holy Trinity? He complains that our God is too Jewish. He sees YHWH, the God of Jesus Christ, as primarily judge of humankind and argues that one cannot love a judge, even a merciful one. He complains also that he only loves people on condition that they believe in him, and makes threats of eternal punishment against those who do not.

One must admit that Nietzsche’s god  - an ‘up there’, judgemental and punitive tribal potentate in an extra-terrestrial kingdom – does lurk in the pages of the Bible, but he only peeps out here and there. There are far more references to God’s infinite mercy and kindness and his uncompromising compassion and justice. The Christian God is not so much our judge but rather our source (Father) and our saviour. There are serious consequences for sin, but they come from our injured relationship with one another and with nature, not, I believe, from divine wrath. And the allegorical story of Job challenges directly the notion that suffering is necessarily the consequence of sin.

Nietzsche’s god is too anthropomorphic. The Jewish God, YHWH, is a mystery, not even to be named. All images, anthropomorphic or otherwise, are absolutely forbidden. The post-Nicene Christian God, the Holy Trinity, owing as much to Aristotle as to Moses, is even more intellectually challenging than YHWH, but the Trinity is certainly not an extra-terrestrial personage. He is not even an entity among other entities; he is the ultimate source and essence of all being. As Meister Eckhart put it: “God is everything, but everything is not God.” The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Nietzsche’s thinking was confined within the materialistic science and philosophy of his day. He insisted that the universe is nothing but a chaotic and meaningless collection of material objects. Nothing could be less like the universe as understood by twenty-first century physicists and cosmologists. They see the universe as a single living organism in which order, diversity and complexity have been increasing, and metabolic processes of renewal, change and growth have been happening from the beginning. Earth’s biosphere, and that of any other planets, is a product of natural cosmic processes. We are a product of our living universe. Philosophers of science also argue that, if life materialises in any part of the universe, then it is a property that belongs to the universe as a whole.

In the nineteenth century, matter was understood to be what could be perceived by the senses, and consisted of small, indivisible objects called atoms. A physicist today sees matter very differently: as essentially an intricate dance of infinitesimal energy particles that are, confusingly, also waves, depending on what you look for. Einstein proved in 1905 that matter is essentially energy.

A number of philosophers of science also see the universe as having mind[2]. We experience mind through our own particular physiological makeup, but ‘pansubjectivists’, as they are called, hold that this is a particular manifestation of something that is innate in the cosmos as a whole. Mathematical physicist, Brian Swimme, even goes so far as to say that we should see the universe as a spiritual event rather than a material object.

The twentieth century also saw some significant developments in both popular and academic theology. In the 1960’s, Bishop John Robinson led a forceful attack on the anthropomorphic, ‘up there’ god, still popular among both laity and clergy[3]. In spite of opposition from many clerics and bishops, he made a significant impact on many thoughtful lay people and even some clergy. 

In Nietzsche’s time, theologians and scientists were openly at war. This is no longer so and some theologians have developed their thinking about the nature of the physical world and its place within Trinitarian theology. Paul and John[4] saw Christ, the Word, as a cosmic being, in and through whom the whole universe subsists. Theologians today frequently speak of the Cosmic Christ, and Professor Sallie McFague[5] has developed an ecological theology based on the belief that God’s incarnation (embodiment) is in the whole universe, the totality of physical nature.

I doubt if Nietzsche’s arguments carry as much weight today as they might have done in the late nineteenth century. Not that I think the public is any more religious than it was then, probably less so in the strict sense. But the intellectual environment has changed, most radically in science but to some extent in theology as well. Materialism is losing ground. There are signs that, in spite of their indifference to the Church, people are looking for a spiritual interpretation of life. A significant number are turning their attention to Eastern traditions, Hindu and Buddhist particularly.

There is no sign that ‘modern man’ is going to follow Nietzsche’s advice to abandon morality. The consequences of risky, selfish and unjust behaviour are being acutely felt in today’s global state of war and financial crisis. The immorality inherent in the individualism, espoused and politically promoted by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980’s and neo-conservatives since, has caused social disintegration and financial chaos. Barak Obama and Kevin Rudd both won their spectacular public support through proposing a more compassionate and just society. And, in a world at war, people are beginning to look for the justice without which peace is impossible.

Nietzsche and his social class lived in a time of complacent security and stability. His philosophy has a deliberately provocative, almost playful quality about it. Such thought-games are no longer popular. Today even the middle classes are feeling deeply insecure. People are searching for certainties. Spiritual interpretations of life and a longing for transcendent values and a sound ethical system are becoming increasingly evident.

Jesus told a parable (Matthew 25:14-30) about a man who planned a long trip away from his business and made arrangements to look after his liquid assets. Let’s try it in modern dress. These assests totalled $800,000. He gave his general manager $500,000 to look after, his assistant manager $200,000 and his chief accountant $100,000.

After many months away the man came back and asked his staff members how they had got on. The general manager had made a hundred percent profit on the money he was given; the assistant manager had done the same, but the chief accountant had kept his $100,000 in the office safe. He was afraid to take any chances with it, even in a bank (which would not surprise us these days).

The proprietor eventually returned and was delighted with the work of his two managers and promoted them both. However, he was understandably angry and disappointed with the chief accountant and gave him the sack. In fact he had him thrown out of the building.

Jesus didn’t tell these stories simply to entertain his listeners. He was trying to challenge them, to get them to think. The two managers inspire us to be smart and industrious. They were achievers. Principally, they were good at making money. That’s all very well, of course but, frankly, if all we know about them is that they were good at making money, I find those two rather boring. It is the third guy, the chief accountant who grabs my interest. He was a timid man, afraid to take risks, and that was his downfall, but bean counters tend to be like that. Maybe, like St Paul, he had even discovered that love of money (philargura) is the root of all kinds of evil.

This is not a literal story, however, it is a parable. Everything is symbolic. In Matthew’s version (probably much closer to Jesus’ original than mine), the money is in huge currency items called talents. In interpreting this parable, people have traditionally understood ‘talents’ to mean God-given gifts and abilities, not sums of money.

We can all think of individuals who God appears to have given lots of talents to; they are famous. Some of them have made the world a better place by the use of their talents. Others have been winners at the expense of losers. Not all achievements, however spectacular, glorify God.

Most people are not great achievers, important people in the public eye. Jesus was, both in his lifetime and posthumously. He was a genius, and he made the fullest use of his talents as a healer and exorcist and, it seems, more than that. His instinctive understanding of human nature, of all of nature in fact, was extraordinary – unique. Although we are assured that each of us is loved equally by God, there are big inequalities between individuals. Jesus was not only supremely gifted; he was a uniquely perfect human being. But he achieved that perfection, St Paul says, through the things he endured. It didn’t come easy.

With this parable, I think that Jesus intended his listeners to be interested in the third man. He should face us with a challenging question: Am I that timid and lazy man? 

If I rise to Jesus’ bait, another question arises: What is that talent? It’s an intriguing question. It has to be something fairly universal or the story would only have a narrow application.

John gives us a clue when he tells us that God is simply and essentially love (1 John 3:8) The source and essence of our very being is love. The medium in which we live is love. It is so completely enveloping and permeating that we cannot objectively define it.

Although it permeates us, we are not fully absorbed by love. It can seem dangerous. It can make us nervous. We resist, often confused. We flounder clumsily about, gingerly trying to get a handle on it. Love can get us into all kinds of trouble. Sometimes it attracts hate: look what it did to Jesus. So we are tempted to bury our capacity to love and be loved under a load of mundane activity, worries and cares, and, of course, possessions.

Love need not be buried by busyness The Book of Proverbs tells of a woman who was full of good works (Prov. 31:10-31). Her busyness was her way of loving. But love includes more than simply serving others. It includes passion. I’m sure the woman’s love of her family and compassion for those in need included powerful emotions. Emotions can be dangerous, so we need also to be wise.

A word about wisdom. Wisdom is not, I think, a natural talent, like intelligence. It isn’t something you’re born with. People acquire wisdom through a sustained, attentive and positive attitude to life. Wisdom is, in fact, a by-product of loving. Wisdom and intelligence are not the same. Intelligence is to do with structures in the brain that produce a good memory and the ability to think fast. Wisdom doesn’t depend on something called our IQ; it depends on a deep and passionate interest in life, in people. Getting wisdom needs patience; it takes time, a willingness to learn rather than teach, to sympathise and respond rather than to analyse and judge.

Wisdom is a precious thing, but of all the gifts, as Paul said, the greatest of all is love. And love is a universal gift: it is the creative energy and the motivation of cosmic creation. We can’t define it, but we know it when we find it. We can ask: “Is that a loving thing to think, to say, to do?” Instinctively we know the answer.

We need to exploit our capacity for love. I don’t think that we bury it completely, but we tend to put it on the shelf or in a glass case or in the ‘too hard’ basket. Like the successful servants in Jesus’ parable, we need to be proactive and be willing to take risks.

The Torah gives us the Ten Commandments and the commands to love God and our neighbour. Jesus said, “A new commandment I give you: that you love one another as I have loved you.” It was new because he now referred to himself – a person rather than a book of rules. If you want to know what human love is, the perfect example is Jesus, and Jesus is not just a character in a book; he is a living person whom we meet every day.

BUSINESS IS BUSINESS

Jesus told a parable (Matthew 25:14-30) about a man who planned a long trip away from his business and made arrangements to look after his liquid assets. Let’s try it in modern dress. These assests totalled $800,000. He gave his general manager $500,000 to look after, his assistant manager $200,000 and his chief accountant $100,000.

After many months away the man came back and asked his staff members how they had got on. The general manager had made a hundred percent profit on the money he was given; the assistant manager had done the same, but the chief accountant had kept his $100,000 in the office safe. He was afraid to take any chances with it, even in a bank (which would not surprise us these days).

The proprietor eventually returned and was delighted with the work of his two managers and promoted them both. However, he was understandably angry and disappointed with the chief accountant and gave him the sack. In fact he had him thrown out of the building.

Jesus didn’t tell these stories simply to entertain his listeners. He was trying to challenge them, to get them to think. The two managers inspire us to be smart and industrious. They were achievers. Principally, they were good at making money. That’s all very well, of course but, frankly, if all we know about them is that they were good at making money, I find those two rather boring. It is the third guy, the chief accountant who grabs my interest. He was a timid man, afraid to take risks, and that was his downfall, but bean counters tend to be like that. Maybe, like St Paul, he had even discovered that love of money (philargura) is the root of all kinds of evil.

This is not a literal story, however, it is a parable. Everything is symbolic. In Matthew’s version (probably much closer to Jesus’ original than mine), the money is in huge currency items called talents. In interpreting this parable, people have traditionally understood ‘talents’ to mean God-given gifts and abilities, not sums of money.

We can all think of individuals who God appears to have given lots of talents to; they are famous. Some of them have made the world a better place by the use of their talents. Others have been winners at the expense of losers. Not all achievements, however spectacular, glorify God.

Most people are not great achievers, important people in the public eye. Jesus was, both in his lifetime and posthumously. He was a genius, and he made the fullest use of his talents as a healer and exorcist and, it seems, more than that. His instinctive understanding of human nature, of all of nature in fact, was extraordinary – unique. Although we are assured that each of us is loved equally by God, there are big inequalities between individuals. Jesus was not only supremely gifted; he was a uniquely perfect human being. But he achieved that perfection, St Paul says, through the things he endured. It didn’t come easy.

With this parable, I think that Jesus intended his listeners to be interested in the third man. He should face us with a challenging question: Am I that timid and lazy man? 

If I rise to Jesus’ bait, another question arises: What is that talent? It’s an intriguing question. It has to be something fairly universal or the story would only have a narrow application.

John gives us a clue when he tells us that God is simply and essentially love (1 John 3:8) The source and essence of our very being is love. The medium in which we live is love. It is so completely enveloping and permeating that we cannot objectively define it.

Although it permeates us, we are not fully absorbed by love. It can seem dangerous. It can make us nervous. We resist, often confused. We flounder clumsily about, gingerly trying to get a handle on it. Love can get us into all kinds of trouble. Sometimes it attracts hate: look what it did to Jesus. So we are tempted to bury our capacity to love and be loved under a load of mundane activity, worries and cares, and, of course, possessions.

Love need not be buried by busyness The Book of Proverbs tells of a woman who was full of good works (Prov. 31:10-31). Her busyness was her way of loving. But love includes more than simply serving others. It includes passion. I’m sure the woman’s love of her family and compassion for those in need included powerful emotions. Emotions can be dangerous, so we need also to be wise.

A word about wisdom. Wisdom is not, I think, a natural talent, like intelligence. It isn’t something you’re born with. People acquire wisdom through a sustained, attentive and positive attitude to life. Wisdom is, in fact, a by-product of loving. Wisdom and intelligence are not the same. Intelligence is to do with structures in the brain that produce a good memory and the ability to think fast. Wisdom doesn’t depend on something called our IQ; it depends on a deep and passionate interest in life, in people. Getting wisdom needs patience; it takes time, a willingness to learn rather than teach, to sympathise and respond rather than to analyse and judge.

Wisdom is a precious thing, but of all the gifts, as Paul said, the greatest of all is love. And love is a universal gift: it is the creative energy and the motivation of cosmic creation. We can’t define it, but we know it when we find it. We can ask: “Is that a loving thing to think, to say, to do?” Instinctively we know the answer.

We need to exploit our capacity for love. I don’t think that we bury it completely, but we tend to put it on the shelf or in a glass case or in the ‘too hard’ basket. Like the successful servants in Jesus’ parable, we need to be proactive and be willing to take risks.

The Torah gives us the Ten Commandments and the commands to love God and our neighbour. Jesus said, “A new commandment I give you: that you love one another as I have loved you.” It was new because he now referred to himself – a person rather than a book of rules. If you want to know what human love is, the perfect example is Jesus, and Jesus is not just a character in a book; he is a living person whom we meet every day.

 Where do Christian moral standards come from? We have the Ten Commandments and something that Jesus said was a more fundamental and all-embracing law: to love your neighbour as yourself. I don’t think anyone would quibble about the Ten Commandments. But the rest of the Jewish law books, the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, they are heavy going. There are hundreds of rules and regulations. But let’s be clear: for Jews, unlike Christian fundamentalists, they are a living text. The meaning is not fixed. The Torah is constantly being interpreted by Jewish scholars in the context of contemporary living.

A special church obsession at present is sexual orientation. The seventh commandment in the Deuteronomy version of the Ten Commandments (5:6-21) says we must not commit adultery, which presumably includes fornication; and sodomy is a form of fornication. For modern Jews, however, homosexual orientation seems to be a grey area. The famous London Rabbi, Lionel Blue, freely admits he is gay, and it doesn’t seem to dent his reputation as a wise and articulate ambassador for Judaism. Of course, as always in the Jewish community, there is rich diversity of opinion.

I wish we were focussed on more important things than this issue, but it has been made so central recently. So how do we Christians shape our moral judgments about sexual orientation? Is there a standard Christian set of rules? In spite of the fundamentalists, I think the answer is ‘no’. The Anglican Church authorities have agreed on a moratorium on gay weddings and said that the consecration of an openly gay bishop was insensitive and divisive, but there is no consensus regarding sexual orientation in itself. The Archbishop of Canterbury personally takes a liberal view, but hard-line fundamentalists insist that homosexuality is an abomination to the LORD and the Archbishop loyally supports the bishop’s majority opinion about gay weddings.

Jesus said something about judging other people that he says three times altogether. He said it to Peter after he had declared his belief that Jesus was the Son of God: “I will give you the keys of heaven: what you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and what you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”  (Mt. 16:19) Then, again in Matthew’s Gospel (18:19), he said the same thing to the disciples as a group. Finally, he said similar words to some disciples when he bestowed on them the Holy Spirit on the evening of his resurrection: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of anyone they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of anyone, they are retained.” (John 20:22-23)

This was revolutionary. No longer were people to be bound by a book of rules and have to offer expensive sin offerings from which the priests and moneychangers made a comfortable profit. People were to depend upon the Holy Spirit on a case-by-case basis. What a responsibility! No book of immutable rules but dependence, to some extent at least, on fallible human feelings and human reason.

I began by referring to the present obsession in church circles with sexual orientation. If you really feel the need to form a judgment about that, the guiding example should come from Jesus. Jesus never referred to homosexuals and, maybe, that is in itself an example for us. Twentieth century studies showed that sexual orientation varies a lot between individuals (homosexuals being about 7% of the population) and that was unlikely to be much different in Jesus’ time. In the New Testament homosexuality is only mentioned by Paul and that was in relation to the appalling promiscuity of the Roman upper classes

With homosexuality, we are not dealing with a matter of conscientious choice; we are dealing with a deep-seated and involuntary psychological condition, and with people who are trying to make the best of the cards they have been dealt. They may make good decisions or bad decisions, but we should not be over-hasty in judging what is a good or bad decision for someone else. For most of us no judgment on the matter is necessary: another person’s sexuality is none of our business; it is the way people live and the way they love and serve the community that matters.

There are much more important issues to address. What should we be doing about Muslim terrorists? Al Qaeda and the Taliban sincerely believe that Western society is decadent and immoral and that we are spoiling the world, physically and morally. Can we say that there is not a trace of justification for that? I’m not sure we can. All orthodox Moslems believe that Islam offers a better basis for world government than Christianity. That is a valid opinion but not if it means the punitive, violent and sexist kind of religion that is enforced by the Taliban. Moderate Islam, as it is more generally understood, is another matter; I can happily live alongside that. However, we are entitled to defend ourselves against violent fundamentalists. The consensus of ‘Christian’ nations is that the radical pacifism of Jesus is not really an option.

What about the environment? Surely there are moral issues there. Is our materialistic, money-obsessed, indulgent, lazy, ignorant, careless, individualistic and selfish society spoiling the world physically? The evidence is very strong indeed that we are doing a lot of harm, and public opinion is coming round to this view. More people are beginning to take their responsibilities seriously and do what little bit they can as individuals to lessen the damage we are doing. Even governments and big businesses are moving in response to the prophetic voice of science and the pressure of popular opinion. A picture of right and wrong in this area is rapidly taking shape, and I believe the Holy Spirit is behind this.

And what about birth control, abortion, genetic engineering, euthanasia, drug addiction, global poverty? New moral issues are emerging.

Jesus’ revolutionary shift of attention from scriptural statutes to a contextual morality of the conscience, both individual and social, applies not only to Christians; it applies to everyone, religious or not. Public attitudes determine the way the world is moving – towards perfection or perdition, and our secular legal system is not adequate as it stands. The law needs to be constantly reviewed, debated and improved. Ancient and venerated scriptures are not sufficient either unless they are sensibly interpreted for the times.

You might like to:

Ask the Holy Spirit to grant you greater wisdom in making judgments about some of the most pressing contemporary issues today.

There’s a story in Matthew’s Gospel (15:21-28) that raises the question. Jesus and some disciples were hiking through the region of Tyre and Sidon. It was a cosmopolitan region – people from all over the Eastern Mediterranean. On their way a Canaanite woman accosted Jesus, pleading with him to heal her mentally disturbed daughter. The disciples were embarrassed and they urged Jesus to get rid of her. Jesus seems to have felt the same way. “I am only sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he said, and added, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” It was not only racist; it was rather offensive. Was the woman to be regarded as a lower form of animal life because she was not Jewish? However, the woman was too concerned about her daughter to take offence. Picking up Jesus’ own metaphor she replied, “Yes Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

A change of heart 

That brought Jesus up short. He stopped walking, I think, and I imagine him turning and looking at the woman with surprise and dawning respect. “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And, Matthew says, her daughter was instantly healed.

What was really happening?

I would hate to think that Jesus was only making a single exception for this individual. I would like to think that he was beginning to realise that he was not only to be the saviour of Israel but the saviour of the whole world. Later he says, in John’s Gospel, “I, if I be lifted up, with draw all people to me.” (12:32)

This is not the only indication that Jesus’ understanding of his identity and vocation grew on him in stages. The most striking occasion occurred when he was baptised by John. Mark tells us that a voice from heaven said: “You are my Son, the Beloved, in you I am well pleased.” (1:11) (Son of God was a title for Messiah.)

Mark goes on to say that “the Spirit immediately drove Jesus out into the wilderness.” (1:12) It is as though he was quite shocked and was rushing off to be alone where he could think through the implications of this startling experience. He had known for a long time, from childhood probably (Luke 2:49) that he had an important vocation from God, and John had realised that too, but the voice from heaven was quite specific: Jesus was the Son of God, Messiah. While Jesus was in the desert he was tempted by several very bad ideas about how to go about being Messiah (Matt. 4:1-11). There was some serious thinking through to be done. It sounds like a learning experience, but also indicates a thorough knowledge of the Torah.

It also seems likely that his destiny to go to Jerusalem, where murderous enemies would hound him down and have him killed, became clear only on Horeb, the mount of transfiguration (Matt 17:1-8). The evidence of such a fate was to be found in the Law and the prophets if you knew where to look (this is indicated by the appearance of Moses and Elijah) but it would be natural if Jesus had, up to then, been reluctant to grasp the significance of such gloomy prophecies as Isaiah’s suffering servant (Is.53) and the evidence of Israel’s history of persecuting the prophets. Also, the Law contained a catch 22: to claim to be Messiah was blasphemy, so even the true Messiah would be sentenced to death (John 19:7).

I don’t think we have to believe that Jesus had known all this from infancy, even before he could talk. It seems quite reasonable to think that his understanding of what the Law and his vocation as the Son of God demanded developed in stages. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews says that Jesus “learned obedience through the things he suffered.” (Heb. 4:8)

So what?

What’s all that got to do with me? Paul refers to Christians as the body of Christ in numerous places, so we share in Jesus’ Messianic vocation.

When I was a boy I was taught how lucky I was to be a Christian, brought up in a Christian country, educated at the “religious, royal and ancient foundation” of Christ’s Hospital. I was instructed about various mysterious advantages like the gift of the Holy Spirit and everlasting life. Being a Christian seemed all pluses.

But, like everyone else, I discovered as a child that life has its ups and downs. Often the example of Jesus was extremely difficult to follow, and I failed all the time. I gradually realised that being a Christian demanded a different set of values from those of the general public, even the public school!

Like Jesus, I have learned obedience through the things I have suffered. It has been through failures, disappointments and personal mishaps more often than through success that I have made my most important discoveries.

I am still learning where my personal vocation is leading me. It will not be to the same horrible end that Jesus suffered, but it will contain similar ingredients. The loss of physical strength and other faculties leads to humiliating and sometimes painful situations. In my mid-eighties, I speak with some experience.

I am not a special person. What I have said of myself will find an echo (I hope) in most people of any age. We are all discovering in stages who we truly are and what our vocation in Christ is. When I think of Jesus losing his racist beliefs I feel quite complacent: I don’t have any Hansonish hang-ups. But when I think of the end of Jesus’ earthly life I am strongly challenged. In spite of constant challenges from the pulpit, I don’t think most church people regard the crucifixion as having much real relevance to their own lives. That was Jesus’ thing. But it can still be a challenge. Pain and humiliations occur at every stage of life, but a Christian understanding of them, and that they are, sometimes at least, part of the Messianic vocation, can make life seem more reasonable, more coherent, more meaningful.

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Read Isaiah 53

Reflect on your own experience and see if it has ever been in this sense “messianic”.

Pray to understand your life and vocation more clearly, and to find joy and hope in any growth of insight.

I have been re-reading a book that caused a sensation in the Anglican Church some forty-five years ago. That was a time when Anglicans were more concerned about evangelism than sexual orientation. Bishop John Robinson believed that the Church had a deep-seated problem in presenting God to the contemporary secular society. He described the problem at length in his book Honest to God (SCM Press. 1963). It is interesting to reflect if things have changed since that time.

Robinson believed that the problem was, basically, the Church’s tendency to talk of God as a being that exists alongside other beings (the universe), and that he is somehow “out there” in a place called heaven beyond the bright blue sky, beyond the universe.

In the 1960s quite a lot of people still went to church, though the number was smaller than during World War Two, and shrinking. Robinson attributed this loss of belief mainly to a reified, “out there” kind of theism: seeing God as a discrete entity in the midst of nothingness. He was also concerned about the popular idea of Jesus as not quite human but only partly divine – a sort of theological mixture. His experience told him that, while churchgoers were still content with those notions, increasing numbers of people found them incompatible with reason and modern-day thinking. Atheists were having a field day.

However, Robinson thought there was hope for a “new reformation”. He cited the writings of radical and controversial theologians like Dietrich Bonhöffer, who made an enigmatic reference to what he called “religionless Christianity” in one of his letters from a Nazi prison, Paul Tillich with his notion that we should see God as the “ground of our being” rather than someone up in heaven, and Rudolf Bultmann, who stressed the mythological nature of much Biblical writing.

The book raised a storm of protest from conservative church people, clerical and lay. Some even accused Robinson of being an atheist and demanded his resignation. I believe that, today, such a book would cause less outrage; it would probably attract little interest in fact. Numbers in the pew have continued to fall and the average age to rise. People mostly don’t actively deny Church doctrine; they simply see it as irrelevant to real life. Apathy is a greater threat to faith than atheism, which is an act of faith anyway. In 1963, Bishop Wand was able to say that the word ‘religion’ still stood for the highest values in life. I doubt if that could be said today.

The ongoing decline of church attendance has been attended by other significant cultural and social changes over the years. One has been the emergence of a popular hunger for spirituality, often expressed in so-called “new age” cults, usually focussed on our relationship with the natural world. Many people today say they are interested in spirituality but not in institutional religion. Even those who are respectful of religion still feel no desire to be involved. Conservative Christians are hostile toward new age spirituality and sceptical about spirituality focussed in nature. They tend to see the environment as something separate: something to conquer and control. They are sceptical about climate change and the need for environmental care. (Cardinal Pell is a prominent local example of this attitude.)

Another development has been a growing interest in other religions and in interfaith dialogue. There might be as many people interested in religion now as there were in the 1960s, but there is more diversity.

The rising average standard of living has also had an impact. With more money, people have more ways to enjoy themselves at weekends. Young people have cars. Even retirees can afford to do more interesting things than going to church.

Of course, the simplest answer to all this is to say that all these people ought to go to church like I do and my ancestors before me, but wrapping oneself up in a warm blanket of self-righteousness (relieved that we’re not gay or lesbian) doesn’t really help. Jesus told his disciples (not just clergy, because there weren’t any) to go out and proclaim the Good News.

Jesus did this himself, not by issuing a new set of dogma, but by telling made-up stories about daily life with a challenging twist to them. We need to be able to communicate the Good News in terms of modern life and modern thinking in this affluent, materialistic, sceptical, scientific age rather than trying to sell them theological dogma or, even less, tell them what their sexual inclinations must not be.

There has been one significant development during the last hundred years: the radical change in scientific thinking. Relativity and quantum theory have revolutionised nearly all scientists’ view of reality. It is much less materialistic. The more physicists learn about the fundamental nature of matter, the less material it seems to be. They explore four ubiquitous fields of energy and the intricate dance that goes on in them that create the illusion of solids, liquids and gases. They talk like mystics at times. This has led to a new burst of dialogue between academic scientists and theologians, and they are finding an astonishing degree of resonance between the two fields of study. Palaeontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, was a pioneer in this process, writing about the same time as Robinson. He had a mystic’s understanding of the material world. Mathematical cosmologist, Brian Swimme, says that we should see the universe as a spiritual event rather than as a material object. If this were to flow down to ordinary church people or even to the clergy, it would open a new channel of communication with scientifically minded society. More importantly it could open up for us Western Christians a new vision of God for ourselves in the material world around us. This is something that has always been essential in other religions and in earlier European Christianity, but was lost during the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution.

Generally, the Good News is most effectively communicated, not through theology or dogma, but by opening people’s eyes to God around them. This is what Jesus’ parables did. The Nicene Creed is a useful tool for certain occasions, but I’ve never heard of anyone being converted by it. Even more effective is action: acts of love, compassion, forgiveness, understanding and tolerance.

There is much debate these days among the clergy about how to “be church” in new ways. Perhaps there is now more general agreement about the need for a “new reformation”. Perhaps we still need to be more honest to God.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is often over-mystificated, but religious people should be mystified. A sense of mystery is an important element of religious experience. God is the ultimate mystery. Jews do not even attempt to speak his name. The ninety-nine names proclaimed by Moslems are abstract attributes; physical images are forbidden. Christianity, Michael Ramsey said, is the most materialistic of all religions (this will be evident as this essay proceeds) but many Christians recognise the shallowness and near idolatry of our masculine, human images.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not intended to mystify us with an arithmetical riddle; it is intended to give clarity and precision to our thinking. The Nicene Creed is a brilliant summary of many centuries of Jewish religious experience, and the Christ event in particular. It is immensely helpful in any attempt to put our own experience of God into some order. But the danger of fragmenting or partitioning our image of God is ever present. Athanasius and the church fathers of Nicea and Chalcedon were at pains to affirm the absolute unity of God. Any devotional or dialectic use of the doctrine of the Trinity that compromises or confuses us about God’s absolute unity is bad theology.

The council of Nicea was called by the emperor Constantine, primarily to settle the hotly debated question of Jesus’ fundamental nature: was he, the Jews’ Messiah, holy but simply human, or was he divine, the God-man? The council finally voted to affirm the latter opinion: Jesus was divine.

The form of their statement reflects classical philosophical thinking. The Creed states that Jesus was “of one substance with the Father”. The word substance (Greek ousios) is used in the sense that Plato used it, meaning the essential nature of something. On the religious level also, the notion of a divine human being is Hellenistic. Though entirely foreign to Jewish tradition, human gods and goddesses were a familiar part of Greco-Roman culture.

There is no doubt that the intention of the Council was to affirm something much more than that Jesus was merely one of the Greek gods, but their idea was more acceptable in the predominantly gentile fourth century church than it could have been earlier in a predominantly Jewish one. (We recall that Jesus had been condemned to death by the Sanhedrin because they deliberately interpreted his answer to their question as to whether he was the Messiah as a claim to be equal with God.)

However, against the background of the earliest Christian writings, the Creed tells us about much more than the nature and status of one man. In Paul’s letters and in the prologue of John’s Gospel there are clear statements that Christ is an eternal and cosmic being – infinitely more than one individual man. The whole of creation is in Christ and comes into being through him. If then, as the Nicene fathers affirm, Christ is divine and co-equal with God, it follows that everything is part of the material embodiment or incarnation of God. This fits in with the belief of creation from nothing (ex nihilo). There is nothing from which God can create the universe except himself

Jesus referred to God as “our Father”. Bear in mind that, at that time, it was believed that a woman was merely an incubator for a complete potential human being, generated and delivered by the man. Paul saw creation as female to God, “in labour” like a woman in childbirth. And Saint Francis saw that our divine kinship extends to the whole of creation.

The really new idea that emerges from the Nicene Creed, and the early Christian writings I referred to, is that physical reality – matter and energy, space and time – is divine. The fourteenth century German mystic, Meister Eckhart, said, “God is everything, but everything is not God”. No single entity, not even Jesus the Messiah, is all that we mean by God; God is the totality of all existence. God is the very essence of existence, the source of all being. And this includes material nature.

Importantly, we need not regard material nature as a finite entity. Our range of observation will always be limited, but many cosmologists believe that the universe, the totality of physical existence, is infinite, though all but a small part is beyond any possible observation.

The work of scientists of many disciplines over the last century has revealed that the universe is not just a collection of inanimate things with a tiny amount of biological matter here and maybe elsewhere also. The whole universe is a living, growing, evolving organism. Some philosophers of science also argue that the universe is also a psychic entity – it has mind. In animals, mind and matter meet. Cosmic mind is materially manifest in brains. But our thoughts and imagination are not spatially located in our skulls; to some extent they are a globally shared experience. Physicist, Brian Swimme, says we should see the universe as a spiritual event, not a material entity. We should notice that this contemporary thinking originates in some of the earliest Christian writings and was codified in classical philosophical terms in the fourth century.

The doctrine of the Trinity gives us a way of ordering our experience of God. It suggests that we experience God at three levels. Firstly, with our faculty for abstract thought, we define God as the very essence of existence and source of all being – the “Father” of creation. Secondly, with our spiritual sensibility we perceive God as goodness. Paul specified the qualities of goodness to the Galatians: love, joy, serenity, faithfulness, gentleness and so on. And thirdly, though we see these qualities only in people, God shows himself also through the beauty and wonder of all of nature.

We also experience what we think of as not God. If we only ever experienced pleasure, the idea of a good God in a flawed world would not enter our minds. But we know both the warmth of the summer sun and the cruel winds of winter, the fertility of the earth, watered from the heavens, and the dire experience of drought and famine, kindness and wisdom in some people but viciousness and stupidity in others. Finally, with our analytical faculty, we think about God in abstract terms: pure being, both immanent in and transcendent to everything.

The doctrine of the Trinity is not about three gods in one God; it is about three ways in which we experience the Holy One, the un-nameable LORD, the ultimate mystery.