POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE COMING OUT AS ‘NO LONGER A CHRISTIAN’ – CHAPTER 3(A) Part of an ongoing working document for my book GOD IS NOT THE ENEMY [I have more to add to this section/chapter but want to publish it in its current form now for those engaging with my thoughts. A few things should be noted by anyone reading my developing ideas: 1 They ARE developing. This is a first draft and the improvement and additions should hopefully more accurately and in a more thoughtful, nuanced way convey what it is I want to say. 2 There will be a need for a rearrangement of sections at a later stage - right now some of my thinking may seem to be disjointed as a result and I hope later revisions will address this. 3 One thing which will remain consistent is my style of demolishing before building up. The finished book will have a positive and upbeat message while not fearing to say what needs (in my opinion) to be said.] God is not the enemy. But God, made in the image of man, is. This God has been used against me as a weapon of attack and control and self-justification on the part of those who have used religion as a means to get power over others. The shock for me though has been to witness this manipulation, more subtly, among those of allegedly more progressive Christian outlook. Of course people can attack, induce guilt, instil fear, control others and justify any and all actions they wish to perform, however questionable, without reference to God. But God can be an enormously useful ally in this regard. I have similarly used God against others – and myself – in the past. I am still deeply ashamed of what amounts to using God as both missile and shield to ensure that I am winning the war, not so much against others when it comes down to it, but against myself – God becomes both the attack and defence needed against taking responsibility for my own life. You’ll understand, if you have grasped what I am trying to achieve in this book, that all of the above does not require that you take a particular position on the matter of whether or not God objectively exists. The concept of God had done much harm. And of course I am not touching here upon much bigger issues like war and terrorism, slavery and genocide. The point is that all the evils of which we as a human race are capable are the sole responsibility of said human race. But people have often been inspired by their notion of God so to act. God becomes a useful tool in the hands of people – usually men – to subjugate and conquer and control. There is no doubt that some seek divine justification to enable them to sink to shocking depths of depravity. They don’t need God to do this, and of all people atheists are bound to agree that God isn’t in fact helping anyone to plumb these depths (can’t – doesn’t exist). This is all about people and it doesn’t require God’s actual existence to be true. But none of this is integral to what ‘God’ means. God, it has often seemed to me, is only really a problem around religious people. I first read these words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer when I was 20: I often ask myself why a Christian instinct frequently draws me more to the religionless than to the religious, by which I mean not with any intention of evangelizing them, but rather, I might almost say in brotherhood. While I often shrink with religious people from speaking of God by name - because that Name somehow seems to me here not to ring true, and I strike myself as rather dishonest (it is especially bad when others start talking in religious jargon; then I dry up completely and feel somehow oppressed and ill at ease) - with people who have no religion I am able to speak of God quite openly and as it were naturally. Writing from a Nazi prison he could not have been reflecting on these issues in a more different context than I was reading them, but every single word resonated with me. It’s cheesy to say it, but it really did feel that those words had been written especially for me. I want to unpack what this all meant and means to me as the argument of this book develops. But though I instantly identified with some much in Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, nevertheless time and again, and in spite of the chord that was struck by Bonhoeffer’s expressed desire for a religionless Christianity, I was drawn like a moth to the flame back to situations of religious intensity. But like the deeply contradictory threads woven into the life of Christian faith communities that I wrote about in Chapter 2 - the civil war between control and censure and conformity and fear on the one hand and freedom, affirmation and encouragement to explore life on the other - this was all happening within me. At the very time that I was suffocating in sanctimonious company – often being the most sanctimonious of the lot - I found a freedom and release when I was communing (to use a nice religious word!) with God in the most normal, natural and ‘secular’ of situations – with mates who had no faith down the pub, at discos (yes they were called discos then, this is how long it has taken me to finally come into the truth of what I was seeing then!) and frankly in other places and situations where I most definitely should not have been finding God… I should have listened and responded to this inner voice – the voice of God as I truly felt it to be. It’s true that Bonhoeffer spoke of religionless Christianity and I am presenting myself as not a Christian. But though there are significant differences (as well as similarities) between what he was proposing and where I now find myself to be, the underlying theme is the same: that God - if we take the notion of God seriously - cannot be contained within human institutions, structures of control or theologies. God cannot be contained by religion, which is by its very nature manmade. If you reside at the Catholic end of the Christian spectrum and you want to insist that your understanding of apostolic succession contradicts me, you have to deal with the fact that it is a doctrine concocted by men. It’s a circular argument and one that allows people to refuse to take responsibility either for the collective history of the Church or for their own lives. To hold that a structure, an institution and a body of men has some sort of divine immunisation from the law of cause and effect and tension between rights and responsibilities is to seriously deceive oneself. If you are at the evangelical end of the spectrum and you want to insist that it is the Bible that must be held up as the litmus test for what is right and wrong - of God and not of God - in the Church in its many expressions, you have to first deal with the fact that we only have that Bible because the Church which evangelicals and others protested against gave it to us.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 12:06:07 +0000
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