SOFiA - Exploring Values, Meaning and Spirituality: Newsletter issue 166, Jun 2023
Jock Crawford (1935-2023) was a stalwart Sofian. He wrote an account of his spiritual journey, intended for his wider family. Part of this, we print below. It’s a down-to-earth story no doubt repeated with minor variations by many of us.
I was born in 1935 and raised in a New Zealand then still recognised as a Christian Dominion of Great Britain. During my first year as a boarder at Southwell School, World War II ended in August 1945 with the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, announced to the assembled school prior to daily morning chapel service by the headmaster, the subsequently greatly revered Paul Sergel, then a recently returned Army padre from the hell of Monte Cassino.
A period of national relief and optimism tempered with the need for rationing staple foodstuffs and other exigencies followed six years of warfare which had engulfed most of the world in one way or another. The birth of the United Nations organisation in October 1945 was the most visible sign that the international community was done with aggression, slaughter and torture and lasting Peace was the common goal.
It is little wonder that there was a quickening of religious interest in the West: there was a lot of church building and congregations grew significantly. God was back in Heaven instead of fighting alongside every soldier whether Friend or Enemy – both Allies and Axis combatants and their relatives had surely claimed His help. In New Zealand the traditional Christian denominations were well supported with the Anglicans claiming the greatest number of adherents, of which I was one.1
I was in my early forties when my hitherto conventional understanding of who Jesus of Nazareth was and what he accomplished started to undergo some real scrutiny. Up until that time he had been, for me, a shadowy figure typically depicted in Sunday School posters, perhaps sporting freshly shampooed long hair and wearlng a white robe à la the ubiquitous Persil soap advertising of those days, with a young lamb draped around his shoulders. He was understood as having been a great miracle worker and healer before being agonisingly crucified “for us men and for our salvation” and miraculously rising from his tomb before ascending – apparently bodily – up to Heaven to sit beside God, his father, to ultimately judge us all. One had to have the utmost respect for such a figure but to have any doubt about standard church doctrine, let alone express such, was simply not done.
At that time (1976) I became a participant in a local religiously oriented programme of Life in the Spirit seminars. The weekly classes were very ecumenical in nature – some 50 or so people from all the local churches had their religious interest greatly enhanced as a result. Many had strong emotional responses to the material studied and all became much more familiar with the gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching and the recorded circumstances surrounding his death and resurrection.
I think the town gained considerable benefit from those seminars which was apparent, particularly within the church-going community, for some years afterward. I myself became interested in and committed to church cooperation having been exposed to some different emphases and understandings for the first time in my life. I had also been forcefully struck by the sheer brilliance of Jesus’ teaching and his courageous example. Who was he really? How did he come to display such wisdom? From whence did it come? If he was a fully human being how could he have been “born of a virgin”?
During the intervening years since those Life in the Spirit seminars were held, I have become familiar with the thinking and writings of quite a few well-recognised, thoughtful and widely published theologians. Of particular interest have been books by John Spong, a former bishop of the Episcopalian (Anglican) Church in Newark, New Jersey, whose many titles have been read by hundreds of thousands; Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, a Unitarian minister and Catholic priest respectively and close friends; Karen Armstrong, a former nun; and, most significantly, Lloyd Geering, tried for heresy here in New Zealand in 1966 but acquitted by the Presbyterian Church -- to name only five. Much of what they have written I have found very helpful to my understanding and which has allowed me to remain in the more liberal part of the Church with a degree of intellectual honesty.
The first real challenge to the rather weakly practised belief system I grew up with was the “virgin birth”.2 As a 20th century Kiwi farmer and father of my own two children, the expression of this piece of doctrine which ran contrary to everything I knew of mammalian reproduction had to be examined and discarded. This was especially so when it came to light that almah, the Hebrew word for young woman, had been mistranslated – either accidentally or purposefully – to “virgin” with the consequent officially implied view that human sexual reproduction contained much sinfulness which Jesus’ mother was believed to be incapable of: hence the requirement of his divinity and mysterious and essential fatherhood “by God”.
It was, of course, the Nicene Creed, which gave much impetus to the development of Church doctrine and orthodoxy. Hammered out under the stern auspices of the Emperor Constantine at Nicea in 325 CE, it was the final flourish which put the finishing touch to the transformation of Jesus’ teaching which had been all about life and love, how to treat friend and enemy, how to act with generosity and compassion; nearly three hundred years later this had been transformed into what to believe.
How this came about surely must be due to many factors, among them the wrestling with Jesus’ political execution and the need to distil meaning from his significant life and death for his followers; the incorporation of the thinking and missionary travels of S(P)aul of Tarsus which have had such an influence on non-Jewish beliefs; the Roman occupation of Judea since before the birth of Jesus and the razing of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E.; the sidelining of the parts played by the women among the early followers of The Way, particularly, perhaps, that of Mary Magdalene, recognised as being one of Jesus’ closest confidantes and given the respect and status of a widow at the time of his death and burial according to gospel accounts. (One coherent theory is that she could have been a prime source for the writer of the gospel of John.3)
It was pointed out to me recently that in the words of the Nicene Creed, Jesus’ ministry and adult life was reduced to just a punctuation mark e.g.
“...incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man.↙
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;...4
However, this is not the place for a deep discussion of the creed and I am certainly not equipped to do so. My limited understanding, though, is that, apart from the theological questions wrestled with at the time and which have been debated in certain academic and theological quarters ever since, Constantine succeeded in the initial joining of Church and State into the most powerful amalgam of power the world knew for the next 1300 years or so. Christendom came to loom very large indeed for individuals, societies and nations. If you offended against the State you ran the risk of execution by hanging or far more ghastly methods like being hung, drawn and quartered; question the orthodoxy of the Church and you might be stretched on the rack, burned at the stake or drowned. The Crusades and the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions were the most blatant distortions and travesties of what Jesus’ message became during the Middle Ages.5
Temporal power was exercised by the State and spiritual power by the Church. That was more or less the status quo until 1510 when Galileo and his telescope proved that Nikolaus Copernicus’s mathematical calculations were indeed correct and so Earth was not the centre of the universe. It was this development which ushered in the Age of Enlightenment although the Catholic Church was affronted at the time and Galileo was lucky not to lose his life as a result. Indeed the Vatican did not officially recognise that he had indeed been correct until 1992! 6
I have shunned reciting the Nicene Creed now for nearly 20 years, ever since a much loved minister, the late Alan Leadley, told me in private conversation that he would no longer expect his congregation to have to stand and recite words, many/most of which some people could no longer believe with integrity and thus had to do so with their fingers metaphorically crossed behind their backs. What a relief that conversation was to me at the time, I who could not have remained in the pews much longer otherwise!
It was a lightbulb moment when I started to realise that no, I was definitely not from a Jewish background and living in a harsh Palestinian environment occupied by a Roman garrison at a time when few people could read and write and Earth was understood to be flat. That was then and this was now, thousands of miles away in a most beautiful island country and nearly two millennia in time. Coming to some understanding of the difference between the Jesus of history who became the Christ of faith has become central to my perception of reality.
Who or what is meant by reference to G O D ?
I approach this question with some trepidation. Over the last five hundred years or so many of the practices of Christian belief have had to undergo some serious revision, starting with Galilieo’s discovery referred to earlier. The ongoing revelations of scientific and academic research have brought about massive changes in our understanding of not only the position and age of our planet in relation to the solar system, the galaxy and even the cosmos itself but also of humankind’s growth and development. Our culture has been undergoing increasingly rapid change, particularly over recent decades even. Because of this much of the language of religion has lost a lot of its power and meaning through overuse and familiarity or has become too archaic or opaque to be useful for many.
I also am only too aware that any attempt to find contemporary meaning in this context has the possibility of seeming arrogant and dismissive of much of great value that has long been believed and sincerely acted upon. I intend no disrespect – only a search for some philosophical integrity for myself in the time and place in which I live and will soon die.
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GOD...
How do I understand the meaning of those three letters: G O D? Well, no longer the way I did in my youth when the accepted version of the Deity was as an omnipotent celestial being who had literally created the perceived universe along the lines described in Genesis but on a greatly distorted timescale, e.g. “A thousand ages in Thy sight are but an evening gone” (Hymns A&M). Due respect should be and was due to such a One who on occasion could be implored to intervene in puny human affairs on behalf of and support those in dire straits. After all “every hair of your head is numbered” but as the years have passed by my understanding has had to undergo significant revision. Jesus himself, the originator of the phrase above, called that terrible cry from his cross as he was dying: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? which has echoed down the centuries.
The IDEA of gods endowed with supernatural power first took root a very long time ago and is common to all major civilisations of the past. From a modern perspective it seems understandable that in antiquity fire, thunder and lightning, flood and drought, and other inexplicable phenomena were attributed to powers thought to be super human in form and ability.
Also from a modern perspective is the revelation that the world we inhabit is an infinitesimally small part of the Milky Way galaxy calculated to have formed some 13.2 billion years ago in the aftermath of an initial Big Bang which gave birth to our universe. Even more mind blowing is the recent scientific hypothesis that there may be an infinite number of galaxies which form parts of multiple universes – Why? Who/What is responsible? Or should we not question but just accept that it is so and be very grateful for Life itself and live accordingly?
The Hebrews were the first to scrap a pantheon of deities in favour of their One God who inspired awe and fear and whose name was not to be spoken aloud. The God of the Hebrews was variously understood to be bloodthirsty, demanding, just, jealous, merciful, omnipotent, vengeful and other contradictory all-too-human attributes writ large. In a patriarchal society this god was involved in not only the creation of the world and mankind but with various mega events – some apocalyptic or historical, some surely allegorical or mythical – set out in the Torah of the Bible. Major ones included the story of Noah and the Flood, the Exile in Egypt and subsequent Exodus from there led by the charismatic but by-then-octogenarian Moses; the colonisation of the Promised Land and displacement or slaughter of the Canaanites, Hittites and others who inhabited it, the aftermath of which is still being played out some three thousand years later in today’s Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
The replacement of the understanding of a somewhat bloodthirsty, capricious and demanding God of the Hebrews/Old Testament by the loving Father figure Jesus related to was a watershed development. It also seems reasonable to suggest that the special relationship Jesus had with whom he called his heavenly father was because he did not know who his earthly biological father was. [An idea I am indebted to the late Fred Marshall for in one of his essays.] Be that as it may, whatever doctrinal adornments and accoutrements have been added to early Christian beliefs and practices over two millennia, one thing stands out above all others: Jesus’ adult life, example and teaching to the point of being executed for his vision of a “Kingdom of God” to which all people of goodwill are called to recognise and serve in the here and now can be for us “the way we need to follow and the truth we need to know” (NZPB page 486).
It is at this point the question arises for me: If the IDEA of God is to have any real traction in 21st century secular New Zealand (and indeed elsewhere) then it has to undergo some fresh thinking.
I must be one of an increasing number of people brought up with traditional orthodox religious beliefs who have cast off a lot of what we learned as children, much of which was taught us in doctrinal terms without much thought being given. I am fully aware that much of their spiritual life is an emotional response for many, reflected in the wording of certain prayers, well known pious hymns and Bible readings. The tendency for many people nowadays seems to be either to ridicule and dismiss most of such matter, or to invest in it literalness never originally intended. I am wary of both approaches.
One thought that does resonate with me is “God has no hands but ours”. In his elegant book God is the good we do Michael Benedikt examines theopraxy – godly actionversus theology - godly words. A practising Jew, he argues most persuasively that God can be understood as being present in simple acts of compassion, decency and kindness and absent from acts of aggression, coercion, violence, war and the like. It is in subscribing to the values of the former that will see most of us die in a clean hospital bed rather than in a gutter at the end of an AK47, for instance.
My father’s last words uttered to me as he was in fact dying in just such a hospital bed were: “I am in God’s hands now.” Religion was not a subject we had ever really discussed, which seems strange in the light of the relationship we had, but I firmly believe that from that moment the words he had uttered were true in the way that his passing was attended to by everyone involved.
Our perception of reality itself needs revision and with it also some aspects of contemporary religion as practised. For instance, climate change deniers need to discard the biblical stance that Earth is to be exploited for humankind’s benefit (Genesis Ch1 v28) and become serious stewards instead: ‘’The earth is the Lord’s and all that therein is’’(Psalm 24). Lloyd Geering has addressed the question persuasively in his monograph The Greening of Christianity.
Perhaps some radical new thinking resulting in beneficial action may receive some real impetus in reaction to the aftermath of recent increasingly catastrophic weather events. Issues of climate change and political actions resulting in mass population movements and growth/restrictions demand concerted, worldwide action; also urgently needing to be addressed are much wider questions of human sustenance and viability, relationships both international and individual, the overcoming of unbridled greed and the need to treat neighbour and “stranger within the gate” as well as we wish to be treated ourselves.
Jock Crawford
17/2/2022
NOTES
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The 1945 NZ Census figures were(A)32,578; (RC)15,190, (M)7,535 and (P)1,646; for Anglicans, Roman Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterians respectively. Six years later in the 1951 Census the comparative figures in the same order had grown to (A) 37,311; (RC)16,958; (M)8,529 and (P)2,357. The overall gain for these four denominations was more than 14%.
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In the Ancient World Zoroastrianism was a primitive religion dependent on a virgin birth. The birth story of Muhammed is another which shares this belief. Other religions more distant from Palestine also feature such.
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Spiritual Defiance by Robin Meyers. Yale University Press 2015.
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Most contemporary experts would place the total number of official executions during the Spanish Inquisition alone at between 3,000 and 10,000, with perhaps an additional 100,000 to 125,000 dying in prison as a result of torture and maltreatment.
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New York Times October 30, 1992.
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The hypothesis that Mark was written first continues to be held by the majority of scholars today, and there is a new recognition of the author as an artist and theologian using a range of literary devices to convey his conception of Jesus as the authoritative yet sufferingSon of God.
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Luke, Ch4 v17
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Mark, Ch6 v3
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The list includes Caesar Augustus and Alexander of Macedonia. “Son of God” - This should not be confused with “God the Son” of later doctrinal importance.
The Editor