GODBLOG 

This weBLOG is about GOD. It carries pieces written by Leslie Cram  inspired by programmes on the television which are relevant to God. The views expressed are his own and not necessarily those of ONE for Christian Exploration.

.December 5 2006

Last week the programmes on the Monarchy by David Starkey came to the Glorious Revolution and William and Mary. William was invited by the Parliament of Britain to take over kingship of the islands. James was proving to think of being king too much as Charles I had thought, absolute monarchy. William was offered the kingship under the authority of Parliament.

The Old and New Testaments give us a story over centuries of how the Israelites were governed and how they thought of God. They were ruled by Judges in the earlier Old Testament but they wanted a king to be like their neighbouring tribes. God did not want this but gave in and they began with David and Solomon. By the time of the New Testament their names for God were the same as that of the highest authority governing them, lord and king. God the father and Jesus continued to be thought of and depicted in this way into Mediaeval times.

In Biblical and Mediaeval times it was hard to get training to carry on a profession except by being born into it and learning from your father. This applied to being king as well as to being a ploughman. Today, with universal education, any person can learn to do any job. Education also means that every adult is considered equally able to vote on what will be best for the country. Kingship as a job that the child is best qualified to do and only one person should decide what is best is a bad word.  When the words lord or king come up in a Christian concept I disassociate myself from them and say God and Jesus is certainly neither a lord nor a king.

I have never been a Jesus person. The story of Jesus has been for me his death leading to the coming of the spirit as recounted in Luke/Acts. This spirit then brings everyone together as equals as in present day democracy and  the operation of science.

December 17 2006

16 December More4 TV 7.30 pm . THE DOMESDAY CODE

This was a showing of the programme first seen on channel 4 on Saturday evening 16 September 7 to 9 pm “The Domesday Code”. This was Tony Robinson’s (of Timeteam fame) programme. It lasted two hours, and took things slowly so one was not pushed to follow the argument.

The programme followed how the prophesies about the end of the world in revelation are expected to happen now in the beliefs of “end timers”, fundamentalist Christians in the USA. The fulfilment of the prophesies began with the refounding of the Jewish state in 1948. The Temple will be rebuilt on Temple Mount in Jerusalem, despite the Muslim Mosque and the Dome of the Rock sitting at present on the site. Temple Mount belongs to Israel since it was captured in 1967. After this the rapture will occur when true Christians will be taken up to heaven. This is a belief not in the Book of Revelation but first put forward by Darby of the Plymouth Brethren. Next will follow the Great Tribulation with global war, earthquakes and disruptions in the natural environment.. Nuclear war with Israel and the USA pitted against the Muslim world is expected. The Antichrist will walk the earth, another belief not in Revelation but in the epistles of John. The antichrist is expected to come from the United Nations. God will be preached to all nations, missionary activity by the Church will continue up to the end time. Finally there will be the Last Judgement.

The United States of American can be defined as made up of a series of immigrations of people seeking to establish the kingdom of God on earth. The American Civil War had overtones of this as can be seen in the Battle Hymn of the Republic – “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord”. The present end timers follow this tradition. The programme was rich in interviews with end time preachers – all from the Protestant tradition. Tony did the interviewing and was impartial in his questions. He did bring out how the USA is involved in Israel and Palestine politics. Israel has to be supported in establishing itself and spreading its territory to its historic areas. The occupation of the west bank is an example where this is necessary for the end time to come and Bush can be seen to have changed his policy to support west bank occupation. End time beliefs accept Jewish/Muslim tensions as inevitable as the end approaches so gives no time to resolving conflicts. Indeed end timers make hatred of Islam legitimate. Environmental disasters are inevitable as the end time approaches so care for the environment has no part in end time beliefs. Believers today should expect to be God’s instruments in bringing the end time to happen. The programme stated that Bush is not known to be an end time believer, but it showed clips his speeches using word from end time belief like evil. Bush relies on end time votes. It was not clear from the programme how many end timers there are. A statistic was quoted that some 60% of the USA population believe that the Revelation prophesies will come true.

The programme ended with a more academic look at who actually wrote the Book of Revelation. The answer was an unknown person with some experience of the Roman suppression of the Jewish state and destruction of the temple in AD 70. Its content can be understood in the context of the east of the Mediterranean around AD 100.

I liked the programme because it gave an impartial airing of all views and its final conclusions on the Book of Revelation being written for its time and to be understood in a way that handed responsibility for making a decision to the viewer.

Thoughts that come to me after seeing the programme (my take on it) are that the early church was end time. I think the actual words and beliefs of Jesus are not available to us because so much was interpreted in the prevailing beliefs of his followers and the writers of the New Testament. He does appear to have believed that the end of the world come in the generation after him. St Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians 4: 13 -18 took up the problem that some people had died before the end had come. I have little interest in spreading the word, converting people to belief in Christ without this being part of action to bring health and improved conditions of everyday life. I use the words in the Gospel to argue for this :-

Luke 7:20 - 22 “When the men were come unto him, they said, John Baptist hath sent us unto thee, saying, Art thou he that should come? or look we for another? And in that same hour he cured many of their infirmities and plagues, and of evil spirits; and unto many that were blind he gave sight. Then Jesus answering said unto them, Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached.”

ONE4GOD has already established itself in being free to criticize not only Christian beliefs today but also in the earl church in its publication “Bad Acts if the Apostles” by John Henson.

18 December 2006

The Lost Gospels by Pete Owen Jones first shown on BBC Four on 4 December was repeated last week. It will be shown again on 20 and on 21 December. If you are like me, you want just the facts – you can do the interpretation yourself - this programme was for you. It looked at everything that was written about Jesus in the first three centuries after his death. There was the New Testament as we know today, the four gospels, 21 letters and Revelation. There were also two or three times as many other gospels, letters and other writings which together are known as New Testament apocrypha or non-canonical New Testament writings. You can read them all on the web; try

http://wesley.nnu.edu/biblical_studies/noncanon/index.htm or http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/apocrypha.html.

As part of becoming the established religion of the Roman Empire the church authorities decided upon our present New Testament as the authentic writings and proclaimed others as heretical or quietly left them alone. It is interesting that what is in the canon of the New Testament was still being debated up to the reformation. Luther did not want Revelation. Most of them were known in recent times to have existed because they were argued and written about in of the first centuries of Christianity. In the last 100 years copies of many of them have been found. The greatest number were found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt buried in the sand.

Like the four canonical gospels, the texts can be traced back to separate groups of Christians, holding their individual understandings about Jesus and sometimes a political agenda. The programme picked out as examples:-

• The Gospels of Phillip and of Mary treat women as equal to men so running against the practice of a male hierarchy that eventually came about.

• The Gospel of Peter comes from a decetist group with belief in Christ being entirely God; he did not feel pain on the Cross.

• The Gnostics, as shown in the beginnings in the early Gospel of Thomas, believed in Jesus as the bringer of special understanding to those able to understand.

• The Ebionites believed in the Jesus being only for Jews with his divinity coming from his baptism and lasting until his death.

• Marcion on the other hand believed in there being two gods to account for evil in the world, the evil God being of the Old Testament and Jewish religion and the good God being Jesus and the New Testament but his New Testament was made up of only the Gospel of Luke and letters of Paul. The original writings of the Ebionites and Marcion are not known at present but who knows what may emerge from the sands of Egypt or the Caves of the Dead Sea.

Pete Owen Jones ended his excellent programme by speculating about what might have happened to Christianity as an established church if the existing cannon had not been chosen. The New Testament as we know it makes clear that salvation is equally for all and it is because of the death of Jesus not because of anything we are or we do. In other words it applies to the whole world.

If these writing were put aside by the church authorities in the third and fourth centuries how might it help us to look at them again now?

I do not propose that everyone should now read through them all and make up his or her own New Testament. But I do think it is valuable to know how our present understandings came to be. This was by debate between different groups of Christians and between Christians and other beliefs. God is not in the written word so much as in the Spirit that led the debate. The same debate led by the same Spirit is wanted now.
 

21 December

Brother Roger.

Radio 3 at 9.30 pm on 17 December had three quarters of an hour on Brother Roger of Taize a year after he was stabbed to death during a service. I was there in 1997 for two days during a pilgrimage from Rome to Derry on the anniversary of St Augustine and Columba. I wrote then :-

"Taize, 7.30 in the morning, the crypt. It is a week predominantly of German young people and the Roman Catholic Mass is in that language. Not all of us are here but a good representation of both Roman Catholic and Protestant. We are a community in welcoming all around us in the Peace. Did some Protestants go forward? Certainly some did not receive but delighted in being there.

Taize, an hour later, the first of the three times of prayer every day. The brothers, from various denominations, gather to be together and with their visitors. The church slopes gently up to the back, with no chairs on its carpeted floor and young people sitting or kneeling in the soft light, the quiet and the gentle singing. Bread blessed at the earlier Mass is available to all. This sharing of blessed bread is the nearest that the Brothers experience of being one at the Eucharist. They are a community that is not able to join at the Table of the Lord.

The Romanesque village church at Taize, an Anglican Eucharist for our coach party in the afternoon. Perhaps half of us are here, some Roman Catholics stay at the back while their Protestant fellows go forward to receive.

At Taize a handful of us found we were meeting one another's eyes across the Protestant/Roman Catholic divide with a shared urgency for full communion. We knew the denominational divisions in various places in Europe, we felt these divisions were equally between us here and now at Taize. If we allow ourselves to be separated at the Table of the Lord we also allowed the killings to continue elsewhere. The clergy are the executives of the people of the church and it is for the people to instruct the clergy to bring all together."

During the stay I had a meal with the monks at which I was sitting diagonally opposite from Brother Roger. I had no conversation or eye contact with him but was pleased to be picking up something about him from sharing a meal with him and others.

The programme highlighted the position of Brother Roger and the community of monks coming from both the Protestant and the Catholic traditions that he founded. What allegiance did he have to a church on this earth? There are plenty of individuals who have an independent existence and are tolerated by the churches as for instance they give into the world insights from their spiritual life and writings. But Brother Roger was a challenge to the traditions as he did not put his community under the authority of any one established church. He appears to have in the end be accepted as  a full member by both Roman Catholic and Protestants.

My own belonging in the church is not to any tradition but a commitment for life to a spiritual parent. I have belonged since being a teenager to the united church in the future. I cannot belong to any church today because each one demands as a condition of belonging that I separate myself from other churches.

I see a hole  in organizations in Britain that they are either new age Christianity flying free of connections with the established churches (and excellent for that) or renewal type organizations of individuals within an established church (and excellent for that). What I get from ONE is a filling of that gap with committed people from established churches  wanting to live now in more togetherness. Our meetings are in some way a British Taize.

Will the Taize movement spread to form a community in Britain as other forms of monastic life spread?

 

18 December 2006

The Trouble with Atheism.

I shouldn’t bother to watch the programme by Rod Liddle on Channel 4 at 8 pm on 18 December  if it is repeated. It ended by saying maybe there is a God, maybe there isn’t as God – that the agnostic position is the only acceptable position for those not convinced of belief. It looked at the intolerance of atheists being as absurd as the intolerance of believers. It took belief to be accepting the supernatural, atheism being  the scientific rejection of the supernatural.

The world is divided into three parts, science in which truth is equally available to all, the supernatural in which truth comes to specific persons but is not equally available to all, and the arts (poetry, music and pictures the most common in the religious context) in which truth is part of everyday although certain persons are more able to appreciate it. Bultmann in the 1930s proclaimed that Christianity must be part of  science. It is absurd that it lives in a medieval and earlier cosmos in the supernatural. It is in the arts that religion can find common cause with science. Richard Dawkin, the rising star of atheism from Oxford University, writes and speaks of the poetry of scientific exploration.