“Sounds like bog-standard Anglicanism to me” is a quote by Tim Chesterton on a recent Thinking Anglicans thread. This blog is written from my personal and passionate perspective, fuelled by life’s present insanities.
What is God “like”?
What matters to me when it comes to thinking about God and what God is “like” is first of all that God isn’t and cannot be “like” anything. I try to remember that “God” is a word created by human beings that we use to identify concepts and ideas that have been formulated by human beings, however ancient the concepts are and however authoritative they are thought to be because sacred books like the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian Bible and the Qu’ran are held in highest esteem by many as the authoritative (and for some, literal) WORD of God.
Some would say that my initial premise is wrong; it isn’t MY idea or my thoughts about God that matter; it’s what and who GOD existentially is and has revealed Himself to be that matters. For Christians, God has revealed Himself to us through the life, death and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ. Believe in Jesus and I will be on safe ground – ground secure enough to save me from damnation and the fires of hell. The stakes for some believers have always been high – high enough to impale false believers who rely on their own intuition. This is a line of thought that is, to me, infantile, immature, and dangerous; but it is still residually commonplace – I suspect. It is present whenever something happens that we interpret as an event brought about by God to punish us or teach us something – magical thinking, as I might call it.
When I think about thinking about God and what God is “like”, I think about the qualities and values that are most vital to a healthy, creative, energised pattern of life. “God” must inspire the best, infuse life with the love, goodness, wisdom, insight and awareness that weaves creative energies and relationships through LIFE – my life, our lives, life on earth, the life of the cosmos. It is something universal, something integral to creation and evolution, something vital to existence and the best of my BEING.
The influences on “MY” God
“MY” God and what MY God is like is, of course, deeply influenced by my Western Christian Anglican mid-twentieth century birth, childhood and youth and my enculturation in a ‘South London Diocese of Southwark South Bank’ model of Christianity. Other models were and are available and now predominate.
I was also deeply influenced by the liturgical movement that was spreading to the UK from Europe and the Roman Catholic Church, fuelled by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), revolutionising theology, language, liturgy and ritual. How things were done, what was said, the way space was used, the relationships in and dynamics of worship, were all affected, embraced, resisted, and gradually codified into a new normal, the Church of England ending up with a comprehensive “compile your own style from a range of ingredients Common Worship book”. Roman Catholics ended up with liturgically re-arranged churches that became their new normal – because stone altars impose presence and make flexibility impossible. People breathe a sigh of relief; things have settled down and now we know where we are again. We can navigate the newly familiar.
My 1960s world was filled with other influences. At school, contemporary plays and authors made their presence felt: N.F. Simpson, Waiting for Godot, existentialism. Theatre, opera, music, books, architecture, the worlds of performance, imagination and transformation, all made a big impression on me. My architectural training introduced me to the dynamics of space, within and around buildings, their effect on us physically and emotionally and the things we do in them; buildings, church buildings more so than others for me, have had their effect, programming my expectations. There is a huge difference between a building consciously designed to open and enhance our potential for creativity, offering us a vision of the possible, compared with a building designed to an unimaginative brief given to the architect by a client with little or no awareness of the possible.
Formative influences
My intuitions about God were given shape by contemporary theological and liturgical movements and developments and were intuitive, assessed according to what worked and made sense to me - what I knew about the world I lived in – evolution, space-time, an expanding universe, the world of Freud and Jung and psychotherapy, of a developing holistic understanding of human health and well-being and an expansive world-view.
My intuitive God had to be congruent with, fit in with, the development of a faith and a way of life that inspired and infused healthy, good, loving, creative living, relationships and communities. I read and interpreted the Bible and Christian theologies and teachings in this light, according to these parameters.
All my intuitive ideas about God were influenced by the fact that I was gay in a necessarily secretive, sometimes homophobic culture and by never doubting my conviction that my desires were true, healthy and “God-given”. My feelings for other men were holy, sacred, mystical, the essence of love and goodness, truth, justice, wisdom and life in all its fullness, It is through this personal prism that I view the life of the Christian Church today and assess what my fellow Christian travellers and the God they worship looks like.
Contemporary inspiration
I’m reading Diarmaid MacCulloch’s “Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity” at the moment and I’m being reminded repeatedly of the naivety, ignorance and prejudice of the faith and belief of so many across all strands of the contemporary Church of England. It’s easy, obviously, to take as given, normal, true, orthodox and Biblical ideas about God inherited and internalised from the Church’s enshrined performance of Christian teaching and tradition. The teaching of the Church, as we are from time to time reminded is embedded in liturgy, the Bible, tradition and reason. In this culture, we are always confronting a challenge when we decide to take traditions and orthodoxies out of the cabinet and take a look at them in the round, as Diarmaid does with Christianity’s history of sex, viewing it from multiple dimensions, comparing and contrasting our ideas and assumptions, clarifying ideas and removing centuries of encrustation that influence our ideas. From the interior depths and mysteries of our conscious and unconscious wisdom, we may attempt to question and deconstruct our programmed beliefs and the emotional conditioning that impels us to leap to the defence of our faith and belief system.
The Church of England that helped to develop and affirm my personal culture and awareness was and is inhabited by many people of an open, questioning, uncertain, meandering faith that Tim Chesterton identifies as bog-standard Anglicanism. It is in this bog-standard openness that my deep truths and values, inspired by Jesus, the Bible, God and the Holy Spirit, are somehow embedded and expressed. It is, or has been in the past, fluid, open, permissive, generous, adventurous, broad and “inclusive”. But it is being actively displaced by and superseded by a model imposed by the institution and imposed on local congregations by the desperate need for survival, achieved by growth by any means and fuelled by financial resources not available to those pursuing bog-standard Anglicanism – because bog-standard Anglicanism is too radical and scares the horses.
Week by week Thinking Anglicans posts blogs, reports, articles and comments that describe and critique and increasingly, from new conservative vanguard, support the contemporary salvation culture and the irreconcilable differences about sexuality and gender argued over in Synod and House of Bishops meetings. For me, the healthy, unconditionally loving, visionary, faith-deepening, open primary centre of Christian faith is becoming increasingly difficult to find. It’s there, somewhere, lingering, undervalued and unloved, no longer sufficiently understood.
Human societies are breaking through taboos about sexuality, gender and intimacy, the taboos of gay sex and marriage that were once thought to be definitive of sin, resulting in God’s displeasure, condemnation and judgment. God’s displeasure, condemnation and judgement is still around, but now directed against those who dare to be different, intuitive, self-aware, independent spirits. I have lived for sixty-five years in the permissive Christian culture outside the boundaries of “orthodox, traditional, Biblical, God-given Christian faith” that Diarmaid MacCulloch describes.
Where do Archbishops Justin and Stephen and the majority of today’s Church of England bishops stand? Most of the time they are knee deep in fudge and prevarication; actually, it’s more like up to their navels – their genitals submerged in fudge. They lack the courage and spiritual freedom that is integral to our knowledge and consciousness of life on our fragile planet in the twenty first century, living in a precarious global environment in a universe of unimaginable dimensions with fragile international political and economic relationships, competitive religious systems and tribal belief systems venerating a less than almighty, universal, unconditionally loving God.