Beginning Advent

Happy Advent!

Well, possibly.  As far as Protestants and Catholics concerned, Advent this year doesn’t start until 3^rd December, which is the latest possible start date.  And as I said in my last post, in the Orthodox Church it has already been in fast mode for over two weeks now.  But this, at any rate, is the day when Advent calendars start. 

The campaigning organisation Transform Trade this morning sent me the first email of their Injustice Advent calendar, asking volunteers to do 24 actions over 24 days to make the world a better place.  Today, I signed an email to a number of fashion companies asking them to defend the rights of textiles workers in their supply chain working from home in India.  I don’t know what the other 23 actions will be about.

It’s easy to sign petitions.  It’s easy to wear seasonally blue and purple clothes for Advent.  It’s even possible (at a pinch) to stick to a pre-Christmas diet, though that’s tougher when it comes to resisting the pizza that my friends are sharing in the pub, the remains of a jug of hot chocolate in the café where I work where the barrista made far too much and it will only be wasted if I don’t drink it, or the hand-made cupcakes we had in the shop today for our evening opening to celebrate the switching-on of the Christmas lights.

What is harder for me is deciding whether I’m even glad that Christmas is coming, which involves deciding how I feel about Jesus, and therefore whether I’m glad that he was born or not.  The trouble is that, nearly nine years ago, I decided to take a contrarian approach to the gospels, starting from the assumption that Jesus said everything that the gospels report him as saying, but that the meaning of the gospels, and Jesus’s motives, were completely different from everything Christianity has taught for the past two thousand years.

What if he was the opposite of everything the prophets hoped the Messiah would be, and everything the Church since the 1^st century onwards has said that Christ is?  How could he be Isaiah’s ‘Prince of Peace’ when Matthew’s gospel quotes him as saying “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword”?  And if Jesus wanted violence and hatred rather than peace and love, and Jesus is God and shows us what God is truly like, how could Paul have been right in writing that the fruit of God’s Spirit in our lives is ‘love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control’?

I am far from the first person to assume that I am the only one to have discovered what Jesus really meant, and that his disciples, who shared his cultural background, actually heard him speaking, and had far more conversations with him than the few that got written down, completely misunderstood him.  Most people who take this route come up with an idea of Jesus that suits their personal needs.  Being thoroughly neurotic, I felt a need to be miserable, so I decided, back around the beginning of 2015, that Jesus regarded all humans as evil and came to tell us that we’re all going to hell.

Thankfully, the other important thing that happened to me in 2015 was that I met PDB11 and that we fell in love with each other.  Perhaps if I hadn’t had a crisis of faith in God’s love, I wouldn’t even have believed that I needed a human’s love, and would never have done anything so self-indulgent as to join a dating website.

At any rate, since PDB11 is intensely logical (and happened to be studying for a theology degree at the time when I met him), he pointed out the many fallacies in my argument.  For one thing, he said, Christianity isn’t based on the Bible (after all, the New Testament hadn’t even been written when Christianity began, just as the books of the Hebrew Bible hadn’t been written when Judaism began), or even on the belief that Jesus is God, but on the belief that Jesus is the Saviour.  So if the early Christians were wrong about Jesus being the Saviour, why should they happen to be right about him being God?  Why shouldn’t he just be some random lunatic whose words no-one need take seriously?

‘But don’t lots of people, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or atheist, respect Jesus as a moral teacher?’ I countered.  ‘Yes,’ PDB11 said, ‘but that’s because they don’t interpret his words the way you do!’ 

In fact, virtually nobody except me interprets Jesus’s words the way I do in my most paranoid moments, and most of the few who do interpret him this way don’t respect him as a great teacher at all.  And the few Christian extremists who insist on taking some of Jesus’s reported sayings at face value and insist that yes, he really does regard us as evil and want us to hate ourselves still don’t actually believe that he intends to send us to hell.

It occurred to me that there was yet another hole in my reasoning, alongside the question of why we should think Jesus was even important if the Bible writers had been so wrong about him.  If Jesus’s disciples, who lived alongside him, heard his tone of voice when he spoke, and were familiar with his moods and personality, were completely mistaken about what kind of person he was, how could they have perfectly remembered the exact words he used, so as to be able to pass them on to the people who wrote the gospels?  (Not to mention the fact that, while Jesus may have known Greek, he probably mostly spoke in Aramaic, and the gospels are written in Greek, so we don’t have his original words in any case.)

Effectively, I had been reading the gospels as if Jesus’s disciples were all autistic savants with eidetic memories but no understanding of motivation.  Probably I was projecting myself onto them, as I’m autistic myself and, while I don’t have an eidetic memory, I do tend to fixate on the words people use, while ignoring the emotional context of what they mean by those words.  But I couldn’t write a biography of PDB11 in which I recounted our conversations in impeccable detail, and it isn’t historically likely that Jesus’s disciples did.

So, if I am to be a Christian of any sort, I need to take a less dogmatic approach.  Instead of treating the gospels as completely reliable primary sources and everything else as obviously wrong where it contradicts the impression I gain from them, I need to ask myself, ‘What sort of person did those who knew Jesus personally in his life on Earth, and those like Paul who would have heard about Jesus from them, think he was?  And what did they think God was like?’

Another question to ask, alongside this, is ‘What do I think God is like?  Allowing that Bible writers like Paul may not have been always right, and that even if Jesus really was always right, his words may always have been accurately reported, what does reason tell me about what sort of God is worth worshipping?’  As PDB11 says in the first post of his Theological Engineer blog, his approach to theology is to look at different approaches to understanding God, and ask “What works?”

Taking this approach, I think I am gradually moving towards a position of trusting in Jesus’s love, rather than his words as reported in the gospels.  Over the past few years, playing hymns has helped me, because seeing how different hymn-writers, often from different theological traditions, expressed ideas has helped me to identify what are common themes in Christianity.  At the same time, because nobody claims that hymns are Divinely inspired and inerrant, playing hymns allows me to think, ‘No, I don’t agree with that,’ where, in the past, I would have felt uneasy about disagreeing with anything that a Bible writer seems to be saying.

However, lately I have found that I have been able to return to reading the Bible, and treat it in the same way as playing hymns: not as a set of inerrant facts which I just have to accept, or unalterable rules which I just have to obey, but as an assortment of writers’ expression of their experience of God, and a starting-point for me to consider what I believe, and to pray.

In March this year, I left a little book of prayers inspired by Bible verses, Prayers for Emotional Wholeness by Stormie Omartian, at Ashwick and Oakhill Village Hall as I hadn’t read it for years.  Nobody picked it up, and in November, when PDB11 in his role as the organiser of the village hall BookCrossing Zone, decided to cull it from the shelves, I took it back and started re-reading it.

It offers a Bible verse, and a prayer based on this verse, for each day of the year.  So, when I remember, I look at today’s date’s Bible verse and prayer.  I may or may not find it helpful.  But then, if I have time, I read the whole chapter that the verse comes from, and think about it, and pray my own prayer.  And, for the moment, I am starting to find this helpful, when in the past I might just have found it distressing or disturbing.

So over the next few weeks, I will try to write a series of posts that, like Stormie Omartian’s book, start with a verse that I have found thought-provoking, followed a prayer inspired by it.  Or a reflection on what I think about it.  Or maybe a prayer about something else.  At any rate, if they don’t seem particularly relevant to you, I hope that they might encourage you to look at the passage that the verse comes from and find something else helpful in it.