The Reading(s) Room

Drew’s Gospel (November 2006)

“I believe, help my unbelief!”

The important point to note as you begin the delightful task of dissecting this gospel is its date. Once upon a time my gospel to you would have been immovable, irrevocable, outside of time and space, a towering granite hunk of eternal certainty and wisdom. Alas that time has passed. My journey of faith (and disbelief) has moulded my heart of stone to a heart of flesh, warm blood coursing through its growing, pulsing and uncertain doctrine.  In other words, this date serves as a disclaimer. If you are repelled by the frustratingly incomplete, the shamelessly imperfect and gaping holes of epistemological uncertainty, look away now. This faith of mine, like any relationship, shifts with the ebb and flow of time. But it remains real. 

Where to begin? The resonance of my past life of methodological certainty does not elude me completely and as such I begin with the beginning, where there was the Word. I wear on my sleeve the scars of creationism that was once the fervent and definite cornerstone of my belief. It still has its claws in me although my reading of scripture has changed. Whilst Genesis 1-2 no longer demands of me a literal 6 day creation as it once did, the God of love, the Creator, the divine animal rights Activist (Jonah 4:11) that is YHWH, whom I found and still find wading throughout my Biblical story cannot lower Himself to ordain the evolution by genetic mutation that is the demanded dogma of modern biology. Thus I am still the voice of protest, the lonely and wild-eyed dissident who dares stand in the face of scientific orthodoxy with no greater scientific credentials than combined GCSE Sciences. For me, God is still the Creator in a way that does not and cannot fit with the apparent cruelty and immense, immense waste that is demanded by 4.6 billion years of genetic mutation. Is this a position of faith? Absolutely yes. Might it change? Indeed it may, but then barely a day goes by without the biology (?) of neo-Darwinism taking another sideways step. As such, my foe and I can continue to develop and change together. My colours can no more be nailed to the mast of dogmatic scientism than they can the mast of literal 6-day creationism. 

My Gospel therefore demands a good God, a good creation and, I suppose, a fall. Here is where my uncertainties come to the fore. The fall is central to my gospel, in that my hope for resurrection and a good physical world, free from death, pain and suffering resonates with a faith that says such a physical reality can one day be (and perhaps once was?) A God that curses Her creation with a barbarous fall from perfection could quite rightly be challenged in the same way that the wasteful and capricious God of theistic evolution has been rejected in my earlier summary. I have no answer to that complaint as yet. My theology is still gasping to catch up with my questions. Nevertheless, this World that I live in continues to confront me with both its beautiful goodness and its inherent tragedy. Death may be a biological necessity for life as we know it but that does not make it good. The agony of a disease-riddled body or starving child before death cannot be celebrated as the beauty of the intended creation. For me, the challenge posed by Dostoevsky through Ivan in the Brothers Karamazov remains, that if “the tears of one tortured child” are the cost of my existence in this God-ordained existence, then “I most respectfully return him the ticket.”  Thus my gospel at once celebrates and mourns creation, grasping the insane hope that one day death will be no more and that life can be made complete, with God being all in all.

This hope is made manifest through the voice of YHWH crying out in the deliverance of Israel from slavery, and the continuing prophetic voice that demands justice and mercy, for a world where the lion lies down with the lamb and justice and mercy flow as streams of water. Mostly though, this hope is made complete through Jesus the Nazarene whose existence, teachings, crucifixion and resurrection remain the centre-point of my Gospel.

My Jesus is bewildering, wonderful and hopelessly unsystematic. Is he God? Yes I think so. What does this mean? I don’t know. I believe that humanity is made in the image of God, and that this image was fulfilled utterly in Jesus in a unique and exemplary way. I believe that Jesus eschewed the reverence and idol-worship of him that distracted from the mustard seed of the kingdom that he was so intent on sowing. I believe that we are more called to follow Jesus than to worship him. I believe he sought to empower humanity in an earthly and real way, not to distract with the spiritually abstract and the politically sterile language of religion. The gospel of God, of Jesus is the good news that I seek to live. 

This Good News is reiterated again and again through Jesus’ Kingdom where the powers of a fallen creation are challenged. As Walter Wink surmises, The Powers are Good, The Powers are Fallen, the Powers can be redeemed. Jesus’ Kingdom is not about heaven and hell. If that were true, he did a pretty shoddy job of preaching it. Jesus’ kingdom is about the here and now, about the reign of God breaking into the fallen creation and turning it upside down. To save time here, you can cut to “the Gospel according to Becky” where her exposition of Jesus’ ministry to the marginalised and challenge to the powers encapsulates what I could ramble on about here forever.

This radical and revolutionary message was such that Jesus knew it would end in his death.  This was no pre-ordained sacrifice from YHWH. This was not a mechanism that was required to enable God’s offended honour to be satisfied. This was not a sadistic act of divine child abuse. This was Jesus challenging the ultimate enemy in the knowledge that it could not hold him down. The cross is too immense and slippery to fully grapple with here. I do believe that it exposed the crass cowardice of violence, the impotence of hate and the powerlessness of death. I believe that it was a pivotal event in the history of this cosmos, along with the resurrection forming the pivotal moment of this whole story. The resurrection was real, whatever that means. It remains my hope, my utterly foolish hope, yet one that I cling to with a grasp of steel. As in Christ all die, so shall we all be resurrected.

So Jesus has shown me the gospel, that it is something for me to act upon, for us as a church to act upon, for us as humanity to be swept up in, for us the creation to be consumed with. Can it be accomplished by endeavour and faith alone? I don’t think so. I still think that the kingdom can only come in complete fulfilment when God once again steps into the frame in a gleeful and shocking way. Call this the second coming, the eschaton or the Big Crunch. I can only imagine that one day there will be more than this, and that it will be wonderful, that the kingdom of Shalom, of peace and wholeness will be complete, that God’s laughter and tears will wash over us all. I believe that we will all be part of that kingdom, all that has ever been, is being and will be. Christians do not have a monopoly on the kingdom. Indeed, humans do not have a monopoly on it. I can no more model the self sacrifice of Christ than a Buddhist Monk. I can no more demonstrate the life of non-violence than the Hindu Gandhi. I can no more act with the unwavering obedience to YHWH than the most sincere of Muslims. I can no more claim ownership of YHWH than a Jew whose lineage stretches back to the calling of Abram. So I am a hopeful universalist. I am certainly inclusivist. Perhaps some will reject God and even the most ludicrous and generous display of love, acceptance and grace will not be enough to pull them into the laughing arms of the Almighty. Who knows? What I am sure of is that God will never reject them. The door will never be shut. The bus will continue to run from the grey town to the light of the High Country, forever running on the fuel of grace.

This is my gospel.

Andrew Worthley