Richard Holloway
During Easter Week I read Richard Holloway's new book, Leaving Alexandria. His exposure of what has gone wrong with Christianity is relentless, although he is perhaps too hard on himself. His unconscious assumptions, such as the unqualified and somewhat patronising remark that the Church's purpose is to look after people —true, perhaps, of the down-and-outs in his life, but not of the rest of us who resent the clerical attitude that the non-ordained are idiots—are just as revelatory as revelatory as what he knowingly dissects. Here are a few excerpts:
p. 150 There was a subversive tradition in Xty that claimed it was sinners who got Jesus, people who couldn't mind their Ps and Qs, not the righteous. It was the hopeless prodigal who understood, not his upright and disciplined big brother. Where to start trying to explain all that? But the dissonance went even deeper. It may have been fear of being found out myself, but I actually felt a strong revulsion against the morality-policing aspect of religion that was such a strong element in the Scottish tradition. I was attracted to the prophetic voice of faith that spoke against structural or [p. 151] institutional sin and the way the powerful ordered the world to suit themselves. I hated the prurient kind of religion that pried into personal weaknesses and took pleasure in exposing them. Yet, to the eyes of many, the ordained ministry was freighted with this reputation, which was why people felt they had to guard their reactions when they were around me. No wonder clergy sometimes fell into the trap of overcompensating for this misunderstanding by embarrassing demonstrations of their worldliness and humanity. The whole business was so tainted with false expectations that only the saintly seemed impervious to the treacherous currents that pulled me along. And I was no saint.
...The inner disconnect between the Church's official theology and my own version of Xty was one I did not fully comprehend at first...I had been propelled into religion in search of a great love to which I could give myself away. I was in pursuit of an object ever flying from desire, but I had stumbled into a complex institutional reality whose on relationship with that object was highly ambivalent. The ambivalence lay in the difference between modes of pursuit and possession. The romantic is always in pursuit, while the realist wants to possess. All institutions over-claim for themselves and end up believing more in their own existence than in the vision that propelled them into existence in the first place. This is particularly true of religious institutions. Religions may begin as vehicles of longing for mysteries beyond description, but they end up claiming exclusive descriptive rights to them. They segue from the ardour and [p. 152] uncertainty of seeking to the confidence and complacence of possession. they shift from poetry to packaging, which is what people want. They don't want to spend years wandering in the wilderness of doubt. They want the promised land of certainty, and religious realists are quick to provide it for them. The erection of infallible systems of belief is a well-understood device to still humanity's fear of being lost in life's dark wood without a compass. 'Supreme conviction is a self-cure for infestation of doubts.' That is why David Hume noted that, while errors in philosophy were only ridiculous, errors in religion were dangerous. They were dangerous because when supreme conviction is threatened it turns nasty...
... In the liberal tradition..., the church was essentially a paternal unit, a way of looking after people. However, there was a hidden tension, which was how you gathered the people in the first place in order to look after them. Liberals were better at the looking-after bit than at the gathering, which is why they tended to rely on congregations that had been collected by previous generations. It was Evangelicals who were the great gatherers. The trouble is, to be an effective gatherer you had to be excessive in your beliefs. It takes excessive certainty to convince others and override their doubts. Though liberal Catholics like me were no good at landing converts, we were quite good at keeping them on board once they'd been landed, because we were always living with our own doubts and were therefore reassuring to other doubters.... Something cared...
p. 155 The journey, from a movement that tried to follow the example of Jesus to an institution that hardened round a particular interpretation of his meaning, took hundreds of years to complete...
p. 156 .... Wrong words have to be punished because they threaten to erode the citadel of belief into which we have escaped from the cold winds of an empty universe...
p. 157 ... For this school, the Resurrection was a psychic event in the lives of the followers of Jesus that was later given mythic power...
[2nd view] ... suddenly, [Peter[ is overwhelmed that Jesus' death was not a defeat, but the release into the world of his message of forgiveness and love. That turnaround was the Resurrection...
p. 156 [3rd] ...consistent story... if God can create a universe out of nothing, why can't he raise Jesus from the nothingness of death into a new kind of being?
[4th] ...Believing the Resurrection becomes a way of living, not of speaking...
p. 159 ... Strictly speaking, agnosticism should not be described as a hypothesis, because it is not so much positing an answer to the question as learning to live without one. It encourages us to live gratefully within uncertainty and give thanks to we-know-not-what for the gift of being. The risk run by this position is that it can lead to intellectual smugness at the expense of those who refuse or are incapable of, living with such uncertainty ...
p. 161 Terry Eagleton...'God,...if he does turn out to exist has absolutely no reason for doing so. He is his own reason for being.' The existence of such a being is a possible solution to the riddle of the universe, so let me buy this ticket and start the God-game...
p. 162 [But]... you cannot have a relationship with a hypothesis ...
p. 164...It was alive [light over ambry] and suggested a presence; but it was a presence that also suggested an absence because of what was not there ....
...The sacramental system, for all its beauty and potency, is based upon the presence of an absence ...
p. 185 ... Faith, by definition, always implies doubt. There can be something desirable, something worth doing, in the decision to believe—but it never gives us certainty! And here's the catch. Revealed religions tend to blow a smokescreen round the living reality of the faith-doubt experience and out of the smoke emerges—doctrinal certainty! Behind a great clatter of mirrors and a great fog of smoke thy move from faith to certainty. Believers are not encouraged to take the plunge of faith, they are invited to sear to the certainty of a series of historic claims that come in proposition form. That is why religious history is so full of disputes over competing interpretations of the certainties contained in the faith package. I have already mentioned the diary of Edward VI who noted the execution of Joan Bocher, precisely because she refused to accept on of these claims—the Virgin Birth—as a historical fact. Once we get to this stage in the evolution of religious institutions, we are no longer playing the ancient game of faith. We are no longer saying, let us suppose that God exists and Jesus is his revealed meaning and live in faith as though it were true. We cannot know any of this for certain, but there is beauty in the choice and it will give our lives a purpose, and maybe pay the universe a compliment it does not [p. 186] deserve. Care to join the experiment? Care to do the [unreadable] and lovely thing? That bracing approach disappears, and is replaced with or sworn upon the [check copy] the truth package of absolute religion...
How does such hard an punishing certainty emerge from the existential gamble of faith? Paradoxically it is lack of faith and fear of doubt that prompt it. What do you do if you can no longer live with the doubt that is co-active with faith? You try to cure yourself. And the best cure for doubt is over-conviction...
p. 285 Conservative Evangelicals, I discovered, did not negotiate. They asserted what had come to them from [p. 286] above, from Outside. It was written, so the matter was closed. If human history could be at least partly conducted as a journey into new knowledge, then to go on that journey convinced you already know everything there was to know about human relations foreclosed the future entirely. There could be no stranger waiting around the next bend offering you a new annunciation...
p. 150 There was a subversive tradition in Xty that claimed it was sinners who got Jesus, people who couldn't mind their Ps and Qs, not the righteous. It was the hopeless prodigal who understood, not his upright and disciplined big brother. Where to start trying to explain all that? But the dissonance went even deeper. It may have been fear of being found out myself, but I actually felt a strong revulsion against the morality-policing aspect of religion that was such a strong element in the Scottish tradition. I was attracted to the prophetic voice of faith that spoke against structural or [p. 151] institutional sin and the way the powerful ordered the world to suit themselves. I hated the prurient kind of religion that pried into personal weaknesses and took pleasure in exposing them. Yet, to the eyes of many, the ordained ministry was freighted with this reputation, which was why people felt they had to guard their reactions when they were around me. No wonder clergy sometimes fell into the trap of overcompensating for this misunderstanding by embarrassing demonstrations of their worldliness and humanity. The whole business was so tainted with false expectations that only the saintly seemed impervious to the treacherous currents that pulled me along. And I was no saint.
...The inner disconnect between the Church's official theology and my own version of Xty was one I did not fully comprehend at first...I had been propelled into religion in search of a great love to which I could give myself away. I was in pursuit of an object ever flying from desire, but I had stumbled into a complex institutional reality whose on relationship with that object was highly ambivalent. The ambivalence lay in the difference between modes of pursuit and possession. The romantic is always in pursuit, while the realist wants to possess. All institutions over-claim for themselves and end up believing more in their own existence than in the vision that propelled them into existence in the first place. This is particularly true of religious institutions. Religions may begin as vehicles of longing for mysteries beyond description, but they end up claiming exclusive descriptive rights to them. They segue from the ardour and [p. 152] uncertainty of seeking to the confidence and complacence of possession. they shift from poetry to packaging, which is what people want. They don't want to spend years wandering in the wilderness of doubt. They want the promised land of certainty, and religious realists are quick to provide it for them. The erection of infallible systems of belief is a well-understood device to still humanity's fear of being lost in life's dark wood without a compass. 'Supreme conviction is a self-cure for infestation of doubts.' That is why David Hume noted that, while errors in philosophy were only ridiculous, errors in religion were dangerous. They were dangerous because when supreme conviction is threatened it turns nasty...
... In the liberal tradition..., the church was essentially a paternal unit, a way of looking after people. However, there was a hidden tension, which was how you gathered the people in the first place in order to look after them. Liberals were better at the looking-after bit than at the gathering, which is why they tended to rely on congregations that had been collected by previous generations. It was Evangelicals who were the great gatherers. The trouble is, to be an effective gatherer you had to be excessive in your beliefs. It takes excessive certainty to convince others and override their doubts. Though liberal Catholics like me were no good at landing converts, we were quite good at keeping them on board once they'd been landed, because we were always living with our own doubts and were therefore reassuring to other doubters.... Something cared...
p. 155 The journey, from a movement that tried to follow the example of Jesus to an institution that hardened round a particular interpretation of his meaning, took hundreds of years to complete...
p. 156 .... Wrong words have to be punished because they threaten to erode the citadel of belief into which we have escaped from the cold winds of an empty universe...
p. 157 ... For this school, the Resurrection was a psychic event in the lives of the followers of Jesus that was later given mythic power...
[2nd view] ... suddenly, [Peter[ is overwhelmed that Jesus' death was not a defeat, but the release into the world of his message of forgiveness and love. That turnaround was the Resurrection...
p. 156 [3rd] ...consistent story... if God can create a universe out of nothing, why can't he raise Jesus from the nothingness of death into a new kind of being?
[4th] ...Believing the Resurrection becomes a way of living, not of speaking...
p. 159 ... Strictly speaking, agnosticism should not be described as a hypothesis, because it is not so much positing an answer to the question as learning to live without one. It encourages us to live gratefully within uncertainty and give thanks to we-know-not-what for the gift of being. The risk run by this position is that it can lead to intellectual smugness at the expense of those who refuse or are incapable of, living with such uncertainty ...
p. 161 Terry Eagleton...'God,...if he does turn out to exist has absolutely no reason for doing so. He is his own reason for being.' The existence of such a being is a possible solution to the riddle of the universe, so let me buy this ticket and start the God-game...
p. 162 [But]... you cannot have a relationship with a hypothesis ...
p. 164...It was alive [light over ambry] and suggested a presence; but it was a presence that also suggested an absence because of what was not there ....
...The sacramental system, for all its beauty and potency, is based upon the presence of an absence ...
p. 185 ... Faith, by definition, always implies doubt. There can be something desirable, something worth doing, in the decision to believe—but it never gives us certainty! And here's the catch. Revealed religions tend to blow a smokescreen round the living reality of the faith-doubt experience and out of the smoke emerges—doctrinal certainty! Behind a great clatter of mirrors and a great fog of smoke thy move from faith to certainty. Believers are not encouraged to take the plunge of faith, they are invited to sear to the certainty of a series of historic claims that come in proposition form. That is why religious history is so full of disputes over competing interpretations of the certainties contained in the faith package. I have already mentioned the diary of Edward VI who noted the execution of Joan Bocher, precisely because she refused to accept on of these claims—the Virgin Birth—as a historical fact. Once we get to this stage in the evolution of religious institutions, we are no longer playing the ancient game of faith. We are no longer saying, let us suppose that God exists and Jesus is his revealed meaning and live in faith as though it were true. We cannot know any of this for certain, but there is beauty in the choice and it will give our lives a purpose, and maybe pay the universe a compliment it does not [p. 186] deserve. Care to join the experiment? Care to do the [unreadable] and lovely thing? That bracing approach disappears, and is replaced with or sworn upon the [check copy] the truth package of absolute religion...
How does such hard an punishing certainty emerge from the existential gamble of faith? Paradoxically it is lack of faith and fear of doubt that prompt it. What do you do if you can no longer live with the doubt that is co-active with faith? You try to cure yourself. And the best cure for doubt is over-conviction...
p. 285 Conservative Evangelicals, I discovered, did not negotiate. They asserted what had come to them from [p. 286] above, from Outside. It was written, so the matter was closed. If human history could be at least partly conducted as a journey into new knowledge, then to go on that journey convinced you already know everything there was to know about human relations foreclosed the future entirely. There could be no stranger waiting around the next bend offering you a new annunciation...
posted by Maggie Ross at 8:01 am
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