God and His People
In the Bible God choses a covenant people (Israel). In this people he establishes a religion with priests, ceremony, ritual and law. The people must keep the Sabbath, remember tithes and offerings, attend religious ceremonies and repeat religious rituals such as the passover.
Yet those who experienced God's will in this ordered, regular way were not the only ones recorded in the Bible. Indeed, while the books of the law in the Bible cover this conservative, traditional form of religion in great detail, surprisingly it is largly missing from the rest of the Old Testament.
Instead, most of the Old Testament records religious passion, from the poetry of the Psalms and Song of Solomon to the intense visions of the prophets. In these writings God speaks outside of the traditional religion, and works through those on the margins - the "prophets", a-social deviants, frequently considered mad by the rest of society. The message of the Old Testament is that rather than confining himself to the established religious tradition, God is free to speak however he desires, and through whoever he wishes - he is a God of surprises, an iconoclastic God.
Jesus and the Jewish Church
In the New Testament, God choses to become incarnate not as a High Priest but as someone outside of the religious establishment. Indeed, Jesus is almost constantly in conflict with the Jewish religious leaders, both Pharesees and Saducees, most noticably over the issue of the Sabbath. Continually Jesus refuses to keep the Sabbath, for example telling a man who he has healed to break the Sabbath by carrying his bed. He claims he is "Lord of the Sabbath", that he, not the Sabbath, will give rest, that he, like his Father, is working on the Sabbath, and so on.
The Early Church
Although after Jesus' death his disciples began to form a type of church, God again intervened "from outside", calling Paul to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. Paul's teachings were radically opposed to the traditional religious practises of the disciples, and he soon came into conflict with the Jerusalem Church.
Paul taught that Christians had "died to the law", that they were "free", that the gospel was a gospel of "freedom", and he encouraged people to break free of the "yoke of the law". The usual religious practises of holy days, special foods, holy places and holy laws was, according to Paul, overturned by Jesus message of liberty and freedom. However his teachings were constantly being blunted by the traditional religious restrictions taught by the original disciples such as Peter and James.
The Lost Gospel of Freedom
While after Paul's death, Christianity again began to sink back into religion, there were those who began to take seriously the freedom promised by the gospel. These Christians rejected the moves to establish a Church hierarchy based on leaders and led, and instead insisted on the equality of all believers. They encouraged believers to find their own truths, to have their own revelations from God, to create their own gospels, in short, to nurture and attend the Holy Spirit within them, and not have blind faith in religious institutions.
These radical believers were called "Gnostics", after their emphasis on knowledge (gnosis) of the heart, spiritual knowledge from within. In the first few centuries of the Christian era they produced writings of outstanding poetry and beauty, and continued to practise the liberty and freedom of the gospel taught by Jesus and Paul.
When the traditional church gained secular power, this movement of free-thinking, independent gnostics were seen as a threat. Soon gnostics were being persecuted, and their writings destroyed. Finally they were smashed as a movement, but their ideas lived on, continually rising again and again throughout history, a flame that can never by forever extinguished.
The True Role of the Church
The destruction of the gnostic movement shows their weakness as a historical and social force. It must be possible to establish some form of religious organisation which is able to act both as an institution in the world and as a spiritual home for believers.
Because Christianity is not a religion, the Community of Believers has no power as a religion, that is, no power in itself. The Community of Believers has power only insofar as it conforms to the will of God. Indeed, there is always a gap between the Community and God, since God is one who acts and so can always act outside of the community and contrary to its expectations.
The organisation of the Community of Believers is a constant struggle between those who seek to turn Christianity into a religion and those who believe because it is not a religion. Installing religious practises within the Community challanges the whole post-religious realised eschatology of Christianity, and such practises are destabilised, deconstructed or degenerated by True Believers.
Because the Church belongs to the Lord (literally from the Greek kyriakon, meaning belonging to the Lord) and not to man, it may be ruptured, destroyed, split or fragmented by the Lord whenever he chooses. As the Church degenerates into a religion, this of necessity must happen to restore the Spirit to God's people. In Sartre's terminology, the practio-inert must be destroyed by praxis.
Similarly Priests (literally from the Latin presbyter meaning elder) are those who hold the truth of the past within them, much more than simply people with titles given to them by the Church; and Bishops (from the Greek episcopos, meaning overseer) are those who can see over the top of life. This is the meaning of the Biblical title "the priesthood of all believers", the fact that we all hold the same Spirit within our souls.
In a more complex manner Vicars (from the Latin vicarus meaning supplying in the place of another) and Pope (from the Latin papa meaning Father) disseminate the semiotics of the Godhead into the world, the emptying of the God into Humanity. The Mass (which means literally to send away, i.e. to disseminate) again repeats this unblocking of the sediment at the mouth of the soul (even the soul of the world). This free, uninterrupted flow of the incarnation is an eternal insemination, the alien God emptying himself perpetually into his bride the Church. Thus the Community's hymen becomes heavy with memories from this primal God. For those who say Christ's body became female at the resurrection this suggests the true (primal) source of the Eucharist, which to complete the symbolism should be taken once a month.
The Catholic Church
The Catholic, meaning "Universal" Church is not entered by an individual, but itself enters the soul of the believer. The Catholic truth is a many sided truth, a complex, ambiguous, changing truth. In this truth, the Real Presence in the Host is the reality and the world that presents the physical bread the illusion. All doctrines are 'forms of life' from St Augustine to John Calvin, from Thomas Aquinas to Aleister Crowley, they should be understood in Wittgenstein's sense of meaning, in terms of how they function. In the true Catholic Church there is no heresy.
It is an ideology of many religions that they hold the whole truth, that God works directly and uniquely through them, and that no one comes to God but through them. However as the theologian Karl Barth said, Christianity is not fundamentally a religion, for religion is man's search for God, but in Christianity it is God who seeks after man. Because God is a God who acts, he cannot be labelled or pinned down, since he is always free to act contrary to how we expect.
The sacraments must be understood within this context. They are always overdetermined and superabundant with meaning. For example marriage is a sacrament because it reveals God's relation with his covenant partner. Yet God has frequently changed his covenant partner, and indeed had more than one covenant partner at once. What does his reveal about the true nature of marriage? The fracturing of dogma generated by these truths releases more grace for those who know how to hold it.
Further, those joined to God are already married, the ceremony is for the purpose of adjusting the world to the already established state of the believer, it changes the world, not the believer. This is the purpose of the sacrament in general, it adjusts the world to the reality of the believer, it sucks the truth from the believer into the world.
The Sin of Religion
Yet with religion, and particularly the Christian religion, may we not find a path to approach God? Strictly speaking, no, for we are no nearer God in the human activity of religion than in the human activity of sport, cooking or theatre going. However because part of religion is trying to speak about God, in language we may begin to discern his shape and form. Theology is a poetry about God.
Let us begin with the way theology speaks about God, man and sin.
In traditional religious ideology, we "sin" against God when we fail to perform some religious act, such as giving the correct offering, attending a religious service or eating "unclean" food. To "atone" for this sin we must perform some act of penance, and seek the forgiveness of God. In this way we are constantly in need of seeking the forgiveness of God, and the means to attain this forgiveness are typically provided by the church.
The genius of Luther's break from this morbid and painful world is to return to Paul's emphasis on Christian freedom. For Luther, to be a Christian is to be "imputed" with the righteousness of Christ. No matter what we do, we can never be sinful, for we are no longer under the "law", and therefore no longer under condemnation. "Sin boldly" said Luther, for all that is needed for salvation is faith, not good works. The liberation and joy that comes from entering this new Eden is such that good works will follow naturally.
The Meaning of the Sacraments
Yet while Luther, Paul and the gnostics rightly emphasise the freedom of the gospel, there remains the need to produce positive realisations of that freedom, and not simply negative ones. How can believers effectively benefit each other, how can symbols, art, writings, prayers and so on enrich the community of believers?
Whilst many people find various forms of worship beneficial, such as prayers, hymns, preaching and musical works, frequently the primary reason for worship is to share in the sacrament of the bread and wine. Yet what is it about these particular 5 or 7 signs that has special significance?
The promise of each sacrament is the reception of grace. Some sacraments even "mark the soul" with an indelible mark of grace that cannot be removed. These marks of grace imply the opening up of the soul, the drawing near to God at these times of sharing the sacrament. The sacrament, in promising to be a door to the other side, also marks itself with a danger of blasphamy. There is always the possibility that the sign which points towards the ultimate will seek to replace the ultimate with itself. The idol may not always desire to be the idol.
Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Holy Orders and Marriage all stand at boundries, they are on borderlines. These edges of life, as all practioners of magick know, are heavy with spiritual energy and may be used to stand briefly between two worlds. Yet these channels of grace may be seen as tunnels into the unconscious, opportunities to fall into the black hole of the soul.
Religion as a Human Creation
There is an important balance between religion as discovery and religion as creation. Often people see a religion as something eternally existing, something that has always been true and always will be true. In this ideology, the individual has no place except to obey the iron will of God, unbending, unchanging, unfeeling. Soemtimes people see religion as something which can just be invented, rearranged and adjusted to suit the individual - seeing the different religions as offering a "pick n' mix" of beliefs and doctrines. Rather than either of these extremes, it is wise to live within an existing religious structure, as if within a haunted house, but with a view to meeting the ghosts.
These ghosts of past doctrines must be controlled and adjusted with skill and knowledge. The believer is free to kill doctrines and beliefs, but within the psychic economy of the spiritual often the dead are more powerful than the living. Doctrines and teachings (the foreknowledge of God, the trinity, the nature of Christ, the reality of hell) are huge phantoms living in the body of the believer, which have to be altered, mesmerised even deconstructed, by theology, poetry, magick, language and art. New sacraments can be created, or can hideously appear, to release strange grace like a sinister gas into the soul of the Christian. Sacraments, living between two worlds, can appear as obscene objects/abjects resonating with an evil pulse, yet guarded by angels.