Behold!
The veil of the temple is the last iron curtain!
Transcendence will be torn from top to bottom by the solar Christ
the son of God who fell like lightning from heaven and brought fire to humanity enflaming our souls with desire, heresy, pleasure and freedom.
The Grand Inquisitor Bishops will have their fat souls of flesh
ripped to pieces by the Christ-Crow.
Behold the carrion of superstition!
I favour poetry, ranting and parable in expressing religious views, despite the fact I am very interested in philosophy. This is because religious modernism tried the route of translating theology into philosophy, which was part of the whole modernist meta-narrative project, whilst postmodernism is more about the plurality and contingency of narrative and story. My problem with Cupitt is that he spends too much time with philosophy. How is your typical believer and priest supposed to translate this back into practical religion? (In the film Jesus in Montreal a theologian says that the Bishop has prevented the theology department speaking the truth, therefore the actors/artists must speak it).
I think I can state my philosophical position fairly clearly. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas describes a time when language truly communicates: instead of language hiding reality behind stereotypes, the true complexity of reality is communicated. This is a good example of the failure of philosophy - it produces abstract notions, stereotypes, whereas one feature of art is its ability to explode the common, general, abstract with too much detail, too much life, too much reality.
Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity says that "the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry", an overdetermination of meaning gives language resonance and beauty.
It is this language of sublime, raw power that theology should seek out. I am encouraged that Empson says that "mescal-eaters have just that impression common among readers of 'pure' poetry, that they are seeing very delightful but new colours" - language can alter the mind: it can drown it in beauty, terrify it with a story, silence it with a poem. This psychosomatic language is how religion works, and the ability to use it marks a religion's success or failure. Religion cannot therefore be ethical and compassionate, not without first exploding the listeners' mind by transgressions, blasphemies, unconscious breaking of taboos, symbols of the forbidden and promises of the unknown.
Thus we can see that simply educating people into the complexity of reality is itself a form of religious enlightenment, for in so doing they are killing their idols, destroying all the contingencies that have been made absolute. (In the Guns N' Roses video of "Knocking on Heaven's Door" Axle Rose has a T-shirt with a picture of Christ's head, and underneath the words "kill your idols", very Tillichian).
Accompanying this view of reality as highly plural, varied, contingent, ambiguous etc. is the recognition that we ourselves are one pattern in this multiplicity (this is very similar to the neural network model of the brain's representation of knowledge). Thus we ourselves cannot simply accept meaning and value as contingent for us, which in a religious context means we cannot justify scepticism from contingency. All beliefs and doctrines must be created or discovered by ourselves, we are not to be passive receptacles of dogma but creators, incarnating our own truth.
Intellectually we should be aware of the variety of religious beliefs, but spiritually we will find that only some teachings speak to us (the same way that only some art speaks to us). Julia Kristeva speaks of the act of creation by an artist as the creation of a second body, the resurrection of the body, - a transubstantiation. There is an important connection between artistic creation and religion. George Steiner argues that without religion we will have no artistic creations of value; alternately Julian Jaynes believes that art began when the Gods left man (i.e. when consciousness developed in the bicameral
mind see his The Origin of Consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, quoted in Cupitt's What is a Story?, I think). See also, of course, Jung.
Creating our own truth is not producing our own beliefs, just inventing things ourselves (the "if I want to read a gospel I'll write one" attitude). It means finding ourselves in the web of ideas and stories that we call language. For example suppose we wish to remember something, we may think that the way to do it is to will the memory to return. However a usually more successful solution is to produce the right associations for the memory to appear, perhaps by visiting a place or looking at a photograph. Thus whilst biologically memories are "in our head", in practise they exist in the world and we search for them in the world.
Similarly our "self" exists as a pattern of beliefs in philosophy if we bother to study philosophy. Before we study it, we are not aware if we are materialists or idealists, nominalists or universalists, but through studying it we discover ourselves. Religion similarly tells us more about ourselves through what we find "appeals to us" (as if our self were a magic pot: add certain ingredients, beliefs, ideas, stories and symbols and see what appears).
Derrida calls "ghosts" those memories that we have that were never originally thought by us (thus a pilgrimage is a journey to recall memories we never had, a search for ghosts). This discovery of our memories, our ghosts, our selves is something do though art, religion and philosophy and therefore does not have to be some religious, philosophical or artistic work we produce ourselves. However a mark of true "gnosis" (see below) is creation as well as consumption.
Religion is important to see as varied and multiple. Art is important in establishing this through the media. How many people have their idea of Jesus formed through "Jesus of Nazareth"? Quite a lot I should imagine. If those people could also see "The Last Temptation", "Jesus in Montreal", Dennis Potter's "Son of Man" and so on, this would broaden their idea of how Christ is created, not revealed.
For me an important aspect of this discussion, both intellectually and spiritually, is Gnosticism - in particular as it is explained in Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels. From a practical point of view, the Gnostics seem very similar to radicals; they were independent free-thinkers (spiritual creation was a sign of "gnosis"), were non-realist (particularly on the resurrection, there is a bit of the Treatise on Resurrection which criticises the realist view saying something like "the orthodox say we teach that the resurrection is an illusion, not at all - rather the world is an illusion and the resurrection reality"), organised non-hierarchically (they took turns, including women, to lead services), and were opposed to martyrdom (they took the oath to the Emperor as an example of Paul's eating meat sacrificed to idols).
Spiritually I think their writings are much more interesting than the folk religion of orthodoxy. They have some very challenging ideas, and their writings tend towards the paradoxical/Zen side of Christ's teachings rather than the miracles, parousia, resurrection etc. It also means you can "battle" with realists using their own mythological language.
As an aside, another approach to Jesus I know of is Albert Nolan's Jesus Before Christianity. Instead of emphasising the mythology so that it is clear it cannot be meant literally (which is what gnosticism tends to do), he argues that Jesus' teachings on the Kingdom should be the basis of a Christian's life, and forget about the cosmic significance of his death. This seems to me an interesting alternative way around the absurdity of the resurrection.
One final point about gnosticism, I'm sure Tillich was very influenced by it. His idea of the "God beyond god" is pure gnosticism, and his sermons contain positive references to Gnostic myths. Similarly his idea of sin as estrangement rather than seen in ethical terms seems very Gnostic.
As you can see, I have a very different conception of radical Christianity to Cupitt. Whereas for Cupitt religion must be purged of mysticism and "odd" experiences and instead the ethical side emphasised, I am all for getting a religious "head" and think ethics has very little to do with religion. (This has two implications, firstly it doesn't matter whether the Bible is unethical in its treatment of women, animals, people etc., ethics is wholly secular and immanent; second we can gain religious/spiritual knowledge from highly unethical sources, e.g. Aleister Crowley!)
So to specifically answer your questions about attacking folk religion and teaching postmodern conceptions of truth, I would say the following.
Folk religion is an ignorance of the alternatives, it can be deconstructed by showing how what people believe leads them to conclusions they were not aware of. The idea that Christianity is not a religion I think is quite good, Paul's teaching that the resurrected body is not made of flesh and blood is useful, the idea of the three-in-one of the trinity means that their conception is already part of a larger unity (and that is also part of another larger unity etc.) whilst at the same time each element contains a threesome, each element of which further fragments etc. makes God impossible to conceptualise.
However people won't abandon their folk religion until they have an alternative which is a way of life, and not a series of doubts and questions (have you ever seen the book A Course in Miracles? it has some useful techniques). (See also the Quest/Verdict journal mentioned below).
Stories are important, people will relate more to Tillich after they have heard the story about the woman with the green stockings than if he is just a theologian who thought God was the Ground of Being. The difference between evangelical books and liberal books is that the evangelical books use lots of stories and anecdotes - not very intellectual but that is what your average churchgoer will read.
On postmodern theories of truth we need to show that meaning is created, not discovered or revealed. This can be shown from analysing the Bible to show how the writers invented and created, not copied. This point can then be used to argue that we similarly must create our own truth.
I'll also enclose a few articles, some stuff about gnosticism and some book reviews - you can keep these. Also for SOF I did some interviews with various theologians, you can have a copy of their answers (my AC/DC is my response to Cupitt's replies).
You may find an article I wrote on animals useful. Whilst reading it meditate on this
Blasphemy has a sensual beauty
Whose poetry ennobles humanity
What is heaven but a place full of obedient animals? God knows heaven is a flower of evil too! Radicals prefer the sweeping planes of hell and the grotesque red palaces of Pandemonium, where we may seek out the ruined temple of Christ, whose terrible stone statues are now overgrown and crumbling and whose melancholy red mist is moved only by wolves and vultures.
I have a number of copies of a US journal called QUEST (formerly Verdict) which is interesting in that it is not intellectual but has a very open, exploring view of religion and Christianity. It was originally evangelical and some of its statements are rather (at best) ambiguous towards realism (I am doing my best to educate them on this!) However on important issues like the resurrection it obviously doesn't hold the "realist" view but it does use the symbol "resurrection" to refer to a post-religious faith that emphasises human freedom and creativity, which it opposes to the evil triad of sin, religion and death.
I think its ideas are excellent when dealing with folk-religion and evangelicals, since it argues for values that I believe in whilst avoiding the sort of intellectual baggage I can't help bringing to bear on issues. I use Quest/Verdict arguments to move people from folk-religion/fundamentalism towards a liberal middle ground, from where perhaps at some later stage they can proceed to radicalism and beyond. You can keep the journals for as long as you like, but may I have them back when you are finished?
All the best
John Mann
PS. I have just re-read the Clash of Symbols workshop you led at the SOF III conference and was encouraged to see you quote from Elaine Pagels! Do you think many SOF people are simply nostalgic for tradition, ritual and drama? Symbols die when they no longer form part of a meaningful story, so it is no wonder that there was little consensus for which symbols continue to work - radicals have no new story to fit the symbols into!
For myself I find talk of resurrection and Eucharist bizarre since I am convinced that psychologically much of this symbolism works through sublimated sex and gender references. This is why artists today find mixing sex and religion an easy way of producing an effect. For example the idea that the Virgin Mary was a whore is explored in numerous ways by "Madonna", and is dramatised as an historical possibility in Jesus in Montreal, while the female symbol of redemption of Dostoyevsky is usually the holy prostitute - and don't forget the Gnostic myth of Sophia.
The idea that Jesus lost his virginity on the Cross is used in The Last Temptation, Jesus and Mary Chain's song Reverence, and
in the video for Soundgarden's Jesus Christ Pose (images of Christ on the Cross with an erection were used by some Gnostic cults of course, the "chi" cross). There are numerous cultural references to his death as an orgasm, his agony ecstasy, or more generally seeing death as a sexual climax, or sexual orgasm as a form of spiritually cleansing death.
Similarly the idea that Jesus' resurrected body was female is the unconscious story controlling much New Testament symbolism. The Eucharist then becomes the spiritual menstrual period which when eaten by the lovers of Jesus becomes fertilised and bears spiritual fruit. Holy food always gains its significance by unconsciously telling people it is taboo food.
We need to keep two things in mind when considering the power of a symbol. For much of the Christian era art has been devoted to religious ends, only relatively recently has art become so secularised. The fact that religious symbols are less frequently "given life" through art means they are disseminated thinly and obliquely. Thus their significance and poetry is weakened since their ambiguity is drained.
Secondly not only do art and science advance by breaking their own rules, but of course a new religious story gains its power from the awesome blasphemy of its claims. Those artists who are keeping religious symbols alive do so through being able to incorporate significant blasphemous structures in relation to the original framework (e.g. Francis Bacon, Jean-luc Godard, Salman Rushdie and Derek Jarman).
Indie, Goth and Metal groups whose extraordinary use of Christian symbolism is almost entirely blasphemous and heretical (as seen from a traditional viewpoint - they aren't defining themselves as the negative part of a binary couple of course) yet sometimes can be highly individual and creative. Groups such as Creaming Jesus, Godflesh and Christian Death obviously find the symbolism only works when combined with "forbidden" associations.
From a more postmodern perspective "retro" religious art doesn't need to change the symbolism, its novelty/blasphemy lies in experiencing the authentic original in a totally superficial, shallow manner. "Retro" art allows the pre-modern attitudes of commitment, involvement and tradition on the understanding that the ultimately bored subject will be trying something else tomorrow - "retro" exists on the promise that the past contains infinite variety.
This probably is all reflected somewhere in the radical religious attitude. Most radicals are probably easily bored by the traditional religious symbols and need a bit of blasphemy to continue to make the symbols mean anything. As my soft theology/magical realism articles argue, this meaning is tied in with the cultural use of religious symbols and the creative ability with which artists can continue to make such symbols productive.
Modern/existentialist theology usually takes the symbol out of the narrative context and turns it into some philosophical line. Tillich is typical of this when he says (somewhere something vaguely like) "do not throw symbols at the heads of the people like stones, they will only turn away, but explain their meaning and they will understand them and accept them". Well I don't know. It seems to me that once explained a symbol becomes dull and platitudinous and very likely to turn people away with boredom (evangelical Christianity is only interesting for people who somehow fail to see how predictable it all is).
Better to say "don't explain the symbols to people or they will only turn away, but throw them at their heads like stones/and stone them" (see Van Morrison's song "It Stoned Me" and Dylan's "Rainy Day Women"). Symbols should clash and create a theological white noise, preventing thought and allowing only dance and laughter, the only truly divine abilities we possess.