1. Introduction
"Do not think the resurrection is an illusion. It is no illusion, but it is truth. Indeed, it is more fitting to say that the world is an illusion rather than the resurrection which has come into being through our Lord the Saviour, Jesus Christ"
The Treatise on Resurrection, The Nag Hammadi library
"If there is no resurrection of the dead then Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. "
1 Corinthians 15:13-14
The purpose of Sea of Faith is the exploration of religion as a human creation, but where is the theological direction in such a purpose? This article proposes such a direction by
1. Showing that throughout the Bible a central motif is resurrection, and that if we are to make any sense of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition we must incorporate this motif in all its power into our faith.
2. Having established this motif at an individual level, we then examine it at a more cosmological level and situate the SOF as a potentially key actor in the ecclesiastical drama being fought out today.
3. Argue that the lessons learnt from this study provide the basis for understanding the spiritual significance of the Sea of Faith, and establish an agenda for challenging the existing religious power structure.
2. The Resurrection Motif in the Bible
Although resurrection itself appears little in the Old Testament explicitly, as an implicit symbol it permeates it. The power of death to generate life, the transition through destruction to a new level of being is a constant motif of Biblical stories.
Gen 3:23 (The Fall), Gen 4:25 (Seth and Abel), Gen 7:22 (The Flood), Gen 11:8 (Tower of Babel), Gen 19:24 (Sodom), Gen 22:2 (Abraham and Isaac), Gen 37:24 (Joseph sent to Egypt), Ex 12:29 (Passover), Ex 14:27 (Exodus), Ex 32:27 (Golden Calf), Various offerings (Lev chapters 1-7), Lev 16 (Day of Atonement), the fall of Jericho (Jos 6:21), the death of Samson (Judg 16:30), Absalom (2 Sam 18:14), 2 Ki 6:7 (Elisha and the axe head), 2 Ki 17:20 (Exile), Daniel in the furnace (Dan 3:24), Daniel in the lion's den (Dan 6:17) etc.
The message throughout all these stories then is clear, the necessity of death and destruction for rebirth and renewal. There is here no concept of evolution, gradual change, progression, development. Rather instead the emphasis is on total destruction as a means of cleansing and regeneration.
Also note that not only is destruction/death necessary for individuals, but also for God's covenant people. God seeks their destruction in order to recreate them (Fall, Flood, Exile etc). We shall examine this in more detail later.
3. Interlude - discussion on religion as a "human creation"
Before we continue this investigation, let us reflect about how understanding religion to be a human creation allows us the freedom to understand the material here. I wish to make two important points.
1. We need to look at the use of the term "human", the tradition it comes from and the history of its meaning. Typically "human" has connotations with the enlightenment, seeing man as rational, independent, autonomous and free. Religion as a "human creation" then becomes an object held at a distance from life, something contingent to it and outside of it. In terms of religion this is totally inadequate. Instead "human" must embrace the full range of our experience - insanity, dreams, visions, evil, possession - the passion and desire that burst forth from the bottomless pit within the human soul. "Human" being is a vast roaring ocean, an uncontrollable nightmare force that cannot be contained and whose "creations" appear independently of individual purposes or designs.
2. Thus a human God is far more dreadful than a supernatural one. A supernatural God can be relied on to be all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, he can be trusted and loved. A human God is a force within humanity that speaks from some alien realm, a terrifying power within ourselves from whom we cannot escape, forever waiting to rise up, like a leviathan lurking in the deep waters of the psyche. When we read the Bible, these accounts of a God's past deeds call him forth again to appear in our souls, it is then that we need some form of religion to control this energy before it possesses us. We can see that the lack of an effective religion to direct the Spirit results in a sickening spiritual fascism (which can also generate political fascism), and highlights the importance of the task before us.
4. The Body, Resurrection and Contemporary Culture
The resurrection of the body as an individual task is, in Julia Kristeva's phrase a "transubstantiation of the body", the creation of a new body, and is an major theme in contemporary culture - for example Foucault's important last work The History of Sexuality and his description of life as a work of art. Cultural icons such as Madonna and Michael Jackson recreate themselves through the creation of new bodies, and radical designers such as Vivian Westwood show the importance of the body in relation to philosophy and belief. The Yugoslavian philosopher Slavoj Zizek reminds us in The Sublime Object of Ideology that changing the appearance of the body can profoundly change our inner selves.
There is too much to cover in this area, and we shall have to leave a full discussion for another time. However note that whilst resurrection is an unconditional necessity for Christianity, we can make no assumptions as to how or when it can be induced, what the exact nature of the experience will be, the relation between the dead old body and the living new body etc. There will be an element of belief however, and we shall explain the importance of this below, after we have examined the role of resurrection in the renewal of God's people.
5. Resurrection - the bringer of the New Age
We have seen how the motor for renewal and change in the Bible is destruction. What we shall focus on now is the nature of the destroyer, what or who are the agents of God's new order?
Clearly in some cases, typically in the more mythological sections of the Bible, God uses "natural forces" as his agents of destruction - the waters of the flood, the crossing of the Red Sea, the Tower of Babel etc. However it is much more usual for God to select human agents to enact the destruction, for example the Golden Calf and in Israel and Judah's exile.
Yet whilst we have been focusing on the destruction of Israel, we have omitted the other major theme of destruction in the Old Testament, the establishment of God's kingdom through the destruction of the wicked.
Taking the military victories of King David as a type, the prophets speak of a new military ruler ("the Branch of the Lord", see Is 4:2, Is 11:1, Jer 23:5, Jer 33:15, Ez 34:23, Mic 5:4, Zech 3:8, Zech 6:12 etc), another King David (Ez 37:24, Ez 34:23, Hos 3:5 etc), who would destroy the world's empires and establish the rule of God. This new king, also called the Shepherd (Zech 13:7, Mic 7:14, Is 40:11) also brings destruction, this time of Israel's enemies who must first be destroyed before they will turn to the Lord. Thus again the resurrection motif, death and destruction followed by rebirth and renewal, is used in the plan for the establishment of the rule of God.
The people of God who execute this destruction have themselves undergone a resurrection. This army is the "remnant" of God's covenant people (1 Ki 19:18, Is 4:3, Ez 9:6, Mic 5:7, Zeph 3:13, Hag 1:12), they are God's "rod" (Ps 23:4, Ez 21:10, Ez 20:37, Mic 7:14) who destroy his wicked people, starting "at my sanctuary" (Ez 9:6).
Thus the whole eschatological drama unfolds through a "cleansed" people of God themselves "cleansing" the earth in a sequence of horrific destructions, using the resurrection motif of life through death.
6. Jesus and Resurrection
Turning now to the New Testament we see the importance of the explicit symbol of the death and resurrection of Christ. The Jesus of the gospels is a concentration Old Testament stories (e.g. Elisha, 1 Ki 19:20, 2 Ki 4:42-44; Isaiah, Is 1:17, Moses, Ex 15:22 etc.) but most importantly he is the new David (Matt 1:6, 27:37, Lk 3:31, 23:38), longed for by the prophets, Israel's shepherd (Matt 18:12, 25: 32, 26:31, John 10:2, 11, 14, 27, 21:17 etc.) and thus his destruction allows a transformation not simply of God's covenant people, but even of God himself.
The symbolism associated with Christ's death and resurrection is astonishing and radically new in our understanding of God. Now rather than experiencing our own death and resurrection we are mystically to die and be reborn "in Christ". Yet who is this mother that gives birth to us? Where is the womb of this new birth? The New Testament is clear that the Spirit gives birth to us (John 3:5 etc.) thus for the first time in the Judeo-Christian tradition the feminine has entered the Godhead.
Note there was a strong tradition of personifying aspects of God - e.g. by Philo of Alexandria with the Logos - in which wisdom took a feminine form (e.g. Proverbs). This in itself is highly significant, as we shall see later.
Yet more than this has occurred, since it is also clear that the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ (2 Cor 3:17), what then has occurred to the gender of Christ? Various other mysteries of the risen Christ begin to make sense when we understand this subliminal imagery working at an unconscious level, but making the new revelation effective - for example why Christ could not be recognised (Luke 24:16, John 20:15), the significance of his "wound" (John 20:27), and his appearance first to the women (Matt 28:8 etc).
This image of the female Christ who in spirit gives birth to our new souls is a terrifying rupture from our previous understanding of God, yet explains why God himself had to undergo a death and resurrection to destroy himself and recreate himself, taking this regenerative process into the being of the Godhead itself.
The unconscious message of the crucifixion is of Christ losing his virginity on the cross (John 19:34) and becoming impregnated with new souls "in Christ", to whom he later as a female Spirit gives birth (John 3:5-8). Religion only works through sublimated breaking of social taboos, which are themselves rusty chains holding back the free development of our minds.
"What is the resurrection? The image must rise again through the image" (The Gospel of Philip, The Nag Hammadi library)
The most potent symbol of the female Christ is the Eucharist, charged with symbolic energy by its unconscious association with the menstrual period. Christ's spiritual discharge, his body and blood, become after our new birth the food to renew our spiritual energies.
"This is a hard teaching, who can accept it?" (John 6:60)
It is only through breaking through the forbidden and unthinkable that new stages of spirituality can be reached (in Gnostic mythology the "eighth and ninth" aeons beyond the material world), and new dimensions of God experienced.
7. Resurrection and Rebirth
It was mentioned above that the exact manner of our rebirth cannot be preconceived. However an important part of it must be this new understanding of God, the paradoxical nature of which allows it to operate as a Zen koan to bring an enlightenment to the believer.
As the warrior age of David was followed by the reconstruction of Solomon (rebirth following destruction), so it is Solomon who personifies our new dispensation. The old body, like the old temple, must be rebuilt ("do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit" 1 Cor 6:19) as Solomon rebuilt the temple in a Byzantine splendour, full of opulence and extravagance (1 Ki 6-8) so our new bodies must display the overabundance of the spirit within us.
It is also no accident that Solomon was possessed with the feminine spirit of wisdom (1 Ki 3:12, Prov 8) as he exists as the type for the "new creation", the reunification of male and female (Gen 2:23). Solomon is the pattern for our spiritual psyche in this new stage of Christian existence, he provides the model of experimentation, perversity, decadence and melancholy, he is our de Sade. The Song of Songs was written about the spirituality of the feminine Christ, it is the first book of the next Bible and once the waters have broken many more poems will fall to earth, still covered in the blood of the Godhead.
8. The Resurrection of the Church
Feminist theology, and the reintegration of the feminine into the Godhead, is the sword with which God will destroy his wicked Church. This new "rod" will cleanse the Church of its deceit the way the Levites cleansed Israel of false belief in the Golden Calf.
With the death of the second shepherd (Zech 11:4-17) the entrance to the cave of heaven (Rev 8:1-5) is now revealed, within which lies a new dream of God (the SHE-kinah, see Lev 16, 1 Ki 8:10-13, Ez 43:5, Rev 11:19).
We can be certain that this new dream has entered the garden of our souls (S of S 4:16) but we must wait for it to meet us.
Do not arouse or waken love until it so desires" (S of S 3:5).
The immediate task is the transubstantiation of our bodies, and intensifying our new experience of God. The new spirit created by this new destruction will be the power to resurrect Christianity (those born of Christ all have the authority of Christ, see Zech 6:12-13 and John 15:5).
The dream is a garden, hazy with incense
The spirit is the sound of the rich perfume
singing in your mind
The trees are covered with shiny angels
The spirit is blood and the spirit is fire
The mighty cedars are heavy with angel flesh
The dream is a fire and
The spirit is black with blood
Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.
John Mann October 1993