Theophanies – Then and Now.

One of Cuyler Black’s biblical cartoons, (www.inheritthemarth.com) shows Moses coming down the mountain carrying the Ten Commandment stones and grumbling to himself. “Kill joy! Out of the cloud overhead comes the Voice, “I heard that!” That’s a delightful turn of phrase about the meaning of a theophany.

 Part of the title of this note could be reversed to now and then. That’s how some even very religious people think of theophanies. It is not just occasional, but rare and bestowed on very few individuals as a special gift. That is not what the dictionary definition states. A theophany is defined as the appearance of a god to a human. Note the singular. Usually a theophany is an individual religious experience a manifestation of that spiritual reality we call “God.”

 Just how theophanies take place is quite unknown. The Bible is full of them. In particular prophets have them and so become spokespersons for God. Because of the male bias of the authors of the writings we have collected in what we call our Scriptures, we have come to think of particular men like Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, Jesus and Paul as having such experiences. That is a pity, because there is no reason why women and other men may also have theophanies. Deborah (Joshua 5), Mary, the mother of Jesus, (Luke 1:26-56); Anna (Luke 2:36-38), Lydia (Acts 16:14), Priscilla (Acts 18:1, 26) are women of the Bible known to have had similar experiences.

 Are we then to presume that every person who claims to have had a spiritual experiences of this kind have had a theophany. That would be foolish. It is not the experience per se that is evidence of a theophany, but the spiritual fruits that results from it that determines its validity.

 I recall attending an evangelistic revival in a large stadium that was normally used for football games. The preacher held forth for nearly an hour, then called for people who felt so moved to come forward in an altar call. I am not sure that that either the preacher or any of those who went forward for a special blessing and prayers would claim that any had a theophany. Yet there are plenty of examples of evangelists who desperately tried to create the circumstances for a theophany to occur - but failed.

 The truth is that we cannot manipulate God to appear or to communicate with us at will. Yet we do need to maintain our relationship with God in public worship an in private devotions.

 An article in the current issue of The United Church Observer asks, “Does God need to be thanked?” The author proceeds to give what he calls “four good reasons to argue that there is no need to offer thanks to God.” He concludes by saying, nevertheless, that if we believe in the God Jesus revealed we need to remind ourselves that we have a relationship with the God who loves us and the whole universe. We have a place in God’s whole scheme of things. “God needs our thanks to know that we care.” He quotes from the First Letter to the Thessalonians 5:18 where Paul wrote, “In everything give thank: for this is the will of God in Jesus Christ concerning you.”

 It is to people who practice their faith on a regular basis that a theophany may occur, if God so wills.

 
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CIVIC RELIGION

CIVIC RELIGION.

The late Mordecai Richler was one of Canada’s leading 20^th century novelists. From the Jewish community in Montreal, Richler fiercely opposed to the narrow French nationalism of Quebec. He was equally dismissive of what he called “sentimental, milquetoast” nationalism of English Canada. A lecture delivered on the Big Ideas program on TVO, Ontario’s educational television network, featured Charles Foran, author of a recent biography of Richler. Yet Foran had difficulty describing the kind of nationalism exhibited in Richler’s numerous novels, magazine and newspaper articles, and television commentaries.

Foran believes that Richler rejected all sense of tribalism, whatever its source. Instead he belonged to a brand of moral individuals springing from Judaism “whose duty is to question and confront” every position that does not meet the highest standards of justice. Without saying so, Foran described a man who was a prophet of his time in the midst of Canada’s struggle to remain a united country.

Canada has a long history of nationalism, particularly in relation to the United States of America. Our first prime minister, John A. Macdonald (1815-1891), was perhaps the greatest of those who could be said to be Canadian nationalists. He was determined to do everything possible to maintain the whole of Canada’s vast geography from east to west coasts as “British North America.” It was his driving motive for striking the political deals that brought about Confederation in 1867. Later he negotiated the entry of Manitoba and British Columbia in the west and Prince Edward Island in the east, as the next provinces to become part of the new “Dominion of Canada” as part of the British Empire.

Today Canada is a vast country stretching from sea to sea to sea, with a very limited population of only 33 million. Our constitutional monarchy expresses a value system that recognizes our place in the world as a nation that seeks to help others protect democracy or achieve freedom and independence. In global geopolitics we have served many times as peacekeepers or peacemakers for the United Nations.

Most everyone may be proud of their own country’s particular brand of nationalism. Some may criticize or condemn it as an extreme form of patriotism. I prefer to call it our civic religion. Each brand of civic religion has its own liturgy, beginning with a national anthem and a constitution that declares the nation’s basic values and system of government. In this country our national holidays and memorials are essential to our civic observances. Our Canada Day celebrations on July 1^st and Remembrance Day parades to the national and local cenotaphs on November 11^th also evoke the liturgies of our civic religion.

One of the more powerful instances of civic religion came  little more than a week ago in the marking of the 10^th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. We in Canada marked the anniversary too by recalling how we had helped the many airline passengers who had been forced to land at airports far from home. We welcomed several thousand passengers from those aircraft into our homes for up to a week while they waited to be cleared to fly on to their destinations in the USA. All this was done without any cost to the passengers. We feel proud of doing more than might have been expected of us. Those simple acts of kindness were a supreme expression of our civic religion.

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REV ELATION - Part 2.

The role of the church in determining whether or not a particular experience of revelation is valid also has to be raised. Through the centuries Christian church authorities have been somewhat rigid in allowing solo voices to depart from the creeds established by church councils. Creeds have been used as a means of controlling what is a true and what is a false revelation. The church has often denied that particular individuals have received a prophetic revelation.

For instance, since the 4th century CE the Christian church has insisted that God is to be understood as a Trinity of three personae but one divine being. Anyone who disagreed with this doctrine has been pushed to the fringes, expelled from the church as heretics, or at times cruelly executed. On a number of occasions in church history these people have created new movements that became sects or denominations that prospered as competing rivals. Unfortunately, this divisive process is still going on.

Not all revelation occurs in a religious context. The discovery that energy is the basis of all life is a scientific revelation. So is the discovery that all animal species have remarkably common genomes. For instance, fruit flies and humans share 60% of the same genes. Another revelation states that all living things have a common descent stretching back over the 3.5 billion years that there has been life on the planet Earth. The religious person interprets such discoveries as experiences of God’s unfolding purposes.

A children’s book I read to my children many years ago had these words: “God speaks to me in my mind and says, ‘Be good; be kind.’” Those words and the influence of people of faith in their lives helped to shape their character and their faith. Many other parents have had similar experiences. This is both a mental, moral and religious process. Physiological and neurological research is beginning to discover the means by which this takes place within our neurological system.

“The mind is the locus of revelation,” wrote Bruce Chilton in his latest book, The Way of Jesus to Repair and Renew the World. (Abingdon, 2010.) “What if whole communities, formed by people inclined to Mindful discipline, treated prophecy as a human gift, conveyed by the Spirit, rather than an unusual and random occurrence? St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Pursue love, be zealous for spiritual things, and above all that you prophesy.” (1 Corinthians 14:1). To him it seemed obvious that an awareness of God active among us should bring prophecy to the leading role in the guidance of communities. What is obvious to see, of course, is not always easy to do. To move from possibility to action will be the achievement of Mindful practice.” (Capital letters for Mindful were Chilton’s.)

In 2010 the Tony Blair Faith Foundation launched the Religion and Globalization initiative at the Centre of Research on Religion (CREOR) at the Faculty of Religious Studies of McGill University, Montreal, Canada. This year a series of leectures on "Religion and the Brain." These lectures will likely be published at a later date. I wait with anticipation to read them.

I am convinced that further research will bring to light how God uses the basic elements of our bodies and minds to reveal to us the nature of faith. Whatever the technical details may be, it is not likely to take us beyond the biblical revelation that the true nature of God is love, a love that embraces all humanity and wills that all humanity embrace each other.

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REVELATION - Part 1

The story of the call of Moses to lead the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to freedom and a home in Canaan is a story about revelation. It reveals in that it makes something known. It discloses a kind of knowledge that the Israelites interpreted as re-establishing their God-given promise of a homeland and their mission in a world of much hostility. According to the biblical record that promise and mission were first given to Abraham (Genesis 17:2-9).

These days we are flooded with information, with new knowledge about ourselves, the world and the universe we live in. Conflicting religious traditions and cultures tend to blur or blot out entirely our understanding of what revelation is. In theological terms, revelation is transcendental. It exists apart from, beyond, and not subject to the limitations of the physical universe. The late Prof. Wilfrid Cantwell Smith, a prominent Christian scholar of comparative religious history, used the word Transcendent to refer to our human experience of the divine in all religious traditions.

In the biblical sense revelation is not about us or our material universe at all, but about God. The God who is Spirit beyond our sight and other senses, but whose presence can yet be experienced by ordinary human beings. That is why the familiar story of Moses and the burning bush is so important to the Christian and Jewish traditions alike.

There are several kinds of divine revelation in this narrative. There is mediated revelation. There is direct revelation. There is spiritual revelation interpreted by faith. There is revelation of God’s own nature. There is revelation of divine purpose and mission. There is revelation in a historical context. Above all, there is revelation of the real presence of God in human life and history.

Throughout the Bible these several kinds of revelation can be found again and again. This is particularly true in the experience of Israel’s prophets of whom Moses was the first and perhaps the greatest. The prophets of Israel appeared to have a special sense of what God was about. This was often couched in words that came directly from God to the prophets who the declared, “Thus says the Lord ….”

We must not infer this to mean that the actual words of scripture are in and of themselves the literal revelation. Some people do believe that; I do not. Instead it means that God uses the words of scripture to show people of faith what God is like, what God is doing, and how that matters to us in our historical context. Revelation through the words of scripture is a religious experience. That is true even in this atheistic age when reason is so emotionally espoused as the only acceptable alternative.

To Christians the supreme revelation of God is a person, Jesus of Nazareth. He has been revealed to us the Messiah/Christ, Son of God, since the first writings of the New Testament were composed in the 1st century CE. In Jesus the essence of all that is divine and all that humans may become has now been disclosed. This revelation brings people of faith into a personal relationship with God and with each other.

The danger of this revelation is that we can turn it around to believe in God as anthropomorphic – very much like humans, made in our image. Psychologists and psychiatrists following Sigmund Freud and others have consistently made that claim. But does this really affect our understanding of revelation?

It is true that many passages in the Bible also give this same impression. Numerous texts cite God speaking, as in the story of Moses receiving his call to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. Through the ages, numerous people of faith have heard God speaking. Have they all been deceived?

The history of our Christian tradition tells us that they have not. Rather, they perceived a revelation, experienced and interpreted through faith, and formed a personal relationship with God and with Jesus Christ. God had become a real presence in their lives and consequently they have acted accordingly. We call this the work of the Spirit of God within them. They have been given prophetic powers that shape their lives in unique ways and help us discern the will and purposes of God in the context of everyday life. These prophetic gifts are not exclusive to a few but available to all people of faith.

(More of this note on Revelation will follow in Part 2.)

MINDS IN A CROWD - WHY RIOTS OCCUR.

The following quotation is from the abstract of Dr. Elizabeth Zoffmann’s presentation, Minds In A Crowd, at the 32^nd International Congress of Law and Mental Health held in Berlin, July 17-23, 2011.

“People ‘en masse’ often behave in ways that the individuals alone would not. Literature review reveals little empirical study of mass behaviour though individual interviews with protest/riot participants indicates that frontal lobe functions are limited or absent in the context of excited crowd activity. Recent advances in policing methods have used principles from this theory to manage group behaviour by addressing the principle that critical mass, physical proximity, a physical or psychological focus and a driving ‘beat’ are required to form a ‘mass brain’ or syncitium that is less than the sum of its parts.”

The unusual word in this excerpt – syncitium – comes from biology. It describes individual cells that act as one. In this context, however, syncitium means that people in a crowd lose their individual sense of critical judgment and personal discipline. They then behave as a mob, acting in such a way as to cause a riot.

Dr. Zoffmann, a practicing behavioural psychiatrist and an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, first worked on her theory with a former Vancouver police inspector, Dave Jones.  Her psychiatric practice and teaching are based on evolutionary biology. Her ideas were featured in an interview published in the Vancouver weekly newspaper Georgia Straight. The interview referred extensively to the riots following the loss of the Vancouver Canucks in the Stanley Cup playoffs of the National Hockey League in May 2011. 

The riots in the United Kingdom during the past week have given rich new data for the research Dr. Zoffmann hopes will result in further tests of her theory. It would appear at this date that the massive police force that swarmed onto London’s streets after four days of rioting, arson and looting have indeed proved adequate to quell the violence permanently.

One should note, however, that placing the blame on the frontal cortex of our highly evolved human brain is only one theory of why such widespread destructive behaviour occurred in London and other British cities last week. Other explanations cited such political decisions by the Conservative government to reduce expenditures for education and training of the large phalanx of unemployed youth. These political decisions had economic causes in the massive debt incurred after extended budgetary deficits at all levels of government.

Some of the louder voices blamed the widening gap between rich and poor in Britain’s traditional class structured society. Others called this a race riot pointing to the large number of rioters who were black and south Asian youth. Such descriptive terms themselves were racially intended as people looked at photographs of youths throwing molitov cocktails to start massive fires or running out of stores with stolen merchandise. Black youth workers responded that budgetary cutbacks on social assistance and unemployment had made it virtually impossible for many youths to avoid involvement in criminal gangs.

From those inclined to moral and religious interpretation of events came angry cries that parents were neglecting their responsibilities to teach their children moral discipline. When the riots had subsided a few parents did turn their children in to the police to be charged. Angry right wing religious groups placed the blame on Islamic fundamentalists. Religious leaders responded defensively, falling back on the fact that Christianity and Islam alike embrace family moral values.

The history of riots cites incidents as far back as 44 BCE when a mob seized firebrands from Julius Caesar’s funeral pyre in the Forum and ran through the streets of Rome to attack the houses of Cassius and Brutus. British and American history includes plenty of similar examples of mob violence. The original Boston Tea Party in 1773 led directly to the American Revolution. Belgium emerged as an independent country after riots that began with what is called “the Opera Riot.” Street violence was joined by theatregoers emerging from an opera on August 25, 1830. Violence continued through the southern provinces of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands for nearly a year, ending with the declaration of the independent Kingdom of Belgium on August 12, 1831.

During the parliamentary debate that followed the suppression of the riots, Prime Minister David Cameron told the nation that there had been too few police deployed available to quell the violence. His admission that the police had got the riots wrong was immediately countered by a retort from Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers. He acknowledged that police had faced "an unprecedented situation, unique circumstances" — but added that it was police themselves, rather than "political interference," that got the situation under control.

It is popular to express the traditional philosophical position established by John Locke (1632-1704) that God made humans in God’s own image so that even in our natural state we are not jungle beasts because we possess the God-given gifts of reason and conscience. It would seem that both reason and conscience are in very short supply of late. If Dr. Zoffmann is right in her analysis there is likely to be many more riots in future.

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EVERYONE NEEDS FUNDAMENTALS

Fundamentals. We use the word quite often, but do we actually know what it means. A dictionary definition may help. A fundamental used as a noun is "a basic principle, rule, law, or the like, that serves as the groundwork of a system; essential part: to master the fundamentals of a trade." (Random House Dictionary.) More often it is used as a noun. In the study of any intellectual discipline, whether a student or a scholar, one beings with some fundamentals that are the guidelines or, as we see above, "the groundwork of our system."

In all disciplines, there are fundamentals that form the basis of study, research and implementaion. Biblical studies are no different. A little more than a century ago a new movement burst on the scene disrupting scholarly pursuits in biblical interpretation that had been pursued since Christians and Jews first composed what became their respective Holy Scriptures. From the beginning of the Enlightenment Age in the 17th century scholars had been applying modern historical and literary methodologies to those scriptures. The impact of these methodologies and in particular the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species with its fundamental challenge to the Creation passages in the Book of Genesis caused many sincere scholars and preachers to react with surprising negativity.

This new movement was given the name of Fundamentalism. In many respects, the conflict it caused resulted in irreparable divisions within some Protestant denominations and numerous congregations. Like all intellectual systems, Fundamentalism has its basic principles, five in number: biblical infallability and inerrancy, the virgin birth and deity of Jesus, the doctrine of substitutionary atonement for sin, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus to heaven, and the authenticity of the miracles of Jesus and his miraculous return at the end of history.

There is nothing wrong with those fundamentals, but it is certainly not those I would select as necessary for appropraite study of the Christian Bible or the Holy Scriptures of any other religious tradition. The tragedy of our time is that every tradition has its own "fundamentalists" who attempt to force their will on others of their own or other traditions. I was trained in the historical critical approach to the Bible. That was more than sixty years ago. The discipline has changed in the interim. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to keep up with the changes unless one has access to a major library collecting every available imprint in the field.

Recently I have been reading selectively in progressive biblical studies like those written by members of the Jesus Seminar and Evolutionary Christianity. My main question to those authors is a simple one: "By what fundamentals are you deciding that your approach is an advance over what has gone before?" Another serious question that could also be asked is the proverbial one: "Are you throwing out the baby with the bath water?" To be specific, a significant issue needs to be  raised: Does setting aide the traditional doctrine of the Trinity or reviving the century old search for the historical Jesus in the Gospel narratives create more faithful followers of Jesus in a global society?

Those authors who seek to move the Christian faith beyond its traditional base of theism embodied in human life need to make clear just what other fundamentals they would put in its place.

FAITH AND DOUBT

In its November/December 2010, the Biblical Archaeology Review published an interview with Professor Sean Frayne, Director of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies and Emeritus Professor of Theology at Trinity College, Dublin. Prof. Frayne is a renowned scholar whose studies focus on the integration of literary and archaeological sources of Galilean culture in the Hellenistic and Roman times. Possibly his most controversial statement was that the real Jesus is a historical and theological construct.

For the next three issues BAR published angry letters to the editor. Some threatened to cancel their subscriptions – and a few actually did so - because the article had challenged their concept of faith as true believers. Others offered support of Frayne’s critical views of the historical character of biblical narratives. One of the more trenchant supportive letters said in part, “Within the very concept of faith is the possibility of doubt, lest it would cease to be faith.”

Passages in the New Testament itself would appear to support Frayne’s position. A case in point is the Gospel lesson in last week’s lectionary (Matthew 14:22-33).  The disciples became terrified when they saw Jesus was walking toward them on the sea. Doubting that the approaching figure was Jesus, Peter challenged Jesus to let him walk on the waves too. Jesus bid him come. Out of the boat Peter’s courage failed him and he began to sink. Jesus saved him saying “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”

For a second instance see Acts 9:10-19 where Ananias, a Christian in Damascus, had a vision that God had told him that Saul of Tarsus was staying in a house on a certain street praying. Knowing why Saul was in Damascus, Ananias immediately doubted that God had spoken to him. But God insisted and Ananias obeyed. In the ensuing encounter with Saul, the great apostle to the Gentiles was baptized and for a short time longer in Damascus became a persuasive preacher that Jesus is the Messiah.

Taken literally, these miracles stories require an unusual faith that Matthew and Luke had access to any records of these events. Was that possible in an oral culture 50 or 60 years after the events occurred? Or is it credulity?  Another unlikely possibility is that the Holy Spirit inspired the verbal composition of these narratives. Critical scholarship looks at both stories as instances where faith met doubt in challenging situations and triumphed. To believe otherwise is to question the creativity of the authors with a sound theological message to convey: that Jesus is the Christ, Son of God.

No interpreters of scripture use a totally literalist reading of the text. To do so would be to deny that the world revolves around the sun. (Psalm 104:19; Judges 5:51; Joshua 10:13; etc.) It may still appear to be so and our more poetic language still uses it as a metaphor. Yet Galileo proved that to be a totally mistaken observation as long ago as 1610.

Out of such discoveries critical scholarship has developed alternative systems for interpreting the mysteries and apparent paradoxes of the Bible. Neither history nor archaeology can fully satisfy human reason and the seeming paradoxes of faith, Prof. Frayne argued. But faith is just that - “paradox is all but the very definition of faith.” Therefore, in true faith, doubt can never be escaped.

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