A TREE WITHOUT FIGS

 

 

William Tyndale made the famous statement, “I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the scripture than thou doest!”

     Perhaps I ought to correct that to the formerly-famous statement, back in the days when we knew something about our own history.  I was once discussing the Salmon Rushdie Satanic Verses furore with a senior examiner: one with high responsibility for the transmission of our country’s literary heritage to our country’s young.  She did not believe in God, but had a deep faith in education.  I did not believe in God, at that point in time, but had little faith in education either, in view of some of its practitioners and end products.  I commented that anyone prepared to confront a powerful religion head on should be prepared to take the consequences, and I cited Tyndale as an example.  My astonishment that she had never heard of Tyndale was matched by her astonishment on hearing what had become of him.  Why would anyone be put to death just for translating the Bible?  Her ignorance of key forces that have shaped our culture did nothing to enhance my confidence in education.  But I digress...

      Being given the words is only half the story.  To have access to the words need not give access to the meaning.

     Let us consider the incident of the Fig Tree in Mark 11: 12 -22.  Jesus is hungry, and notices a fig tree in leaf.  He examines it, but it is not the season for figs.  He curses it: “May no one ever again eat fruit from you.”  The next morning, the disciples notice that the tree has withered from the roots up.  What on earth is the point of the story?

     In his essay ‘Why I am not a Christian’ Bertrand Russell had great fun with it.  If it wasn’t the season for figs, then you couldn’t blame the tree.  Just Christ in a fit of pique; in line with his petulance when dealing with opponents, or his pleasure at the thought of the wailing and gnashing of teeth.  It is why Russell rates Socrates, Buddha and Confucius higher than Christ.  By implication, thank God (if God existed) that the man in question didn’t really have any miraculous powers.  Imagine the harm that could have been done with that sort of temperament!

     Russell had the words before him.  How could a man of his intelligence have got it so utterly wrong?  Because the words alone are not enough; he didn’t have the necessary contextual background.

     Mark’s method, it must be conceded, is rather cryptic.  He likes to make his audience search for the answers.  The mood of his gospel is of things coming slowly into focus; of a progression from initial bafflement to gradual clarification.  Christ’s question “Do you still not understand?” (8:21) sets the tone. But it may also be that some things puzzling to modern urbanites were so obvious to ancient country dwellers as not to need saying

     Christ is hungry, and that focuses his attention on the fig tree.  No problem with interpretation there.  But as someone reared in a rural environment, Christ would have known the season for figs as well as anyone.  What he is looking for is evidence of the little green figs that will ripen in due course.  He finds none.  The tree is all leaves and no fruit; all show, and no substance.  Christ often uses various plants – the mustard seed, the vine, the fig tree – to illustrate various spiritual truths.  He does so now, by cursing the tree.  The tree is like the backsliding nation of Israel; or like its leaders, the Pharisees.  God’s blessing will now pass to the Gentiles.

     I confess to working out none of this by myself.  When I first read the episode - while still an atheist -  I took the same view of it that Russell did.  Russell’s essay, in fact, was one of the sources that fed my atheism.  The Bible is a difficult book, written in contexts very different from our own.   I do not believe that you can understand it simply by picking it up and reading it without awareness of the background.  Russell is a case in point.

     It may be argued that God’s word brings its own clarity with it, that the Holy Spirit can illuminate us and enable us to see the Bible in its own light, without the need for an external human interpreter.  This was the view of the Swiss reformer, Zwingli.  (It would not, needless to say, have been applicable in the case of Russell). In some circumstances – when no other sources are available, for instance – I have no doubt that this does happen.   Zwingli, however, found that other honest, earnest, Spirit-led believers came to interpretations that differed from his own. 

     This might not, of itself, be any bad thing.  Argument – conducted in a spirit of mutual discovery – might be one of God’s methods for preventing his word from ossifying.   As Oscar Wilde said – albeit of a very different sort of book – “Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital”.  Lack of controversy about it proves that the thing is trivial. 

     At the other end of the scale is the view that the laity should not bother themselves with the Bible.  Leave it to the priests to interpret it for them.  There is a lot to be said for this view, and for some of the laity it may very well be the right solution.

      For myself, I will keep my Bible that Tyndale died to give me.

     But beside it, I will keep a couple of commentaries.  

HERE BE DRAGONS

 

The undiscover’d country from whose bourn

No traveller returns.

                                                                            Hamlet 3.1.78

In a 2010 edition of The Big Questions, Benjamin Zephaniah said that he believed in God without believing in religions.  It’s a nice idea – and behind it lies the tolerant thought that no one religion should lay claim to being better than another – but there are problems with one’s own private God.  The Yorkshire Ripper seems to have had a private God: one who apparently told him to murder prostitutes.  Hitler’s God, if he had one – the evidence seems inconclusive – presumably told him to exterminate other races, including the one that had given Europe its definitive concept of God in the first place.   Personal Gods, in fact, can end up being as divisive as different religions.

  And if one God tells you to love, and another God tells you to offer a human sacrifice every day by cutting out the victim’s heart, who is to say that one God is right and another is wrong?   Are there any criteria by which we are able to decide?

Let us imagine six novelists given free reign to create a character of their choice.  There might be variation in the results: of age, gender, ethnicity, physical appearance, personality etc.  We might say that one is a better delineation than another in terms of descriptive power, or psychological insight.  We might prefer one character to another insofar as it happens to resemble ourselves.  But we cannot say one character is ‘truer’ than another in any deeper sense, given that all the characters are imaginary in the first place.

            That, presumably, is the sort of situation we are in if God is simply a creation of the human imagination.  We might find one version of God  more congenial another because that is the version we were taught about as children, but we have no grounds – other than the wish to extend our own sphere of influence – for asserting the superiority of our own imaginary deity.  If God is imaginary, indeed, then that is an argument not for preferring one imaginative version to another, but for getting rid of the idea of God altogether.

Now let us imagine that the same six novelists are asked to describe a person who actually exists, but whom they have never met and about whom they know nothing.  One description might be closer to the reality than another, but it would be pure coincidence.  In this case, the subject might intervene with a personal account.  I am like this, I am not like that.  I approve of this, I disapprove of that.  I was born here, not there etc.

            Any autobiography has an advantage over pure guesswork: it can settle such questions as who my parents were, where and when I was born, how many siblings I had etc.  Outside these verifiable details, the matter becomes more problematic.  The self-analysis of character and motives might be wishful thinking.  It is true I was, say, born in London and not in Leeds.  It is not true in the same way that, for example, the divorce was her fault and not mine.  The friends of my estranged wife might have a different – and more plausible – version of events. 

            So, if God reveals divine details – or assists others to do so – that could not otherwise be known, then obviously the religion through which He (without revelation, the very sex of God is simply a matter of opinion, and often determined by what sex you yourself happen to be) chooses to do so has an advantage over those which have to rely on human intuition.

But is that revelation reliable?   People on interview make all sorts of claims about themselves; the reality lies in what they actually do.  God might claim to be Love and Truth but might in practice delight in cruelty and lying.  A test would be for God to become human, and then to decide whether or not God measured up to the claims.  “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”

            This, of course, is only an analogy: with all the flaws that analogies are heir to.  It does, however, mean that revelation and incarnation are crucial doctrines.  Non-believers, particularly, often define Christianity simply as loving your neighbour.  I John Chapter 4 puts the emphasis rather differently: only spirits that acknowledge that “Jesus Christ is come in the flesh” are from God. (ie a definition of what a Christian is includes acceptance of the Incarnation).   From this acknowledgment comes the indwelling Spirit to generate the love of others which is the mark of the Christian.  Loving your neighbour is a symptom of Christianity, not its definition.  The Incarnation is.

Now let us imagine the very early stages of the Voyages of Discovery, when rumour outran fact.  Instead of the Cyclopes with one central eye, there were the Monopods, with one central leg and foot.  Further south of the Monopods, were even more unknown regions, ‘Here be Dragons’ as the early maps put it: not wishing to be thought ignorant.

            Maybe, maybe not.  One guess was as good as another.    Some might say there were dragons; others might say there weren’t.  Others again might say that not only did the dragons not exist; neither did the lands they were supposed to inhabit.  On a slightly different tack, some might say these lands, if they existed, were accessible to everybody; others that they were the entitlement of a select few who could cope with the climate.  And so on.

            You could play this guessing game for ever.  The only way to bring it to an end was the actual reports of actual returning travellers.   No there are not Monopods, but there are other humans like us with a different skin colour.  No there are not dragons, but there are crocodiles and alligators. 

We are in much the same position with the question of life after death.  Emily Brontë seems to suggest in Wuthering Heights that there are different sorts of Heaven for different sorts of people.  I have a real problem with shaping Heaven to suit yourself, rather than shaping yourself to be suitable for Heaven.  Otherwise, presumably, Heaven for a bully would be an eternity of victims unable to escape.   But Heaven for a victim would be an eternity with no bullies.   How do you reconcile the conflicting demands?

 The speculation does not end there. Maybe some go to Heaven and some go to Hell.  Maybe every one, even the Devil, goes to Heaven eventually.   Maybe there's reincarnation until you can break out of the cycle of existence. .  Maybe all this is wish fulfilment, illusion etc and death really finishes you.

How can we ever know?  You can’t kill a few sample people and ask them to bring back a report about what’s on the other side: once they’ve gone, it’s like East Berliners escaping over the Wall in the old days.  They disappear for good.

The only person who could speak with authority about whether or not the after life exists, and what it is like, is one who had returned from the dead.    That is one reason that it matters so much whether the Resurrection happened or not, and why St Paul said he preached two things: Christ and Resurrection.  No Resurrection, no Christianity.  Eat, drink, be merry – and die tomorrow.

Incarnation and Resurrection, if true, impart authority and authenticity.  On that basis, and on that basis alone, Christianity may claim authority over other religions. But reduce Christianity to being nice to other people and it has no more authority in the marketplace of ideas than does anything else.