CHRISTIANITY AND THE CARNIVOROUS PRINCIPLE

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

                                                                                               Blake

 

Blake presumably asked his question to his Tyger in a rhetorical sense.  I want to ask it quite literally.

Lamb is my favourite meat; provided that I don’t think about the source while I am eating it. 

     In our neigbouring field there are currently two lambs.  They chase each other in the sheer joy of living.   I have seen one of them feeding from its mother, and wagging its tail in delight.  To think about the probable fate of both of them puts me off eating lamb. 

     On the other hand, lamb was a key ingredient of the Passover Meal.  Animals sacrificed in the Jerusalem Temple were then eaten, with God’s blessing.  Christ is the Sacrificial Lamb, and the Lamb in Revelation has on it the marks of slaughter.  The sacrificed lamb is an integral part of the Christian tradition. Clearly, I am wrong to feel the way I do about my youthful neighbours. 

 

I believe the Bible to be divinely inspired: that is to say, I believe it is it is not simply human guesswork, but what God has chosen to reveal.  It contains what is necessary for our salvation: other data, we are intended to work out for ourselves; for that seems to me the intention behind the command in Genesis to “subdue the earth”. 

     We know, by using our brains and researching the rocks, that there were dinosaurs that pre-dated the arrival of humans, and we know that some of them were carnivorous.  That seems to render inadmissible the old idea that animals became carnivorous only after the Fall; although it does not rule out an initial vegetarianism before carnivorousness arose among the dinosaurs.  There can, after all, be herbivores without carnivores: but not the other way round.

     The Genesis account of things – which I take to be actual history in a concentrated and poetic form – does seem to imply just such a universal original vegetarianism.  The King James version, ambiguously perhaps, says “’the fruit of a tree bearing seed; to you it shall be for meat’”.   The same is true for animals:  to birds and beasts alike, ‘”I have given every green herb for meat.’”  A more modern version will substitute ‘food’ for ‘meat’, but the sense is the same: you can eat the products of the trees, and so can the animals.  And that is all you can eat.   If Adam can name the animals, he cannot eat them.  After the Fall, however, God clothes Adam and Eve in skins.  Who killed the animals, and for what purpose?  Was it just for clothing? 

     After the Flood, God makes a new covenant with Noah.  As the NEB expresses it: “’Every creature that lives and moves shall be food for you; I give you them all, as once I gave you all green plants.’”  Presumably the same now applies to animals: to stay alive, some animals will have to eat other animals. 

     Nowhere after Genesis can the case be made for vegetarianism.  Animals must be cared for, true – a working animal must have a day of rest, like its human owner – but they can be eaten.  Dietary restrictions imposed on the Jews are for health reasons, and for their spiritual discipline.  In the New Testament Mark says that Christ “declared all foods clean”, and Peter has a vision of animals suggesting that the old food restrictions no longer apply. 

     Where do we go from here; for the carnivorous principle seems to have unequivocal divine sanction and approval?

 

 The poet A E Housman blamed God for making him a homosexual and then condemning him.  More to the point, Housman didn’t believe in God; but had God existed, such would have been the case, which was why Housman didn’t believe in Him. Housman felt himself victimized by those who did believe in God, but in doing so he was ignoring the whole doctrine of sin: whereby we are all in the same boat in our unredeemed state.  Despite the impression given by the social gospel of liberal theology, the central message of Christianity is not that we should all be nice to one another because we are all the children of God.  If you go by what the Bible says, we are clearly not all the children of God.  We may become children of God only if we repent and are born again, and are transformed by the indwelling Holy Spirit into the sort of beings we were originally meant to be.  The Christian message about humanity is the flat opposite of Rousseau’s: we are not born good and are made bad by society; we are born bad, but may become good through divine grace.

     The point I am trying to make from all this is that we are not delivered perfect from the hand of God.  Human nature, according to Christianity, has gone radically adrift, is not the way it was meant to be, and is need of being redeemed.   And what is true of human nature may then be equally true of Nature itself. Nature, too, is spoiled and fallen: “abnormal” as Francis Schaffer used to describe it.  If such should be the case, is the carnivorous element in Nature a part of that corruption, and – if so – at what stage of history did it happen? 

       In the left-hand panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, we are shown a cat carrying a rodent in its mouth; for Bosch, the carnivorous principle was there from the beginning.  Milton, who came later than Bosch, gives a perhaps more biblical view.  Only after the Fall were animals changed: “to graze the herb all leaving, Devour’d each other.”  ( Paradise Lost, Book X, line 711)

     In some sense, both are right.  Bosch is in line – although he didn’t know it – with the evidence of the carnivorous dinosaurs; and Milton is in line with the intensification of natural corruption that would inevitably have occurred in the wake of the Fall. 

     My own  tentative: view – and I stress tentative because it is inevitably speculative, and I would be willing to be found in error  –  is that natural corruption probably began not after the human Fall, but after the angelic Fall that preceded it.  In ancient tradition, Lucifer was the angel in charge of matter; and along with his rebellion would have gone a perversion of his area of responsibility.

     I would like to digress at this point to counter those why say that they believe in God but cannot believe in the Devil. 

     I can respect strict materialists; although I believe them to be mistaken: matter is all there is; those believing in spirit are the victims of a delusion. 

     But if you profess belief in a God that is anything more than a pantheistic life force,  then you admit the spiritual world.  And if the spiritual world exists, there is no reason why, in addition to God, it should not contain angels; as Thomas Aquinas argued, there is nothing inherently improbable about them.  And if there are obedient angels, there might equally be rebel angels: the chief of whom is Satan.  (Or the satan, the adversary). 

     And if Satan delights in spoiling the handiwork of God, then the malevolence might extend to enjoying the sufferings of animals as much as the sufferings of humans.

     I recently watched a wildlife programme focused on a waterhole.  A herd of wildebeest came to drink, and one of them – after a long and weary journey – was taken by a crocodile.  Its death – for it resisted being killed – seemed a cruel process.  But what was either participant to do?  The one had to drink, and the other had to eat: the blame lay with whoever or whatever had devised the process in the first place.  A related programme featured a family of meercats.  When the eldest kitten was taken by a bird of prey, the others gave sounds of distress; and I do not believe it unduly anthropomorphic to think that they were grieving.

     Descartes believed that animals had no souls and were therefore just machines.  You could therefore experiment on them without reference to the sounds they made.  Descartes began the divorce of body and soul which led to the modern materialism that retains the body and abolishes the soul altogether.

     I don’t agree with Descartes.  I don’t know whether animals have their own sort of souls that would enable them to recognize their Creator[1], but I don’t believe for a moment that animals don’t feel pain and fear.  Take a cat to the vet, and then look at the sweaty paw prints when you lift it off the table.  But the very same cat later went after a bird, and took out its eye.

     If this is the God-ordained order of things, then why are we told in Isaiah 11, that the leopard shall lie down with the kid?  Is the carnivorous principle, then, only a part of the current travail from which the whole world longs to be released? If that is so, then my regrets at the death of the lambs are not so far out of line after all: rather, a sort of response ahead of time to what will happen when the world is changed. 

 

Since animals are part of the created world, and since the created world is to be made anew, we may hope that there will be animals in the New Creation.   And since there will be no more death we may hope that the carnivorous principle will have gone forever, along with all the other evils of this current world, and that the words of Isaiah will be true and the lion – its digestive system duly changed – will, indeed, eat straw like the ox.

     And we may hope, too, that  the ox – a beast of burden no longer – will become the bull that it was always meant to be.

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[1] In C S Lewis’ Prince Caspian, even the trees respond to Aslan by bowing down to him.

'IMAGINE', AND RICHARD DAWKINS

Imagine there's no Heaven

It's easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today

 

Imagine there's no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace

 

You may say that I'm a dreamer

 But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will be as one

 

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world

 

You may say that I'm a dreamer

 But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will live as one

 

                                         

‘The old religion said “Heaven help us!”  Our new one, from its very lack of that faith in heaven will teach us the more to help one another.’

Thus George Eliot.  Her sentiment reflects, I think, the first verse of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’; although the ideas contained therein are more likely to have come from Karl Marx.  Being cynical, one might say that ‘living for today’ has a certain fecklessness and lack of foresight more appropriate to Hippie Haight Ashbury than to a solution for the world’s problems. Being charitable, let us assume the Eliot/Marx hypothesis: belief in Heaven stops people from bothering to put things right on Earth.  Getting rid of Heaven – and Hell – is a prelude to social justice.

Well it might be, if we could be sure of the basic niceness of everyone.  But can we be?  Is the school bully motivated by thoughts of Heaven or Hell?  If he/she forgets about them and starts living for today will he/she start patting heads instead of thrusting them down toilets?   To believe that arguably requires a more robust faith than the one just disposed of.  And the probable heavenless future can be gauged by just one example from the heavenless past:  it is not clear that Attila the Hun believed in Heaven; or, if he did, his idea of heaven was to create hell on earth.  Not believing in an afterlife is no guarantee that you will try to make things better for everyone else.

For George Eliot’s course of action is not the only possibility; especially if you lack any sense of the categorical imperative.  Take away Heaven, and the promise of reward, and you might decide that if you only live once then you have a charter for selfishness: climbing on the hands and faces of potential rivals for worldly resources as you ascend the ladder of material success.  Get rid of Hell and you take away the threat of punishment in the afterlife: a potential charter to do what you like as long as you don’t get caught by terrestrial authority.  Either line of behaviour makes quite as much sense as helping other people on anything more than the ‘scratch my back’ principle.

This is not to argue that without belief in an afterlife everyone will adopt a policy of let’s live like pigs.  It is to doubt that disbelief in an afterlife will necessarily promote everyone’s altruism.

 

Lennon’s second verse ponders the evils caused by nationalism (countries) and ideologies (religion).   Get rid of nations and belief systems and there will be peace.  Really?   How can you know, until you’ve done so?   And what if you’re wrong?  What if strife were to continue in a stateless, ideology-free world?

            My scepticism is fuelled by memories of the heyday of football hooliganism: groups such as the Inter City Firm or the Chelsea Headhunters, who left calling cards pinned to the bodies of felled supporters of rival teams.  Unless you are to treat football as a religion, that sort of stuff had little to do with ideology, something to do with nationalism (undercover research in the 1980’s established links between such groups and the National Front), and a lot to do with tribal rivalry which, if Darwin’s The Descent of Man is to be believed, was around before religions or countries were even thought of, and will continue – pace the Marxist dream – after the nation state has withered away. The contemporary versions of tribalism – city-centre fights after pub closing time, or gang knifing of any one who ‘disses’ you: even if from the same culture/country – are showing vigorous life, and suggest that Lennon was a dreamer indeed. 

 

Lennon’s identified evil in the third verse is personal possessions.   Without them, there would be no need for greed or hunger.  One is reminded of Rousseau’s On the Origin of Inequality: the archetypal villain is the one who first erected a fence and said, ‘This is mine!’

            But it is not clear to me that hunger is caused purely by the greed of others.  What about famine arising from prolonged drought?  How would lack of possessions help prevent that?  Might not that lack exacerbate the problem?  And how extreme should lack of possessions be?  Would it include not having a bowl for an Aid handout, or no bucket to carry water in?  In such a situation, those with possessions are the only ones in a position to help.  Egypt and the seven years of famine come to mind.  It was fortuitous all round that Pharaoh followed the advice of Joseph and built more grain silos; rather than following the advice of Lennon  – or his ancient equivalent – and getting rid of those he had. 

            I am, of course, being satirical.  But even if ‘no personal possessions’ means ‘possessions held in common’, can we feel confident that communal possessions would be distributed fairly in a time of shortage?  Especially if we remember the survival of the fittest.  Would the ‘fittest’ in this situation turn out to be the greediest?

 

Darwin brings me onto Richard Dawkins.  In the Preface to The God Delusion, Dawkins cites Lennon’s ‘magnificent song’ with approval, and targets the national and social conflicts arising from religion.  But can we sure that all the instances Dawkins cites are caused by religion, rather than, say, nationalism or male arrogance?  Let’s consider just two examples from his list:   Northern Ireland – Britain’s Cuba – and the partition of India.

Was it religion that caused the Cuban Missile Crisis when two of the parties in the ménage à trois – USSR and Cuba – were officially atheist; or was it the global strategy of two political superpowers?  

Ireland as Cuba.  Historically, Ireland has been a convenient stopping off point for Britain’s enemies.  Certainly Protestant England exacerbated the hostility of Catholic Spain.  But what about trade issues?  Galway used to trade with Spain.  When Britian stopped that link by insisting that all Irish trade must be with Britian were the reasons religious or commercial?  Would it have happened anyway, even if Britain had remained Catholic, or had had no religion at all?  Economic survival of the fittest?  Were the ‘Troubles’ primarily a question of Protestant versus Catholic: or of Scottish settler versus Irish native?  When Protestant Britain and Catholic France disputed with each other over Canada, was the issue religion or the expansion of empire?  England and France fought each other about territory when both were Catholic.  Britain and Holland fought each other for commercial reasons when both were Protestant.  The Thirty Years War started in disputes about religion, but ended in disputes about borders.    Which factor was the more important?

            Was the division of India purely a Muslim/Hindu issue?  What about the fact that the Muslims were originally invaders from the North?  By analogy, is the current division of Cyprus caused by difference of religion or by difference of race?   Was religion the issue in the divison of Korea or Viet Nam?   Or was it rival ideologies?  Or rival economic systems? 

            I am not suggesting religion was not a factor in any of the above.  I am asserting that it is simplistic to cite religion as the only, or even the dominant, factor.  (In fairness to Dawkins, he does make the same sort of point himself in Chapter 7: both about Ireland, and about football teams.  Lennon has more to answer for than Dawkins does). 

 

To make the Preface’s religion-free world of ‘Imagine’ a reality, however, Dawkins has sought in the rest of the book to eliminate the idea of God.  How successful has he been, and is his diagnosis the correct one in the first place?  Would the getting rid of religious delusion create the hoped-for improvement on Earth?  I han me doubts. 

In any case,  you won’t get rid of  the delusion in question simply by writing a book about it.  Some faith heads may have had their beliefs destroyed; but others, like me, may have read the thing from cover to cover and remained unconvinced by it.

Why?  Well, in his own field of biology, Dawkins is brilliant and illuminating – what fascinated me most about the book was the explanation of why moths fly into candles – but when he strays outside his comfort zone he is pretty amateur.  His demolition of Anselm’s ontological argument, for instance, makes it sound far more trivial than it is by ignoring the context of Platonic universals that underlies it.  If Dawkins really thinks Arianism would have made no difference to anything, could he  refute G K Chesterton’s assertions to the contrary in The Everlasting Man?  What about Dawkins’ dating of the Gospel of Thomas, or his easily-won assertion that Christ never claimed to be God?  There is too much of a sense of A N Wilson, and too little of serious Biblical scholarship. 

Dawkins says we pick and choose bits from the Bible.  Do we?  Not if we are in the tradition of C S Lewis’ ‘The Weight of Glory’: “If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which appear puzzling or repellent.” 

Granted that Dawkins has done his homework in tracking down all the most repellent episodes and instructions in the Old Testament.  Responding to this issue – and it is a searching and legitimate query that has been asked by many others before Dawkins, and is not to be glibly answered – is a separate topic in itself.   One thing I would note is that he has a tendency to assume that because events are in the text they are there to be approved of, rather than the opposite.  Consider the rape and cutting up of the concubine in Judges 19.  What Dawkins doesn’t refer to is the opening of that chapter: that there was no king at that time.  Isn’t that the point made: when people become a law unto themselves, these are the sorts of things that happen? 

In similar vein, the Christianity Dawkins is rejecting has a very Muslim feel about it: a religion of works rather than faith, which for Dawkins simply means the ability to believe the unbelievable.  Can you be good without religion? is his key question: as if Christianity said that the purpose of our existence was to be good, and earn brownie points accordingly, rather than to know and love God.  Christ’s, “If you love me, you will obey my commandments,” is not, as far as I know, a text that Dawkins addresses, and he seems much more comfortable with God as sadomasochist than with God as Love. 

And having disposed of his version of Pascal’s wager, the Dawkins oeuvre generally presents us with a stark choice of his own – evolution or God – without ever satisfactorily explaining why it is not possible to believe in both.

Despite these reservations, in the variety of issues it confronts The God Delusion is the product of a wonderfully searching, fertile, satirical, far-ranging and formidable intellect. As a full-frontal attack, it is refreshingly honest and overt in its intentions.  Probably too much so for its own good.  For, perceiving the agenda, genuine religious bigots, Christian or Muslim – the real target of Dawkins’ attack – will probably not read the book at all.

 

The biggest problem I have with Dawkins – and if he resolves this satisfactorily then I have either failed to understand him or missed the relevant section altogether   – is that on the one hand he is desperately eager for us all to accept a Darwinian take on things, while simultaneously insisting that survival of the fittest is a principle by which we cannot live.  But isn’t there a danger that if we adopt the one we will adopt the other: casting off, as Nietzsche did, and Hitler after him, the sympathy by which Darwin was constrained? 

Far more likely than Dawkins anyway, in my view, to bring about the Darwinisation of Britain is the Darwinism-by-stealth of contemporary reality TV.  Take ‘Golden Balls’ (now mercifully discontinued), ‘The Weakest Link,’ ‘Come Dine with Me’, or ‘I’m a Celebrity, Get me out of Here!’ as a reasonably representative sample. Consider the encouragement to lie and betray in order to win; the humiliation of contestants by appearance, intelligence or personality; the bitchiness of comments about fellow diners, and strategic voting regardless of the actual dining experience; or the easy contempt for lesser creatures: does even a cockroach deserve to be put in a tank with the likes of some of the celebrity contestants?   

There, indeed, is the survival-of-the-fittest social principle, untrammelled by Christian constraint,  that dooms ‘Imagine’ – Lennon or Dawkins variety – to remain the dream that it is, and reawakens the hope of Heaven as humanity’s only ultimate solution. 

 

UNANSWERED PRAYER

Ask and it will be given to you.

                                                                                              Matthew 7:7

Scenario One.  Indulgent parent says to child: you can have anything you want.  Child replies: “Right then, I’ll have ten ice creams and ten giant chocolate bars.  And I want ‘em now!”  In the process of saying no, parent points out damage to teeth, digestion, being sick etc.  Child – especially if previously sick from previous overindulgence – might well see the truth of this, but would be justified in querying why such an open-ended offer should have been made in the first place.   

Scenario 2.   The Christian farmer who has prayed for rain might welcome the storm that occurs on Saturday.  But it might be bad news for the long-planned church fete.

Scenario Three.  Six people pray to be given the job they have seen advertised.  Five of them – or perhaps all six – will have their wish frustrated.

Scenario Four: Dawkins style.   Sick people in a hospital ward.  See if prayer works.  Pray for half of them, and see if the half prayed for get better.

It will be seen, I hope, where this argument is headed.  Unless we are to make God into the Genie of the Lamp, and know in advance what the correct answer ought to be, how can we even be sure whether our prayer has been answered or not?  In the case of Scenario Three, the immediate job offer may have failed because there is another one, in the very near future, to which I am much better suited; and I felt let down at the time only because I did not have the big picture. 

 

There are lots of seemingly-irresponsible promises in The New Testament.  (Promises relating to this life, I mean: promises about the next are a matter of faith).  If James 1:6 – “But he must ask in faith, without a doubt in his mind; for the doubter is like a heaving sea...” - is bad enough, then Matthew as a whole is far worse.  "Who among you will offer his son a stone when he asks for bread?" (7:9). Simple. God will. Or so it must sometimes seem to suffering humanity in times of plague or famine. God feeds the birds of the air (Matthew 6:26). That may be true enough as a generality; yet many of us will have seen images of birds that have died en masse of starvation through changes in environment that God has permitted, even if He has not initiated.  And what about those seabirds caught by an oil slick? 

"If two of you agree on earth about any request you have to make, that request will be granted by my heavenly father." (Matthew 18:19). A truly breathtaking promise. And demonstrably not true.  In the First World War, the whole Church on both sides of the conflict prayed for peace, but the fighting continued.  You could say the end of the War was caused by prayer, rather than by the exhaustion of the combatants, or the intervention of the Americans – or that these were the result of prayer – but you’d have a hard time proving it.

And to give the most altruistic of examples, Christians prayed for the Jews once they realised what was happening in the concentration camps.  But the deaths continued. It would be the coldest of cold comfort to say that only six million died, when it could have been thirteen million

“Say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done.”   (Matthew 21:22) What about the resultant tsunami, never mind the ruin to an established landscape?  It sounds like a nightmare from the wildest and most irresponsible reaches of fairy tale. 

There is a saying about Mohammed and a mountain that has no record in Islamic writings.  It can, in fact, be traced to Francis Bacon.   The story is that when Mohammed told believers he could move a mountain, and was then unable to do so, he explained himself by saying that Allah had been merciful: had the mountain really moved, the observers would have been crushed. 

This presumably, was intended as a piece of anti-Islamic propaganda.  For me, insofar as it does anything at all, it redounds to the credit of Mohammed.  If faith will move mountains, then Richard Dawkins is in the right, and faith is something we need as little of as possible. 

Fortunately, most of us are not concerned with moving mountains.  Faced with one, road builders tunnel through it, or curve round it.

The rest of the verse – “If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.” – is even more notorious: as witnessed by the disgruntled testimony of former believers who had tried that promise and found it did not come true. 

Herod put himself in an awkward position by making a foolish, over-expansive promise.  How would God deal with a request, made in full faith, for the head of John the Baptist, or some equivalent troublemaker?   Or for a night with Angelina Jolie in her prime?

It could be argued that neither of these requests could be made in Christ’s name, since Christ would not have sanctioned murder or adultery.

But Christ healed those who were afflicted with disease, and if I pray now to be healed in the way that they were then, then  that, surely, is in Christ’s name; and to deny me would be to show intolerable favouritism to those who happened to be alive when He was on Earth? 

In the Gospels generally, but with Matthew in particular, faith seems to be the key ingredient in the formula. Thus the Centurion at Capernaum - "Because of your faith, so let it be” (8:13); thus the haemorrhaging woman - "Your faith has cured you” (9:22); thus the two blind men - "As you have believed, so let it be" (9:30). And conversely, Christ's power is hampered by a lack of faith. “He could not work many miracles such was their want of faith.”  Peter’s lack of faith means that he sinks in the water, and his deficiency is reflected in his generation as a whole. Have faith, will happen.

The most poignant depiction I know of the misery arising from taking this statement at face value is in Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage. Orphaned schoolboy Philip Carey has a club foot, and hears of the Matthew text through his clergyman uncle. He prays for healing through the night; but, in the morning, his foot is the same as it was. He asks his uncle – hardly the best of spiritual advisers: a clergyman in the sense that it is what he does rather than what he believes, and chock full of snobbery – for advice, and is told that he did not pray with enough faith. Philip is thus given the double whammy of not having his prayer answered and of feeling guilty for his own failure. Unsurprisingly, he later becomes a religious sceptic.

“The text which spoke of the moving of mountains was one of those that said one thing and meant another.”

Of Human Bondage: Ch4.

 

However little consolation that thought may have provided to Philip Carey, it is, in fact, the key to any answer that might reasonably be given.  The Bible does not, in fact, mean what it says, or what it sometimes appears to say.  We can see the truth of this within its own pages. 

            That Matthew 21:22 cannot mean what it appears to mean is apparent from Christ’s prayer to have the cup pass from him.  Otherwise, the prayer would have been granted, and there would have been no crucifixion.  But, “Not my will but thine be done,” is something that anyone – even a sceptic who does not believe in the efficacy of prayer – can relate to.  Leave the decision-making to the one who has the overview. 

The case of St Paul is similar.  Paul, clearly, cannot be accused of a lack of faith.  Yet at the end of his letter to the Colossians, he writes “Remember my chains.”  Why not simply invoke the 21:22 promise, and have the chains drop from him?

In 2 Corinthians, Paul speaks of the thorn in his flesh, his three prayers for its removal, and the reply: “My grace is sufficient for you.”  It is like the situation in Gethsemane.  An answer to prayer was given, but on God’s terms, not Paul’s; and not in the way that Paul, at the time, would have wished.    

 That seems to be the pattern in The Bible.  We see it in the story of David and Goliath.   Most of us have encountered a bully in one form or another.  The David story is that you will be strengthened to fight the bully.  Most of us would probably far rather that the bully went away of his/her own accord, without any action from us. 

In Animal Farm, Benjamin the donkey finds scant consolation in the fact that he has a tail to keep away the flies.  He’d rather not have the flies in the first place. 

But this side of the Second Coming, the flies are a part of our human condition in this world.  Nor should this come as a surprise to us, given who was described as The Prince of this World.  And known also as ‘The lord of the Flies’. 

 

We should be accustomed, from literature – never mind everyday speech – to the realisation that things need not mean what they appear to mean on the surface.   “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”  is neither true nor universally acknowledged – especially by rich young men –  but is a problem only if we take the words as Jane Austen’s real opinion and completely fail to understand her irony.  The horror of a moving mountain fades away if we see it as a piece of Eastern hyperbole, and realise that Christ might have had a sense of humour. 

“Take no thought for the morrow,” does not mean we should not consider a life insurance policy for the sake of our dependents.  Not to do so would clash with Paul’s injunction to take account of widows and orphans.  If you take it as meaning that we should not think so much about this life that we forget about the next one, then Christ’s statement makes a lot of sense as a condemnation of uncritical materialism.  One of the Sikh gurus said as much to a rich man boasting about his possessions: try taking even this iron nail with you into the hereafter.   

            In considering The Bible, the audience to whom particular statements are addressed seems to be absolutely key.  Some will remember the joke about picking texts at random.  Open one page and you might find, ‘Judas went and hanged himself’.  Open another and you might see, ‘”Go thou, and do likewise”.’ 

When it comes to quoting Biblical statements out of context, sceptics are even worse than worse than overenthusiastic believers.  I once heard some humanist in a TV discussion programme ridiculing the Bible because it tells us to wear blue robes with pomegranates around the hem.  Clearly, some one had randomly opened The Old Testament at Exodus. 

            As it happens, the Bible tells ‘us’ to do nothing of the kind.  That was the attire for a specific group – the priests – under the Old Covenant, and long since superseded.  That is the problem with treating The Bible as if the whole thing is still equally relevant.  Or irrelevant.  But the Bible is probably best viewed as akin to a detective story.  A murder mystery, and the consequences arising from that murder, might - in fact - not be far short of the truth.  However, to return to the analogy, progress in solving the mystery means that earlier theories become out of date; although you still need them in order to understand what follows. 

            Bertrand Russell says somewhere – citing their failure to follow their own precepts – that the Bible tells Christians to give everything to the poor, which is very good advice, only they don’t did it.

            But was this ever addressed to Christians as a whole?  This was advice given by Christ to one particular rich young man in response to one particular spiritual need.  Nowhere is it recorded that Christ said anything of the kind to the wealthy women whose generosity enabled him to undertake his ministry: had they done so, they couldn’t have continued to support him.  Paul says that anyone who wilfully refuses to work for a living shall not eat.  Paul doesn’t tell Priscilla and Aquila that they should scrap their leather-working business and bankrupt themselves. To take away the sources of wealth creation is simply a recipe for universal poverty.  Contemporary  Zimbabwe is a sad illustration of just such an event..

            Disappointing though such a conclusion us is, that promise of Matthew 21:22 was probably made to one particular group of disciples at one particular moment in time, rather then to all believers indiscriminately.  And much was demanded of those to whom much was given.  To give another analogy from literature, the “Will you marry me?” of the romantic novel is a proposal made to the heroine, not to the reader; although general observations made about marriage might be more widely applicable. 

            Some say that miracles ended with the apostles, others that they continue  still.  Whatever we may make of the cures wrought by Catholic saints or Protestant faith healers, (and there seems convincing evidence that both can occur; although some are fraudulent) we would all agree that such healings are a rarity rather than the norm.  For most of us, healing depends on the painstaking research and long training of the medical profession.  Believers may see in the abilities and devotion of hospital staff certain gifts of the Spirit, and may thank God for the genius of a Pasteur or a Jenner or a Lister in alleviating suffering.  On this view, Christ’s healings during his lifetime were a sign to his followers that illness was an evil to be resisted; not a sort of blessing, in a pantheistic acceptance that everything is God.   (And a sign to those of us who follow of what lies in store in the New Creation.)

 

The Bible is a dangerous book, and to read the whole thing in a sprit of strict literalism, with no regard to translation, genre, or original audience is to invite disillusionment; although I do not know the statistics for those who have survived or succumbed to venom or cyanide from a literal reading of the bit about poison and serpents in Mark 16:18.  Saint Paul is recorded as having survived a snake bite; but, again, that was in the Apostolic Era. 

It would be nice if we could simply sit down, pick the thing up, and have an infallible interpretation. That this is not his case is seen in the number of different churches, and the nineteen  or whatever different ways of reading Genesis 3. 

       I would not wish for a moment to suggest that there must always be an intermediary text between The Bible and the reader; or that there cannot be direct and shattering encounter through the words of the Bible between the searching soul and God.  

But for most of us, as with our medical needs, we need to rely, most of the time, on the experts: on the painstaking research and careful reading of Biblical scholars to counteract both the confusions wrought by those false teachers of whom both Christ and Paul warned us to be on our guard, and the limitations of our own understanding.   

And while nothing should be a substitute for a direct encounter with the text, most readers will welcome the opinion of another reader, especially in matters of clarification: what belongs to which genre, what to take metaphorically, and what to treat literally.   For if we need not take the moving mountain at face value, it does not follow that the language about the Resurrection should be treated in the same vein...

A reliable commentary for Protestants (or the Magisterium for Catholics) is a good safeguard against wild interpretations. And against disappointment.