In a Church Meeting discussion last night about what it means to offer a 'radical welcome' to people, someone made the point that we need to be able to see past the labels to the 'humanity' beneath. Stereotyping sells papers, makes complex matters appear simple, and appeases people's own tribal or pack instincts.
Seumas Milne, writing in today's Guardian (http://bit.ly/pyrUCF), dismisses the arguments of those who suggest that the Norwegian mass murderer Breivik is insane. I'm sure Milne is correct : Breivik had planned his 'political' strategy for years in consultation with extreme right-wing Islamophobic groups in England and elsewhere. He lives in a world in which a moderate Muslim is only a cover for violent extremist Muslims, a world in which any politician who makes a noise that they can construe as being sympathetic to Islam (in the words of columnist Melanie Phillips, whom Breivik apparently quotes at length in his manifesto) is "at best a stupid mouthpiece of those who are bamboozling Britain into Islamisation, and at worst a supporter of that process." (see http://bit.ly/neU37p ) This is the woman that the BBC chooses to put on 'the Moral Maze' - see earlier post - the woman who smells anti-semitism in every critical comment about the Israeli government who nonetheless condemns the British Muslim community for its "inflated and perverse sense of its own victimisation". Am I glad I don't live in her world of stereotypes, labels and conspiracy theories.
I get the same sense of frustration when I read that 'all Christians believe X', 'all Muslims believe Y' - or at least, if they don't believe X or Y then they implicitly support those who do. It's not true. I remember a conversation I had with a respected Jewish rabbi who was telling me about a series of inter-faith conferences he attended. Within a couple of hours of assembling, the conservative and fundamentalist Muslims, Jews and Christians would have gathered at one end of the room, and the liberal-minded ones at the other. If Breivik hadn't been a "white Christian" fanatic, but born in Pakistan instead, he would have been a fanatical Muslim mass murderer. The skin colour and religion is just an excuse, irrelevant in itself. Every religion has verses in its scriptures that can be pressed into service to justify mass homicide, provided they are taken in isolation. You don't have to be insane to become a fanatic - just have . . . I don't know . . a profoundly low self-esteem, coupled with an inflated ego, a touch of an inability to see things from others' perspective and perhaps mostly an addiction to conversations that fuel that tribal sense of heroic self-righteousness (which I'm sure must be quite enjoyable and addictive).
Seumas Milne might have noted that the Guardian's immediate initial response to the atrocity as soon as the news broke was to identify the likely perpetrator as an Islamic extremist. Ironic that the same evening as the killing, the English Defence League firebombed a mosque (in Luton, I think) and daubed it with slogans. According to Melanie Phillips, as a white Christian I must be an apologist for such acts - irrevocably tainted as I am by racial and religious association. In fact it is people like her who are the apologists, not only for the EDL and the Breiviks, but for the Islamic fanatics too.
The problem with looking for the common 'humanity' in each other is that 'humanity' can be - as we see - both beautiful and gracious but also disgusting and brutal. There are choices to be made all along the line about what constitutes 'humanity' - something that I believe is a fundamental weakness in the (secular) Humanist project. For me, I'm inclined to follow the Quaker advice to 'look for that which is of Christ in everyone'.
Thursday, 28 July 2011
Friday, 8 July 2011
Murdoch's only doing what comes naturally - it's the politicians who fail to govern that should 'consider their position'
There is no such thing as 'business ethics'. The essence of business is making money : that's all business is. We shouldn't complain too much if a business like News Corporation scours the gutters, abuses human rights and bribes policemen to beat its rivals in the marketplace. Like a cat with a bird, it's only doing what comes naturally. We're dealing here, not with human beings, but with what the Apostle Paul called the 'principalities and powers' (Ephesians 6:12) :
"We are not fighting against humans. We are fighting against forces and authorities and against rulers of darkness and powers in the spiritual world." (The 'rulers of darkness' are not humans like Rupert Murdoch; these are 'spiritual' forces, beyond any single human.)
Any ethics in business has to be supplied by human beings. Yes, we can hope that the human beings employed in the business have ethical standards and apply them. Realistically, though, that isn't going to happen unless ethical behaviour is rewarded. It has to be rewarded from within - the people at the top must define the ethical position. In News International that clearly doesn't happen and hasn't happened for a long time. Rebekah Brooks is absolutely implicated. Murdoch's (and her) ethics are 'do what is necessary to make money'. He and his underlings don't need to instruct junior journalists to hack voicemails. They don't even need to know they're doing it. As long as those journalists could be confident that they would be commended for anything that steals a march on rival newspapers, some of them were bound to do it - like the soldiers that torture prisoners because there is a top-down culture of impunity. Or like the famous assassins of Thomas à Becket, who overheard the king wishing his Archbishop dead, and murdered him on his own altar steps. The king - according to the story at least - had himself whipped through the streets of London as a public penance. I can't wait . . .
Of course, every purchaser of the Sun and the News of the World has also rewarded Murdoch's empire with their custom. The 'customer is always right' in business. As long as someone is prepared to buy gutter journalism, gutter journalism will exist. But it's not realistic to hope the market for gutter journalism will dry up, any more than it is realistic to hope that people like Coulson, Brooks and Murdoch suddenly see the light.
So if it's too much to hope that media moguls in a competitive world will behave ethically, because it's too much to hope that their market will dry up, who will supply the ethics?
Isn't that what we have politicians and judiciary for? In fact, isn't that almost their sole function?
What we have had for the past thirty years is a political culture of hand-washing and avoidance of responsibility.
The old Tory ideology is "You can't expect the common people to know how to run a country. The best people to do that are those who already know how to run a country estate, keep the peasants employed and all that." In the 80s that culture changed and went downmarket. Now it was big businessmen who were likely to be the best at running things (except, of course, they did that so well they shifted most of our manufacturing industry to the Far East because it was more profitable). That meant the only real big businessmen left in the country were the financiers. And how the Blair government feted them! Now of course we know that the financiers weren't terribly interested in running the country either - much more interested of getting as much of their tax liability offshore as they could.
In this whole sorry mess, then, the real culpability lies with our political leaders for failing to govern - for failing to do the job we put them there to do. For failing to supply the ethics to a fundamentally unethical world of business and finance - in fact, for doing the exact opposite and transferring responsibility for governance on to them. And alongside them - and this is a tawdry story yet to fully emerge - stand the police. It seems pretty clear that investigations into phone hacking were blocked at a very senior level in the Met. And unless it was just one rogue policeman passing on phone numbers (like it was 'just one rogue journalist' Mulcaire) I expect to see heads roll at top level in the Met - a police force that's shown itself stunningly short of ethics in recent years and tried to spit out the only Commissioner who showed signs of having any.
400 years ago, bloody civil war fuelled by religious bigotry led to a separation of the power of the Church (the Rupert Murdoch of its day) from politics. Well, theoretically. Now it is time for an enforced separation of powers between politics and big business and finance. Rebekah Brooks shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the gates of Downing Street - or Cameron's dining table. All MPs - or if not that, at least Cabinet members - should automatically be required to resign from their business interests.
And David Cameron, rather than Rebekah Brooks, should be the one 'considering his position'. We need a clean sweep and a culture change at the heart of British politics.
"We are not fighting against humans. We are fighting against forces and authorities and against rulers of darkness and powers in the spiritual world." (The 'rulers of darkness' are not humans like Rupert Murdoch; these are 'spiritual' forces, beyond any single human.)
Any ethics in business has to be supplied by human beings. Yes, we can hope that the human beings employed in the business have ethical standards and apply them. Realistically, though, that isn't going to happen unless ethical behaviour is rewarded. It has to be rewarded from within - the people at the top must define the ethical position. In News International that clearly doesn't happen and hasn't happened for a long time. Rebekah Brooks is absolutely implicated. Murdoch's (and her) ethics are 'do what is necessary to make money'. He and his underlings don't need to instruct junior journalists to hack voicemails. They don't even need to know they're doing it. As long as those journalists could be confident that they would be commended for anything that steals a march on rival newspapers, some of them were bound to do it - like the soldiers that torture prisoners because there is a top-down culture of impunity. Or like the famous assassins of Thomas à Becket, who overheard the king wishing his Archbishop dead, and murdered him on his own altar steps. The king - according to the story at least - had himself whipped through the streets of London as a public penance. I can't wait . . .
Of course, every purchaser of the Sun and the News of the World has also rewarded Murdoch's empire with their custom. The 'customer is always right' in business. As long as someone is prepared to buy gutter journalism, gutter journalism will exist. But it's not realistic to hope the market for gutter journalism will dry up, any more than it is realistic to hope that people like Coulson, Brooks and Murdoch suddenly see the light.
So if it's too much to hope that media moguls in a competitive world will behave ethically, because it's too much to hope that their market will dry up, who will supply the ethics?
Isn't that what we have politicians and judiciary for? In fact, isn't that almost their sole function?
What we have had for the past thirty years is a political culture of hand-washing and avoidance of responsibility.
The old Tory ideology is "You can't expect the common people to know how to run a country. The best people to do that are those who already know how to run a country estate, keep the peasants employed and all that." In the 80s that culture changed and went downmarket. Now it was big businessmen who were likely to be the best at running things (except, of course, they did that so well they shifted most of our manufacturing industry to the Far East because it was more profitable). That meant the only real big businessmen left in the country were the financiers. And how the Blair government feted them! Now of course we know that the financiers weren't terribly interested in running the country either - much more interested of getting as much of their tax liability offshore as they could.
In this whole sorry mess, then, the real culpability lies with our political leaders for failing to govern - for failing to do the job we put them there to do. For failing to supply the ethics to a fundamentally unethical world of business and finance - in fact, for doing the exact opposite and transferring responsibility for governance on to them. And alongside them - and this is a tawdry story yet to fully emerge - stand the police. It seems pretty clear that investigations into phone hacking were blocked at a very senior level in the Met. And unless it was just one rogue policeman passing on phone numbers (like it was 'just one rogue journalist' Mulcaire) I expect to see heads roll at top level in the Met - a police force that's shown itself stunningly short of ethics in recent years and tried to spit out the only Commissioner who showed signs of having any.
400 years ago, bloody civil war fuelled by religious bigotry led to a separation of the power of the Church (the Rupert Murdoch of its day) from politics. Well, theoretically. Now it is time for an enforced separation of powers between politics and big business and finance. Rebekah Brooks shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the gates of Downing Street - or Cameron's dining table. All MPs - or if not that, at least Cabinet members - should automatically be required to resign from their business interests.
And David Cameron, rather than Rebekah Brooks, should be the one 'considering his position'. We need a clean sweep and a culture change at the heart of British politics.
Saturday, 28 May 2011
Sharon Shoesmith
Dreadful interview by John Humphreys on R4 'Today' prog this morning. He didn't ask a single question about the inquiry into Sharon Shoesmith's dismissal as Head of Child Services (or whatever the job title was) for Haringey Borough at the command of Ed Balls. He arrogantly said "the nation wants to know who to blame" (or words to that effect). So he speaks for the nation? He certainly doesn't speak for me!
As I understood what she was trying to say - she didn't get much of a chance, and could have perhaps said it more clearly - she wasn't arguing that she shouldn't have been dismissed. (Humphreys clearly assumed she was). Only that her summary dismissal on the instructions of a politician, without a proper inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Peter Connolly's death, is unlikely to be the best way of improving the way statutory agencies deal with children at risk - and the focus absolutely has to be on learning the lessons and improving procedures. Scapegoating may make people feel better, it may sell newspapers and enable politicians to exonerate themselves but it doesn't actually enable lessons to be learned. It's not in the interest of 39,000 children at risk. In fact it may encourage a culture of secrecy and dishonesty and put them more at risk. It's irresponsible. And we are equally entitled to ask whether government has been giving the necessary resources to social services departments : it's an eye-watering caseload in many cases.
I think she's dead right, and dearly hope the appeal is lost. I have no idea as to whether she should have been dismissed, and if so on what grounds. The stupidity is that the manner of her dismissal means we will probably never know whether she should have been.
As I understood what she was trying to say - she didn't get much of a chance, and could have perhaps said it more clearly - she wasn't arguing that she shouldn't have been dismissed. (Humphreys clearly assumed she was). Only that her summary dismissal on the instructions of a politician, without a proper inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Peter Connolly's death, is unlikely to be the best way of improving the way statutory agencies deal with children at risk - and the focus absolutely has to be on learning the lessons and improving procedures. Scapegoating may make people feel better, it may sell newspapers and enable politicians to exonerate themselves but it doesn't actually enable lessons to be learned. It's not in the interest of 39,000 children at risk. In fact it may encourage a culture of secrecy and dishonesty and put them more at risk. It's irresponsible. And we are equally entitled to ask whether government has been giving the necessary resources to social services departments : it's an eye-watering caseload in many cases.
I think she's dead right, and dearly hope the appeal is lost. I have no idea as to whether she should have been dismissed, and if so on what grounds. The stupidity is that the manner of her dismissal means we will probably never know whether she should have been.
Saturday, 30 April 2011
Morris as 'Sacrament without Word'
Currently preparing my sermon for tomorrow, which will be delivered wearing morris dance costume, since this year May Day is on a Sunday. I've long been fascinated (as a somewhat lapsed dancer) by a powerful ritual that has lost all contact with its original meaning - we're left with speculation. Yet there's probably more proper (that is, ritual, rather than social) morris danced in churches at Morris Ring meetings than at neo-pagan events.
Hopefully I'll get a link up to the finished article. Meanwhile, early to bed tonight to be up at 4:15. As a local councillor for the Magdalen Bridge area I have a particular interest in the policing of a very recent "tradition" : extremely drunk students jumping into the river from a height of 10m - a river that currently has only 80cm of water in it in places.
Hopefully I'll get a link up to the finished article. Meanwhile, early to bed tonight to be up at 4:15. As a local councillor for the Magdalen Bridge area I have a particular interest in the policing of a very recent "tradition" : extremely drunk students jumping into the river from a height of 10m - a river that currently has only 80cm of water in it in places.
Let's get physical
An old mate of mine - Jon Cape - has been selected to present a paper at a 'Consciousness Studies' conference in Stockholm (http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/) this week. I found the abstract for his paper really interesting :
"Despite the huge popularity of reality shows, the nature of reality is hardly a popular subject. Well it sort of is - put God in the title of a book and - for or against Him - you can draw an audience. And yet much of the classical 'God versus the atheists' debate generates more heat than light. It does so because so many of the assumptions behind both sides of that debate remain unexamined, at least outside a fairly narrow and specialist philosophical circle. I thoroughly disagree with Socrates. The unexamined life can certainly be worth living. But unexamined assumptions can at least be fun to explore.
When it comes to the nature of reality, what is the dominant outlook? For many, the answer is so obvious it doesn't merit a name. Still less does it merit examination. Within the worlds of science and philosophy, the prevalent outlook, if named at all, is physicalism - sometimes dressed as scientific naturalism.
Physicalism in western philosophical tradition is a version of monism. Monism took battle with dualism and monism won. Monism thought the world was composed of one kind of stuff. Dualism opted for two. Monism had two types. These two types were called idealism and physicalism. In today's language, to show idealism is to aim for perfection, whether this is realistic or not. Supporters of idealism may or may not have been idealistic in this popular sense. For them, reality was basically one thing and that thing was mental or spiritual in nature. Physical reality flowed from this. Physicalists took the opposite view and won the day. Science would hardly make sense otherwise, would it? Physicalism became, and by and large it remains, the only show in town, the emperor whose writ is law in most of modern intellectual life. In many parts of the physical, biological and social sciences, to appear to question this holy writ is to seriously damage your wealth, professional prospects and credibility amongst your peers. Thus we find arguments which might run the risk of giving this appearance being carefully prefaced by a denial of any such intention. But the empire is much larger. For many of us in all walks of life, we might not give a second's thought to the emperor. But he quietly informs what we can think about the world and our place in it.
Physicalism is often presented as if it is simply science, or what science tells us about reality. But this is not so. Physicalism is one view of reality. It is a dominant view, indeed an emperor in today's world. The emperor's clothes are high fashion. But is he really naked?
In this talk, the conventional wisdom of today, physicalism, will be given a philosophical grilling much in the way that Anthony Freeman ('God In Us', 1993) has done so ably with regard to conventional wisdoms of yesterday."
Watch this space for a link to the eventual paper.
"Despite the huge popularity of reality shows, the nature of reality is hardly a popular subject. Well it sort of is - put God in the title of a book and - for or against Him - you can draw an audience. And yet much of the classical 'God versus the atheists' debate generates more heat than light. It does so because so many of the assumptions behind both sides of that debate remain unexamined, at least outside a fairly narrow and specialist philosophical circle. I thoroughly disagree with Socrates. The unexamined life can certainly be worth living. But unexamined assumptions can at least be fun to explore.
When it comes to the nature of reality, what is the dominant outlook? For many, the answer is so obvious it doesn't merit a name. Still less does it merit examination. Within the worlds of science and philosophy, the prevalent outlook, if named at all, is physicalism - sometimes dressed as scientific naturalism.
Physicalism in western philosophical tradition is a version of monism. Monism took battle with dualism and monism won. Monism thought the world was composed of one kind of stuff. Dualism opted for two. Monism had two types. These two types were called idealism and physicalism. In today's language, to show idealism is to aim for perfection, whether this is realistic or not. Supporters of idealism may or may not have been idealistic in this popular sense. For them, reality was basically one thing and that thing was mental or spiritual in nature. Physical reality flowed from this. Physicalists took the opposite view and won the day. Science would hardly make sense otherwise, would it? Physicalism became, and by and large it remains, the only show in town, the emperor whose writ is law in most of modern intellectual life. In many parts of the physical, biological and social sciences, to appear to question this holy writ is to seriously damage your wealth, professional prospects and credibility amongst your peers. Thus we find arguments which might run the risk of giving this appearance being carefully prefaced by a denial of any such intention. But the empire is much larger. For many of us in all walks of life, we might not give a second's thought to the emperor. But he quietly informs what we can think about the world and our place in it.
Physicalism is often presented as if it is simply science, or what science tells us about reality. But this is not so. Physicalism is one view of reality. It is a dominant view, indeed an emperor in today's world. The emperor's clothes are high fashion. But is he really naked?
In this talk, the conventional wisdom of today, physicalism, will be given a philosophical grilling much in the way that Anthony Freeman ('God In Us', 1993) has done so ably with regard to conventional wisdoms of yesterday."
Watch this space for a link to the eventual paper.
Friday, 1 April 2011
'Bible's Hidden Secrets' concluded
Francesca Stavrakopoulou's series concluded with an exploration of the real meaning of the Garden of Eden. She suggested that the story refers to the Jerusalem Temple of Solomon's day. That is not at all far-fetched; however, in the first programme of the series she made much of the lack of any archaeological evidence for the existence of such a temple, and suggested that Solomon did not inherit a united nation capable of building such a grand edifice. You can't have it both ways!
The 'Deuteronomic' Biblical writers want their readers to understand that David didn't build a temple, not because he didn't have the power, but because God didn't need him to (2 Sam 7 : 5 - 7). Solomon's version (according to 1 Kings 5 : 3) is that David was not militarily secure enough. Whilst there may not be archæological evidence, there is an enormous amount of written evidence for the existence of Solmon's Temple, with detailed descriptions of it which Stavrakopoulou herself drew on. We even have the contract with Hiram, King of Tyre, for the felling of a vast numbers of cedar trees in Lebanon in 1 Kings 5 using conscript labour (a mass destruction whose legacy remains, and which was lamented by the prophets e.g. Jer 22 : 13 - 16).
As Margaret Barker has clearly described, the Solomonic Temple was a representation in built form of the seven days of creation as described in Genesis 1, and the Adam figure is the figure representative of humankind in the form of the royal high priest, who alone may enter the Most Holy Place. But is there not a 'chicken and egg' situation here? Yes, it is possible that the story of the so-called 'Fall' of Adam and Eve postdates Solomon's Temple and refers to it. It is likely that Solomon's Temple is constructed on the basis of a pre-existing creation story. Yet it also seems likely that the Hebrew creation story was refined during the exile to draw a clear distinction from the bloodthirsty creation myths of the Babylonians. The final editors felt it logical, clearly, to put these two creation stories and the story of the Garden together; but they are stories that refer back to the lost temple in Jerusalem, which itself was constructed on the basis of the creation story. That suggests that the material out of which these stories were constructed predate the Temple, possibly by centuries. It seems far more likely that this part of Genesis is knitting together well-established ancient Hebrew stories and giving them a contemporary twist.
I couldn't help noticing how Stavrakopoulou skirted round the most obvious garden reference : that of Babylon itself, whose royal gardens were one of the wonders of the world. Babylon (just as much as Jerusalem) leaves its fingerprints all over this Genesis text, as it does that other 'priestly' writing we find in Ezekiel (a Hebrew prophet in exile in Babylon). Ezekiel's detailed description of the Jerusalem Temple he dreams of (Ezek 40 &ff) directly echoes architectural descriptions of Marduk's temple in Babylon, the cuneiform tablet of which was exhibited at the British Museum a couple of years ago.
In the BBC programme, a false distinction was made between Adam as a historical royal/priestly figure and as an archetypal/original human. The whole point of the high priestly role is precisely to become the archetypal human for the sake of making effective atonement with God. The kingly high priest/Messiah in the temple is both. The reason she made this false distinction was because of the evident dislike and difficulty she has with the myth of 'original sin' that she thinks the story of the Garden contains. She tries to dispense with it by pinning the meaning of the story to a particular historical figure. This is simply not possible with a story that has gone through such a complex editing process that it has embedded within it multiple references.
She would have done better to ask whether the story of Adam and Eve in Eden is a story of a 'Fall' into 'sin' at all. Is it a 'moral' story? I don't see it has much to do with morality as such. It's the apostle Paul that we have to thank for that reading, which the institutional Church has capitalised on over centuries to keep women in their place and retain its ideological power. But that's only one possible reading of the text. As a description of the human condition it is profound. It asks and seeks to answer 'what is it about Adam (the 'earth creature') that is different from all other creatures?' and the answer is correct : not that humans are 'sinners' but that they are too inquisitive for their own good. (There are many other messages too). The consequences of that ability to question and push boundaries are not a 'punishment for sin' by an angry God but simply an inevitable consequence. 'Pandora has opened her box'. The 'genie is out of the bottle', and cannot be put back in. There's even the suggestion that this development is God's will (God creates the serpent, after all), and there is almost a sorrowful tone in the voice of God as God describes the tension and trouble that being a God invokes! The story of the suffering Messiah flows naturally from this.
The impression I am left with from the series is that Stavrakopoulou knows a lot about archæology, and a lot about the Bible, but does not know enough about the world of biblical theology. At every turn she has gone to people who articulate what she imagines to be the classic, almost cariacature, teachings of Christianity : creationism, original sin, a degraded view of women, strict monotheism etc., - but has not honoured the rich variety of interpretations and continual wrestling with the inherited texts that have always been part of the Christian tradition. Sydney Carter once wrote : "the function of the Bible is to force us to create", and though I found the series stimulating, it didn't really offer a life-enhancing alternative reading. Because, I think, it wasn't looking for one.
The 'Deuteronomic' Biblical writers want their readers to understand that David didn't build a temple, not because he didn't have the power, but because God didn't need him to (2 Sam 7 : 5 - 7). Solomon's version (according to 1 Kings 5 : 3) is that David was not militarily secure enough. Whilst there may not be archæological evidence, there is an enormous amount of written evidence for the existence of Solmon's Temple, with detailed descriptions of it which Stavrakopoulou herself drew on. We even have the contract with Hiram, King of Tyre, for the felling of a vast numbers of cedar trees in Lebanon in 1 Kings 5 using conscript labour (a mass destruction whose legacy remains, and which was lamented by the prophets e.g. Jer 22 : 13 - 16).
As Margaret Barker has clearly described, the Solomonic Temple was a representation in built form of the seven days of creation as described in Genesis 1, and the Adam figure is the figure representative of humankind in the form of the royal high priest, who alone may enter the Most Holy Place. But is there not a 'chicken and egg' situation here? Yes, it is possible that the story of the so-called 'Fall' of Adam and Eve postdates Solomon's Temple and refers to it. It is likely that Solomon's Temple is constructed on the basis of a pre-existing creation story. Yet it also seems likely that the Hebrew creation story was refined during the exile to draw a clear distinction from the bloodthirsty creation myths of the Babylonians. The final editors felt it logical, clearly, to put these two creation stories and the story of the Garden together; but they are stories that refer back to the lost temple in Jerusalem, which itself was constructed on the basis of the creation story. That suggests that the material out of which these stories were constructed predate the Temple, possibly by centuries. It seems far more likely that this part of Genesis is knitting together well-established ancient Hebrew stories and giving them a contemporary twist.
I couldn't help noticing how Stavrakopoulou skirted round the most obvious garden reference : that of Babylon itself, whose royal gardens were one of the wonders of the world. Babylon (just as much as Jerusalem) leaves its fingerprints all over this Genesis text, as it does that other 'priestly' writing we find in Ezekiel (a Hebrew prophet in exile in Babylon). Ezekiel's detailed description of the Jerusalem Temple he dreams of (Ezek 40 &ff) directly echoes architectural descriptions of Marduk's temple in Babylon, the cuneiform tablet of which was exhibited at the British Museum a couple of years ago.
In the BBC programme, a false distinction was made between Adam as a historical royal/priestly figure and as an archetypal/original human. The whole point of the high priestly role is precisely to become the archetypal human for the sake of making effective atonement with God. The kingly high priest/Messiah in the temple is both. The reason she made this false distinction was because of the evident dislike and difficulty she has with the myth of 'original sin' that she thinks the story of the Garden contains. She tries to dispense with it by pinning the meaning of the story to a particular historical figure. This is simply not possible with a story that has gone through such a complex editing process that it has embedded within it multiple references.
She would have done better to ask whether the story of Adam and Eve in Eden is a story of a 'Fall' into 'sin' at all. Is it a 'moral' story? I don't see it has much to do with morality as such. It's the apostle Paul that we have to thank for that reading, which the institutional Church has capitalised on over centuries to keep women in their place and retain its ideological power. But that's only one possible reading of the text. As a description of the human condition it is profound. It asks and seeks to answer 'what is it about Adam (the 'earth creature') that is different from all other creatures?' and the answer is correct : not that humans are 'sinners' but that they are too inquisitive for their own good. (There are many other messages too). The consequences of that ability to question and push boundaries are not a 'punishment for sin' by an angry God but simply an inevitable consequence. 'Pandora has opened her box'. The 'genie is out of the bottle', and cannot be put back in. There's even the suggestion that this development is God's will (God creates the serpent, after all), and there is almost a sorrowful tone in the voice of God as God describes the tension and trouble that being a God invokes! The story of the suffering Messiah flows naturally from this.
The impression I am left with from the series is that Stavrakopoulou knows a lot about archæology, and a lot about the Bible, but does not know enough about the world of biblical theology. At every turn she has gone to people who articulate what she imagines to be the classic, almost cariacature, teachings of Christianity : creationism, original sin, a degraded view of women, strict monotheism etc., - but has not honoured the rich variety of interpretations and continual wrestling with the inherited texts that have always been part of the Christian tradition. Sydney Carter once wrote : "the function of the Bible is to force us to create", and though I found the series stimulating, it didn't really offer a life-enhancing alternative reading. Because, I think, it wasn't looking for one.
Thursday, 24 March 2011
'God's Wife' (BBC2 series 'Bible's Buried Secrets')
BBC2, Tuesdays 9:00pm)
What a strange programme this was! Francesca Stavrakopoulou 'exposed' how the Bible 'lies' to us about monotheism, yet the evidence she drew was from the Bible itself! Even more strangely, she implied that because the inhabitants of Israel before 600BC were polytheists rather than monotheists that somehow monotheism 'isn't true'. I'm fairly sure this was the result of poor editing by people who assumed that a programme about a subject they presumed to be fundamentally uninteresting and of no contemporary relevance would need to be made a bit more racy and provocative. Unfortunately (as I go on to argue) they missed the point, which was nothing to do with the trustworthiness of the Bible (whatever that means).
To those who keep half an eye on biblical studies there was nothing particularly new here. It's obvious that the Hebrew scriptures - or at least the so-called 'Deuteronomic History' books of the Bible - tell a story of a continual struggle against Canaanite religion. But as Stavrakopoulou pointed out (and as I 've been saying in sermons for years) that struggle took centuries to find success, only perhaps achieving it after the Babylonian Exile of the 6th century BC.
I was amazed she didn't cite one of the key texts - Jeremiah 44 - where Jeremiah is attributing the destruction of the nation to its failure to observe a strict monotheism, while his opponents - refugees in Egypt - argue fiercely that the rot set in when a religious purge by monotheistic reformers (initiated by the king Josiah) suppressed all worship (by women, mainly) of the Queen of Heaven :
More radical is Margaret Barker's work on the worship and imagery in Solomon's Temple (c.1000 BC) and her suggestion that the early Christians - most notably the writer of Revelation - understood Jesus to be fulfilling in himself not only the role of High Priest and the symbols of the second Temple (recently completed by Herod), but that he and his mother were in some sense a restoration of the the first, Solomonic, temple with its holy artefacts : the ark, the snake, the tree, the cherubim, the image of the goddess Wisdom, the 'cakes' etc.
But underlying the presentation of the 'hidden story' of the Bible (with its insinuations of cover-ups and the Bible's untrustworthiness) Stavrakopoulou was actually presenting two genuine arguments of genuine contemporary relevance, which the editors either missed or sought to play down.
The first, which was given about one minute of the programme, is that monotheism is bad for women and that having a fertility goddess as a male god's consort is better for women. That is a question well worth asking, but none of the evidence necessary to tackle that question was found in the programme. There is plenty of evidence that objectifying women as procreators doesn't necessarily do them any favours. According to the monotheists' story as told in the Bible, they struggled against temple prostitution and child sacrifice, for instance.
The second argument was provocative enough never to be stated outright in the programme. The claim of the Jews to be a distinctive people, separated from all others by their monotheism, bequeathed a Promised Land almost from time immemorial by a 'jealous' God who opposes all polytheistic tendencies is vitally important as the guiding myth for Zionist Israel's policy of suppressing and driving out the present 'Canaanites', the Palestinians. Stavrakopoulou argued, effectively, "But you're all Canaanites! The myth of the exclusive inheritance of the Promised Land by monotheists comes not in Abraham's time but later than the 6th century BC exile in Babylon - 500 years after David and Solomon." Now this (in my mind) undoubtedly correct assertion is far more interesting than supposed cover-ups in the Bible. But I suspect it was too risky for the editors to spell out. I wonder why?
What a strange programme this was! Francesca Stavrakopoulou 'exposed' how the Bible 'lies' to us about monotheism, yet the evidence she drew was from the Bible itself! Even more strangely, she implied that because the inhabitants of Israel before 600BC were polytheists rather than monotheists that somehow monotheism 'isn't true'. I'm fairly sure this was the result of poor editing by people who assumed that a programme about a subject they presumed to be fundamentally uninteresting and of no contemporary relevance would need to be made a bit more racy and provocative. Unfortunately (as I go on to argue) they missed the point, which was nothing to do with the trustworthiness of the Bible (whatever that means).
To those who keep half an eye on biblical studies there was nothing particularly new here. It's obvious that the Hebrew scriptures - or at least the so-called 'Deuteronomic History' books of the Bible - tell a story of a continual struggle against Canaanite religion. But as Stavrakopoulou pointed out (and as I 've been saying in sermons for years) that struggle took centuries to find success, only perhaps achieving it after the Babylonian Exile of the 6th century BC.
I was amazed she didn't cite one of the key texts - Jeremiah 44 - where Jeremiah is attributing the destruction of the nation to its failure to observe a strict monotheism, while his opponents - refugees in Egypt - argue fiercely that the rot set in when a religious purge by monotheistic reformers (initiated by the king Josiah) suppressed all worship (by women, mainly) of the Queen of Heaven :
Jeremiah, what do we care if you speak in the LORD's name? We refuse to listen! We have promised to worship the goddess Astarte, the Queen of Heaven, [a] and that is exactly what we are going to do. We will burn incense and offer sacrifices of wine to her, just as we, our ancestors, our kings, and our leaders did when we lived in Jerusalem and the other towns of Judah. We had plenty of food back then. We were well off, and nothing bad ever happened to us. But since the time we stopped burning incense and offering wine sacrifices to her, we have been dying from war and hunger. Then the women said, "When we lived in Judah, we worshiped the Queen of Heaven and offered sacrifices of wine and special loaves of bread shaped like her. Our husbands knew what we were doing, and they approved of it."
Jeremiah 44 : 16 - 19
More radical is Margaret Barker's work on the worship and imagery in Solomon's Temple (c.1000 BC) and her suggestion that the early Christians - most notably the writer of Revelation - understood Jesus to be fulfilling in himself not only the role of High Priest and the symbols of the second Temple (recently completed by Herod), but that he and his mother were in some sense a restoration of the the first, Solomonic, temple with its holy artefacts : the ark, the snake, the tree, the cherubim, the image of the goddess Wisdom, the 'cakes' etc.
But underlying the presentation of the 'hidden story' of the Bible (with its insinuations of cover-ups and the Bible's untrustworthiness) Stavrakopoulou was actually presenting two genuine arguments of genuine contemporary relevance, which the editors either missed or sought to play down.
The first, which was given about one minute of the programme, is that monotheism is bad for women and that having a fertility goddess as a male god's consort is better for women. That is a question well worth asking, but none of the evidence necessary to tackle that question was found in the programme. There is plenty of evidence that objectifying women as procreators doesn't necessarily do them any favours. According to the monotheists' story as told in the Bible, they struggled against temple prostitution and child sacrifice, for instance.
The second argument was provocative enough never to be stated outright in the programme. The claim of the Jews to be a distinctive people, separated from all others by their monotheism, bequeathed a Promised Land almost from time immemorial by a 'jealous' God who opposes all polytheistic tendencies is vitally important as the guiding myth for Zionist Israel's policy of suppressing and driving out the present 'Canaanites', the Palestinians. Stavrakopoulou argued, effectively, "But you're all Canaanites! The myth of the exclusive inheritance of the Promised Land by monotheists comes not in Abraham's time but later than the 6th century BC exile in Babylon - 500 years after David and Solomon." Now this (in my mind) undoubtedly correct assertion is far more interesting than supposed cover-ups in the Bible. But I suspect it was too risky for the editors to spell out. I wonder why?
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