It Depends What You Mean By God

It Depends What You Mean By God

By

Josephine Griffiths

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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It Depends What You Mean By God

Copyright © 2010 Josephine Griffiths

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The information, views, opinions and visuals expressed in this publication are solely those of the author(s) and do not reflect those of the publisher. The publisher disclaims any liabilities or responsibilities whatsoever for any damages, libel or liabilities arising directly or indirectly from the contents of this publication.

A copy of this publication can be found in the National Library of Australia.

ISBN: 978-1-921791-87-1 (pbk.)

Published by Book Pal

www.bookpal.com.au

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By the Same Author:

The Reclaiming of Wisdom:

The Restoration of the Feminine in Christianity

This Year for Joy:

A Day by Day Guide to care for the Soul

This Royal Throne

A Romp through the History of the Kings and Queens of England

Available from the author at jojo1@iinet.net.au

Out of print

Seeking Sophia:

Meditations and Reflections for Women Who No Longer Go To Church.

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Acknowledgements

My family and friends are always encouraging about my writing but this book I must particularly attribute to my eldest grandson, Sam and my daughter, Holly. Sam’s constant scratching away at the God question gave me the idea and it was Holly’s appreciation and enthusiasm that persuaded me it was worth writing. Thank you.

I am grateful to Susan Ledger for the beautiful cover illustration, and to Elizabeth Reid-Boyd for reading the draft and making some very helpful comments. My thanks go as always to Madlen for her patience and ready help with the technical stuff in which she is an adept and I am a perpetual novice. Bronwen Joy and Madlen both proof-read the text, with great thoroughness; together they have saved me from many an error. Thank you.

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For

Holly

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Contents

Introduction

It Depends what you mean by Christianity

It Depends what you mean by God

It Depends who you mean by Jesus

It Depends what you mean by Prayer

It Depends what you mean by Eucharist

End notes

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Introduction

In every academic discipline there is a vast gulf between the expert in the field and the lay person. Medicine is a familiar example: what is known, understood and carried as accepted theory among the medical researchers takes years to drift down to the patient in the doctor’s waiting room. Indeed, it takes quite a while to come to the busy G.P. who may have no time to read more diverse literature than the drug companies’ promos. By the time the lay person has got a handle on the new procedure, it is likely ‘old hat’ and superseded by newer research at the top. Today we are constantly bombarded by the media with information from ‘the experts’ in every field, not just medicine, but environmental science, geological exploration, meteorological research etc. etc. and few of us can keep up. Most of us are confused, doubtful or cynical since we know that we do not know and have plenty of experience of media extrapolation and distortion. We do not have access to the necessary research, nor do we have the training to interpret it if we did.

It is much the same with matters religious or theological. The busy parish priest or minister does not always keep up with what is being discussed among the theologians; maybe because s/he doesn’t want to know, finds study onerous, believes there is no time for the luxury, or simply has a closed mind. The closed mind is not unknown in religious circles. The aim of this present work, therefore, is to track something of the variety of notions surrounding words/concepts that are central to the Christian religion, to see where they have come from and even where they are going. The book will be interesting to people outside of the church who perhaps would like to know what this historic faith is about. For people within the church it may take them a little deeper into understanding the faith and it will appeal to people who would like to have more information to hand if they usually find themselves on the back foot in religious debate. Perhaps, most of all, it will be of especial help to those people who have become disillusioned by their experiences in the church, whose spirituality has been shaped by the Christian story, who even yet feel there could be something there for them if only they could find it.

The intention is to bring down to ordinary language and everyday accessibility some of the ideas and understandings that are commonplace in theological academia, but extraordinary, scary or blasphemous to those who do not have access to that level of scholarship. This gap in understanding is demonstrated, for example, when a clergyman writes a book, say, about the Resurrection which is unremarkable in scholarly circles, but is taken up by the press, achieves banner headlines that may bear little resemblance to the text of the book and causes ‘grave concern’ for the well-being of a Christian community led by such a person.

Half-remembered lessons from Sunday school or strictures taught by well-meaning nuns who knew little of scholarship beyond the devotions received in the novitiate; ideas picked up from scraps of adult conversation, or television, where no conscious teaching is intended, such flimsy but dogged ideas lodge in the mind and masquerade as religious teachings. For many people, updating these fragments from childhood is too hard and life generally offers more pressing challenges, but there are souls who want to know more, who want to understand what religion or spirituality is about. Some people find themselves in religious conversation with dedicated, (perhaps aggressive) and proselytising Christians and are at a loss to know where to go. I hope these essays may be of some use; they are intended to contribute to understanding something of the variety of meanings that lie beneath familiar and supposedly straightforward Christian terms.

A frequent complication in religious conversation is the mistaken assumption that both parties mean the same thing by the words they use. If, for example, someone asks, Do you believe in God? the safest response is to return with a question; What do you mean by God? An unqualified yes or no to the belief question can lead to a lot of confusion because what the questioner means might, for example, be the imagined God of Genesis who created the world in seven days; an image of God which only the most stalwart or stubborn of believers can hold to. (Genesis was never meant by its authors to be a history book!) If we want to improve our mutual understanding and advance our dialogues we need to clarify what we do mean by loaded religious terms. Even with our nearest and dearest, to assume that they think about God in similar ways to ourselves can lead to some surprises. And of course different faiths and different denominations within the same faith can show considerable variation of interpretation

Here I must offer a caveat because it would be quite wrong of me to conduct this discussion as though what one says about belief in God applied to any religion. Too much harm has been done down the years by Christians speaking as though what they had to say on matters was all that did matter. I may have a minor working knowledge of other faiths, but I do not experience the world through those eyes so I cannot speak of different faiths without impertinence. It has generally been accepted since early times that the three ‘Religions of the Book’, Judaism, Christianity and the Moslem faith, because they share the book of the Old Testament and more, have a similarity of belief about the nature of God, but I am not following that track. I speak from what I know, within the Christian tradition.

Within the Christian tradition there are areas of vast differences and areas where shades of meaning depend more on lived experience. A good analogy is to think of men writing on the psychology of women, or women writing on the psychology of men; from the opposite side one is always an observer and only aware of some of one’s own filters. So it is with writing about the experience of faith; writing from a lifelong devotion to the catholic tradition within the Anglican Church I cannot know what it is like to experience the faith through Protestant or indeed Roman Catholic forms. I can explore the historic process and the development of the divisions within the church but, as I hope I have shown, there is always a degree of interpretation and where there is interpretation there is also always a degree of bias, often unrecognised. If I am guilty of this I must crave indulgence, translating big ideas into accessible language is a risky endeavour!

Religion, Spirituality, God, Jesus, Prayer, Eucharist these are some of the most influential concepts in the history of the world, in the West, at any rate; and some that cause the most trouble on the personal level, on the world stage and on every human category between. Not only do these words mean vastly different things to different people, they mean something different to each of us as we move through the stages of our lives. The passion with which we loved Jesus as a fervent adolescent may be mere embarrassment to remember when we are past forty. The psychology of religion demonstrates that as we develop, if our faith life is deepening, the further we go, the less sure we will be of what we can say for certain about matters religious. Great certainty that our definitions and interpretations are right is an elementary stage in our growth to spiritual and emotional maturity.

If one