Part of what intrigues me about the idea of the miracle is that it is by definition unpredictable, unnatural, unreproducible.  Despite the claims of faith healers and charlatans everywhere, our common experience readily tells us that no amount of prayer, no degree of faith, no focus of will, nor anything else for that matter, is capable of producing miracles on demand.  If there are miracles, if such things do occur, they only occur quite apart from our desires and our wills, and virtually all scientific research on the subject, such as it is, has confirmed this, finding no substantial difference in populations who receive prayer and those who do not.  Of course, if we could produce miracles on demand, they would no longer be miracles, and so part of what makes a miracle essentially a miracle is that it cannot be produced on demand, that it occurs, if it occurs, only where and when it we do not expect it.

The other intriguing part of miracles is that, also by definition, they can never be definitively verified.  It is always possible to rationalize, explain, ignore, or otherwise reject any proofs that might be offered for miracles.  Even if someone was to be raised from the dead, it would always be possible to claim that there had been no death in the first place, that a medical error had been made or that a hoax had been perpetrated.  No evidence can really suffice for miracles.  Because miracles lie, in their nature, entirely outside of scientific and experiential norms, because they cannot be replicated or reproduced, they can never be truly verified, and the very idea of a verified miracle should strike us as a bit bazaar.

Despite all this, many of the people with whom I speak, religious or otherwise, have admitted to experiencing things that have appeared to them as inexplicable, as impossibly coincidental, as unnatural, as miraculous, though they are often reluctant to admit to these kinds of experiences.  They have encountered something that does not fit with their understanding of the world and that certainly does not fit with their rational and scientific culture, and they are not sure what to do or say about it.  The experience has sometimes even come to play a central part in their lives, and yet it is not something that they can readily articulate.

This situation, where the experience of the miraculous has only a tenuous place in public discourse, is a fairly recent one.  Stories of signs and miracles were standard fare in western culture before they were gradually displaced by scientific and rationalist discourses, and these kinds of miraculous stories remain significant in certain of our microcultures, particularly religious ones, but they no longer find any place in our broader public discourses, and I am curious to see how this experience of the miraculous would be expressed were it given an appropriate forum.

So, I am proposing a discursive experiment.  What if were to use a second blog to solicit stories from people about where and how they have encountered the miraculous in one form or another, from the extraordinary to the banal. The stories would be submitted by comment on the static main page, and I would select from among them and publish them as posts.  Submissions could be made anonymously, and they would not need to conform to any form in particular.  The purpose of the project would not be to prove anything about miracles, but to open a space where people could begin to describe their experience of the miraculous within a culture that is no longer able to hear this kind of discourse.  Its aim will be to explore how the phenomenon of the miraculous experience operates in our lives despite the fact that we are no longer able to discuss it openly.  I am not sure how long I would give to let the project run its course, but I think it would be fascinating to read people describe their experiences.

What do people think of think of this idea?  Is there any merit in it?

There were certainly those who believed in Christ before these thieves, those who believed in him as the fulfilment of Jewish messianic prophesy, those who those who believed in him as the promised Messiah who would reign as king over Israel.  They chose to believe in a man who would defeat their enemies, who would raise up their nation, who would offer them  political and military as well as spiritual salvation.

There were also certainly those who believed in Christ after these thieves, those who believed in him as the originator of a new Messianism, those who believed in him as a Messiah who would inaugurate and rule over a spiritual kingdom.  They chose to believe in a man who could pardon their sins, who could raise up a new kind of faith, who could offer salvation to the Jews first but also to the gentiles.

It is only the two thieves, however, who are asked to believe between these two Messianisms, between a triumphal Judaism on one hand and a triumphal Christianity on the other.  It is only they who encounter him solely in the moment between, where he appears to have failed in every respect, where he is broken and bleeding and dying.  Is it any wonder then, despite two thousand years and more of Christian condemnation, that one of the thieves is recorded as mocking Christ?  Mockery was the only logical response to a man who had claimed to be the Messiah and who was dying like a common thief.  Such a man deserves only mockery, or perhaps pity, but certainly not belief.

Yet, in this very same moment, in those hours between the Messiah that Christ was and the Messiah that he would be, in the time when he was nothing more than a common criminal, in the moment when no one claimed him or made any claims on his behalf, the other thief believed.  What could account for this?  Surely it is the most remarkable act of faith every recorded.  This second thief has as little reason to believe as the first.  He too has encountered Christ in the moment of his failure, and yet he chooses, against all logic and sense, to believe.

This choice is indefensible.  It is either the most faithful or the most foolish choice there has ever been.

Consider that the word ‘wisemen’ is a translation of the Greek word μάγοι, which is sometimes better translated as ‘magi’.  This word was derived from Old Persian and refers primarily to the priests of Zoroastrianism, who were widely known for their knowledge of astrology, but it can also be used more broadly in reference to wisemen, interpreters of dreams, sorcerers, and magicians, and it is used elsewhere in the Christian scriptures to describe Elymas the Sorcerer and Simon Magus.  In other words, despite many attempts to identify these magi as Jewish priests from Babylon or Persia or Yemen, this was almost certainly not the case, as is further evidenced by the fact that they needed to consult with the priests in Herod’s palace about the Jewish scriptures to learn where the Messiah was to be be born.  This is not to say necessarily that the magi were entirely unfamiliar with Jewish faith and scriptures, since substantial Jewish populations had been taken captive into Babylon and Persia in earlier times, and since there were Jewish communities in many of the major cities to the East, but it is to note that these men were almost certainly from quite another land and quite another race and quite another faith entirely.

How strange is it, then, that the gospel of Matthew would record the magi as coming to offer gifts to the child Messiah?  How strange is it that men who were regarded as sorcerers and magicians and astrologers, all of whom were forbidden by Jewish scriptures, were accorded such a prominent role in the story of Christ’s birth?  Whether or not we regard the account as corresponding to some historical event, is this not a strange story to be telling about the one whom you believe to be the Messiah?

I have no good answers here, but perhaps it should make us see the magi a little differently when next we see them standing in somebody’s creche.

I have been thinking a great deal over the past few years about what it means for me to love God and to love my neighbour as myself, because it seems to me that the very core of Christ’s message lies in these commands. The commands to love God and to love our neighbour find their source in Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, and Christ not only affirms these passages when they are quoted to him by the young lawyer in Luke 10, but he also quotes these passages himself twice, in Matthew 22 and Mark 12. Very few ideas in Christian scripture have this kind of pedigree, so the dual command to love God and to love our neighbour would certainly warrant our attention even if Christ did not emphasize its importance so strongly, yet he does emphasize it to an extraordinary degree. “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets,” he says. “There is no other commandment greater than these,” he claims. They are “worth more than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices,” he affirms. “Do this,” he says, “and live.”

And yet, despite the tremendous significance that Christ grants to these words, and despite the significance that most Christians would also grant to them in theory, I think that many Christians are deeply uncertain about how they are to love God and to love their neighbour. If you ask them about how they love God, they will usually, in all sincerity, give you the answers that they were taught in Sunday School: that they need to obey God’s commands and read the Bible and pray and be a part of a faith community, and while these are all good things, to be sure, I would suggest that none of them is really loving God.

It is possible to obey commands out of fear, to read the Bible out of habit, to pray out of duty, to join a faith community out of loneliness. These things are not love in themselves. They can never be love in themselves. They can only ever be, at best, the signs of our love, the burnt offerings and sacrifices that are mentioned by the scribe in Mark. And the question remains: How do we love God? How do we love something that we cannot see or touch? How do we love something that is sufficient to itself, that needs nothing we can offer? How do we love God in a way that is meaningful and tangible?

The answer to this question, or least the beginning of an answer, can be found in the way that Christ joins the two commandments together. Inititally they are not joined at all. Deuteronomy 6:5 contains the command to love God and Leviticus 19:18 the command to love our neighbour. The two are entirely distinct. They remain distinct, though now in close proximity in the Luke passage, where the lawyer merely quotes one after the other, joining them together with a conjunction. In Matthew and Mark, however, the two passages where Christ quotes the commands himself, the injunction to love God and to love our neighbour are joined together in a much closer way. “This is the first and great commandment and the second is like it,” Christ says in Matthew.  In Mark, he says again, “This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this.”

What does Christ mean by this phrase “is like it”? How is loving our neighbour like loving God? What is the relation between loving our neighbour and loving God?  Does it really imply, as it seems, that loving God and loving our neighbour are similar acts?

There would be much scriptural support for this idea. In Mark 5, for example, where Christ also makes reference to the command to love our neighbours, expanding it to include loving our enemies, he says that we should love others in this way in order that we may become sons of our Father in heaven. James goes so far as to claim that those who do not love their neighbours have a dead faith. John says that anyone who does not love remains in death. In each of these examples, our spiritual vitality and our very status of children of God are directly tied to the command to love our neighbours.

This does not even account for the innumerable occasions on which the New Testament writers, Paul in particular, emphasize that we fulfill the law of God and show ourselves to be Christians precisely through our love. “Love each other as I have loved you,” says Christ. “Love others, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law,” says Paul. “Love one another deeply, from the heart,” says Peter. And I could literally list these exhortations for pages. There is no command in all of the New Testament that is stated so often and in so many ways.

If even all of this could be argued away, however, Christ makes the connection between loving God and loving our neighbours unavoidable in Matthew 25: 31-46:

When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on His right hand, ‘Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.’ “Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’ And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’ “Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.’ “Then they also will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?’ Then He will answer them, saying, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’ And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

In this passage Christ explicitly links loving others with loving God, links them so closely that loving the first is in actuality loving the second. There is no distinction between the two. To love those in need is to love God. To ignore those in need is to ignore God. There is no separation.

Even more interesting, Christ includes not a single other criterion for loving God. He does not say that loving others and praying a certain amount or reading a certain amount of the Bible or sitting on a certain number of committees is loving God. Loving those in need is the sole way to love God and the sole criterion by which God will judge us. Why? Because, as Christ and the apostles never tire of telling us, to love one another is the whole of the law. It is all that is required to fulfill the law. Love God by loving your neighbour: This is greater than offerings and sacrifices.

Yet this idea, put into practice, would scandalize most Christians.  The idea that truly loving those around us, not merely being nice or acting out of duty, but truly loving them, with all the sacrifice that this love entails, is the only way to love God and the only criterion by which we will be judged, is deeply scandalous in a church culture that has for the most part, throughout its entire history, been content to love only insofar as it does not interfere with building churches and running programs and imposing morals and collecting tithes and pretending to holiness.

And yet, to love others as if we are loving God is the greatest commandment. It contains all the Law and the Prophets. It is better than offerings and sacrifices. To do it is to live.

Many of those who know me best, my wife among them, responded to the list of beliefs that I posted by suggesting that it was misrepresentative in its brevity, that it did not include many of the other things that I do sincerely believe. There is some truth in this.  My aim was not to list exhaustively the things that I believe, but only to list the things that I felt I could defend experientially, apart from a particular religious tradition.  Though this list of beliefs would, of course, be heavily influenced by the Christian tradition in which I was raised and in which I still practise my faith, I was hoping to isolate the kinds of beliefs that I could maintain apart from the apparatus of this tradition.

If I lay these restrictions aside, however, I certainly do believe a good deal more than my previous post would seem to indicate.  I do count myself as a Christian.  I can cheerfully subscribe to all of the old Christian creeds, though I would question the biblical evidence for a strict doctrine of the trinity.  I can even grudgingly subscribe to most contemporary Christian “statements of faith”, though I object very much to their deeply and ironically unbiblical bibliolatry.  In short, the list of beliefs that I made in my previous post is certainly not exhaustive.

It was not my intention to obscure these beliefs.  I hold them very closely and very deeply.  Rather, I was trying to distinguish between these kinds of beliefs, which are entirely dependent on a particular tradition and a particular set of scriptures, and which are therefore impossible for me to verify even to myself,  from a second set of beliefs that I can verify through my own experience, even if only to myself, even if only to some limited degree.  It is not that I hold the one kind of belief more deeply than the other.  It is that I hold them very differently.  I arrive at them differently.  They are two different ways of believing.

On the other hand, many of those who know me less well, who know me solely in a more academic capacity, questioned my list of beliefs from the other direction entirely, challenging the validity of any beliefs that are based entirely on unverifiable experience.  There is some truth in this too.  I readily admit that my experience can guarantee nothing about God, but it was not my intention to guarantee anything about God.  I would even go so far as to say that nothing about God can ever be guaranteed by anything that is human.  To ask for such guarantees is to misunderstand the nature of belief.

The nature of belief is not to guarantee but to bear witness.  It must not say, “Look here, this must be believed,” because it always lacks this authority.  It can only say, “Look here, this is what I have tasted and seen and found to be good, perhaps you might taste and see also.”  Any belief that seeks to promise more runs the risk of becoming a fundamentalism in the worst sense of this word.

This is what I also believe.  To this much I bear witness.

What follows is a first attempt.  It is not adequate for more reasons than I can list here, but I hope that it might be a place where I can begin thinking through these kinds of ideas with others who are like-minded.  Though the following statements are very influenced by my Christian upbringing, they are only those that I feel that I can defend experientially, apart from any specific text or tradition.

1. I believe in a God who loves us, though I confess that I do not understand this love.

2. I believe in a God who comes to us because we are unable to come to God, though I confess that I do not understand how this  is accomplished.

3. I believe that the only proper response to God’s love is to love God in return, and that it is only possible to love God through loving one another.

4. I believe that all true religion, in whatever faith it arises, leads to an increase of love, and that any religion leading to anything else, in whatever faith it arises, is false, absolutely.

5. I believe that God appears through the Christian tradition, through its scriptures and sacraments, though I suspect that this appearance is neither exclusive nor absolute.

6. I believe that the only essential theology is this:  “God loves us, so we must love God through loving one another.”

Last semester, however, I found one of Williams’ novel’s in the EBC library discard sale, so I thought I might check to see if there were any more of his books in the school’s collection. I had low expectations. The EBC library, serving a Bible College as it does, is adequate in areas like theology and biblical studies, but its English Literature section is literally a few shelves in the furthest corner of the stacks. I did not even bother to check the computer catalogue. I just went to the section and scanned the shelves, and there, against all my expectations, were every one of Williams’ novels and a book of his theology besides.

In retrospect, I should have expected that a Bible College library would be likely to include the fiction of a writer who was also a Christian theologian and a who was, perhaps more importantly, a close friend of C. S. Lewis, for several decades now the closest thing that Protestants have to a patron saint. None of analysis after the fact was able to spoil my mood, however, and I have just finished the first of these books, entitled Descent into Hell.

The novel is superficially about a group of actors who are putting on a play at the residence of its famous playwright, Peter Stanhope. More deeply, it is concerned with the way that some of these actors relate to themselves as selves. For example, the heroine, Pauline Anstruther, sometimes sees a copy of herself approaching along the street, and another of the actors, Laurence Wentworth, creates for himself a succubus that is never really distinct from his own substance, and he falls into a kind of demonic narcissism. Others of the characters are also self-obsessed in the more usual ways, and much of the book’s philosophizing has to do with this question of self.

In this context, Williams has Stanhope muse to Pauline about the shift that occurs from the Greek philosophical tradition’s “know thyself” to the Christian tradition’s “love thy neighbour”. The shift, he implies, is not just from knowing to loving, but also, perhaps primarily, from the self to the neighbour. Though Stanhope does not articulate this distinction at any great length, some of his other comments make it unlikely that he is opposing knowing the self and loving the neighbour absolutely. Rather, he seems to be arguing that it is only possible to know the self through loving the neighbour, that loving the neighbour is precisely what produces true knowledge of the self, and the conclusion of the plot goes so far as to suggest that knowing the self apart from loving the neighbour is productive only of a kind of hell on earth, where the human imagination creates succubi for itself and the dead cannot rest in their graves.

Of course, Stanhope’s observation makes most of Christian history an irony, since Christianity, especially in its Protestant guises, has been intimately bound up with all the various individualisms of personal salvation, democratic politics, capitalist economics, individual rights, and private property. The self trumps the neighbour here, again and again, resoundingly, even if this self remains largely unknown. What is more, this triumph of the self produces, at least according to the logic of the novel, a descent into hell on earth, and it implies that the Christian tradition, far from bringing about the heaven of the neighbour, has been far more concerned with bringing about the hell of the self.

I am not certain whether Williams would actually have levelled this criticism against Christianity, but I think that his logic is worth following. If Christianity, or any other faith for that matter, has anything worth saying in this age where the hell of the self has become our greatest ambition, surely it is that we can only come to know ourselves by loving our neighbours.  This is surely the only thing that it has ever had to say, the thing that it has always been saying, without end, though it is all too seldom heard, so I will quote:

“This is the first and greatest commandment: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Interestingly, this trinitarian construction parallels the grammatical structures that characterize the English language, along with most others. God appears in it as subject, verb, and object, forming a complete, albeit unusual, sentence. It might even be argued that the trinitarian conception of the Christian God is necessitated by this very linguistic structure, which would be only one example  of how human understanding requires God to appear according to its own limits. Conversely, it might also be possible to understand a certain kind of human grammar as a reflection of the trinitarian mode of divine revelation. More likely yet, perhaps a certain structure of human existence, of human being in the world, has produced both of these effects, necessitating both the trinitarian nature of its grammatical structures and the trinitarian form of divine revelation, as God reveals God to us through the structures by which we have our being and our understanding.

Thus, even the trinitarian nature of God might be said to be an incarnation, a revelation that makes itself appear such that it can be apprehended but not comprehended, a tautological revelation that neither affirms nor denies God but merely recognizes that any God worth the name would remain beyond any human understanding, that any God worth the name would appear, if at all, only according to the limits of our humanity.

To say “God Gods God,” then, is really to say nothing at all, and yet it may be everything that can be said.

Power may choose only to love or to oppress; there are no other choices that power can make.

Choosing to love almost always involves choosing to set aside power in favour of weakness.

This is the nature of power that oppresses: it continually chooses to be powerful.

This is the nature of power that loves: it continually chooses to be weak.