Gretta Vosper’s With or Without God: A Critique
By
Lloyd Brown
Gretta Vosper’s book is a difficult one to write about. It seems to lack focus, taking pot-shots at too many issues without adequately discussing any of them. It lacks an analysis of the issues raised, is frequently contradictory, sometimes is simplistic and shallow, and is irritatingly peppered with claims that are arrogant and dismissive. To deal with all of these points would take more time and space than I can devote to them in this critique, so I shall discuss only the main issues raised in the book.
The first question to ask is what is this book about? Let us allow the author to answer the question: “It is about finding a way to be the church” (p. 12). We need, she observes, “something new, related to but distinct from what went before” (p. 12-13). How exactly would this church differ from the church of the present? It would be, she continues, a church “freed from its absolute and supernatural claims,” a church “leading in the area of ethics, relationships, meaning and values” that “grow out of our own best thinking” and would not depend on “biblical verses to support them” (p.13). In summary, this new church would be without absolutes, without any references to or dependence on a supernatural God or a supernatural Jesus, and it would be a church that would pay little attention to the Bible because it “can no longer assist us” in discerning “our way toward ethical living” (p.222).
My purpose in this paper is to examine these and other aspects of Vosper’s new church, and to call attention to what I see as weaknesses in her arguments.
First, a few words about the premise expressed as part of her title: “Why the Way We Live Is More Important Than What We Believe,” and her propensity for self contradiction. Vosper is here assuming that what we believe and how we live are discrete and unrelated to each other. Is this really the case? Surely what I believe influences what I do. If I believe that my employee is God’s creation, with a spark of divinity within him, I will more likely treat him with kindness and respect than if I regard him as of no special worth, as a mere economic unit, say.
In fact, in her book Vosper has difficulty separating belief and action. For example, she says (p.90) that apartheid in South Africa was challenged by Christian communities using biblical stories “to argue the rights of people of colour to the justice and freedom that comes with the (Christian) faith.” In other words the action of the people was motivated by their beliefs. Later (p.122) she again argues for the connection between belief and action in these words: “Believing that the universe is either unfolding as it should or that it is wildly off course will cause one to approach a situation in radically different ways.” Further, in discussing leadership in organizations she concludes that “changing their belief system is the single most effective way” of controlling any situation (p.126). Exactly.
Indeed, there is much evidence throughout her book to show that Vosper’s strong point is neither logic nor careful thought. For example, she says that “In a world in which we must consult myriad perspectives to ascertain the truth, it is impossible to name one moral position as absolute” (p.280) However, throughout her book she, rightly, names justice and love as absolutes without, seemingly, being aware of the contradiction. On the same page (p.280) she also says that “We must recognize all life and the earth as holy.” This sounds very like an absolute to me. Vosper has the same problem as most post-modernists. They talk about multiple meanings and argue that there are no absolutes until their own core values are questioned. Then they become absolutists. Vosper is caught in a similar bind, preaching individual interpretation while being dogmatic about her own position, her own, to use the post-modern term, “metanarrative.” Her dogmatism is evident throughout her book and it contradicts her claim that openness is a characteristic of progressive thought. Sadly, she doesn’t practice what she preaches. A part of the openness that she espouses, she says, is the absence of arrogance, a barrier to open conversation (p.180). Yet she concludes, “It seems almost incredible that, with the brilliant minds we have put to the task, we have not yet been able to adequately share progressive scholarship with the wider church” (p.103). The inability to share this scholarship is not because these brilliant minds, among them no doubt is Rev. Vosper’s, have poor communication skills. No, it is due to the poor “theological formation of church leaders” and the distain of those in the pews for the insights and knowledge of these brilliant minds. Instead they are “ensconced within world views that maintain a comfortable sense of divine privilege” (p.103). How is that for openness? Could anyone find anywhere a clearer example of arrogance?
The remainder of this paper will be devoted to the major topics discussed in Vosper’s book: God, Jesus, the Bible, and the church.
GOD
What does Vosper say about God? She says a variety of things in a variety of tones. For example, she speaks about God in the Genesis story as a “bumbling God.” She continues “The first thing we learn about him is that he tires easily. After uttering a sentence or two a day for six days, he needs to take a whole day off” (P.226). The only thing I wish to say about this comment is to point out that it is a good example of her frequent flippancy, her predilection for belittling, her propensity to sneer instead of engaging in serious discussion, and her embarrassing shallowness.
She also makes it clear that she is not a theist. That is, she rejects the notion of God as a supreme reality, a reality that Polkinghorne (1998), a physicist turned theologian, describes as a “mind and a purpose behind the history of the universe”, “a veiled presence…worthy of worship and the ground of hope” (p. 1). Flew (2007) agrees with I.M. Crombie that theism is a belief in God as a transcendent being, and being transcendent, is a mystery and beyond comprehension and can only be talked about in images. (p.46) From this point of view Vosper is right, but is saying nothing new, when she observes that we have created the concept of God. (p.54). In fact, we have created many images or concepts of God. It is the way the limited human mind tries to think about the transcendent. It can only use the concepts and images that it knows to speak of the infinite. God has therefore been named using such images as cloud, fire, wind, rock, fortress, light, lord, king, shepherd, father, judge, and love. However, traditional Christianity has used these images to try to grasp the reality of God, to help others understand something of the mysterious nature of God. But Vosper says that God is a human concept to dismiss God, to show that God is a mere human creation.
Why is Vosper so dismissive of the theistic notion of God? Apparently it is because of evolution. She says, using Dawkins, an atheistic Darwinian, for support: “When we can understand the evolution of any life form as the simple trial and error progressions exposed in Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, there is little reason for us to hold on to God as explanation” (p.233). Others, less naïve than Vosper, have been less willing to accept his view that to accept evolution is to reject God. For example, Collins (2006), a leading geneticist, takes issue with Dawkins, claiming that he is a master at “setting up a straw man, and then dismantling it with great relish” (p.164). He concludes that Dawkins’s flaw is that in claiming that science demands atheism and demolishes God he is “going beyond the evidence,” because since God is outside nature, “science can neither prove nor disprove His existence” (p.165). This is a position, by the way, that Dawkins himself agrees with. However, it hasn’t stopped him from pontificating about the absence of God as if science proves the point.
Other scientists have also taken issue with the notion that to accept evolution is to reject God. Polkinghorne (1998) refers to the Anthropic Principle to make his point. This principle states that the universe is so fine-tuned that it couldn’t have happened by chance. For example, scientists are saying that if the force of gravity were a little weaker or stronger than it is, our planet would not be habitable. Polkinghorne says that this fine-tuning suggests a divine purpose and a divine creator (pp.6-8). Davies (1983), a theoretical physicist, though doubtful that the hypothesis can ever be tested, concludes “It is hard to resist the impression that the present structure of the universe…has been rather carefully thought out” (p.189).
In fact, Darwin himself, though at times ambiguous about the subject, on one occasion wrote that he experienced:
the extreme difficulty…of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity for looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look for a First cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man, and I deserve to be called a Theist. (Quoted in Miller, 2007, p. 287)
In the light of these views of internationally-know scientists, Vosper should have been more cautious in accepting Dawkins’s views without question or discussion.
So, according to Vosper God is not theistic, not personal, not a reality that one could pray to. What, then, does she say God is? The following are some expressions she uses to communicate her understanding of God: “a presence,” “something…like a feeling,” (p.120), “a feeling that makes you want to be the best person you can be” (p.230), God “dwells in our relationships” (p.250); “god is what exists between two people” (p. 234); “everything that is good in the world” (p.234); God resides within friends and family (p.248). She also says that she’s going to try to drop the word “god” to help us forget about the notion of God as being. “I’m going to use some other word—maybe breath, or love, or pyntrilm” (her own creation) (p.235). She accepts Love, compassion, mercy, and forgiveness as characteristics of God, and when we live out these qualities we are, she says, incarnations of God (p. 249). On another occasion she says that our work in the church is “to create god,” but “Not ‘god’ as anything real that exists separately… from us” (279).
We have to give Vosper credit for trying to describe God in a different way. I also have wished for and thought about others ways of speaking about God, ways freed of preconceived notions and unfortunate associations. So I appreciate the difficulties that Vosper is having. And the difficulties are clear. She seems to be struggling and in the end it is, I think, a failed project. For instance, it is not clear what she means when she says that God is a feeling “that makes you want to be the best person you can be” Does she mean that God is the feeling? Or does she mean that God creates this feeling? In other words, is it the prompting of the Holy Spirit that she is referring to? If so, she hasn’t moved very far from the traditional theistic concept of God.
God as presence is also acceptable to even non-progressive Christians. But what does she mean by God as presence? Is this presence impersonal like energy? Or is it more like a person? Does it communicate? Could we regard the recognition of this presence as the soul’s encounter with the Transcendent?
What can she possibly mean when she defines God as that which exists between two people? Is she saying that the relationship is God? What kind of a relationship, exactly? If it were a loving relationship, is she saying that this love is a finite expression of the infinite love of God? I don’t think she is. I don’t think she would say that our limited, finite expression of love is a reflection of the love of an infinite God as John describes it in his first Letter. God for her is, as far as I can determine, not the Source of truth or value.
The scholars that I have read concern themselves with discussing God as “Infinite intelligence,” “Divine source of life,” “the great unity,” “the Mind and Purpose behind the universe,” “the rational ground of existence,” “Divine Order,” “Absolute Truth,” “Supreme Source of value,” “Creator,” “ the unseen order,” and the like. Michelangelo’ s God, painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, is portrayed as a transcendent power behind the order of the cosmos. Isaiah’s God is characterized by power (“Those who trust in the Lord will renew their strength. They will rise on wings like eagles.”), and care and comfort (“Do not be afraid-- I will save you. I have called you by name—you are mine.”). The New Testament refers to Jesus as the living God made incarnate. St Paul says that in Jesus the fullness of God did dwell. None of these concepts are discussed in Vosper’s book. She takes her own advice and creates her own God; but it is a weak, cut-down God with no power, no authority. The following are some brief observations on what I see missing in Vosper’s God:
1. Vosper’s God has no part to play in creation. In eliminating God from creation she undermines a firm foundation for treating the world and God’s creatures with care and kindness. Kung (1981) emphasizes this point. He says he believes in God as creator and therefore is obliged to accept “with greater seriousness, greater realism and greater hope my responsibility for my fellow men and the environment” (p.642). This concept of God helps us understand the world and our place in it.
2. Borg (2003), in his discussion of God, refers to God as “a nonmaterial layer of reality, an extra dimension” (p.63). William James (1958), the great American philosopher and psychologist, called God the “unseen order.” To illustrate the power and importance of this unseen order in people’s lives he wrote a chapter in his book on the experiences of those who have encountered it. (p.58). Vosper seems to confine herself to the space-time world. There is no discussion of encounters with the divine, no references to those from the Bible who have had such experiences, such as Elijah, Saul, Jesus, and the disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration. This aspect of religious life, as far as I can determine, has no place in her church.
3. St. Paul refers to God as one in whom “We live and move and have our being.” One couldn’t say this about Vosper’s God, being, as it is, reduced to human size.
4. The Bible’s God is one of hope in the face of death: “For God so loved the world…that everyone who believes in him shall not die but have eternal life.” Vosper’s God offers no such assurance. It is hard to think of a God which is a symbol of our commitment “to be the best we can be” as offering hope in the face of death.
JESUS
Vosper’s abandonment of the theistic God also influences her view of Jesus. What exactly does she say about Jesus? She is at least consistent. Since there is no theistic God, she logically concludes: “The whole idea of Jesus being the Son of God no longer makes much sense” (237). She resolves: “With the help of scholars and authors who made academic research accessible, we will have set before us a very human Jesus” (p.238). (It should be pointed out here that Vosper frequently refers to modern scholarship and scholars to support her position. One would think in reading her book that all modern scholars supported her views. In fact, few do. Even Borg and Crossan, whom she frequently cites, don’t agree with her in everything. And she makes no references to those modern scholars who disagree with her position, such N. T. Wright, Luke Timothy Johnson, John Polkingthorne, Alister McGrath, and Ben Witherington. It is important, then, not to give too much credence to her references to modern scholarship). Further, she adds something even more astonishing:
But, stripped of the designation as God’s only begotten, complete with its requisite claims to salvation, there is nothing that he said or did that we must take more seriously than anything said by anyone else. What he is purported to have said or done may…have been remarkable for his day” (p.239)
However, she concludes, we should not give any more attentiveness to what he has said and did than “we would give to any person or piece of literature, film or art” (239). So Jesus, robbed of his designation as the son of God, is just another story teller, like Hemingway, Dickens, Flannery O’Connor, or Margaret Laurence. However, having robbed Jesus of his divinity, she proclaims, without seeming to recognize the contradiction, that we should “embrace the being-ness of our own divinity” (p.237). Jesus may not be divine but we are!
She concludes with these words, dismissive, arrogant, and disparaging: “contemporary scholarship strips Jesus of his…divine status and leaves him only as a Middle Eastern peasant with a few charismatic gifts and a great posthumous marketing team” (p. 255). And Bishop Spong, her mentor, in his introduction to her book, calls this “scholarly insight” (p. X1V)!
The resurrection and the crucifixion of Jesus are the two most significant events in Christianity, but not for Vosper. She doesn’t mention the first of these two, a peculiar omission for one writing about the Christian church. And she says almost nothing about the second, though we get something of her attitude about the cross in this pronouncement: “It is my hope that, in time, as the horrific story the cross represents loses it place at the centre of Christianity, the cross will become obsolete, a silent reminder of the past” (p.326). For one who accepts the traditional view of the cross in Christian theology this comes as a shock, an outrage. To begin with, the cross is, as Houston Smith puts it (2005), not only a central symbol of Christianity, but with its “vertical arm uniting heaven and earth, and its horizontal arm symbolizing throwing one’s arms out to others— it comes close to being a universal symbol” (p.110). Yet Vosper looks forward to the day when it will be regarded as obsolete! Alister McGrath (1996) places the cross as the “starting point of authentically Christian theology.” He adds, “The cross is not an individual aspect of theology, but is itself the foundation of that theology.” Further, he concludes that it is also “at the centre of all Christian thought, in that from its centre radiate all Christian statements on ethics…the Christian life, and so on”(p.41). No wonder one is taken aback that a Christian minister makes it her business to try to destroy the central symbol of Christian life and theology, a symbol denoting love, self sacrifice, trust, and forgiveness!
Jesus, having lost his divinity, is left with no “slavific power” (p. 254). This seems to me to be a peculiar position, considering the influence of Jesus in the lives of his disciples and in the lives of people we know and knew. Smith (2005) says of the disciples that they were
men and women who were ordinary in every way except for the fact that they seemed to have found the secret of living. They evinced a tranquillity, simplicity, and cheerfulness that their hearers had nowhere else encountered (p. 78).
Similarly, we have all met people who, having encountered Christ, have experienced such joy, inner peace, happiness, and love that they could not contain them. Might we not conclude that these are marks of the salvific power of Christ?
Not only has Jesus no salvific power, but, according to Vosper, he is not a very good moral teacher either. First, she says that Jesus is not able to provide the “broad base” necessary to “help us wrestle with…difficult ethical issues.” And he is not able to provide this broad base because “his vision is constrained by the context in which it was cast” (p. 155). It is hard to believe that the one who asks us to love one another, to forgive others, to pay more attention to our souls than to our possessions, to regard our bodies as God’s temple, to hunger and thirst after righteousness, who asks us to consider anyone in need as our neighbour can be said to be speaking to his time only. Surely these admonitions are universal and provide the broad base that Vosper is looking for. Surely they provide the necessary foundation for all our actions. If these words “don’t make sense any more” (p.155), I’m afraid that Vosper’s new church with its new God, new Jesus, and new language is not going to do much to save us. If we cannot make sense of them it’s because we have lost our ability to hear Truth.
What are some of the particular aspects of Jesus teachings that she objects
to? She takes issue with Jesus because he tells the rich young man to sell all and give to the poor, and she condemns it as utopian. Taking this incident literally, she says that acting in this manner “can serve to abdicate the responsibilities we have to one another” (p.154). There may be times when such an admonition might be unwise and unrealistic. However, Jesus is faced here with a young man who worships his riches, and seems to think that such a radical statement is necessary to bring him to his senses, to help him realize that his soul is worth more than all his riches. Sometimes Vosper’s literalism, while allowing her to pontificate, makes her pronouncements appear shallow. The superior values to the ones Jesus advocates, she says, are dialogue and diversity. Vosper does not seem to like the authority with which Jesus spoke to the rich young man. She is too concerned about pluralism and diversity to recognize his Truth. I can’t help wondering if Oskar Schindler dialogued and considered diversity when he risked his life to save Jews from extermination. I’d like to think that he recognized the Truth at the heart of existence, the universal moral law and acted accordingly.
Other sayings of Jesus, she says, are either “unhelpful” (divorce) or “unsupportable and exclusive” (“I am the way, the truth and the life”) (p.242-243). What “unhelpful” means here is not made clear. It is merely stated as if her stating it made it so. Jesus regarded marriage as a divine institution and a permanent relationship, likened to the relationship of the Christian Church to Christ (Ephesians 5:28-30). Anyone who observes our present society might have good reason to conclude that divorce has led to the ruination of many families, and further we might at least wonder if the destruction of families is not related to the break down of our society. If we took Jesus’ words seriously and lived by them, we might find them very helpful indeed, certainly to our children who seem to suffer most from the break up of families.
The meaning of “unsupportable” is also not clear. Does she mean it (“I am the way…) is irrational? Is she saying that there is no evidence to support it? Millions of Christians, now and in the past, have been and are witnesses to it. They supported it and do so still. Clearly, then, if has been, supported for two thousand years, it is supportable. One would be very arrogant to say that those who accept Jesus as “the way” were all irrational. As for evidence, after examining his teachings about love, trust, and forgiveness, I find it difficult not to accept it on that evidence. For I believe that Jesus is the Way (capital W) because he embodies those characteristics which are really true to what we are meant to be and to the way human life is. If these are not the way, what would Vosper suggest the way is?
One wonders why Vosper has so little regard for Jesus, taking every opportunity to undermine his authority and uniqueness, to deny him as the incarnation. Maybe it is a part of her pluralist agenda. This pluralism is obvious through her book. She says that divested of their particular rituals, beliefs, and traditions we find that the core values of Christianity are shared by other world religions (p. 101). These rituals and traditions, she further argues, is divisive and a mark of tribalism. Uniqueness, then, is bad; it is divisive. If my theory is correct, one can understand why she has adopted a heretical view of Jesus. When she rejects Jesus as the Christ she rejects what is distinctly Christian, and thus turns Christianity into just another religion. In this way inter-religious cooperation and understanding are enhanced and pluralism is advanced. However, since Jesus the Christ is constitutive of Christianity, it would also destroy Christianity, for unless Jesus is the Christ there is no Christianity.
THE BIBLE
To claim that we should not take what Jesus said and did any more seriously than what anyone else said and did (pp.238-39), one would have to deny what the New Testament says of him. To do that is to argue against the authority of the Bible. Most Christians would have reservations about taking such a strong stand. Rev. Vosper, however, does not. What exactly does she say about the Bible? She says that it no longer assists us in learning to live ethically (p.222). However, this seems to contradict an earlier statement where she observes that the Bible does support us “to live according to life-enhancing values” p.149). Vosper apparently sees no need to explain this contradiction.
The important point to be made here is her claim that the Bible is no longer authoritative. When we adopt this stance toward the Bible, she says, we are free to read the Bible as we want and “to name what is worthy of being welcomed into our places of worship” (p.149).Her approach to reading the Bible needs to be developed further because it is an approach that necessarily robs the Bible of any authority. Her reading is that of a post-modern deconstructionist. The deconstructionist argues that there is no meaning in a text. There is only the meaning that the reader constructs. And since each reader has a different interpretation of a text, it has as many meanings as there are readers. Her advice is that we should look for meaning, not “The Meaning” (p.224). This suggests that neither the author of a text nor an expert reader can tell us what a text means. No one interpretation is any better than any other. There is just the democratic frenzy of interpretations.
Vosper is a good example of this kind of reader. This is what she says about the Bible and the reading of it: “It is just a book …There is no The Meaning. There is only the possibility that something might resonate with you, challenge you…or disgust you. That’s all” (p.240).How dismissive is that! And how post-modern! “Resonate, challenge, disgust” seem to me to suggest a limited view of reading. Disgust suggests annoyance and loathing, but not intellectual engagement. A text that resonates with the reader is one that the reader agrees with. A text that challenges is one that may test one’s ability to think critically about it. However, neither of these responses to a text suggests that the reader will learn from it. And this is congruent with Vosper’s view of reading Scripture. The question, she says, is not “What is the meaning of the story”? Rather it is “What do you make of it”? (p.222), not” what can I learn from this story”? Always the emphasis is on the reader not the text itself. I think good reading calls for careful analysis of a text— the context in which it was written or told, the vocabulary, the language, the genre (history, poetry, letter, story), the purpose. Good reading also calls for humility and respect in encountering the text, and asks us to recognize that it has something worthwhile to say to us. Borg (2002) captures what I want to say when he observes that we should listen to what the Bible has to say, “and let its central stories shape our vision of God, our identity, and our sense of what faithfulness to God means” (31). A reader can register disgust, and feel resonance, or challenge without this humility, respect and analysis, but he/she is not likely to learn much from the text, not likely to discover much of its meaning without them. Good readers remain open to the text and refrain from imposing their own views on it.
Instead of such an analysis, what does Vosper suggest we do when reading the Bible? She says that we should ask such questions as: “Is Jesus acting in a way you would be proud of…? What do you make of it? Does this story evoke a good feeling in you or a bad one”? She also, in encouraging the study of Jesus, gives her students a one-sided perspective of him to guide their reading: He taught people to acquiesce (“turn the other cheek”), “Jesus’ moral teaching is not outstanding,” “No other historical record (other than the gospels) contains anything about Jesus’ miraculous works or resurrection,” These and other points are presented without discussion or qualification, as if there were no disagreement about them. They are meant, she says to “challenge the idealized picture (of Jesus) we’ve held for so long” (pp.242-243). In other words, she feels it necessary to influence her readers’ minds about Jesus before they begin their reading. And further her suggested way to read the Bible not only begins with preconceptions but seems to have its beginnings in her own ideology.
The fact is that Vosper has very little regard for the Bible. Because it is an old book, she says, it is not the word of God for all time, and because the original authors were humans, it is limited in its truth, and there is no “divine being trying to get through to us” (p.220). What are we to make of this view that we have nothing to learn from the ancients? She seems to be saying that there are no universals, that moral values are products of the times, human creations for each generation. The Bible, then, she seems to say, speaks only to the past. If there are no universals, perhaps Vosper is right. But if there are universals we must allow that the ancients have something worth saying, some wisdom to communicate. It is difficult to imagine that Plato, Job, Proverbs, The Sermon on the Mount, and St. Augustine are irrelevant. Is this what Vosper is arguing here? Is this what she really means? If so, intellectually, she must be a very lonely woman.
I agree with her that the Bible was written by humans. For example, it is not a script written by God in a way the Koran is, which is regarded by Muslins as the transcript of a tablet preserved in heaven, and revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. In fact, throughout the Koran God speaks in the first person. The Bible, in contrast, is a composite of books, poems, letters, stories recorded by a variety of people. However, this doesn’t mean that there is no divine “trying to get through to us” in the Bible as Vosper suggests. Since John, Luke, Mark, Matthew, and Paul, for example, are writing of their understanding and experience of God, couldn’t we conclude that the spirit of the divine, through their writings, is breaking into our world and experience? Vosper has read Marcus Borg, and if she had been interested in presenting a more thoughtful and balanced perspective, she could have consulted his ideas on the authority of scripture. Borg (2002) agrees with Vosper. He also sees the Bible as a human product, a human response to God written by those who have experienced God. He concludes, then, that God is not “scripture’s ultimate author” (p.22). Yet he maintains that scripture is for Christians “the most important collection of writings we know” (p.29). He further argues that it defines who we are: “It is the ground of the world in which we Christians live” (p.30). How different this is from Vosper’s view that the Bible is just another book. She says that “once the Bible is set aside as a spiritual resource,” you can “use whatever it is you’re reading” (p. 222). She mentions several examples, two of which are William Blake, the eighteenth century English poet, and Philippa Gregory, best know for her fictionalized biographies. Vosper doesn’t say why she would choose either of them to replace the Bible, except to indicate that they have “deep spiritual wisdom” that we can find there (p.223). (A contradiction should be noted here, because she has already stated rather dogmatically that there is no “Meaning” in the text; we have only the meaning we bring to the text. Apparently there are exceptions). Borg’s view of scripture here is what I call a modification from within the tradition. He takes a non-traditional approach to scripture, but treats it with respect and emphasizes its centrality. Vosper’s, treatment of scripture, however, amounts to an attempt to dismantle it, to undermine completely it position in the Christian tradition.
THE CHURCH
Given Vosper’s views of God, Jesus, and the Bible, what conclusions can we
draw about her church?
1. There will be no reference to an unseen realm, no talk of an encounter with the divine. She seems to dismiss the traditional notion of the transcendent and replaces it with the spirit of the times. The unique truth of Christianity about our redemption in Jesus the Christ will not be preached in Vosper’s church.
2. Because she eliminates the possibility of an encounter with the divine, with the numinous, she creates a church that seems to me to be rather barren. It lacks appeal to the imagination or to our sense of mystery. Nor is it a church that will satisfy our eternal longing for the eternal, for what is always just beyond our reach, for the sense of beauty and love which our everyday experience is but a pale reflection.
3. Her church is not grounded in a very hopeful theology. Having eliminated the transcendent, personal God, Vosper leaves us alone in the universe.
4. Having abandoned the Christ story, there will be no central place for Jesus in sermons, hymns and readings in Vosper’s church.
5. Prayer in Vosper’s church, as I understand it, will not be to God exterior to us, not to an interventionist God, but to a God in ones family and friends who are praying for us. Knowing this we can create mental images of them which will strengthens us. She has written a prayer (pp.252-53) that draws heavily on the famous prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. What is revealing about her prayer is that it makes no reference to God, sin, forgiveness, or eternal life, all important concepts in St. Francis’ prayer.
6. Vosper’s church will be one in which other stories will be placed on a par with scripture.
7. There is not likely to be any reference to the Trinity in Vosper’s church. Her prayer for baptism, for example, uses a “somewhat Trinitarian form” (‘341), but without mentioning the Trinity:
I baptize you in the name of
Life who created you
Wisdom who knew you first
Hope by which you will be sustained (343).
8. Vosper, regarding the story of the cross as horrific, will not grant it a central place in her church.
9. Vosper’s will be a church that will emphasize social issues (pp.284-85). She says that the focus of the Jesus stories “is not on the man called Jesus. The focus is on how to live”(p193).
10. Vosper’s notion of Communion emphasizes community. There is no God, no Jesus, no “in remembrance of Me,” no reference to sin, sacrifice, and atonement. The words of the traditional liturgy, she says, if we really pay attention to them, are “really offensive” (p.259). She concludes “I hope that there will be no need for the sacraments in the next incarnation of the church” (p.259).
My concluding observation is that Vosper’s church is not a Christian church. I cannot see how it can be. She rejects the Christian notion of God, of Jesus, of Scripture, and she also rejects Christian rituals and sacraments. In a church there are always tensions between the autonomy of the individual and the authority of the institution. But a church must have, however loosely defined, common beliefs, practices, and goals. Anyone who cannot accept any of these, is, it seems to me, obliged to leave it.
REFERENCES
Borg, Marcus J. Reading the Bible Again for the First Time. HarperCollins: New York, 2002.
Borg, Marcus J. The Heart of Christianity. HarperCollins: New York, 2003.
Collins, Francis S. The Language of God. Free press: New York, 2006.
Davies, Paul. God and the New Physics. Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1983.
Flew, Antony. There Is a God. HarperCollins: New York, 2007.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New American Library, 1959.
Kung, Hans. Does God Exist? Vintage Books: New York, 1981.
McGrath, Alister. A Passion for Truth. InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove, Illinois, 1996.
Miller, Kenneth R. Finding Darwin’s God. HarperCollins: New York, 2007.
Polkinghorne, John. Belief in God in an Age of Science. Yale University Press: Yale University Press: New Haven, 1998.
Smith, Houston. The Soul of Christianity. HarperCollins: New York, 2005.
Vosper, Gretta. With or Without God. HarperCollins: New York, 2008.
By
Lloyd Brown
Gretta Vosper’s book is a difficult one to write about. It seems to lack focus, taking pot-shots at too many issues without adequately discussing any of them. It lacks an analysis of the issues raised, is frequently contradictory, sometimes is simplistic and shallow, and is irritatingly peppered with claims that are arrogant and dismissive. To deal with all of these points would take more time and space than I can devote to them in this critique, so I shall discuss only the main issues raised in the book.
The first question to ask is what is this book about? Let us allow the author to answer the question: “It is about finding a way to be the church” (p. 12). We need, she observes, “something new, related to but distinct from what went before” (p. 12-13). How exactly would this church differ from the church of the present? It would be, she continues, a church “freed from its absolute and supernatural claims,” a church “leading in the area of ethics, relationships, meaning and values” that “grow out of our own best thinking” and would not depend on “biblical verses to support them” (p.13). In summary, this new church would be without absolutes, without any references to or dependence on a supernatural God or a supernatural Jesus, and it would be a church that would pay little attention to the Bible because it “can no longer assist us” in discerning “our way toward ethical living” (p.222).
My purpose in this paper is to examine these and other aspects of Vosper’s new church, and to call attention to what I see as weaknesses in her arguments.
First, a few words about the premise expressed as part of her title: “Why the Way We Live Is More Important Than What We Believe,” and her propensity for self contradiction. Vosper is here assuming that what we believe and how we live are discrete and unrelated to each other. Is this really the case? Surely what I believe influences what I do. If I believe that my employee is God’s creation, with a spark of divinity within him, I will more likely treat him with kindness and respect than if I regard him as of no special worth, as a mere economic unit, say.
In fact, in her book Vosper has difficulty separating belief and action. For example, she says (p.90) that apartheid in South Africa was challenged by Christian communities using biblical stories “to argue the rights of people of colour to the justice and freedom that comes with the (Christian) faith.” In other words the action of the people was motivated by their beliefs. Later (p.122) she again argues for the connection between belief and action in these words: “Believing that the universe is either unfolding as it should or that it is wildly off course will cause one to approach a situation in radically different ways.” Further, in discussing leadership in organizations she concludes that “changing their belief system is the single most effective way” of controlling any situation (p.126). Exactly.
Indeed, there is much evidence throughout her book to show that Vosper’s strong point is neither logic nor careful thought. For example, she says that “In a world in which we must consult myriad perspectives to ascertain the truth, it is impossible to name one moral position as absolute” (p.280) However, throughout her book she, rightly, names justice and love as absolutes without, seemingly, being aware of the contradiction. On the same page (p.280) she also says that “We must recognize all life and the earth as holy.” This sounds very like an absolute to me. Vosper has the same problem as most post-modernists. They talk about multiple meanings and argue that there are no absolutes until their own core values are questioned. Then they become absolutists. Vosper is caught in a similar bind, preaching individual interpretation while being dogmatic about her own position, her own, to use the post-modern term, “metanarrative.” Her dogmatism is evident throughout her book and it contradicts her claim that openness is a characteristic of progressive thought. Sadly, she doesn’t practice what she preaches. A part of the openness that she espouses, she says, is the absence of arrogance, a barrier to open conversation (p.180). Yet she concludes, “It seems almost incredible that, with the brilliant minds we have put to the task, we have not yet been able to adequately share progressive scholarship with the wider church” (p.103). The inability to share this scholarship is not because these brilliant minds, among them no doubt is Rev. Vosper’s, have poor communication skills. No, it is due to the poor “theological formation of church leaders” and the distain of those in the pews for the insights and knowledge of these brilliant minds. Instead they are “ensconced within world views that maintain a comfortable sense of divine privilege” (p.103). How is that for openness? Could anyone find anywhere a clearer example of arrogance?
The remainder of this paper will be devoted to the major topics discussed in Vosper’s book: God, Jesus, the Bible, and the church.
GOD
What does Vosper say about God? She says a variety of things in a variety of tones. For example, she speaks about God in the Genesis story as a “bumbling God.” She continues “The first thing we learn about him is that he tires easily. After uttering a sentence or two a day for six days, he needs to take a whole day off” (P.226). The only thing I wish to say about this comment is to point out that it is a good example of her frequent flippancy, her predilection for belittling, her propensity to sneer instead of engaging in serious discussion, and her embarrassing shallowness.
She also makes it clear that she is not a theist. That is, she rejects the notion of God as a supreme reality, a reality that Polkinghorne (1998), a physicist turned theologian, describes as a “mind and a purpose behind the history of the universe”, “a veiled presence…worthy of worship and the ground of hope” (p. 1). Flew (2007) agrees with I.M. Crombie that theism is a belief in God as a transcendent being, and being transcendent, is a mystery and beyond comprehension and can only be talked about in images. (p.46) From this point of view Vosper is right, but is saying nothing new, when she observes that we have created the concept of God. (p.54). In fact, we have created many images or concepts of God. It is the way the limited human mind tries to think about the transcendent. It can only use the concepts and images that it knows to speak of the infinite. God has therefore been named using such images as cloud, fire, wind, rock, fortress, light, lord, king, shepherd, father, judge, and love. However, traditional Christianity has used these images to try to grasp the reality of God, to help others understand something of the mysterious nature of God. But Vosper says that God is a human concept to dismiss God, to show that God is a mere human creation.
Why is Vosper so dismissive of the theistic notion of God? Apparently it is because of evolution. She says, using Dawkins, an atheistic Darwinian, for support: “When we can understand the evolution of any life form as the simple trial and error progressions exposed in Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, there is little reason for us to hold on to God as explanation” (p.233). Others, less naïve than Vosper, have been less willing to accept his view that to accept evolution is to reject God. For example, Collins (2006), a leading geneticist, takes issue with Dawkins, claiming that he is a master at “setting up a straw man, and then dismantling it with great relish” (p.164). He concludes that Dawkins’s flaw is that in claiming that science demands atheism and demolishes God he is “going beyond the evidence,” because since God is outside nature, “science can neither prove nor disprove His existence” (p.165). This is a position, by the way, that Dawkins himself agrees with. However, it hasn’t stopped him from pontificating about the absence of God as if science proves the point.
Other scientists have also taken issue with the notion that to accept evolution is to reject God. Polkinghorne (1998) refers to the Anthropic Principle to make his point. This principle states that the universe is so fine-tuned that it couldn’t have happened by chance. For example, scientists are saying that if the force of gravity were a little weaker or stronger than it is, our planet would not be habitable. Polkinghorne says that this fine-tuning suggests a divine purpose and a divine creator (pp.6-8). Davies (1983), a theoretical physicist, though doubtful that the hypothesis can ever be tested, concludes “It is hard to resist the impression that the present structure of the universe…has been rather carefully thought out” (p.189).
In fact, Darwin himself, though at times ambiguous about the subject, on one occasion wrote that he experienced:
the extreme difficulty…of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity for looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look for a First cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man, and I deserve to be called a Theist. (Quoted in Miller, 2007, p. 287)
In the light of these views of internationally-know scientists, Vosper should have been more cautious in accepting Dawkins’s views without question or discussion.
So, according to Vosper God is not theistic, not personal, not a reality that one could pray to. What, then, does she say God is? The following are some expressions she uses to communicate her understanding of God: “a presence,” “something…like a feeling,” (p.120), “a feeling that makes you want to be the best person you can be” (p.230), God “dwells in our relationships” (p.250); “god is what exists between two people” (p. 234); “everything that is good in the world” (p.234); God resides within friends and family (p.248). She also says that she’s going to try to drop the word “god” to help us forget about the notion of God as being. “I’m going to use some other word—maybe breath, or love, or pyntrilm” (her own creation) (p.235). She accepts Love, compassion, mercy, and forgiveness as characteristics of God, and when we live out these qualities we are, she says, incarnations of God (p. 249). On another occasion she says that our work in the church is “to create god,” but “Not ‘god’ as anything real that exists separately… from us” (279).
We have to give Vosper credit for trying to describe God in a different way. I also have wished for and thought about others ways of speaking about God, ways freed of preconceived notions and unfortunate associations. So I appreciate the difficulties that Vosper is having. And the difficulties are clear. She seems to be struggling and in the end it is, I think, a failed project. For instance, it is not clear what she means when she says that God is a feeling “that makes you want to be the best person you can be” Does she mean that God is the feeling? Or does she mean that God creates this feeling? In other words, is it the prompting of the Holy Spirit that she is referring to? If so, she hasn’t moved very far from the traditional theistic concept of God.
God as presence is also acceptable to even non-progressive Christians. But what does she mean by God as presence? Is this presence impersonal like energy? Or is it more like a person? Does it communicate? Could we regard the recognition of this presence as the soul’s encounter with the Transcendent?
What can she possibly mean when she defines God as that which exists between two people? Is she saying that the relationship is God? What kind of a relationship, exactly? If it were a loving relationship, is she saying that this love is a finite expression of the infinite love of God? I don’t think she is. I don’t think she would say that our limited, finite expression of love is a reflection of the love of an infinite God as John describes it in his first Letter. God for her is, as far as I can determine, not the Source of truth or value.
The scholars that I have read concern themselves with discussing God as “Infinite intelligence,” “Divine source of life,” “the great unity,” “the Mind and Purpose behind the universe,” “the rational ground of existence,” “Divine Order,” “Absolute Truth,” “Supreme Source of value,” “Creator,” “ the unseen order,” and the like. Michelangelo’ s God, painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, is portrayed as a transcendent power behind the order of the cosmos. Isaiah’s God is characterized by power (“Those who trust in the Lord will renew their strength. They will rise on wings like eagles.”), and care and comfort (“Do not be afraid-- I will save you. I have called you by name—you are mine.”). The New Testament refers to Jesus as the living God made incarnate. St Paul says that in Jesus the fullness of God did dwell. None of these concepts are discussed in Vosper’s book. She takes her own advice and creates her own God; but it is a weak, cut-down God with no power, no authority. The following are some brief observations on what I see missing in Vosper’s God:
1. Vosper’s God has no part to play in creation. In eliminating God from creation she undermines a firm foundation for treating the world and God’s creatures with care and kindness. Kung (1981) emphasizes this point. He says he believes in God as creator and therefore is obliged to accept “with greater seriousness, greater realism and greater hope my responsibility for my fellow men and the environment” (p.642). This concept of God helps us understand the world and our place in it.
2. Borg (2003), in his discussion of God, refers to God as “a nonmaterial layer of reality, an extra dimension” (p.63). William James (1958), the great American philosopher and psychologist, called God the “unseen order.” To illustrate the power and importance of this unseen order in people’s lives he wrote a chapter in his book on the experiences of those who have encountered it. (p.58). Vosper seems to confine herself to the space-time world. There is no discussion of encounters with the divine, no references to those from the Bible who have had such experiences, such as Elijah, Saul, Jesus, and the disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration. This aspect of religious life, as far as I can determine, has no place in her church.
3. St. Paul refers to God as one in whom “We live and move and have our being.” One couldn’t say this about Vosper’s God, being, as it is, reduced to human size.
4. The Bible’s God is one of hope in the face of death: “For God so loved the world…that everyone who believes in him shall not die but have eternal life.” Vosper’s God offers no such assurance. It is hard to think of a God which is a symbol of our commitment “to be the best we can be” as offering hope in the face of death.
JESUS
Vosper’s abandonment of the theistic God also influences her view of Jesus. What exactly does she say about Jesus? She is at least consistent. Since there is no theistic God, she logically concludes: “The whole idea of Jesus being the Son of God no longer makes much sense” (237). She resolves: “With the help of scholars and authors who made academic research accessible, we will have set before us a very human Jesus” (p.238). (It should be pointed out here that Vosper frequently refers to modern scholarship and scholars to support her position. One would think in reading her book that all modern scholars supported her views. In fact, few do. Even Borg and Crossan, whom she frequently cites, don’t agree with her in everything. And she makes no references to those modern scholars who disagree with her position, such N. T. Wright, Luke Timothy Johnson, John Polkingthorne, Alister McGrath, and Ben Witherington. It is important, then, not to give too much credence to her references to modern scholarship). Further, she adds something even more astonishing:
But, stripped of the designation as God’s only begotten, complete with its requisite claims to salvation, there is nothing that he said or did that we must take more seriously than anything said by anyone else. What he is purported to have said or done may…have been remarkable for his day” (p.239)
However, she concludes, we should not give any more attentiveness to what he has said and did than “we would give to any person or piece of literature, film or art” (239). So Jesus, robbed of his designation as the son of God, is just another story teller, like Hemingway, Dickens, Flannery O’Connor, or Margaret Laurence. However, having robbed Jesus of his divinity, she proclaims, without seeming to recognize the contradiction, that we should “embrace the being-ness of our own divinity” (p.237). Jesus may not be divine but we are!
She concludes with these words, dismissive, arrogant, and disparaging: “contemporary scholarship strips Jesus of his…divine status and leaves him only as a Middle Eastern peasant with a few charismatic gifts and a great posthumous marketing team” (p. 255). And Bishop Spong, her mentor, in his introduction to her book, calls this “scholarly insight” (p. X1V)!
The resurrection and the crucifixion of Jesus are the two most significant events in Christianity, but not for Vosper. She doesn’t mention the first of these two, a peculiar omission for one writing about the Christian church. And she says almost nothing about the second, though we get something of her attitude about the cross in this pronouncement: “It is my hope that, in time, as the horrific story the cross represents loses it place at the centre of Christianity, the cross will become obsolete, a silent reminder of the past” (p.326). For one who accepts the traditional view of the cross in Christian theology this comes as a shock, an outrage. To begin with, the cross is, as Houston Smith puts it (2005), not only a central symbol of Christianity, but with its “vertical arm uniting heaven and earth, and its horizontal arm symbolizing throwing one’s arms out to others— it comes close to being a universal symbol” (p.110). Yet Vosper looks forward to the day when it will be regarded as obsolete! Alister McGrath (1996) places the cross as the “starting point of authentically Christian theology.” He adds, “The cross is not an individual aspect of theology, but is itself the foundation of that theology.” Further, he concludes that it is also “at the centre of all Christian thought, in that from its centre radiate all Christian statements on ethics…the Christian life, and so on”(p.41). No wonder one is taken aback that a Christian minister makes it her business to try to destroy the central symbol of Christian life and theology, a symbol denoting love, self sacrifice, trust, and forgiveness!
Jesus, having lost his divinity, is left with no “slavific power” (p. 254). This seems to me to be a peculiar position, considering the influence of Jesus in the lives of his disciples and in the lives of people we know and knew. Smith (2005) says of the disciples that they were
men and women who were ordinary in every way except for the fact that they seemed to have found the secret of living. They evinced a tranquillity, simplicity, and cheerfulness that their hearers had nowhere else encountered (p. 78).
Similarly, we have all met people who, having encountered Christ, have experienced such joy, inner peace, happiness, and love that they could not contain them. Might we not conclude that these are marks of the salvific power of Christ?
Not only has Jesus no salvific power, but, according to Vosper, he is not a very good moral teacher either. First, she says that Jesus is not able to provide the “broad base” necessary to “help us wrestle with…difficult ethical issues.” And he is not able to provide this broad base because “his vision is constrained by the context in which it was cast” (p. 155). It is hard to believe that the one who asks us to love one another, to forgive others, to pay more attention to our souls than to our possessions, to regard our bodies as God’s temple, to hunger and thirst after righteousness, who asks us to consider anyone in need as our neighbour can be said to be speaking to his time only. Surely these admonitions are universal and provide the broad base that Vosper is looking for. Surely they provide the necessary foundation for all our actions. If these words “don’t make sense any more” (p.155), I’m afraid that Vosper’s new church with its new God, new Jesus, and new language is not going to do much to save us. If we cannot make sense of them it’s because we have lost our ability to hear Truth.
What are some of the particular aspects of Jesus teachings that she objects
to? She takes issue with Jesus because he tells the rich young man to sell all and give to the poor, and she condemns it as utopian. Taking this incident literally, she says that acting in this manner “can serve to abdicate the responsibilities we have to one another” (p.154). There may be times when such an admonition might be unwise and unrealistic. However, Jesus is faced here with a young man who worships his riches, and seems to think that such a radical statement is necessary to bring him to his senses, to help him realize that his soul is worth more than all his riches. Sometimes Vosper’s literalism, while allowing her to pontificate, makes her pronouncements appear shallow. The superior values to the ones Jesus advocates, she says, are dialogue and diversity. Vosper does not seem to like the authority with which Jesus spoke to the rich young man. She is too concerned about pluralism and diversity to recognize his Truth. I can’t help wondering if Oskar Schindler dialogued and considered diversity when he risked his life to save Jews from extermination. I’d like to think that he recognized the Truth at the heart of existence, the universal moral law and acted accordingly.
Other sayings of Jesus, she says, are either “unhelpful” (divorce) or “unsupportable and exclusive” (“I am the way, the truth and the life”) (p.242-243). What “unhelpful” means here is not made clear. It is merely stated as if her stating it made it so. Jesus regarded marriage as a divine institution and a permanent relationship, likened to the relationship of the Christian Church to Christ (Ephesians 5:28-30). Anyone who observes our present society might have good reason to conclude that divorce has led to the ruination of many families, and further we might at least wonder if the destruction of families is not related to the break down of our society. If we took Jesus’ words seriously and lived by them, we might find them very helpful indeed, certainly to our children who seem to suffer most from the break up of families.
The meaning of “unsupportable” is also not clear. Does she mean it (“I am the way…) is irrational? Is she saying that there is no evidence to support it? Millions of Christians, now and in the past, have been and are witnesses to it. They supported it and do so still. Clearly, then, if has been, supported for two thousand years, it is supportable. One would be very arrogant to say that those who accept Jesus as “the way” were all irrational. As for evidence, after examining his teachings about love, trust, and forgiveness, I find it difficult not to accept it on that evidence. For I believe that Jesus is the Way (capital W) because he embodies those characteristics which are really true to what we are meant to be and to the way human life is. If these are not the way, what would Vosper suggest the way is?
One wonders why Vosper has so little regard for Jesus, taking every opportunity to undermine his authority and uniqueness, to deny him as the incarnation. Maybe it is a part of her pluralist agenda. This pluralism is obvious through her book. She says that divested of their particular rituals, beliefs, and traditions we find that the core values of Christianity are shared by other world religions (p. 101). These rituals and traditions, she further argues, is divisive and a mark of tribalism. Uniqueness, then, is bad; it is divisive. If my theory is correct, one can understand why she has adopted a heretical view of Jesus. When she rejects Jesus as the Christ she rejects what is distinctly Christian, and thus turns Christianity into just another religion. In this way inter-religious cooperation and understanding are enhanced and pluralism is advanced. However, since Jesus the Christ is constitutive of Christianity, it would also destroy Christianity, for unless Jesus is the Christ there is no Christianity.
THE BIBLE
To claim that we should not take what Jesus said and did any more seriously than what anyone else said and did (pp.238-39), one would have to deny what the New Testament says of him. To do that is to argue against the authority of the Bible. Most Christians would have reservations about taking such a strong stand. Rev. Vosper, however, does not. What exactly does she say about the Bible? She says that it no longer assists us in learning to live ethically (p.222). However, this seems to contradict an earlier statement where she observes that the Bible does support us “to live according to life-enhancing values” p.149). Vosper apparently sees no need to explain this contradiction.
The important point to be made here is her claim that the Bible is no longer authoritative. When we adopt this stance toward the Bible, she says, we are free to read the Bible as we want and “to name what is worthy of being welcomed into our places of worship” (p.149).Her approach to reading the Bible needs to be developed further because it is an approach that necessarily robs the Bible of any authority. Her reading is that of a post-modern deconstructionist. The deconstructionist argues that there is no meaning in a text. There is only the meaning that the reader constructs. And since each reader has a different interpretation of a text, it has as many meanings as there are readers. Her advice is that we should look for meaning, not “The Meaning” (p.224). This suggests that neither the author of a text nor an expert reader can tell us what a text means. No one interpretation is any better than any other. There is just the democratic frenzy of interpretations.
Vosper is a good example of this kind of reader. This is what she says about the Bible and the reading of it: “It is just a book …There is no The Meaning. There is only the possibility that something might resonate with you, challenge you…or disgust you. That’s all” (p.240).How dismissive is that! And how post-modern! “Resonate, challenge, disgust” seem to me to suggest a limited view of reading. Disgust suggests annoyance and loathing, but not intellectual engagement. A text that resonates with the reader is one that the reader agrees with. A text that challenges is one that may test one’s ability to think critically about it. However, neither of these responses to a text suggests that the reader will learn from it. And this is congruent with Vosper’s view of reading Scripture. The question, she says, is not “What is the meaning of the story”? Rather it is “What do you make of it”? (p.222), not” what can I learn from this story”? Always the emphasis is on the reader not the text itself. I think good reading calls for careful analysis of a text— the context in which it was written or told, the vocabulary, the language, the genre (history, poetry, letter, story), the purpose. Good reading also calls for humility and respect in encountering the text, and asks us to recognize that it has something worthwhile to say to us. Borg (2002) captures what I want to say when he observes that we should listen to what the Bible has to say, “and let its central stories shape our vision of God, our identity, and our sense of what faithfulness to God means” (31). A reader can register disgust, and feel resonance, or challenge without this humility, respect and analysis, but he/she is not likely to learn much from the text, not likely to discover much of its meaning without them. Good readers remain open to the text and refrain from imposing their own views on it.
Instead of such an analysis, what does Vosper suggest we do when reading the Bible? She says that we should ask such questions as: “Is Jesus acting in a way you would be proud of…? What do you make of it? Does this story evoke a good feeling in you or a bad one”? She also, in encouraging the study of Jesus, gives her students a one-sided perspective of him to guide their reading: He taught people to acquiesce (“turn the other cheek”), “Jesus’ moral teaching is not outstanding,” “No other historical record (other than the gospels) contains anything about Jesus’ miraculous works or resurrection,” These and other points are presented without discussion or qualification, as if there were no disagreement about them. They are meant, she says to “challenge the idealized picture (of Jesus) we’ve held for so long” (pp.242-243). In other words, she feels it necessary to influence her readers’ minds about Jesus before they begin their reading. And further her suggested way to read the Bible not only begins with preconceptions but seems to have its beginnings in her own ideology.
The fact is that Vosper has very little regard for the Bible. Because it is an old book, she says, it is not the word of God for all time, and because the original authors were humans, it is limited in its truth, and there is no “divine being trying to get through to us” (p.220). What are we to make of this view that we have nothing to learn from the ancients? She seems to be saying that there are no universals, that moral values are products of the times, human creations for each generation. The Bible, then, she seems to say, speaks only to the past. If there are no universals, perhaps Vosper is right. But if there are universals we must allow that the ancients have something worth saying, some wisdom to communicate. It is difficult to imagine that Plato, Job, Proverbs, The Sermon on the Mount, and St. Augustine are irrelevant. Is this what Vosper is arguing here? Is this what she really means? If so, intellectually, she must be a very lonely woman.
I agree with her that the Bible was written by humans. For example, it is not a script written by God in a way the Koran is, which is regarded by Muslins as the transcript of a tablet preserved in heaven, and revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. In fact, throughout the Koran God speaks in the first person. The Bible, in contrast, is a composite of books, poems, letters, stories recorded by a variety of people. However, this doesn’t mean that there is no divine “trying to get through to us” in the Bible as Vosper suggests. Since John, Luke, Mark, Matthew, and Paul, for example, are writing of their understanding and experience of God, couldn’t we conclude that the spirit of the divine, through their writings, is breaking into our world and experience? Vosper has read Marcus Borg, and if she had been interested in presenting a more thoughtful and balanced perspective, she could have consulted his ideas on the authority of scripture. Borg (2002) agrees with Vosper. He also sees the Bible as a human product, a human response to God written by those who have experienced God. He concludes, then, that God is not “scripture’s ultimate author” (p.22). Yet he maintains that scripture is for Christians “the most important collection of writings we know” (p.29). He further argues that it defines who we are: “It is the ground of the world in which we Christians live” (p.30). How different this is from Vosper’s view that the Bible is just another book. She says that “once the Bible is set aside as a spiritual resource,” you can “use whatever it is you’re reading” (p. 222). She mentions several examples, two of which are William Blake, the eighteenth century English poet, and Philippa Gregory, best know for her fictionalized biographies. Vosper doesn’t say why she would choose either of them to replace the Bible, except to indicate that they have “deep spiritual wisdom” that we can find there (p.223). (A contradiction should be noted here, because she has already stated rather dogmatically that there is no “Meaning” in the text; we have only the meaning we bring to the text. Apparently there are exceptions). Borg’s view of scripture here is what I call a modification from within the tradition. He takes a non-traditional approach to scripture, but treats it with respect and emphasizes its centrality. Vosper’s, treatment of scripture, however, amounts to an attempt to dismantle it, to undermine completely it position in the Christian tradition.
THE CHURCH
Given Vosper’s views of God, Jesus, and the Bible, what conclusions can we
draw about her church?
1. There will be no reference to an unseen realm, no talk of an encounter with the divine. She seems to dismiss the traditional notion of the transcendent and replaces it with the spirit of the times. The unique truth of Christianity about our redemption in Jesus the Christ will not be preached in Vosper’s church.
2. Because she eliminates the possibility of an encounter with the divine, with the numinous, she creates a church that seems to me to be rather barren. It lacks appeal to the imagination or to our sense of mystery. Nor is it a church that will satisfy our eternal longing for the eternal, for what is always just beyond our reach, for the sense of beauty and love which our everyday experience is but a pale reflection.
3. Her church is not grounded in a very hopeful theology. Having eliminated the transcendent, personal God, Vosper leaves us alone in the universe.
4. Having abandoned the Christ story, there will be no central place for Jesus in sermons, hymns and readings in Vosper’s church.
5. Prayer in Vosper’s church, as I understand it, will not be to God exterior to us, not to an interventionist God, but to a God in ones family and friends who are praying for us. Knowing this we can create mental images of them which will strengthens us. She has written a prayer (pp.252-53) that draws heavily on the famous prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. What is revealing about her prayer is that it makes no reference to God, sin, forgiveness, or eternal life, all important concepts in St. Francis’ prayer.
6. Vosper’s church will be one in which other stories will be placed on a par with scripture.
7. There is not likely to be any reference to the Trinity in Vosper’s church. Her prayer for baptism, for example, uses a “somewhat Trinitarian form” (‘341), but without mentioning the Trinity:
I baptize you in the name of
Life who created you
Wisdom who knew you first
Hope by which you will be sustained (343).
8. Vosper, regarding the story of the cross as horrific, will not grant it a central place in her church.
9. Vosper’s will be a church that will emphasize social issues (pp.284-85). She says that the focus of the Jesus stories “is not on the man called Jesus. The focus is on how to live”(p193).
10. Vosper’s notion of Communion emphasizes community. There is no God, no Jesus, no “in remembrance of Me,” no reference to sin, sacrifice, and atonement. The words of the traditional liturgy, she says, if we really pay attention to them, are “really offensive” (p.259). She concludes “I hope that there will be no need for the sacraments in the next incarnation of the church” (p.259).
My concluding observation is that Vosper’s church is not a Christian church. I cannot see how it can be. She rejects the Christian notion of God, of Jesus, of Scripture, and she also rejects Christian rituals and sacraments. In a church there are always tensions between the autonomy of the individual and the authority of the institution. But a church must have, however loosely defined, common beliefs, practices, and goals. Anyone who cannot accept any of these, is, it seems to me, obliged to leave it.
REFERENCES
Borg, Marcus J. Reading the Bible Again for the First Time. HarperCollins: New York, 2002.
Borg, Marcus J. The Heart of Christianity. HarperCollins: New York, 2003.
Collins, Francis S. The Language of God. Free press: New York, 2006.
Davies, Paul. God and the New Physics. Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1983.
Flew, Antony. There Is a God. HarperCollins: New York, 2007.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New American Library, 1959.
Kung, Hans. Does God Exist? Vintage Books: New York, 1981.
McGrath, Alister. A Passion for Truth. InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove, Illinois, 1996.
Miller, Kenneth R. Finding Darwin’s God. HarperCollins: New York, 2007.
Polkinghorne, John. Belief in God in an Age of Science. Yale University Press: Yale University Press: New Haven, 1998.
Smith, Houston. The Soul of Christianity. HarperCollins: New York, 2005.
Vosper, Gretta. With or Without God. HarperCollins: New York, 2008.
