4:If your school still had religious assemblies, you probably puzzled your way through Cardinal Newman’s Dream of Gerontius...

If your school still had religious assemblies, you probably puzzled your way through Cardinal Newman’s Dream of Gerontius, which worked its way into hymnbooks as Praise to the Holiest in the Height. 

O wisest love! that flesh and blood

  Which did in Adam fail,

Should strive afresh against the foe,

  Should strive and should prevail.

And that a higher gift than grace

  Should flesh and blood refine,

God’s presence, and His very self

  And essence all-divine.

Evangelicals are prone to reduce the whole of Christianity to the single proposition that Jesus was punished on the Cross for the transgressions of the human race: but the hymn asserts that human nature was change by the very fact of its being amalgamated with divine nature. A sentimental modern “chorus” has a jolly good go at putting across the same concept “Lord of infinity/stooping so tenderly/lifts our humanity/to the height of his throne.” The Athanasian Creed, which is I think still in the Anglican prayer book, says that although Jesus was both God and Man “yet he is not two, but one Christ; One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but by taking of the Manhood into God”. 

Lewis, in Mere Christianity, uses a vividly concrete image to explain the idea. Imagine that you could see the human race from an extra-temporal perspective, he says. Then the human race would appear, less as a collection of distinct individuals, more as a very complicated tree. Each branch of the tree would be a human life; long or short as the case may be; growing out of his father and mother and perhaps with children growing out of it. [I wonder if he was thinking of Robert Heinlien’s Lifeline when he wrote the passage?] If Christianity is true then somewhere in the middle of that vast four dimensional spider-web is one human life which is also the life of God: and the presence of that divine life changes the totality. 

“It is as if something which is always affecting the whole human mass begins, at one point, to affect the whole human mass in a new way. From that point the effect spreads through all mankind. It makes a difference to people who lived before Christ as well as to people who lived after Him. It makes a difference to people who have never heard of Him. It is like dropping into a glass of water one drop of something which gives a new taste or a new colour to the whole lot.”

This is a drawback to anyone who sees interplanetary missionary work as a theoretical possibility. If God specifically saved humanity by taking on a specifically human nature, then it is hard to see that he also redeemed Venusian nature or Kaled nature. 

So what does it mean to suppose or conjecture that Jesus took on the body of a Lion in another world or another universe? Are Peter and Lucy Kings and Queens of Narnia by virtue of Aslan dying on the Stone Table, or by virtue of Jesus having once shared their nature? Can God save mouse-nature or donkey-nature by amalgamating himself with lion-nature? Is it quite decent to even contemplate the question?

“But Andrew: these are not questions which would reasonably occur to anyone reading a fairy story; and they are not questions which Lewis himself was particularly interested in. The average occupant of the average pew has probably never heard of the Athanasian Creed, although they may have sung Meekness and Majesty. Can’t you just let a fairy story be a fairy story?”

I agree: these are not sensible questions. We don’t read Puss in Boots and ask whether a cat’s vocal chords could really produce human speech; we don’t watch Tom and Jerry and wonder about the physics and biology of a universe in which domestic animals can survive being physically flattened by anvils. It would not occur to me to ask such questions: unless reactionary Christians had started pre-emptively damning an unmade movie on the grounds that a famous actress will be speaking the words of an animated Lion.

Unless, that is, there were people who were  okay with Jesus being a Cat but not okay with Jesus being a woman. 

People who, would, I assume, want to change Sidney Carter’s cosmic hymn so it says 

who can tell what other body

he may hallow for his own

but it will definitely be a man’s body

because that’s the only one in which he would feel at home.

And who would amend Johnny Mathis to “waiting for one child: black, white, yellow, no-one knows, but one thing they do know, it will definitely be a boy.” 

People who think that Jesus’ humanity is inessential, but that his masculinity is indispensable.   

That God is irreducibly male and that Christianity represents the belief that the universe is governed by the male principle. [*] 

I am reminded of the old joke about the Jewish atheist who visits Belfast during the Troubles, and is asked whether he is a Catholic Jewish Atheist or a Protestant Jewish Atheist? 

“Is it bad theology to imagine that the Christian story might have happened on a planet of super intelligent asexual amoebas?”

“It depends. Are they boy super-intelligent asexual amoebas or girl super-intelligent asexual amoebas.” 

Continues.

If you don't hate this essay, please consider supporting my Patreon. 

* This is not actually what they are saying, of course. What they are actually saying is that they hate on trans people, and that the pretend cat with the female voice can be drawn into their whining conspiracy theory.