Somewhat wishing I hadn't started this.
SK was clearly being mischievous (a thing which has almost never happened before) when he pretended that everyone would immediately
see that Arians weren't Christians. This left an obvious opening for Sam to pretend that couldn't see any difference between the two positions. The Dawk, after all, uses Arius
vs Athanasius as his main example of meaningless theological
debate.
Sam, of course, plays the standard
counter-gambit – since the Aristotelian terms "same substance"
/ "similar substance" sound obscure and strange to us, they
can't signify any real disagreement; the two schools must have been
arguing about nothing whatsoever; Christians are silly etc etc. If
charity were really the order of the day, he might have asked whether
it made any difference if you believed that Jesus was the Creator,
or merely a sub-ordinate creature. But that would require us to ask "what do we mean by
difference"? That chap who did the History of Christianity on the Beeb a couple of years back pointed out that Arian art depicted a realistic, human
Jesus who appears to age during his ministry, where Byzantine art of
the same period depicts a more distanced, obviously divine figure. But that's a bit of a rarefied distinction. I am quite sure that Sam would be
able to quite easily spot an Arian by its behaviour. It would be
the one wearing a headscarf, knocking on his front door, and asking him to buy
a copy of the Watchtower. Is that the kind of difference we are
looking for?
We are of course, not permitted to say
that "Well, the positions are different because the people who
believe in the two positions believe that they are different"
because Sam could then play his "Popular Front of Judea vs
Judean Popular Front" card.
In all seriousness. Christians seem able to disagree with each other about quite big theological questions, and still regard each other as "fellow-Christians",
albeit "fellow-Christians who should jolly well stop denying the
miracle of the mass / worshipping a biscuit and come back to the true
church". But Christians have found that
the question of the Trinity is one about which they are unable to
agree to differ. It's not a question of poor hard done by Arians
saying "But we are Christians, the same as you: please
let us back into your church." Trinitarians think that Arians
aren't Christians; Arians think that they are the only
Christians. They knock on my door early on Saturday mornings and try
to convert me, which the Bishop of Rome, to give him his due, has
never done.
I don't think that the question about
whether the Holy Spirit proceeeds from the Father and the Son or from
the Father alone is a question about nothing; I think I could have a
stab at saying what the difference is and why it seemed to be
important. But the Pope in Rome
regards the Patriarch in ... wherever he lives, do you know,
I honestly don't know... not merely as a fellow Christian, but as a
fellow Christian who is so near to being a Catholic as practically
makes no difference. Even though he's quite sure that he's wrong about filoque.
So why do questions like Arianism not admit of the same kind of compromise?
I
understand that from a position outside of any Church, this might
look odd; could Sam accept that from a position inside the Church, it seems obvious. (Obvious that Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormon's aren't Christians, but that Anglicans are simply fellow Christians who've got it badly wrong about infant baptism.) Could he perhaps accept on trust that the person of Christ is what
Christianity is about; in
fact what Christianity is (in
the way that the Koran is what Islam is)
and that while there can be very great differences of opinion about
baptism, Eucharist and even ethics, you can't mess around with our
understanding of who Christ is without changing – or in fact
obliterating – our faith.
To
press the analogy in a possibly ignorant direction; I don't think
that there has ever been a textually liberal form of Islam – the Koran is
either the actual word of God, or it is nothing, and without the
Koran there is no Muslim religion. Would orthodox Jews say the same thing about
the Torah – that you can't be "a Jew who doesn't follow the
Law" because following the Law is what being a Jew means? But I may be wrong about that.
There are
certainly clergy who take the view that Jesus was a teacher of
ethics; that he preached a radical, revolutionary message; that his
death was a political martyrdom; and that the resurrection is to be
understood simply in terms of "his followers kept following his
political message even after he died." Does Sam genuinely not
see that this is different from
the mainstream position that god came down from heaven, died on the
cross to enable human beings to go to heaven, came back to life after
he had been killed, and then went back to heaven? Does he genuinely not see why I, coming from the second perspective, would not be prepared to call the first one "Christian"?
Is the point "I don't think Giles Fraser really takes the
liberal – modernist position that your ascribe to him."? (I am perfectly happy to concede that I may have misjudged him.)
Is the point "It doesn't matter if Giles Fraser takes the
liberal - modernist position, because the liberal – modernist
position is in fact indistinguishable form the traditional –
conservative position." (In which case Fraser is equally to blame, since he appears to deny that Catholics and Evangelicals are Christians in any meaningful sense.)
Or is the point "It couldn't possibly make any difference whether
Fraser is a liberal – modernist or a traditional – conservative
because all religious positions are equally meaningless? "
I
think that Sam, being what C.S Lewis called a naturalist, may find it
genuinely difficult to believe that Christians are what C.S Lewis
called supernaturalists. I think that he finds the idea that there is
Something Else apart from the scientifically observable universe so
strange that he thinks that whenever Christians seem
to be talking about something supernatural, they must really
be talking about something natural. "I know you say that you
say that you think that Jesus died so you could get in touch with God, but you
can't really mean that: you must really mean 'so that you can form a more
just society' or 'so you can overcome your psychological hangups' ".
I
don't think that any good Christian has ever quite believed in the parody
of the Atonement which Richard Dawkins and Giles Fraser abominate.
This is sometimes called "Penal Substitution": I prefer to call it the Tom Sawyer theory. (God wants to
whip Becky Thatcher; but Tom Sawyer, who is innocent, volunteers to
get whipped instead, so Becky Thatcher gets off scot free.) As committed a death-cultist as John Stott points out that it doesn't work
because it's not fully Trinitarian: God is in fact both the one doing
the punishing and the one getting punished. Mr C.S Lewis starts out
his chapter on the Atonement by saying that before he was a
Christian, he thought that the whipping boy
theory was the one he had to believe, and that it made no sense
to him. He said that once he became a Christian, even
the theory of one person
getting punished on someone else's behalf seemed less immoral than it
had; and if you changed it to "paying a debt" or "standing
the racket" then it made more sense; because it's a matter of
common experience that one one person has got himself in trouble,
it's the innocent person who isn't in trouble who has to get him out
of it. He then propounds a rather complicated theory, based on
Anselm, about human beings needing to "go back" to God, but
not being able to, and Jesus doing the "going back" on our
behalf.
Again:
I don't quite know whether Sam really doesn't see the difference
between an objective
Atonement ("The
death of God actually changed the relationship that the material
universe has to the supernatural realm") and a subjective
Atonement ("Jesus'
death was a good example of not striking back against evil, however
horrible it is") or whether he's pretending not to for tactical reasons. Or if I'm failing to explain it very well, which is most likely.
If the Tom Sawyer analogy is a poor one, why do people carry on using it? Because it is a very vivid and dramatic way of picturing the idea that Jesus' death made
a difference. God was
cross with us; Jesus was punished; now God isn't cross with us any
more. Darnay was going to be beheaded; Carton switched places with him; Darnay
lived happily ever after. There are other versions: the
human race owed God a debt; Jesus paid the debt; now the human race
doesn't owe God a debt any more. Many nasty imperialist
evangelical tracts ask us to imagine a judge, or more probably a
Judge, who imposes a fine on a certain prisoner and then pays it
himself. We were too dirty and filthy to go to heaven; we washed
ourselves in the blood of Jesus; now we are clean. Jesus went down
into hell, fought with the devil and smashed down the gates, so
no-one has to stay in hell unless they want to. For the first thousand years of Christian history, the most popular theory involved God playing a trick on the devil to make him exceed his authority, and idea that would be incredibly alien to almost all Christians, but important if you are are going to make sense out of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
The Bible talks about the death of Jesus in terms of "sacrifice". It is absolutely true that the idea of sacrifice is strange to us.
But the idea was clearly not strange to the people who wrote the
Bible. Jesus is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world;
he is handed over to be executed preparation day ("when the
passover must be killed"); he initiates a sort of holy role-play
in which passover wine becomes "my blood of the New Covenant".
Church of England churches still have a table at the front which they
call an "alter"; Giles Fraser has to perform a rite
involving phrases like "in memory of thy perfect sacrifice made
once for all upon the Cross" and "Hallelujah! Christ our
Passover is sacrificed for us." It is very reasonable indeed for
a clergyman to say "We need to find ways of explicating this
strange language; we need to be pretty sure we understand what
"sacrifice" meant to a good Jew, and, come to that, to a
pagan convert at the time of Jesus." But I don't think you can say that the whole idea of sacrifice is abhorrent, and actually anti-Christian. You can only say that if you think that the people who we depend on for our knowledge of Jesus (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) had utterly and completely missed the whole point of every word he had ever said. Possibly you may think that Jesus was all right but the disciples were thick and ordinary, that their twisting it has ruined it for you. Once you've said that, there isn't really anything left called "Christianity" to talk about.
In Fraser's version, Christianity went off the rails pretty darn early. St
Mark pretty definitely has a story about Jesus miraculously stopping a storm. Fraser thinks that miracles of the storm-stopping kind are completely contrary to the whole idea of Christianity. That's sort of a bit of a problem.
It may be that I misread Fraser. It may be that (like me and St Mark) he thinks that the point of the story of Jesus calming a storm is the final line, where the disciples say "Hang on...only Yahweh is meant to be able to tell the weather off. But that means....."; that he's saying "The point of the story is that Jesus really was Yahweh; the point of the story is not that we don't need to listen to the shipping forecast before going on boat trips from now on." It would have been nicer if he could have framed in as an affirmation of what he does believe, and not as a rant about how horrible we evangelicals are.
I'm not talking here about whether we think miracle are even possible, or whether
we ought to interpret miracle stories literally or metaphorically. I am quite
happy to debate with the fellow who thinks that Mark 4: 35-41 is not a news
report, but (say) a commentary on the book of Jonah. But when someone says "Mark completely
missed the point of what Jesus was on about; but fortunately, I get
the point perfectly well" then I smile patronisingly and walk
away.