Religion as idolatry

I am continuing to meditatively read Nicolas Lash's beautifully written lectures, Holiness, Speech and Silence: Reflections on the Question of God. Much of what he has to say on 'religion' turns on its head most of the commonly held assumptions in contemporary discourse about the meaning of the term.

Most religion is, of course, idolatrous. We ascribe divinity to, we treat as sacred, a vast diversity of ideas and institutions, peoples, place stories, customs, which are, at worst, destructive of ourselves and of the world in which we live, and, at best, ambivalent intimations of where true holiness, beyond all our construction and imagination might be found. 

Thus it is that the great religious traditions of this world function as schools in which people learn that there is no feature of the world - no nation, institution, text, idea, ambition - that is, quite simply, sacred. To be a pupil in these schools (and all the teachers in these schools are pupils too) is to learn that we are called beyond the worship of the creature; to learn that that alone is truly 'holy', is quite beyond location and imagination, radically transcends the secular in which we live and die, bearing the gift and burden of contingent freedom. It is within the world, in all the world, in all we think and do and say and see, achieve and suffer, and by no means only in some small margin of the world which people, these days, call 'religion', that we are required to be attentive to the promptings of the Spirit, responsive to the breath of God. (39-40)

'Doing' theology today

Nicholas Lash has an excellent account of what doing theology means today in his series of lecture  Holiness, Speech and Silence: Reflections on the Question of God.

... continuing to hold the Gospel's truth makes much more serious and dangerous demands than mere lip-service paid to undigested information. Unless we make the truth our own through prayer, thought and argument - through prayer and study and an unflinching quest for understanding - it will be chipped away, reshaped, eroded by the power of an imagining fed by other springs, tuned to quite different stories. And this unceasing, strenuous, vulnerable attempt to make sone Christian sense of things, not just in what we say, but in the ways in which we 'see' the world, is what is known as doing theology. (4)

For a helpful unpacking of some of the themes in this fine piece of theology, see Simon Barrow's paper What Difference does God make today?

Holiness and Justice

Giles Fraser, former Dean of St Paul's in a recent column in The Guardian puts his finger on a critical issue concerning the relationship between holiness and justice that was provoked by visit to Bethlehem.

"This is the place where Jesus Christ was born," whispers a guide in an affected and well practised baritone. Bells jingle and incense fills the church. And thousands queue up for the experience with hushed reverence. Buses from plush Jerusalem hotels make their way through the Israeli checkpoint and disgorge their passengers just a few paces from the narrow entrance to this most holy of Christian shrines.

Crusaders lowered the once grand entrance so as to stop pilgrims entering the church on horseback. Nothing so profane as a horse, and its inevitable waste products, must go anywhere near so sacred a place. Leviticus 10.10 puts it thus: "You are to put a difference between the holy and the unholy, between the clean and the unclean." In other words, the church must be protected from the world.

Sitting on the far side of Manger Square, I find myself getting more and more angry with this deeply rooted understanding of holiness. Bethlehem is a place of such vast injustice and social deprivation. The Israeli separation barrier has severed the whole town from its traditional sources of social and economic vitality. Farmers can no longer reach their olive trees. Families who live just a few miles apart can no longer visit each other. Graffiti on the vast concrete wall offers a slender message of hope: "Nothing lasts for ever."

But it seems that for many of the pilgrims to Bethlehem, this complex political reality is something to be passed by on the other side. They have come to find a sacred space that is as protected from politics as the holy is from the unholy. Yet there is a terrible irony in all this. For the birth of Jesus Christ, in a smelly cow shed, and threatened by the forces of occupation, represents a wholesale rejection of precisely this idea of holiness. God is no longer to be set in some pristine otherness. The sacred is no longer to be protected from the profane. Which is why Jesus makes such an ostentatious show of fraternising with those who were traditionally debarred from holy space – the lame and blind, sinners, lepers, menstruating women.

In the life of Jesus, holiness is redefined as justice. Like the prophets before him, he is at best indifferent and at worst downright hostile to traditional forms of protection against defilement – washing, ringfencing the Sabbath from work, and so on. The task of religious professionals is not to keep God clean, as one might defend a brand new exercise book from inky fingers. "I have come to give good news to the poor, freedom to the captive, sight to the blind."  Occupy St Paul's: no church should insulate itself from human raw need