1. SCRIPTURE – KEY TO THE FUTURE

Chapter 4  A New Way of Seeing

4.1 Introduction

In the Hebrew and Apostolic Testaments, the expected outcome of hearing the testimony is a new way of seeing. This is consistent with the analogy to testimony in a court of law. As I write, there is a trial occurring in this country concerning multiple murders carried out 15 years ago, a whole family except for one son who was subsequently convicted of the murders. The conviction was eventually  quashed and this new trial ordered. The defence contention is that the father murdered his wife and three children then committed suicide. For the jury on this trial -- and generally on most trials -- the question comes down ultimately to the single issue -- what do they see as having occurred, having heard all relevant testimony? For us in the religious arena, the central issue is not what happened in the sixth century BC or the first century A.D. The crucial question is, what do we see happening in our own time and in our own lives? The effect and power of the scriptural testimony is only known if and as it produces contemporary sight.

In my next book I shall be exploring the question of "sight" and reality. The model that I shall be exploring is that the universe reveals itself to us according to the question we ask of it, and, in response to the question, reality reveals itself wholly. If we ask of reality the physical question, the universe reveals itself as wholly and fully physical and that is what we see. The model affirms without reservation the validity of what we see.

However, when we ask the ‘grace’ question of reality, the universe reveals itself fully and wholly as grace and that is what we see. This too, is, without reservation, valid. The two ways of seeing cannot be conflated into any kind of unity of vision. We can only move between them. When we hear the scriptural testimony, what we are led to is found in asking the grace question of reality. As indicated, a more complete exposition of this will be undertaken in the next book.

Earlier, I identified the six elements that comprised the process by which, first, the Hebrew and, later, the apostolic community met and overcame the challenge that threatened to destroy them. Each of these elements produced a special manner of seeing into the nature of reality as grace. The victory these communities achieved arose because they came to ‘see’, and what their testimony is saying to the contemporary world is that our ability to meet and overcome our challenges is likewise rooted in achieving a parallel quality of seeing.

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4.2 The Prophetic Seeing

The Hebrew prophets were not teachers of propositional truths or wisdom. They were, literally ‘seers’: they saw into the depths of events to the grace that impelled them. Fundamentally, of course, the core insight was that events were indeed impelled by grace and not simply consequences of prior human actions. Certainly, it was possible, then and now, to trace the causes of Jerusalem's tragedy to the geo-political situation of the region and to massive political failure as well as to roots in economic and social injustice. Nor do the prphets overlook such physical causes. What they saw, however, is that Jerusalem's tragedy lay in the grace-realm: that what was happening to the city and people was directly driven by Yahweh who was acting from out of grace towards all humanity. Later, when all hope appeared extinguished, the prophetic sight still saw Yahweh acting in grace and therefore saw with complete clarity that the community would be restored and reconstructed, transformed.

The prophetic sight, when it came to be manifest in the apostolic community, saw in the catastrophic event of Jesus’ death, and the disgraceful manner of his death, the manifestation of grace. Assuming the accuracy of the gospel record, Jesus himself stood in that prophetic tradition. He saw the inner meaning of his life and his approaching death: he saw that he was not just another human teacher but was in fact the expected Messiah, though, seeing, he realised that the messiahship was very different from what the tradition expected.

Following Jesus, the great prophet of the apostolic church was Paul. Paul ‘saw’ into the meaning of Jesus's death the power of grace that no one among contemporary Christian leaders saw. Without Paul's prophetic seeing there can be little doubt that Christianity would never have survived, at least outside Judaism. This seeing into the inner meaning of reality reached its climax in the letters to the Colossians and Ephesians, whether by Paul or some other apostolic figure.

The consistent witness through both scriptural testaments is a challenge to the contemporary world to see into the ‘grace-nature’ of our present world. Their seeing is as crucial to us as it was to the Hebrews and the apostolic community. This is not to deny the scientific evidence of global warming, of analysis of resource depletion and pollution, of the effects of wars, AIDS and, and the potentiality for pandemic disease. All these things are real at the physical level and we cannot escape addressing them physically by escapism into religiosity. The prophetic word, witnessed to in the Testaments, speaks to the grace-dimension of what is happening in and to our world.

When we see our world in grace we see humanity as the one life-form where grace takes conscious and physical life . Grace fills all things but only in humanity is there direct consciousness of grace and the capacity, in free will, to ‘be’ grace. We see this special place of humanity in the universe confirmed by the incarnation of the Word in the physical humanity of the man, Jesus. We see the calling and vocation  of the human species in and to the whole creation . We see the abject failure of humanity to meet and fulfil this calling and how, in contrast, humanity has become a threat to the rest of life on earth, the living contradiction of grace, how our social and economic structures have become defiant of God's economy. Seen in grace, the vast crisis engulfing global humanity is not essentially ‘punishment’ but a massive deconstruction that is happening out of grace and so that grace may emerge more clearly in what arises out of the ashes of global events. Prophetic sight shows us that grace is ultimately in control of everything that is happening,  however catastrophic we may experience it to be. In prophetic sight, we know with absolute certainty that beyond what our world is and will be suffering in a century and perhaps beyond, there will spring new life, transformed community.

Such seeing could lead to passive fatalism. This is not what occurs in response to genuine prophecy. In the first place, there is a message of repentance and a recognition that, in changing our ways we may yet avert a catastrophe. The prophetic word to our world is not one of doom in an unavoidable sense for what comes ringing through the preaching of the great Hebrew prophets is that if the people repented and changed their ways, their fate was not sealed. Even at the very climax of the catastrophe for Jerusalem, the prophet Jeremiah declared to the king the way the doom on the city could be averted.

Contemporary Christians may not shelter behind gleeful announcements of devastation of the earth: every effort to change the way humanity lives is an impulse of the Spirit. Addressing the way we are degrading the planet, its environment and its resources, confronting violence, corruption and abuse of power, economic and social injustice, criminality and drugs are all authentic responses to both physical and spiritual seeing. Even more potent, the vision attested by the apostolic witness is that the Holy Spirit equips us with everything necessary to meet any and every challenge. The essential faith sight of the Christian is that if we work in conjunction with grace, we possess every resource we need to avert the human crisis. We are not fatalistically locked into planetary catastrophe. This too, we see prophetically and it is the most potent good news we can possibly possess.

For each of us as individuals, or for small church communities, the sheer scale of the human crisis is such that anything we think we may contribute seems so small and futile that we experience a sense of defeat before even we commence acting . Even as we attempt to work, disillusionment and despair always threatens to engulf us and anger at seemingly unconquerable justice overwhelms us.

The prophetic sight shows us that we are called simply to respond to where and what grace calls us to be at do. We live in sight not just of the global events but of grace in our immediate and present life. For us, sufficient grace is given to us each day and, in prophetic sight, we can look back on each completed day and see how grace has manifested itself in that day.

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4.3 Social vision

The second area of seeing is a social vision arising out of a grasp of the nature of grace. The Hebrew reformers of the seventh century were the first to grasp such a social vision, expressed, in all probability, in the chapters 12 to 26 of the book of Deuteronomy. They took their new understanding of the nature of Yahweh as an ethical guide demanding an ethical community, together with the requirements of a reformed cult. During the exile, imagination worked on this vision to develop a detailed picture of an ideal Yahwist  society, the ideal embodied in the books of the Law. From the mid-fifth century, there was a concerted effort to institute this society, and those efforts are still alive in some sections of Israeli society today, two and a half millennia later.

Even though the Hebrew vision was a failure, as all idealist societies end in failure, the ‘seeing’ of a shape of a possible new society was crucial to their survival. When a society -- or an individual -- becomes aware of the "wrongness" or inadequacy of present and past existence, or sense, as the Hebrews came to,  that their society was under judgement, then unless there is a vision of what is ‘right’ and judged positive, and a pathway immediately accessible towards that goal, the community is broken by despair.

The element of seeing the shape of a new society was picked up by the apostolic church of the first century after Christ. It may well have been that at first the disciples thought simply of a modified version of the Hebrew vision but the breakthrough into gentile participation in that community radically altered that. As the Pauline message of freedom from the Law took hold, the issue came to hold centre stage for the Christian community -- what kind of society is a Christian society? Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians chapter 13 in particular, installs agape/love firmly in the centre of such a life and along with this love, a strong and rigorous moral sense. Matthew, reaching back to traditions about Jesus’ teaching that Mark did not record, develops strongly, in what we call the Sermon on the Mount, a vision of life in the ‘kingdom of God’. Luke, too, in his idealised account of the early years of the church, as well as in the picture he paints of Jesus, provides further detail to the way the apostolic community developed its vision. As with the Hebrews, without this vision of grace translated into concrete community life,  the church could never have come into lasting existence.

This then, too, is the testimony of the two Testaments to the contemporary world. We know that life as it has been lived by global human society is no longer sustainable, whether we ‘see’ this in physical or spiritual perception . It is impossible for humanity to continue to "eat its future" as we have been doing and this is a challenge not just to the excesses of modern industrial consumer society but to the way human life has shaped itself since the rise of agriculture over 7000 years ago. Human survival past just a very few generations into the future, human fulfilment of its vocation in grace, is totally dependent upon our radical top-to-tail transformation of human community.

The critical task, then, in the challenge to survive and fulfil our vocation is to develop ‘sight’ of what human community is called upon to be and to look like in the future. It is a central element in the role of the Christian community in its relation to the world and in its ‘salvation message’ it proclaims as clearly as possible the nature and elements and values of this ‘redeemed’ society and seeks practically to embody the vision.

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4.4 Mythological seeing

The issue of being able to ‘see’ mythologically is perhaps one of the most significant issues of our age. The dominant mentality of our age is that the only knowledge is rational knowledge. The theory of knowledge that has dominated our thinking for the past few generations has ruled out the imagination as a route to knowledge about the nature of reality. The greatest tragedy of all is that vast swathes of the Christian community have bought into this ideology. Although the finger usually points at liberal Christianity in this regard, the major culprit in this respect is evangelical theology. Although it asks of its followers a suspension of rationality, yet it is wholly rooted in modern rationality-limited thinking. Like its secular counterpart, it excludes real imagination except in so far as that imagination allows the psyche to be manipulated. But right across the board from Roman Catholic to Pentecostal, the most significant element in contemporary religion is the downgrading and often complete elimination of the imagination as a manner of seeing reality. This development, more than any other single factor, is what has cut the heart out of religious life in the modern era.

The word "myth" here is key. With the elimination of imagination as a pathway into reality, "myth" as concept has been relegated to being the equivalent of a fairy tale and equates at the rational level to "not true". This is not what myth means and there may be no more significant task of the Christian community in the 21st century than to recover its grasp on myth as the key to spirituality.

Myth is the way we see into the realm of reality that is beyond physical sight and rational construct. Without it -- and this is the basic diagnosis of contemporary Christianity -- the Christian community is blind. It doesn't matter how much of the Bible we ‘know’, we are like the Pharisees and John chapter 9 in the way we are blind.

To introduce the concept of myth, I want to tell the story of some cats. Many years ago, when our children were toddlers, we had a boxer dog but we wanted a cat. However, the dog, a bitch, chased a kitten which we attempted to introduce to the household so we gave up on that idea. Then early one morning, around 6 o’clock, I was in the garden when a commotion with the dog occurred which drew me to find out what was going on. It turned out that a wild cat had produced a litter of kittens under our house and was in the process of moving one of the kittens, only a few days old, when the dog caught in the open. The mother dropped the kitten and fled and I came across the dog nosing the tiny bundle of fur over and over in the wet grass. I brought the kitten inside but its survival seemed hopeless. The dog was beside herself with excitement. I still do not know what impulse caused me to do it, but I lowered the kitten to the dog which licked it to life. My wife went for the overnight pharmacy to get an eyedropper to feed it and while she was away I received one of the clearest messages from God I can ever recall: "This kitten is my gift to you. Its name is to be Charis". When my wife arrived back she said to me, "I've been given the name of the cat. He is to be called Charis"!

Shortly after this event (the cat survived; cat and dog became inseparable partners), we plunged into a health crisis with my younger child, a struggle that lasted three years with death always at the door. Through these years, that cat was a constant sacramental presence. He had only to walk into the room to bring a sense of the presence of God and he had an unerring sense of seeking out the person in distress and going to them. We came through those years and emerged with our faith stronger than before -- and the cat played a large part in that.

Now of course, all this perception is purely in the imagination -- and that is exactly the point. To any objective observer, this was just a household pet doing what cats do. But to us and for us she was a 'mythic' being, a presence that brought contact with that which for ever lies beyond rationality and even beyond imagination. This is what is the real meaning of 'myth'.

Jumping ahead a number of years, we had been without a cat or any animal in our lives and, living in an apartment, expected to have none. However, our 'chance' encounter with a cat during a holiday awakened in us a longing to once again have a cat in our lives. In the meantime, however, I have been deeply involved in a publishing project, The Sacred Cat that was all about the Birman breed and,  if I was going to have a cat at all I wanted a Birman. When I enquired of a breeder, however, the cost of buying one was prohibitive, let alone the fact that I wanted a pair. So -- there would be no cat and I accepted that. About two years later the breeder phoned: "Did you ever get the cats you wanted? I have two adult Birmans that I am downsizing from my breeding stock. They are inseparable companions so I want them to go to the same home. There will be no charge. Interested?" So, miraculously (and I use the word seriously) we acquired two wonderful Birmans. What these two cats have come to mean is a standing sign to us of God's grace and provision. For coincidentally with this gift, we entered a period where we undertook a demanding ministry that functions on minuscule material resources. Like the first cat, these cats have become 'mythical' beings, their existence taking us in imagination into a realm beyond rationality but which is, nevertheless, fully real. The continually spoke of the fullness of God’s provision.

These two stories point up another feature that lies at the heart of authentic myth -- that it is inseparable from story. It is not possible to 'decide' to create a myth or a mythic belief. Myth happens out of a story that points to its origins beyond rationality and purely human creation. You cannot go to be SPCA or breeder and order a mythic cat!

The Hebrew people -- including modern Jews -- are a mythic people. They, if they will forgive the comparison, are of the same order as my cats though, of course, with universal meaning. At the heart of authentic spirituality is that we 'see' the Hebrew people as mythic. This does not mean buying into the traditional narrative of their mythic origins but it does mean that grasping their story is essential.

Jesus is a mythic figure, the archetype of mythic figures. Again, the story of how he arises as this mythic figure is important. We do not have to accept the legendary stories around the nativity to recognise that the birth of Jesus was a momentous moment for all humanity. Without getting hung up on issues of historical veracity, we can celebrate the angels and shepherds, annunciation and all the rest as pictures that take us into the heart of inner reality that rationality cannot access. These stories enable us to 'see' truth because such seeing can only be through the imagination.

Take the miracles recorded in the gospels: it is irrelevant whether in the hard, cold actuality of history Jesus ever fed 5000 with a few loaves and fishes, or walked on water, or turned water into wine. To make judgements based on historical veracity blinds us to the mythic seeing that is their purpose. When we approach these accounts as mythic then we see through them into a depth of reality that no rationality can penetrate yet is as really real as anything we can touch physically.

When we gather in liturgical worship we enter this realm of mythic seeing. Unless our gatherings for worship take us there we are simply wasting time and effort.

Let me attempt to describe what I 'see' when I enter into liturgy. First of all, anyone who thinks they can arrive at liturgical worship just as it's about to start -- or fill in the time between arriving at the commencement by chatting to another person -- is fooling themselves if they think they are ready to engage with God. We need time to effect a mental transition from the normal state of our minds to being able to 'see' into the spiritual reality. That requires a focus of imagination. For myself, I imagine that this particular assembly of which I am part on this occasion is the only focus that God has -- nothing else exists for God than these few people here and what they are saying and doing. Every word we say God takes with total seriousness as if this were the sum total of the divine/human interaction. This is 'mythic' seeing and it transforms liturgy in our experience of it.

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4.5 Spiritual seeing

Without mythic seeing there can be no 'spiritual' seeing. What I mean by spiritual seeing is the way in which we see grace operating in and through our lives. Spirituality takes its very name from ‘spirit' which in Christian understanding is the dimension of intimacy and immediacy in our relationship with God. To see spirituality is to see the intimate and immediate relationship of whatever we are seeing to the nature of our personal life and that at its deepest level.

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4.5.1 Spiritual seeing and God

Theologically and dogmatically we know that no human being can 'see God' and this has become even more of a dogma as theism has passed into history and we no longer conceive God as ‘a Being’. The problem created by the death of theism, however, is that we appear to have been stripped of any viable image that enables us to 'see spiritually'. For there is a vast difference between theological 'seeing' and spiritual seeing.

I believe that we need to 'see God' spiritually and this means being able to conjure in our imagination a 'Being' to which we can relate. It is perhaps one of the ironies of our age that having recognised the rather inadaquacy of theism to be a model for our theological understanding of God we find ourselves freer than perhaps before to visualise a ‘theo’. The reason why we are free is that we recognise the nature of myth and imagination. We can visualise 'Theo' without falling into the trap that somehow this visualisation 'captures' God.

I may be speaking only for myself here, but it is my experience that prayer and liturgy and meditation only become power for me in any subjective sense when I first focus on creating in my mind a concrete visualisation of ‘Theo’. A future book of the series explores spirituality so what I have to say on this subject may well be more fully stated there. At this stage, I simply want to make the point that creative visualisation of God, with the proviso that we do not think that we can 'describe’ God as 'seen' in this visualisation, makes very concrete and specific our spiritual relationship. It is a very necessary first step in prayer and as we gather in liturgy. It strikes me that the biggest single failure of our efforts at liturgical worship lies in our failure to bring the assembly into a space of corporate 'seeing' before we start anything in the way of liturgical prayer in action.

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4.5.2 Seeing the universe in grace

Book II of this matrix project explores the basic model by which we can freely enter into the universe as grace. The fundamental of the model is that we can stand in a place where we see the universe, all reality, as purely physical and that is what we see, wholly: and it is wholly appropriate that we see reality in this manner.

However, we can shift the place where we stand and view the universe, all reality, as grace and what we see is that reality is wholly grace,  pure grace: and it is wholly appropriate that we see it in this manner. The art of living the Christian life lies in our freedom to move between these two ways of seeing the universe.

What has happened in our contemporary world, however, is that the 'seeing’ that has been emerging from the physical stance has become so overwhelming that it has filled our capacity to see, and at the same time an ideology has arisen that says that this is the only valid way of seeing. Even Christian ministry and practice has been drawn into this theological stance. Recently I read a book on pastoral ministry that was simply psychotherapy repackaged for consumption in the church environment -- and this was a standard text for pastoral training. There was a total absence of 'spiritual seeing', excluded by the ideological approach that controlled the book.

Spirituality without the capacity to see the universe spiritually is simply a formal and outward religious practice. We must rediscover our capacity to see the world as grace -- and wholly grace, not simply as occasional eruptions of 'grace' into an otherwise physical world.

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4.5.3 Spiritual seeing, humanity and the church

Someone once said, referring to the old practice of genuflection in the creed at the incarnatus, that if we took the incarnation seriously we would genuflect before everyone we met. This is extreme but no more so than Jesus' statement about logs in our eyes. In the extremity lies profound truth. The mainspring of authentic Christian ministry has always lay in the ability to visualise humanity either en masse or as an individual as being 'transcendent'. Once again, this is rooted in the ability to think mythically.

Very few of us think of our local church community as being a true and full expression of what the church could be and, though I cannot speak from personal experience, I am sure that this would be true even of those who belong to 'successful', growing and active churches. Even if we have a deep love for the people of our community, the more we know them the more we see their/our faults and failings and inadequacies. We look to our hierarchy and squirm with inner agony over their weakness, their blindness, their foolishness -- and even their corruption.

One of the biggest challenge every Christian faces is being able to look past all of this and see the inner spiritual reality of this community. I know that for me one of the most subjectively important liturgical exchanges week by week are these words

"Brothers and sisters, we are the body of Christ.
  By one Spirit we are part of one body."

At the level of global humanity, where the great crisis of our day is being played out, we need a spiritual seeing that is more than just a blind "God loves the world". Using the clues given to us in scripture, in the Hebrew prophets and in the letters to the Ephesians and Colossians and the Gospel of John, we need a spiritual seeing into the heart of the meaning of the human species to the entirety of creation. When I say, "spiritual seeing",  I am still speaking within the understanding of spirituality as being about intimacy and immediacy. When spiritual seeing of human community is authentic, whether it be of our local church or of all humanity, it always creates a sense of vocation, of being in some way an instrument in God's great plan of salvation.

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4.5.4 Spiritual seeing of ourselves

Spiritual seeing is also in a seeing into the depths of ourselves, and seeing ourselves as God sees us. This, of course, is the heart of recognising sin. There has been a dramatic decline in the sense of sin in our world, which is directly related to the loss of ability to see spiritually. It is absolutely true that we can make no progress on spirituality until we are able to see ourselves in a state of sin, of betrayal of God and our calling. Such awareness in fact arises naturally and fully out of all the previous 'seeing' being explored. If, when we cringe at the awareness of the inadequacy of our local church we do not embrace ourselves in that sense of failure we are guilty of an even greater sin than anything we see in others, the sin of self-righteousness, and the blindness that Jesus identified in the Pharisees.

At the same time, it is equally important to see ourselves as completely free from sin -- provided that we recognise that this is a gift of grace through the cross and not our own achievement. I have mentioned how I visualise a ‘Theo’ concretely in prayer. In the same visualisation I also see myself as being in that immediate and intimate presence and it is myself as absolutely without sin, able to face God directly -- look God in the eye!

There is vastly more that needs to be said about spiritual seeing in relation to ourselves and I will not attempt to go further at this point. The essence is that we find the capacity to see ourselves spiritually.

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4.5.5 Seeing time spiritually

"Never forget that to the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day". We might well say, one second is like a billion years and a billion years like one second. If only such a spiritual vision of time could re-root itself in our world we might be able to get past the absurdities around creationism.

When we stand before the universe and see it with a spiritual vision, as grace, time is annihilated. The fascinating thing about even the physical world is that we know now scientifically that at the sub-atomic level of physical reality space and time appear no longer to exist. If we recognise that ultimately everything that exists physically is comprised of these sub-atomic particles, then a grasp of what time means changes dramatically.

Spiritually, time is immaterial. I am not going to take this further because the implications are huge. The vision is, however, of enormous importance in a world in which, at the physical level, the concept of time has exploded exponentially, reaching not thousands but billions of years into the past and reaching ahead and indefinite number of billions of years. To think of humanity and the church in our day we should be projecting a potential future in hundreds of millions of years. So we have in fact they two-fold time challenge to our spiritual vision: to allow ourselves to conceive the spiritual mission is having a time-line measured in hundreds of millions of years: and to see that time does not exist at all in the universe seen as grace.

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4.6 Meta-historical seeing

Metahistory is the protection of the realm of reality that is not connected to physical reality. Metahistory was a strong component of the theistic model, positing as it did “another world” that was not of a physical nature. The death of the theistic model has brought with it the death of this metahistory of another world. Although our theological and liturgical conventions still speak of such an 'other world' the stark reality is that very few people -- or any -- believe it any longer. By this I do not mean that people have altogether surrendered their intellectual, theological belief in an afterlife but I have never in my entire ministry met anyone who translates that theology into actual practical living. The metahistory of another world could be abandoned by every part of the Christian community and aside from changing some liturgical expressions we would notice no difference at all in the behaviour of Christians -- and this is just as true of the most conservative Roman Catholic or fundamentalist evangelical as of a theological liberal.

Yet there is a great loss being experienced here. It is only through some form of meta-history that we can see very significant dimensions of reality. Tthe Lord's Prayer for an instance. "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven." To make any sense whatsoever of the prayer we need a meta-historical framework that can grasp in some way in imagination what "life might be like in heaven".

There is enormous significance here for a healthy dynamic of the human community. Meta-historical imagination acts like a call to us towards an ever deeper fulfilment. We can take each of the nine fruits of the Spirit Paul lists in Galatians chapter 5 and project the kingdom of God as perfectly manifesting each separately and together: a community perfect and full in love in every respect, in joy in everything, in total and all-embracing peace, and so on. Even the poor and tentative  grasp our imagination can lay on such a vision radiates our concrete community not just in judgement for its inadequacy but in potential to move closer to the vision.

What we know, though, is that this meta-historical vision always lies beyond, and ever beyond, the human horizon and one reality we know is that the more we as persons come close to the fulfilment of the vision of the kingdom the further off we sense its fulfilment to be. The only people who ever think of themselves as 'good people' are those who have little knowledge and understanding of God. No saint or 'saintly' person ever thinks hesselves good, just as Jesus himself rejected the appellation 'good'.

Why this is so powerful is that the alternative in human society for those who wish to advance its quality is idealism. Idealism envisages concretely the 'best' way for humans to live together or how life should be lived. Although we frequently commend people for having ideals, the reality of human life is that idealism is always finally destructive. The greatest suffering in the world is what arises from idealism. The Nazis were idealists as were the Communists, Pol Pot -- even Presidents Mugabe and Bush. All of them wrecked havoc in the name of their ideals. Idealists invariably come to believe that fulfilment of their ideal justifies trampling on other values that appear to get in the path of the fulfilment of the ideals. At the end of every idealist road lies disillusionment and death. This was the inherent problem in the programme of the seventh and sixth century BC Hebrew reformers and their successors in Judaism: they were idealists, which is why the Hebrew answer never finally worked. The state of Israel is a living testimony to the failure of the Hebraic solution as embodied in Judaism.

One of the challenges for the Christian community in our own day is to rediscover the capacity to 'see' with a meta-historical imagination. This is the only real answer to the liberal/conservative divide that has been tearing the Church apart over the last generation. The conflict really does come down to the status of meta-history. What liberalism has done is to deny altogether the validity of meta-history in line with its integration with the ideology of secular materialism. What the conservative reaction has essentially been affirming is that with out meta-history we are spiritually blind -- and though the reaction lost its way by trying to cling to the theistic model, it has been fully justified in its reaction against liberalism. Though the conservative reaction may be judged inadequate and, in many respects, destructive of faith, falling captive to demagogues, idealists and exploiters, yet that reaction has been a saving grace to the community of faith just as the Hebrew reformers, for all their idealism and distortions, were a vehicle of saving grace to the Hebrew community.

Now though, while religious conservatism is in decline in the Christian community, liberalism is completely dead as an alternative. There will need to be much more exploration of the concept of meta-history as a way of 'seeing'. At this point, the essential element lies in the recognition that, in imagination, we are able to reach beyond what human rationality can ever attain and the key is learning to trust that the discernments that arise when we see with meta-historical imagination as being the discernments that genuinely reach into the heart of reality.

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4.7 Seeing illusions

There is a sense in which the book Ecclesiastes is one of the most important pieces of a literature of all time. It is extraordinary that the Hebrews had the courage to include it in their canon of testimony. Although later editors tried to add is some glosses that attempted to make it look orthodox, the stark fact is that Ecclesiastes takes a hard look at the entire Hebraic answer to its crisis and says, "Bullshit!". A load of pious crap.

The core problem that affects all religious life is that there is a fine line between spiritual vision and illusion and we are, all of us, ever crossing the line and converting our religion into a construct of interlocking illusions. The problem is compounded by the fact that religious leadership acts like a magnet to people who seek power over others and they always come to the recognition that the way to have power is through the creation and maintenance of illusion. The ecclesiastical structures of power become totally vested in the maintenance of popular illusion. The papacy in its entirety is an illusion: it has absolutely no substance behind any of its claims to power and authority. The entire focus of the Vatican is upon the maintenance of this illusion. Biblical literalism and the whole vast edifice of evangelical enterprise, all the mega-churches, the huge publishing empires and all the other activities around this: all is entirely based on an illusion and the vast effort that has been poured into evangelical religion is about sustaining the illusion. It is the same in Islam.

The most creative 'seeing’ in religious life at this present moment lies in discerning that all this religious effort is one great exercise in all bullshitting. The shattering of illusions is always painful and when, as will happen, as is happening, the religious delusions of our world come tumbling down, this disorientating experience feels for many like the end of faith.

This is where the Hebrew prophets, particularly Jeremiah, become so important for what they say is that God is the destroyer of every illusion. When our religious illusions come crashing down around us, Jeremiah says to us, "you are in the hands of the living God". To see that is to begin the rebirth of faith.

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