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My own eirenic and ecumenical leanings are tempered, always, by one thing – the knowledge that there is only one way to salvation – through Our Lord Jesus Christ and belief in Him. We have discussed here, many times, how that might map on to confessional allegiance, and whilst there will be some who will say that if you are not of x denomination/church then you are damned to hell, it is not a view I share. God makes these decisions, but as Geoffrey’s interesting pieces (and as I have just formatted tomorrow’s one for him, I can tell you it is a treat) on salvation show, belief in Christ as the sole means of salvation is common to us all.
This came to the fore in my mind because I attended a meeting in the lunch hour at work where we had an ‘interfaith practitioner’ visit the chaplaincy to tell us all about the work he does. He was, he told us, once an Anglican priest, but has now, in his own words, ‘passed beyond that’ to a ‘recognition’ of the ‘oneness’ of ‘all believers’. Whether ‘Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed or Wotan, or the Hindu pantheon, they are all manifestations of our desire to be one with Mother Nature and all creation’. We were all, ‘Brother Ben’ told us, bound in obedience ‘only to the voice of our own conscience, which is the voice of god within.’ He quoted liberally from Scripture, but also from the Koran, Buddha and other ‘ holy writs’. In the q&a after, someone asked him how he would describe himself, and smiling broadly he told us: ‘a human being who sees the Tau in Christ and the Buddha in Wotan and Gaia.’
I am afraid that I wanted to be rather ill, and rather violently so at that moment.
The friend who had invited me asked me what I thought, and although I am usually a dreadful coward and say something which is non-committal, I had to say something of what I felt. I told Wendy that it seemed to me that ‘Brother Ben’ was like a man in a restaurant who decides to concoct his own version of a nourishing meal and ends up with everything from the dessert course; even that didn’t quite get what I really felt, but it seemed better to leave it there as Wendy is not a Christian ‘but is spiritual’.
There was, with him, a desire to concoct something which had in it a bit of everything. At one level it seemed very ‘open’, but I suspect that at another it was actually quite controlling in that if one did not accept his concoction he seemed to get quite cross. One student asked whether there was not a ‘truth’ for which we should be looking, and ‘Brother Ben’ was not too happy with that: ‘there are many truths, and we should never let anyone tell us otherwise.’ Strip away the liberal tone and that is quite authoritarian; why should one not let others persuade one otherwise.
For some reason I did not get, he was dressed in a religious habit, but like his beliefs, it was syncretistic – there was a Jewish scarf, a rainbow stole and a cross. Was this simply confusion? I told Wendy I thought not, it seemed to be a deliberate attempt to find a lowest common denominator – when one ought to find the highest common factor – Christ.
Since we believe that Christ is truth itself, I suppose ‘brother Ben’ to believe there are a myriad of Christ’s roaming about. What is the point of any faith if everyone and every idea is true – though they contradict one another?
Quite so, dear friend.
I’m OK, you’re OK and so is everybody else. God is totally in the beholder I guess and it sounds suspiciously like paganism rearing it’s ugly head once again.
It seemed to me to be some sort of pantheism – god in all of us, all of us are god sort of stuff. Naturally it went down well with the students. When I told C about it he huffed and said ‘you shouldn’t waste your lunch time like that’.
As ever, he had a point
x
Indeed C had a great point. Many more of those and you might not be able to hold down your lunch.
I did actually genuinely feel quite sick.
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I’ve been subjected to this rubbish many times and walked out more times than I can recount – biting my tongue the entire way.
I can understand that
xx
I will send you an email about this, but have to ask whether the fellow was from oop North somewhere. I’ve a reason for asking which I shall share with you privately.
I have just responded, Geoffrey.
Typical, unfortunately. The more open and liberal the position the more circumscribed as well. I can do a reasonable job of comparing Thor to Zeus but Wotan to Christ is far to much of a stretch, and silly to boot.. Sorry you wasted your lunch hour on this drivel.
C was, as ever, quite right. It was a bit of an eye opener though
Sort of remind me of some of our so-called megachurches, only more so.
I am obviously lucky to have avoided it so far.
x
As am I
x
When I have been to these things, we always were served chicken. Which reminds me of what the ‘Tyrannosaurus Rex’ said when it bit into a Brontosaurus, ”Tastes like Chicken”
On the farm my rooster would have looked at the Tyrannosaurus wandering into its territory once and then done him twice.
That might have been the best line here
“Brother Ben” (evidently a sockpuppet name) seems to have misinterpreted all religions simultaneously, except perhaps for some form of Buddhism. Certainly, whatever Christ’s message was, it was not “our desire to be one with Mother Nature and all creation”. Nor Mohammed’s, even less so. When he starts bringing in Wotan he is just being silly.
My theory is that it was Eccles playing a joke on you.
I am sure darling eccles would have been more fun – and made more sense. I did wonder whether he was ‘for real’ but I am assured that he was. Now if it had been 1 April, I would have understood
x
This too is a matter of authority and being rooted in something beyond your own opinions beliefs. People are now schooled in that they are the final judge what is God, not God.
Dr. Kissinger one said, ”If I wanted to speak to Europe who shall I call”.
If I wanted to talk to Christianity about abortion, birth control, same-sex marriage, women priests, gay bishops, the rapture, the Eucharist, the prosperity gospel, the dead, the saints, miracles, the resurrection of christ in his body, the virgin birth, the holy spirit, the whore, christian science, the LDS, the tribulation, the LXX or the Hebrew canon of 90AD, the center of Christianity is luther, calvin, the orthodux, the romans, the 1st church of the believers est Jan 1, 2013 ?,…..Who should I call?
This man has make God into his image, because he is the center and there are too many voices saying ‘No, I am the center’, so he chose.
Bosco chose,
Some forms of Christianity are a branch that looks healthy, but has been separated from the roots too long and is dying internally from starvation and in its dying it has become insane. Because it believes all things are true.
So tell me who shall I call?
This attempt to combine all religions simply insults every single one of them.
I agree. It is an act of colossal egotism.
I came on board when you posted ‘Unity’. There must be points of unity for us to agree too, we as the gentleman you talked are like individual icefloes, each splintering and drifting further apart until we are lost in an endless sea.
There is a time to be born and a time to die. Is that the history of Christendom?
We need to find points of agreement and very soon or the separation will be too great for any unity. In any facet of life there are tipping points, are we at one now? There are things I will not give up for unity and there are others who will not give up the things I can not accept. So how do we join in unity. This gentleman is the norm not the strange and different. Christendom is the history of Europe, how do we make the future? Christendom is a act of faith. Any ideas?
A good question, Tom, and one of the reasons why real ecumenism matters.
Ah, the new paganism. At the risk of sounding cynical, I think its attraction is much the same as radical chic in the 1960s and 1970s. It is trendy, and you are spared the tedium of having to think about what you believe in. It also brings a little bit of excitement into our daily round.
I am a morris dancer as well as an agnostic (I am not sure which pursuit readers of this blog will find more distressing), and I vividly remember an occasion several years ago when my local side, the Brackley Morris Men, had finished dancing and was relaxing in the local hostelry with a few beers. We started singing folksongs and playing tunes, and at this point were joined by two very pleasant young pagan ladies. When their turn came round we asked them if they wanted to sing a song, and they sang a catchy little number about the Earth Mother, whom they identified with the goddesses Isis, Aphrodite, Tanith, Ashtaroth and Ishtar. There were several others too (Cybele? Diana?), but those are the ones I happen to remember, because their names featured in the song’s chorus. My interest was piqued, of course, and I had a long conversation with them. It turned out that they both worked as clerks in Northamptonshire County Council and were bored to tears by their jobs. Paganism gave them a certain frisson that boring old Christianity could not.
Neither of them was able to explain precisely what it was that they believed in, and I came away from the evening with a profound admiration for the lucid theology of the Thirty-Nine Articles. Whatever else Christianity might be, it is not a religion for airheads.
interesting, David. I wonder what they actually knew about ‘boring old Christianity’?
As someone who attended the Morris dancing at Thaxted a few years ago, I can report that there, at least, it fits in with the Church.
It does indeed, and the connection goes back at least as far as the 1930s, when Joseph Needham (the author of ‘Science and Civilization in China’ and a keen morris dancer himself) used to hobnob with the so-called ‘Red Vicar’ of Thaxted. I remember attending a service in the local church during a morris weekend at Thaxted in 1976, at which all the morris sides present were solemnly blessed by the vicar. The staffs of office which signified our membership of the Morris Ring were laid up during the service, rather like the tattered standards of an English county regiment. It was a slightly absurd occasion, but so splendidly English. Foreigners will never understand us.
My maternal grandfather knew Conrad Noel, the said ‘Red Vicar’. A very English phenomenon – an ardent Communist for a curate, himself very much a man of the Left, but very proud of his connections with the earl of Gainsborough – unintelligible to the rest of the world. He, my grandfather, was a keen Morris man, something which caused utter bemusement to my German relatives!
If you have the time and inclination, I recommend watching Ian Hislop’s History of the Church of England. A pleasant documentary to while away the hours. It’s on YouTube – part two here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK-BpWN7MOc
For some reason I cannot find part one, but the other parts are able to be found.
It talks of Thaxted and Conrad Noel.
Thank you so much – I shall
xx
County regiments, parish churches, morris dancing. Oh, what a joy it is to be English.
As Cecil Rhodes so agreeably put it, to be born an Englishman is to win first prize in the lottery of life.
I’ve always fancied reading this novel, but never got around to it. A splendid title:
God Is an Englishman