Finding it Real Tracing the Roots Of Faith Jim Purves © Jim Purves 2020 All Scriptural quotations within the text are taken from: THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. Table of Contents Page Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The slippery slope 3 Chapter 2 Lost in Translation 15 Chapter 3 What did you say Your name was ? 24 Chapter 4 Sliding down the Slippery slope 35 Chapter 5 The non-sense of Idealism 48 Chapter 6 Making sense 59 Chapter 7 Bringing sense 72 Chapter 8 Keeping in touch 84 Summary 92 Endnotes 94 . Introduction This book, second in a series of three, attempts to drive a tunnel through what has proven to be, for many, an insurmountable mountain. On one side, the vital life of convinced, experiential Christianity. On the other side, the arena of theology. It is written for the man or woman who wants to be stimulated into making sense of what it means to have a vital relationship with the One God who meets us and reveals Himself to us in Jesus Christ. Mountains separate different environments. In this book we trace how ways of doing theology moved away from speaking about realities we meet with and experience, confirmed by our senses, towards a philosophical study of ideas. At the same time it also traces a counter-movement, which looked to reaffirm the place of sense and experience in our relationship with God. We begin by looking at patterns of thought that arose in the Early Church, tracing them through the Reformation. We examine some examples in Scottish theology, indicative of similar patterns that could be traced in other parts of the World. We look at the work of some writers who illustrate this tension 1 between a philosophically abstracted understanding of faith and a more experiential faith, rooted in our senses. Are you persuaded that the message of the Christian Gospel is the most important, relevant and helpful message that can be shared with your family, friends, colleagues and clients? No? Then read on, and let’s see if we can change that. I’m telling the story from where I’m standing, and really believe this story can help you see how Jesus Christ can make a difference to your story. There is no greater voyage of discovery than finding out about God made known in Jesus Christ. By meeting with God as He truly is we can discover who God has designed us to be, what we are to do and how we are to do it. This book is a companion volume to Seeing it Real and Making it Real, available from Amazon both in Kindle and paperback versions. 2 Chapter 1 The slippery slope The God of sensible experience is the One God who embraces us, reaching out towards us. In this reaching out, we meet Him in His movement towards us: from God our Father, through His Son come to us in Jesus Christ, and by the Holy Spirit infilling and poured out upon our lives. This is what the early Christians meant when they started to speak of God as Trinity: God as three. They weren’t saying that 1+1+1=3. They were not trying to make out that God was anything other than One God. Rather, they were saying that 1x1x1=1! That God dynamically relates towards us, touching us as sunlight that is generated by the Sun, made visible in the colours and contours of a stained glass window, felt by us as its rays warm our bodies and touches us with light. It’s all one light: from source through to reaching us. Like the water that comes from a deep spring, busting onto the hillside and tumbling down the mountain is one water. Yet we can recognise it as rising up from hidden subterranean caverns, bursting into the world on a hillside and enjoyed by us in the deep draughts we drink from the water that is the 3 stream. For nearly 300 years, this was how Christians learned to think and talk about God. The trouble was, it wasn’t the way people normally thought about religious things. Not then, not now. In a world where what God wants is rarely what people want, it can suit us to think of God as distant and aloof. A God who is standing outside our front door, knocking and wanting to come in, can be a bit too close! The way that Christians started to lose sight of the sensible God, God met with in our senses, began slowly. It was very subtle. It was a slow build up, coming to a head in the 4th century. It was caused in a natural and understandable way. Christianity had to find expression within the culture and context of the sprawling Roman Empire. Here there were very strong and powerful political and philosophical forces. These forces had enormous influence on ways that Christians would come to express their relationship with and describe their experience of God. We need to look at both of them. 4 Politics That politics not only effects the development but also shapes the presentation of the Gospel is accepted and embraced in the Biblical accounts. In the Old Testament we find God appointing the people of Israel as an instrument in order to demonstrate His compassion and mercy. He designates them a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.1 Out of them a special leader, the Messiah, would come. He would be God's light to the nations.2 In the New Testament we see a Roman provincial governor, Pontius Pilate, ordering Jesus to be crucified.3 The first widespread dissemination of the Christian message arose when Christians were persecuted by the Jewish governing authorities.4 Throughout the Scriptures we see the importance of political events both in developing and shaping Christianity. Indeed, it is politics that propels Christianity from being a local, Jewish sect centred in Jerusalem into a world faith. The continuing influence of political factors during the early Christian centuries was 1 Exodus 19.6 2 Isaiah 49.6 3 John 19.16 4 Acts 8.1 5 expressed primarily through the influence of Imperial Rome. The Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, whose mother had become a Christian, was responsible for the edict of Milan in 313AD. This imperial ruling led to both political toleration and active support for Christianity by the State, leading to involvement in the growing church by the powers of State. As one contemporary theologian puts it, this changed the Christian faith from being `a religion of radical nonconformity'1 into becoming the accepted religion of society and Empire. Moreover, such active collaboration set the stage for convening the great councils of the church under imperial direction, where important Christian doctrines for the future of Christianity would be set out. The first great, ecumenical council of the church, at Nicea in 325AD, was called together by the Emperor Constantine. The Emperor Diocletian had divided the Empire into Western and Eastern spheres of influence. Constantine reunited the two halves once again. But a year before the Council, Constantine had selected the Eastern Mediterranean city of Byzantium as his imperial capital, replacing ancient Rome as capital of the Empire. The power of Rome was checked. 6 The Council of Nicea gave the bishop of Alexandria, in Egypt, priority in the Eastern part of the Empire, reinforcing a political divide that would lead to the development of an eastern church with not one but a number of separate centres of ecclesiastical influence, including both the renamed Byzantium (Constantinople) and Alexandria. At the same time, the decision to move imperial power to the eastern part of the empire had the effect of reinforcing the religious authority of Rome in the West. The ensuing, separate development of spheres of political influence in the two halves of Empire, reinforced by the language differences of Latin in the West and Greek in the East, served to carve out two separate paths and expressions of Christian faith that the churches of the West and East would follow. By the time we come to the end of the 4th century, persecution and trial within and without the church had led to the consolidation of a Rome-centred church in the Latin West. Cyprian of Carthage's dictum, `no salvation outside the church', would easily evolve into a `no salvation outwith Roman religious authority' or western, Rome-centred Christianity. Likewise, the Latin theologian Tertullian's notion of `original sin' would be picked up and 7