I couldn’t get to last Wednesday’s talk by Archbishop Coleridge due to illness, and the live stream didn’t work so I listened to the audio here, and I’d recommend you do so too if you have the time. I like to keep up with the music that was played but as I wasn’t there I don’t know.
He tried to fit an awful lot in and wasn’t really able to do his subject justice as a result.
He returned to the theme of Biblical story and its aim of theodicy. We have the task of acquiring the eye that sees God’s justice in these stories despite the impression they give, as life does, of being unjust. He went back to the Garden to contrast the Tree of Life, which is merely about immortality that all gods had, to the Tree of Knowledge, which is uniquely a property of God. God always knows everything and our task is to move from our blindness to God’s vision, something that is not achievable in this life, but is to be worked towards.
Biblical story is a means to this by as we “cleanse the doors of perception.” (Blake) He quoted a lot of Blake.
He notes the light and shade in Biblical story, the gaps and silences in which the ambiguity resides. He also notes the irony in the tension between the way the world seems to be and how it really is. The characters in these stories are flawed, damaged people and not heroic in a conventional sense.
He gave a sadly brief example with the story of David and Bathsheba (2 Sam 11) and illustrated the technique of asking questions:
- Why wasn’t David with his army? Was he already aware of Bathsheba?
- Why was she bathing there? Was she aware of David?
- Does Uriah already know what David has been up to? etc
The plan of God unfolds in a tawdry story of adultery, murder and treachery. He didn’t have time to expand on how this particular story is a message of hope or how the death of the innocent child is an example of God’s justice. “The Lord caused the child that Uriah’s wife had borne to become very sick… a week later the child died.” (2 Sam 12: 15,18) Despite his championing the sophistication of biblical stories, which I certainly acknowledge, we also have to acknowledge their world view, mightily strange to moderns and needing to be fed into any interpretation, that clearly sees God in the death of a child rather than infant mortality being a huge problem in the pre-modern world.
He concluded by briefly discussing Law as being gift rather than somehow opposed to grace. In obedience to the Law, we have freedom, we have our own Exodus, moving from the things that keep us enslaved. He notes that in the Torah we see an evolution of the Law as the “counter society of God” grows in its understanding of God through its history.
I’m getting concerned about his oversimplistic contrast of the secular world as being without hope with the liberating world of obedience to God’s Law – there is a bit of a straw man argument going on here, but I suspect he is doing this for effect and would acknowledge the nuances needed in such an argument.
What really concerns me though, is that if he is heading toward the idea that obedience to God’s law is freedom – is the Garden – means God’s law as exemplified by the Church, and if he fails to acknowledge that this has to evolve, as it did for the ancient Israelites, we have a huge problem. Truth is by its nature relativistic and our task is to find God’s truth in our incarnated existence with no guarantee that ancient answers offer more than a hint. That is the point of story being ambiguous as he has noted repeatedly. If the freedom of obedience is nothing more than abdicating our sense of justice then it is just idolatry and another form of slavery.
His next session is more on the Law, so I will be interested to see where he takes this. I am concerned that he is trying to have things both ways, that is that the story is ambiguous but the Law is concrete.