"Called upon or not, God will be there"

Last week I wrote about sitting on the Areopagus and thinking about St Paul's debate there with the Athenians. I want to return to Greece in this blog. A brief week among its classical antiquities is no more than a taster, but I have to admit that like so many other travellers before me, I've fallen under its spell. I ask myself, how can I never have visited the country before? I'm grateful that I've got there before I die.

If you ask me what the highlight was, I have to pause. How do you compare Athens, Olympia, Epidauros, Mycenae and Delphi? They are all magnificent, all utterly absorbing, all providing not just great beauty but so much food for thought. This includes many of their museums where the artistic heritage of these places is presented and interpreted in fascinating and exemplary ways. But for my wife and me, there was something special about Delphi. Let me try to say why.

 

We visited it on a grey, damp windswept day. It was the tail-end of the Mediterranean mini-cyclone Zorba that landed in Greece the same day that we did. As I wrote last time, for us who live by Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland, there's nothing odd about ancient sites in a storm. Indeed, so extraordinary is the site at Delphi on its steep valley-side below Mount Parnassus that the lowering skies only lent it greater dramatic force and sense of place. We stayed the night in the nearby village. It was a new experience to sleep on what felt like a cliff-edge.
 

Delphi was the centre of the Hellenic world, its navel or omphalos. The myth said that Zeus had sent two eagles to fly towards each other from the eastern and western edges of the world. Delphi was where they met. The site was dedicated to Apollo. Here, the prophetess or sibyl Pythia sat on a tripod set above a cleft or "chasm" where vapours emerged out of the ground. Intoxicated by the fumes, she dispensed wisdom to those who consulted her. She was famous for her enigmatic responses. The Lydian king Croesus asked her if he should attack the Persian king Cyrus. The Oracle replied that a great empire would fall if he did. Croesus did not ask which empire, assuming she meant the Persian. Of course it was his own. 

The landscape setting is incomparable. The Via Sacra or pilgrims' way snakes steeply up the hillside through ruins that date back to the sixth, fifth and fourth centuries BCE (the fifth was the "golden age" of Pericles' Athens). Highlights include the Temple of Apollo, treasuries built to house the spoils of battle offered to the gods, the Sibyl Rock where the oracle was said to preside, a theatre and right at the top, a stadium. From these heights you look down to the gymnasium and the famous, much-photographed circular Tholos of Athena. The museum houses a memorable display of sculptures, including the legendary Charioteer in bronze, one of the most famous statues from antiquity. (Hadrian is there too, by the way, the Roman emperor who fell in love with Greece and came to Delphi, an unexpected point of contact - in addition to the weather - with our distant Northumberland homeland and its Roman Wall.) 


But it was not for any of these reasons that we were especially touched by Delphi. For me, it was crystallised by a retired school teacher I was talking to about our Greek trip. She is a reader in her local cathedral. She told me she had taken many school groups to Greece and got them performing scenes from Greek drama (did she also mention Shakespeare?) in the ancient theatres they visited. Delphi was one of them. "Of course, the thing about Delphi" she remarked "is that it's a sacred place. Even after all these centuries, you feel something there, something in the stones that remember how mortals once went there to look beyond themselves, commune with the gods and seek their wisdom". I paraphrase but she put into words what I'd been sensing. When I checked it out with my wife, she said she had experienced it too.

She (my wife) is a psychotherapist with a particular interest in Carl Gustav Jung whose influence on analytic practice has been profound. Above the door of his practice in Kusnacht. Switzerland, he carved an inscription: vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit. "Whether called upon or not, the god will be there." That saying is attributed to the Delphic oracle, said to be the answer the Spartans got when they consulted her about taking up arms against Athens. Jung elevated it into a universal principle about how urgent it is that humanity seeks a deeper wisdom than is attainable through reason alone. He once said that he had not encountered a problem or question in any of his patients that did not turn out to be religious in origin. The divine, always present in human life even when it is unacknowledged, is the source of hagia sophia, the holy wisdom that alone can grant mortals a new vision of our better selves, the potential we are called to realise if we are to become what we are meant to be - in his language, find individuation.

The Christian question is, of course: who is the deus in that saying, this god who is always present in our midst? This was precisely the matter St Paul addressed on the Areopagus when he observed the dedication on one of the altars he had seen, To an unknown god. I wrote about this last time. Christianity gives a name to this deus, says Paul, and tells us that he is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who was crucified and raised from the dead. In him, what is unknown becomes known, the hidden God is disclosed to us. This God invites us to know and to love him and, yes, vocatus atque non vocatus, always find him alive and present among us by the power of Hagia Sophia, his holy and life-giving Spirit.

Delphi bears witness to humanity's long search. It's one more in the long list of places remote from Christian revelation where I've unexpectedly glimpsed "the idea of the holy". In our own parish of Haydon Bridge you can find what is left of a Roman Mithraic temple standing alongside Hadrian's Wall. I quip with the vicar that we are one of very few parishes in rural Northumberland where there is a religious site belonging to another faith community. We shouldn't dismiss the spiritual potency of these places. It's a narrow view of Christianity that limits the ways in which God discloses himself, for there are many names by which he is perceived.

But for us Christians, there is a name that is above every name. Albert Schweitzer wrote at the end of his great book The Quest for the Historical Jesus: "He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, he came to those men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same words, Follow me! and sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey him, whether they be wise or simple, he will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in his fellowship, and as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who he is."

Here is Christianity's answer to Delphi, the fulfilment of all that it reaches out for. Here is where our spiritual yearnings and hungers are met; where all our oracles and dreams are transcended; where we find our God-given selves at last.  

 

Musings on Mars Hill

Last week I stood on Mars Hill in the centre of Athens. Above me, the Acropolis stood proud, its Propylaea, Temple to Athens Nike and Erechtheion glowing in the afternoon sun. Below you could see the Ancient Agora with the Temple of Hephaestus an island of white marble amid a sea of foliage; and on the lower slopes of the Acropolis, the cluster of famous olives that echo the lone olive tree that stands on the rock by the Erechtheion, said to be the gift of the goddess Athene to her city. Far away was the glint of ocean, the “wine-dark sea” Homer called it, but on this luminous afternoon more like a golden frame surrounding a tableau of marble sculptures.

You can’t see the Parthenon itself from Mars Hill, but it is the unseen presence whose power permeates classical Athens. I had not visited it before, and was not prepared for its sheer immensity. It’s by no means the best-preserved of Greek temples, but it is one of the largest, and the one that is most freighted with symbolism. It is the emblem par excellence not only of ancient Greece, indeed of classical civilisation, but also of the modern nation as it emerged in the early nineteenth century from Ottoman rule. 

Last week I saw it twice close-to. On the first occasion, Greece was being deluged by torrents of rain thanks to a rare Mediterranean cyclone. The Acropolis was dark, brooding and windswept, somewhat forbidding, it has to be said, and not a place to linger. I doubt many tourists have seen it in those conditions though when you come from North East England you are perfectly used to visiting antiquities like Hadrian’s Wall in the pouring rain. We went back there at the end of our week in Greece. It was as the picture postcards said it should be. The Parthenon was ravishing and serene. You could understand its hold on the imagination of the romantics who came to Athens as part of the grand tour. And you could appreciate the sentiment that longs to see the Parthenon Marbles, removed by Lord Elgin and now in the British Museum, reinstated in the new Acropolis Museum just below the rock, one of the best museums I’ve ever visited.

But back to Mars Hill, the Areopagus or Hill of the god Ares. He was the god of war, and one thing you learn when you come to Greece is now bellicose classical Athens was. To succeed in warfare was everything. The defining myth of Ancient Greece was the Iliad and the Odyssey. I read some of Homer on my iPad while I was there, and was reminded how readily the blood flows in that great work. You are not spared the details of how good men and bad perish alike in war, thanks to the intervention of the gods who notoriously take sides in their support of either the Greeks or the Trojans in this decade-long conflict. At Delphi we saw a frieze depicting the Trojan War and the part played in it by the capricious deities whom the Greeks worshipped.

I had thought that the Areopagus was a proper hill with a ruined temple or two on top, and an open space for argument and debate. In fact it’s no more than a outcrop of the Acropolis, separated from it by a narrow fault. You clamber up a steep ancient stair cut out of the rock and emerge on an uneven plateau - perilously slippery for the marble has been worn smooth by twenty-five centuries of human footfall. I stumbled around for a few minutes until I decided that the least hazardous way of experiencing this place was to sit down for a while.

Up here climbed St Paul one day some time around 50AD. He was brought here by the Athenians, for Mars Hill was where philosophers had argued and debated since the days of Pericles five centuries before. Perhaps he had come down from visiting the temples of the Acropolis, or up from the Agora; either way, his mind was full of the vivid experiences this first and last visit to the city had given him. Athens has that effect on travellers. And the Athenians, who had learned curiosity from Socrates, wanted to know more about this strange doctrine Paul was propounding that seemed to point to new deities they had never heard of, “Jesus” and “Anastasis” (Resurrection). And of all the novelties the Athenians loved so much, nothing pleased them more than new ideas they could discuss among themselves on the marble Areopagus.

Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by
human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’

Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.

I read these words from Acts 17 on my phone and wondered what Paul thought he was doing, according to St Luke’s account. Some think that this attempt to engage with Greek culture was a one-off experiment that failed. Brilliant rhetorician that he was, quoting poets and philosophers and winning intellectual arguments on the Areopagus was not the way to promote the gospel. From then on, it is suggested, the Apostle resolved not to tangle with Greeks who sought wisdom, any more than with Jews who looked for signs. His sole task was “to know nothing among you except Christ and him crucified”.

Except that his time on Mars Hill, whether it was an hour or a day, was not seen as a failure by St Luke. When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, “We will hear you again about this.” At that point Paul left them. But some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them. A street below the Acropolis is named after Dionysius the Areopagite, said to be the first bishop of Athens. There is a strong memory that Christianity began to take root in the city. After the collapse of Roman civilisation in the fifth century, Christians occupied part of the Parthenon and worshipped there. Movingly, at the foot of the steps up the Areopagus you will see a bronze tablet displaying the Greek text of this story of Paul’s visit.

On this Thursday afternoon, there were not many philosophers to be seen arguing about religion on the Areopagus. But it was still a crowded place animated by lively conversation. There were throngs of tourists taking selfies, of course. But there were also a great many young people, some enjoying lovers’ trysts, others talking among themselves and enjoying the warmth of an autumn afternoon. Everyone had their mobile phones and were sharing photos and social media posts and for all I knew, reading and discussing Acts 17. 

What would Paul do if he came there today? The same as he did on that day nearly two thousand years ago. He would engage with the culture of the day, contemporary wisdoms that clamour to be heard in the market-place of ideas, try to point out how they both cloak and yet give clues to our fascination with unknown gods. He would draw out of anyone prepared to listen how the universal human longing is for truth and reality and meaning in life. “To search for the God who is not far from any of us” - “closer to us than our own souls” says Mother Julian - “so that perhaps we might feel after him and find him”. And yes, speak plainly about Jesus and the resurrection, and about the reckoning we must all face because know it or not, we are all accountable to our Creator. 

These weren’t new insights to me, what we call “contextual theology”. But they took on a new significance as I sat on Mars Hill for a while. Being “missional” is, I think, a more sophisticated task than we sometimes imagine. Especially has this become true in our complex digital age, as Pope Benedict said when he described contemporary media as the Areopagus of our own day. The environment is as slippery as the polished marble on Mars Hill. It’s easy to put a foot wrong.

But it’s heartening that there’s a new energy for faith-sharing today, and that includes the project of helping people with no explicit religious background - worshippers of unknown gods? - make sense of Christianity and discover intelligent religion. If local churches can place themselves in mind and imagination on Mars Hill and ask what it means to bear Christian witness in this place and at this time, there’s every reason to be hopeful for the future of Christianity.

A Day of Wisdom

I've just got back from leading a study day for clergy and readers in Llandaff Diocese where my friend June Osborne is bishop. They had asked me to reflect with them on wisdom literature in the Hebrew Bible with the tasks of leadership, ministry and preaching in the church today especially in mind.

I wrote a book a decade ago on precisely this theme. Wisdom and Ministry (SPCK, 2008) was an elaboration of ordination retreat addresses I'd already given in the Diocese of Durham. My focus on wisdom in relation to public ministry had been prompted a few years earlier when the Church of England draft revised ordination rites were presented to the General Synod. I made a speech about the readings from the Hebrew Bible that were proposed for ordinations. All of them, I recall, were drawn from the Prophets: call-narratives like Isaiah's "Here am I: send me" (Isaiah 6. 1-8), and Jeremiah's "I have put my words in your mouth" (Jeremiah 1.4-12), or passages that affirm the prophet's vocation, like the Isaiah passage quoted by Jesus in St Luke, "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me" (Isaiah 61.1-3).

Now these are all great texts, I told the Synod. But invariably to read passages such as these at ordinations suggested that the role of a Church of England vicar in the contemporary world was like being a Hebrew prophet in antiquity. I said that I seriously doubted that. And despite the importance of being able to speak "prophetically" on occasion, it would be seriously misleading to expect clergy to function as "prophets" all the time. Years ago Bishop John Habgood once spoke about the relentless call on church leaders to "speak prophetically". He said that it's very hard to do when you can see several sides of the same question. I guess that "being prophetic" is all the more effective if we don't attempt it too often.

But Habgood's seeing many sides to the same question is precisely what wisdom is about. So in my Synod speech I offered a model for public ministry that I believed was closer to our contemporary reality. This could be found among the wise of ancient Israel. Here were men and women whose role was to reflect on our human experience, help us find our place in creation, discern God's presence in ordinary life, foster our capacity to "see into the life of things" and find meaning there, explore the joyful and sorrowful mysteries of life such as purpose, destiny, suffering and love, handle the ambiguities and paradoxes of life, and above all to, be led by wisdom into reverencing and loving the God who is "not far from any one of us" as St Paul put it in his sermon at Athens (Acts 17.16-34).

So my ordination addresses were based on wisdom texts that I believed spoke straightforwardly to the privileges and demands of ministry today. Solomon's prayer for wisdom at the outset of his reign, for example (1 Kings 3.3-15), or precepts for living and leading wisely in the first nine chapters of Proverbs, or wisdom-influenced stories of leadership in action like those of Joseph (Genesis 37-50) and David (2 Samuel 9-20, 1 Kings 1-2, the so-called "Court History" or "Succession Narrative"). And I drew on other wisdom writings to suggest how in preaching and pastoral ministry we bear witness to the central issues of human life that are common to our human race: suffering (Job and some of the Psalms), meaning and purpose (Ecclesiastes), love (Song of Songs).

After the Cardiff day, someone tweeted about what I'd tried to share. Not the drama of the edgy + prophetic, or busyness of the big personality charismatic leader, but priest as humble servant of Holy Wisdom. Yes. Which put succinctly what I was on about. I could have spoken at length about the danger, as I see it, of the romantic idea of the minister-as-hero: always energetically engaged in some grand projet (and being remembered for it), fixated by strategic plans, smart objectives and measurable outputs. It plays into the excitable culture which it's easy for the church to emulate (as it already has in some quarters), like Paul's Athenians loving anything that is new and different and that arouses us from our unacknowledged boredom with religion. I caricature of course. I'm all for thinking and planning ambitiously for the sake of the gospel. My concern is how the big, the dramatic and the busy can be better grounded in a proper Christian humility, better rooted in a contemplative, ancient and holy wisdom. I want to ask how we all learn to become, as the good jargon has it, reflective practitioners in the spirit of our great Anglican forebears.

Hebrew wisdom is full of both encouragements and warnings to those who lead. In my session on David, I drew attention to how the story gives us what Robert Alter calls "the most unflinching insight into the cruel processes of history and into human behaviour warped by the pursuit of power. And nowhere is the Bible’s astringent narrative economy, its ability to define characters and etch revelatory dialogue in a few telling strokes, more brilliantly deployed.” It shows “an unblinking and abidingly instructive knowingness about man as a political animal in all his contradictions and venality and all his susceptibility to the brutalisation and the seductions of exercising power.” 

The beauty of the narrative is how it doesn't do the work for you of asking questions about your own leadership style and use (or abuse) of power. At the end of the session I set out the seven "Nolan Standards in Public Life" and invited my audience to lay it over the story of King David as a template by which to calibrate his performance. These are ethical values and virtues that should be required of anyone in a public role - monarchs, political leaders and elected representatives, educators, civil servants, business leaders and, yes, clergy and readers! Here's the list: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and leadership-by-example.

I'm pretty confident that the author of Proverbs or the stories of Joseph and David would endorse that list. So having begun to understand the successes and failures of David's reign, his virtues and his flaws, we as ministers need to apply the same wisdom/Nolan template to our own careers too. This should be one of the tasks of the Church of England's programme of Ministry Development Review (MDR). This isn't about reviewing attainment targets or dwelling on past achievements and future objectives for their own sake. It needs to focus on how to promote development and growth in ministry, how to address precisely the leadership challenges posed in the story of David. I measure that not by success or failure, but by how far our progress as ministers is being informed and motivated by an underlying God-given wisdom.

"Priest as humble servant of Holy Wisdom." In Greek, that is Hagia Sophia, elided by ancient Christian readers of the Hebrew Bible with the Holy Spirit who is the Comforter, Teacher and Advocate. I gave another set of ordination addresses last year on the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus that is sung at all ordinations of priests in the famous seventeenth century version of John Cosin in the Book of Common Prayer: Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire. You can read that as a prayer to, and for, Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom. What better hymn to sing, what better prayer to offer as we serve God in this sacred vocation of bearing witness to grace and truth in the name of the church?

The Bible and the European Union

I've been challenged to outline how I would defend Britain's membership of the European Union from a biblical viewpoint.

The first thing to say is that you can't read a modern institution like the EU out of the pages of scripture. So it's futile simply to quote texts as if to say, argument won. (I also doubt whether you can argue for the modern nation state like that either, but maybe that's another story.) It's a case of tracing the direction in which the Bible leads our thinking and our prayer. So while I don't at all believe that the EU is a sign of the kingdom of God, Jesus' teaching about the kingdom will certainly have something to say about how we order our lives, not only as individuals but as communities, societies and peoples. 

Where to begin? Let me go first to the very foundations of Jewish faith that Christians all affirm. When Jesus is asked in the gospels which commandment is the greatest, his answer is to quote the Jewish Torah. The first is to love God with all our heart. The second is to love our neighbour as ourselves (Matthew 22: 37-40). It's this love of neighbour that seems to me to lie at the heart of the founding vision of the EU. It's a family of peoples who are pledged to seek one another's welfare and pursue the common good. We must remember that the love command in the Torah especially emphasises the poor, the needy and the marginalised (Leviticus 19.18). To me, any human association that follows these ideals deserves to be supported. It's the exact opposite of the kind of rhetoric we hear in the noise of the current EU referendum debate: "think what's best for the UK, what's best for you!" The kingdom of God requires us to be outward-facing, generous, inclusive and compassionate. That's why I believe that despite its flaws, the EU is still a great institution.

Following the noble idea that peoples should be pledged to seek one another's welfare, I turn to another fundamental biblical concept, that of the covenant. We've heard a lot in recent days about treaties and whether or not they are legally binding. That partly misses the biblical insight that covenanted relationships belong to the very heart of human life. Marriage, business contracts, articles of association are all covenantal in character. But what makes them work is that they are based on promise and trust. When God makes a covenant with Israel (Exodus 19-24), he promises that they will be his people and he their God. Christian faith takes the new covenant in Jeremiah and applies it to the relationship Jesus has with his church, his body. In turn, he commands, the members of his body are to "love one another, as I have loved you" (John 15.12). In the Upper Room in St John, that new covenant relationship is expressed in mutual service symbolised by the washing of feet. His vision of a "society of friends" takes us straight back to loving our neighbour. As a formal, treaty-based association of nations joined together in covenant, the EU, like the federation we call the United Kingdom, is precisely an instance of living together in friendship and mutual service. You might even call it love.

Let's pursue this further in the New Testament. There, the church is portrayed as a "household of faith" that is at one in its witness to the grace of God and its common life. The work of Christ has been to "create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace" (Ephesians 2.15). Of this new humanity, the church is called to be a foretaste and sign. All my instincts tell me that it is always better to follow the path that brings human beings together and reconciles them rather than fragments and divides. For in this "single new humanity", St Paul famously says, "there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). I know he is speaking of the church here. But if the church is a symbol of what will one day become true of the whole human family, how can we not see this covenanted, collaborative vision as worth pursuing in our ordinary human life as well as in the church? It is never good for a man or a woman to be alone, says Genesis. But that's what lies behind the emotional appeal of Brexit just as it lay behind the idea of an independent Scotland. It's why I want to stand up for both unions, the UK and the EU, as beneficent human structures of reconciliation, friendship and human flourishing, ideas that are so big in the New Testament as I've tried to show. 

These are simply some thoughts to start with. You'll see how I'm trying to argue this on the basis of an intelligent and holistic reading of scripture. What we need to do is to discern the broad streams of Torah instruction, prophetic utterance, wisdom insight, gospel proclamation and apostolic reflection that have shaped our faith. At their heart, the Hebrew and Christian scriptures testify to God's everlasting love for the human race, and the obedient response of faith that looks to order human life for the good of all. I see the Bible pointing unambiguously towards life together, rather than life apart. The EU is an instance of this. It does not carry any divine mandate, and it is far from perfect. But it exists because good people, largely inspired by a Christian vision of the world, wanted to galvanise the peoples of Europe to work together in pursuit of values that are so prominent in the Bible: reconciliation, peace, freedom, social justice, solidarity with the poor and needy, and seeking the common good. To this we must today add our care of the environment. We can't make as big a difference to these things on our own. Together, so much is possible.

I believe this was the biblical case for the UK to join the EU in the first place. To me, it still stands. It's only a start. So I'll no doubt have more to say on this in the coming months....