Like a tragedy, it stirs up pity and terror in us. Like a tragedy it requires us to contemplate the world’s darkness. Like a tragedy, it draws attention to waste. It shows us a life that need not have been extinguished being extinguished, without particular malice, by the normal processes of the world. It shows us that accident, injustice, spoilage, are all standard, all in the pitiably usual course of things. Here it’s important that Jesus’s death was an obscure one, when it happened. He’s not an Oedipus or a Prince Hamlet, someone falling from greatness. His death belongs beside the early cutting-short of the millions of lives of people too poor or too unimportant ever to have been recorded in the misleading story we call history; people only mourned by others as brief as themselves, and therefore gone from human memory as if they had never been. Jesus dies like a migrant worker who suffocates in a freight container, like a garbage-picker caught in a slide, like a child with an infected finger, like a beggar the bus reverses over. Or, of course, like all the other slaves ever punished by crucifixion, a fate so low, said Cicero, that no well-bred person should ever even mention it. Christians believe that Jesus’s death is, among other things, a way for God to mention it, loudly and with no good breeding at all, a declaration by the maker of the world, in pain and solidarity, that to Him the measure of the waste of history is not the occasional tragedies of kings but the routine losses of every day. It is not an accident that Christianity began as a religion ‘for slaves and women’.* It is not an accident that, wherever it travels, it appeals first to untouchables. The last shall be first and the first shall be last, said Jesus. You’d have to turn the world upside down to do justice to God’s sense of the tragedy of it.
* Nietzsche. He thinks this is a criticism. It’s a compliment.
And when the story does turn the world upside down, or the order of nature anyway, by telling us that Jesus lives again, it isn’t suggesting that he didn’t really die, or that we won’t really die. The happy ending makes a promise sized to the utmost extent of our darkest convictions. It says ‘Yes, and . . .’ to tragedy. It promises, bizarrely enough, that love is stronger than death. But it does not promise that death is imaginary, that death is avoidable, that death is temporary. To have death, this once, be reversed is to let us feel the depth of our ordinary loss in it, not to pretend it away. Some people ask nowadays what kind of a religion it is that chooses an instrument of torture for its symbol, as if the cross on churches must represent some kind of endorsement. The answer is: one that takes the existence of suffering seriously.
And this is why I feel comfortably orthodox in choosing to tell the story without any of the emphasis you may have been expecting on promises of eternal life. Like all good stories, it can’t just be understood one way. It creates a repertoire of possible understandings, and right from the beginning these understandings have ranged across several things Jesus could have meant when he said he came to bring ‘life in abundance’, life without limits. There are many ways life can be limited, and only one of them has to do with duration. You can take the story as meaning that if you believe in Jesus you’ll live for ever with him in heaven. Many Christians have and many Christians do. You can; but you don’t have to. You can also believe that Jesus’s death and resurrection ‘redeem’* us right now, in our lives, by acting to free us from our pasts; from the weight, the confinement, the limits, of the HPtFtU. And this too is orthodoxy, this too is part of the ordinary core of the religion rather than its avant-garde fringe. It’s what makes sense to me. I’m a very this-worldly Christian. I am averagely afraid of dying, but I don’t believe because I expect, or want, to have an unlimited future, tweedling about with a harp while the stars of the Western Spiral Arm burn out one by one. I believe because I know I’ve got a past and a present in which the HPtFtU did and does its usual work, and I want a way of living which opens out more widely and honestly and lovingly than I can manage for myself, which widens rather than narrowing with each destructive decision. Like the Christian Aid slogan says, I believe in life before death. For me and for everyone else. I don’t care about heaven. I want, I need, the promise of mending.
* A word meaning ‘to buy out of slavery’. But putting issues of etymology aside, this is the last footnote of the chapter, and therefore the last chance to address the question some of you may feel should have been its main attraction. Viz., is the damn story true? Not what its history is, or what literary category it belongs in; whether it actually happened. Well, I don’t know. I think it did, miracles, resurrection and all. But I don’t know. And you will have to judge for yourself, too, because although Christianity makes a historical claim, and therefore in principle is falsifiable in the way that a purely philosophical belief in God’s existence isn’t, in practice it’s highly unlikely that an archaeological discovery or a lost document is going to come along and cause the religion to implode suddenly. That’s Dan Brown territory. One move, please note, is not available to you – at least you can’t make it and expect it to be decisive. You can’t just say, this story contains physical impossibilities (miracles, resurrection from the dead) and thus a priori must be counted among the impossible things a rational person shouldn’t believe before breakfast. That is to assume the untruth of the story’s own contention that there is a maker of nature who, this once, was able to alter nature’s normal operations. In other words, the argument from impossibility depends on a faith position adopted beforehand, which rather reduces its logical grip on the world. So despite it being a historical question we’re trying to settle here rather than a philosophical one, we’re back on undecidable ground. You can base your judgement on your sense of probabilities, certainly. Induction holds even if deduction doesn’t. But also, maybe, you should judge whether you feel the story tells you anything urgent or important.
Mended is not the same thing as never broken. We are not being promised that it will be as if the bad stuff never happened. It’s amnesty that’s being offered, not amnesia; hope, not pretence. The story of your life will still be the story of your life, permanently. It will still have the kinks and twists and corners you gave it. The consequences of your actions, for you and for other people, will roll inexorably on. God can’t take these away, or your life would not be your life, you would not be you, the world would not be the world. He can only take from us – take over for us – the guilt and the fear, so that we can start again free, in hope. So that we are freed to try again and fail again, better. He can only overwhelm the HPtFtU with grace.
Which we can now define. Grace is forgiveness we can’t earn. Grace is the weeping father on the road. Grace is tragedy accepted with open arms, and somehow turned to good. Grace is what the wasteful death on Skull Hill did.
7
The International League of the Guilty, Part Two
A message of universal forgiveness? What could possibly go wrong?
A version of Christian history assembles itself very readily these days which jumps off from famous Christian-committed iniquities of the present, like clerical child abuse, and works backward in time finding counterpart outrages all the way to the point, two thousand years ago, when the memory of Jesus was first organised into the thing called ‘the church’. Outrages and miseries; and nothing significant but outrages and miseries. This version of the Christian centuries is filled exclusively with conquistadors and crusaders, inquisitors and witch-finders, with bigotry and burnings and fear preached from the pulpit, with libraries on fire and science suppressed, with vicious battle between armies supposedly committed to brotherly love. If you believe that this record of hate is the whole truth about what happens when Christianity exists as an organised presence in human society, then it is going to be very hard to see why anyone would sign up to it with reasonably good intentions. And it’s going to be just about inexplicable that, given all the bad stuff, Christians nevertheless believe that our church is something precious. Unless, of course, we secretly approve of the bad stuff. Unless in our heart of hearts we’re actually in favour of ma
ssacre and prejudice and exclusion.
Well, we aren’t; or, more accurately, we aren’t specially. We’re only as darkly susceptible to that stuff as everyone else is. But here I both do and don’t want to argue with the current caricature of Christian history. It’s only untrue in being partial. I could certainly insist on the reality of the good stuff in the religion’s record, which is often harder to see, having succeeded and thus faded indistinguishably into the background of our common sense. I could talk, for instance, about the invention of kindness as an ideal of behaviour to rival honour or dominance or stoicism. It may seem obvious to you now that you should be decent and polite to people you can get no use out of, but it wasn’t always. Or I could bring up the way that the emphasis on people being loveable to God irrespective of what they deserve laid the groundwork for the idea of there being rights owed to people irrespective of their status, their behaviour, their capabilities. Or I could point to the slow, fitful, never wholehearted Christian campaign against slavery, which gradually, with massive backsliding and vast swathes of avoidable misery, expanded the prohibition on people owning people until now it is just about complete.* These are things to be proud of. But the bad stuff was, and is, real too. And deep down it doesn’t really help to draw attention to the existence of a credit side as well as a debit side in the moral ledger of the religion. If Christianity is anything, it’s a refusal to see human behaviour as ruled by the balance sheet. We’re not supposed to see the things we do as adding up into piles of good and evil we can subtract from each according to some kind of calculus to tell us how, on balance, we’re doing. Experience is not convertible. Cruelty cannot be cancelled by equal and opposite amounts of being nice. The weight of sorrow is not lightened by happiness elsewhere. The bad stuff cannot be averaged. It can only be confessed.
* The starting-point was a prohibition on Christians owning other Christians, which by 1400 or thereabouts made Europe the only continent without significant slave labour – just in time for the discovery of the New World, and the massive profits to be made from slavery there, to tempt European Christians into becoming owners of Africans on the grand scale, and for the whole institution to have to be laboriously extirpated all over again over the next five centuries. Yes, I really do get that it was Christians who committed the crime of the Atlantic trade, and for centuries found theological justifications for it. Yes, I really do see that the idea of a partial ban on owning some people is exclusive, vile and inadequate. But that was the circle that eventually widened till the ban became universal; and it was within Christian theology that the reasons for widening the circle were found. Only the Christian world was wicked enough to practise slavery in its bulk, industrialised, plantation-labour form, but once Christians decided against it, it was largely in imitation that the rest of the world started to reject it in its domestic, small-scale form. Slavery was abolished in Saudi Arabia, for example, in 1962.
On one level it is utterly unsurprising that Christian history is shot through with miseries, like a bloodstained roll of fabric. Christian history is, because all history is. It’s the HPtFtU at work. Of course it’s the HPtFtU. Christianity can shape human behaviour; it can influence it, put a new frame around it, sometimes temper or channel or redirect it. It has the power that culture has, that imagination has, which is not a negligible power, for what people are is sculptable as well as scripted, we’re creatures of chance and circumstance (and grace) as well as of our biology. But it can’t abolish human behaviour. It can’t eliminate human destructiveness. Accordingly, it hasn’t. The first and most decisive feature of Christian history is that it has been composed at every stage of the actions of people. And people are subject to the HPtFtU. We don’t stop being subject to it when we’re Christians. People lie, cheat, extort, tyrannise, torture and kill. Christian people also lie, cheat, extort, tyrannise, torture and kill. People, given an institution to play with, turn it into a pecking order, a tool for personal power, an arena for politicking, an opportunity for spite, a capturable reservoir of rent and loot. So do Christian people. People fight wars. So do Christian people. People fight them for profit and territory, for the sake of abstract ideas, because they hate their neighbours; and so do Christian people.
When I see one of those passionate denunciations of religion which treats Christianity as the great gratuitous cause of all our sorrows, I mainly think: read more history, mate. Look at the vast record of conflict generated in every society that ever signed up for the opportunities and the costs of being more organised than hunter-gatherers. The logic of the complaint seems to be that because Christians believe in unreal things, the bad stuff Christians are involved in is unnecessary, and would stop if the unreal beliefs were taken away. Without pernicious Christianity we’d all be grouped round the white piano with John and Yoko. Yeah, right. The patterns of human bad behaviour are far wider and more ancient. I won’t, myself, be convinced that the bloody wars Christians have fought over points of theology are uniquely the fault of the religion rather than of the species in general, unless someone can point out to me a non-Christian area of the planet, with reasonable population density and enough wealth to underwrite weapons production, where they don’t invest their spare time in butchery for the ostensible sake of ideas. If not ideas about religion, then points of economic theory, or doctrines apparently supported by science. There hasn’t quite been a war about evolutionary biology yet, but the brew of bad ideas in Nazism certainly drew on turn-of-the-twentieth-century speculations about racial difference which people at the time thought were Darwinian. Saviours, prophets, sages, poets, biologists, fashionable madmen, the voices of long-dead economists in the air: they all come in handy when we pink/sallow/brown/black monkeys need an alibi for cutting each other’s throats.
But, but, but. Just invoking the HPtFtU is too easy. It may be true that without Christianity there would be other cruelties in the place of the Christian-committed ones, the inexhaustible fertility of the HPtFtU churning them out in endless forms most ugly: but the specific Christian cruelties are the ones we’ve actually got. And beyond the category of shit that happens because people are just, fairly reliably, shitty, there are crimes and sorrows in human history that would not exist at all without Christianity. There are ills that would not be there without the specific Christian framing of human behaviour, without the presence of our specific story in human imagination. People who see Christianity as empowering horrors aren’t generally just talking about the religion’s failure to stop suffering, or about the lamentable gulf between what Christians say and what we do. They’re talking about forms of suffering Christianity actually causes.
By now Christian history is very long and very diverse. After two thousand years, Christianity has existed in just about every conceivable human context. It has been the religion of dizzily plural societies and of stark human monocultures, of angry empires and of peaceful republics, of wealth and of poverty, of the desert and of the metropolis, of collectivism and individualism, of civilisations on the rise and at their peak and in decline and reduced to ruins and turned to bumps in the ground only an aerial photograph can find. It has been the religion of peasants who have seen no change in the world since their great-grandparents’ time, and of nimble businessmen in skyscraper cities that didn’t exist the year before. It has been quick and slow, crude and subtle, coercive and co-operative. It expresses different parts of its repertoire of possibilities in the different human niches where it has flourished: and also, it grows new pieces in each of the places it finds itself. It has been incredibly adaptable. When I talk about ‘the church’ here, I don’t mean any one organisation, I mean absolutely all of the congregations that descend from the group of Jesus’s friends. The Pope’s influential outfit in Rome, Brazilian storefront Pentecostalists dancing the samba, the Copts in Egypt, the Serbian Orthodox Patriarchate, Korean Presbyterians, the students of the Oral Roberts University: we’re all the church of Christ. We’re all, collectively, the ecclesia, ‘the gatheri
ng together’.
Yet across all the variants, some things go wrong persistently. There’s a set of failures which repeat, a group of malignant possibilities which come round again and again in different forms because they are failures generated close in to the unvarying core of the religion. They’re Christianity’s intimate disasters. They’re the result of our HPtFtU acting on the story itself – or at least, on the way we understand the story, and what should follow from it. I can see four main areas of disaster.
Let’s start with the worst. We are supposed to take the story of Jesus’s death as God’s spanner in the works of pain; an interruption by God to the cycle of human violence. But it is possible to treat it as an excuse for more pain, more violence. It all depends on whether we are willing to understand that the actors in the story, the people on the street and the soldiers, the Chief Priest and the governor, are just the front row of a crowd that also contains us. If we let ourselves see that the story is the story of everyone’s culpability (and consequently of everyone’s redemption) then we’ll know that the inhabitants of Jerusalem in AD 33 who happen to be up at the front of the human crowd are not behaving in some exceptionally wicked way, they’re just behaving like people. But this is hard. It’s hard to accept your own destructiveness at the best of times, and the story raises the stakes to a dreadful level, offering us a bleeding image, written on a human body, of what it means for us and the world to go on as we usually do. The story asks us to abandon self-righteousness, there being the grimmest irony imaginable in it being the powers-that-be of the existing religion of the God of everything who co-operate unknowingly with the Romans to get God Himself killed. That’s as difficult and uncomfortable as it always is, even if what lies beyond the difficulty is the ease of being fallible, and being forgiven. Watching Jesus stumble to Skull Hill requires work, requires sorrow, requires us not to look away from the spectacle of our world and ourselves. It’s a lot easier for us than for him, but the nearest there comes to being a price for the utterly priceless, unpriced present God is trying to give us is that we need to be able to go on looking at the means by which He gives the gift. It’s horrible: and all the while there is an easier option. We can stop seeing it as a story about all suffering and all guilt – a story of crucifixion which is dreadful because crucifixion is dreadful – and make it a story about a special shiny person, whose side we’re all on as we listen, being abused by especially evil persons. Then what’s wrong in the story is no longer that Jesus is being crucified, it’s that Jesus is being crucified, lovely innocent Jesus. And, comfortably directed outwards, pity turns to anger, and anger turns to hate.
Unapologetic Page 14