“Art thou the troubler
of Israel”
How wonderfully
and prophetically do our lessons speak to the religious confusions and
conflicts of our world and day!
Religion is, to
be sure, a great inconvenience and often greatly resented. How much more so
in a culture which prizes convenience and comfort above all else? Hostility
against religion is not new, but it is certainly a feature of our times. And
no doubt, it will only get worse. You only have to contemplate the turmoil
in the Middle East and the exasperation in the United Nations and throughout
the Western democracies with the state of Israel, an exasperation which
borders, at times, on anti-semitism, to see hostility against
religion or to note the fulminations in the media, particularly of the
left-leaning variety, against so-called Christian fundamentalism whenever
any sort of religious viewpoint is alluded to with respect to domestic or
foreign policy.
On another
level of consideration, there is rightly considerable disquietude with a
kind of Christian triumphalism which thinks to do the right thing in
relation to Islamic countries and which claims to respect the religion of
Islam but seems incapable of understanding the distinctives of either Islam
or the very Christianity which historically and constitutionally undergirds
its own forms of political and social life. The consequence is continuing
conflict about the place of religion in the so-called atheism of the
modern secular state which claims a tolerance through indifference
but is increasingly coercive against religion with respect to political and
social policies. Traditional Christian morality has no voice and no hearing
in our contemporary culture. Religion, in short, is inconvenient at best and
downright annoying and objectionable at worst. Why?
Because
religion does not easily accommodate itself to the political, social and
economic agendas of our world and day. In fact, it seems to get in the way.
Whether directly or indirectly, religion is often blamed for many of the
forms of social, political and economic unrest in the global community. How
shall we understand this conflict and opposition? By seeing it, really, as a
conflict of religious outlooks. Religion makes demands. But what religion
and what demands and how are competing and conflicting demands to be
resolved?
First of all,
we need to see that the so-called secular culture of the western
democracies, having thrown off or at least standing in denial of their
Christian principles without which they are not thinkable, constitutes
simply another form of religion, namely, the religion of secular atheism.
But to begin to think atheism means to recognize that it owes the
possibility of its very being to Christianity. To put it in another way,
there are no atheists in the ancient world. Atheism only becomes a
possibility through Christianity – through the possibility of not accepting
the Incarnation there lies the possibility of the rejection of the idea of
God altogether as being in any way necessary for the living out of one’s
life.
But hostility
against religion needs to be more closely defined. The hostility is not
really with the various forms of nature religion or their spurious modern
counterparts in the so-called “new-age” spiritualities of the self
that proliferate in our contemporary market culture. No. The problem is with
the great revealed religions of the world, Judaism, Christianity and
Islam, precisely because each in their own way, hold to a
transcendent principle, the God who cannot be reduced to the phenomenal
world of sense and experience but stands above and beyond the world as its
source and creator.
The differences
between the three have entirely to do with the form of the relationship
between God and the community of believers in the world. For all three we
might say, however, there is a forsaking of the world by being bound to
God, through the Law in the case of Israel, through the
Love of God in the Incarnate Logos or Word of God in the case of
Christianity, and through the authoritative but inscrutable Will of
Allah in the case of Islam. To put in another way, and one that
suggests the possibilities of a dialogue and a conversation between Jews,
Christians and Muslims, all three are religions of the Word; the Word of
God as Law, the Word of God as Love, the Word of God as Will.
There are enormous and important differences between the three but, not
surprisingly, all three are inconvenient from the standpoint of the
religion of the secular state which eschews any transcendent principle
and thereby any sense of the limitations to its own authority. The state, in
a way, is God.
And therein
lies the conflict. Once you have a hold of the idea of a transcendent
principle, it alters your relation to the world. There can be no easy
accommodation. Revealed religion is a great troubler to the secular
state, the secular state, that is to say, that has forgotten or denied its
sacred origins. For here, too, lies an important qualification. Just as we
can really only talk about atheism by way of reference to Christianity, so
too, the very idea of a secular state is largely a western Christian
development arising out of the distinction within the Latin and Christian
west between the respective realms of the sacred and the secular, the
spiritual and the temporal, both of which are seen as Christian. The further
paradox is that out of that distinction in its more modern forms, beginning
in the seventeenth century, arises the principle of religious toleration
within and between Christian states and by extension between cultures. By
toleration here, I mean, a principle established in law and not merely an
attitude or feeling towards the one who is seen as the other. Such a
principled view, though, it seems to me, has its roots in the spiritual
distinctives of the three great revealed religions of the world.
The lesson from
The First Book of Kings brings out the conflict between
religions within Israel. Of course, the point of the story of the encounter
and test-match between King Ahab and the prophet Elijah is that there is no
contest. The transcendent God of Israel wins hands down, as it were, in this
stars-wars-like contest. God cannot be compared to the gods of our
imaginations; in this view, the Baals of the older nature religions
to which Ahab and Israel have turned by turning away from the God who has
revealed himself in the Law and the Prophets, the God, too, by the way, who
has revealed himself as the God of all peoples through the mission of Israel
to the nations of the world. That larger dimension of Israel’s true
character is something which the prophets will emphasize precisely against a
privatized view of God, a God for Israel exclusively, as it were.
Elijah
represents an early but essential form of the prophetic ministry, a form
which is always necessary for all revealed religions. The essential idea of
prophecy is not about predicting the future but always about recalling the
fundamental insight which defines the religion. That means making clearly
and, indeed, forcibly, the distinction between the gods of this world and
the God of all creation. Initially, from the standpoint of the practical
life of the people of Israel, Elijah seems to be “the troubler of Israel”,
precisely because he reminds Israel of the uncomfortable truths which define
Israel over and against every and any immediate and pressing, practical and
political concerns.
The lesson from
The Book of the Acts of the Apostles shows the conflict
between early Christianity and the pagan cults of late Antiquity, in this
story, the cult of the many-breasted Diana of the Ephesians. As with
the story from The First Book of Kings, there is really no
conflict – the cult of the city is seen primarily as an economic interest
and is really being mocked for its crassness. Once again, though, a clear
distinction is being made; once again, through a form of conflict. The real
concern from the standpoint of the Roman authorities is about keeping the
peace. It shows clearly and unambiguously the kind of world from which
Christianity ultimately emerges. It shows the unavoidable conflict between
the gods of this world and the God who the Creator and the Redeemer of the
world, the God who engages our world without being collapsed into it.
These two
lessons uphold the primacy of the principle of the transcendent. A choice
has to be made. There can be no compromises. There can be no fudging of the
basic distinction between God and the world, a distinction which arises from
the principle of revelation itself. But does this mean that the only
relation that revealed religion has to the world is that of opposition and
conflict? The Eucharistic lessons for today, the Fifth Sunday after
Trinity, suggest something more. The epistle argues for a mode of
behaviour in the world that is rooted in Christ, in other words, it argues
for a form of charity grounded in the charity of God. “Be of one mind”,
it says, on essential matters of faith, it seems to suggest, and live
peaceably and honestly in the world, “sanctifying Christ as
Lord in your hearts”. In other words, the religious bond or relation to
Christ, which has a certain spiritual inwardness, nonetheless governs our
outward actions.
The further
illustration of this is given in the gospel which is about the call of Simon
Peter and others to become fishers of men. But it begins with the story of
the people “pressing upon Jesus to hear the Word of God”. In other
words, there is a yearning in our souls for something more than the goods
and services of the world. Indeed, like the fishermen, James and John
and Simon Peter, we may find that “we have toiled all the night long and
have taken nothing”. The question is whether we will hear the Word of
Christ and act “according to thy word”, being in this world but not
of it, because we have “fors[aken] all and followed him”. In so doing
we have a way of being in the midst of the confusions and the conflicts of
the world without being collapsed into them or being defined by them.
It means
holding to the fundamental principles of the Faith and, often, in the face
of enormous pressures to compromise and, essentially, to worship the false
gods of economic determinism and hedonistic self-determination;
the cult of Great Diana of the Ephesians lives on! The point of the gospel
story, as a kind of illustration of the epistle, is that it shows how the
world can be gathered back to God. “Nevertheless, at thy word, I will let
down the net”. Living in accord with the principles of the Christian
faith gives us a way of engaging our world and our culture with a view to
recovering the deeper spiritual desires and yearnings present in it,
bringing everything home to Christ, not by coercion but by charity, the
charity that is rooted and grounded in the love of God made visible in
Jesus Christ. That love cannot be compromised or denied without
betraying ourselves and our culture.
The religion
that troubles the world and ourselves is also the religion that settles us
upon the high things of God, the things of salvation, the things that last
and truly satisfy.
“Art thou the troubler
of Israel”
