Category: theology

UNFKD Episode 18 - LOVE

UNFKD Episode 18 – LOVE

Posted on by Jude Mills

“No hate like Christian love” – was the prompt for this episode. A comment on a social media post was met with this response.

And I get it.

Recorded in the calm before storm Floris from a campervan on the west coast of Scotland, I share a brief reflection on love from a Christian theological perspective. My take is that we are compelled, as Christians, to love. And for me, this means praxis or love in action.

However, this is contextualised with awareness that some people have been deeply wounded by Christianity.

Transcript

There is no hate like Christian love

You may have heard this phrase before. I confess I hadn’t heard it until quite recently. It’s particularly prominent in ex -evangelical and deconstruction circles, mostly in the USA. This phrase highlights the ways in which people have been hurt and damaged by Christianity. Evangelical and fundamentalist expressions of Christianity in particular. My impulse as someone who believes that Christianity is a religion based in love, might be  to try and do the ‘not all Christians’ thing. But I recognise this is futile in the face of hurt and anger. Instead, I am going to do what I always do and make a podcast. This episode is about Love.

You are listening to  UNFKD, the bonus series of my podcast “Fkd up by faith,” where I explore theology and adjacent ideas that are harmful, misunderstood, or just plain wrong. This episode is a bit different because I’m not sitting in my little studio at home with my podcast equipment. Instead, I’m sitting in my campervan – which actually makes a really good recording studio, and I am looking out from the Island of Mull towards the Island of Iona. I think I’ve mentioned Iona in other episodes. It’s the little  island  off the west coast of Scotland, which was inhabited by Saint Columba, also known as Colmcille, who established his monastery here in the sixth century. Nowadays it is home to the Iona community and sees many visitors and pilgrims to visit the Abbey.

This reflection came from a  post that I saw on social media yesterday. I no longer use the usual mainstream social media applications for all the reasons reasons, but I do use Blue Sky. You might be laughing because Blue Sky is often seen as a little left-wing or liberal bubble. Honestly, I like it that way. However, I don’t post a lot. Sometimes I “re-post” other people’s posts. I do lurk and find a lot of my news that way.

I saw a post by someone well-known in progressive Christian circles. They were talking about the idea of Christianity or people claiming to be Christians who speak or behave in ways that go against the Christian idea of love. I couldn’t help myself. Sometimes the urge comes upon me to comment on posts like that. My comment was that without love then it isn’t Christianity at all. The person who answered my comment and used this quote went so far as to say that, ”Nobody has ever seen a Christianity with love. What Christians call love is so far away from love that we had to come up with the saying “no hate like Christian love”.

I get it. This is the theological waters that I swim  in: religious trauma, spiritual abuse, and the ways in which people have been damaged by religion, especially Christianity. I know about the ways in which so-called Christians and Christian organisations act in hateful ways and then call it love, or say that it’s in the name of love. Being exposed to, and especially growing up in such an expression of Christianity is deeply harmful.

As someone who takes a particular interest in this topic, I am compelled to be understanding, even if I don’t agree with what  the person is saying. And I don’t. It is simply not objectively true to say that there is no expression of Christianity that is loving. There are many ways in which people express and experience Christian love, the way that I would argue  it should be. However, some people who have experienced religious harm or spiritual abuse within Christianity, sometimes adopt a view that suggests that all Christians are problematic, and that Christianity is based in hypocrisy and lies. Indeed even people who have not been harmed by Christianity adopt this view. It is a common stance amongst  the more vocal atheists, for example, to suggest that Christianity is responsible for more harms that goods. This is also, objectively untrue, even if it sounds like it should be true. However, this episode is not about that. I may do an unfkd on that question in the future.

I thought it might be an idea to explore what Christianity has to say about love and perhaps give some examples of how Christians have shown love. There are many ways in which we can look at the subject of love, summer, theological perspective, and as with most of the topics I tackle in this podcast The discussion can be wide and complex. However. Theologians are generally united in agreeing that Christianity is, at its heart, a religion of love.

Most significant at the heart of this assertion is that Jesus Christ actually compels us to love each other. It’s one of those kind of non negotiable givens.

John 13:34-35

34 I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’

Matthew 22:36-40

36 ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ 37 He said to him, ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’

Indeed these are often cited as the only two real commandments that he gave. The clear interpretation of this is that we are compelled as followers of Jesus, to show love to others.

Now the definitions of what this love means vary among commentators. And this is very much shaped by historical and philosophical influences over the centuries. I will link to an excellent resource about these theological influences in the show notes. However, prime among the ways in which we can view the idea of Christian love is first and foremost rooted in God’s love. That is God’s love for us, and ours for God. Thus love is expressed as a dynamic relationship between the human and the divine.

This is shaped of course by our modern understandings of human biology, psychology and behaviour.  St. Augustine for example believed that ONLY God could love, and therefore, any expression of love was an expression of God. Theology also went through a period of trying to separate pure love which came from God, from other lesser forms of love that were based in human desire.  This has also been expressed as Agape love, a selfless, sacrificial love sometimes described as caritas. This is seen as distinct from Eros, the love which encompasses desire. Whilst there are some who might still work within this distinction, I think it is more common to consider love in a more integrated way. And certainly my view is that all relationships : with humans, with other creatures, with the environment, with  our communities and indeed with the whole universe are a dynamic interplay with God as the foundation, the ground of all being, and indeed as love itself.  

Bear in mind this is my theology and other theologies are available.

My thinking is that we can get rather caught up trying to define Christian love rather than get on with the business of doing love. In this respect we can see Christian love as Praxis.  The ways that this might play out in practice include the ways in which I choose to meet and communicate with others, to the ways in which I engage with my community and with the world. For some, this is about engaging in acts of local community service, for others it is about larger acts of social activism.

Which brings us back to the original stimulus for this discussion, the idea that there is no hate like Christian love.  What this refers to are the ways in which human beings have abused, corrupted, distorted and misunderstood what it means to be a Christian. IN the minds of some people who have been the victims of this, it corrupts Christianity altogether.  The Christian response to this, should, if we are being Christian about it, be with love.

Bible References

John 13:34-35 (NRSV)

Matthew 22:36-40 (NRSV)

Theological resources

Jeanrond, Werner G. A Theology of Love. London, T & T Clark, 2010.

Jeanrond, Werner G., ‘ Love’, in Nicholas Adams, George Pattison, and Graham Ward (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought (2013; online edn, Oxford Academic, 3 June 2013), ⁠https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199601998.013.0012⁠, 

Music

“Better Day” and “Nebula” by Penguin Music on Pixabay ⁠https://pixabay.com/users/penguinmusic-24940186/⁠

“Echoes of Heaven Meditation” by ⁠Leigh Robinson⁠ from ⁠Pixabay

UNFKD - Episode 17 - HELL

UNFKD – Episode 17 – HELL

Posted on by Jude Mills


TRANSCRIPT

“Hell Mend Them!”  I said to a friend  the other day. We were talking about the US administration. He by the way is an American  and also a priest and he had never heard the phrase. I have since discovered like many of my expressions it’s  actually idiomatically Scots  and also like many of my expressions I didn’t realise that it was  Scots until non-Scots pointed out to me that they had never heard it before.  The phrase is more accurately “Hell Mend  Ye” or “Hell Mend You”  and  you would be more likely to hear it  in previous generations of parents or grandparents,  and they would use it as a warning  about the consequences of doing something stupid  or harmful.

This is Unfkd, the bonus series of my podcast Fkd Up By Faith, where I examine theology or theology-related ideas which are harmful,  misunderstood, or just plain  wrong. I’m Jude Mills,  and today we’re going to talk about hell.

Like most episodes of UNFKD it isn’t my hope or my intention to give you the history and evolution of the idea of hell in Christian theology. I’m going to make the assumption that you are pretty familiar with the Contemporary ideas of hell. As a place of fiery punishment and torture. These images and ideas are rife in art, literature, television and film. They are part of our collective Consciousness Whether we are religious or not. The other thing that I think it’s important to point out is that hell isn’t just a Christian concept. Ideas of hail or health states or hell realms exist in many different religious contexts. And the idea of hell, as we might understand it, isn’t necessarily the idea that was inherited either from the Hebrew Scriptures or from the person of Jesus Christ. I will link to resources in the show notes Gave an excellent breakdown or understandings of hell in Christian theology.

What I am going to talk about is why idea of hell as a place or a state of punishment might be compelling to us, and why I think that the idea of hell is not just harmful and misunderstood it is also just plain wrong. Firstly, I suppose I should talk about why I (and many other Scots) use the phrase Hell Mend Ye.

Given Scots post-reformation history, the invocation of hell is perhaps unsurprising.  As the historian Michelle D Brock writes,

‘For many Scots, the Reformed faith entailed, in both theory and in exercise, a complex and often anxious process of questioning the self. This internal questioning stemmed from a potent mix of ideas about the Devil, innate depravity, and double predestination (the doctrine that God has foreordained both those who will be saved and those who will be damned). The collision of these doctrines with experiential struggles against Satan caused the self-identified godly in Scotland, in moments of intense scrutiny, to believe the very worst: that they were irrevocably evil, even demonic, and destined for an eternity in hell.‘

I found myself trying to put this phrase into theological context for my priest friend. What do I mean by ‘hell mend them.’? Even before I could call myself a theologian I knew what the arguments were against the existence of any reality that could be described as hell. If I believe that there is a loving God, I cannot also believe that the same God would subject their beloved children – made in God’s own image – to the eternal torment of fire. The same God whose sacrifice  in the figure of Christ, we are also told put an end to all of that eternal damnation nonsense.

The Eastern Orthodox Scholar David Bentley Hart writes this,

 ‘For the whole substance of Christian faith is the conviction that another has already and decisively gone down into that abyss for us, to set all the prisoners free, even from the chains of their own hatred and despair; and hence the love that has made all of us who we are, and that will continue throughout eternity to do so, cannot ultimately be rejected by anyone.‘

If you haven’t read his book ‘That All Shall be Saved’ I highly recommend it. He writes in the mostly deliciously eviscerating way about the literalism of fundamentalist bible interpretations and how utterly illogical the idea of hell is.  

What I cannot get away from or avoid is that  in the gospels Jesus talked quite a lot about hell. More accurately, however, he didn’t  use that word because hell is an English word with Saxon roots. The word that he most often used was Gehenna and Gehenna  could  mean all sorts of things depending on the context. It could either mean a place of spiritual separation or punishment or torment. It could mean an actual physical place  where fires did burn and where historically there were sacrifices made.

My favourite (Maybe my second favourite) bible passage, that one in the Gospel Matthew where Jesus talks about the ‘least of these’? As much as I would like to, I cannot avoid the part where he also talks about ‘eternal fire’ and ‘eternal punishment’. [Matthew 25: 41-46]

‘Then he will say to those at his left hand, “You  that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire  prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry, and you gave me no food.  I was thirsty  and you gave me nothing to drink. I was a stranger, and you did not welcome me naked, and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison  and you did not visit me.”

Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it  that we saw you hungry or thirsty  or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison  and did not take care of you?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you,  just  as you did not do it to one of the least of these,  you did not  do it to me.”  And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.‘

And of course this makes it really tricky.  It’s easier to perhaps perform a very nifty hermeneutic of avoidance. And I suspect that you may well have witnessed or, if you’re a preacher, even performed such a manoeuvre.

The problem only arises, or at least should, if we indulge in literalism and fail to read the bible, as I believe it should be read, in context. Or more accurately contexts which include the historical, social and religious context of the time that it was written in, the religious tradition that it arose out of, as well as understanding of the biblical use of metaphor and imagery. Which Jesus used all the time. The subject of a literal or metaphorical hell has and continues to be the source of much debate and that includes whether on not Jesus meant that people would literally be consigned to eternal fire, or if he meant something else. As you would imagine, I vote for the something else. Jesus, as we know was Jewish, was speaking to a Jewish audience and they would have been very used to hearing things in the form of metaphor and symbolism. Jesus is frequently heard using metaphors to make a point, and uses parables to illustrate lots of different aspects of his theology. We find it easy to accept that when he says, for example, that we should or cut off our right hand  [Matthew 5:30] that he means it metaphorically. I think we can assume, given the style in which  the gospel writer Matthew writes, and presents how Jesus spoke, that the same metaphorical analysis can apply to the parts when he talks about eternal fire. Otherwise, we are indulging in a curious kind of cherry picking exercise.

The thing is, part of me finds the idea of post- mortem punishment rather compelling.  The world is filled with such blatant acts of cruelty. The truth is  it always has been, but it’s more visible to us now.  There are those people in the world, and always have been those, who not only don’t do things for ‘the least of these’ but actively go out of their way to make things worse for them. To be uncaring and cruel and sadistic.  The idea of hellish consequences for these deeds appeals to my desire for justice.  But despite my anger and frustration, I have no real desire to see anyone punished for  eternity, even if I believed that such a place existed. But I do have a desire – and I have a feeling this is pretty universal – that a truly  people don’t just ‘get away with it.’  

It feels right though, doesn’t it, that our worldly actions have a consequence, even (or maybe especially)  if we do not face that consequence on the worldly plane

This is how human beings function. We don’t like to see wrongdoing go unchecked. There are those, like me, who believe wholeheartedly in rehabilitation, in reconciliation, in restorative justice, and  then there are the ‘hanging is too good for them’ types. Either way, the need and the desire for justice is very human.  I often see the invocation of  there being a ‘special place in hell’, often by non-religious people who are hoping against their own judgement that a divine justice might take the place of a lack of it in this current mortal reality. However, it is sobering to remember – to be reminded –  that some of these folk think that I might have such a special place reserved for me. And for people like me, for  the leftists and the queers and the ‘woke’.

I’ve been thinking about this and ‘Hell Mend Them’ suggests that hell might have a restorative power. A state, not of torment, but of healing, of cleansing.  Being mended  means being fixed, being healed, to be made whole .I believe that this maybe (at least partly) is what Jesus meant. That we cannot escape the spiritual and psychological consequences of our wrongdoings. Now we know this to be the case simply from our own experience of guilt and shame (well most of us do) There is another layer of theology which suggests that Gehenna (or hell if you prefer)  might be the experience of the absence of God.

My imagination leads me to a mirror, in which the sinful, and the guilty (which is all of us) are invited to look at ourselves face to face. And, held in this reflective fire, seeing who we are and what we have done, we come to know who we are in relationship with God. and how separate we have imagined ourselves to be. I believe that this can only be imagined because the God of my understanding is A God who is the ground and substance and nature of all being. As we heard David Bentley hart say earlier, “the love that has made all of us who we are, and that will continue throughout eternity to do so, cannot ultimately be rejected by anyone.”

References

Brock, M.D. (2016). Satan and the Scots : the Devil in Post-Reformation Scotland, c.1560-1700. Abingdon, Routledge.

Brown, D. (2023). Hell. St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology. [online] Available at: https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/Hell.

David Bentley Hart (2019). That All Shall Be Saved : heaven, hell, and Universal salvation. Yale University Press.

Music

Music “Better Day” and “Nebula” by Penguin Music on Pixabay https://pixabay.com/users/penguinmusic-24940186/

“Echoes of Heaven Meditation” by Leigh Robinson on Pixabay

UNFKD Episode 16 - THE ASCENSION

UNFKD Episode 16 – THE ASCENSION

Posted on by Jude Mills

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

I would like to invite you to do something point to heaven.Now, I bet that quite a few of you are pointing up the way.

Everyone knows that heaven is up there, right? Or is it?This is UNFKD, the bonus series of my podcast Fkd Up by Faith, where I talk about theology or theology related ideas which are harmful, misunderstood or just plain wrong.

And today we’re talking about the Ascension.In the episode that I did at Easter about the resurrection, I promised that I would do this episode on the Ascension.

Now the Feast of the Ascension actually occurs on the Thursday 40 days after Easter, which would make it last Thursday.But a lot of churches in the Catholic and Anglican traditions will celebrate Ascension on the following Sunday after Ascension Thursday.

And this often happens with some of the bigger feast days.I suppose it’s to allow more people to go to mass.So as this podcast goes out, Ascension Sunday was yesterday.

That was Sunday the 1st of June.Now, if you are unaware of the Ascension story, or even if you are here, it is as it’s described in the book of Acts.

ACTS 1: 1-11 (NRSV)

“In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when He was taken up to heaven.

After giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen after his suffering, He presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during 40 days and speaking about the Kingdom of God.

While staying with them, He ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father.This, he said, is what you have heard from me.For John baptised with water, but you will be baptised with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.

So when they had come together, they asked him, Lord, is this the time when you will restore the Kingdom to Israel? He replied, It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by His own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

When He had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took Him out of their sight.While he was going, and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them.

They said, Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw Him go into heaven.”

The Ascension, like most of the themes that I choose for this podcast, is very much misunderstood and has been the subject of much debate and controversy over the centuries. And nowadays, because it continues to be something which is difficult to get your head around, it’s kind of ignored, I would say. I personally love it.That’s partly because it’s one of the major feast days that I have been privileged to preach on in the church.I really enjoyed getting my theological teeth into particularly the mysticism inherent in the story.

And So what I’m going to share is one of those sermons, if you want to call it that, gently modified for this medium in which I explore what it means, certainly from my theological perspective, for Jesus to have ascended into heaven and kind of what that means for us. Now, as always, I’ll include in the show notes some pointers towards additional resources that you can look at if you want to know a little bit more.All right, let’s get into it.

If you Google or use another search engine, the Ascension, you will.If you look at the images, you’ll see many depictions painted throughout the centuries, and almost all of them show Jesus floating upwards or on or into a cloud. Sometimes he’s surrounded by angels, sometimes he is being pulled seemingly by the hand of God, and sometimes, rather amusingly, you will see just his feet disappearing into a cloud.

The astronomer Carl Sagan is reported at least to have said if Jesus were caught up at the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second, with what we know today about the vastness of our Galaxy, Jesus would still be travelling today just to reach the outer limits of the Milky Way.Furthermore, there are billions and billions of galaxies now.

As 21st century Christians, we know, most of us, that the Earth is a globe with an atmosphere with it’s own weather systems. We have the benefit of understanding that the Earth is part of a vast solar system, an even vaster Galaxy, and an unimaginably vast universe.We can be pretty certain from the evidence of science and from our own experience, most of us have been in an aeroplane, that heaven is not physically up there above the clouds.

So where is it? In truth, attempting to grapple with any literal interpretation of the Ascension story is, I think, missing the point.At the top of the episode I asked you to point to heaven. So if I were to ask you another question, which is where is God, you might answer something like, well, God is everywhere.Contrary to popular imagery, God is not a man in the sky.

God cannot be pinned down by geography, or by direction, or indeed any of the rules of the physical universe as we understand them.Any sense of God or heaven being up there is to restrict God to a view which is always mediated both by our human senses and our current understanding of the laws of the universe.

We are told in the ascension story that Jesus was taken out of sight in a cloud.Now clouds in biblical terms are often represent the presence of God.So Jesus in this sense may be seen to have been enveloped in the cloud of God. So taken back, absorbed back into God, He returned as he came to God’s everywhereness.This everywhereness of God is utterly beyond our imagining, because it isn’t everywhere in any physical, tangible, touchable, measurable way.

There’s a a book by an anonymous 14th century Mystic.It’s called The Cloud of Unknowing, and in this book the author describes this idea in a very beautiful way, as Mystics often do. So this is what they say.

“Since Christ ascended in physical form and then afterwards sent the Holy Spirit physically, it was more fitting that his journey to heaven was described as up rather than down, and that the Holy Spirit’s path to earth was described as from above rather than from below, from behind, in front of or on one side or another.I say that it was more fitting because it makes more sense to us, but in reality, the direction that he went up instead of down didn’t matter since it’s all the same distance.Spiritually speaking, heaven is as close down as up, as close behind as before, as quickly reached from one side as the other.“

One of the other readings assigned for Ascension is from Saint Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, and in it Paul asks us to be enlightened by the eyes of our hearts with this understanding, the everywhereness of Christ who is one with God.It’s not something we can see with our physical eyes, but it can certainly be felt, and we’re told in the ascension story how we access it. We access it through the presence of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is seen as the final redemptive gift of the whole Paschal mystery, the story of Easter. And that culminates in next Sunday celebration of Pentecost, the celebration of when the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples when they’re in Jerusalem.In this way we might imagine that heaven is not so much up as in Saint Augustine said.

“He is here with us by his divinity, his power, and his love.We cannot be in heaven as he is on earth by divinity, but in him we can be there by love.When the disciples witnessed Jesus final bodily departure from earth, they might have felt sad, but we are told that they returned to Jerusalem with joy.“

And so it’s with joy that we recognise that while Jesus is no longer visible with our physical eyes, Christ is always with us.

I’ll leave you with the words of the late Pope Francis. This from a homily that he gave for the Ascension.

“The Lord’s ascension into heaven, while inaugurating a new form of Jesus presence among us, calls us to keep eyes and hearts open to encounter Him, to serve him and bear witness to him to others.It is a matter of being people of the Ascension, that is, those who seek Christ along the paths of our time.On this journey we encounter Christ in our brothers and sisters.As at the beginning the risen Christ sent his apostles with the power of the Holy Spirit, so too does he send all of us today with the same power so as to establish concrete and visible signs of hope.”

14:54

You’ve been listening to Fkd Up by Faith UNFKD.I’m Jude Mills.You can listen to the podcast on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.You can connect with the podcast on social media. I am on BlueSky as Jude Mills.The podcast Fkd Up by Faith is on Instagram or you can find out about the podcast on my website judemills.com.If you would like to be a guest on the Fkd Up by Faith podcast, I’d love to hear from you.

So do get in touch.Go well.

RESOURCES/LINKS

Reading from from the Acts of the Apostles 1: 11 (NRSV)

Text of “The Cloud of Unknowing https://sacred-texts.com/chr/cou/index.htm

Homily on the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord –  from Pope Francis (2018) https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/angelus/2018/documents/papa-francesco_regina-coeli_20180513.html

Very comprehensive Wikipedia entry on the Ascension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_of_Jesus

Ascension in the Vatican News https://www.vaticannews.va/en/liturgical-holidays/solemnity-of-the-ascension-of-the-lord.html

Ascension resources from Loyola Press https://www.loyolapress.com/catholic-resources/liturgical-year/sunday-connection/ascension-of-the-lord-cycle-c/

Music “Better Day” and “Nebula” by Penguin Music on Pixabay https://pixabay.com/users/penguinmusic-24940186/

“echoes-of-heaven-meditation-186652” by Natures Eye on Pixabay NaturesEye – Pixabay