Neurophysiology and spirituality

For those of us who follow Christ, and for others with an interest in the possibility of God, the up-and-coming field of research into the neurology of religious and spiritual experience is one to watch. It will be (actually is) a playground for those disposed to nothing-buttery, and it behoves us as Christ followers to look properly at the results emerging from the research and at the interpretations offered. We should recall that it is unlikely to offer us proof or otherwise of God or afterlife or whatever. However, it will be interesting to compare and contrast reductionist explanations with emergentist ones. The starting point, as Sacks points out is:

The tendency to spiritual feeling and religious belief lies deep in human nature and seems to have its own neurological basis, though it may be very strong in some people and less developed in others.

Remember though that the frame can interpret very differently. Is the spiritual tendency simply an evolutionary quirk or is it sign of a spacetime centred round the strange attractor of an Incarnation? Both readings could make sense.

Seeing God in the Third Millennium - Oliver Sacks - The Atlantic

Ethical wiggle-room: a seedbed of miscreancy in corporisations

On the basis of what's said in this article, I'd want to see a bit more research cross-culturally, but if the basic results pan out, it's a very significant finding for the study of corporisations (politology?). It would relate to the issues relating to the Eichmann thing about participation in corporate evil and perhaps give a window into a psychological mechanism allowing people to offload a sense of responsibility to an aggregate, corporised entity:

Our experiments showed that if people plainly see that to lie in a given situation would be fraudulent, they shy away from it. However, if people are given "wriggle room," they can convince themselves that their behaviour is not fraudulent and this does not attack their sense of who they are

In a sense it seems to link 'back' to the question "Did God really say '...'?" in which the serpent, by that question, precisely opens up the kind of wiggle room uncovered in this research. This strengthens my hunch that evil is essentially social not individual.

We are basically honest – except when we are at work, study suggests

Blessed Nativity

The blessings of the Christ child be upon you ...

If you want to know a bit more about the image, well, it's a kind of e-sketch for something I'm working on artistically currently. What's coming together in thinking about the image are several things.

One of these is eikons -or icons- which for me are about conveying a theological 'something' to those who view (which is not the same as eastern Orthodox approaches to iconography where the most important thing is a sacramentality -they are to convey and mediate spiritual presence and encounter). In this case I'm interested in theological motifs such as seeing Mary as a live temple of the Presence; considering Mary as the representative of all creation in forming the body of the Incarnate (hence the globe); affirming the blessing of God in Christ.

Another of the contributory thoughts is also drawing on a traditional rendering of eikons where part of the eikon is highly decorated and overlays the painted board underneath to act as a kind of frame for the main person depicted. In this case that development gives rise to the idea of an eikon within an eikon: the depiction of Mary is the 'framing' eikon for the Christ-embryon -hence the 'window' into the womb. The window is in the form of a sonogram as a relatively contemporary expression of such a 'window'.

I have posted a similar (precursor) image before but this one has been further worked on: the halo behind Mary's head has been completed and the background has been extended to the whole background and worked to be reminiscent of Van Gogh's starry night picture.

Evil, context and responsibility

Clare Carlisle has produced a very helpful series of articles about Evil. I'm aware that work on corporisations involves considering the way that evil works in and through humans individually, aggregatedly and corporately. In this respect this article Evil, part 7: the trial of Adolf Eichmann (2) | Clare Carlisle | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk is important taking up Hannah Arendt's examination of Adolf Eichmann's role in the Shoah. Carlisle notes:

Eichmann's evasiveness seems to be characterised by what Kierkegaard called "a dialectical interplay between knowing and willing". Kierkegaard argued that, on the question of evil, the key difference between ancient Greek philosophy and Christianity was that the Greeks (Plato in particular) equated immorality with ignorance, whereas Christians insist that this is a matter of the will.

Certainly I recognise the decisive importance of willedness in defining what is truly evil and distinguishing such from what is merely 'unfortunate' or simply suffering unhappy eventualities. Suffering chance or unavoidable harms is different from suffering malicious or malevolent harms which are of a greater degree of evil than ignorant or  insouciant harms. They may all hurt 'as much' on the level of pain felt through the sensorium interacting with the brain -though I suspect that is a theoretical construct for the sake of argument rather than an actuality because (and this is the second point) pain is mitigated or exacerbated by the social dimensions of others' attitudes which affects how much we suffer the pain. By that I am drawing on an insight which I draw from what I understand of some Buddhist reflection that pain and suffering are not the same thing. The former is done to us, so to speak, the latter is centrally about our response to and internalisation /representation /construal of pain.

But I'm left at this point asking a question: what are the NT (indeed scriptural) understandings of evil in these more philosophical terms -rather would early Christians have recognised Augustine's thinking and indeed ours. Or would they have held a greater place for what Carlisle characterises as the Greek view. it seems to me that atonement theories indicate the latter, perhaps.

The other thing I'm considering in the light of these reflections is that even the 'willed-evil' truistic view has its ecology altered by  the idea that corporisations have a life and will of their own; that they could be responsible for evil in this voluntarist sense.

Atheist prayer for the soul of England

If this were the face of the new atheism, we'd hardly have a beef with it.
An atheist's prayer for the churches that keep our soul | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free | The Guardian The flavour of it is an appreciation of what faithful, humble contributions are being made to the common good by churches and clergy -even if one didn't believe our message.

Local England has reverted to the middle ages, with the clergy as its most public face. The clergy are the ones who tend to know who is in trouble, who is a villain, who a saint. Their workplace is a church. They apparently mobilise 1.6 million parish volunteers for what amounts to social work, from caring for the elderly to hospital visiting. This output must be worth billions to the state. And all the state does in return is impose VAT and health and safety regulations on church repairs.

It's just a shame that the stats hadn't been read a bit more carefully: Simon says,

This month, the census appeared to confirm a Religious Trends reportthat church attendance was falling so fast that by 2035 there would be more active Muslims than Christians in Britain, and by 2050 as many Hindus.

Thing is, the report is from 4 years ago and the census is reporting a drop in nominal Christianity while the active Christian population seems to be more stable than the earlier report indicated -in some places and organisations it is growing. My own diocese seems to be seeing more churchgoing even while nominal Christians fall in number. I suspect that journalists will need to think a bit harder about the cliched categories they think in about religion in this country.

Much better from that point of view is another Guardian article by Zoe Williams (who is an atheist also) in Comment is Free, who asks properly what people might understand by the rather blunt Census Question (which I actually felt constrained to answer in a way that would have made it hard to interpret -as a Christian with a streak of Reformed in me, I don't react well to the label 'religious').

Overall, then, the structure of the question was deemed to have hoovered up a lot of people who were only Christians atmospherically, neither cleaving to its beliefs nor upholding its practices. Personally, I didn't mind that – one of the many joys of being an atheist is that you don't have to pretend to be inclusive. Organised religions have to take all comers. I am proudly exclusive in my belief system – I only want other people to be atheists if they're committed to not believing in God, and are prepared to say so. I don't want to scrabble madly among the "don't knows" for people who might be in my club on a particularly trenchant day. The Jedi Knights are welcome to them.

That's a good point, and at my university when the possibility of entrance documentation asking for religious information, I felt that it was important to put down a marker that the way that the census asked the question was not very helpful and that we might want to catch some nuances that would be more useful for guiding thinking in an institutional context.
In fact Zoe picks up a thought that is pretty much my own (here);

self-described Christianity is disintegrating – not because anything's happened to make God's existence less likely, but because, as a badge of respectability and cultural identity, it no longer cuts it.

Communities Shape Morals

It's not new but it is good to note this article underlining the power of corporisations to subsume individual humans.

As a social primate species, we modulate our morals with signals from family, friends and social groups with whom we identify because in our evolutionary past those attributes helped individuals to survive and reproduce. We do not just blindly concede control to authorities; instead we follow the cues provided by our moral communities on how best to behave.

But the interesting thing in this article is that it nuances the Milgram experiments (where people were apparently asked to deliver huge electric shocks to other seeming-subjects) by noting that there is not only a conformity to authority thing going on, but that this is in conflict with empathy for suffering victims. Thus lessening the 'defence' that genocidalists, for example, might offer: that they were subsumed.
How Communities Shape Our Morals: Scientific American:

Amos Yong and the Powers

Very interestingly, Amos Yong pretty much makes the case for seeing the Powers in an emergentist way as I have been advocating. See particularly p.207 where he advoactes two "levels of spiritual realities" (corresponding to what I say in Demolishing Strongholds) and of the corporate level (the other being personal) he says: "corporate spirit-beings constituted initially by corporate realites, but irreducible to them and capable of surving the dissolution of such realities, at least for a period of time."
That latter clause corresponds to what he says about personal spirit-beings, and I can understand why he might want to say that, though I'm wondering how convinced I am by it in relation to corporate spirit-beings. Is there particular reason to want to attribute this to them?

Clearly I will need to check this book out further -shame it's not on Kindle or other e-book format as yet.

The Spirit of Creation: Modern Science and Divine Action in the Pentecostal ... - Amos Yong - Google Books

Collective Intelligence

Hundreds of years ago recognising the intelligence of organisations and the mystery of how they have something of a 'life of their own' which is more than the sum of their parts tended to be done in the language of angels: Dominions, Principalities etc being spoken of as spiritual beings associated with those organisations -or, in fact, quite often as the spiritual 'dimension' of them. Perhaps the analogy was of human beings having physical and spiritual aspects. Now, we tend to look at what I think is broadly the same thing through the science of emergence:

It's important to realize that intelligence is not just something that happens inside individual brains. It also arises with groups of individuals. In fact, I'd define collective intelligence as groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent. By that definition, of course, collective intelligence has been around for a very long time. Families, companies, countries, and armies: those are all examples of groups of people working together in ways that at least sometimes seem intelligent.

This article, Collective Intelligence | Conversation | Edge, explores this, offering examples of collective intellingence which the NT writers might well have applied the language of Principalities and Powers to.

One of the interesting things in this article, for me, is that they've tried to see common 'design patterns' in collective intelligences (though I'm wondering how they've identified them and whether they have thrown the net widely enough). Design patterns named in the article are 'crowd' and 'hierarchy'. I'm wondering how these patterns relate to emergent dynamics like synchrony, feedback, energy etc.

At the end of the article there is this theologically intriguing bit:

It's clearly possible to view groups of humans and their artifacts, their computational and other artifacts, as intelligent collectively as well. That perspective raises not only deep and interesting scientific questions, but also raises what you might think of as even philosophical questions about what we humans are as groups, not just as individuals.
You might well argue that human intelligence has all along been primarily a collective phenomenon rather than an individual one. Most of the things we think of as human intelligence really arise in the context of our interactions with other human beings. We learn languages. We learn to communicate. Most of our intellectual achievements as humans really result not just from a single person working all alone by themselves, but from interactions of an individual with a culture, with a body of knowledge, with a whole community and network of other humans.
I think and I hope that this approach to thinking about collective intelligence can help us to understand not only what it means to be individual humans, but what it means for us as humans to be part of some broader collectively intelligent entity.

This is interesting for several reasons. One is that the corporate humanity thing is resonant for things like 'for as in Adam, we all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive'. If we are 'wired' to be social then the social is likely to 'wire' us individually, including in matters of spiritual identity and dynamics. And the final sentence points us to what I think is one of the salient perspectives that emerges from the NT: we are responsible both to work with our 'collectively intelligent corporisations' and also to refrain from doing so where they become tyrannical or self-serving.

Research on Meditation: -changes in brain's emotional processing

Reading the synopsis of this research
Meditation appears to produce enduring changes in emotional processing in the brain: had me asking questions about prayer. First a bit of result.

In the mindful attention group, the after-training brain scans showed a decrease in activation in the right amygdala in response to all images, supporting the hypothesis that meditation can improve emotional stability and response to stress. In the compassion meditation group, right amygdala activity also decreased in response to positive or neutral images. But among those who reported practicing compassion meditation most frequently outside of the training sessions, right amygdala activity tended to increase in response to negative images -- all of which depicted some form of human suffering.

This would play well with what I think is a Christian noetic principle: what we fill our minds and hearts with changes our attitudes, behaviours and character in turn. So my question is whether (as I suspect) practising prayer related to these meditative practices. For example, how about looking into the effects of self-examination and confession? I'm pretty sure that these have made a difference to my neural 'wiring' over the years in ways that might well show up in the amygdala. Or what about intercessory prayer related to matters of compassion? Come to that what about lectio divina /traditional evangelical Quiet Time?

It's useful in considering this to look at this synopsis of research.

"Through continued practice, the person can develop a psychological distance from any negative thoughts and can inhibit natural impulses that constantly fuel bad habits," ... continued practice can also increase empathy and eliminate our attachments to things we like and aversions to things we don't like. "The result of practice is a new You with a new multidimensional skill set for reducing biases in one's internal and external experience and sustaining a healthy mind,"

This is a set of interprentations of research which puts together a set of plausible mechanisms for what is happening to produce healthy thought processes. In doing so it helps to begin to see how other kinds of religious practice might also contribute -as clearly they do.

Home truths for Christians

I think it's important to hear and take seriously the critiques of well-motivated, intelligent and sincere critics. I don't think Christian faith has anything to fear from listening carefully and responding compassionately to what we hear. I think that sometimes we can hear the voice of God in these critiques and in taking them seriously and changing our minds and actions we engage in real repentance.

So let's listen in to an open letter from an atheist to their Christian friend. You should read the whole thing before reacting to the quotes I make so that you can guage the warmth and genuineness; this really isn't an emotionally hostile attack.

 I hope [God] doesn't exist. And that if he does, I hope he's nowhere near as petty as you make out.

'Petty' might be 'arbitrary'. And what I think we need to hear in this is just how implausible our accounts of God seem to others.  And if you don't get it, it's explained towards the end of the article:

we've always been good friends. You know I always try to do what I think is right, yet the God you believe in says I deserve to go to hell, and you still sing his praises.

Now, of course, I 'know' that there's an issue here about moralism and the concept of fallenness, but we should take note that the concept of 'desert' seems so out of whack with the 'crime'. We really do need to get out of that 'game' in terms of how we try to explain our faith; we have to find another way in not predicated on a sense of sin. You see, our 'gospel' was formed in ages when people did tend to have more a sense of guilt and so we tend to answer questions about forgiveness, atonement etc. Our problem now is that we find ourself in the guilt-arousal business because we have realised that our answers require that we conscientise people to the questions they 'should' be asking for our inherited version of the gospel to work and be good news indeed.

It's also not what the NT does. When gospel audiences had questions about sin and guilt, forgiveness and atonement was indeed proclaimed. Interestingly, non-Jewish audiences seemed not to be so concerned about those things and they don't get the same emphases in the gospel they hear. Go on -look in Acts. And those Jewish audiences that get the 'forgiveness' gospel, get it because they become convicted of complicity in the execution of the Messiah. Other audiences get a gospel about Christ's superiority or Christ's victory over death or evil or liberation from humanity-curtailing forces. It seems to me that the problem here is a telling of a cliche'd gospel which lacks resonance because the formula gets in way of understanding the issues and responding appropriately.

I'm interested to read this

I can never argue back because offending someone's religion is a huge taboo.

Because I think for a lot of people, it's true. Yes, there are some who enjoy provoking or 'telling it like it is'. But for most of us, we don't want to offend. And what that makes me think is that we Christians need to get out of the way of the Good News. If people are afraid of airing honest doubts or concerns about our faith, we're in the way of listening and sharing; we've ended up defending ourselves rather than giving an answer for the hope within us -or at least we've given that impression.

What I'm really thinking: the atheist friend | Life and style | The Guardian:

The five stages of organisational grief

I read this a few weeks back and saved it in Catch to read again later and perhaps blog about. Well, decided to go a head on the blogging front, mainly because I think that my interest in the way it may transfer to the churches in the West is still intriguing and perhaps insightful. In making the connection, I was minded of Mike Riddell's book a few years back
Threshold of the Future which pretty much started with the idea that the church in the West is undergoing the bereavement of Christendom. That's the idea that has stuck with me and so revisiting it through the prism of how political parties react who suffer major electoral setbacks such that they have to question their received wisdom, strategy and messages. In this article the reflection frame is the five stages of grief.

Caveat: the five stages of grief needs nuancing and careful handling; not applying like a rule to human lives so that it becomes a straight-jacket of emotional tyranny. So this is for musing and consideration only; it's not a fate or a procrustean bed.

The article was published shortly after Obama's re-election Now Republicans face the five stages of political grief | Jonathan Freedland | Comment is free | The Guardian, and the author characterises the reactions of Republicans:

Think of it as the political equivalent of the five stages of grief. The ones that trigger the deepest anguish are the serial defeats and the beatings you didn't expect.

So he goes through the stages reading the evidence through the interpretive grid of the stages.

the first stage is denial. ... embodied by the electrifying sight of former Bush guru turned Fox pundit Karl Rove scolding Fox's own number-crunchers for calling the election for Barack Obama, desperately pretending two plus two did not, in fact, equal four.

Yes and we the churches of the West do similar things: we cling to the census returns showing high -but still declining- figures of at least nominal Christians (see here for a bit more info),  and we carry on trying to do church as if they were still holding hundreds rather than dozens.

Next comes anger, often manifested in lashing out and blaming others. ... When Candy Crowley – the CNN anchor who had moderated the second TV debate, arbitrating at one crucial point in Obama's favour – appeared on the giant TV screens, the Republicans in their suits and evening dresses began booing loudly. "It's your fault!" they howled,

I think that this is what a lot of all that stuff with Christian groups protesting at perceived sleights and imagining that they are being treated less favourably than others: it's anger borne of a sense of loss of a previous influence and standing and power.

The third stage of grief is said to be bargaining, accepting that something has to change but seeking to delay or dilute what needs to be done ...  In the current Republican case, you can hear it in the time-honoured admission that "we didn't get our message across" or "there is a perception problem". The party agrees to tweak appearances, but remains unwilling to undertake deep reform.

I think this is probably where a lot of the churches in GB are at the moment: if only we update our worship, say things in a relevant way, use modern media ... you get the picture. Please note that 'deep reform' in this case doesn't mean changing the basic values or core identity, but it does mean recognising that there may be things that have become quite dear to us which are barriers to us reaching out and connecting beyond our own communities.

Friedland rushes the last two stages:

After depression – common after a string of losses, such as the five defeats in the popular vote the Republicans have suffered in the last six presidential elections – comes acceptance. In politics, that usually means a recognition that the country you seek to lead has changed and that, therefore, you have to change with it, no matter how painful that process will be.

Depression? Yes, that's around. I know I have and do experience this stage (nb, one of the crits of the 5 stages is the observation that, in reality, people seem to re-visit 'previous' stages and go at different speeds in different bits of their lives through the process). To be fair, depression is a kind of acceptance where the loss is still keenly felt.

I hadn't realised that I had become so invested in some of the 'advantages' of Christendom until I found myself depressed about their ebb. I was a bit bemused because I recalled praying (way back when I was a newish Christian full of the realisation that many people had the label 'Christian' but didn't understand the importance of the cross and hadn't had an experience of inviting Christ into their lives) that the 'nominals' would stop thinking of themselves as Christian so it would be clearer what being a Christian is and they wouldn't have a false assurance. Well, I kind of feel that that prayer was prescient and now it seems to be in process of being 'answered' (I don't actually think it is being, btw, because I don't think that my asking it was necessarily either right or actually a 'causal' factor), I wasn't sure that it was so good a thing.

Not necessarily good because I think that maybe there are a number of those 'nominals' who actually do  'have a faith' but whom the way we have done church has left cold. I'm also more aware now of how the Christian cultural legacy has helped evangelism. Of course, there is still a dimension of the legacy of Christendom that it would be good not to have and which corresponds to the intent of my erstwhile prayer. That legacy is the sense that people think they know what is 'Christian' and reject it. The problem being that when one investigates, it becomes plain that they don't understand a real Christian faith at all and have rejected a cartoon. The problem is that a post-Christendom society has a lot of this around. It'd be better if we could re-pristinate society with regard to Christianity, but we can't. Not to mention that we continue to score own goals in relation to this: we keep apparently fulfilling those negative stereotypes.

And what would acceptance look like? I think it would have a lot less nostalgia about it. It would be more focused on disciple-making and intentional Christian-formation, it would be strategically counter-cultural rather than narrowly moralistic.

We're not collectively there yet, and those who are (often in contexts like emergent churches) suffer the denial-anger reactions or depressive cynical responses. It's the work of generations, probably.

Of course the other thing to notice about this is that way that I've tended to describe individuals still, rather than institutions. I guess the question is how the way that groups of people sharing grief reactions  scales up within a collection of smaller institutions and organisations interacting when all are at various stages: how does the overall 'feel' change out of those component dynamics?

Anarchist among Jihadists raises questions Christians should consider

This is just such a fascinating article both because it tells us more about the situation in Syria than most of us in the West would otherwise know and because there are some intriguing ideas in it worth considering by Christians.

If like me you're used to Anarchists being fairly anti-God, then this is refreshing:

My real problem, and that of the oppressed in general I think, is not with god himself, but with human beings who act as gods and are so sick with authority that they think and act like gods, be they secular dictators like Assad or Islamic imams.
God himself is never as deadly dangerous as those who 'speak' for him.

Of course that's not to say there's any theism there, it's probably simply saying that believing in God is not high on the hit list (God may still be 'dangerous' in anarchist terms because God represents some degree of heteronomy) -there are more important issues; one being the way that God is used in human discourse to legitimise tyranny. And that is fair enough: I'm similarly concerned. And of course the converse should be noted too: atheism can be tyrannical (Pol Pot, Stalin and Mao Zedong demonstrate that well enough I think).

There's an intriguing thought too about sharing ones beliefs which I think bears further reflection. I'm interested to see it in relation to the issue of proselytism too:

I have never tried to convince anyone to be an anarchist and have always thought that trying to affect others is another way of practicing authority upon them.But now I see this issue from another perspective. It is all about making anarchism 'available' or known to those who want to fight any oppressing authority, be they workers, the unemployed, students, feminists, the youth, or ethnic and religious minorities. It is about trying to build an example — or sample — of the new free life, not only as a living manifestation of its potential presence, but also as a means to achieve that society.

I think that articulates quite nicely some issues to do with evangelism and its ethical implications. I wouldn't have used the phrase 'practising authority upon them' of my own accord, but it does say neatly what one of the problems can be. But then so is his 'another perspective' useful to help us to understand how a re-imagined evangelism could be. Working, as I do, in a context where the explicit 'contract' is to avoid proselytism, this perspective is useful: there is a difference between promoting ones views in a harassing or even bullying way and making a perspective or a set of facts and interpretations available to those to whom it may be relevant. I would say the former is proselytism, the latter is part of a free society.

Article here: http://peacenews.info/node/7061/anarchist-among-jihadists

One: The Gospel According to Mike: a review

There are things I like about this book and there are things irritated me.
First the things I like.
It's a really interesting core proposal and one which resonates for concerns I have myself. The core thesis seems to be that on the cross God has already achieved in Christ everything needed for God to become one with creation -hence "ONE" the title. Mike Williams talks about this in terms of the sin of one man, Adam, being offset by the righteousness of the one man Jesus. What I liked was Williams' unrelenting attention to the once-for-allness of this proposition and his exploration of the declension of various forms of Christianity from this such that we all too often reintroduce or substitute law for grace (my characterisation more than his, that). As a result, he writes about "Christianity" and it becomes evident that for him it is not an affectionate term but rather a term denoting a system of religion which in effect avoids or side-steps the real good news and substitutes rules and/or unfreedoms.

There's a big part of me that resonates to this approach. I think he's right to notice how religiosity both binds and screws people up. ONE is laced through with Williams' own testimony of how religious Christianity helped put him in mental health hell on several occasions -illustrating vividly the latter point. This is rooted in one of the things that I think he's right to explore theologically: in older language 'the sufficiency' of the cross. I think he's broadly right to notice that a lot of contemporary Christianity often doesn't take the cross seriously enough as a game-changing event cosmically affecting the relationship between God and creation. Williams does take it seriously. My main criticism here would be the lack of attention to the systematic/philosophical dimensions of this, for example considering the time -related implications: whether the cross could affect people backwards in time being one area of consideration here.

What Williams seems to be doing is reiterating the theology which says that the Christian life is about putting into practice what Christ has already achieved for us: becoming what we are. I think that Williams goes further in that his thesis seems universalist so it is about all human beings becoming what we are in Christ rather than continuing to live in Adam. This is an important area for consideration because I think Williams is right that much Christian teaching has fallen into legalism -that is in effect what he is railing against. It is a legalism that is rooted in a negation of the Cross at key points of thinking and doing. It is a negation of the cross which has filip from enforcement of power and status games within Christian communities and networks.

I liked too that he wrestled with his sexuality and had a deep and passionate dialogue between the theology he inherited and the realities of his human condition. And so as an example of practical theology it is useful to see the way that experience can question our neat theologies and the practical outworkings of them.

What I found irritating most were things like the lack of systematising the topics: I kept finding myself wondering how Williams would handle the more philosophical and theological implications of the position he was developing. For example, what would he say to the charge of antinomianism? -or rather to the suspicion that his position would provide no way to gainsay licence or wickedness. I think that there are ways to deal with that kind of charge from what I understand his position to be, but I kept finding that he simply didn't go there at the points when that question was begged.)

The lack of systematisation also irritated in relation to his repeated statement that God imputed unrighteousness to humanity following the sin of Adam. What does it mean to impute unrighteousness? Does that mean we weren't really unrighteous? Similarly he tends to see this in very clear timely terms: so before the cross everyone was unrighteous in God's sight, afterwards everyone (absolutely, without exception) is unrighteous in God's sight. Now I think that there is a way to think this through (and which doesn't necessitate a commitment to a historical Adam -another issue, despite Williams' protestation towards the beginning).

I think that I'd recommend that Williams engage with the work of Karl Barth (you may get a flavour of why I say that from this article) -on religion and then Barth's thinking about Christ as saviour in the Dogmatics -perhaps especially the exposition of Ephesians chapter 1. In that way Williams's instincts about the Cross and its meaning could be given some systematic rigour and he'd also be able to come to a more nuanced assessment of some of the church where such things have already been thought about.

I felt that Williams could sometimes be unfair to positions and people he thought disagreed with him -and not always consistently so. I think that Martin Luther actually agreed with Williams' over many things but you wouldn't always get that from the way the Williams writes about him, for example. Also there are sometimes sweeping statements which are borne of ignorance: Williams appears to think of Christianity as a fairly narrow section of EPIC Christian expressions and a cartoon of Catholicism. Yet if he know more about theology more widely than there is evidence of in this book, he'd find that much of what he says is already part of a wider Christian conversation -and has been for some time.

That said, I recognise that this was born out of some pain and desperate circumstance and so the catharsis of it is an important part of it: I would just want to say that this is not a finished or polished theology and there are more questions that arise from it and more discussions to have even if one grants Williams's perspectives as seen here.

One: The Gospel According to Mike"