On Sunday I got home just in time to catch the first in a series of programmes on Channel 4 called �The Bible: a History�. It was introduced by the British novelist Howard Jacobson, and I wanted to watch it because of an article Jacobson wrote for this week�s Radio Times. He claims not to be religious but says that the religious beliefs or instincts of other people fascinate him, because it is �from those who are most different to you that you have most to learn.� He has no time for aggressive modern atheism because �it lacks imagination, and worse still, curiosity.� He sympathises with Richard Dawkins� anger at terrorist atrocities carried out in the name of faith � as would we all � but he fears that kind of atheism which manifests the terrorist�s simplistic certainty under another name. Atheists may not bomb people but the past century has proved that �contempt for the belief of others is a poison.� Such atheists also criticize agnostics for being fence sitters but, says Jacobson, �Not to be sure is not cowardice, prevarication, or cynicism; not to be sure might very well be where you arrive, intellectually, after a lifetime of troubled and conscientious thought. In our unstable and too, too brutal world we need more people willing to admit they are unsure, not fewer.�
One weakness of Jacobson�s film, as in many such personal investigations where a �naive� investigator takes his questions to a variety of authorities, was that the questioning of those authorities was sometimes rather limited � especially in the case of the philosopher AC Grayling, who was allowed to get away with the idea that �people want to believe the creation story and stop themselves thinking about it too clearly� and that the story does nothing �to enrich� us. Fortunately Mary Midgely was able to counter his view that the creation story was made up by people whose ignorance led them to seek explanation in an agent �bigger� than themselves, by pointing to the natural human tendency to think of ourselves as part of a greater whole, where myths like the creation story provide us with imaginative vision � a background which we can�t live without. The strength of the film lay in Jacobson�s persistent hold on our need for mystery, uncertainty and doubt which make for creativity, and which lead him to honour the imaginative necessity which drives people to believe this creation myth. He concluded that �We have forgotten how to read the Bible not because we are too sophisticated but because we are not sophisticated enough.�
I was struck by the consonance between his approach and some ideas in a novel I have just reread by the science fiction author Ursula LeGuin. called �The Left hand of Darkness.� At one stage the main character, an ambassador to a distant planet, approaches a group of Foretellers who live in the wilderness and are visited by people wanting to know their future. Their leader tries to explain to the ambassador the purpose of his community: �We come here to the Fastnesses mostly to learn what questions not to ask�.we perfected and practice Foretelling… to exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question�. The unknown, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion�� He goes on to say that the one certain thing we do know concerning our future is that we shall die. �The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.�
This February letter is usually concerned with the forthcoming season of Lent and how we might make use of it. So far it might seem that I am suggesting we take up doubt for Lent � which is not perhaps very helpful as we are all probably quite familiar with doubt and uncertainty. Is being unsure the only alternative to brutal certainty? Might it not rather lead us to vacillation and weakness? And yet the Foretellers in LeGuin�s novel are not weak � they have their own kind of authority � it is unselfconscious, candid, and kind. We might ask therefore, does certainty always have to lead to brutality and arrogance or can there a stance which is neither too certain nor too weak? AC Grayling revealed that kind of certainty in scientific knowledge which has, as it evolved, detached us from our environment and led to exercises of power, control and exploitation which have severely damaged the world we have to live in. If we had held on more scrupulously to the idea of our being part of a greater whole � this might not have happened. Perhaps what we need is a discipline whereby we cleanse our minds and hearts of the wrong kinds of certainty, the wrong questions, the need for useless answers. And we can do that perhaps by pondering the story which follows on from creation in the book of Genesis. If the creation myth was an acknowledgement of our dependence on the one without whose creative power there would only be chaos and darkness, yet with whom we have the dignity of being co-creators, then the myth of the Fall is an acknowledgement of our inability to trust one another and our desire for knowledge which will make us invulnerable and secure in a way we imagine to be godlike. The story of Lent � beginning with Jesus� resistance to the temptations of power and ending with the crucifixion � shows that Adam and Eve were wrong in their understanding of what it is to be godlike. The more sophisticated reading of scripture which Jacobson is looking for, should therefore create space for the text to question us, to stimulate our imagination and our questioning in a search not for certainty but for courage, trust, and openness to that which is immeasurably more than we are. We know when we have found the right kind of question, because the view suddenly opens up and we feel an expansion in ourselves to go out and explore it.
With my love and prayers,
The Vicar writes
Stephen Tucker