One of my favourite books is John Berger’s short book on art theory called “Ways of Seeing”. Although it’s primarily about how we look at paintings, Berger actually shows how our beliefs and the ideologies that shape them, do in fact dictate how we interpret all kinds of images, even how we look at the world itself. When I first read it as an undergraduate it set me thinking about how Christianity is not so much about ethereal concepts that we believe in our heads (not really about metaphysics at all) so much as it is a “way of seeing”, a way of looking at the world around us and interpreting it in such a way as reveals the world as it truly is, as God has created it.
We often think about faith in quite different terms. Since the scientific revolution and the rise of a philosophy which supposes the material world to be mechanistic and self-explanatory, religious people have been obliged to push their ideas into nonmaterial realities. And so it is generally assumed that to be religious you have to believe in things which we cannot see. To be religious is to believe in another dimension full of ‘otherworldly’ realities.
And that’s even pushed some Christian thinkers into talking about material things as obstacles, or “veils” that hide the things we really believe in. St Isidore of Seville spoke of the sacraments of the church as “veils” that mask transcendent realities. So the bread and wine at the Eucharist somehow mask what we really wish we could see: the presence of God. That idea has carried through even to our Christmas carols. Charles Wesley wrote, of course, “veiled in flesh, the godhead see”, as if God was just using this human baby as some kind of camouflage within the physical world, hiding the true reality of the Incarnation.
But I disagree with both those perspectives, because they make Christianity out to be some frustrating attempt always to look beyond the material world, rather than as a “way of seeing” things in the world as they really are. The Eucharist does not reveal the body of Christ to us by turning bread and wine into magical objects. Rather, God is made present in the blessing and sharing of material objects that re-member the breaking of Christ’s own material body to form the redeemed community of the church. Augustine famously exhorted participants in the Eucharist, “be what you see, and see what you are”.
Similarly ,the Incarnation is not a veil masking divine reality, but the total emergence of the creative divine source of the world within the space and time God has created. So we should not think of this human being, Jesus, as some kind of ‘window’ onto another (divine) reality. Rather the early Fathers, like Athanasius, could argue that by the Incarnation all space and time has been consecrated by God. Faith is not just about looking beyond what we see now, it’s about seeing it in a particular way, seeing it in such a way as allows for no absolute divide between the creator and creation. This is the Christian sacramental “way of seeing”.
And it strikes me as particularly odd that theologians should ever think it appropriate to use this language of “veils” since, as was particularly important to the writer to the letter to the Hebrews, the removal of a veil (a curtain) is an image central to the Christian teaching of the atonement. In the Temple in Jerusalem, the Holy of holies was the place that housed the Mercy Seat and the Ark of the Covenant. It was viewed as the very dwelling place of God on earth. So it was separated from the people by a curtain through which only the high priest could pass. And as you may recall, three of the Gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke – tell us that at the moment of Jesus’ death that curtain was born in two. There are no more veils, no more stark separations from otherworldly reality. There is a new way of seeing.
That is a way of seeing that the writer of the letter to the Hebrews connects very closely with the idea of hope. It is this hope that also enters the inner shrine. It is this hope that is to anchor our souls. So Christians are to see the world hopefully, as a world that the Father has created, that the Son has redeemed and in which the Spirit is active, bringing about God’s purposes, in and through us.
That perhaps brings alive for us the prophecy of Isaiah that the day will come when “violence shall no more be heard in your land, devastation or destruction within your borders”. This is God’s will for our world, not least for Isaiah’s native land, so troubled today. And as people turn to God and allow themselves to become agents of God’s purposes, this hope will become more real. And it will become more real, not because of what concepts we believe in our heads, but because of the way in which we come to see the world. For, as Isaiah puts it we shall no longer see the world by the light of the sun, but by the light of the Lord himself who will be our everlasting light, our sure and steadfast hope.