What is Biblical Truth

Yesterday I was strolling around the internet and came upon an interview with Richard Dawkins.  For those of you who don’t know Dawkins, he is a big name in the religion debunking business and what I could call the cult of atheism in popular social media today.  The title of the interview, which says a lot about Dawkins, is Outgrowing God: Richard Dawkins in Conversation and can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Sf2eNVWVs.

Now from my observation of Dawkins, his approach is to set up straw dogs of fundamentalist religious beliefs so that he can make a splash of knocking them down.  In this case, Dawkins was describing a discussion two people were having about the creation story in Genesis and disagreeing about whether Adam and Eve were tempted by an apple or a fig.  Dawkins dismissed this out of hand and stated his concern was that the Garden of Eden story never happened implying that the details of the story didn’t matter.

As it happened, this was a great example of what I was preaching about yesterday at St. Alban’s Anglican Church in Souris PEI.  Dawkins uses the facts of the biblical account as a straw dog to try and destroy people’s belief in God.  The Gospel Reading for the day was the account in Mark of Jesus feeding 4000 men with a few loaves of bread and a few small fish.  I believe that when dealing with miracle accounts in the bible, it is not constructive to engage in issues of facts i.e., did the events in the biblical account happen the way they are recorded.  Rather, I think that we can find common ground in why these accounts - these stories are part of our scriptural heritage.  In other words, what is the message in these stories that are important and necessary for our understanding of who Jesus is and how God works in the lives of the people in the bible and in our lives today.

St. Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians this way of understanding those things which God gives us including an approach to scripture, “Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are discerned spiritually.”  If we approach the accounts of miracles spiritually – as a gift of God’s Spirit we can begin to understand what these miracle stories mean for us.

With that let us see what the spiritual message is for us in this account of the feeding of the multitude.  The account tells us that Jesus began with seven loaves of bread and a few small fish.  There is not a lot to work with in in terms of food for such a large number of people.  However, with this beginning, they are fed – we can assume they were filled to the point of their appetites were probably more than satisfied.   In fact, there was more than what they had to start with.  From seven loaves and a few fish they ended up with seven baskets of leftovers – I wonder who got to take some of that home?  We can look at the number seven and if we investigate this, we find that seven is a number which signifies perfection or completion.  There is the seven days of creation and the seven seals in the book of Revelation for example.  We could say from this that the followers of Jesus were completely fed with spiritual food.  Those followers and by implication, we are offered by Jesus, food for our souls which will completely satisfy us.

This is reminiscent of the account in the Gospel of John in which Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well:

Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’

Jesus gives to that Samaritan woman and to the four thousand people gathered to hear him the bread of life and the water of life.  If we eat that bread and drink that water we will be fed spiritually.  Our spirit will never again be thirsty in a dry and barren land and will never be spiritually hungry.  Therefore, let us follow Jesus for he offers us the bread of life to eat and he offers us the water of eternal life to drink.

May you be blessed to receive the bread of life to eat and he offers us the water of eternal life to drink on your journey.

The Spiritual Journey

On Saturday Lorna and I were at the funeral for the mother of a friend here in P.E.I.  It was a Roman Catholic funeral in the R.C. church in Souris.  The funeral was well done and the liturgy was very similar to the Anglican B.A.S. liturgy so it was fairly easy for us to follow along and join in to the responses.  However, there was no bulletin and was difficult for some Anglican parishioners who attend our local Anglican church as we use the old prayer book; the Book of Common Prayer. 

That being said the homily was very thoughtful and one point which particularly resonated with me was the assurance by the priest that the deceased has come from her heavenly home when she entered this life and had now returned to her heavenly home.  I agree wholeheartedly with this understanding of life.  We come from God and will return to God when our time on this earth has run its course.  It is that journey which we are all on that is our calling.  A quote from T.S. Eliot sums it up very well:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

The bible is actually the story of our journey of being with God in the beginning—the Garden of Eden and our journey and eventually returning to that home—the New Jerusalem as shown in the Book of Revelation.  The story of our first parents began in the Garden of Eden paradise where our progenitors were one with the heavenly father.  They walked with “Him” in the cool of the evening.  They were naked i.e. without any personas and were unashamed.  They were in effect in union with God.  Once they became aware of themselves as separate from God i.e. ate of the knowledge of good and evil, they were, in effect, expelled from Paradise. 

The rest of the bible is an account of humanities’ journey of a growing relationship with God.  This goes through the stages of development from a childlike relationship to the teenage rebellion into a more mature yet still imperfect relationship.  The journey goes from union to separation to a new union (reunion).   Indeed, Jesus recapitulates this journey in the parable of the Prodigal Son. 

This journey has been explored and developed by Carl Jung and his followers as the journey of the creation of the ego (the individual semi-conscious person) and separation from God, which Jung represents as the Self or the God-image in our psyches, to a potential reunion with God which Jung calls individuation.  It can be illustrated as follows:

Figure 1 The ego is in union with God

Figure 2 The ego becomes partially separated from union with God 

Figure 3 The person is individuated and in full relation with God. 

Jung was a psychologist and his theory is one of psychological development.  However, it is equally applicable to understand the development and maturing of the relationship between human beings and our creator.  As pictured in figure 2 the ego has the illusion it is in charge and wants to maintain control of how we are in the world.  Manifestations of this include ego-centric people and to more extreme states such as full blown narcissism.  The ego believes that everything, including God, should be in service of the ego i.e. the individual as he or she perceives the world.  The journey is to move to the position as pictured in figure 3 where the person is in service to God and in a new spiritual and psychological union with God.

I understand the journey to be one in which we have the potential of discovering more fully the people God intended and intends us to be when we were created. 

I had Sunday off from official duties and Lorna and I attended St. Alban’s together.  It is nice to be able to worship with her in that way.  Consequently there is no sermon this week.  Blessing on you journey. 

Greg