Movement 123

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a. L .*. the speaker guilttripped everyone into steppin$ forward and $iving Stuart what was in their pockets Got a comment on the column? Talk to Wood at www. movement. org.ulV forum Wood is a freelance writer, living in Swansea. ln previous columns, l've talked about people's stories. l've changed the names. And, like a lot of columnists in the confessional game, l've not been averse to slipping one or two of my own stories in. You just do that. The important thing is that this particular story is not about me. I got it secondhand from the individual in question. This is my - probably slightly hazy - interpretation of a story he told me, and so the facts may well be distorted. Or rather, I really hope they are. had been attending a church for some years, which styled itself as a 'NewTestament' church. Charismatic, upbeat, hands in the air, people speaking in tongues, dancing, that sort of thing. I make no judgement on that. lf it floats your boat on the old Sea of Faith, it's fine by me. My friend - let's call him Stuart - atlantis and me Every so often they'd say how you've 'got to be blessed to be a blessing,' - they appeared to believe that you were only able to do good work for the Kingdom if you were rolling in it and happy and stuff. Stuart wasn't really happy with that. After one guest speaker had talked on the whole prosperity kick, Stuart sent a brief e-mail to the leaders of the church with his concerns. lnevitably, the reply came that Stuart didn't understand what the man was saying, and that he should think about it and pray about it a bit more. One time Stuart turned up, and it was his birthday. The sermon was about giving. The speaker got him to stand out the front, holding a collection basket, and said something like, 'ls Stuart here your Christian Brother? Do you love him? Well, it's his birthday. Come out and give him what's in your pockets.' And the speaker guilt+ripped the congregation into stepping forward and giving Stuart what was in their pockets, one by one. Stuart stood, helpless like a bunny in the headlights, as five-, ten- and twenty-pound notes rained into his pot. He couldn't give it back. He'd been given so much money that he had no idea who had given him what, and it was pointless trying to give it back. I must admit that had I been in this position, it would have been drinks on me at the pub that night, but Stuart felt really bad about having been used to guilt-trip a congregation, and so he gave the money to charity. And he started thinking about leaving the church. This is the part of the column where I break from Stuart's story for a minute to explain about 'love bombing'. That's when someone new joins up and the group makes them very welcome. They shower the newbie with affection and support, both emotional wood ingham's tales from the world of the stran$e and the christian student the new testament love bomb and material. You turn up and within a few weeks, they've offered you a membership card, and everybody at church has invited you to dinner. Which doesn't sound so bad, except that when a member of the group ceases to toe the party line in any way, they take away all that affection and support in one stroke' You get it back if you come back into the light, but if you don't, they'll never talk to you again. It was the Moonies that came up with this, but an awful lot of churches do it. They don't necessarily mean to do it - it comes naturally. Stuart's church had a lot of people who were like that. This didn't actually include the ministers, but it included enough prominent members of the congregation to make Stuart feel really uncomfortable about leaving. He'd heard a whole load of bitching directed against people who'd left the church and against the churches they'd gone to, and he began to feel it was a really big deal. The church had a big deal about authority, too. You were supposed to listen to their ministers, prophets and apostles, and if you were a member - and you had to be a signed-up member to get involved in church activities - the importance of tithing your income to the church was hammered home. So it wasn't just a question of skipping out and going somewhere else. lt was a really big deal. He spent a long time wondering whether he could go through with it. And he couldn't go quietly. People had noticed that he was edging towards the periphery. He was assigned to a housegroup. The Bible group leader turned up at Stuart's place a few times, trying to get him to attend. The group was called 'Men Sharpening Men' (no, I honestly don't think that they even realised). He decided to give the place one last chance. So he turned up one Sunday and kept a low profile, sitting right at the back. During this service, one of the church's 'prophets' stood up between songs and said that he felt Cod wanted him to encourage everyone to demonstrate their love for one another. He got down off the platform and gave the wife of one of the elders a massive hug. One of the ministers stood up and said, maybe they should all show their love for one another while the band played the next couple of songs. And if there's someone looking lonely or isolated, well, they should especially give those people hugs. Stuart, not the physically demonstrative sort at the best of times, stood, transfixed in horror, as the band began to play, and everybody in the church started to give each other warm embraces. He bolted, running a gauntlet of a half-dozen people who all wanted to hug him. A few days later, he wrote them a letter resigning his membership, and he hasn't been back since. I 24 movement
not sure what you believe? we look at the background to aspects of christian thought, doctrine and belief neglative theolo€y Negative theology ... as opposed to what? Positive theology, of course! StThomas Aquinas had a lot to say about both positive and negative theology. But Aquinas was a Roman Catholic Christian. lsn't negative theology just another term for atheism? No. Aquinas thought that negative theology (or sometimes apophatic theology) had a role to play in the discourses of Christianity. He thought that Cod could be explained positively by analogy, but that these descriptions (i.e. 'God is...') were inadequate in some ways. Hence, negative theology. So what is it? The practice of understanding Cod by what Cod is not. ln other words, when you say 'God is not a tree', you're saying what God is by stating what God is not. This method of theologising has long been used in mystical writings from across the Christian traditions, but perhaps most notably in the Eastern Orthodox church. But what's the point of it? Surely there are some things we can state positively about Cod without needing to go that far. It's likely that there are ... and that they can be understood by this approach! The Vra Negativa (Latin for 'negative way') sheds a lot of light on our assumptions about how much we can know about Cod. As the theologian Denys Turner says, 'Negative theology does not mean that we are short of things to say about Cod; it means just that everything we say of Cod falls short of him.' How so? ln this line of thinking, there's no necessity that ties us to describing Cod's essence, like you might find in a number of theological approaches that are quite prevalent today. I mean, when was the last time you heard a sermon in which the preacher refrained from making an explicit positive statement about God? Hang on a sec though ... what about Cod's revelation throughout history? lf we take that as read, then the universe must'be loaded with positive affirmations of what Cod is really like - Cod's essence. Negative theology sees our knowledge of Cod as limited to what Cod has revealed. Does Cod's historical revelation really show us Cod, or merely reveal something of Cod's purposes? lt's worth pondering. So what kinds of conclusions have these negative theologians come to? Often they address some of humanity's biggest questions in an unconventional but, some might argue, particularly profound way. The Cappadocian doctrine fior I I Fathers, who lived in the fourth century, claimed to believe in God, but did not believe that Cod existed. Similarly, the twentieth century French mystic Simone Weil decided, by using the apophatic way, that God was neither existent nor non-existent. there's no difference between God's existence and God's [onexistence in any empirical sense whv? Because she wanted to show that Cod is not a being within the world in any ordinary sense - Cod doesn't exist in any tangible way to our sense experience, as a chair or an iPod might:'To believe in God is not a decision we can make'. On the other hand, she is often defined as a Christian mystic and philosopher with no qualms about seeking Cod's presence within each one of us. But surely that's illogical! Cod must either exist or not exist. It could be suggested that there's no difference between Cod's existence and God's non-existence in any empirical sense. Meister Eckharl again, says that 'Cod is a "being transcending being and a transcending nothingness"'. Besides, it's not like there are any knock-down arguments, right? People are still arguing and thinking about all this after centuries of debate. I suppose ... but if we can't grasp God's essence or nature, how can we experience God at all? Through Cod's immanence, of course! lt is precisely because of the absoluteness of the divine transcendence that Augustine can speak of Cod as more intimate to us than we are to ourselves. What particular opportunities can negative theology afford then in our culture? There are strong mystical and apophatic traditions that run throughout Christianity's history, from the gospels and letters, through such works as The Cloud of Unknowing, right up to the present day with spiritual writers such as Thomas Merton and theologians like Karl Rahner. As a result, negative theology can perhaps still act as a necessary counter-balance to theologies that may seem to over-stretch into the realms of mystery. EM Forster called the faith 'poor little talkative Christianity'; perhaps it's time to be humble and remember that that which we cannot say is sometimes more meaningful than that which we can... I Rob Telford is an ex-Theology student from Cardiff. movement 25
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Movement 123

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