Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

So Sarah laughed

With the story of Abraham, Genesis moves from the mythological to the historical. With Abraham we step into history, as it were. This raises interesting questions about how we think the Scriptures. Many atheists and many fundamentalists, for instance, have the same problem in their approach to the Scriptures, namely, reading them literally and failing to note what they mean philosophically. Aristotle notes that poetry is more philosophical than history but that doesn’t mean that history is not philosophical or that there is no philosophy both in and of history.

After the great poetic and philosophical account of creation in Genesis 1-2, the text considers the Fall of humanity. Along with the consideration of how we are being called to account – the positives of the story of the Fall and its aftermath – Genesis is at pains to show how humanity, when left to its own devices, is pretty deadly and destructive. The story of Cain and Abel lead, ultimately, to the story of the Flood as an illustration of what ‘freedom without order’ means; namely, violence and death. The Flood is the divine response to clean up the mess that arises from human wickedness and to place our humanity and the creation as a whole upon a new foundation; the new foundation of God’s covenant signalled in the sign of the rainbow. We are reminded of God’s commitment to his creation and in so doing, too, we are reminded of our commitments to God and to one another. It is, however, always a matter of education.

Freedom without order contrasts with order without freedom which is seen in the story of the Tower of Babel in the attempt by humans to impose one language and one way of thinking and acting upon everyone. Shades of totalitarianism. It stands in direct contrast to the divinely created world in which there are diversities of cultures and languages. These mythological sections of Genesis then pass over into the historical, commencing with Abram who is renamed Abraham through his encounters with God. God’s covenant with Abraham is about the promised land and the promised son. They, in turn, belong to the powerful idea that through Abraham “all nations of the earth shall be blessed”. In other words, we arise to the idea of a universal principle through the particularities of culture and language and not at their expense.

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In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground

Ah, the curses of work and labour! There is, it seems, no escaping the reality of the Fall. It means a different relation to the world and to one another and all because of a falling out, we might say, with God occasioned by our deceit and disobedience.

We return this week after the Thanksgiving Break to consider the further consequences of the Fall in the Third Chapter of Genesis. In a way, it connects with some of the themes of thanksgiving since bread is very much an aspect of our human engagement through work with the good order of creation. It means that nothing is simply ready at hand; labour is one of the consequences of the Fall, one of the curses. And yet, in and through our labours with the good order of God’s creation, blessings are found. We can learn about what we experience. The Fall means that good and evil, which are known to God through intellect, are known to us through experience. Yet through our experience of estrangement and separation, we may come to learn intellectually and ethically about good and evil.

The so-called curses that are the fall-out of the Fall are also about a kind of falling into reason. The awareness of ourselves as self-conscious beings means our awareness not only of the otherness of God and of one another but of the natural world itself. To live requires now our self-conscious effort at the same time as there is our self-conscious awareness of our connection to the world, to the ground itself: “for out of it you were taken; you are dust and to dust shall you return”. This is not really news. The two creation accounts have already and amply chronicled our connection to the ground, to the dust of creation and to every other created thing. What is new is the idea of labour and hard work. “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.”

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And one turned back … giving thanks

Thanksgiving is more than mere courtesy, important as courtesy and consideration are. An integral feature of all of the world’s religions, the concept and act(s) of thanksgiving are altogether essential and central to the Christian understanding of things and in ways that carry over into certain aspects of the contemporary secular world.

Religion, like education in general, cannot be forced; it has very much to do with our engagement with ideas and concepts which are life-changing and transformative. There are, of course, a host of confusions and uncertainties as well as hostility and animus against ‘religion’, whatever one might mean by the term. But is ‘religion’ simply meant to be a reflection of ourselves and our assumptions and experiences? Or are there ways in which religion, like education, is often as not counter-cultural? Think for a moment about what we ‘do’ in Chapel. ‘Don’t just do something, sit there and think’, and pray. That is profoundly counter-culture in the face of a culture and age hell-bent – I use the term advisedly – on practical and measurable outcomes.

In a way, too, the concept of thanksgiving is profoundly counter-culture and in very important and corrective ways. It counters the assumptions of “the entitlement culture”, the idea that you – we – deserve all and everything that you – we – want. And far more than simple courtesy, thanksgiving is altogether about grace. It is there in the word eucharist – charis is grace. The word as whole has a specific meaning for Christians – ‘the great thanksgiving’ – referring to the central act of Christian worship, the Holy Eucharist.

And it is about an activity in us that belongs to the truth worth and dignity of our humanity and to our essential spiritual freedom. To put in terms of the IB learner profile, thanksgiving is about being reflective. It is about an attitude of mind and soul with respect to the natural world around us as well as to one another and our engagements with that world and with one another. It is profoundly spiritual and intellectual precisely because it does not take anything for granted but recognises everything and everyone as a gift. That changes our outlook and, I think, our behaviour.

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Did God say?

The amazing and world-transforming story of The Fall from Genesis 3 was read in Chapel this week along with the equally amazing and apocalyptic story from Revelation about St. Michael and All Angels. “There was war in heaven.”

The connections to the life of the School and to any educational programme worthy of the name are inescapable. We are being challenged through these Scriptural readings about the moral and ethical principles which inform our lives. In other words, these Scriptures speak directly and profoundly to our humanity regardless of our faith or non-faith commitments. They are in some sense the story of our world.

Genesis 3 is the biblical version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in the sense of providing a powerful critique of reason itself. Looked at in conjunction with the late September Feast of St. Michael and All Angels in the Christian tradition, we have a powerful commentary on the nature of our beginnings intellectually and ethically.

This is Michaelmas Term following the traditions of both Oxford and Cambridge. I think it is marvellous that our school term should begin with Angels. For it is altogether about the primacy of the intellectual which alone can redeem and perfect the physical and the material. The Angels are the pure thoughts of God in creation. To think is to think with the Angels.

But Genesis 3 reminds us of the cunning of our reason, something of which we must also be aware. Genesis 3 provides a profound and necessary critique of human reason. We are being challenged in two ways: first, not to think of reason as merely being about problem-solving and, secondly, to recognize the cunning and deceit of reason.

We need Oedipus Rex as commentary on Genesis 3 and vice-versa. Oedipus not only thought that he knew who he was but thought that his problem-solving kind of reason was the highest, the truest, if not the only form of reason. In that assumption he anticipates so much of our current world and its discontents. To reduce reason to problem-solving is to reduce reason to a tool and an instrument and to deny to its operations anything intellectual, ethical, and spiritual. Oedipus Rex and Genesis 3 counter that assumption brilliantly and effectively, if only we have ears to hear and eyes to see.

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The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground

And now for something completely different, it might seem. Another account of the creation of our humanity that seems and feels completely different from what we heard in the reading of the first chapter of Genesis. Is it contradictory or complementary? We are being challenged about how we read and think.

Genesis One presents creation as a powerful, orderly and intellectual process and ends with the creation of our humanity. “God created man” – ha’adam meaning human being generically considered and as from the ground, adamah – “in his own image (betsalmo); in the image of God (betsalem ‘elohim) he created him; male and female he created them.” It is powerful concept. Alone of all of the things of the created order, our humanity is said to be made in the image of God. An image both is and is not what it resembles. We are not God. You are not your selfie! All of us, male and female, are said to be made in God’s image. Think about how that challenges us about how we think and act towards one another. To know that you are made in God’s image is to recognise that every other human being is made in that same image.

It speaks to the special dignity of our humanity but to be made in the image of God does not mean that we are God. Both modern science and Genesis agree that nature and therefore our humanity as part of the natural order is not divine. But what does it mean to be made in God’s image? What do we know about God in the first chapter of Genesis? God speaks, commands, names, blesses, hallows, makes and makes freely, looks and beholds, seeks goodness, shows care and concern, sustains and provides. Somehow these verbs suggest some of the features which belong to our humanity. They speak to our rationality.

Our humanity, too, is given dominion over every other living thing. The idea of dominion has been a troubling concept and one which has been often misconstrued. If we assume that it means the power to dominate, manipulate, and exploit nature and, by extension, other human beings, then we become the bullies of creation. Perhaps that has been a feature of modernity and one which worries us, as it should. Yet that expresses a very limited and destructive form of reason that assumes that our rationality is primarily instrumental, as essentially directed to practical actions and outcomes but as nothing in itself. Reason becomes merely a tool, a means to an end. That misses the deeper meaning of dominion. The word (at least in its Latin form) refers to the dominus, to the Lord, to what God does as the model and truth of what humans are to do and to be. It is not about bullying and lording it over everything and everyone. The Genesis account emphasises how our humanity is connected to everything else in the good order of creation as well as having a special dignity within it. That is surely the main point, a dignity that requires our respect for everything and everyone else.

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And God said … and God saw that it was good

It is a recurring refrain that frames the first Chapter of The Book of Genesis and opens us out to the mystery of existence. As Meister Eckhart (early 14^th c.), following a long tradition of philosophical inquiry into the nature of things, notes, “creation is the conferring of existence”, following the pagan neo-Platonic philosopher Proclus’ proposition that “all beings” – every that exists – “proceeds from one First Cause” (5^th c.). Heady stuff but that is really what the account of creation in the first Chapter of Genesis is really all about. It is about the intellectual principle upon which all knowing and being depend. Wow.

How do we think nature, and, indeed, how can we think at all? Is there only one way to think the natural world and, by extension, our place within it? Is ‘modern science’, whatever we mean by that, the only way to think nature? Is ‘religion’, whatever we mean by that, the only way to think about reality? It would be a huge mistake, I think, to suppose that modern science negates religion or that religion negates modern science; in short, that there is only one way to think nature, only one way to think period. In a way, Genesis opens us out to the very assumptions that underlie the possibilities of our thinking and knowing anything. The Genesis account understood philosophically identifies a principle essential to our activity as students and learners. We can only think and come to know anything if things are in principle knowable.

We begin with God, with what can be called an intellectual principle. Everything is in God and comes from God. The great Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, writing in the time of Jesus, and drawing directly upon Plato and Aristotle, emphasizes “that in all existing things there must be an active cause … and that the active cause is the intellect of the universe,” echoing Plato’s idea of a world soul. Creation is in the mind of God first, as it were, and only then made perceptible to the senses; the sensible world as modeled upon the intelligible idea. The world has its origins in “that good which is founded in truth”. For the metaphysical traditions primacy is given to formal cause in order to explain the ‘what-it-is’ of things, not material, efficient, or even final cause. As Boethius (6^th c) expresses it, God “bear[s] the beauteous world in [his] mind and form[s] it to be like that image.”

Genesis 1 is not science however much it belongs to the possibilities of science, both ancient and modern. It is a poetic and philosophical way of thinking. It presents us with an ordering intellectual principle. “When creation was begun, when God spake and it was done,” as the hymn we sang on Monday and Tuesday puts it. God speaks creation into being. But “unlike us,” as Eckhart notes, “God’s speaking is his making and also unlike us his speaking is the cause of the entire work and its parts.” After all, we too only come after.

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In the beginning God… In the beginning was the Word

And so it begins, again and yet again. For as T.S. Eliot puts it “in my beginning is my end” even as “in my end is my beginning”. There is far more to beginnings than a linear sequence, first this, then that. In a profounder sense, there is a philosophical, a theological beginning that is about ends and purposes, about truth and meaning that we can only enter into and begin to learn more and more about the mysteries of life.

To be sure, we are at the beginning of a new school year, the beginning of term. And for students and faculty alike there is all of the excitement and anxiety that comes with expectations and wonder. We make a beginning. Yet we can only do so because of the far more radical nature of beginnings and ends which are signalled in the Scripture readings for the first two Chapel services.

It has become a tradition to have the Head Boy and Head Girl read sequentially Genesis 1.1-5 and John 1.1-5. It takes no great wisdom on my part to note that these readings complement and comment upon one another. They are some of the profoundest and most philosophical passages in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures and they open us out to the mystery of God and the created order which is clearly and emphatically intelligible in principle. It is not science but the presupposition upon which science and all our studies depend. In the beginning God…in the beginning the Word.

In the beginning God what? God created. Begin with God and everything else comes after. We begin with God who is without beginning, eternal, and everything begins to be seen in God and from God. This, too, is John’s great insight. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.” And as in a comment upon Genesis, John’s Prologue adds, “all things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” This too has its complement in Islam. The “Originator [Badi] of the heavens and earth. When He decrees a thing, He says only ‘Be!’ And it is” (Qur’an 2:117).

Chapel is an integral part of the educational programme at King’s-Edgehill School. It belongs at once to the School’s honouring of its religious and philosophical origins – Christian and Anglican – but just as importantly to the role and place of religion in education, something which is often overlooked and ignored in the dogmatic forms of our secular culture. The point is rather simple. There is not a single area of study or discipline of learning that is not profoundly shaped and informed by religious and philosophical thought. The task in Chapel is to engage seriously and respectfully with the questions which religion philosophically raises.

Students and faculty come from all manner of cultures and places religiously and non-religiously. Chapel is not simply about people’s individual faith or non-faith commitments precisely because of that obvious plurality of cultures. It is about speaking faithfully out of a Christian perspective but in ways that reflect upon and engage the different aspects of our world in all of its confusions and glory and particularly with the different religions of the world such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism as well as the forms of secular atheism.

It is primarily about respect for another way of thinking than what belongs to the distresses and strains of contemporary culture, what Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, refers to as “the currents in our peculiar contemporary society” such as “an instrumentalizing and managerial spirit, an anxious shrinking of language into cliché and formula, a nervousness around emotional risk and exposure that is balanced by profound and fluent sentimentality, a desperate not-knowing-how-to-cope faced with a nightmare world of mass atrocity that sits alongside the acquisitive fevers of our economy.” Quite a comprehensive description! O brave new world – with all of the allusions to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Huxley’s dystopia.

At the very least, we endeavour to engage and to think humbly and critically, responsibly and respectfully, not presuming to have the answers but refusing to despair of thinking ethically and intellectually.

David Curry

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