What is the Gospel?

Here is a talk I gave at my church, Watershed Charlotte. The topic was on 'What is the Gospel?' As in, what do I personally understand the Gospel (the good news) to be?

The word ‘Gospel’ first conjures up for me what I consider to be the American evangelical meaning. That being, that the Gospel (the good news) is that Jesus died for you, for your sins, and that if you believe in him, you will have eternal life (which is to say you will earn your heavenly reward). It’s all about that utopia we will reach at the closing of the day - the pie in the sky when you die by and by.

The reason that this is the first association that I have with the word, despite my being British, is because as I said last week, my first degree was in theology, and it was at the London School of Theology – a theologically conservative Bible College in the UK and very much Evangelical. Now, American Evangelicalism and British Evangelicalism are very similar, a largely overlapping Venn diagram. The biggest difference is when it comes to politics; obviously American and British politics are very different, and conservative theology doesn’t really map onto conservative politics in quite the same way that it does here in the States. A lot of my friends who are conservative evangelicals and politically left wing, and that’s far more normal in the UK.

So, I remember being at my conservative Bible college in London, with friends, and thinking about (or speculating about) a variant of this question that I asked. Was living a Christian life or being a Christian worth it, if you knew for a fact that there was no reward in the end? My friends and I concluded at the time that yes it would still be worth it, though I don’t recall anyone articulating any justification for this, it just seemed like the right answer. I wonder now, looking back on it, if we weren’t in way trying to justify something to ourselves, that even if we were completely wrong concerning some of those larger metaphysical questions, wrong concerning this larger meta-picture that one buys into to be an Evangelical Christian, even if we’re wrong about all that, we’re still doing something worthwhile; it is all still worth it. A better question, perhaps, would have been “if there is no afterlife, then why should one be a Christian at all?” And I don’t think that I or any of my friends at the time would have had any answer to that.

I said last week, that in a way our questions are never really resolved, because there is no way of getting any definitive answer. We transcend our questions, we don’t resolve them. Our questions change. The reality of Heaven was once a very important question for me. I wanted to know if it was real, and if it was real, how I might ensure that I would end up there. The Evangelical formula of the sinner’s prayer offered a kind of comforting simplicity: by just praying a prayer like this - Forgive me, I know you that died for my sins, and rose again, I want to follow you as my Lord and Saviour - that ticks the box and gets me into heaven. But then I wondered about everyone else. And I went through a gradual evolution with that. At first I thought there was a literal Hell full of all those burning unrepentant sinners, but this seemed unnecessarily cruel to me, especially coming from a supposedly all-loving God. For a while I was able to just let the question hang in the air, I’d have said something like ‘who are we to know, we’re to trust in God that everything will unfold according to his plan’. I toyed with an idea that Hell was not so much a literal place, in which people were being tortured, but more like being in darkness or being cut off. That seemed a little more comforting.

It was hard to imagine that Heaven could be all that Heavenly if I knew at the very same time I was up there chilling with the angels, that Uncle Larry was being poked with a pitchfork down there, in some realm of outer darkness… I remember in one class being taught an alternative model which appealed to me. The idea being that our life, and our consciousness, and our awareness are all gifts from God. It related to the Genesis story in which God said, “do not eat from the tree of knowledge, because if you do, you will die.” And so if we remain faithful to God, he will ultimately undo the curse of Adam, and we will live, we will have eternal life. But if we don’t, corruption will get us in the end and we will die, we will REALLY die. We will be snuffed out of all existence. There will be no suffering, no darkness, no nothing. And I thought that was much better.

But more questions arose, and more questions bothered me. The whole cosmic system just seemed so arbitrary. God was beyond all reckoning, and I was finite and limited in so many ways, and yet just because I had a particular thought, just because I was able to convince myself of one thing as opposed to another, somehow that had these huge cosmic implications. One thought may give me eternal life, while another may damn me to Hell.

As I mentioned last week, there’s the problem of viewing Heaven (or Salvation) through this very Western Individualistic lens. Whenever we think about Heaven or Salvation we’re always thinking in these atomistic terms. It’s all about ‘my’ salvation, ‘my’ choice, and ‘my’ experience. But knowing the history, the idea that an individual with their own distinct agency will freely choose for themselves to believe x or y, is in the grand scheme of things a modern conception. Throughout most of history, we believed what we believed, not because we picked it, but because within our culture, or within our context, that is just what was expected of you. Or you would subordinate your own agency (your choice) to someone in authority, the Lord of the Manor, the chief of the village, the head of your household, or whatever… But not even subordinate, because that suggests you’re freely choosing to comply with this authority, but it’s not really even that. It’s not choice at all, it’s just the way it is. We all have unexamined assumptions, things that we believe that we don’t even question as to why we believe them. And for most of history, religious belief was in that category. It was just the reality of things.

And so, paralleling this there’s the idea that if we’re conceptualizing heaven in the West in these very individualistic terms, what might it mean to think about Heaven in non-individualistic terms, or in non-ego centric terms (meaning terms which are not all about my own individual conscious experience)? And out of that you get ideas like, in Heaven it won’t be my own individual self which is having an individual experience of some Eden-like realm, skating a half-pipe or whatever, but rather my individual consciousness will cease, and be absorbed into the divine, or into God, in some inexplicable way. Surely God’s infinite love is always greater than humanity’s (or man’s) capacity for evil. Even the greatest evil must pale in comparison. And yet you would hold the pettiness of man against him for all eternity… As I’ve said, you don’t resolve such questions, you transcend them.

I wasn’t actually going to talk about Heaven at all this evening. I was prompted to do so by last week’s discussion. I thought it was probably useful to do a kind of biography of belief on a specific area, because, (and I’ll say it again), it’s not that our questions are answered, its that our questions change, or we transcend them. And so, the Heaven or Salvation questions just don’t occupy any space in my mind anymore, and yet I do remember just how critical such questions once were, and so I’ve imagined my way back into the journey I took to arrive at where I am now. And my arrival here has of cource nothing to do with finding an answer.

I think, in a strange sort of way, when you’re not seeking THE answer anymore, when all you’re doing is a kind of ariel observation of the landscape of belief, when you’re just looking at it in a disinterested way, you’re able to appreciate that all the answers are in a certain sense true. Because any answer has been able to satisfactorily resolve the question for some individual, and therefore it is in a sense correct, as it has worked for them. You could say it is functionally correct. It has given them a workable framework to operate within society (or the world). Your personality and character may suit a particular functionally correct answer. But sometimes our intuition or thinking can lead us down a path of enquiry towards an answer which is both intellectually satisfactory while at the same time being functionally less useful to us (or perhaps even damaging).

So, in my understanding of the Gospel (what is the Good News), Heaven is not a significant part of that; I’m basically agnostic on the Heaven question. For me the Gospel is not about what’s up there, or what’s next, it’s about what’s here and now. As a way into this I’m going to talk about the parable of the good Samaritan. As you all know, in the Gospel of Luke Jesus tells the story of a man who was left for dead on the side of the road; he was set upon by robbers. A priest came by, and seeing him crossed over to the other side of the road to avoid him, and eventually the good Samaritan comes along and saves the day. But focusing on the priest - the reason the priest crossed by on the other side of the road has to do with Jewish purity laws. If he came into contact with someone spiritually unclean (i.e. someone bleeding), he would not have been able to enter the temple without going through the necessary purification ritual. So, the point that Jesus is making in telling this parable is that the obviously right thing to do, that being to help the man in need, was being overlooked for the sake of religiosity, or religious expediency. This is a very stark example, but one could imagine this happening in much subtler ways, in which a focus on religiosity in general gets in the way of what should be done now, or gets in the way of perhaps even being able to recognise the need before you.

And I think the normative American Evangelical Christian approach to heaven could cause a similar sort of conflict, as it shifts the focus away from what can (or should) be done now, towards getting into heaven when you die. An extreme example of this may be the desire to “save” people over feeding people. Where do your priorities lie? But you could imagine this in subtler ways, just a shift in emphasis, in which someone feels that because they have this eternal assurance that they’re good in this very cosmic sense, that they’re “right with God”, therefore, they have nothing more to prove. Because indeed, they don’t have anything to prove. They become blinkered to real needs, real hurt, and unable to see what is possible.

And so, when we think about the “what is the Gospel” question and look at it through the lens of the Good Samaritan parable, you get something very practical. The Gospel is not about looking the part, it’s not about religiosity, it’s not even about right belief, or lofty metaphysical ideas (not about where your soul will ultimately end up). Rather, it’s about recognising and responding to need here and now. The difficulty here is whether we actually possess this ability to not only recognise need, but also to respond to that need in such a way that will ultimately be helpful. I’m not sure thinking about the ‘what is the Gospel’ question through this singular Good Samaritan lens is entirely satisfactory as it leaves a lot out, elements of mysticism and spirituality which I wouldn’t want to ignore, but I think this parable can be helpful in setting us the right direction, but it’s not without its pitfalls.

So, in reaction against Evangelicalism people look for a Christianity which is more grounded in “reality”. They’re reacting against a Christianity which is propositional, which is all about a series of asserted positions, a Christianity which has formulary conceptions of the gospel – if you just tick these boxes, if you just pray the sinner’s prayer, you’ll put a smile on Jesus’ face. Rather, they want a Christianity which is about recognising true need, and doing the good, doing the most loving thing. And there’s an idealism in that, possibly a naïve idealism. I think it’s aspirationally positive, but it is far easier said than done. It requires one to not only recognise true need, but also to know what is good, and to be able to implement that in such a way which is ultimately positive, or beneficial. I think this can create more problems than may at first be apparent.

So, a progressive Christian reframing of the Gospel (which is kind of the natural place to end up as one makes this reflexive move away from evangelicalism) goes like this - that Heaven is not so much a place out there or up there, but rather it is a state of being right here on earth, and hell, likewise, is a state of being here on earth, and many people are in it. In these terms, the Gospel is understood to be a process of expanding this heavenly domain on earth and liberating people from their hells. This often takes on a socio-economic/political dimension: challenging structural injustice, championing the plight of the poor and the marginalised so that together they can seek after and realise the Kingdom of God on earth.

Returning to the good Samaritan story - the man who was left for dead on the road was in “hell”, and the priest could have reached down, and literally pulled him up and out of it, but he chose not to. And so you could juxtapose the conservative and progressive Christian gospels as both being about utopias – one is about a utopia that we’re ultimately trying to get into (the conservative), and the other is about the utopia that we’re trying to create on earth (the progressive). There are pitfalls to this as I’ve suggested. But let’s just assume that this duality is correct, that there is the conservative way (which we’re probably reacting against) and then this progressive way (which we like.) The next question would have to be that if we’re trying to create a heaven on earth, or a Kingdom on Earth, what would that Kingdom look like? What would this Eutopia we want to build look like? What are the Ethics which would underpin this new Kingdom?

In these terms, the ‘What is the Gospel’ question becomes ‘the Kingdom’ (the Kingdom and the Gospel are synonymous): the Kingdom is that which we are all participating in manifesting together on earth. We manifest it when we live it, in the Gandhi sense, when we embody it. We must “Be the change [we] you wish to see in the world.” If the Kingdom is love, then we are to be instruments of that love, if it is justice, we are to be the instruments of that justice, if it is peace, if it is joy, if it is kindness, and so on… But the Greatest of these is Love.

 “…if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.” 1 Cor 13:2 (NRSVA)

“And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” 1 Cor 13:13 (NRSVA)

So, progressive Christians will routinely equate Love with God. They’re often used synonymously. In the same way that the Kingdom is understood to be that which expresses the power of God’s love on earth, love then is the foundation of Kingdom ethics. Everything the Kingdom is - justice, peace, joy, kindness, whatever - are all really just expressions of that love. That’s the idea right?

Now nowhere in theology is this love-centric ethic better expressed than in Joseph Fletcher’s ‘Situation Ethics.’ Fletcher was an American theologian, and ‘Situation Ethics’ was his most important work, which was published in 1966. The thesis of it was that we should be striving to maximize love in all instances. It is a consequentialist argument, meaning that it doesn’t really matter what you do to arrive at this end in which love is being maximized, it just matters that you get there. Which is to say, the ends justify the means. Remember I’m talking about this because we’re trying to establish what the ethic should be which underpins the Kingdom.

So if we return again to the good Samaritan story, the Situation Ethic reading of this would be that it doesn't really matter if the priest breaks purity laws, or any laws really. Only the maximising of love matters, and therefore the only thing which mattered in that story was meeting the needs of the suffering man, which the priest failed to do. Because those are the actions which would have been required to maximize love. So, this ethic is built upon the foundation of what is called utilitarianism, a philosophical doctrine which is very similar to this ‘maximizing of love’ ethic, but instead it sought to always maximize happiness (or pleasure) depending on definition.

Utilitarianism was developed by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 19th Century, and his pupil, who was the politician and influential member of the British Liberal Party, John Stuart Mill. A lot of the foundational principles of liberalism in the Western world were developed by John Stuart Mill, and his wife who was also a philosopher, Harriet Taylor Mill. They were very much an intellectual power couple. The principle of Utilitarianism over the course of its development became slowly more sophisticated, as it tried to address what is its fundamental flaw, namely, that it is very difficult (perhaps impossible) to calculate in the long run what will actually maximize happiness. Because how can you possibly know? What may maximize happiness in the short term, may do the exact opposite and cause immense suffering in the long term. We’re all very familiar with this; there are advantages which are reaped when we delay gratification. This gets very tricky, because what our common sense tells us is the most loving thing to do, which seems obvious to us, may not actually in the long run result in that at all.

To address this problem, the Utilitarians made a distinction between what they thought of as higher and lower forms of pleasure. They literally made calculations, which became slowly more complicated as they attempted to account for all the possible variables, all the short-term and long-term variables. Ultimately however, one has to conclude I think, that unless we were to possess an omniscient (God’s eye) view on all of reality we cannot ever ultimately know the complete outcome of any single ethical decision. And of course, the same criticism can be made of Fletcher’s ‘Situation Ethics’. What may subjectively in any given instance appear to be the most loving act, may in fact in the larger frame of things do more harm. Our common sense, or our gut sense, may be doing us a great disservice.

So, the question is, what does this Kingdom look like? What are the ethics which should underpin this Kingdom? This becomes a very difficult question for us to answer when one thinks in these terms about what the ethics should be which underpin the Kingdom, which is to say, should they be based on a consequentialist model, such as ‘Situation Ethics’? This position is often contrasted with the alternative, which is the virtue ethics position.

So, as I’ve said, ‘Situation Ethics’ is all about the ends justifying the means. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as love is maximized to the greatest possible extent in the end. Virtue Ethics says it is all about the means. It’s basically the exact opposite. Let the ends worry about themselves, what matters is that you do what is “right” now. Whatever that means. And this is the more conservative position – just do what is right, just follow the rules - this is principle based, rule-based Christianity. The ultimate virtue ethic example which is often given concerns Anne Frank (who documented in her diary her experience of hiding from the Nazis during their occupation of the Netherlands. She was eventually caught and sent to a death camp). Paraphrasing her diary, she says something to the effect of, “if a Nazi officer asked me where my sister was, ‘Is she upstairs‽’ I would reply with the truth, yes she is, because lying is wrong, lying is a sin”. This is the ultimate virtue ethic position - just do what is right and allow the ends to play out as they will. Don’t try to game the system.

This relates to the trolley problem, which you’ve probably come across at some point, the classic philosophical thought experiment. If a train is heading down a track towards five people, but you have the opportunity (or the power) to pull a leaver, and redirect the train towards one person, should you pull the leaver? The consequentialist or ‘Situation Ethics’ person will say, yes, you should definitely pull it! because one person dying is better than 5 people dying. This outcome is the best; it most maximizes love. But the virtue ethicist would say, no, because by acting, by pulling that leaver, one is inserting themselves into the situation, and choosing to commit murder. You’re playing God. When I told my wife I was going to cover this, she said that there is a character in The Good Place, which I haven’t seen, who goes over this, so you may know it from that. Anyway, there are a lot of different types of virtue ethics, because it depends on what ethic you want to hold up as the gold standard to follow.

The fundamental problem here with the ‘just do what is right’ ethic is that it depends upon what that right is. Whose “right” are we talking about? It would be impossible to come up with a list of fundamental principles which could serve as a universal, or pan-cultural list of rules or principles. It’s just not possible to determine that. A conservative Christian might say, well what is right should be determined by what the Bible says is right. But what does the Bible say is right? Ultimately, what the Bible says is right becomes a matter of what I, the person in a position of power, says it says is right. An individual in power, or a dominant cultural group, determining for everyone else what is right. This is not to say, of course, that the Bible doesn’t have value, I’m just very uncomfortable when it’s used in this way, when it’s used to crash through / override your own perceptions, your own intuitions, your own rationality. And I think people gravitate towards places like Watershed, because they’re trying to get away from that, this kind of top-down authoritarian implementation of the Bible, a Bible being weaponized against people. Instead, the Bible is there to be dialogued with, argued with, disagreed with, and imagined alongside, and this process is what facilitates spiritual formation.

Okay, so let’s just go back to the Kingdom idea for a second. As I said, the shift which usually takes place as we move from Conservative to Progressive forms of Christianity is that we’re moving away from a Heaven or a Kingdom which is to be our reward for being good and faithful servants when we die, towards a Kingdom which we’re trying to bring forth now. The question becomes, what does this Kingdom look like? What are the Ethics which underpin this Kingdom? And as I’ve tried to demonstrate that is a very fraught question. Whichever ethic you’re building it upon has fundamental flaws baked into it. Whenever there is an attempt to impose one person’s vision for the Kingdom on another there is almost always harm caused. I went through, last week, America’s rich history of suicide/murder cults. This is what a cult is - it’s one person’s vision of the Kingdom being imposed upon a community of people. Or there are political expressions of this: communism is a version of this, it is a vision of the Kingdom (although in this case a secular vision) being imposed upon an entire nation.

As I said last week, I was a minister in the UK, first in the Church of England, and then in the Unitarian Church. And in the last year I was in the UK, before moving here to Charlotte, I did my master’s degree in Jungian Psychology, also called Depth Psychology, or Analytical Psychology. I gravitated towards this masters program because I was very taken with the spiritual implications of Jungian Psychology. It helped me to move beyond some of the conflicting dualities in my own thinking at the time, some of which I’ve just articulated. Jung offered a kind of way forward. So, a very quick introduction: Carl Jung was a Swiss-German Psychiatrist, prominent in the first half of the 20th century. His father was a Swiss Reformed Church pastor, and there was an expectation that Carl Jung would do the same and become a pastor himself. But he didn’t. he went to university and became a psychiatrist and then psychoanalyst. He eventually teamed up with Sigmond Freud. Jung was a pupil of Freud’s until they parted ways. The reason for their parting of ways was complex, but it basically came down to spirituality. This is a simplification, but Freud thought that all religion was just a silly illusion, just us trying to satisfy immature, childish needs. Whereas Jung thought there was a lot of value in religious traditions, that religion could offer profound insights into the core of the human condition. Religion has, as it were, co-evolved alongside humanity, and therefore it must speak to the very essence of what we are. We are spiritual beings by nature.

The most important aspect of Jung’s psychology is his understanding of the human psyche. So, for Jung, we have our conscious awareness - literally anything you are conscious of right now - then beneath that we have all this content within our psyche which we are not aware of right now - our unconscious. And there are layers to this unconsciousness. If I asked, what did you do for Christmas? You can probably immediately recall that. This is material coming up out of your unconscious into your conscious awareness. Some unconscious material is readily available, but most is not. A lot of time this may just manifest as feelings. We take an immediate disliking to someone for example, but we can’t really say why. There is some unconscious material there which we are completely unaware of, which is shaping our perceptions. There is an internal conflict at play. Think of the person you most dislike, think about what it is that you most dislike about them, and you’ve probably just identified what you most dislike about yourself.

At the deepest levels of our unconscious is material which we didn’t even accidently put there. It’s material we’ve inherited, much like instincts, that humanity largely shares in common, that is held by us all collectively. There’s a kind of pattern at this deepest level of the psyche which amounts to a default way of operating which we’re constantly falling into or aligning ourselves with, and we’re unaware that we’re doing it. And it’s not a bad thing. In fact, if we pull too vehemently against these default patterns within the depths of our psyche, we can cause ourselves harm.

And so, what does this pattern within the depths of our psyche look like? It looks like religion. Why? Because as I said humanity has co-evolved with religion, with mythology. Our psyches have been shaped by it. Religion echoes our collective unconscious, and our collective unconscious echoes religion, which is why you get similar tropes, similar patters within religion the world over, even if those religions have emerged independently of one another. There’s no cultural cross-contamination.

So, what Jungian psychology is then, is a process of identifying this material within the unconscious psyche, and then integrating it into a larger conception of who you are. You’re much bigger than the mask you present to the world. You’re much bigger than your own internal thought world. You’re much bigger than the pain that you’ve suppressed in order to function within the world, or appear to function. We contain multitudes.

The parable of the Good Samaritan does not really speak to how we should be in the world, rather, it speaks to a process which is continually unfolding within us every day. We are the wounded man left on the side of the road. We are the priest ignoring ourselves, this part of us, which is allowing preconceived notions, or ideology, to justify a form of self-abuse. But (and this is the Good News), we can also be the Good Samaritan to ourselves. Within the depths of our psyche, within some unknown part of ourselves, in some despised part of ourselves we can discover the pearl of great price. So, that is my Gospel – that we can be our own Good Samaritan, and that everything else flows out from that, everything is a consequence of us first being our own healer. Nothing can be imposed from above. We can have guides along our way, but ultimately it must come from within.

So, where is the Kingdom of God? As Luke 17:21 is sometimes translated, ‘The Kingdom of God is within you’. There’s a journey to be taken, a process of cultivating interior harmony, a journey towards this Kingdom within. These externalized conceptions of the Kingdom are always necessarily narrow in scope, they’re always lacking, they can never take into consideration the full depths of our humanity. And as a result of that there is always harm being done, most obviously, often to innocent bystanders on the side-lines.

You’ve probably heard the trope that the people who have the most screwed up kids are therapists, or pastors, or politicians, there is some to truth to this. What do these people have in common? There’re often focused on manifesting an externalized vision of the Kingdom, their own vision, or an ideology which has captured them. They’re trying to impose this narrow vision. Their focus is top down – not on what is within, and so, instead of finding one’s salvation in those hidden aspects of themselves, rather, those hidden aspects (or shadows) are woven into what they do. Harm is caused which goes unexamined. This is the case with so many things. Anyone who presents to the world a very well-polished image of themselves are often the most insecure people, damaged, but so wrapped up in this vision they’re presenting to the world, so invested in their mask, that they fall under the illusion that that is who they are, the mask is who they are. When one focuses in on the external in this way it’s always a recipe for disaster. Virtue signaling works in the same way. It’s not about personal growth, it’s about cultivating an external image, what you present to the world. Its skin deep, and shallow.

The Gospel of Thomas is one of the extra-canonical books, probably written around the same time as the other gospels, maybe a little later. Maybe between John and the other three. Thomas is a book which is mostly comprised of sayings from Jesus, and there’s a passage in it which sums up basically everything I’ve said this evening. This is saying number 70, which goes like this: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” To paraphrase, if you do this interior work and explore your own hidden depths, you’ll find that pearl of great price, the Kingdom within, your own Salvation, and you’ll have something to offer to a world in pain. But if you do not, you will put yourself in hell, and inadvertently you’ll put others in Hell too.

So, as I said, that is basically what I see as the Gospel – it’s a process of transformation which unfolds when we bring aspects of our unconsciousness (aspects of our unknown selves) into conscious awareness. Some of that will feel very personal (well it will all feel personal), but in an odd kind of way, the more personal you go, the deeper you go, the more universal it becomes. As I said, at the deepest levels of the unconscious there is a collective dimension. There is a difficulty in prescribing how one should go about doing this. That requires you to listen to yourself, to know yourself. Carl Jung was very into dream analysis – the idea being that when we sleep all this unconscious material is bubbling up and finding expression in our dreams, and by meditating upon or thinking about the imagery or patterns which show up, we’re able to uncover aspects our hidden self, and in this way we’re becoming aware of ourselves.

But it doesn’t need to be that. It concerns following passions, what makes you feel more alive, exploring what resonates with you, particularly those things which have a kind of primordial (or pre-history) dimension to them. So exploring religion and mythology can be a way into ourselves. As can nature, art, movement, running, play, meditation, yoga, story, relationships, community, animals, music, the stars, spirituality, food, imagination, silence, and so on… The Gospel is that you should reach out to your suffering self.