What is a Christian?
Professor Geering is put to the question
Professor Lloyd Geering is no heretic — or so the Presbyterian General Assembly ruled in 1967. But if he had been unlucky enough to live in the fifteenth' century instead of in the permissive end of the twentieth, and was silly enough to take his holidays in Spain, there is no doubt that Torquemada and his pals of the Inquisition would have made short work of him — and not only for being a Protestant.
For the sort of disbeliefs which Professor Geering openly confesses, the sinister clerics of the Spanish Inquisition would have barbecued him for the good of his soul — after first tenderising him a little with the rack and other instruments of persuasion. Professor Geering, former principal of Knox Theological College, admits that he does not believe some of the central claims of the New Testament story. The crucial things in the gospels which set Jesus of Nazareth apart from other great teachers and philosophers are the supernatural events, particularly his virgin birth as the son of God made man, his miraculous resurrection, reappearance to his followers, ascent to heaven, and — arising from that, so to speak — the promise of eternal life for those who believe in him.
These events defy logic; they call for a leap of faith. Lloyd Geering does not believe them, but he still calls himself a Christian. Indeed, he is still a minister of the Presbyterian Church. He has just retired after 12 years as head of religious studies at Victoria University, Wellington, and they have now “closed” his chair together with many others which the university cannot afford to keep going. He has been made a professor emeritus, and he still expounds the radical religious views that got him into hot water in 1967.
There are plenty of church-goers who would find his views quite heretical and inconsistent with the label “Christian.” But in spite of his disbeliefs — or rather because of them — Lloyd Geering is the only New Zealand theologian whose name has become a household word. It is his view of the Bible that shapes his religious position. Fundamentalist Christians regard the Bible as the literal word of God; Lloyd Geering does not. “I think that to say the Bible equals the word of God, full stop, is extremely dangerous. And it is a form of idolatory,” he says. “In fact, the term ‘bibliology’ has often been used to describe that.
“These are the words of men, and they can be valued in the same way that we can value the words of Shakespeare, but they have to be understood within their context.
“It would be true to say that up until the modern period both Protestants and Catholics assumed that the Christian faith consisted of giving assent to certain beliefs. Many, if not most, liberal theologians would no longer agree with that. They would say that it is false
to identify faith with the acceptance of certain beliefs, however important they are. “Faith is actually something much more subtle and complex. It is an attitude of trust and hope which has expressed itself in certain beliefs in the past, but those expressions of belief are often no longer adequate today. “Now the ones you'mention, sayvirgin birth, and the bodily resurrection of Jesus, are two in particular that form a good focal point for discussion. They would be almost universally accepted until, say 1880. They have both been very seriously questioned and for the most part abandoned today in scholarly Christianity of the liberal kind.
“Indeed, only a fortnight ago Channel 4 in Britain had an hour’s discussion on these issues and not one of the four theologians accepted them.” Professor Geering says that belief in these miraculous events may have seemed in the past to have been the central plank of Christianity, “but Christianity is a much bigger thing than that.
‘Life is ... all there is’
“It’s a whole set of values and lifestyle and experience, which may or may not depend on those things. The fundamentalists say that it does; I say it doesn’t. “There is no easy way of defining a Christian that is going to include everyone who wants to call himself a Christian. “One of the best definitions I know is that given by Hans Kung, a fairly radical Swiss Roman Catholic theologian — that a Christian is a person who makes Jesus Christ the criterion for all his important decisions. That leaves a wide variety of ways of interpreting what is meant by Jesus Christ.” Does it not even require a belief in eternal life? “No. Well, let’s qualify that a little bit. It does not mean life after death as a kind of survival after death, which of course isn’t a biblical term anyway. Eternal life is a biblical term, but it doesn’t mean primarily going on for ever. It means a quality of life which is of such a kind that death is no longer a threat to us. See the difference?” But does not Christ’s resurrection mean to the Christian a promise of the same for believers? “That’s right. Traditional Christians in the nineteeth and early twentieth centuries tended to think of these terms — eternal life — as living on after you die in some other kind of world. It gave people a certain amount of comfort. What they tended to forget is that that is not how the medievalists saw it. They had no doubt whatsoever that everyone would survive death. But that’s just the trouble. Where were you going to survive it? “Life after death isn’t necessar-
ily a comforting doctrine. In many ways I view my particular position as a much more comforting doctrine than survival.
"My position is that life is finite. It's bounded by birth and death. That’s all there is — as far as conscious existence goes. People say ‘Does that really mean that you snuff out like a 'candle, as if you've never lived?' And I say, ‘No. that’s not what it means’.”
“No-one can wipe out the fact that we have lived. We are part of a very complex, continuing stream of life, from which we have received, and to which we have contributed, for better or for worse.”
Professor Geering says he is “pretty certain” that Jesus of Nazareth was an historical character, but he does not believe that he was the son of God. “I think that term is a symbolic phrase in order to describe what he has come to mean to so many people.” What about God, as depicted in the Old Testament?
“I have a great admiration for the Old Testament heritage, which we share with the Jews. I think it, and the Bible as a whole, is a very remarkable set of writing when viewed against the heritage of all the holy writings. But it’s got to be understood in its historical context.
“One of the ways that the Old Testament differs from all other ancient sacred writings is that it rejects any of our attempts to spell out the nature and character of God. It rather speaks of God as somebody who can never be seen but only heard as a voice, and the voice is heard within ourselves.
“It specifically states in the first two commandments that it is wrong ever to worship anything
which attempts to represent God visually. We can extend that to say that it is wrong to spell out in words the very nature of God. “What contemporary theologians are moving towards is to say that the word 'God' is simply a symbol for what forever lies beyond human conception, but refers to the ultimate mystery both of the world in general and of human existence in particular. “God language then becomes a language which we find useful to talk about ultimate religious questions. It's a symbolic language for talking about the mystery of life that always transcends us and always eludes our philosophising and our individual analysis.” Professor Geering says he has never felt any bitterness against those who brought heresy charges against him. Neither did he feel resentment at the time.
“I was sorry about it,” he says, “but sorry about it for them as much as for myself. I was also unhappy about i’t because it had unfortunate repercussions on my family. They suffered some of the consequences although it was nothing to do with them personally. “What in retrospect I’m a bit sorry about is that the Church had a great opportunity to come to grips with the challenge of modernity. Instead, it wanted to hush the matter up and get the door closed as soon as possible. They really swept it under the mat. “They still have to face it.”
St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church on The Terrace in Wellington has invited him to a new type of parttime lecturing position. Professor Geering estimates that two-thirds of the people who attend St Andrew’s are just as radical as he is. “The church won’t recognise it, but they are there, albeit in the minority. The real trouble is that they get pushed out. “Statistically, the fastest growing section of New Zealand society, religiously, is the unchurched — people who don’t belong to any church. That includes, however, many people who are really interested in the great religious
issues — the basic Christian positions. Thinking people are looking for something' they feel the traditional churches are no longer giving."
Another growing, and increasingly influential religious phenomenon. is the fundamentalist Christian revival. Professor Geering says the word itself originated with two Presbyterian elders from the southern United States who. quite literally, struck oil and from the proceeds spent about $250,000 getting conservative scholars to write a series of booklets on what they regarded as fundamentals of the faith. These were distributed free to every minister and Sunday school superintendent in the Eng-lish-speaking world. They saw it as a return to the fundamentals, which in their view meant the literal inerrancy of the scriptures, and certain theological doctrines which were conservatively Protestant.
‘Everybody has a religion ..
“There has been a rise of this more conservative type of Christianity within the New Zealand churches — the Anglican, Presbyterian and, strangely enough, the Roman Catholic,” says Professor Geering. “It joins people together right across these original denominational barriers. The real divisions within the church today are no longer denominational, although of course it’s very hard to avoid them; we’re stuck with them. The real divisions are between the liberal pole and the conservative pole. People who are conservative feel more in common with conservatives from other denominations than they do with the liberals of their own denomination. “In my view it is a backward step, but in their view it is a recovery of eternal truths which, being eternal, can never be dropped, and cannot therefore ever
Seventeen years ago Professor Lloyd Geering, then principal of Knox Theological College, leapt to prominence as defendant in a heresy trial conducted in Christchurch by the Presbyterian Church. He had denied in a sermon — delivered to the Methodists — that man has an immortal soul. He was acquitted. Professor Geering has now retired after 12 years as head of religious studies at Victoria University of Wellington, but his religious views are as radical as ever. GARRY ARTHUR asks him how he reconciles his disbeliefs with his claim to be a Christian.
be a backward step. Only for people like myself, who think that religious thought must always be evolving and meeting new needs, does it appear to be a backward step — a temporary delay in what otherwise should be forward-look-ing."
Fundamentalists would be very much at loggerheads with Professor Geering over his view of the Bible. "Of course I would want to say that the fundamentalists do also interpret the Bible, but they are not willing to admit that they interpret it," he says. "No twentieth century fundamentalist reads the Bible in exactly the same way as our forbears did 200 to 300 years ago, but they think they do. "They want to argue that the Bible can be reconciled at all points and they go to no end of trouble to attempt to do so. The fundamentalist selects those parts of the Bible which mean most to him or her and just ignore the rest."
Where does Professor Geering stand, theologically speaking, now that he has reached the end of his teaching career? Is he still a religious man, or simply an academic whose subject is religion? “I would see myself as religious. I'm an academic who is interested, but also I am a practising churchman. I go to church fairly regularly. I take services from time to time.
“In my definition of religion I'm religious, but then you see my definition of religion is so broad that I believe everybody has got a religion of some kind, although it wouldn’t fit into the traditional interpretation.
“If asked, I would say I’m a Christian, but I don't think that labels are of all that much importance. What is really important is for people to become as whole as they possibly can, to grow spiritually, to develop their full human potential — that’s what’s important: to become the only true individual that you, and only you, have the capacity to become. “That’s what I think Christianity is all about.”
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Press, 17 May 1984, Page 21
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2,225What is a Christian? Press, 17 May 1984, Page 21
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