Love’S Contagion: Who Do You Really Believe In?

By Roger Grainger

This is a book for people who believe in God. Whatever religion we belong to, or whatever branch of whatever religion, just believing in God is enough to differentiate us from those who dont. Not necessarily any better, but different. In a secular world, we who believe ought not to concentrate on the things we disagree about but on this one most important thing that we have in common. And in any case, Gods saving love is contagious, which means it spreads out far beyond the barriers we erect in order to try to keep him to ourselves. We may search for alternative things to worship, but there is no real substitute. Now is the time to face facts. Do we believe in God? Whether or not we do is crucial!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: May 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490734651

Roger Grainger

Roger Grainger is a sociologist of religion and a counseling psychologist. A doctor of divinity of London University, he is professor extraordinary in theology at North-West University, South Africa, and an honorary research fellow of University of Roehampton. Ordained into the Anglican Church in 1966, he retired from full-time hospital chaplaincy in order to concentrate on writing and research. His latest book is Ritual and Theatre (Austin Macauley 2014).

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© Copyright 2014 Roger Grainger.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

The Scripture quotations used herein are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4907-3464-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-3465-1 (e)

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Our vision of the truth has to be big enough to include other people’s truth as well as our own. Let us continue to hold together at our deepest level. We are a forgiven community.

Beth Allen, 1984

(Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain, 2013, 10.28)

CHAPTER 1

‘My mother was always very religious.’

Some people think of religion as an obsession, an idea which a person cannot get rid of. Other see it as a neurosis, a useful way of shielding the self against adversity by learning to interpret it in a way which deflects it or, at least, is capable of lessening the impact it has upon us. Alternatively, it can be seen as an effective way of dealing with feelings of guilt, either rational or otherwise; accepting religious feelings as justified relieves this kind of psychological pressure. This is a very short list of the things which religion is able to do for, or with, us—limiting itself to those which function at an unconscious or semi-automatic level. They are some of the ways in which religious people tend to be understood by their fellow human beings and deserve to be taken into consideration by those at whom they are aimed; even though they are felt to miss the mark, they are recognised as valuable because they do this.

Certainly religion has other more public functions. For instance, those ‘unofficial,’ or unacknowledged, characteristics may be consciously manipulated by others for purposes of direction and control. This is a fact about religion which its critics find extremely useful—and who can blame them? Sometimes the result has been, and continues to be, politically disastrous and, even when this is not the case, the means employed for peace-keeping involve a good deal of stress on the need for obedience to authority and the strict use of religious sanctions of various kinds. At a less dramatic level, fear of punishment, sometimes human but more frequently divine, plays a notable part in the religious awareness of many who have been brought up to fear the spiritual authority of the priesthood. In the words of the young James Joyce’s spiritual directors,

No king or emperor of the earth has the power of the priest of God (Joyce, 1960, 158).

All the same this is not a book about the misuse of authority. Nor is it about neurosis. Its concern is with whatever it may be that we consider important enough to afford the highest place in our lives, elevating it far about everything else. These are the things we hold as our personal, final truth about life. The need to find expressive words remains the same, although the story told may be very different. A contemporary writer describes two contrasting ‘explanations of ultimacy’:

One person looks around and sees a universe created by a god who watches over its long unfurling, marking the fall of sparrows and listening to the prayers of his finest creation. Another person believes that life in all its baroque complexity is a chemical aberration that will briefly decorate the surface of a ball of rock spinning somewhere among a billion galaxies (Haddon, 2013, 199).

The second of these two accounts scarcely qualifies as religious and actually goes out of its way in order not to do so; yet the enthusiasm with which it is presented and the conviction to which it bears witness give it an almost credal significance, according it the dignity which attaches to scientific pronouncements of all kinds. Certainly the second version creates a sense of wonder which the first may seem to have forfeited by relying on metaphor to capture something that otherwise would remain inexpressible, a way of avoiding our duty to subject anything to its lowest common denominator. Metaphors can never be measured but the origin of the universe, well, who knows? To call a scientific theory a creed is definitely figurative. On the other hand, this is a kind of metaphor which scientists themselves frequently use when the reality which they are describing lies beyond the reach of the kind of language they are dedicated to using. In large areas of the world, the non-literal sense of the word ‘God’ is part of people’s ordinary vocabulary as they express themselves on matters about which they feel strongly or seek to describe an experience which they regard as extraordinary, particularly one which they were unprepared for and which took them by surprise. ‘God’ is frequently invoked in this way by believers and non-believers alike, not as someone with whom we have a personal relationship but as an exalted official, or Higher Civil Servant, responsible for ensuring that things turn out the way we expect and that no-one ‘upsets the apple cart.’

This kind of behaviour is common among human beings who, whether or not they actually believe in God, still find it convenient, when the occasion arises, to treat him in such a way. We know from what Jesus tells us that familiarity with him is to be encouraged, this being precisely what he wants; but we should take more care not to allow it to degenerate into the disdain we sometimes feel for those who wound our own self-esteem. If we believe that God is love, and have personally experienced him to be such, we should make more effort to treat him as our lover and not simply as ‘the one in charge.’ For us, as human beings, ‘all-loving’ is more important than ‘all-powerful.’ Far more important . . .

The important thing, then, is love: love as the gift which God gives so that we can give it back, both to one another and to him—particularly to him for he is the source of the love we live by sharing. This is the responsive love in which we turn to whomever or whatever is not ourself in order to share his gift with them—the gift which he continues to bestow because it is who he is. It is hard to find words for this because the experience is not one to be caught and held, although the doctrinal statements have the power to keep on reminding us of it, of the experience of losing and finding the God whom our hearts love, he who summons us away from ourselves to find him where we had not expected.

This, then, is the underlying theme of this book: God’s intention for his creation, lived out in time and eternity, is to be himself for us. This means enabling us to allow ourselves to be loved. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself,’ Jesus says; love is not to be hoarded. Indeed, it cannot be as it lives in exchange—or more precisely in interchange. It comes home to us in being given away by us, so that it is always among us as evidence of its origin. We may tell ourselves that God’s love is different from ours but this is because of our tendency to see love itself as something that belongs to us, which we can use as we see fit, apportioning it according to other people’s merit or, worse, trying to use it as a way of earning the love which they themselves would otherwise withhold from us. We treat loving as a kind of commercial activity, something to be bought and sold. Perhaps we may try to reassure ourselves with the thought that, after all, such an attitude is entirely suitable for life in the world in which we live which depends so much on principles of ‘give and take.’

God’s love, on the other hand, is ideal rather than practical, although we are reasonably certain that it functions on much the same lines. Certainly we are able to conceive of his being more forgiving than we usually are and that, when he does punish, it really is for our own good and should not be confused with a human desire for vengeance. Because we are human it is perfectly understandable that we should feel the need to create a god in our own image and that this is the god we should worship; what is certainly true, however, is that this god is not he who is revealed to us—and who continues to show his true self at work in his world. It is not that God’s love is different but that love itself is other than we have sometimes supposed it to be.

Julius of Norwich has this to say on the subject of punishment: ‘God regards sin as sorrow and pain for his lovers to whom, for love, he