Living life forwards
Soren Kierkegaard is reputed to have remarked that one of humanity's problems is that we live life forwards and understand it backwards. In order to predict the future, we have only conjecture based on data from the past. The problem with traditional Christianity is that it appears to assert that conclusions drawn in a dim and distant past are permanently valid for all.

Holloway lets the leaders of Christian parties (to make a point, I won't say "denominations") off with what I think is a mild basting. They deserve a harder time. The truth is that Christian leaders have, over many decades, refused to put their power at risk. Instead of facing doubt and uncertainty squarely they have continued to assert a claim to absolute authority.

Access to the "moment of grace and justification" which these clerics claim is theirs to dispense is, to use Holloway's phrase, a "universal human experience". It is not mediated by Christians and most certainly not by their leaders. The radical freedom which Jesus pioneered is available to all just as it was to Paul before any Church existed. Holloway writes that regardless of the precise meaning of the elaborate system we call "Christian doctrine", what is beyond dispute "...is that something radical and liberating happened to Paul which brought him charging into the Christian movement." Liberation is ours for the taking and no heightened claims of absolute truth by Christian leaders can prevent anyone seizing it.

Reading this book, I found myself wishing that Holloway had been a little more direct. It may slip the attention of his readers, for example, that he denies that the death of Jesus is "...a forensic act which achieved objective ends ... a vehicle which bears, for Christians, the universal human experience of justifying grace." Hidden behind these rather technical words, is a statement that Jesus did not "save" us, to use a standard phrase; that freedom from imprisoning negation (through "salvation") is available to all - and always has been.

 That we are all acceptable is occasion for great joy. But, writes the author, the responsible freedom which acceptance gives has been turned by the Church into "...a theological formula which turns the experience on its head ... into a prerequisite for the acceptance of free grace" (my italics). All code or law, according to Jesus himself, is dangerous because "... it can turn what was meant to assist humanity into a heavy burden around its neck." For a bishop to say this is revolutionary stuff.

All changed utterly
Holloway quotes Easter 1916 by W. B. Yeats: "All changed, all changed utterly". He goes on to argue that the great myths and symbols which have been created by Hebrews and Christians over millennia cannot be taken literally in the 21st century. This itself is no great news. For more than a century Christian scholars and latterly most ordained ministers have known this.

Christian narratives are there, writes the author, as a "..human creation that expresses the depths and struggles of our own nature." He addresses some of the stories of the faith - the Fall, the Exodus, the "myth of the demonic" and Satan - with modest clarity. I for one can't easily understand how his explanations and alternative meanings can be rejected. But then, the mind of the fundamentalist has always been something of a mystery to me.

The problem is that "... it is not easy either to falsify or to verify" religious beliefs. Our understanding of God, of God's role in the universe and how the world works has changed radically over the centuries. Some appear to be able to hold within themselves an assent both to the worldview of the first century and that of the twenty-first. As far as I can tell, the husband and wife nuclear physicists I once knew were able to do so only by partitioning their consciousness. In one part was housed a literal perception of Jesus walking on water. In another part was information about the surface tension of liquids. And never the twain did meet.

"If we are wise," writes Holloway, "we won't sneer at earlier ideas about the powers that control us, but nor will we accord them virtue just because they came before us." His advice is to use ancient world views, processed by the contemporary mind as myths, not as "...a device for containing obsolete interpretations of the universe, but [as] an action indicator".

This is perhaps one of his strongest points. What merit or power has belief, he asks, if it doesn't determine our behaviour? "Is there a believing muscle we exercise by persuading ourselves to entertain fabulous possibilities?" What merit is there is believing in the bodily resurrection of Jesus from death if we ourselves don't enter fully and passionately into life here and now? Holloway adds: "We might be persuaded of the physical fact of the resurrection without it making the slightest difference to our actual lives."

A theology of wholeness
It was a joy for me personally to enter into Holloway's thoughts. He has a great talent for pointed expression. He knows how to bring dry-as-dust analysis to life.

There is a sense, however, in which he remains uncomfortably on the cusp between the old and new. Cusps are painful things to sit on. The temptation is to get comfortable by slipping over to one side or the other.

My point is that I found myself wondering if Holloway has perhaps not fully acknowledged quite how sharp the cusp is. A great divide has opened up between the past and today - a divide which makes it increasingly difficult for many, not so much to appreciate ancient myths in a new light, but to appreciate myths at all. Holloway is a genius at reinterpreting the myths of traditional Christianity. But I don't think he has realised that myth itself may be dying - or a least being relegated to a minor role in the way we understand life and the universe.

That myth (a tale once thought literally true but now interpreted as metaphor) is being replaced by story (never thought literally true, but expressing truth metaphorically), is a startling change. Many will no doubt exclaim, "But I knew that!" That may be - but I for one maintain that very, very few are even attempting to think through its implications. The trite truth is that knowledge is a whole.

We should not sneer at past world-views, old paradigms that have served a useful purpose. But we must say boldly that they are now wrong in terms of how we now perceive the world. If Jesus rose from death, for example, then all contemporary knowledge - science, medicine, history, archeology, biology to name but a few - are likewise wrong. Don't cushion the impact by saying "mistaken" or that the contradictions should be "held in tension".

As Holloway makes clear, however, when one says "wrong" in this context one is also saying something about the way we now frame our perceptions of truth. He writes, "...one of the permanent fallacies we commit in all the human disciplines is to accord them a clinical objectivity they cannot have." That's correct - the way we perceive the universe is constantly changing. There's no such thing as a Christian gospel "delivered once and for always" to a sinful world.

But whatever our paradigm is at any point it's the only one we have. If it changes - and it must -  then change is our only certainty. One pivotal current paradigm is that the universe is a system comprising multiple sub-systems, all interlocking and interacting. Systems don't work if a part of them is wrong. Each of us is a biochemical system. We correct things which go wrong or we die - that is, the system which is me ceases to work and in doing so ceases to be a system.

Human knowledge is a system "entire in itself". If a part of it contradicts another part, then the whole ceases to be a working system. We may have to live with such a system until new knowledge or perceptions right matters. If Holloway is right, the traditional Christian sub-system is asynchronous or "out of synch" with the main body of contemporary knowledge. Sitting on the cusp until greater synchronicity is achieved is painful.

One of Holloway's central themes is that orthodoxy must be replaced by orthopraxy, right belief by right action. The Nuremberg atmosphere at the Lambeth Conference of bishops is a good example of "right belief" issuing in wrong action. The problem for those sitting on cusps is how to tackle the perceptions which seem to issue in cruelty even though they fit traditional theology. This book is one which serves as an excellent example of how to face up to searing contemporary concerns with wisdom and charity.

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