A dog may resemble a king

I take my title from that of Christopher Howse, who is I believe the Religious Affairs correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, and who wrote a short article in that newspaper on Saturday May 5, entitled “Mosaic of a dog not a king’. My own title is marginally less bewildering than his, it seems to me - though I’m not sure I shall be so successful in unravelling the conundrum which lies at the heart of his article. I have read it several times, and still emerge feeling that there is something wrong, somewhere, with his logic. There’s an Alice in Wonderland quality to it, that makes one recall how horribly muddled one felt, as a child, when the Red Queen shouted “Sentence first, verdict later. Off with his head!”

Religious debate has always been a bit like that though, hasn’t it? The assumption is always there, that one must suspend disbelief in order to believe. And if that were not conundrum enough, one need only go to Christopher Howse’s exposition of the position of heretics within the Christian church, to know that the confusion hasn’t ended yet. Howse takes as his starting point the idea that heresy “has quite a good press these days”. He refers of course only to heresy within the Christian Church - which seemed a wise precaution, given the kind of press that heresy receives elsewhere, just at present.

We no longer burn heretics, anyway. Though as Howse points out, it remains important still, for Christians to distinguish their own beliefs from those of heretics. And he cites, in illustration of this, a “little book of essays from different hands edited by Ben Quash and Michael Ward, the Dean and Chaplain of Peterhouse, Cambridge”. The book is entitled Heresies and How to Avoid Them, and the “helpful subtitle” is Why it Matters What Christians Believe.

So far, so reasonable, I thought; I’m prepared to go along with that. Being uncertain of what I believe or disbelieve anyway, and having a lingering fondness for ecclesiastical obfuscation and the spirited debate, I’m prepared to go some distance with most things; even those with which I’m inclined most profoundly to disagree. I was even ready to go along with the mosaic of Christopher Howe’s title – though I could have wished that the image it portrayed had been just a little sharper, and more to the point! The image is taken from the words of St Irenaeus, ”a third-generation Christian who had known the martyr Polycarp, who had known the Apostle John……….’ (And if that seems complicated, just wait for the complication of Irenaeus’s image itself, and his prose!)

St Irenaeus was anxious, apparently, to “preserve the teachings handed down to him, and he characterised heretics, who had their own versions, thus”:

"It is as if someone, when a beautiful image of a king has been made by a skilful artist out of precious jewels, should then take this likeness of the king all to pieces, then rearrange them together to make them turn into the form of a dog or a fox, and even then but poorly executed; and should then maintain that this was the beautiful image of the king that the skilful artist constructed, pointing to the jewels.”

I don’t know what you make of that? And it’s true that I’m no sort of historian or biblical scholar, so I can’t be sure how much of written doctrine was available to St Irenaeus at the time of writing. But it does seem to me that, even allowing for the scarcity of written records, St Irenaeus must have had some access to the lucid prose of earlier scholars - which makes his own rather dismal showing all the more difficult to comprehend! (Perhaps he didn’t though? Have access, I mean. As I said, I’m no sort of scholar, and have no way of knowing for sure. Perhaps I ought to have suspended judgment therefore, and given St Irenaeus the benefit of the doubt?).

Christopher Howe moves on swiftly enough from St Irenaeus anyway, to consider some of the more esoteric heretical creeds, and then to compare their doctrines with those of orthodox Christianity itself. And it was here, that I found myself most seriously perplexed. He cites one in particular. It was called Theopaschitism; and though he concedes that it wasn’t exactly mainstream, even for its time, he did still seem to think its beliefs worthy of a mention. Theopaschitism maintains ( or did maintain, at any rate – I’m not sure that it’s still around) that “God suffers and sorrows in sympathy with mankind”; and that “ if he did not, he must be considered aloof and unloving”.

A sensible enough creed, wouldn’t you say? But Christian teaching, it seems, does not agree. “The trouble with this” Christopher Howse says; “ is that the traditional teaching about God is that he is good and wise and almighty………… and so much above the frailties of creatures that his own act of being is not corruptible and his desires are not thwarted. Christians accorded him the property of impassibility – in other words he could not suffer.”

“ If God does not have these perfections,” Christopher Howse goes in; “including the ability to do what he wishes, then his promises to us are not to be relied on. If he is changeable, vulnerable to the effect of events, then he would be in no position to get us out of the mess we are in.” And he ends by quoting St Paul, who said “If we are faithless, he remains faithful- for he cannot deny himself.”

Now I don’t know how you feel about the two doctrines – but for my own part, the Theopaschitian one seems the kindlier and more humane. Christianity doesn’t stop there though. It has a great deal more to say on the subject; and it was with Christopher Howse’s final contention that I felt myself most passionately disposed to disagree. He goes on to point out that “Jesus Christ is believed by Christians to be God and Man”………. “If he were not God, the reconciliation would be insufficient. And if not man, mankind would not be caught up in the reconciliation”.

This is the usual Christian fare of course , and one can take it or leave it as one will. But when, right in his closing paragraph, Christopher Howse elects to say this :
“If, as the writer Elie Wiesel suggested in his celebrated novel Night, it is true to say that, when a man is wickedly hanged in a concentration camp, God is the suffering victim, then it is only true because God became man. In that lies our hope.”………..
.... why, then, I am driven to cry aloud at last: “Give man a break, Elie Wiesel and Christopher Howse! Let him retain the dignity of his own suffering at least!”

I wonder what anyone else thinks?