Café Theology

Exploring love, the universe and everything

Michael Lloyd

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781473696112
• eBook ISBN: 9781473681231
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

If theology doesn't stretch our minds, it probably won't stretch our lives.In Café Theology, Michael Lloyd invites us to travel on a journey from Creation to New Creation, visiting the Fall, the Incarnation, Resurrection and Ascension, and stopping off at the Trinity and the Church. Michael's inimitable gift for mixing insightful theology with unflinching honesty and a fantastic sense of humour offers an enriching view of life and the Life-Giver.You don't have to be a professor to understand this book - it's written for anyone who wants to explore theology more deeply, with a study guide to help think through each topic. Readers will be refreshed and encouraged as this distinctive book makes theology applicable to our ordinary lives.

1 CREATION

Consider these two statements of where we come from and what we are for. First, the atheist philosopher, Quentin Smith, writes:

The fact of the matter is that the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing and for nothing. … We should … acknowledge our foundation in nothingness and feel awe at the marvellous fact that we have a chance to participate briefly in this incredible sunburst that interrupts without reason the reign of non-being.¹

Secondly, theologian and food critic, Robert Farrar Capon, begins his book, The Third Peacock, like this:

Let me tell you why God made the world. One afternoon, before anything was made, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit sat around in the unity of their Godhead discussing one of the Father’s fixations. From all eternity, it seems, he had this thing about being. He would keep thinking up all kinds of unnecessary things – new ways of being and new kinds of things to be. And as they talked, God the Son suddenly said, “Really, this is absolutely great stuff. Why don’t I go out and mix us up a batch?” And God the Holy Spirit said, “Terrific! I’ll help you.” So they all pitched in, and after supper that night, the Son and the Holy Spirit put on this tremendous show of being for the Father. It was full of water and light and frogs; pine cones kept dropping all over the place and crazy fish swam around in the wineglasses. There were mushrooms and grapes, horseradishes and tigers – and men and women everywhere to taste them, to juggle them, to join them and to love them. And God the Father looked at the whole wild party and said, “Wonderful! Just what I had in mind!”²

In the end, there are basically only two possible sets of views about the universe in which we live. It must, at heart, be either personal or impersonal. It must either be the product of a Person, or the unplanned, unintended by-product of the impersonal + time + chance.^a Quentin Smith thinks that the universe is ultimately impersonal. He sees life as arbitrary (‘for nothing … without reason’) and temporary (‘briefly’). Robert Farrar Capon, on the other hand, believes that the universe is ultimately personal. It emerges from relationship, creativity, delight, love. It is purposeful (‘for the Father’, ‘to love them’) and rooted in permanence (‘From all eternity’).

There is no more important decision you can make about the universe than this. Is there a Person behind it or not? How you regard the universe, how you treat it, what you hope to get from it and give to it, how you view your own life and work and relationships and goals – all will be shaped decisively by how you answer that question. The Bible doesn’t keep us long in suspense about what its answer is: ‘In the beginning, God …’ (Genesis 1:1). In the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, which begin with these words, we have, I suggest, the overall story which makes sense of our world, and our lives, and our longings, and our values, and our feeble and frustrated fumblings after an understanding of who we are and what we are for.

1. THERE IS A PERSON BEHIND CREATION

The Bible is utterly clear from its opening words that there is a Person behind Creation. It sides unambiguously with the personal view of life, the universe and everything. Before the universe is even mentioned, the Bible has already introduced us to a Person. It seems to me that as human beings, we warm to that, for we are personal beings. The most valuable things we know in our own experience are people, so it doesn’t surprise us to know that it is a Person who is behind reality and responsible for it. There are many things about our experience that aren’t as we expect, and not as we would want, which do surprise us and to which we do not warm, and we shall be looking at why that might be in Chapter 2. But we relate to the suggestion that there is a Person behind it, because there is a sense of deep calling to deep, of recognition, of kinship, and of belonging.

That there is a Person behind existence has always been foundational to an enriching understanding of who we are, but it has never perhaps been so important as it is today. For we live in (what has every appearance of being) an impersonal world. To the health authority, we’re an NHS number; to the Post Office, we’re a postcode; to the Inland Revenue, we’re a National Insurance number. And while employees of these vital institutions make every effort to remember that behind each statistic is a person, the sheer quantity of applications and forms and letters and houses and phone calls with which they have to deal means that the amount of genuine relationship possible in these interactions is necessarily small. Gone (largely) are the days when your GP would come to your home and have time to talk, and know your family. Or your bank manager would know your financial situation and its ramifications for your family and other commitments. We live at greater relational distance from all but a small (and sometimes fragile) collection of friends and family members. We cry out for community, but are generally too busy to create it or contribute much to it. And loneliness is, as Mother Teresa observed, one of the most prevalent and depressing features of the Western world. We need to know that our world is not ultimately a cold, empty, impersonal product of time and chance.

And into this situation, the Bible speaks its ancient message with new freshness, force and relevance. There is a Person behind it. Creation is therefore pregnant with the possibility of relationship with the Person who made it, and that transforms our experience of our lives. A painting by your small daughter is much more valuable to you than it would be if it were simply a painting done by someone you didn’t know. A simple meal cooked by your husband as a token of love, and eaten together, is much more enjoyable than a gourmet meal eaten alone. Places that you visited with your wife when you were still courting retain a lifelong significance. Life that is lived in relationship with the Person who made you – however tentative and ambiguous that relationship may be – is infinitely richer than one lived in the belief that the universe is ultimately impersonal, and life ultimately unrenewable. Believe that there is a Person behind the whole shebang, and all Creation becomes a trysting-place where we may meet with our Lover.

I had three friends on board the PanAm flight that was blown up over Lockerbie in 1988, and in the papers of one of them, Sarah Aicher, we found this: ‘Sometimes I feel that every cell is pregnant, every atom is swollen with the strong, sure love of God for me and for all creation.’ What Sarah sometimes felt is, in fact, always the case, because there is a Person behind and within the world in which we live. And that is basically what spirituality is – opening oneself to perceive that occasionally and fleetingly, training oneself to believe that constantly and consistently, and learning to live on that basis significantly and joyfully. This is not a glamorous or ethereal business, but a matter of living ordinary, everyday, mundane life in the company of the Life-Giver. As George Herbert put it in his great poem, The Elixir:

Teach me, my God and King,

In all things Thee to see,

And what I do in any thing,

To do it as for Thee:

‘Teach me’, it begins, because we need to be taught. Seeing God in everything does not come naturally. It’s a skill to be acquired, an art to be learnt. It is one of the tasks required in living a Christian life, and, indeed, a human life. Herbert enjoins us to see God ‘in all things’ – not just in ‘spiritual’ things, not just in prayer or in worship, but in all things, for all things have been created by God, and we may meet with Him in them all. He may be met with in all things, and all our actions may be done for Him. All dimensions of who we are and what we do may be lived in the warmth and creative quirkiness of relationship.

A man that looks on glass,

On it may stay his eye;

Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,

And then the heaven espy.

You can look at your window, if you like, and notice the smudges and the smears and the raindrops and the bird-droppings, or, in my case, the glazier’s squiggles, put there to stop me from walking into the glass and not yet wiped off in the two years or so since the glass was put in. Or you can look through it, which, after all, is what a window is for. Similarly, with creation – you can look at it, and that’s a good thing to do. It’s a place of curiosity and wonder and beauty, and, as we shall see, it should be observed and explored and enjoyed and revelled in. But it can also act as a window through which to espy the Beauty and the Love from which it (and we) sprang. And that can transform everything we do, making drudgery divine:

All may of Thee partake:

Nothing can be so mean,

Which with this tincture ‘for Thy sake’

Will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause

Makes drudgery divine:

Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws,

Makes that and the action fine.

This is the famous stone

That turneth all to gold:

For that which God doth touch and own

Cannot for less be told.³

The letters of a seventeenth-century monk called Brother Lawrence have been collected together into a book, under the title, The Practice of the Presence of God. In it, he tells of how even the lowliest and most mundane of tasks in the monastery kitchen became for him an opportunity to bask in God’s presence and love. The practice of the presence of God is the appropriation and celebration of the fact that there is a Person behind and within our world, and it is the art of enjoying creation as it is intended to be enjoyed.

There are many ways of aiding this practice. Saying Grace over a meal is one such: it is a way of acknowledging that food doesn’t just happen. It is not just a mechanical process. Food is not just fuel. Saying Grace is a recognition that we are dependent for our nourishment on a whole chain of suppliers and producers and farmers – a chain of dependence that culminates in the Creator. And a meal is more than the absorption of energy – it is an opportunity for relationship. Saying Grace is an exercise in the practice of the presence of God, for it reminds us that we have not just a meal to be enjoyed and one another to enjoy it with, but also an unseen Guest to eat with and meet with. There is a Person behind it.

2. THERE IS A PURPOSE FOR CREATION

There is a purpose for Creation. It is not just haphazard. It is not just there for us to impose our own purposes on it. We may not simply do what we like with it. Nor are we left to make up our own limited purposes for our own lives. Everyone wants their life to have purpose, but only a person can have purposes. A force cannot have purposes. Electricity cannot have a purpose. Gravity cannot have a purpose. Scientists sometimes speak as if the ‘purpose’ of DNA, for instance, is to replicate itself; and the sperm with the outboard motor in Larson’s cartoon waving to the unmotorised sperm and saying, ‘See you guys later!’ certainly seems to have a purpose in mind! But that is funny precisely because it personalises the sperm, it attributes to it the sort of intention (and deviousness!) of which only a person is capable. Thus Richard Dawkins concludes, ‘The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.’⁴ That is consistent with the impersonal view. If there is no Person behind it, there can be no purpose for it, except for the (frequently exploitative) purposes we impose upon it.

But if there is a Person behind it, then creation can have intrinsic purposes, which we are called upon to respect. And we ourselves can have a purposeful place and rôle within it, a rationale, a raison d’être, a reason for being here. So what are the purposes of God for creation? Far more, I suspect, than we can ever know, and it would be presumptuous in the extreme to pretend that we have anything more than a provisional and hazy idea of what He intends for His handiwork. But that goes for just about anything one might want to say theologically and the time comes when it is better to risk saying something than to say nothing, especially if you then expect people to splash out £9.99 on a 416-page theological tome! So I want to suggest seven aspects of His purpose about which we may be reasonably (though humbly) confident.

a) Creation is there for the Son

It is appropriate that what creation is for is not a thing but a Person. Its purpose is not ultimately functional but relational. St Paul tells us that ‘We look at this Son and see God’s original purpose in everything created. For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, rank after rank after rank of angels—everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him’ (Colossians 1:16 THE MESSAGE). Or, as a more literal translation puts it: ‘in him [ie God’s beloved Son] all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him’ (NRSV). The word translated ‘for’ might actually be translated ‘to’. All things have been made ‘to Him’. In other words, the whole of creation is orientated towards the Son of God who became human in Jesus of Nazareth. Just as a flower is made for sunshine and cannot flourish or indeed survive without it and therefore reaches out towards the light, so creation is made for the Son and only flourishes in so far as it is reaching out towards and opening itself up to Him. It depends upon Him for its original existence, for its present flourishing and for its future fulfilment. It is for Him in the sense that it needs Him in order to be fully itself. It is for Him in the sense that it is the Father’s gift to the Son. And it is for Him in the sense that it exists for relationship with Him and to bring Him glory.

John of the Cross captures this well in the conversation he imagines between the Father and the Son:

My heart dreams of your having,

son, an affectionate bride,

who for the worthiness in you

merits a place at our side:

to break bread at this table,

the same loaf as we two,

and ripen in acquaintance

with traits I alway...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword to the first Edition
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Creation
• Chapter 2 Fall
• Chapter 3 Providence
• Chapter 4 Incarnation
• Chapter 5 Atonement
• Chapter 6 Resurrection and Ascension
• Chapter 7 Spirit
• Chapter 8 Trinity
• Chapter 9 The Final Victory of God
• Chapter 10 The Church
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Study Guide
• Footnotes