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Supplanting the supernatural with the ultranatural

By Peter Sellick - posted Wednesday, 10 June 2015


It is obvious that Tacey has a problem with theologians and doctrine. He states that "The narratives (biblical) were written as vision but misread as doctrine." This is a misreading of how doctrine is formulated by the Church. It is not just read off from narrative but an ongoing process of thought about how God is reflected in Scripture. Without doctrine the Scriptures would be opaque, we would have no consistent framework in which they could be read and no structure to produce competent liturgies for worship.

Tacey constructs a polarity between theologians and their doctrine and poets and thinkers who, in his opinion, are our only reliable guide to the world of the spirit. In the absence of argument this looks like prejudice. According to him doctrine is purely political, used to subordinate the masses and increase the power of the Church. With his prejudice against doctrine, Tacey can offer us little of the Christian tradition. He cannot explain key terms such as 'Spirit" nor explain how the Church is formed by it. He removes so much of the tradition that there is very little left.

There are many barriers to Tacey reaching a workable Christian theology. With his insistence that historical fact is of no avail when it comes to faith he also rejects the power of historical event. This power is not reducible to evidence for belief, as when miracles are used as evidence that Jesus was the Son of God, it is the power that events hold within themselves. It is the fruit of all historical consciousness. For Tacey "the historical personage of Jesus is secondary to his "true" nature as archetype."

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In the absence of the power of historical event, Jesus is reduced to an example of living a life of the spirit. Admittedly, the passion narratives are embellished accounts of events using mostly Old Testament tropes. The use of psalm 22 is a prime example. But something important happened in the trial and death of Jesus that marked the world forever. Tacey is right that that event is interpreted dramatically and metaphorically, but we cannot do away with the event itself. If we do, we disengage faith from lived human history, we are liable to fly off into spiritual fantasy.

Which is what happens in the book with the help of Carl Jung. For Jung, the spirit exists in the soul of every individual: it has only to be awakened. This conception harks back to the Socratic/Platonic notion of innate ideas that God has placed all knowledge in the soul and that learning is the process of uncovering, or bringing to consciousness what is already present. In Jungian psychology it is the divine that has to be discovered or awakened. Thus the fullness of life, the growth and development of the psyche is a potential already contained in the mind and accessible through introspection, the example of Jesus and depth psychology.

This runs counter to the contemporary understanding of the mind, courtesy of John Locke, that the mind is a clean slate. The projection of the divine, whatever that is, onto the human mind, looks very much like wishful thinking and is in danger of becoming an idol in itself. Such an idea is gratifying because original sin, a very unpopular but misunderstood idea, is done away with. We are, in the end left on our own because we are complete, we contain divinity. There can be not Other to confront us.

Even Christ is not Other because He is assumed into the self in the form of implanted divinity. What is pivotal is not the historical Christ who was crucified and rose but "the Christ within us." Everything exists in the self. Instead of a breaking with self-obsession, that is central to the gospel, we are invited to dwell only in the self and to find all divinity in the self. This must be an invitation to narcissism.

Tacey is struggling with the age old problems of how the Son and the Spirit relate. By positing Spirit in the soul of everyone, even the creation, he can only connect it to Christ as exemplar:

He (Christ) is not a god to be worshipped. He is a holy man who becomes a symbol of what we must do: balance our human and divine selves, find an equilibrium between them, live the mortal ego and the divine spirit.

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In his impatience with the Christian tradition Tacey would revisit the fourth century councils of the Church in which the being and relations between the persons of the Trinity were satisfactorily solved. He would bring back the Gnostics who proclaimed the presence of the divine in the human soul and Arius who believed that Jesus was subordinate to God the Father. While the former would have left us seemingly spiritually complete, the latter would produce an incompetent saviour, the pre-eminence of grace would have been lost and we would be left with a work that we must do, in this case endless introspection directed towards an abstraction of divinity.

In conclusion, this is not a book I would recommend to those who are thinking again about Christianity. While its aim is to address disengagement with the Church, it offers only an incompetent theology that obliterates the very basis of the faith.

The book is strangely out of time. It reminds me of fellow students of theology, thirty years ago, who had become entranced by the ideas of Jung and who failed to put together a workable theology from their studies. Tacey shows no evidence of reading recent theology but relies on people like Northrop Fry, Harvey Cox, Rudolph Butlmann and Paul Tillich, all superannuated now by the mainstream. While I understand the necessity to find a conversation with late modernity this cannot be it because the centre of the faith is missing.

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This is a review of Beyond Literal Belief: Religion as Metaphor by David Tacey, Garret Publishing.



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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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