Post a Comment On: Bruce Charlton's Notions

Anyone who goes back through this blog to its early days of 2010 will know that it was many years before I wrote about the Bible in any detail; and only more recently that I wrote about my experiences of close reading.

This is because when I converted, under the influence of CS Lewis, I regarded having opinions about the Bible as a snare, and the path to leaving the faith. However, I have never been able to freeze my beliefs at any particular point - or, at least, not without a rising tide of feeling-dishonest about it - and a consequent erosion of active faith.

So I began with the idea that being a Christian was about joining a church, then trying to find the correct church, then discovering there was none. The Bible I simply accepted as true in an overall sense; then I became unable to say sufficiently precisely what that truth actually was; only then did I realise that everything depends upon at least one act - more often several acts - of intuitive evaluation.

If which religion and which church can only be decided by intuition; the problem does not end there. Because the churches are all riven by dissent - and each position depends on different assumptions that can only be decided by intuition...

So eventually I became clear to me that I need to reach an intuitive decision on everything that was sufficiently important to trouble me - or else rely on this current decision to be guided by a previous intuition (eg about the truth of a particular church, or person).

This led, by a process of gradual homing-in, to posting accounts of my thought processes reading the Fourth Gospel.

Some of these have apparently been helpful to some people; and unhelpful or subversive to others - I have no idea where the balance of help and harm lies, nor would such knowledge be decisive. Although I defend my own understanding; I have no interest in leading others, nor in imposing a particular interpretation on others.

My intention is to show people that such things may be done. And also that they need not be destructive - because (at least at present) I have what feels like a very coherent, strong, positive and inspiring Christian witness - albeit it is very probably unique to myself, and probably not final even to myself.

How this 'work out' is not possible to know - not least because part of my understanding is that past solutions are not open to us, the present is unsustainable and undesirable - therefore any valid solution will be unprecedented.

But that is what is going-on here.