Methuselah, Amazing Blondel, Tom Yates

My latest article for Seen and Unseen is entitled 'Rock ‘n’ roll’s long dance with religion'. The article explores how popular music conjures sacred space through a survey of inter-connections between faith and music.

The article includes a link to my Spotify playlist 'Closer to the light' which includes a wide selection of the music I mention in this article. 'A day, night and dawn with Nick Cave’s lyrics' is a review of Adam Steiner’s Darker With The Dawn — Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death in which I explore whether Steiner's rappel into Cave’s art helps us understand its purpose.

My co-authored book The Secret Chord explores aspects of a similar interplay between faith and music (and the Arts, more broadly). Posts related to the themes of The Secret Chord can be found here.

Check out the following too to explore further:

• David Ackles, Chris Bell, Bryan Maclean
• God Gave Rock 'N' Roll To You
• Jesus Music - 1 & 2
• The Jesus Rock Revolution and the Jesus Movement
• When Jesus Met Hippies
• A Rough Guide to Christian Art
• Looking down the wrong end of a telescope
• Pop's holy rollers
• Perhaps the most underrated band ever
• Rock gets Religion
• Ed Kowalczyk and Scott Stapp: Angels on a razor
• Hidden Gems - Bill Fay & Michael Morley
• Electric Eden and the New Folk Revival
• Salt and Sweetners
• The mystery at the heart of music - 1 and 2
• Inspiration from the Psalms
• 'Tryin' to throw your arms around the world' click here - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Carrying the theme of my Seen and Unseen article plus my post on Jesus Music, here is some information on three more performers engaging with the sacred:

Methuselah was the band that John Gladwin and Terry Wincott formed before finding success with Amazing Blondel and after Gospel Garden. Methuselah were signed to the U.S. Elektra label and recorded one album, 1969's Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Joe Marchese writes: "As the band's moniker might indicate, the first four tracks - named after the writers of the gospels - all had religious-themed lyrics, in essence forming a song suite. The lyrical themes continued on "My Poor Mary" ("My poor Mary, what's the matter/Born Jerusalem in the morning") and the heavy title track. "High in the Tower of Coombe," with its medieval flavor, augured for Amazing Blondel. "Fairy Tale" and "Fireball Woman" both emphasized their hard rock sound, with the latter in a particularly driving vein. The closing jam on the French nursery rhyme "Freres Jacques" (or "Brother John," first published around 1780) veered into jazz-rock territory."

Elektra failed to give the LP a UK release, and the US issue was delayed until October 1969 – by which time the band had split, with John Gladwin and Terry Wincott turning their backs on electricity to work as Amazing Blondel. Now highly regarded by collectors, the Methuselah album combined the group's West Coast-influenced harmony vocals with a late 60s psychedelic-into-progressive hard rock feel, largely down to the one-louder leads of Les Nicol, who'd been Mick Ronson's main rival for guitar hero status in the Hull group wars a couple of years earlier.

Terry Wincott wrote that "Amazing Blondel was formed by John Gladwin and myself after the break-up of too-loud rock band Methusalah. We were soon joined by a talent guitarist Eddie Baird and after a disastrous "showbiz" record signing, Amazing Blondel were recommend by the members of the band Free to Island boss Chris Blackwell. After signing to Island Records and Artists, Amazing Blondel quickly produced three albums with the above line-up and undertook a series of intensive international and national tours to promote them."

John Gladwin wrote that "Blondel was an attempt to re-create a past era and fashion a completely English music":

"Amazing Blondel reflected a further idiosyncratic appendage in the ever-more bewildering animal that was folk rock. The range of ideas and styles being introduced into the realms of folk music by the mid-'70s was so diverse that it even entered the hitherto semi-mythical realms of medieval music with its own peculiar instrumentation, complete with bassoons and crumhorns. While Gryphon catered the more studious, progressive rock end of that style, and City Waits concentrated on more authentic reconstructions, Amazing Blondel successfully bridged the popular gap in the middle. They always seemed slightly eccentric - sweet and a little out of place; Pseudo-Elizabethan/classical acoustic music, sung with British accents to the contemporary transatlantic audience of the day. From this unlikely combination they carved their niche and won a devoted cult following ... It wasn't folk music per se. It was all original period music, derived from Elizabethan and Renaissance inspiration, but palatable to 20th century audiences."

Religious-themed songs continued to feature among their "pseudo-Elizabethan/Classical acoustic music sung with "British" accents" including 'Canaan' (The Amazing Blondel), 'Evensong' (Evensong), 'Celestial Light (For Lincoln Cathedral)' and 'Safety in God Alone' (Fantasia Lindum), 'Cantus Firmus to Counterpoint' (England), and 'Benedictus Es Domine' (Restoration).

Celestial Light. A History of Amazing Blondel is the first book to trace the history of the band and contains interviews with all three members of the band as well as Adrian Hopkins (responsible for orchestration), Paul Empson (guitarist), Erik Bergman (model on the cover of the first LP), Phill Brown (sound engineer), Jerry Boys (sound engineer), John Glover (manager), John Donaghy (roadie), Sue Glover (backing vocalist and ex Brotherhood of Man), Steve Rowland (producer of first LP on Bell), Paul Fischer (luthier) and others.

Tom Yates was a regular on the Cheshire and North West folk scene back in the 1960s/70s before he left for Antwerp where he sang and wrote his songs up to his untimely death in 1993. Tom’s first album was on the CBS label in 1967 and later he released two more LPs in the 1970s. He colllaborated with Duncan Brown on some songs. Tom will also be remembered for the gigs he did in the clubs and for the folk club he ran at The White Horse in Disley where he lived up to his move to Belgium.

David Kidman writes that: "Rochdale-born Tom was just one of the large crop of singer-songwriters who came into prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He got to know Paul Simon on moving to London in the late 1960s, and his first LP (Second City Spiritual) was recorded for CBS in 1967. It was in 1973, around a year after moving to Disley, a village near Stockport (Cheshire), that Tom released his second LP, Love Comes Well Armed." Love Comes Well Armed has been described as "a spiritual journey into the soul of purity and the essence of love".

Song of the Shimmering Way was Tom’s third and final studio recording. Originally released in 1977, it shows Tom’s fascination with the Celts in his songwriting and has a much more lavish sound with orchestra arrangements on some songs. The album reflected the interest in Celtic culture, stories, traditions and mythology that he had begun to embrace in the years since Love Comes Well Armed.

Tom was in the process of preparing his fourth LP when he sadly took died of leukaemia in Antwerp in 1994. His widow provided tapes of Tom’s songs that were recorded in studios in Antwerp, enabling Epona to release his fourth album Love is Losing Ground posthumously. Epona has also released a fifth and final album to complete a quintet of Tom’s musical legacy. A Walk in Other Shoes features songs that he wrote in Antwerp after he connected with the Christian faith and most of the songs reflect his faith. Many of these songs were on a cassette that Tom sold in the local clubs and bars of Antwerp but the album also includes three songs from his unfinished “A Dream of John Ball” plus, as a bonus track, the first recording Tom ever made, the 1965 Pye Records single "Rattle Of A Toy".

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Methuselah - Matthew.

David Ackles, Chris Bell, Bryan MacLean

My latest article for Seen and Unseen is entitled 'Rock ‘n’ roll’s long dance with religion'. The article explores how popular music conjures sacred space through a survey of inter-connections between faith and music.

The article includes a link to my Spotify playlist 'Closer to the light' which includes a wide selection of the music I mention in this article. 'A day, night and dawn with Nick Cave’s lyrics' is a review of Adam Steiner’s Darker With The Dawn — Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death in which I explore whether Steiner's rappel into Cave’s art helps us understand its purpose.

My co-authored book The Secret Chord explores aspects of a similar interplay between faith and music (and the Arts, more broadly). Posts related to the themes of The Secret Chord can be found here.

Check out the following too to explore further:

• God Gave Rock 'N' Roll To You
• Jesus Music - 1 & 2
• The Jesus Rock Revolution and the Jesus Movement
• When Jesus Met Hippies
• A Rough Guide to Christian Art
• Looking down the wrong end of a telescope
• Pop's holy rollers
• Perhaps the most underrated band ever
• Rock gets Religion
• Ed Kowalczyk and Scott Stapp: Angels on a razor
• Hidden Gems - Bill Fay & Michael Morley
• Salt and Sweetners
• The mystery at the heart of music - 1 and 2
• Inspiration from the Psalms
• 'Tryin' to throw your arms around the world' click here - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

I've received some interesting feedback on the article which has flagged an artist whose music I hadn't explored previously and whose music has then reminded me of two other musicians that I briefly mentioned in the article.

David Ackles was a musician who has been described by Rev Jim Friedrich as: "a lifelong Christian, deeply spiritual and theologically astute, an authentic and generous man. And though some of his songs revealed a profound empathy with the suffering of displaced souls, there was an essential core in him—a comedic faith in resurrection—which survived the harrowing descent of the artist into the nether regions of the human condition."

"Ackles recorded three albums for Elektra – his self-titled debut (1969), ‘Subway To The Country’ (1970), and probably the most famous of all, ‘American Gothic’ (1972), the last of which was recorded in England, and produced by Bernie Taupin, the lyric writer for ...Elton John." Then, "What should have been the fourth album in a long and illustrious career, in retrospect turned out to be Ackles's swansong. Five & Dime may not be as tightly-knit as American Gothic, but as a many-colored patchwork of varied songs, the album has few rivals."

Kasper Nijsen writes that: "Ackles was a versatile and accomplished composer, drawing inspiration from disparate sources including Broadway composers, vaudeville and music hall tradition, French chansonniers, Nashville country music, American jazz and spirituals, Los Angeles surf music, and classical music."

"He was called a genius, one of the best that America had on offer (Elton John, Reuters obituary, March 1999), and was said to have forged an utterly unique and unrivaled sound (Collin McElligatt, Stylus, 09-01-2003). His masterpiece album was hailed as the Sgt. Pepper of folk (Derek Jewell, Sunday Times, 1973) and called a work of pure poetry, theatrical, witty and sublime (Robert Cochrane, Culture Catch, 03-30-2008). It was also said that Ackles could have been another Randy Newman or Leonard Cohen (Reuters obituary, March 1999) and his music has been compared to Weill and Brecht and even Richard Wagner (Bernie Taupin, blog entry, 12-3-2008)."

Michael Baker concludes the story: "Brutalized in a near fatal car accident in the early eighties, the weakened Ackles found time to raise a son, maintain a successful marriage, work for bigwig philanthropic organizations, write an occasional score for a made for TV movie, and work on an operatic treatment of Aimee Semple Macpherson ... who became L.A.'s leading religious leader and basked in world wide celebrity ... Tough, individualist, and savvy, she most certainly would have been a formidable opponent, for Ackles wanted if not clarity about faith and individual works of grace at least a reconciliation between a cold world that dumps slag on top of children and an uncommunicative God. This reconciliation, man's major intellectual achievement, is both disconcerting and liberating. And Ackles knew full well that the balance between conventional and conservative faith and yearning, narcissistic, seductive art is the greatest of musical aspirations."

Baker suggests that "Ackles regarded the message from Ecclesiastes as gospel: "Who gathers knowledge gathers pain."" He expands by noting that Ackles and his vignettes of dispossessed personae: "set the stage for blurred epiphanies, an ironic fusion of baseless ritual and superficial decorum. These pockets of darkness contain paralysis, vagueness, and thwarted ambitions. The only thing holding the center is the voice, a voice of grandeur, tenor resonance, and declamatory power. Never comfortable simply crooning, and forsaking a kind of blues/soul aesthetic that would have diminished his uniqueness, Ackles uses his booming, cajoling voice to proclaim truths from the center of town. It is a convincing voice of reason in the re-created scenes of missing emotions. Although the narratives are uncertain with action deferred or muddled, and the characters are inarticulate carnage of that universe, Ackles retains dignity for himself, his characters, and their landscapes, by renouncing censure. We are all flawed; we have all fallen."

This seems to me to be an accurate description of Ackles' storytelling songs which demonstrate a incarnational 'being with' approach to his characters ("We are all flawed; we have all fallen."), while the cumulative picture painted is of the bleakness of a world which has, as with the stunning 'His name is Andrew', lost its connection with God.

Look out for the forthcoming biography of David Ackles by Mark Brend, which is due in July 2025. 

The short-lived Memphis power-pop pioneers Big Star from the 1970s have been referred to as “the greatest American cult rock band this side of The Velvet Underground”. Given this, it is remarkable, as David Zahl has noted, that they "made music that, especially on their first record, bordered on proto-Christian rock". "Much of this was due to the influence of ... Chris Bell, the co-leader of the band" with Alex Chilton.

Zahl quotes by way of example the following lyrics from 'My Life is Right': “Once I walked a lonely road/I had no one to share my load/But then you came and showed the way/And now I hope you’re here to stay/You give me life”. Zahl notes that "Bell’s talent came with its fair share of personal demons" including drug addiction and clinical depression. As a result, songs like 'Try Again' are "anguished first-person prayers":

"Lord I’ve been trying to be what I should Lord
I’ve been trying to do what I could
But each time it gets a little harder
I feel the pain
But I’ll try again

Lord I’ve been trying to be understood
And Lord I’ve been trying to do as you would
But each time it gets a little harder
I feel the pain
But I’ll try again"

After the first Big Star album #1 Record "failed to achieve commercial success ... Bell left the band in 1972." "He struggled with depression for the rest of his life." "Bell concentrated on solo work after leaving Big Star" but it was only 14 years after his death that "the songs from his Car Records single and several of his other 1970s recordings were released on 1992's I Am the Cosmos full-length CD on Rykodisc." "Many of the songs reflected his embrace of Christianity."

John Jeremiah Sullivan writing about one of the songs from that album says that: "

"Better Save Yourself," opens jarringly with organ and a huge, minor-key guitar-god riff.

I know you’re right
He treats you nice
It’s suicide
I know, I tried it twice

We have it from David Bell that his brother had, in fact, tried suicide. In the throes of whatever drove him to it, he found Jesus and became a devout Christian, further complicating the psychological picture of his post-Big Star years. In "Better Save Yourself," he goes on to sing "You shoulda gave your love to Jesus/Couldn’t do you no harm.""

There Was a Light: The Cosmic History of Chris Bell and The Rise of Big Star by Rich Tupica is the principle source of information about Chris Bell.

Similarly, the life of Bryan MacLean is, as Jon Cody has written, "a story of extremes; missed opportunities, addiction and family dysfunction alongside critical acclaim, reconciliation and redemption".

MacLean was a member, with Arthur Lee, of the Los Angeles rock band Love. Love's drummer, Michael Stuart-Ware, in his 2003 autobiography, Behind the Scenes on the Pegasus Carousel, describes MacLean's contributions to Love's music: “Bryan’s contributions to the first three Love albums spoke to his talent. My favorite of his compositions has always been ‘Softly To Me,’ but all of Bryan’s songs demonstrated a mystically unique lyrical and musical phrasing quality that defies category, but is at once, both emotional and powerful.”

"MacLean was offered a solo contract with Elektra after the dissolution of Love, but his demo offerings were rejected by the label and the contract lapsed ...

Around 1996, MacLean's Elektra Records demo tapes were discovered by his mother Elizabeth in the family garage, and after two years of persistent shopping around to record companies, a deal was struck with Sundazed, who in 1997 released the CD Ifyoubelievein. In the album's liner notes, Rolling Stone's David Fricke wrote that the collection was, "in a sense, the Love record that never was: solo demos and home recordings of fourteen original MacLean songs, all written in the earliest and most vital years of Love and all but three virtually unheard in any form since MacLean wrote them"."

Cody writes that MacLean "was one of the very first from the L.A. music community to embrace Christianity". "Intra Muros (the title translates as “Inside the Wall) was his ‘real’ solo album, a collection of 14 worship-oriented songs". He said that "Intra Muros is what I care about. It’s who I am" and "My deepest longing is that Intra Muros touches lives and changes them." His mother, Elizabeth McKee, described Intra Muros as "Bryan’s masterpiece". "MacLean described the absolutely unique blend of gothic rock and jazz as “spooky worship music.”" Part of the uniqueness of his music, including his worship songs, derives from the "Broadway influence that permeates his entire catalogue ... with many of the songs sounding like show stoppers from another era".

In his last interview, he said "My goal from the beginning writing music was to be timeless, to transcend age or style and to enrich peoples' lives, to make them feel better about life in general".

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David Ackles - Berry Tree.

Seen and Unseen: A day, night and dawn with Nick Cave’s lyrics

My latest article for Seen & Unseen is 'A day, night and dawn with Nick Cave’s lyrics' in which I review Adam Steiner’s Darker With The Dawn — Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death and explore whether Steiner's rappel into Cave’s art helps us understand its purpose:

'Steiner is also very good when discussing the influence of the Bible on Cave’s work. He briefly outlines Cave’s journey with the Bible from chorister at Wangaratta Cathedral through his choice at 22 to mine its stories to inform his songwriting and on to his rediscovery of the New Testament and the “seduction of Christianity” when writing an Introduction’ to The Gospel According to Mark for the Canongate Pocket Canons. As Steiner notes, “Early on in his career Cave embraced the vitality and urgency of the Old Testament”, while the New Testament “introduced a more personal revelation … an awakening to the possibilities of self-transformation”.'

Read also my co-authored book with Peter Banks of After the Fire, ‘The Secret Chord’, which has been described as an impassioned study of the role of music in cultural life written through the prism of Christian belief. For more of my writings on music click here.

My first article for Seen and Unseen was 'Life is more important than art' which reviews the themes of recent art exhibitions that tackle life’s big questions and the roles creators take.

My second article 'Corinne Bailey Rae’s energised and anguished creative journey' explores inspirations in Detroit, Leeds and Ethiopia for Corinne Bailey Rae’s latest album, Black Rainbows, which is an atlas of capacious faith.

My third article was an interview with musician and priest Rev Simpkins in which we discussed how music is an expression of humanity and his faith.

My fourth article was a guide to the Christmas season’s art, past and present. Traditionally at this time of year “great art comes tumbling through your letterbox” so, in this article, I explore the historic and contemporary art of Christmas.

My fifth article was 'Finding the human amid the wreckage of migration'. In this article I interviewed Shezad Dawood about his multimedia Leviathan exhibition at Salisbury Cathedral where personal objects recovered from ocean depths tell a story of modern and ancient migrations.

My sixth article was 'The visionary artists finding heaven down here' in which I explored a tradition of visionary artists whose works shed light on the material and spiritual worlds.

My seventh article was 'How the incomer’s eye sees identity' in which I explain how curating an exhibition for Ben Uri Online gave me the chance to highlight synergies between ancient texts and current issues.

My eighth article was 'Infernal rebellion and the questions it asks' in which I interview the author Nicholas Papadopulos about his book The Infernal Word: Notes from a Rebel Angel.

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Nick Cave - There Is A Kingdom.

Faith and imagination resources

I was recently asked to recommend some resources on the interface between faith and imagination. Those I commended were: 

Art and Christianity Enquiry are the main organisation in the UK exploring links between faith and the visual arts. There are a small number of articles on the page about their journal. 'Art, Modernity & Faith' by George Pattison, 'God in the Gallery' by Daniel A. Siedell and 'The Art of the Sacred' by Graham Howes are all well worth reading. Daniel Siedell had a blog for a while on the themes of 'God in the Gallery' which has some interesting debate on it. Colin Harbison is also worth reading online.

'Contemporary Fiction and Christianity' by Andrew Tate is a good review of theological themes in literature as is 'The Poet as Mirror: Human Nature, God and Jesus in twentieth-century literature' by Karl-Josef Kuschel. George Steiner's 'Real Presences' is a classic text when it comes to literature arguing that a transcendent reality grounds all genuine art. Malcolm Guite makes a similar argument for poetry in 'Faith, Hope and Poetry'. In 'Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love' Rowan Williams sketches out a new understanding of how human beings open themselves to transcendence.

Steve Scott's 'Crying For A Vision' is worth a read and spans music, literature and visual art. My own co-authored book on faith and music (taking in aspects of literature and the visual arts too) is 'The Secret Chord'.

On imagination specifically, Walter Brueggemann's 'The Prophetic Imagination' is another classic text. 'Image' Journal sees itself as bridging faith and imagination. In Walking On Water, Madeleine L'Engle argues that the prime task of the artist is to listen, to remain aware, and to respond to creation. In The Mind of the Maker Dorothy L. Sayers explores understandings of the Trinity through the medium of human creativity. Finally, in The Book of God Gabriel Josipovici applies literary criticism to the texts of the Bible. 

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Bruce Cockburn - Creation Dream.

The DNA of the western imagination

Daniel A. Siedell's latest post gives clues as to some of the directions Philip Ritchie, Paul Trathen and I are planning to go in with the Living the Story course we are currently planning. Siedell's post is based on a biblical reading of the work of artist Enrique Martínez Celaya:

"First, it argues that the Bible's influence does not have to be embodied in a self-conscious way, as a form of meditation or reflection on particular biblical themes. If the Bible is the DNA of the western imagination, as such critics as George Steiner, Northrop Frye, and Andrew Delbanco suggest,then it should be present in some way in the work of an artist such Martínez Celaya, who is deeply formed by the western literary tradition, not only as a reader but as a writer of poetry and prose ... Second, the exhibition argues that the Bible can function as a provocative and enriching critical tool, which can expand rather than limit the experience of art ...

The Bible is a rich resource for critical practice. But for use in this context, it needs to be liberated from the believers, who fear that its authority or infallability as God's word is undermined if it approached as literature. For them, art, literature, music, film, and theatre should function as Bible studies and devotional exercise in paint, sound, word, and image. Far from protecting it, this literalistic approach to "Biblical art" weakens its power, restricting its use to quoting chapter and verse in support of dogma and theology. This makes the Bible boring and obscures the fact that it is a dynamic and powerful cultural artifact, a library of powerful stories, within which we in the western tradition have lived and breathed and have had our being. And for centuries it has been the engine that drove art and literature ...

to recognize and acknowledge such biblical resonances and influences for western culture risks opening up a pandora's box that secularists have long tried to keep shut: that modernity emerged from and has lived off the  creative capital of the Judeo-Christian tradition, including its theology, as it was embodied in the Renaissance humanism and the Reformation. Recent books by scholars Michael Allen Gillespie (The Theological Origins of Modernity) and Bruce Hoslinger (The Premodern Condition) have revealed this more clearly. The paucity and shallowness of contemporary art criticism, which oscillates between journalism, marketing, and obscure pseudo-theory, might be ameliorated through a rediscovery of the literary treasures of the Bible, treasures that have seduced the greatest minds and artists throughout modernity (and postmodernity)."

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Willard Grant Conspiracy - Fare Thee Well.

The suffering God (2)

Thomas Weinandy has identified three arguments within twentieth century Christian theology for the suffering of God:

• God suffers in himself: the incarnation was the consequence of “God’s passible pathos towards and empathy with humankind (see John 3: 16);


• The Son of God suffers as a man: Jesus suffers as a divine-human person, what pertains to his humanity also pertains to his divinity; and


• The Father and the Son suffer in their relationship: “the abandonment on the cross which separates the Son from the Father is something which takes place within God himself”.

Weinandy points out that the traditional emphasis in Christian theology has, because of the legacy of Platonism, been on the impassibility of God. He notes that this change in emphasis has been the result of a re-evaluation of scripture brought about, in large part, by the impact of Auschwitz on theology. He cites the frequency with which Wiesel’s gallows story is told in books exploring God’s passibility and paraphrases Jurgen Moltmann to suggest that there “can be no theology ‘after Auschwitz,’ which does not take up the theology in Auschwitz i.e. the prayers and cries of the victims”.

As we have seen those prayers and cries also included the argument with God that is encapsulated in Wiesel’s trial story and Christianity has taken up those prayers and cries too. This protesting dialogue with God can be seen, for example, in the work of the poet-priests George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In ‘Bitter-sweet’, Herbert says that if God is going to be contrary in his relationship with him then he will reciprocate and complain, praise, bewail, approve, lament and love. Hopkins’ poems of lament and protest have been called the ‘terrible sonnets’. In ‘Carrion Comfort’ (which he described as ‘written in blood’) he wrestles with God, while a line from ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’ - “Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,/How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost/Defeat, thwart me?” - could be a summary of Wiesel’s protest within relationship.

Christian theology has also taken up these prayers and cries. Karl-Josef Kushel consciously aims to do theology in the sphere of Steiner’s ‘Easter Saturday’ and by paying attention to the art that arises in this sphere. He notes that, “the rebellion of human beings against God can be their form of prayer; quarrelling their form of saying yes; protest their declaration of love to God”.

Walter Brueggemann is another theologian to have tackled these issues and in ways that are similar to Sacks, as the following description of his Old Testament theology will show:

“A somewhat different ... dialectic is found in his proposed structure for understanding Old Testament theology - the dialectic between the majority voice that is creation-oriented, a voice that assumes an ordered world under the governance of a sovereign God and so serves to legitimate the structures of the universe, and a minority voice that is in tension with the legitimation of structure, a voice embracing the pain that is present in the world and protesting against an order that allows such to be. Brueggemann’s dialectical approach, which assumes an ongoing tension between voices “above the fray” and those “in the fray” is fundamental to his reading of the Old Testament".

Brueggemann’s minority voice, the counter-testimony to the core testimony of the Old Testament, equates to the protest in relationship of Sachs and Wiesel. It is a “radical probe of a new way of relationship that runs toward the theology of the cross in the New Testament and that runs in our time toward and beyond the Holocaust, as Elie Wiesel and Emil L. Fackenheim have seen so well”. Brueggemann views the tension between the core- and counter-testimony as unresolved in the Old Testament and therefore views God as ambiguous, always in the process of deciding “how much to be committed to the common theology, how many of its claims must be implemented, and how many of these claims can be resisted”.

Protest within relationship and ideas of a suffering God are, therefore, common to both Judaism and Christianity. This is only to be expected as Christianity’s roots are in Judaism and, although the influence of Greek thought has undoubtedly been great, the extent to which Jewish thought has been sidelined in Christianity is by no means as great as Sacks implies. In fact, as we have seen, the latter half of the twentieth century has seen a significant revision of the relationship, in part because of the Holocaust, and this has impacted significantly in theology. Finally, the fact that the Hebrew scriptures are such a significant part of the Christian scriptures means that the influence of Jewish thought in Christianity should never be underplayed as, for example, in the template that the Psalms provided to Herbert and Hopkins well before the Holocaust.

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Ralph Vaughan Williams - Five Mystical Songs, Part 2: Love Bade Me Welcome.

The suffering God (1)

Elie Wiesel was sixteen in 1944, the year he was deported from Hungary to the concentration camps of Auschwitz (where his mother and younger sister died) and Buchenwald (where his father died). Two of the stories that he tells from his horrific experiences within the camps encapsulate the Jewish responses to the holocaust that I wish first to explore in this series of posts and then to compare and contrast with approaches to understanding evil in Christian theology.

In the first, Wiesel’s mentor in Auschwitz convenes a rabbinic tribunal and accuses God:

“He had added two other learned rabbis, and they resolved to accuse God, in appropriate, correct form, as a proper rabbinic tribunal would, with witnesses, arguments, etc. … the proceedings of the tribunal went on for a long time. And finally my teacher, who was president of the tribunal, pronounced the verdict: ‘Guilty.’ Then silence reigned – a silence which reminded me of the silence of Sinai: an endless, eternal silence.

But finally my teacher, the rabbi, said: ‘And now, my friends, let us go and pray.’ And we prayed to God, who a few minutes beforehand had been pronounced guilty by his children”.

The second is related in Wiesel’s autobiographical novel Night and concerns a day when:

“… the SS guards hanged two Jewish men and a young boy in front of the entire camp. The men died quickly, but the child did not. Describing this scene, Wiesel wrote that he heard someone ask: ‘Where is God? Where is He?’ For more than an hour the child stayed there, dying in slow agony. Wiesel continued: I heard the same man asking: ‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him: Where is He? Here he is – he is hanging here on the gallows.’”

Dan Cohn-Sherbok has spoken of the way in which:

“Jews are perplexed how to make sense of God’s seeming inactivity … How could God have brought about, or allowed, millions of innocent individuals to die in the most horrific circumstances? … Congregants are deeply concerned about the religious implications of the Holocaust, and in synagogues wish to gain some understanding of God’s nature and actions”.

For some, as Cohn-Sherbok notes, “Auschwitz was the final confirmation that there is no God”. Wiesel’s stories resonate with this depth of suffering that the Jewish people have experienced in and because of the Holocaust. In Night, Wiesel’s central character Eliezer appears to lose his faith in God after witnessing the hanging. He feels that he is God’s accuser, as do the Rabbi’s in Wiesel’s trial story. As a result, his thought that God is “hanging here on the gallows” has been read as meaning that this scene represents the death of belief in God in his life and, by implication, in Wiesel’s. But this is actually the reverse of Wiesel’s meaning – “an interpretation bordering on blasphemy” - as he has vehemently explained in his memoirs:

“I have never renounced my faith in God. I have risen against His justice, protested His silence and sometimes His absence, but my anger rises up within faith and not outside it ... the texts cite many occasions when prophets and sages rebelled against the lack of divine interference in human affairs during times of persecution ... If that hurts, so be it. Sometimes we must accept the pain of faith so as not to lose it. And if that makes the tragedy of the believer more devastating than that of the nonbeliever, so be it. To proclaim one’s faith within the barbed wire of Auschwitz may well represent a double tragedy, of the believer and his Creator alike”.

This statement of Wiesel’s could be a commentary on his trial story where the protest of the rabbis occurs within belief in and relationship with the God whom they pronounce as guilty. Jonathan Sacks argues that it is here that Judaism begins, “in the protest against a world that is not as it should be”. Sacks examines the great biblical dialogues between God and Abraham and Moses and Jeremiah and Job and states that they are both unique to and a never-ending feature of Judaism:

“They were even accentuated in the midrashic and aggadic literature. They exist if you read it carefully in the literature of lament of the medieval period, the things we call kinot and slichot. They exist in hassidic stories, especially … stories about the great hassidic Rebbe, Levi Yizhak of Berdichev. Many of his stories are that kind of dialogue with God. And they exist of course in the Holocaust literature, the most famous example the recently re-published dialogue or monologue … called ‘Yossel Rakover speaks to God’.

In other words, the dialogue over the existence of evil has been a non-stop feature of Judaism from biblical times to the present …”

Sacks calls this the dialogical imagination and he contrasts it with the logical imagination which he sees as characteristic of Greek thought. Christianity, he thinks, has been primarily influenced by the logical imagination. He also makes a further distinction that is important in this context and which he again sees as distinctively Jewish. This is the distinction between God’s perspective and the human perspective:

“In Judaism ... God does get involved but He also makes space for humanity to get involved. He does this by conferring integrity, legitimacy, dignity on the point of view of man. That means that in Judaism at the very least ... there are two viewpoints, never less than two: ultimately, the viewpoint of how things appear to God and how they appear to us. And in Judaism both of those are legitimate: truth as it is in heaven; truth as it is on earth”.

When these two distinctions are put together Sacks is able, in a post-Holocaust context, to set out the alternatives as follows:

“On the one hand, maybe Nietzsche was right, maybe there is no justice ... Maybe there is no god and no meaning to life ... In which case, any attempt to find moral meaning in the universe is destined to fail. All we have is the struggle for existence and what Nietzsche called “the will to power”. The strong crush the weak. The clever outwit the simple. The powerful dominate the powerless. And in such a world there is no reason not to expect a holocaust.

On the other hand ... Maybe the devout believer is right. Maybe all evil is an illusion. Maybe everything that happens happens because God willed it so. In which case we may not know why the Holocaust happened. But there is a reason for it: God’s reason. And we must accept it. We must accept the fact of the Holocaust as God’s unfathomable will.

I tell you that I as a Jew refuse to accept either alternative. I refuse to accept them because either of them would allow me to live at peace with the world and I believe it is morally impossible to live at peace in a world that contained an Auschwitz ... Therefore, ... this faith of multiple perspectives, of cognitive dissonance, which is lived out in time through the conversation between Earth and Heaven and lived out in dialogue, is the energising tension at the heart of Judaism. It is what drives us to act and try to change the world. If we see the dissonance between our world and God’s world ... between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’, then we know that that tension can be resolved only by action which is inspired by revelation, which moves us closer to redemption.

... We call out to God and we find Him calling out to us saying, “You must fight the fire. You, human beings, must put out the flames and I will show you how”.”

Sacks’ view still leaves God in heaven though, albeit in relationship, in dialogue and involved and intervening particularly in the early years of His relationship with humanity. Not all Jews have been happy to leave the matter there. Cohn-Sherbok, for example, interprets Wiesel’s gallows story as Wiesel intended:

“For Wiesel, God is not an impassive presence in the universe. Rather, he suffers when his people endure misery and death ... Here in Wiesel’s vision of a suffering God is a response to those who maintain that religious faith has been eclipsed by the Holocaust ... suffering is central to God’s love”.

As Cohn-Sherbok points out Wiesel’s story of the ‘hanged God’ “can serve to draw Jews and Christians together in a quest to understand God’s action in the world”. This has been recognised by other Jewish artists and writers, both pre- and post-Holocaust. Marc Chagall, beginning with White Crucifixion in 1938, created a series of paintings in which Christ’s suffering on the cross was symbolic of the sufferings throughout history of the Jewish people of which he was part. George Steiner has used the three central days of the Passion narrative to symbolise humanity’s current state while Simone Weil saw affliction as that which fastens us at the centre of the universe, “the point of intersection between creation and Creator,” which is the Cross.

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Lou Reed - Sad Song.

Divine dialogues - part 2

A key element in these revelations is the Bible which is, as we should by now expect, conversational in both its form and content. One interesting way into exploring this aspect of the Bible is to look at a statement about Judaism made by Jonathan Sacks in his fascinating series of Faith Lectures. Commenting on Midrash Raba, he states that:

“Abraham says: God, why did you abandon the world? God says to Abraham: Why did you abandon Me? And there then begins that dialogue between Heaven and Earth which has not ceased in 4,000 years. That dialogue in which God and Man find one another.” [1]

“Only thus,” Sacks says, “can we understand the great dialogues between God and Abraham and Moses and Jeremiah and Job … Dialogues which never ended in the Bible … [and which] were … accentuated in the midrashic and aggadic literature … the literature of lament of the mediaeval period, … in hassidic stories, … and … in the Holocaust literature.” “In other words,” he suggests, “that dialogue … has been a non-stop feature of Judaism from biblical times to the present …”. His claim is that this dialogue is unique to Judaism.

He is not alone in putting forward this point of view. Gabriel Josipovici develops a similar argument in relation to the Christian and Hebrew scriptures. He argues that:

“The Christian Bible leads to the end of time, to the fulfilment of time. When time is fulfilled everything will have been revealed … but by and large the Hebrew Bible chose a different path. It chose not to stay with the fulfilment of man’s desires but with the reality of what happens to us in life. We all long in our daily lives for an end to uncertainty, to the need for decisions and choices, with the concomitant feeling that the choices we have made may have been the wrong ones. Yet we also know that life will not provide such an end, that we will always be enmeshed in uncertainty. What is extraordinary is that a sacred book should dramatize this, rather than be the one place where we are given what we desire. But that is precisely what the Hebrew Bible does … What we have to say is that Christianity expresses profound desires and suggests that these can eventually be fulfilled. The Hebrew Bible refuses that consolation.”[2]

I disagree and suggest that Christianity has taken up both this dialogue and refusal of consolation that is a feature of Judaism and of the Hebrew Bible[3].

Protesting dialogue with God can be seen, for example, in the work of the poet-priests George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In ‘Bitter-sweet’, Herbert says that if God is going to be contrary in his relationship with him then he will reciprocate and complain, praise, bewail, approve, lament and love:

“Ah my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament, and love.”[4]

Hopkins’ poems of lament and protest have been called the ‘terrible sonnets’[5]. In ‘Carrion Comfort’ (which he described as ‘written in blood’) he wrestles with God, while a line from ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’ - “Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,/How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost/Defeat, thwart me?” - could be a concise summary of protest within relationship[6].

Christian theology has also taken up these prayers and cries. Karl-Josef Kushel, for example, consciously aims to do theology in the sphere of George Steiner’s ‘Easter Saturday’ and by paying attention to the art that arises in this sphere.[7] Kushel notes that, “the rebellion of human beings against God can be their form of prayer; quarrelling their form of saying yes; protest their declaration of love to God”[8]. The language of prayer should be the basis of theology, talk of God should come from talking with God but, he suggests, theology often does not reflect the disturbed nature of prayer:

“Have we ever perceived what has accumulated over millennia of the history of religion in the language of prayers ... the crying and the jubilation, the lament and the song, the despair and the mourning and the final dumbness? Have we perhaps orientated ourselves too much on a language of prayer which has been tamed by the church and liturgy, by the one-sided images from the biblical tradition? What about Job’s lament ‘How long?’ ... The Son’s cry of desolation, and Maranatha, as the last word of the New Testament? This language is far more capable of resistance, far less malleable and ready for use, far less forgettable than the language of platonism and idealism, in which theology is concerned about how compatible it is with modernity and with which it tests its perplexing firmness in the face of all catastrophes and all experiences of non-identity.”[9]

[1] J. Sacks, ‘Judaism, Justice and Tragedy – Confronting the problem of evil – 6 November 2000’ in Faith Lectures, The Website of the Chief Rabbi – www.chiefrabbi.org/faith/evil.html.
[2] Ibid., pp. 87 & 89.
[3] In making this point I am disagreeing with Sacks’ argument that dialogue with God is unique to Judaism but in doing so I do not wish to equate the scale of suffering experienced by the Church to those of the Jewish people. Nor do I wish to ignore the fact that the Church has not only experienced sufferings but has also inflicted it and, in particular, has inflicted it on the Jewish people both directly and by its silence. For both, genuine repentance is required from us, the contemporary Church. We must remember too that Paul’s imagery in Romans 11: 17 - 24 is of Gentile Christians being grafted in among the Jews as God’s chosen people not, in any way, of Gentile Christians replacing the Jews wholesale although this has often been underlying implication of the way in which the Church has acted.
[4] G. Herbert, The Poems of George Herbert, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961, p. 162.
[5] A comment on their content, not their quality.
[6] G. M. Hopkins, Selected Poems, Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1964, pps. xxv, xxvi, 64 and 75.
[7] Steiner has used the three central days of the Passion narrative to symbolise humanity’s current state: “But ours is the long day’s journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation of rebirth on the other. In the face of the torture of a child, of the death of love which is Friday, even the greatest art and poetry are almost helpless. In the Utopia of the Sunday, the aesthetic will, presumably, no longer have logic or necessity. The apprehensions and figurations ... which tell of pain and of hope, of the flesh which is said to taste of ash and of the spirit which is said to have the savour of fire, are always Sabbatarian. They have risen out of an immensity of waiting which is that of man.” G. Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?, London: Faber & Faber; Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989, pps. 231 - 232.
[8] K-J. Kuschel, The Poet As Mirror, SCM Press, 1999, p. 224.
[9] Ibid., p. 226, citing J. B. Metz, ‘Gotteskrise. Versuch zur “geistigen Situation der Zeit”’, in id. et al. (eds.), Diagnosen zur Zeit, Dusseldorf 1994, 84f.

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Bruce Cockburn - If I Had A Rocket Launcher.