Dr. Margaret Barker: Reading the Meaning

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"All religious belief is expressed, transmitted and received in code.  even the simplest statements, when they are examined carefully by an outsider, have very little meaning.  This is because every religious community has its own way of speaking about faith, and the most effective way to do this is in pictures.  People brought up in a Christian community recognise immediately what is meant by the Lamb of God, or by bread and wine; to someone from another culture, however, these are not vivd images but a solid wall which separates those inside, those 'in the know', from everyone else. 'Other cultures' are no longer those who can be identified as other faith communities.  The 'other cultures' now are the vast mass of people who have lost all touch with Christian tradition.

"It used to be thought that putting the code into modern English would overcome the problem, and make everything clear to people who had no roots in a Christian community.  This attempt has proved misguided, since so much of the code simply will not translate into modern English.  It was not the words themselves which were the problem, but rather the pictures, the signs and symbols which the words were describing.  The 'blood of the Lamb' is a phrase familiar to all Christians; it is perfectly good modern English, but, unexplained, is meaningless.

"There has also been an attempt to put the Bible, more particularly the New Testament, into a code-free form.  Remove the symbols and the pictures, it was thought, break the pure truth free from the story in which it was unfortunately embedded, and then all would be clear.  The result proved to be exactly the opposite; a fog of contemporary philosophical jargon was offered in place of the vivid symbols and stories of the Bible, and the problem remained.

"The task, then, has had to alter. The need now is not just for modern English, or modern thought forms, but for an explanation of the images and pictures in which the ideas of the Bible are expressed.  These are specific to one culture, that of Israel and Judaism, and until they are fully understood in their original setting, little of what is done with the writings and ideas that came from that particular setting can be understood.  Once we lose touch with the meaning of biblical imagery, we lose any way into the real meaning of the Bible.  This has already begun to happen, and a diluted 'instant' Christianity has been offered as junk food for the mass market.  The resultant malnutrition, even in churches, is all too obvious."

Margaret Barker

"On Earth as it is in Heaven"

[2009: Sheffield Phoenix Press]

pp. 1-2.

What we see is as a screen

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This last week I read again Dr. Margaret Barker's The Hidden Tradition of the Kingdom of God -- another of her works deserving three cheers for the scholar.  She concludes her work with a quote from Ven. John Henry Cardinal Newman from the Fourth Volume of his Parochial and Plain Sermons.  I was very taken with Dr. Barker's entire thesis, so this extended quote from Cardinal Newman seemed at first a bit of icing for the cake so to speak.  But reading through I realised how well it grounded and summarised Dr. Barker's approach.  Here is the quotation as used by Dr. Margaret Barker:
 

Once only in the year, yet once, does the world which we see show forth its hidden powers, and in a manner manifest itself. Then the leaves come out, and the blossoms on the fruit trees, and flowers; and the grass and corn spring up. There is a sudden rush and burst outwardly of that hidden life which God has lodged in the material world. Well, that shows you, as by a sample, what it can do at God's command, when He gives the word. This earth, which now buds forth in leaves and blossoms, will one day burst forth into a new world of light and glory, in which, we shall see Saints and Angels dwelling. 

Who would think, except from his experience of former springs all through his life, who could conceive two or three months before, that it was possible that the face of nature, which then seemed so lifeless, should become so splendid and varied? How different is a tree, how different is a prospect, when leaves are on it and off it! How unlikely it would seem, before the event, that the dry and naked branches should suddenly be clothed with what is so bright and so refreshing! Yet in God's good time leaves come on the trees. The season may delay, but come it will at last. So it is with the coming of that Eternal Spring, for which all Christians are waiting. Come it will, though it delay; yet though it tarry, let us wait for it, 'because it will surely come, it will not tarry.' Therefore we say day by day, 'Thy kingdom come;' which means,—O Lord, show Thyself; manifest Thyself; Thou that sittest between the cherubim, show Thyself; stir up Thy strength and come and help us. (Dr. Barker's emphasis)

The earth that we see does not satisfy us; it is but a beginning; it is but a promise of something beyond it; even when it is gayest, with all its blossoms on, and shows most touchingly what lies hid in it, yet it is not enough. We know much more lies hid in it than we see. A world of Saints and Angels, a glorious world, the palace of God, the mountain of the Lord of Hosts, the heavenly Jerusalem, the throne of God and Christ, all these wonders, everlasting, all-precious, mysterious, and incomprehensible, lie hid in what we see. 

What we see is the outward shell of an eternal kingdom; and on that kingdom we fix the eyes of our faith. Shine forth, O Lord, as when on Thy nativity Thine Angels visited the shepherds; let Thy glory blossom forth as bloom and foliage on the trees; change with Thy mighty power this visible world into that diviner world, which as yet we see not; destroy what we see, that it may pass and be transformed into what we believe. 

Bright as is the sun, and the sky, and the clouds; green as are the leaves and the fields; sweet as is the singing of the birds; we know that they are not all, and we will not take up with a part for the whole. They proceed from a centre of love and goodness, which is God Himself; but they are not His fulness; they speak of heaven, but they are not heaven; they are but as stray beams and dim reflections of His Image; they are but crumbs from the table . . . .

We know that what we see is as a screen hiding from us God and Christ, and His Saints and Angels. 

John Henry Newman

'The Invisible World'

Parochial and Plain Sermons

Vol.4, no. 13

+Laus Deo!

Of favourite authors (and my lovely niece)

Margaret Barker on Laurence Paul Hemming's
Worship as a Revelation: The Past, Present, and Future of Catholic Liturgy

My young niece asks of me, "I understand that you are a hermit, Uncle Vincent, but what do you do all day when you aren't able to get out of the house or even out of bed?"

Yes, it is one thing to be a hermit by vocation and quite another when one is simply housebound, so finding my best uncle-ish voice, I reply, "I read, my dear."

Thinking about it for a minute she says in a very serious tone, "I suppose you must since you haven't got a television ... Do you enjoy what you are reading?"

"If it is something by one of my favourite authors, then I do enjoy it very much."

My niece picks up a book off of my bed and asks, "Should I read this, Uncle?"

I strain to see what she has in hand, and it is Laurence Hemming's Worship as a Revelation.

"Some day, my dear, I hope you shall have read it and countless others, but for now," I say whilst rummaging under a pillow, "I think it best if you read this."

Her eyes light up, "Oh, this is a book by one of your favourite authors!"

Before I could say anything else, she's out the door ready to read a well-worn book of stories by Caryl Houselander. Then I set myself to read what Dr. Margaret Barker had to say as a response to Laurence Paul Hemming's Worship as a Revelation. And I am not disappointed. So now I quote at length from her response & expecting many of my friends to agree with her as I do:

Laurence raises important questions about the relationship between Scripture and liturgy, and the relative ‘weight’ of each in the development and expression of the Faith. The disastrous ‘secularisation’ of biblical studies in the last century or so, springing from German literary criticism and so-called scientific method, has been allowed to drive revision of the liturgy in way that, on reflection, seems unbelievable.

I had no idea, until I read this book, that even Rome had adopted the family meal approach to the Eucharist, with everyone gathered round a table. Losing, or even reducing, the covenant and atonement that is at the very heart of the Eucharist must surely lead us to ask: ‘What, then, is left?’

I realised too, as I read several times the philosophy sections of the book [‘several readings’ was not because they were unclear, but because their implications were dawning on me] just how much the original Christian tradition has been infused with - and dare I say confused with - the ways of Greek philosophy. The God of Abraham, is not the God of the philosophers, although, as I tried to work out in my book The Great High Priest, a great deal of Plato, via Pythagoras, does seem to have come from the temple.

Given my pro-temple stance and my love of gardening, I regard these philosophical accretions as a form of intellectual bindweed, with very deep roots and very difficult to eradicate. Left unchecked, it strangles and kills the other plants. It has to be removed. A similar culling may be necessary if we are ever to recover the original glory and meaning of Christian worship, to see again the original vision. Everything else will become Church history or history of scholarship.

Christian history cannot be undone or rewritten, but there is the possibility of - dare I say it?- another reformation, when we free ourselves from the accumulated clutter of academe, be this Greek philosophy or German literary criticism, and begin to see again what has been with us all the time in our ancient patterns of worship.

Laurence uses some powerful words when expounding Ascensiontide: ‘…when we have been made ready by the grace given in the liturgical signs to understand the full meaning of what we have… already been given’ (p.107). This applies, I suspect, to our whole liturgical heritage.

Eight minutes, I was told, so I can say no more. Except, perhaps, one of my favourite quotations from Bulgakov*, originally written of the Holy Wisdom, but applicable, I think to a good deal more:

"All this wealth of symbolism has been preserved in the archives of ecclesiastical antiquities, but, covered by the dust of ages, it has been no use to anyone. The time has come, however, for us to sweep away the dust of ages and to decipher the sacred script, to reinstate the tradition of the Church, in this case all but broken, as a living tradition."

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* ‘The Wisdom of God’ (1937) reprinted in A Bulgakov Anthology, edd. J Pain and N Zernov, London: SPCK, 1976, pp. 144-56, p. 146.


Brava, Dr. Barker, Brava!