Anglican

John A. T. Robinson

The ultra-liberal Anglican bishop and biblical scholar, John A. T. Robinson, author of the bestseller, Honest to God, famous for wanting to change the conventional language of the church so it would better accord with a scientific worldview; famous too for reappraising common wisdom about when various books of the New Testament were written; believed that the Shroud was not the work of a medieval forger. In contemplating the notion that the author of John, the fourth gospel, may have meant for us to interpret that Jesus passed through his burial cloths, he addressed dematerialization in the context of the Shroud of Turin. He seemed to want to redefine it:

Dematerialization is I suspect a modern way of envisaging the relationship between flesh and spirit, matter and energy, of being 'changed' or 'clothed upon' with a body of 'glory'. How a first-century Jew would naturally have envisaged resurrection (though this does not of course mean that this is how it actually happened) would surely have been as a corpse waking up from sleep, like Tabitha in Acts (9:40), as indeed Jesus predicts of Lazarus (John 11:11), and then like Lazarus walking out of the tomb. The difference in the case of Jesus was that the grave-clothes did not need to be taken off him nor the stones removed: he did it himself. For, unlike Lazarus, he was not simply being restored to the weakness of a flesh-body. In the power of the Spirit he broke the bonds of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.

Father Joe on Reason

Father Joe, who teaches biology, explained to me that soup was a metaphor for how he approached faith. “Your mind is like a big pot. Throw in evolution, cosmology, everything that science might yet discover, history, theology, scripture, and everything the church teaches. Mix it, cook it, and let it simmer. If it tastes right, I have a faith I can live with.” The shroud, he told me, is too overpowering of a flavor. “If it’s real, it is too close to saying something certain. Faith is trust in the absence of certainty. Certainty spoils the soup.”      

I’m an Episcopalian. In the Anglican Communion—the Episcopal Church in the United States is part of the Anglican Communion—we have long had a way of explaining our faith, and indeed how we act on our faith, as resting upon a three-legged stool. The legs are scripture, reason and tradition. Remove any one leg and the stool will not stand. Sometimes, with a bit too much pride, we call this metaphorical stool the genius of Anglicanism. Perhaps soup is a better metaphor. The idea, however, is the same.

Reaction to Darwin

It may strike some as ironic that both of these men are buried in the nave of London’s Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster, informally know as Westminster Abbey. They are there, especially honored for their accomplishments in science. It is fitting also, for they have had as much influence on modern Christian thinking as on modern science. Recently, Nature, in an editorial (October,  2009), commented on reactions to Darwin.

In England, for example, the Church reacted badly to Darwin’s theory, going so far as to say that to believe it was to imperil your soul. But the notion that Darwin’s ideas ‘killed’ God and were a threat to religion was by no means the universal response in the nineteenth century. . . . [F]rom Egypt to India, China and Japan, many religious scholars embraced Darwin's ideas, often showing how their own schools of thought had anticipated the notion of evolution. -Editorial from Nature, Volume 461 Number 7268

Yes, some in the Church reacted badly. This was particularly so in the Church of England, part of the Anglican Communion, the “Church” in particular to which the editors of Nature were certainly referring. But they overstated what happened. Darwin’s theory was more of a culture shock than a religious shock. It was more about resistance to change than an inability to accommodate evolution within Christianity. Darwin, after a choral funeral service in the Abbey,  was buried in a prominent place in the church’s nave at the request of William Spottiswoode, the president of the Royal Society, Britain’s academy of science. The suggestion was warmly welcomed.

Darwin, truly a humble agnostic, was very much admired, and his theory accepted by many in the church including, Harvey Goodwin,  the bishop of Carlisle, who on the Sunday following Darwin’s funeral in a sermon preached in the abbey, said:

It would have been unfortunate if anything had occurred to give weight and currency to the foolish notion which some have diligently propagated, but for which Mr Darwin was not responsible, that there is a necessary conflict between a knowledge of Nature and a belief in God….

Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA)

He attempted from his perspective to give a measure of legitimacy to religion—which he respected—by defining “two great realms of nature's factuality and the source of human morality.” There was, he thought, as he explained in his now classic book Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, two non-overlapping magisteria. (6)

Oxford’s Richard Dawkins, our era’s most famous militant atheist disagreed. As he saw it, non-overlapping magisteria or NOMA, as it came to be known in the heady world of academia, doesn’t work because religion makes claims about nature’s factuality, specifically its origins. To Dawkins, there was only one magisteria. Religion was simply bunk. One Internet pundit, a supporter of Dawkins’ views, dubbed Dawkins’ one and only magesteria SOMA. He defined it as science only magisteria. He suggested a name for what he said was a “brain-dead” magisteria. He called it COMA for creationism only magisteria. Oxford’s Alister McGrath, a biologist, a scientific-atheist turned Christian, now an Anglican priest who frequently takes to the stage to debate Dawkins one-on-one, in a serious vein suggested partial-overlapping magesteria, which he called POMA.

John Polkinghorne

Cambridge’s John Polkinghorne,  a particle physicist and mathematician is also a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is also an Anglican priest and theologian. In a Newsweek article, “Science Finds God,” Polkinghorne is quoted as saying:

When you realize that the laws of nature must be incredibly finely tuned to produce the universe we see, that conspires to plant the idea that the universe did not just happen, but that there must be a purpose behind it. (8)

Polkinghorne is far from alone. The list of distinguished cosmologist, astronomers, astrophysicists, theoretical physicists and mathematicians who express similar sentiments reads like a Who’s Who of science: astrophysicists Arthur Eddiington Fred Hoyle, Paul Davies and George Ellis; astronomers John O’Keefe, George Greenstein, Alan Sandage; mathematicians Roger Penrose, Alexander Polyakov—just to name a few.

Critics of such thinking sometimes casually link this sort of thinking to evolutionary intelligent design by calling it ID or calling it God-of-the-gaps theology. While it is true that evolutionary ID proponents generally embrace the fine-tuned universe description, the compliment is generally not returned. The vast majority of scientists, no matter their field of study, do not embrace evolutionary ID whether or not they accept Polkinghorne’s conclusion.

String Theory

Steven Weinberg is not impressed by fine tuning yet none the less thinks that committed atheists can appropriate the idea to help explain something called string theory. String theory is very esoteric for our purposes here and we won’t get into it here except to comment on it. Weinberg suggests that the fine tuning required for human life can be explained by the theory and there is no need to invoke a creator God.  However, not everyone is enamored with string theory, including the atheist Feynman and the Anglican priest Polkinghorne and The New Yorker’s regular science and philosophy columnist, Jim Holt who called it a theory of nothing:

Dozens of string-theory conferences have been held, hundreds of new Ph.D.s have been minted, and thousands of papers have been written. Yet, for all this activity, not a single new testable prediction has been made, not a single theoretical puzzle has been solved. In fact, there is no theory so far—just a set of hunches and calculations suggesting that a theory might exist. And, even if it does, this theory will come in such a bewildering number of versions that it will be of no practical use: a Theory of Nothing.

Polkinghorne simply called string theory, “A conceptual flight of fancy in its way as breathtaking as any idea in eschatology.”

Feynman was, well, characteristically Feynman:

I don’t like that they’re not calculating anything. I don’t like that they don’t check their ideas. I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, “Well, it might be true.”

Terry Eagleton

The quarrel between science and theology, then, is not a matter of how the universe came about, or which approach can provide the best "explanation" for it. It is a disagreement about how far back one has to go, though not in the chrono­logical sense. For theology, science does not start far back enough-not in the sense that it fails to posit a Creator, but in the sense that it does not ask questions such as why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intelligible to us. Perhaps these are phony questions anyway; some philosophers certainly think so. But theologians, as Rowan Williams [the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury] has argued, are interested in the question of why we ask for explanations at all, or why we assume that the universe hangs together in a way that makes explanation possible. Where do our notions of explanation, regularity, and intelligibility come from? How do we explain rationality and intelligibility themselves, or is this question either superfluous or too hard to answer? Can we not account for rationality because to do so is to presuppose it? (Terry Eagleton)

The study of the shroud, if it is a microcosm of the quest for God, must comply with the rules for as much as they are the best rules we have: the scientific method and the means for drawing the best explanations from the information at hand. We must avoid the pitfalls of pseudoscience. We must insist that everything is reasonably verifiable.

In the scientific quest for God, both sides of the fine-tuned universe are well represented by highly regarded scientists—cosmologist, astrophysicists, mathematicians, quantum physicists—and philosophers. There is or there isn’t a multiverse or there is some other explanation not yet understood. This quest will continue. The narrower quest for the historical Jesus is likely to continue unabated. So, too, the even narrower-still quest to understand the resurrection. There is a wide diversity of opinion and countless scholars. Wright lists more than 500 contemporary scholars in his book, The Resurrection.

One would hope that in the very granular study, the shroud, there would be the same give and take of scientists and historians. That just isn’t so. The last time it was so seems to have been in 1988 when dozens of scientists participated in the carbon dating of the shroud. The paper in Nature included 21 authors. Perhaps that was enough. It seemed so decisive. They are now almost universally silent. Perhaps that is justified by the new findings.

Scientists and historians long ago discovered that contending ideas is important when seeking the best possible understanding of anything even if we sometimes resist the impulse to do so. That was what Galileo was doing. It took a long time for the church to come around to his way of thinking. Darwin did the same. It took a long time for many people to accept evolution. The majority within Christian traditions—Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Mainline Protestant—have accepted evolution. Unfortunately, there is little debate about the shroud’s authenticity based on new evidence.  There is one outstanding exception.

N. T. Wright

N. T. Wright, the Anglican bishop of Durham in England is a significant historian and theologian. He has taught at Oxford, Cambridge and McGill University in Montreal. In a gigantic, 800 page, small typeface book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, he explores the entire spectrum of challenges to resurrection from pagan mythology to issues emanating between conflicting 1^st century and modern worldviews. He concludes that:

The challenge for any historian, when faced with the question of the rise of Christianity, is much more sharply focused than is often supposed. It is not simply a matter of whether one believes in 'miracles', or in the supernatural, in general, in which case (it is supposed) the resurrection will be no problem. If anyone ever reaches the stage where the resurrection is in that sense no problem, we can be sure that they have made a mistake somewhere, that they have constructed a world in which this most explosive and subversive of events - supposing it to have occurred - can be domesticated and put on show, like a circus elephant or clever typing monkey, as a key exhibit in the church's collection of supernatural trophies. The resurrection of Jesus then becomes either 'a trip to a garden and a lovely surprise', a happy ending to a fairy story', or a way of legitimating different types of Christianity or different leaders within it. No: the challenge comes down to a much narrower point, not simply to do with worldviews in general, or with 'the supernatural' in particular, but with the direct question of death and life, of the world of space, time and matter and its relation to whatever being there may be for whom the word 'god', or even 'God', might be appropriate. Here there is, of course, no neutrality. Any who pretend to it are merely showing that they have not understood the question.

In other words the rise of Christianity would not have happened as it did if the resurrection wasn’t very real for Jesus’ followers and the early Christian communities. It is the historian’s equivalent of Polkinghorne’s quantum physics analogy: it may not make perfect sense but it makes sense of many things that otherwise have no explanation.

Mozarabic Rite vs Latin Rite

Following the reconquest of Toledo in 1085, a dispute arose about which rite should be used in Toledo, the Mozarabic or the Latin rite. To resolve the dispute both rites were subjected to an ordeal by fire—this time for real. The book containing the Mozarabic Rite, written on heavy vellum survived the fire better than the book with the Latin rite written on thinner paper. Thus it was adopted for use in Toledo despite attempts by Pope Gregory VII to stamp it out. Today, it is licensed for daily use in the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Mary of Toledo and Pope John Paul II celebrated the Eucharist with the rite on two occasions. It has also been adopted as the primary sacramental liturgy of the Anglican Communion’s Spanish Reformed Episcopal Church in Spain rather than the more common Anglican rite.

The Sudarium Envisioned

Many envision this cloth as flat, like a napkin or a towel, placed on Jesus’ face or used to wrap his head after he was taken from the cross. D. A. Carson in his recent, monumental commentary, The Gospel According to John, tells us:

The corpse was customarily laid on a sheet of linen, wide enough to envelop the body completely and more than twice the length of the corpse. The body was placed on the sheet that the feet were at one end, and then the sheet was drawn over the head and back down to the feet. The feet were bound at the ankles, and the arms were tied to the body with linen strips. The face was bound with another cloth (soudarion, a loan-word from the Latin sudarium, ‘sweat-cloth’, often worn in life around the neck). Jesus’ body was apparently prepared for burial in the same way. (29)

Others disagree in one or two minor details. The arms may be bound at the wrists but not tied to the body. Others argue that the soudarion might have been removed prior to the body being enshrouded. Others, such as the great biblical scholar and Anglican bishop, John A. T. Robinson, famous for his book, Honest to God, thinks that the soudarion was a chin band tied around the head to keep the corpse’s jaw closed. We don’t know, one way or the other; not from history, for it is inadequate on this point.

Is the Sudarium There?

There is, in the top layer of the cloth, an irregular raised spot, suggesting that there is something there between the lop layer and the bottom layer of the shroud. Is it the sudarium, the other cloth mentioned in John’s gospel wherein we read that Simon Peter “saw the linen wrappings lying there, ⁷and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself”? (NRSV John 20:6-7)

Biblical scholar Raymond E. Brown, a Roman Catholic Priest and professor emeritus at the Union Theological Seminary, a Protestant seminary in New York where he taught for 23 years, suggested that . . .

John is very careful about the state of the linen cloths (bands?) used to wrap the corpse, and the separate piece for the head. Their position may have outlined the original position of Jesus’ body which passed through them, leaving them where they were. (31)

It is, for the modern reader, perhaps a strange idea more apropos for Hollywood special effects. But what else do we expect if we are the sort of Christian who believes in a bodily, physical resurrection (many Christians do and many do not)? Did Jesus instead get up and remove his burial cloths. If his jaw had been bound closed with a chin band to keep the mouth closed, as has been common in burials throughout history, would he have untied it? Or did he pass through it? The question is only important because the raised shape in the drawing looking very much like it could be a knotted chin band, in just the right place for such an item. This is certainly consistent with Anglican scholar John A. T. Robinson’s view that the other cloth, the second cloth, was a chin band.

Terry Eagleton

The quarrel between science and theology, then, is not a matter of how the universe came about, or which ap-proach can provide the best "explanation" for it. It is a disagreement about how far back one has to go, though not in the chrono¬logical sense. For theology, science does not start far back enough-not in the sense that it fails to posit a Creator, but in the sense that it does not ask questions such as why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intelligible to us. Perhaps these are phony questions anyway; some philosophers certainly think so. But theologians, as Rowan Williams [the Anglican Archbishop of Canter-bury] has argued, are interested in the question of why we ask for explanations at all, or why we assume that the universe hangs together in a way that makes expla-nation possible. Where do our notions of explanation, regularity, and intelligibility come from? How do we explain rationality and intelligibility themselves, or is this question either superfluous or too hard to answer? Can we not account for rationality because to do so is to presuppose it?