Lash-tastic

Phew. Formalities done.

I’ve been reading lots of Nicholas Lash recently. He was until recently a long-time academic in Cambridge’s Theology department and taught one of my current tutors there. His personal history was influenced by lots of time in India, where his grandfather was a Bishop. As a result, he engages in conversation between Christianity and Hinduism, which he sees as a helpful way of rediscovering some classical Christian ways of thinking about God which were lost post-seventeenth century in the west (see lots of later posts I hope).

He makes several suggestions about the place of religion in the modern world.

Lash has a fascinating view of humanity – particularly interesting in terms of Christian concepts of ‘fallenness’, from which we are somehow ‘saved’. I quote:

‘All human beings have their hearts set somewhere, hold something sacred, worship at some shrine. We are spontaneously idolatrous – where, by ‘idolatry’, I mean the worship of some creature, the setting of the heart on some particular thing (usually oneself).’

Also (though I would wish to note that rather a lot of the people who do worship God are reactionary and simple-minded):

‘It is taken for granted, in sophisticated circles, that no one worships God these days except the reactionary and the simple-minded. This innocent self-satisfaction tells us little more, however, than that those exhibiting it do not name as ‘God’ the gods they worship.’

In this context, Lash searches for the place of religion.

His suggestion is that religious traditions – understood properly, having broken the shackles of the Enlightenment’s misunderstanding of the nature of God (again, see lots of later posts I hope) – may offer a helpful context for ‘the common twofold purpose of weaning us from our idolatry and purifying our desire.’

Again:

‘Against this background, the great religious traditions can be see as contexts in which human beings may learn, however slowly, partially, imperfectly, some freedom from the destructive bondage which the worship of the creature brings.’

The characteristic Christian emphasis on the self-sacrifice of the one in whom the supreme presence of God in human history came to dwell serves to enlighten this purpose of religion. The formation into ever-increasing Christ-likeness is the central concern of the Christian tradition. In my essay, I have argued that Christianity’s focus on the self-giving of its patron and the perpetual desire to be formed into the likeness of Christ accurately models Lash’s typology of religion as a helpful context for the purification of desire. Christ is the embodiment of pure desire.

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I like Lash a lot. His desire to engage in multi-faith dialogue as a resource for better understanding what Christians mean when they speak about God is admirable and very successful. Further, his engagement with ‘eastern’ traditions (mainly Hinduism and Buddhism) offers a helpful critique of many contemporary ‘western’ models of God, which distort the traditions that produced them. I am sure I will write more on him.