Presentation notes
Immanent Transcendence in a Kairos of Crisis
Problem 1: Greek Captivity Image of Herakles Antaios
Godhood as Transcendence
→ nature entombs spirit

Spirit
vs Flesh instead of logos sarx egeneto
The ‘hellenising’ of theology was already underway by the time the Biblical canon was
formed. Colossians reads like a treatise on the philosophy of Stoicism, with phrases that
sound like they come directly from Cleanthes the founding Stoic poet; by the writing of
Ephesians and 2 Timothy, Hellenistic worldviews were not only influencing but directing
church life. Hebrews is suffused with Platonic imagery.
That’s what makes the Johannine writings so extraordinary. The author of the gospel
knew very well the foundation of Hellenic thought: Spirit, the essence of heaven, is in a
constant battle to escape the imprisoning carcass of earthly matter: sarx. ‘You must be
born of the Spirit’, Jesus teaches Nicodemus. We who are witnesses of Christ are born
‘not of blood, nor of fleshly desire, nor of human will, but of God’ (John 1:13).
It is hard to think of a more Hellenic phrase in the whole New Testament.
Then, in the very next verse, John turns his Greek readers on their head. Kai o logos
sarx
egeneto … Logos, the rational effulgence flowing from divinity into male minds, ‘becomes’
– is generated into – fleshly matter.
This may be the second most revolutionary verse in the whole New Testament – not least
because, repudiating Marcionism, it absolutely validates the heart of the Old Testament
view of God and creation. [So it needs to be translated properly – John does not say
‘Word becomes human’, nor that he redeems ‘man’ or even humankind. There are words
for those the author did not use.] The Logos, the speaking-breath Word (dabhar) of God,
enters the fleshly cosmos (that is the Greek word – cosmos) to re-deem it: claim it back as
the fleshly presence of God the Creator. *
John uses Greek language and Greek ideas to undermine the whole premise of Hellenic
culture. The goal of God and those who follow God is
not to escape earthy matter but to
reclaim it as God-breathed, ‘enlightened’, and holy.
That’s why I have chosen two alternative voices from the New Testament that show Jesus
as the antithesis of Herakles:
“Christ … did not regard equality with God as something to grasp hold of” (Phil 2:6)
Paul’s famous ‘kenotic’ hymn – from the Greek word kenosis, meaning choosing to be
emptied of self / ego – not only portrays this as the core of Christ’s incarnation, but also as
the goal of the Christian community. The apostle says ‘let this mind be in you’: the mind
that chose to be divested of divinity to enter in flesh into the lowliest of the low.
Herakles, the Greek half-human hero, divests himself of humanness to seize equality with
the gods. The Nazarene hero ‘empties himself’ of divinity to enter into the deepest, most
vulnerable fleshliness of earth. Only in this way can that vulnerable fleshliness be
redeemed into its creational glory.
Why would God in Christ do such a thing? Because, says Jesus to Nicodemus, ‘God thus
loved the cosmos’ (John 3:16), that is, the whole created fleshly order (not merely
humanity). Word did not become flesh to condemn (or escape) the cosmos, but to rescue
it – to restore its wholeness as the embodiment of God (John 3:17). Divine love holds to, is
affected by, suffers with (com-passio), and works toward the eternal redemption of, all
that lives or has ever lived.
“But I when lifted up from the earth will draw all humanity to myself” (John 12:32)
Herakles, through his own heroic effort, leaves behind forever the weak human, material,
mother-born flesh that has contaminated his divinity. He becomes fully divine by
escaping all that made him a mortal human. The Nazarene, by his own choosing, and in
confirmation of his true humanity, is ‘lifted from the earth’ in order to lift up all flesh as
well. Jesus’ resurrection and ascension ina (‘in order to’) offers divinity to all who follow
him – instead of escaping mortality, he enables all mortality to inherit immortality.
It is highly significant that the Creeds, derived from the Greco-Roman world, make it clear
that Jesus is both ‘fully divine’ and ‘fully human’ – and that fully human nature is not lost,
but eternally fulfilled, ‘at the right hand of the throne of God’.
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John’s gospel presents Jesus virtually as all-knowing and omnipotent, attributes of divinity
not so fully developed in the Synoptic writers. But John is extravagant in his portrayal of
Jesus’ humanity as well: he sits weary and thirsty by the well, rages against authority,
despairs at human betrayal, and weeps at the death of a friend. And unlike Herakles who
ultimately disowns his human mother to reclaim his divine inheritance, the Jesus of John’s
gospel will not ‘give up his spirit’ until being sure his mother will be cared for.
It is no coincidence that in John’s gospel women are first to bear witness to the truth of
Jesus: that same mother in chapter two, the rejected Samaritan in chapter four, first
Martha then her sister Mary in chapter eleven, culminating in Mary of Magdala’s witness
of Jesus as the divine Gardener of Paradise redeemed in chapter twenty. Let me remind
you that, as Jesus directed, Mary ‘told the disciples she had seen the Lord’ – and the whole
gospel grows from that opening claim ‘we have seen his glory’, meaning Mary – so that
those ‘who have not seen but believed’ will be blessed (John 20:29).
• Contradiction vs Paradox (the Western delusion)
How can Jesus be, as our Creeds claim, ‘fully divine’ yet ‘fully human’? The whole western
world is built on the foundation of what my philosophical hero Nishida Kitaro calls ‘the
law of non-contradiction’. A is never B; it is ‘one or the other’; it can never be both. Flesh,
says Hellenism, can never inherit Spirit; heaven and earth are the two poles of eternal
contradiction.
But John’s gospel – which scholars believe was written long after Greek thinking had taken
Christianity captive – defies that foundational rule. John celebrates paradox, the identity-
breaking enemy of all rational theology. Spirit and flesh together divine; rational teaching
from the mouths of women; belief based on sight yet blessed beyond sight. Do I need to
remind you that parable, parabola, means ‘the true story is a paradox’.
Aboriginal people defy this western delusion. ‘Of course’ there are two creation stories –
one for saltwater teaching, one for freshwater. They contradict each other, and both are
equally true. My dhuway Maratja wears a shirt that says ‘100% Jolŋu, 100% Christian’. I
hope tonight you will begin to see the danger of this delusion.
• Thus the ‘Great Chain of Being’ with ‘matter’ as the prison
Hellenic logic, the root source of all western thought, is based on contradiction. The
highest form of spirit is rationality, which is so utterly divorced from contradiction that the
ultimate image of God is ‘the Unmoved Mover’, who can never feel pain – or compassion
– because that would mean changing what by definition cannot be changed.
With rationality the only true picture of ‘godliness’, then it becomes possible to categorise
the whole realm of cosmic existence in a ranking system of importance based on fleshly
contamination and change. Thus the stars – which never move – outrank the planets,
which are precisely ‘seeming stars that move’. Landowning male citizens outrank working
class males who do not have the ‘leisure’ for education – remember the word ‘school’
comes from schole, the Greek word for ‘freedom from work for pay’.
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Implicit in this Chain of Being is that true self-control – imperturbability, dispassion, stoic
indifference, English is full of words to show how crucial this value is – can only be
achieved by separation from the changeability of the fleshly world. But being the
ultimately rational summiteers of existence has a cost: those on the top are responsible
for controlling those below them who cannot control themselves. Rationality’s ultimacy
becomes a fetishism of control – and the one percent of humans who hold all our futures
to ransom epitomise (that’s a Greek word) the ancient Hellenic values.
Slaves, of course, like all o barbaroi, rank towards the bottom. Nothing in their lives can
be left to their own control. Eagles which soar in the sky outrank moles who burrow in
the earth. Sex with women is necessary for offspring, but sex between males is about a
much purer love …
Because everything, everything, outranks females. Females are the literal embodiment of
flesh-ness: their bodies produce, like unthinking plant life; their wombs suck blood from
the brain so rational discourse is beyond them; and month after month blood flows out
from them to make plain to all that they are flawed and fallen, constantly in change.
If you think I’m exaggerating, just remember that one of the most common inscriptions
on Greek walls was ‘gnothi sauton’. It means ‘know thyself’ – but the words were written
on the outline of a tomb: flesh is the death-prison from which rationality must break free
– just like the womb is the flesh-prison from which even males have to escape.
Here is the point to this long beginning:
A culture that defines itself as over-against, the literal contradiction of, the world of
created materiality, will never value creation the way Jews, including Jesus, did.
A world that sees divine destiny as not only escaping, but – for its own sake –
reshaping, overcoming, and ultimately controlling the entire planetary environment,
will always end in crisis … because we are part of that creation; its identity is our
identity; and its wellbeing is fundamental to our own.
That is the world of patriarchy, and we are its inheritors. God help us.
Problem 2: Enlightenment Capitulation Image of ‘Laputa’
Have you seen this image before? Who recognises it? Yes, it’s from Studio Ghibli – but it
is a picture of something much older. This is the ‘floating island of Laputa’ in Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels – not the most well-known of his journeys, but one of the most scathing
in all Swift’s brutal satire.
Laputa is the land of ‘pure reason’, a heaven of rationality, where the privileged leisured
males can spend all their days thinking, together and alone. Go and read or re-read that
chapter after tonight and you’ll see why it is such a mockery of Enlightenment thought.
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The clue is in the name itself, as all of you who know Spanish will already have worked out.
‘La Puta’ means ‘the prostitute’. Centuries before Freud showed how our rational minds
are constantly duped by our unconscious flesh, Swift knew it too: Reason is a Whore. Let
me quickly point out that crass phrase means reason is bought and sold by fleshly desire.
Rationality itself is an artefact of flesh, and any world it creates will be a dead place of un-
feeling, disconnected solipsism: an empire of delusional patriarchal control.
Swift didn’t live long enough to see it, but he would not have been surprised that the
ultimate expression of the French experiment with a fully-rational, controlling world of
true ‘Enlightenment’ would become known as The Reign of Terror.
We are its inheritors, God help us. We are presiding over a Reign of Terror for the whole
planet and every vulnerable creature. By capitulating to Enlightenment, even the Church
has become a collaborator in the service of Reason the Whore.
Rationality’s ‘Dead Cosmos’ vs ‘living world’ of our common ancestry
• The ‘Missing Middle’ (Amos Leana)
My wonderful Nungalinya colleague Rev Dr Amos Leana was awarded his doctorate for
examining the missiological implications of what has been described as ‘the missing
middle’. Christian missionaries in ‘the New World’, whatever their denomination, had
capitulated to the Enlightenment idea that everything we feel to be true, and the stories
passed down to us, and the imagery they pictures, is false ‘superstition’ – part of a
darkness of ignorance which the West needed to purge with ‘enlightenment’.
Even the Greeks believed that trees, watersources, winds, sacred sites, were alive with
spiritual presence; and that presence was holy – and therefore dangerous. Nothing in the
natural world was simply a lifeless tool for human exploitation; if anything, we were the
tools for exploitation by the whole Middle Realm of angels, demons, and ancestors.
Our own ancestors believed that the world was alive; that wisdom mothers had access to
knowledge others could not know (Old Wives Tales); that failure to honour the spirit of a
place, a tradition, a local legend, or special presences could seriously endanger you. First
Peoples everywhere shared that belief with our own ancestors; but by missionary times, all
that heritage of interconnection, sacredness, ceremony, and Law had been debunked. It
was either a superstitious illusion, or even worse, a devilish trick.
It is one of the most tragic ironies of history that well-meaning missionaries met
welcoming Indigenous nations in Post-Enlightenment times; so instead of sharing their
common recognition of the creation as alive and blessed and dangerous and connected,
they taught that living for Jesus meant all the rest of the cosmos had to be dead.
• Disembodied ‘Rationality’ as Patriarchy’s Triumph
Folk belief everywhere recognises (like Freud later did) that the world is neither dead nor
at our disposal. If we either ignore it or try to control it, it will rebel; and the price of that
stubborn resistance will fall most painfully on those most vulnerable.
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But then, that’s what patriarchy is all about anyway: a continuous contest for power,
especially the power to control. Trump and Putin and Xi Ping are the inevitable products
of patriarchy; and all of us, like the planet around us, are its victims.
Why in the world, then, do we still allow that heresy of patriarchal, ‘rational’ control, to go
unchallenged by the churches – and synagogues, and mosques – of the Law of Moses and
the Love of Christ?
• ‘Post-enlightenment’s mistrust of metanarrative as Enlightenment Artifact
We Christians have another story to counter the destructive Reign of Terror that is
dominating our planet. It is a story as old as the planet itself, and at its heart is One who
redeems the whole cosmos, not through rationality or control, but through the kenotic
reconciliation of com-passion: feeling-connection to all flesh.
But we lost our soul to the Enlightenment (I mean that literally – ‘souls’ was another
superstition that reason abolished). Now the world is supposed to be ‘post-modern’,
which is as deceptive and silly a phrase as ‘post-colonial’. And yet again, thinking
Christians are capitulating: post-modernism now claims that any ‘grand narrative’, any
ancient founding story which connects all things, is itself another superstition. We say we
have ‘a’ truth but everyone else can have their own, because metanarrative is forbidden.
Friends, the overriding, controlling metanarrative is patriarchy: and unless people of faith
are brave enough to counter with the even bigger story of Mother Earth and all cosmic
creatures interfused with the Spirit of divine Compassion, our own theology will be one
more victim in the crisis we face.
Let me show you the metanarrative that still could save the world.
Result: Sovereign Absolute Theism Pantheism Panentheism
Hellenic Hyper-Theism dominating the 1% Human World – it is bad theology
The central point of my PhD was this: the image of God as ‘Sovereign Absolute’ – a Ruler
standing both alone and above the created cosmos – is also the way humans picture
themselves in relation to the natural world. Standing apart from, and in control over, a
creation which has no intrinsic value of its own, humans feel safe – or as a former mining
magnate claimed, even duty-bound – to exploit all those lesser creatures on the Great
Chain of Being, and the inert planet itself. We can inflict any calamity on those we control
without ourselves being affected: because that is the God in whose image we operate.
This is an extreme form of theism which dominates conservative theology in all three
Abrahamic traditions.
In response, some biocentric traditions respond with a virtual pantheism in which
there is no God apart from the cosmos, and no part of the cosmos that is not God. In
theory this might seem an attractive idea, because at least it re-conceives nature as God-
infused and sacred, so that humans who defile nature are defying God.
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For me there are three problems with pantheism. First is the problem of evil: of
everything is divine, why does evil persist? My PhD dealt with this in too much detail to
cover here, but in essence the crisis of climate change requires a radical shift in ethics and
praxis; and if there is no divinity apart from the existing cosmos, where can that shift
come from?
The second problem for me is because I take the Basis of Union seriously, which means I
have to be guided by the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments; and no Biblical text
(nor any part of our Christian heritage) argues for pantheism, the notion that ‘God is the
world, and the world is God’. To adopt a pantheistic worldview means to cut ourselves off
from the wisdom of our ancestors, and that orphan road is one I cannot follow.
The third problem (I imagine there are many more, alongside strengths, with pantheism)
is that my own thinking has been recurringly challenged by science, and specifically by the
contrasting realms of cosmic astrophysics and fundamental quantum theory. This whole
area requires several separate lectures to unpack (and I have done that elsewhere). But
what makes it problematic for pantheism is that both realms – galactic clusters and quarks
– can only be explainable by reference to something outside themselves.
Current astrophysics suggests that what is scientifically observable is not sufficient to
explain the universe as it is. Theories of harmonic strings, dark matter, and multiple
spacetime dimensions get invoked because without them we cannot explain either the
‘big bang’ with which linear time began, nor the fact that almost mindblowing complexity
‘emerges’ from static simplicity. We need something outside the observable universe to
help us explain that universe. (Many scientists happily discard Occam’s Razor to devise
incredibly complex and often contradictory forms of external causality, because of course
the simplest explanation – a transcendent God – has to be wrong.)
Quantum theory posits that events ‘condense’ from their state of indeterminacy when
observed. Again, Occam would lead us to the simple explanation that God is the Ultimate
Observer whose vision, and indeed ‘Word’, allows the formation of what is from what is
not. And even the attributes of divinity – exactly as Paul writes in Romans 1:20 – ‘are seen
and understood through what God has made’. For example, quantum entanglement,
which shows that two entities once connected continue to interact with each other no
matter how far apart they travel, is for me, a signal that the divine is not unchanging and
impassive. God having made us continues to love us eternally.
Pantheism makes these claims impossible. If the only God who exists, exists only within
the orders of creation, then the emergence of order, complexity, symmetry – even the
arrow of time itself – cannot come from God.
Having been raised in the fundamentalism of (American) theism with all its fetishism, I
gravitated towards the pantheism of Buddhist thinking. But these problems, even before I
thought them through, were hinting that pantheism is not the answer.
We live in a world of attributes; and some of those attributes testify to God’s
thoroughgoing presence within the cosmos (pantheism). But those attributes change, and
the changes move towards greater complexity as if directed from outside (theism).
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That is why that when my research led me to the worldview of panentheism I felt like
Charles Wesley emerging from the dungeon: my chains fell off, my heart was free.
I believe the image is clear: everything in creation is part of God – even brokenness
rests within the embracing love of the Creator. Psalm 139 is the source of this image:
wherever we may hide, God is already present there. (Which of course undergirds the UCA
Preamble, about which more later.)
But there is more to God than creation. The whole cosmos is part of God’s true being –
and, please note this radical corollary, when the cosmos changes those changes are
reflected in the changing nature of divinity itself. Human choices help shape God!
But there is more to God than any human choices, more than the whole universe of quarks
and galaxies, more than our 14-billion-year past unfolding, more than any living being
could ever imagine or dream. God is immanent within creation, and Christ’s incarnation
reveals the nature of that kinship, embedded and embodied in what emerged through
Word and Spirit and Hokmah Wisdom. God also transcends creation; and Christ’s
resurrection and ascension shows that God’s kinship also progresses towards such
transcendence – what is bound by time perishes, but whom God loves never ends.
This panentheistic portrayal of divinely immanent transcendence transforms our
understanding of God, creation, ourselves, and our relatedness. Yet there is more that
flows from its implications. While this lecture is primarily about theology and the ethics
that flow from theology, I am a minister, and pastoral care matters.
I had long ago come into a rephrasing of God’s presence in pastoral encounter. People
need healing; that is, they need some new way of being to emerge out of their very pain.
One dear friend claims that the essence of life is that ‘God makes good’ – whatever is
broken or betrayed or stunted or stifled, God can turn that into creative newness.
My own sense of God’s promise is slightly different. It begins with the credo: good exists,
and seeks to outgrow evil. And everyone in the world shares in that growing. So to those
in the midst of suffering in this life, God says “I will be what you need me to be”.
Whatever pain we feel, God can guide us through; whatever guilt we bear, God can set us
free; whatever harm has been inflicted on us, God can turn to growth.
It is extraordinarily healing to discover that God will meet us right at the point of need,
and that the reality of Holy Spirit means all we need to do is ask as best we can. But – and
this is the key point – that promise is only the first half of God’s caring. Here is the full
phrase that has embedded my pastoral caring into a cosmic epistemology:
I will be, promises God, what you need me to be:
But when you are ready [and sometimes before you are ready] I will be more.
That ‘more’ is the key to this worldview. Let me make my bold claim plain: I believe the
transcendence of God is the source of novelty, complexity, and diversity in the cosmos.
Not only does God’s immanence within the cosmos provide its progress from emptiness
into radically complex fullness; the mission of God’s love will eventually bring an end
forever to the fallenness of cosmic entropy.
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I hope at least some of you will recognise that as Paul’s vision in Romans 8 – and if you
remember the quote you will also remember the extraordinary claim that human beings
(specifically those reconciled by the cosmic Christ) will be part of the agency that brings
‘the promised end’ the BoU describes.
Let me complete my bold claim: the utterly unpredictable emergence of consciousness in
the cosmos through the human race means we are crucial partners with God by enhancing
novelty, complexity, and diversity in the cosmos.
Here is my progressive manifesto, nailed to the door of the church: Christianity betrays
Christ whenever it fails to defend – or even shares in defying – novelty and diversity. That
means the vexing diversity of identity politics as well as the divine right of existing species
not to be exterminated. Did you read that Statement I circulated? The future will not be
able to experience its inalienable right to expressive diversity and fullness if we impoverish
the resources of earth in this generation.
Panentheism means such impoverishment is not just stupid greed or stubborn sinfulness:
it is acting against God’s own design in creation – and because God is genuinely present
within, and experiencing fully with, the cosmos, hurting creation is wounding God.
Here is the heart of my thesis : the way we envisage God – even for those who say
no such God exists – doesn’t just influence, it determines how we act towards creation.
Let me repeat that, because it cuts across classicism, enlightenment thought, scientism,
and postmodernism: The way we envisage God determines how we act towards creation.
We need to take theology seriously, because unless we enshrine an alternative to the
Sovereign Absolute we simply cannot resolve this planetary crisis.
• Disconnection from nature + patriarchal hierarchy
One of the key works that framed my thesis (and I recommend it to anyone) is a book by
Carolyn Merchant called The Death of Nature [1980, Harper & Row, San Francisco]. It is a
wonderful work of scholarship on the beginnings of the scientific method and the
consequences that are still unfolding. It is worth reading just to see how much we owe –
for better but certainly for worse – to Roger Bacon, originator of the scientific method and
master witch-burner of England.
Bacon’s own words make it plain that the science of analysis, which claims we understand
things by taking them apart, is predicated on a logic of pathological control. If we want to
understand an animal, dissect it; if we want to understand a person, isolate them; if we
want to explore the universe, break it into bits.
Doesn’t that mean killing what is alive? No, because the dominant metaphor for creation
is not ‘organism’ but ‘mechanism’. Life is an irrelevance – or even a nuisance – if we are
trying to understand how something works. Patriarchal control turns ‘nature’ the mother
into a merely complex machine.
One word Bacon was fond of was ‘penetrating’ – rending apart a witch’s testimony or a
rodent’s body to ‘pene-trate’ its mechanistic component parts. If this sounds like an
image of knowledge via rape, you have understood the roots of modern science.
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So when, in my thesis, I wanted to describe God’s fully-present nature in and through and
yet beyond the living cosmos, the last image that would do was of God ‘interpenetrating’
the universe. I needed a counter-image that completely contradicted the typical portrayal
of God in masculine identity.
So I coined my own word: interwombing. I believe God interwombs the universe – not
only birthing it into continuously renewed complexity and diversity, but also providing the
‘Ground of Being’ for the cosmos itself to bring new being into birth.
Hosea 11:8 speaks for God’s almost helpless connection with the created world, but its true
imagery is hidden in translation. A proper reading of the Hebrew makes this startling
divine claim:
How can I give you up, Ephraim, or hand you over, Israel, to destruction? My heart
recoils within me, and my womb remembers in compassion.
We and all creation are held in the interwombing compassion of God; never given up,
always alive in divine memory. My examiner advised me to get rid of that silly made up
word, but I still believe the image of an interwombing God can empower us to hope.
• Continuous silencing of alternative voices
The logic of patriarchy not only means only males have logic; it also means that those who
do not speak from the position of male privilege must be kept under control. So Greek
thinking changed the way Christianity read the Hebrew Scriptures. The powerful voices of
the feminine right through the text, including Ruach, the mothering Spirit, and Hokmah,
the divine wisdom through whom creation was made, were silenced.
But Mother Wisdom kept her voice through the folk tradition; within the Orthodox
tradition, Sophia, the feminine Greek version of Hokmah, kept open a spiritual connection
between creation and Paradise; and for both Orthodox and Roman Catholics, Mary
Theotokos (‘God-birther’) was the source of prayers as well as praise.
Then, in the West, the enlightenment finished them off.
As we have seen, another casualty of Enlightenment’s ‘penetration’ of nature was the
almost universal human belief that we find guidance in this life from those who have gone
before. Ancestors do not disappear, and their teachings do not wear out or pass away.
‘We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses’, says Hebrews 12; and we know from
Revelation 7 that those witnesses preserve alive ‘every language on earth’.
Old wives’ tales, Mother Wisdom, the feminine Spirit, the voice of earth itself (our
common mother), and the teaching of the ancestors – these were part of our heritage too,
whatever our cultural or national roots. And it is through those voices that we can recover
the deep truths of the Scripture.
The voices patriarchy tries to silence, they speak for the God that patriarchy exiled from
the flesh of creation. They need priority if we are to recover an ethic that seeks to love the
cosmos with the love God’s own womb remembers in compassion.

Iesu Herakles: Turning Jewish Jesus into Greek demigod
Have you seen this image before? It was one of the most popular subjects for Greek art
over centuries. On his way to one of his Twelve Labours, possibly in Libya, Herakles – ‘son
of [the] god’ Zeus – was confronted by a giant named Antaios [Antaeus], himself son of
the goddess Gaia, the earth. Antaios had never been defeated in wrestling so challenged
the Greek to combat. The giant drew his strength directly from his earth-mother, a
strength beyond any mortal. In the sculpture, Herakles prevails by uprooting his
Indigenous foe from the earth itself. Cut off from his mothering soil, Antaios succumbs.
The victory of Herakles over an earth-bound giant served as a great symbol right through
Hellenic history. The goal of life is to transcend earthiness and inherit heaven through
effort. I hope Australians feel the sting of a story that shows how Indigenous enemies can
be killed by cutting off their connection from the mothering earth. Herakles serves as a
powerful symbol of the Triumph of the West over ‘lesser races’ (o barbaroi). It also serves
to validate the patriarchal victory of a God-son over a Goddess-son, just as the baby
Herakles strangled the two snakes sent by Hera, Queen of Heaven, to kill the boy fathered
by her faithless husband. In Herakles, it is male transcendence that wins over all that is
female, earthy – the sarx that can never inherit heaven.
What does this have to do with Christian theology? Jesus the Jew was made ‘palatable’ to
Greeks by renaming him ‘Iesou Herakliou’ – Jesus Herakles, the Son of God who left the
earth behind to gain his rightful place in heaven.
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The way we have lost will not easily be recovered. It can never be recovered if we simply
concede that theology is no longer relevant, or that the Scriptures no longer apply, or that
religion is by nature part of the problem. It can never be recovered while theology
remains captive to patriarchy or enlightenment thought. It can never be recovered until
we listen to the voice of the land through the voice of First Peoples. But theology matters.
We need to reclaim the heritage that once called Theology ‘The Queen of the Sciences’ –
the compelling and confronting metanarrative which says humans are crucial to the
cosmos but only as we ourselves become a new creation in Christ.
I think all forms of religion have potential to assist in the reclaiming of creation. I think
every denomination of Christianity can help us find our way home. But I am a Protestant,
and my home is in the Uniting Church in Australia; and in Australia I believe this one
particular voice within the body of Christ has two unique gifts to offer in this kairos of
crisis: the BoU, and the Preamble.
So I leave behind my doctoral thesis to sketch out a brief explanation of my claim that our
theology matters as members of the UCA – matters not only to Christianity, not only to
Australia, but to this planet and the macrocosmos beyond.
UCA Alternative: Progressive with Roots (Radix) The Basis of Union
There is probably no phrase more representative of the Uniting Church than the claim that
we are a people ‘always on the way’. There is a ‘promised end’ we seek, but in this interim
age of searching it is the journey itself that defines us. By definition, the UCA is a
progressive church amidst the wider Body of Christ. The founders carefully avoided the
term because of its Leninist reputation, but the vision for UCA members – every one of
whom ‘is called to be a minister’ – is as a vanguard: pioneers expanding beyond settled
realms to make a way for others to follow.
There is no need to recite the markers of that vanguard status, like the ministry of women,
the acceptance of varied sexualities, and the consistent call towards greater justice for all
the victims of a patriarchal world order. We were also meant to be a vanguard for
ecumenism: prodding the wider church to respond with new unity even across historic
denominations. I have seen no signs of progress in that area for many long years.
What is not so widely understood, both outside and inside the UCA, is that we are not just
progressive but ‘radical’: we keep returning to the deep roots of faith like the watersource
for our journey. We have never abandoned the historic church; instead, we seek to
recover its original revolutionary call to transform all realms to the Realm of Christ.
• Tradition of Protest
and Progress
The first of those deep roots is our Protestant tradition. Our ancestry began with protest
and reformation: the terrifyingly revolutionary claim that ‘Mother Church’ can get it
wrong, and when that happens it is up to Christians to change the church itself. Wars
were fought about this. I for one do not want new wars; but I believe that challenging the
authority of existing world systems is as crucial now as ever in our past.