The Bible in TransMission - Summer 2014

Summer 2014

The Bible in Transmission A forum for change in church and culture

Remembering

Transmission

Contents

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3 Editorial

Matthew van Duyvenbode 5

Memory, shared narratives and the perils of exclusion Nick Spencer

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Memorial art Kieran Conry

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Remembrance: A biblical perspective John Drane

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Recording life stories Jan Green

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The Bible, the British and the First World War Michael Snape

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The memories that keep Judaism alive Raphael Zarum

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Pastoral care to those suffering from traumatic memories Andrew Marin

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News from Bible Society James Catford

Bombadier George Hever Vinall dodged three bullets.

Read his story at biblesociety.org.uk/ww1-wia

THE BIBLE WAS A ‘DEFINING INFLUENCE’ DURING WORLD WAR ONE When war broke out on 4 August 1914, every member of the British Armed Forces received a New Testament as a standard part of his kit. Bible Society distributed some nine million Bibles, in 80 different languages between 1914 and 1918, to combatants and prisoners of war on all sides.

This summer, to mark the centenary of the outbreak of war, we’re uncovering just what those Bibles meant to young soldiers at the front, to prisoners of war, conscientious objectors, chaplains and those left at home.

These stories and more are available on our website biblesociety.org.uk/ww1 They’re also being told across the country through the media. It truly is a chance for these voices from the past to speak one last time. If your family has a story to tell about how someone clung to the Bible during World War One, we’d love to hear it. Just get in touch at biblesociety.org.uk/ww1-get-in-touch or call us on 01793 418222.

Summer 2014

Editorial

Over the past year, we at Bible Society have been engaged in an intentional and challenging process of remembering. Recognising the significant cultural landmark of the centenary commemorations of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, we have aspired to mark the occasion with two distinct approaches.

Matthew van Duyvenbode Matthew van Duyvenbode is Head of Campaigns, Advocacy and Media at Bible Society. He writes and speaks nationally and internationally, is Secretary to the Scripture Working Group at the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales and is an Executive member of the Catholic Biblical Association of Great Britain.

The first of these strands is to acknowledge the historical context of the Bible and the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) during the First World War. As noted in one of the articles in this issue of The Bible in Transmission, the zeal to provide the Scriptures to both soldiers and non-combatants resulted in the Bible being a ubiquitous physical, social, political and spiritual symbol during the period we are recalling. By 1916, the records of the BFBS note: ‘The Society is no respecter of parties or persons. It supplies the Scriptures to soldiers of all the armies engaged in either side and in every country. Already the Society has provided Testaments, Gospels or Psalters in more than 40 different languages which are spoken on the battlefields and in the hospitals and in the camps which confine prisoners of war.’

Together with BBC Radio 4’s Making History programme, we have successfully appealed for the stories behind many of these distributed Bibles and Scripture portions to be re-told, and I would encourage you to visit our dedicated microsite at biblesociety.org.uk/ww1 to discover some of the moving and inspiring social history behind the statistics.

However, we are also acutely aware that to remember with Christian authenticity means to reflect on the past to inform the present and step into the future with hope. Thus, the second strand of our activity is to re-offer

the Scriptures afresh to contemporary society as a lens through which the act of remembrance can be seen most fully. Accordingly, we have published Hear My Cry: words for when there are no words – an abbreviated psalter interspersed with poetry, paintings and prayers to help provide a context and vision for remembrance nearly 100 years after the end of World War One. Mindful of this background, it is my privilege to commend to you this edition of The Bible in Transmission, where the editorial team have sought to present a range of biblical and theological reflections on the topic of memory.

I’m particularly pleased to be able to commend these articles because I think they resonate with, probe and elucidate the two dimensions of remembrance that are highlighted in Bible Society’s programme of activity for the Centenary: the significance of remembering the past, and the importance of memory for today and tomorrow.

Our opening article by Nick Spencer explores the significance of history to the current cultural context, identifying the political nature of remembering and its gravitational pull towards favouring either shared narratives or conflictual storytelling. Spencer believes and demonstrates that the debate was as pertinent for Israel and the early church as it is now.

Having briefly demonstrated the significance of remembering itself in the Old Testament and New Testament contexts, Spencer identifies ‘shared memory’ as a strong narrative in the biblical texts, yet one which does not preclude a narrative of inclusion (in contrast to the assumed exclusion of a self-critical historical approach).

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Transmission Tracing the intertwining of these two narratives through the Old Testament, Spencer finds the example par excellence in the Eucharistic remembrance act: ‘an act of sacrifice, of inclusion so wide it tears Christ apart.’

Kieran Conry, Catholic Bishop of Arundel and Brighton, continues the exploration of the contemporary cultural outlook on remembering within the context of Memorial Art. Citing engravings from war memorials, and paintings by Stanley Spencer and Leonardo da Vinci, Conry argues persuasively for the intrinsic value of the symbolic in articulating deep human emotions.

For Conry, there is a particular societal attentiveness to those who died in the First World War, perhaps deriving from and pointing to the Type of Jesus on the cross, representing the social culpability of conflict, and the solidarity of Christ with the suffering and dying. In the light of the resurrection narrative, then, Conry is decisive in stating ‘Memorial is not primarily about the past; it is about the present. We remember the dead but hold their memory – and therefore them – alive.’

In his attentive exposition of how the theme of remembrance can be traced through the biblical corpus, John Drane provides a helpful framework for those seeking to go deeper into the key texts alluded to by previous contributors. For Drane, remembering is a pervasive theme, yet one which comes with the health warning of ‘selective memory’ (citing differences of opinion between the historians of the book of Kings and the prophet Hosea, for instance.)

Drane adds his voice to our other contributors in asserting that ‘we can see that God’s way of remembering is a significant theme throughout the biblical literature, and whenever that theme surfaces it is invariably presented as a way of pointing forward to a surprising new future rather than an excuse for raking over the ashes of a the past.’

In her work recording life stories, Jan Green embodies in a very practical way this connection between the past and the present. In a charmingly personal account, Green advocates for the rich value of remembering and the ministry of listening sensitively to the stories of all people. Citing a number of poignant examples, Green illustrates eloquently that memories are precious treasures to be honoured rather than abandoned to loneliness or busyness: ‘Each life story has a limitless hoard of memories, mostly small but certainly important.’

Michael Snape’s article on ‘The Bible, the British and the First World War’ is a comprehensive overview of the historical context of the subject, and offers an evenhanded and thoughtful description of the range of ways that the Bible was experienced during the period.

Snape is utterly convinced of the central role of the Bible in understanding the worldview, and demonstrates how knowledge of the Bible (perhaps even accepting ignorance of its contents) shaped personal, military and political reactions to the First World War. Even acknowledging the range of ways that the biblical text was encountered and handled in the 4

era, Snape argues that ‘it conditioned the response of a whole generation of Britons to the worst conflict in their nation’s history. Simultaneously a source of legitimation and condemnation of the war, and of fevered speculation as to its meaning and outcome, it nonetheless provided millions of British soldiers and civilians with an indispensable sense of consolation, inspiration, unity and stability.’

Our next contributor, Rabbi Dr Raphael Zarum, draws us back to the theme of memories in his reading of the Hebrew Bible and its commensurate embodiment in the spiritual practice of the Jewish people. Strikingly, Zarum reiterates the theme of bringing the past into the future through the six remembrances at the conclusion of Morning Prayer. He writes: ‘Through these daily acts of remembrance we amalgamate the past into the present and so calibrate a moral compass to guide us in a purposeful future.’

Exploring human memory, God’s memory and the issue of significance in the Jewish Tradition, Zarum is able to both enrich the previous contributions on symbols, scriptural motifs and memory and also offer a fresh perspective on consciousness and humanity’s unique relationship with the divine.

In his article on trauma and pastoral care, Andrew Marin picks up on this theme of consciousness and very helpfully explores the connections between traumatic memories, psychology and Christology. After providing a detailed analysis of the psychological situation of survivors of experienced-trauma, Marin offers a range of practical advice and pastoral suggestions, centred on the principle of integration.

Marin grounds this pastoral reflection theologically in his understanding of the cruciform Christ, ‘an example for how humanity can also embody the reality of their own experienced-trauma’. Marin sees in the Passion narratives a journey whereby Christ embraces and integrates fully into his own suffering, evidenced by ‘the proof of his embodied remembrance of the torture … physically scarred into his body by the nail holes in his hands and feet, and the puncture of the spear’s blade in his side.’

And thus I conclude this note of welcome in the same tone as I began – recognising that remembering is at its heart a challenging – even sacrificial – activity. And yet the prevailing message through our theological and cultural reflection on memory, remembrance and the First World War must surely be one of the hope that persists beyond the pain of humanity’s temporal inhumanity. A point most accurately articulated in the BFBS annual report in 1918, when the rumblings of bombing in France could be heard on the south coast of England: ‘The Bible Society has never passed through more fateful days than these. Once again there is darkness over the earth. The angel of death is abroad and we can hear the beating of his wings. Yet above the ruins and the sepulchres rises one changeless rock – the Rock of Ages, cleft for our sakes; and faithful folk, who hide themselves there, dwell in peace which the world cannot give the and all the wars in the world cannot take away.’

Summer 2014

Memory, shared narratives and the perils of exclusion We will remember them. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, on the TV and on the radio, in magazines and newspaper pullout supplements, in documentaries and at the cinema, at conferences and during weekend re-enactments, in schools and in churches, before war memorials and, of course, at the Cenotaph: we will remember them.

Nick Spencer Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos. He is the author of several books and is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Faiths and Civil Society Unit, Goldsmiths, University of London.

And we have been remembering them, for many months already. ‘It’s still ages ‘til war is actually declared’, a friend recently remarked to me, somewhat sheepishly, ‘and already I’m fed up with Great War retrospectives. Heaven alone knows what I’ll feel like in four years’ time.’

The British do remembering. ‘It’s clear that many of us in Britain are in love with the past,’ remarked Ian Hislop at the start of a recent BBC series. ‘We relish “harking back”.’ This is incontestable. Behind biography (and, of course, cookery), history dominates the non-fiction shelves in bookstores. It’s big for documentaries.1 And, if done rightly on the screen, history is a veritable philosopher’s stone, turning the base metal of ordinary source material into epic, panoramic, cinematic gold. We certainly do ‘the past’.

But, as Hislop went on to observe, very often ‘it’s not so much history we’re in love with as something rather less true, but just as powerful: “the olden days”.’ It’s a category instantly recognised by anyone under the age of ten (its precise historical dates are from when your parents were young to about 10,000 BC) but it retains its power – the power of a ‘heightened, idealised, imagined past’ – well into adulthood. ‘It’s often what we want to believe happened,’ Hislop noted, ‘rather than what really happened.’

This is the cue for a long-running and acrimonious debate about history: what happened, what it means and, above all, how we teach it. The argument runs like this. Once upon a time, history was ‘1066 and all that’. History and history lessons were of the ‘Our Island Story’ variety in which brave Britons defended themselves against bullying Romans, Good Kings (the capitalisation is essential) beat Bad Kings in battle, ‘Right but Repulsive’ Roundheads fought ‘Wrong but Wromantic’ Cavaliers, and nations rose to the Top before they fell, except for Britain which somehow mysteriously – providentially – stayed there.

Those who can remember such lessons are increasingly of pensionable age, though the idea lives on in Sellar and Yeatman’s witty parody.

The problem with it, so the counter-argument ran, was not just that it was wrong (though it was) but that it was sinister, a manipulative fairytale intended to keep top dogs top by writing the great mass of humankind out of history. Real history, so it was argued, was history from the bottom, history of the forgotten millions, through whose struggles, rather than those of Thomas Carlyle’s Great Men, society was slowly, hesitantly transformed for the better.

This might only ever have dug trenches in university history faculties were it not for Orwell’s now oft-quoted observation that he who controls the past controls the future. The historical narrative according to which we choose to live today will shape Britain’s tomorrow, and our present narrative is bequeathed to us in large measure from history lessons, books, films and documentaries. Thus education, hardly a politics-free zone at any time, gets particularly heated when it starts looking back. Witness 5

Transmission Michael Gove’s passionate interest in history teaching and the development of a new history curriculum intended to recapture the full sweep of British history, without succumbing to ‘sceptered isle’ style of yesteryear.

Remembering is political. How we conceive and narrate our past – whether nationally, locally or personally – has a direct impact on the life of the polis, on how we live together today. The debate about teaching and learning history is not a storm in a teacup. It’s a storm in a landscape. It matters.

NOTES 1. As I write, the BBC have series on the Wild West, the Georgians, the Crusades, the Empire, the Vikings, and the lost cities of the ancient world, to name only the most high profile.

2. Matthew places these words front stage in the Sermon on the Mount.

3. Perhaps the earliest surviving Christian document outside the New Testament.

Specifically, it matters whether we tend towards the narrative of shared memory and collective identity, or towards the narrative of struggle and conflict, of oppression and minorities. Those who favour the first insist that without common narrative we become divided, rootless, vulnerable. The best basis for mutual self-interest is a sense of belonging together. The best defence against hostile identities is being sure of your own.

Against this, those who favour a more analytical, more self-critical, and more conflictual history insist that the common narrative approach exists only at the cost of exclusion and readily devolves into the tyranny of the majority. The stories of those who do not fit – the social underclass, denominational minorities, people of different ethnic groups, women – are suppressed.

The frustrating fact in all this is that both parties are on to something. While there are undoubtedly eccentrics at both ends of the spectrum – those for whom the monarchy embodies national liberty and those for whom it embodies, what Polly Toynbee memorably called during the 2012 Jubilee, a ‘spiritual tyranny’ – there are plenty more who are less given to hyperbole and they need to listen to one another. And perhaps also listen to the Bible, for this was a live question for Israel, and for the early church, and one that negotiated with particular sophistication.

Remembering in Old Testament There is an awful lot of remembering in the Bible. The command to remember is fundamental, not only to God’s people but to God himself.

God is a God of covenant, and covenant is a form of selfbinding that is made real in history. Following the flood, God establishes a covenant with Noah, his descendants and, importantly, ‘with every living creature that is with you’. This he promises to remember, and never again to let the waters ‘become a flood [that will] destroy all life’ (Genesis 9.10). Abraham is engaged in a similar way. It is God’s remembering his covenant with Abraham that stands alongside the groaning of the Israelites as the source of the Exodus (Exodus 2.24). When the escape plan goes wrong, it is again to the memory of Abraham (and Isaac and Jacob) that Moses appeals when he pleads with God to overlook the wickedness of his people (Deuteronomy 9.27). Later on, at the dedication of the Temple, Solomon speaks of his father in the same way, as he entreats God to ‘remember the great love promised to David your servant’ (2 Chronicles 6.42). God reveals himself as God in his remembrance of things, and promises, past.

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But there is a flip side to this. For if God is entreated to remember his promises to and rescue of his people, that people only exists through his action. Israel may ‘struggle with God’, but without him they would not exist. Put another way, failure to remember God is failure to be Israel.

It is to loosen the joints of their body politic, to untether the nation not only from its origins and history, but from its purpose and identity. Israel exists by remembering what God has done and who God is. This is the narrative of shared memory and collective identity par excellence.

Thus, the people of Israel are called to remember their slavery in Egypt and their rescue from Egypt; ‘what the LORD your God did to Pharaoh’ (Deuteronomy 7.18) and ‘how the LORD your God led you all the way in the wilderness’ (Deuteronomy 8.2); the commandments he gave them and ‘the Sabbath day by keeping it holy’ (Exodus 20.8) It is by remembering all this that Israel remains Israel.

Of course, they fail in this, spectacularly and consistently.

They do manage to remember the food they had eaten in Egypt – a suspiciously healthy diet for slave workers but, then, the memory does play tricks in the wilderness.

But they too readily forgot what it was truly like there and how God rescued them. For Israel, to forget God is to forgo identity, purpose and common life. It is a form of death.

Remembering in New Testament The act of remembrance is central to life of the young church in two striking ways.

The first is in how remembrance of Israel’s history situates and explains who Jesus is. If there is an original Christian sin, it surely lies here. From the end of the first century and certainly by the time of Marcion of Sinope in the mid-second century, Christians sought to divorce Christ from Israel, digging him out of the narrative flow in which he lived and taught and died and was resurrected him. Here were the first incisions of the antiJudaism that so grimly scars Christian history.

From the Magnificat on, when Mary places her charge firmly within the mainstream of God’s promises ‘to be merciful … to Abraham and his descendants forever’ (Luke 1.54–55); through Jesus’ description of his teaching vis-à-vis the law, ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them’ (Matthew 5.17);2 all the way to the manner in which he explains the events of the first Easter to Cleopas and his friend by opening up the Scriptures to them: all of this grounds the new things that God does in Christ in the things he did of old. Remembering for the early church was similar to remembering for Israel.

Similar but not identical: for the second and arguably foundational act of remembrance in the New Testament, the Eucharist, points to the sharp turn the narrative takes in Christ. Christian understanding of the Eucharist is sadly occluded by the vigorous and one-time violent disagreements between denominations about how we should understand this act. But shining through those clouds is the very fact of remembering itself: ‘do this in remembrance of me’ (Luke 22.19; 1 Corinthians 11.24).

Summer 2014 This remembrance of Christ in the Eucharist veers the narrative away in a new (and surprising) direction, where God’s promises, his covenant, his remembrance of Abraham, of Moses, of David find new meaning and significant in his actions in Christ. In all fairness, and for the sake of the historical accuracy we began with, it is important to point out that by the time of Christ there was no single comprehensive narrative to veer away from. Narrative ends were already badly frayed by the pressure of (yet another) foreign occupation.

Nevertheless, this does not materially affect this second act of remembrance. To remember Christ in the Eucharist is to take the long-standing (and essential) remembrance of God and to turn it into something new.

Narratives of inclusion All this should make it abundantly clear that the narrative of ‘shared memory and collective identity’ is central to the entire biblical story. But it invites the attendant question, the challenge that stands before all such narratives. Why doesn’t this narrative simply become one of exclusion? Isn’t Israel’s shared memory and collective identity bought at the price of alienating others? Both testaments offer answers to this.

Old Testament Israel certainly does have a cohesive and arguably comprehensive shared narrative, but it is grounded in the nation’s (remarkable) ‘immigrant’ identity. God’s call to Abraham to ‘leave your country, your people and your father’s household,’ marks him with the identity of the stranger, something that Abraham acknowledges when arranging for Sarah’s funeral (Genesis 23.4). The writer of the letter to the Hebrews discusses at length how it was Abraham’s willingness to forsake his land and culture and to travel as an alien amongst strangers that defined him made and made him an example of how to live by faith.

Israel is then born as a nation of refugees, from their time in Egypt and through to the settlement of Canaan. Of the former time, Jonathan Sacks has remarked, that this was the period in which the Israelites learned ‘from the inside … what it feels like to be an outsider, an alien, a stranger.’ Of the latter, even once the nation was settled, it is repeatedly reminded of its origins. ‘You yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt … Do not ill-treat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt … you shall declare before the LORD your God: “My father was a wandering Aramean” … We are aliens and strangers in your sight, as were all our ancestors’ (Exodus 23.9; 22.21; Deuteronomy 26.5; 1 Chronicles 29.15).

This is the counterbalance to the (potential for) exclusion inherent in the collective narrative. Given this insistent emphasis on their intrinsically ‘alien’ status, it is not entirely surprising that the Hebrew Bible commands the Israelites to love the stranger in no fewer than 36 places.

On the verge of Canaan and nationhood, Israel is told, in stark and deflating terms, that ‘the land must not be sold permanently because the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants.’

Yes, Israel has a shared narrative and collective identity.

Yes, the act of remembering is fundamental to who they are. Yes, to betray that memory was to betray their identity and purpose. But that shared narrative and collective identity was one of alienation; that act of remembering one in which they recalled their neediness and rescue (and, latterly, disobedience); their identity was one of aliens and strangers; and their purpose was precisely to include and heal, not exclude and deny.

A similar point may be made of the New Testament. The early church is called to remembering precisely the same narrative of alienation, rescue and repeated, constant loving help that formed Israel. The different direction on which it is taken serves to underline all these points. What Christians remember in the Eucharist is an act of triumph but it is a triumph of love rather than the kinds of triumph the Romans celebrated after victorious campaigns; an act of sacrifice, of inclusion so wide it tears Christ apart.

In one respect, this heralds the end of Israel’s exile: God decisively meets his people, all people, in the cross. As Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus, Gentile Christians ‘are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of his household’ (Ephesians 2.19). In another, however, that simply makes them feel all the more like strangers on earth. 1 Peter makes it clear that, whilst no longer being strangers to God, Christian believers remain strangers in the world, a claim that recurs throughout the epistle: ‘Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To God’s elect, exiles, scattered throughout the provinces of Pontus, Galatia … live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear … as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires’ (1 Peter 1.1,17; 2.11).

This was a theme central to the post-apostolic Church’s understanding of itself. In the introduction to his so-called first letter to the Corinthians,3 Clement of Rome begins (literally translated), ‘From the Church of God which is transiently sojourning in Rome’, and in doing so uses a technical term that denotes temporary rather than permanent residence. In a similar fashion, the anonymous writer of the slightly later Letter to Diognetus declares: ‘Though [Christians] are residents at home in their own countries, their behaviour there is more like that of transients; they take their full part as citizens, but they also submit to anything and everything as if they were aliens.’ This is, again, a cohesive narrative and identity, but one based on being an outsider in receipt of hospitality and grace.

Conclusion This, then, is how the biblical story manages to combine the two ideas of remembering with which we set out. The shared story is fundamental. Denying that is not to be ‘radically inclusive’; it is to be radically divisive. But what we are remembering is no less fundamental. The narrative of unity, of coherence, of victory, of (the wrong kind) triumph is, indeed, exclusive and potentially oppressive.

But a memory of vulnerability, of shared need, of (the right kind of) triumph can allow us to develop an identity and celebrate a past that humanises us in the fullest way possible.

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Transmission

Memorial art

Kieran Conry Kieran Conry is the Roman Catholic Bishop of Arundel and Brighton.

On 31 August, 2011, a ceremony was performed in the Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett to mark the end of the repatriations of the bodies of servicemen killed in action. When the first arrived in 2007, just a few members of the local British Legion were there to pay their respects, but gradually the main street began to fill with hundreds of people wishing to honour the dead and recognise their sacrifice. In all, 167 such ceremonies took place, honouring 345 servicemen. In recognition of the part it played in this public gesture of recognising personal bravery and self-sacrifice, the town was granted the title ‘Royal’.

The centenary of the beginning of the First World War, or the ‘Great War’, will focus attention on the memorials that exist throughout the country, poignantly inscribed with the names of those who did not survive. In addition, the carefully tended war graves on the continent – mainly, of course, in France – will also see ceremonies to mark the tragic loss of so many lives. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission is assiduous in maintaining these graves with extraordinary care and ensuring that relatives of those who died know the respect that they have been accorded in the past hundred years.

The way in which a society regards its dead, and especially those who have died in battle, says much about its fundamental values, culture and tradition. In cities, town and villages, in churches and churchyards, in schools, colleges and universities, particular attention will be paid to those memorials to the fallen of ‘the Great War’. The fact that the names of the dead are recorded so faithfully means, first of all, that they will

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not be forgotten and, secondly, that we continue to remember the sacrifice they made.

A feature common to many of these memorials is the figure of Christ on the cross. This is a very eloquent symbol and a very powerful statement of what we are doing in remembering those who died in battle.

First of all there is a tremendous burden of responsibility on the shoulders of a society that asks its men and women to risk their lives for a principle that society regards as sufficiently important. In Shakespeare’s Henry V the gravity of this is examined in the conversation between the king (in disguise and anonymous) and one of his soldiers, Michael Williams, on the night before the battle of Agincourt. Williams questions the validity of the cause that the king has espoused, and what its consequences are: ‘But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make; when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day, and cry all, “We died at such a place”; some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left.

I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument?

Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it,

Summer 2014 who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.’

King Henry tries to counter his argument, but Williams’ case has been stated.

We have a heavy burden of responsibility in sending men and women possibly to their deaths. It is right that we accord them the highest honour.

The recurring presence of the crucified Christ is a reminder that, not only did God come to share our human nature and its frailty, but that he suffered pain and death. It is as if that figure is there in solidarity; he knows the suffering of those who have died, because he has shared it. But the cross is there because it is a reminder of the Christian belief in the resurrection, that death is not the end. This is why the names of the dead are recorded: they are still members of our living community. Memorial is not primarily about the past; it is about the present. We remember the dead but hold their memory – and therefore them – alive.

The artist Stanley Spencer was a very religious person.

Although his private life was somewhat ‘complicated’ his personal beliefs shine through his paintings. There is one series of works that expresses very movingly his own experience of the Great War. Spencer was too frail to enlist as a front-line soldier, and so joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. He served first of all in the Beaufort War Hospital in Fishponds, Bristol and, later on, the forgotten front of Macedonia. At the hospital Spencer tended the privates (not officers) wounded and damaged by the war. The experience of the soldiers in the hospital was not always a very positive one; they were not there to convalesce, but to be fixed as quickly as possible so that they could return to the front.

Spencer recorded his experience of the hospital and the Macedonian front in a series or paintings that were commissioned by John and Mary Behrend for the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, near Reading.

The chapel is, in fact, a war memorial, erected to honour Mary Behrend’s brother, Henry Willoughby Sandham, who fought also on the Maecodonia/Salonika front, but whose name, like so many others, is not recorded on any official war memorial. He died not as a direct result of wounds suffered, but from complications after he contracted malaria on the front.

Spencer painted 16 canvases that adorn the chapel walls. While most artists of the Great War depict its horrors – such as John Singer Sargent’s painting Gassed, which is displayed in the Imperial War Museum – Spencer imbues his paintings with a tremendous sense of hope and faith, faith above all in the resurrection of the dead, even though the paintings are mainly of the mundane and banal routine of the hospital day. They depict scenes of bed-making and the cleaning of tea-urns and the washing of floors. But many of the paintings have conscious religious elements. In the painting entitled Bedmaking a hospital orderly is painted with his back to the observer. The orderly is stretching a sheet and has his arms outstretched, which is a clear reference to the arms of Christ on the cross. And in the painting

Frostbite the orderly is carrying buckets with his arms looped through the handles; they look like the wings of angels.

The most explicit religious image is The Resurrection of the Soldiers with Altar. It depicts a jumble of crosses,

we remember the dead but hold their memory – and therefore them – alive some of which are being handed to Christ in the background. Spencer himself said that he had found his ‘heaven in a hell of war’ when ‘he had buried so many people and saw so many dead bodies that he felt that death could not be the end of everything’.

It is both fascinating and moving to visit the memorial at Thiepval, near the Somme. It is the largest British war memorial in the world, and records the names of 72,000 soldiers who have no known grave. Occasionally still a body is found, and if it is identified the name on the memorial is filled in and so removed. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren come to visit the site and leave small wooden crosses with the name of the fallen.1 The cross is undoubtedly the most powerful Christian religious symbol and, like all symbols, it expresses things that cannot always be put easily into words.

The question that must go always through anybody serving in the armed forces is ‘Why?’ and at some stage it must become a much bigger question than simply orders of loyalty. It is said that there are no atheists in a trench, but that might be presumptuous. Much of the iconography and poetry (in the broadest sense) round our memorials is explicitly religious and Christian.

NOTES 1. The Theipval Memorial was originally built using French bricks from Lille, but, very piognantly, it was refaced in 1973 with Accrington brick.

The ‘Accrington Pals’ (11th East Lancashire Regiment) was one of the regiments virtually annihilated at the Battle of the Somme.

Some northern towns lost almost a whole generation, and the decision was taken not to form Pals Battalions again.

2. R King, Leonardo and the Last Supper (London: Bond Street Books, 2012).

The poet Rudyard Kipling had encouraged his son, John, to enlist, but poor eyesight meant that it took personal favours to get John into the Irish Guards. John was killed at the battle of Loos in September 1915 and Kipling must have felt a great sense of responsibility. He joined what later became the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and was responsible for some of the words on the gleaming white tombstones. He selected words from the deuterocanonical books of Ecclesiasticus 44.14: ‘Their name liveth for evermore’ and the inscription on the grave of an un-named person, ‘Known to God’.

The Christian religion, so much part of British life in the early part of the 1900s, had to become part of the death of British society. Instinctively, that is what many Britons chose to do. To make some sense of the sacrifice of so many young men, many people had to turn to the sacrifice of the cross. The symbol of the cross is so appropriate. Jesus is a young man who sacrifices himself for others, who does not see the outcome clearly, who goes into it with fear and even terror: ’My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me’ (Matthew 26.39).

This sign becomes the Christian symbol of hope and example. Different traditions within the Christian Church regard the dead in slightly different ways. For 9

Transmission example, members of the Roman Catholic Church, with its doctrines of Purgatory and Indulgences, pray for the dead. These teachings were explicitly rejected by the Protestant Reformers so many denominations do not practice prayer for the deceased.

All Christian Churches do, however, share a belief in the Resurrection and its consequences for us, that through the death and rising to life of Christ, our sins are forgiven and we rise to new life with Christ. But this does not enable us to escape the pain and sorrow of physical death, whether it is our own (and the fear of it) or the death of loved

the institution of the Eucharist is the supreme memorial narrative, ‘do this in memory of me’ ones, eve if they are people we did not really know. So it is difficult not to be moved by the sight of rows of white headstones in the cemeteries of the two wars.

The cross is one of the most popular images of Christ, along with images from the infancy narrative – the Annunciation, the birth of the Christ-child and the visits of the angels and Magi. On the one hand there are quite straightforward reasons for this; there is a narrative and a particular historical moment. They tell a story that people would have been very familiar with, but perhaps less so today. The visit of the angel Gabriel to Mary is not only a beautiful and touching scene, but it would introduce a narrative that people could then carry forward themselves. Likewise with scenes from the Last Supper and the rest of the Passion story. They might capture just a moment in that story, but the rest of the story could be filled in by the observer.

The Last Supper provides a particularly interesting topic for study. Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in the refectory of the Dominican convent attached to the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan is perhaps one of the best-known paintings in the world (even though it is one of the least well preserved). The art historian Kenneth Clark called it ‘the keystone of European art’ and it is the topic of an excellent book

by Ross King.2 Not only does King go into the history of the commissioning of the painting (and others that Leonardo notoriously failed to deliver on time), as well as the disastrous experiments with materials that lead to its deterioration, he also examines the history of its interpretation.

King rejects the theories of those who followed the German poet Goethe in seeing in the painting the depiction of the moment that Jesus announces that one of the twelve will betray him. This theory gained a great deal of popularity in the USA in the early twentieth century, and it sees the painting as an observation of the psychological drama that was unfolding at the table of the Last Supper – Jesus being betrayed by someone closest to him. But King indicates the way Jesus is holding his hands, clearly pointing to the bread and wine, the elements of the Eucharist. This is a painting about the references to the bread and wine as Jesus’ body and blood, a profoundly spiritual expression of 10

the painter’s own faith. This is all the more logical given its location in the Dominican refectory. While this debate is not really relevant to the commemoration of the Great War, it does say a lot about how people interpret memorial art. After all, the institution of the Eucharist is the supreme memorial narrative, ‘do this in remembrance of me’ (Luke 22.19) And so we can interpret graveyard and cemetery memorials in a variety of ways. Indeed, even the names we give to these spaces are significant; the ‘graveyard’ is the place where we have dug holes to bury the dead (the modern German graben). This is the necropolis, the ‘city of the dead’, whereas the ‘cemetery’, like the ‘necropolis’, also goes back to its Greek origin, being a place where the dead are merely sleeping, awaiting their awakening from sleep at the trumpet call on the Last Day. Thus the imagery of angels, common in many cemeteries, is that of someone watching over the dead until the moment of resurrection. Likewise the image of the crucified Christ is not so much one of solidarity – he himself suffered the agony of death – but the promise of resurrection. His death on the cross was not the end, and its depiction would make no sense unless we were confident that he rose from the dead.

The commemoration of the Great War might be a useful moment for the nation to reflect on the concept of death and what it means. Is it simply the final moment in a biological process, or can we possibly read something more into it? The sacrifice of so many young lives suggests that it would be callous to state that it is just a physical/biological moment. It is heart-rending to visit the Commonwealth War Graves near places like Beaumont-Hamel and read the dates on the headstones, and to see how many state 1st July, 1916.

Perhaps we have lost much of our sense of the symbolic.

What seems most popular on television is the ‘reality’ of the soap opera. What seems most gripping in the cinema is the plot-less action of the so-called ‘blockbuster’, filled with sound and fury, but ultimately signifying nothing.

However, we are surrounded by ritual and symbol. The day before I am writing this I watched the final moment of the FA Cup on TV. The single most important ritual of the day was the Arsenal captain holding the FA Cup high. Does anyone wonder why a cup and not a shield?

Have we lost that sense of sharing a moment of joy and victory, that the cup was something that was filled with wine and that everyone drank from? Likewise, how much importance do we attach to the pageantry around the royal family? The crowds around even the changing of the guard are quite astonishing, given that it does not have any explicit royal content. Crowds flock to see the two impassive guardsmen and their mounts on Whitehall at the back of Horse Guards Parade in London. Even if we are not aware of it, we have a profound need of and instinctive awareness of the symbolic as something that expresses truths that cannot easily be put into words.

And the most difficult but important truth to put into words is often the truth around death.

Summer 2014

Remembrance: A biblical perspective

John Drane John Drane is a theologian and ordained minister.

He has an extensive ministry among churches of many different traditions, and has taught at theological colleges and seminaries around the world.

He has also served on many key national bodies in the UK.

One of the reasons we still read the Bible at all is its extraordinary ability to have something to say to so many of the topics that concern us today. Indeed, when we bring the questions of our generation to these familiar pages, we often see in much clearer focus what might only have been a dim reflection had we started from the other end by trying to understand the Bible and its message in some abstract theoretical way that is deeply rooted in what happened back then, and then applying it to life in today’s rather different world. As we bring our own pressing questions to the Bible, we engage in a two-way process that often leads to new angles on our questions and fresh understandings of the way in which Scripture can bring its divine wisdom to bear on matters that its original authors could scarcely have imagined.

For as long as I can remember, people have been trying to identify one unifying theme that holds together all the Bible’s many disparate writings. Covenant, salvation history, justification – there are leading scholars who will argue for all these and more as the essential glue that helps to make a single consistent story out of what can at times seem like a pretty random collection of books.

However, there is one significant theme that has often been overlooked in these debates – remembrance, and in particular God’s way of remembering. Our memories of the past can often be destructive but Scripture outlines a pattern of remembrance that acknowledes the past in a way that is inspirational and life-giving for both the present and the future.

Selective memory As I began to think about this topic of ‘remembrance’, I soon realised that I (like everyone else) bring a load of baggage to it. Memory is notoriously selective: we choose what to remember and how to remember it. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the case of the First World War, which some see as a huge disaster while others are inclined to be more generous in their estimation of its significance. We need not be surprised by that: history has a way of dividing opinion, even among those who in other respects might be on the same side.

The Bible itself bears witness to the very same phenomenon. As the historians of the book of Kings recalled and recorded Jehu’s slaughter of the royal house of Israel, they left readers in little doubt that they regarded it as his finest moment (2 Kings 9.30—10.11).

For the prophet Hosea, on the other hand, it was the sort of bloodthirsty act that should have no place among the people of God (Hosea 1.4–5). The same differences of opinion can be traced in relation to the kingdom of Judah, with the Chronicler viewing the reigns of David and Solomon as something akin to perfection while the writers of Kings not only highlighted their dark side but, in the case of Solomon, directly attributed much of the disorder that followed his reign to his inflated sense of self-importance. Like the Great War, these were all pivotal moments of history, and whichever side you were on it was impossible not to remember and reflect on it because they also shaped identity and purpose for many subsequent generations.

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A significant biblical theme Viewed from that sort of angle, the theme of remembrance, and the differing emotions that memories of the past can evoke, easily emerges as one of the key themes not just of the Old Testament, but of the entire

remembrance … as a way of inspiring people to new possibilities grounded in God’s grace Bible. It surfaces almost on the first page, as the serpent asks the primeval pair in the Garden ‘did God say?’

(Genesis 3.1) – a question that at once sowed the seeds of doubt as to whether they really had a reliable memory of the divine instruction. Then once they have left the Garden, the memory of a lost but better way of being becomes embedded in biblical anthropology as a key driver of human aspirations to recover a sense of divine blessing and presence.

As the biblical narrative unfolds, the memory of undeserved divine benevolence surfaces repeatedly.

Though their original contexts were quite diverse, the many festivals of Old Testament faith all came to be connected to historical events and the invocation of those events was central to their proper celebration. The festival of Tabernacles recalled the temporary dwellings of Israel in the desert (Leviticus 23.33–44), while Weeks (Pentecost) was an occasion for reflecting more precisely on the giving of the Law on Sinai (Deuteronomy 16.12) and the weekly observation of a Sabbath rest was grounded in the memory of how God also rested on the seventh day (Exodus 20.8–11). Then there was Passover, arguably the most iconic festival of all, at which the escape of their oppressed forebears from slavery in Egypt was not only remembered but re-enacted, as the people dressed up with sandals on the feet and a stick in the hand to recount the story of that pivotal experience in Egypt not only as a record of the past, but as a reminder of their ongoing identity as the people of God and an inspiration for future hope. The remembered faithfulness of God was a core element of that whole narrative (Deuteronomy 16:1–8). This pattern of remembering the past as an integral part of living in the present and imagining the future is also reflected in later festivals (Purim, recalling the events of the book of Esther, and Hanukkah marking the Maccabean revolt) and is deeply embedded in the way that faith is understood in both Old and New Testaments. We find it in the Psalms, (e.g.

105, 106, 136, 143) and even a cynic like the writer of Ecclesiastes could encourage readers to ‘remember your creator’ as a way of facing an otherwise pessimistic future (12.1).

A divine pattern to follow These remembrances invariably focus on the theme of God’s loving kindness and undeserved (and unsought for) generosity and grace. This comes out at pivotal moments in the narrative, and so Jeremiah can insist that God cannot simply ignore the sins of the past 12

(14.10) while also assuring his people in exile that divine justice would always be trumped by an unconditional love and forgiveness (31.34). Memory of the past often became a way of navigating an uncertain future. When the New Testament portrays the birth of Jesus the Messiah as the dawn of a new future, it was natural to connect that with the memory of God’s covenantal interventions in the past – and so Mary and Zechariah both recognise this joyous event as a sign that God has remembered past promises (Luke 1.54,72). At the end of the gospel, the thief hanging on the cross alongside Jesus asks that he be remembered (Luke 23.42), a request that is met with the same loving generosity that runs like a golden thread through the fabric not only of the life of Jesus but of the Hebrew prophets before him.

Of course, focusing on and remembering the past can easily become an exercise in negativity – an excuse for asking who is to blame for past mistakes, or even an occasion for blaming ourselves in ways that ultimately are psychologically and spiritually destructive. Neither the prophets nor Jesus dodged the reality of past mistakes, whether on a national or a personal level.

But they also understood that the past was just that, and no amount of agonising over it was going to change what had taken place. On occasion, repentance and forgiveness can certainly be appropriate, but the constant theme of the Bible is that remembering the past is not about dwelling on human shortcomings, but about divine grace and the possibility of new life.

Remembrance is invariably an invitation to a better future, though growing out of a realistic appraisal of the past. Ezekiel could openly acknowledge the dereliction into which his people had fallen while also offering a new spirit-filled future (Ezekiel 37.1–14).

Jeremiah likewise acknowledged the brokenness of past misdeeds while holding out the prospect of a reimagined relationship between God and people (Jeremiah 31.31– 34). Similarly, Jesus, when faced with a woman caught in the act of adultery, made little reference to what had happened in the past and instead pointed her to the possibilities of a new life (John 8.53—9.11). And when Paul wanted to encourage his readers in Corinth to have a proper appreciation of their own identity in Christ, he moved very swiftly from a recognition of the inescapable fact that in social and civic terms they were people of little consequence to the assurance that, in God’s eyes, they were all of great value (1 Corinthians 1.26–29).

In doing so, these and other biblical characters were following what they understood to be a divine pattern of remembrance.

Once we ask the question, we can see that God’s way of remembering is a significant theme throughout the biblical literature, and whenever that theme surfaces it is invariably presented as a way of pointing forward to a surprising new future rather than an excuse for raking over the ashes of the past. At the heart of the gospel is a realism about the past, its triumphs as well as its errors, though always looking forward to that which might yet be rather than regret over what has been.

Summer 2014

‘Do this in remembrance of me’ For the Christian, this pattern of remembrance as a means of acknowledging the past in a way that is inspirational for the present and life-giving for the future comes to a clear focus in the one central sacramental narrative of the faith, namely the institution of the Lord’s Supper. In the earliest written account of this, given by Paul in the early 50s (1 Corinthians 11.23–26), the instruction to ‘Do this in remembrance of me’ is pivotal, as also in Luke’s account of the last supper (Luke 22.17–20), and while those exact words are not repeated in either Matthew or Mark’s Gospels, the implication is clearly there. Why else would anyone wish to follow Jesus’ instruction to share bread and wine in this way without intuitively recalling the occasion in his lifetime that was the origin of the practice?

It is, however, much more than merely a matter of remembrance. The breaking of the bread and the pouring of the wine highlight the brokenness of our world and the death – both metaphorical and literal – that is the central tragedy of the exclusion of the primeval couple from the Garden of Eden. Through its connection with Passover, it not only highlights the way in which all the world’s suffering comes to a focus in the cross, but it also points forward to the possibilities of new life, based on the unending faithfulness of God the liberator. More than that, for those who know their Bible it also evokes the image of the great feast of Isaiah 25.6–10 in which God’s generosity overflows in a grand vision of cosmic redemption and renewal for all. In the ensuing centuries as the Church developed a more complex Eucharistic theology, this emphasis on the sacrament as a means of grace, of laying to rest the mistakes of the past while offering new life for the future, became even more pronounced. But the essence of it was already there in the recollection of some key biblical passages.

These examples of remembrance being used as a way of inspiring people to new possibilities grounded in God’s grace are by no means isolated, but represent the overall picture with which the Bible presents us. It is a bit like the old adage that those who forget the past are in danger of repeating it. The Bible never ignores past mistakes, but it never dwells on them and the overriding message is not one of regret for what we can never change, but of challenge to face up to the possibilities of what, with God’s help, we can yet become.

Aspiring to a better future One of the ironies of today’s world is that while Western culture is ostensibly more permissive and laid back, in many respects it is also more judgmental than previous generations might have been. Political correctness, celebrity culture and social media have all played their part in this, which means that we know a lot more than our grandparents would have done, not only about national and international affairs but also of the personal lives and opinions of individuals. Forgiveness tends to be in short supply: we find it harder to move on from the past, because it is not so easy to escape its presence.

Information about all of us is easy to find through online

search engines, and it tends to be there for a long time even if it is no longer relevant, or even current.

In May this year, the European Union Court of Justice ruled that citizens should have the right to require that personal information be removed from websites such as Google. Not surprisingly, the first applications concerned spent convictions and reports of misdemeanors committed years in the past. Most discussion centred around the technical difficulties of actually complying with this requirement, but from a Christian perspective this is not just a technological challenge: it is also a theological issue. We should never forget the past, whether as individuals or nations, but neither should we dwell there because the good news of the gospel is that we don’t need to, and life can actually be different. The past is often messy, whether our own personal past or the more expansive corporate pasts of our diverse cultures in which we are all implicated whether we like it or not. But the phrase ‘there has to be more to life than this’ is so often repeated that it seems to be somehow embedded in the corporate psyche of humanity. It is as if we intuitively come full circle, connecting the painful memories with a better vision of what might have been, as the curse of Calvary interacts with the blessing of the Garden.

Not long before the start of the Great War, Arthur Waite invited his artist friend Pamela Colman Smith to create designs for a new set of tarot cards, and much of their inspiration came from biblical themes. In two of the cards, she drew depictions of Adam and Eve in a contrasting before-and-after characterisation. On the Lovers card they are happily enjoying the presence of God in the Garden, while on the Devil card they are chained up in a dark environment. But one thing is common to both designs, and that is the presence of the two trees, of life and of the knowledge of good and evil. The design of the Devil card is especially interesting, because it shows them with tails (after the pattern of the one who is now oppressing them).

However, their tails are not the same as his. Instead, they carry symbols of the two trees, thereby depicting in graphic style where so many find themselves: oppressed by memories of the past, yet with an inbuilt recollection of and aspiration for what has been lost. The Rider Waite tarot appeared in 1910, and one of the consequences of the Great War was a huge explosion of interest in this and other esoteric spiritual tools in the decades that immediately followed the cessation of hostilities.

These designs became iconic for people whose faith had been shattered, and it is not difficult to see why, because they tap into and illustrate that archetypal tension that is endemic to what it means to be human: the simple reality that the world is messed up, but we instinctively aspire to something better. That ‘something better’ is what stands at the heart of the gospel: an invitation not to ignore the past (still less, to pretend that it never happened), but to share a vision of what might yet be as we remember the faithfulness of God and claim for ourselves a new future characterised by the divine attributes of justice, love and mercy (Micah 6.6–8), mediated to us through the death and resurrection of Christ celebrated in praise and worship.

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Recording life stories

Jan Green Jan has a background in counselling and caring. She lives in Hampshire, is an active member of Romsey Abbey, a National Trust volunteer and enjoys spending time with family and friends. Names in this article have been changed to provide anonymity.

‘Ordinary humdrum life. Is there such a thing?

Wherever you go, wherever you look, there is interest.

Little events that provoke new thoughts; nothing earth-shattering, just small encouragements to share at the day’s beginning. Something someone says or does, or a ‘happenstance’ that catches the imagination. All it takes is the ability to stay awake and aware, to tune in, and listen. We can all do that.’

(Eddie Askew) I love to read historical novels. I revel in the detail, the clothes, the food, schooldays, the buildings, the forms of transport. I know that some people groan at the amount of detail in Dickens but to me there is nothing better than curling up with a good story and I think his are some of the best.

I have discovered a hobby that is even more fascinating than any book that I could read. I help people to record their memories, their life stories. It allows me to meet new people, listen to their stories, to share their memories to laugh and sometimes cry with them. We may sing and even sit quietly as the thoughts go deeper than words can express. It’s such a privilege to be welcomed into another person’s private world. Everyone has a story, we all have a past. We have loved and lost, succeeded and failed. We all have people who have been important to us over the years. Good times and bad, we are all part of history and each tale is worth recording.

Eddie Askew wrote, ‘Wherever you go, wherever you look, there is interest’, and this is what I have found to be true.

Each life story has a limitless hoard of memories, mostly small but certainly important.

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In 1999 I visited Canada to attend a reunion of my father’s side of the family for the first time. As an only child whose parents had both died by the time I was thirty, I had very little information to add to the family history that was compiled about the generation including my father. I didn’t know why he had not joined the rest of the family when they emigrated to Canada in 1926. I didn’t know where he had met my mother. And when I stood at the family grave of my grandparents, in a small churchyard deep in the Prairies, I realised that I knew next to nothing about them either. Why, oh why, had I not asked those questions when I could find out the answers? Well, of course, I was young and busy, too interested in my own life.

For several years I worked for the Stroke Association supporting people left with dysphasia after a stroke.

The frustration of losing the ability to communicate is life-shattering and left me with a new understanding of how important is the need to communicate with one another. I remember sitting with a lady whose speech had been affected and, during the numerous meetings I had with her, discovered slowly that she had taken a degree in archaeology after retiring and had helped Tim Smit to excavate the ‘Lost Gardens of Helligan’. What a pleasure it was to see her face as she realised that I had understood and discovered this part of her past that she was so proud of.

Having a background in counselling has given me the skills to listen. That experience taught me that sometimes it takes time and patience to hear the whole story.

Summer 2014

Listen ‘Let the wise listen’.

(Proverbs 1.5) An 85-year-old lady (referring to the other people in her block of flats in London) said to me one day, ’they only see me as an old lady, not as a person’. Olive had graduated in 1950, long before most women had the opportunity of attending university. She studied Maths and Physics, very unusual subjects for a woman in her day. Before this, Olive had taken her A-levels in the boys’ school because the girls’ school didn’t offer these subjects. Her husband had left her with two children to bring up alone and she eventually became a headmistress. What a pioneering and challenging life story. But to the passer-by she was just an old lady. Do we recognise the jewels of history that are lost because we don’t have time to ask simple questions and to listen?

To tell someone your life-story you have to trust them. I don’t bombard the person with questions but spend the first few meetings getting to know them and building a relationship of trust, laying down some basic ground rules, including confidentiality. Memories that are shared may be happy but they may be sad, they may be uncomfortable. I think it’s really important to allow these memories to surface because it can be really healing and liberating to speak these things out loud. However, we always agree how much I will write down and how much will be recorded in the story. It’s important to me that a person tells the story they want to tell, that they share their memories in their own way. This is not my story to tell, I don’t own it. Neither do I correct it, if the history doesn’t seem to fit, so be it. If a family member disagrees with the memory that can be awkward. However, usually it’s agreed not to record anything that may be too controversial!

Time Give me time for people. Because when I can open the door to them you’ll be able to step in too. And that’s where the difference starts and the joy.

(Eddie Askew) Over the years I have had an increasing awareness of the importance of the small things in life. Of the chance encounters, the kind word, the smile. How those little happenings can make all the difference to our lives.

For me that is where I see God at work and that is where I feel my mission lay. I have been so fortunate to have the time and opportunity to be with folk who are unable to socialise in the normal way, either through age or infirmity. Some of my storytellers have a faith that they can verbalise and some have not. That is what makes this particular journey so exciting, finding God in unexpected places. I do believe that, if we ask God to fill us with his Spirit, he will be with us each day in whatever we do and whoever we meet. We can leave the rest to him.

Much of the Bible is about the life stories of individuals and families. That is one of the reasons why it fascinates us and holds our attention. Most are normal people with

hopes, fears, good things and challenges in their lives just like us.

Memories ‘God gave us memories that we might have roses in December.’

(JM Barrie)

everyone has a story, we all have a past … we are all part of history and each tale is worth recording What helps us to remember those memories hidden deep in our minds? Taking our dog for a walk after the recent floods I noticed a strangely familiar smell.

After the water had receded a thin layer of mud had been left over a local field. Straight away I had a flashback to when I was seven years old staying with my grandmother and tramping over the fields on the banks of the River Severn. As the tide goes out it leaves miles of mud, which I had completely forgotten about until I smelt this very similar smell. Something as simple as a sprig of lavender, rosemary, lily of the valley, wood shavings, oil of cloves, or even some newly exposed mud, can transport a person back in time.

Then, of course, there are the photographs. Please don’t throw away photos if their owner is still alive.

One gentleman, whose life story I was recording, had a fairly swift move away from his last home into a nursing home. The family had rallied around and sorted everything out. Unfortunately, a whole cupboard of photos were lost. Just one photograph can generate a whole afternoon’s conversation. All those long forgotten relatives, holidays, pets, people and the clothes we used to wear, and thought we looked so good in at the time!

Maybe the most evocative of all is music, somehow we remember the tunes that were played when we were teenagers and the words often come floating back. Just to have the appropriate music in the background can be wonderfully helpful in triggering memories.

This might seem an obvious comment but the way we ask questions can make a big difference to how someone responds. If I ask ‘where did you go to school?’

I may just get a one or two word answer. If I ask a more open question, ‘what do you remember about your school days?’, it usually provokes more thought and a more considered attempt to recall days long ago. I also share my own past in a limited way, as it sometimes jogs a memory and makes for a much more normal conversation.

Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You can never tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things.

(Pearce Harris) I can often remember the most inconsequential things, like the dress that I was wearing when I fell over and grazed my knee when the road had been resurfaced.

I think I was ten! So it is with my storytellers, I write 15

Transmission everything down and then try to put some order into my notes later on in the process.

It is important to make the point that we all reminiscence the whole time. It’s certainly not an activity solely for the elderly. My four-year-old grandson loves to visit Mottisfont, our local National Trust property in Hampshire. He often says things like, ‘Do you remember when I fell over and grazed my knee’, or ‘I went paddling

we need time to dream, time to remember, and time to reach the infinite – time to be in that stream.’ Our normal conversations are full of sharing our experiences of yesterday. But along with age can come a series of factors that mean our social world becomes much smaller and communication more limited. Those conversations that we had every day become questions and answers,’ Are you alright’? ‘Can I give you a lift’? ‘Would you like a cup of tea’? Loneliness can creep up slowly.

Do you remember the Olympic games in 2012 or Andy Murray winning Wimbledon last year? Do you remember the day Princess Diana died or, for that matter, JF Kennedy? Do you remember sitting with a dozen other people watching the Coronation on a small television, the only one in the street? Sometimes the ‘big’ events can trigger other memories of that time.

Jack, another of my storytellers remembered 1935 quite well. He was a Sunday-school teacher in the East End of London and was standing outside the church with all the children when Oswald Mosely passed by in a carriage.

Mosely’s band of followers were all in black shirts. One of the stewards told him to take the children inside in case of trouble. Later that day there were riots in the East End. This same gentleman, who was born in 1911, also recalled Armistice Day at the end of the First World War in 1918. He lived in Bridport, Dorset, and climbed the hill with crowds of people, where they waved flags and sang patriotic songs.

Record everything ‘Our most treasured family heirlooms are our sweet family memories.’ (unknown) Michael Oke has written a very helpful book entitled Write Your Own Life Story: How to Unlock Your Memories and Create a Lasting Personal Record for Family and Friends (published by Marks & Spencer in 2004). One question he asks is ‘What would you want to know if your grandmother wrote a book?’ The answer he suggests is ‘everything’. Michael has written many biographies, he also lectures and runs workshops in the subject.

That word ‘everything’ is the important thing to remember when helping someone to record their memories. To the family any information is interesting.

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Life is so busy now and time is at a premium. But not only that, the shame is that often we only begin to be interested in knowing about the past when we have time to think about it and that is often too late to ask questions.

During the search for information about my own family I found that one of my great aunts had been a Mormon.

On their website, we found the copy of her funeral service at which several people had given eulogies.

These provided unexpected information about the sort of person she was – caring and loving. It gave a brief description of her life and was such a precious piece of family history. That is what I hope to pass on to the family of each person who allows me to share their personal history.

I was asked recently to speak at the funeral of Ted, whose life story I had spent some weeks recording.

I was so delighted: obviously the information in the book, though not earth shattering meant so much to the whole family. He was a local man and had lots of memories and photographs. For example, his father had camped with Baden Powell in the earliest days of the Boy Scout movement and Ted had supported the Scouts all his life. He had a wonderful sense of humour as well as a very good memory and I think we both enjoyed our meetings equally.

Once it has been agreed that we have completed the life story, I present it in a variety of ways. Some people have a large number of photos and not so much to say, while others have many stories and remember lots of detail.

The accounts may be typed and simply put together in a spring file, others printed, depending on what seems appropriate at the time for the individual and their family. I always leave space to add stories that may be remembered at a later date.

Conclusion ‘We need time to dream, time to remember, and time to reach the infinite – time to be.’

(Gladys Taber) ‘Time to remember’. I feel that I have been really blessed in having both the time and opportunity to spend time with people helping them to remember their life stories. I hope that I have been able to share my passion and maybe even encourage you to consider this as a worthwhile use of your time. I don’t approach each venture as a professional. I’m simply a Christian who wants to make a small difference in individual lives.

I hope to bring enjoyment and to give an affirming experience to the person that I’m listening to, valuing their life both past and present.

Summer 2014

The Bible, the British and the First World War

Michael Snape Dr Michael Snape, a Reader at the University of Birmingham, is a historian of Christianity and war in the modern world, focusing primarily on Great Britain, the British Empire and North America from 1700 to 1950.

Given its centrality in British life and culture, the Bible (and especially the King James Bible) framed the British experience of the First World War. In a Bible-conscious and scripturally literate society such as wartime Britain, Scripture served either to justify or condemn the conflict, it helped to explain its deeper meaning, it provided inspiration for soldiers and civilians, solace for the many bereaved, and profoundly affected the idiom of remembrance. Nevertheless, the experience of the First World War also exposed some of the Bible’s inherent tensions and even perplexities, becoming a battleground for Christians who supported or opposed the war, and seeming to offer little on the nature of the afterlife, into which all too many young men had departed.

Nevertheless, and if the war deepened confusion for some, in general terms the Bible served as a rock to which the nation clung during the storm of war, a rock that endured for another generation of Britons when faced with the still greater threat of Hitler’s Germany 20 years later.

The centrality of the Bible in pre-war Britain According to Timothy Larsen, a leading historian of the Bible and Victorian Britain, the Bible enjoyed a ‘unique and extraordinary centrality’ in the Victorian era.1 This situation is profoundly important given that the generation of Britons that fought the First World War – its generals, its politicians and even the young conscripts of 1916 to 1918 – were practically all born in the reign of Queen Victoria and were very much products of Victorian society. This was a society upon which the Christian Scriptures exerted a profound and formative influence. Holy Scripture was common to the services of all Christian denominations, from the Quaker meeting to

the Roman Catholic mass. Although subject to different interpretations, the King James Bible was very much a shared text for Anglophone Protestants all over the world, and the Douai version of the Bible had a similar function for Anglophone Catholics. The teachings and values of this common text underpinned the British legal system, and dictated contemporary notions of public and personal morality. Biblical themes, stories, language and imagery saturated British art, literature and music.

Scripture coloured and informed political discourse across the political spectrum, from Irish Unionism to Christian socialism. The Bible infused Britain’s historic sense of national identity (like ancient Israel, Britain was a nation chosen by God for his providential purposes) and, through the missionary movement which sought to take the gospel to the world, it furnished a clear moral and spiritual justification for the British Empire. Their shared Scriptures endowed the British people with a powerful sense of the workings of divine providence in national and international life and, at the very heart of the British state, the coronation ceremony showed how deeply the concept of monarchy was rooted in Old Testament themes and conceptions.

Regardless of social class or religious denomination, knowledge of the Bible was generally understood to be the mark of a good education and a respectable background. It was widely read at home and in private, and, no less than reading, writing and arithmetic, it was integral to the curricula of the nation’s schools. Whether in the public schools, church schools, or even the notionally secular board schools, British children were routinely exposed to biblical stories and teachings, the Bible also being central to the Sunday schools attended 17

Transmission (for shorter or for longer periods) by the overwhelming majority of working-class children in mainland Britain.

Quite simply, the Bible was by far the most widely read, taught and studied book in British society and even agnostics, secularists and atheists had to be familiar with its contents in order to promote their own varieties

in the cauldron in the First World War the Bible continued to inform and to fortify the soul of the nation NOTES 1. T Larsen, A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 6.

2. SC Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark c.1880– 1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 66.

3. A Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp.

154–5.

4. M Snape, The Redcoat and Religion: The Forgotten History of the British Soldier from the Age of Marlborough to the Eve of the First World War (London: Routledge, 2005), pp.

94–5.

5. AK Yapp, The Romance of the Red Triangle (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1918), p. 212.

6. A Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War (London: SPCK, 1978), p. 153.

7. GA Studdert Kennedy, The Hardest Part (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1918), pp. 49–51.

8. C Falls, The History of the 36th (Ulster) Division (Belfast: McCaw, Stevenson & Orr, 1922), pp. 16–17.

9. S Menzies, Sportsmen Parsons in Peace and War (London: Hutchinson, 1919), p. 237.

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of non-belief. So steeped were Britons in the Bible that its language and stories were used colloquially, as in phrases such as ‘Job’s comforter’, ‘prodigal son’ and ‘whited sepulchre’.

Nonetheless, there were problems with the position of the Bible in British society. The nation’s unusually rich mix of Christian denominations (to say nothing of its two established churches) underlined the fact that the Bible was liable to be read and understood in many different ways. More recently, advances in geology and the impact of Darwinian science had thrown into question traditional and literal understandings of the Bible, and especially its accounts of creation. The growth of biblical (or ‘higher’) criticism had helped to accelerate this retreat from literalism in many church quarters.

Furthermore, popular reception of the Bible was an abiding problem. Though respected as a source of divinely inspired truths, and as a sacred artefact, the Bible was far more widely owned than actually read. Even when it was the subject of devotional reading and study, it was often perused and quoted selectively, or poorly digested.

There was even a problem with how the ubiquitous family Bible was regarded, it being widely considered ‘lucky’ for a household to have one.2 Although the Bible informed and sustained personal and public morality, the essence of its ethical teaching was generally understood to be the Golden Rule. Finally, and in seeking to encourage religious habits, and notably churchgoing, among the workingclasses, Christ’s repeated denunciations of religious hypocrisy could prove double-edged, with clergy and devout laypeople liable to be dismissed in scriptural terms as mere Pharisees.

A contested text The Bible is not a transparent or exhaustive rule book for the Christian life and some of its ethical teachings are clearly in tension (e.g. as in the case of Jesus’ teachings on divorce). This is especially true of its teachings on killing in the context of war, with the debates of 1914 to 1918 emphasising its position as a contested text. For those inclined towards pacifism, the sixth commandment and the Sermon on the Mount, among other passages of Scripture, seemed both clear and binding. Against their arguments, supporters of the war could deploy large portions of the Old Testament, much better known then than now, plus other sayings and teachings of Jesus and St Paul, such as, ‘Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace,

but a sword’ (Matthew 10.34). Appeals to the underlying spirit of Scripture were no more conclusive. As the parable of the Good Samaritan does not hint at what its protagonist would have done had he stumbled across an armed robbery rather than its aftermath, in the context of Britain’s war with Germany (and of the unprovoked invasion and rape of Belgium in particular), was it the duty of the Christian to shun the war or to go to the assistance of one’s neighbour? Both approaches were problematic. Those who invoked the sixth commandment could be accused of privileging one commandment over the other nine and, given recent progress in biblical scholarship, of misrepresenting a commandment against wilful murder. Equally, those who invoked ‘Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’ (John 15.13) seemed to be over-taxing its application in connection with the nation’s growing number of war dead.

Ultimately, the Bible furnished a rich and varied repertoire of themes and figures that could be invoked to support Britain’s war effort, while simultaneously providing a store of proof texts that could be cited just as fervently by the small minority of Britons who opposed the war for religious reasons. According to various British commentators, Germany was the new Assyria, the arrogant despoiler of nations (Isaiah 10.12– 14). Furthermore, in view of Germany’s transgressions, the righteousness of Britain’s cause, and the redemptive connotations of their self-sacrifice, the manner and purpose of the deaths of Britain’s soldiers (all of whom were volunteers before the introduction of conscription in 1916), were widely conceived as analogous to that of Christ himself. Besides the reassurance that could be found in John 15.13, Jesus had also said, ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.’ (Luke 9.23).

However, the introduction of conscription in 1916 gave rise to the new phenomenon of the conscientious objector, men who were required to make their case for an exemption from combatant service before local tribunals. Although by no means all of them based their objections on religious grounds, and not all religious objectors were ‘absolutists’ who would play no part in the war effort, the place of the Bible in British society ensured that religiously motivated objectors were able to offer the most cogent and compelling arguments in favour of their case. At many local tribunals, therefore, committees of assembled worthies (which could include clergymen) had ample opportunity to bandy scriptural texts with those seeking exemption. At Preston, for example; the case of one conscientious objector was dismissed after he misquoted Matthew 10.34, wrongly claiming that Jesus had come to bring peace, not a sword; on the other hand, another had his case upheld after he demonstrated a more persuasive knowledge of the Sermon on the Mount.3

The Bible and the armed forces It says a great deal about the enormous value attached to the Bible in British society that Holy Scripture had

Summer 2014 been part of the standard kit of the British soldier since 1825, when the Duke of York, the army’s commanderin-chief, had ordered that every literate soldier should be issued with a Bible at public expense.4 Despite the fact that the War Office issued portions of Scripture and approved prayer books to the other ranks as a matter of policy, as in previous conflicts an immense effort was devoted by civilian agencies to the task of supplying the Word of God to the soldiers of the British army. According to Sir Arthur Yapp, the YMCA alone distributed ‘Millions of Testaments and gospel portions’ free of charge to serving soldiers during the First World War.5 These were, however, only some of the 40 million Bibles, prayer books, hymn books and tracts that Alan Wilkinson estimated were distributed to British troops by civilian religious agencies in the first half of the war,6 the equivalent of approximately six items for every British soldier or sailor who served in the course of the entire conflict.

According to the Anglican chaplain GA Studdert Kennedy, the celebrated ‘Woodbine Willie’, the prevailing attitude of soldiers towards the Bible was affectionate and idiosyncratic: ‘ “Yes, I’ll ‘ave one, sir; you never know your luck; it may stop a bullet.” ’ According to Kennedy, who was writing in 1917, ‘There are thousands of Bibles carried that are not read. That is certain. If you give them out broadcast, that is bound to be so. The Bible, specially the New Testament, has an enormous circulation in the trenches, yet I very rarely come across a man who knows very much about it.’ Kennedy went on to make a telling comparison: ‘I find quite common among men a kind of inherited respect for the Bible. They seem to think of it very much as a decent man thinks of his grandmother. It is ancient, and therefore demands respect; but it is utterly out of date and cannot be taken seriously, except by parsons.’7 While numerous Bibles and New Testaments were undoubtedly kept and treated as mere talismans, giving rise to numerous stories of bullet or shrapnel-stopping Bibles, there were many soldiers who made full and orthodox use of Scripture for devotional purposes. According to Cyril Falls, who served with the 36th (Ulster) Division, ‘The General commanding the 4th Division, to which the 36th was attached for instruction after its arrival in France, spoke of his astonishment at finding so many Ulstermen reading their Bibles.’ As Falls remembered: ‘[I]t was not uncommon to find a man sitting on the fire-step of a front-line trench, reading one of the small copies of the New Testament which were issued to the troops by the people at home. The explanation was that, on the one hand, religion was near and real to them; on the other, that they were simple men. They saw no reason to hide or disguise that which was a part of their daily lives.’8 Naturally, for the fearful and wounded the Bible was a very common and accessible resort. Maurice Peel, an Anglican army chaplain and the grandson of a former prime minister, relayed biblical texts to the men of his battalion by word of mouth before they went over the top, his last message to them being ‘Jesus said, “I am with you always”’ (Mattew 28.20).9 A few weeks after the carnage of 1 July 1916, the bloodiest day of the First

World War for the British Empire, Gerald Brennan, an officer in the 5th Gloucestershire Regiment, remarked on the manner and extent to which the Bible had been used by those fatally wounded on the first day of the Battle of the Somme: ‘The wounded, who could not be brought in, had crawled into shell holes, wrapped their waterproof sheets round them, taken out their Bibles, and died like that.’10 For generals as well as ordinary soldiers, the Bible also proved a source of solace and inspiration. Bearing a colossal weight of responsibility, Sir Douglas Haig, the often unfairly maligned Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front from December 1915, frequently reflected on Scripture in his diary and to a select group of confidants. According to Haig’s chaplain, the Scottish Presbyterian George S Duncan: ‘[The Bible] influenced, perhaps unconsciously, both his ways of speech and his general outlook, without necessarily implying that he knew much about its origins or its theology. I have no reason to think that Haig’s knowledge of the Bible was either profound or extensive.

He certainly gained from it a sense of the divine Presence and Power; and this assurance meant much to him. In a broad general sense he valued it especially for the deep seriousness that characterised its message from the beginning to the end, and for the light which it shed for him on the whole duty of man.’11 The wider experience of a world war inevitably evoked a variety of responses to Scripture from among Britain’s fighting men. Products of a pre-war culture that was steeped in knowledge and awareness of the Bible, many of the war poets evinced a literary response to the war that was heavily coloured by Scripture. For example, and inspired by the wayside shrines that dotted the landscape of northern France and Belgium, Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘At a Calvary near the Ancre’ invoked the Beast of the book of Revelation, as well as the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion.

For many others, the ethical dilemmas of killing were never properly resolved. While on the Somme, the Anglican chaplain EC Cross was tasked with one still burning question: ‘Come on, Padre, what is your answer to this? Thou shalt not kill. What do you make of that commandment now?’12 The Bible also underlined the British soldier’s commonality with his German adversary, sometimes helping to moderate the conduct of the war on the Western Front. Most famously, the spirit of Luke 2.14, ‘on earth peace, good will toward men’ (KJV), was at the heart of the legendary Christmas truce of 1914. In the heat of battle, demoralised German soldiers were also observed to produce their own Bibles and Testaments while trying to surrender.13

10. J Keegan, The Face of Battle (London: Pimlico, 1991), p. 269.

11. GS Duncan, Douglas Haig As I Knew Him (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), p. 114.

12. IWM Documents, EC Crosse, 80/22/1.

13. M Snape, God and the British Soldier: Religion and the British Army in the First and Second World Wars (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 190.

14. Ibid., p. 70.

15. Ibid., p. 236.

16. A Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2012), pp. 257–8.

17. MD Chapman, ‘Anglo-German Theological Relations during the First World War’, Journal for the History of Modern Theology 7 (2000), pp. 109–26; CE Bailey, ‘The British Protestant Theologians in the First World War: Germanophobia Unleashed’, Harvard Theological Review 77 (1984), pp. 195–221 at pp. 208–10.

18. AJ Hoover, God, Germany, and Britain in the Great War: A Study in Clerical Nationalism (New York: Praeger, 1989), p. 27.

Away from the Western Front, for hundreds of thousands of British soldiers the hard campaigns against the Turks in Palestine and Mesopotamia took place against a biblical backdrop that seemed familiar, if only from childhood memory and imagination. Significantly, and conscious of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem 19

Transmission prior to his Passion, and of the Kaiser’s showy entry into the Holy City on horseback some years earlier, General Sir Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem on foot, and essentially as a pilgrim, when the city fell to the British in December 1917.14

A heightened interest in Scripture

19. M Snape, ‘Civilians, Soldiers, and Perceptions of the Afterlife in Britain during the First World War’, in P Clarke and T Claydon (eds), ‘The Church, The Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul’, Studies in Church History 45 (2009), pp.

371–403.

20. J Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 96.

For civilians no less than soldiers, the war engendered a heightened interest in Scripture, a common practice on the home front being to follow an agreed scheme of Bible reading with a spouse or near relative in the armed forces in order to ease the pains of separation and anxiety.15 Inevitably, a war of this magnitude also stoked an appetite for prophetic and even apocalyptic readings of the Bible. As war had traditionally been perceived as a divine means of chastising a sinful nation, another perception grounded on the biblical history of ancient Israel, churchmen often urged Britons to examine their own sins, both personal and societal. Acting on these convictions, during the latter half of the war both the Church of England and the principal Presbyterian churches in Scotland sought to renew church life by means of national campaigns which focused on the need for national self-examination and repentance.

However, given Jesus’s words in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark concerning the signs that would herald his return and the end of the world (Mattew 24.6–7 and Mark 13.7–8), the unfolding events of the war were widely construed in light of the book of Revelation.

Although reflected in the wartime boom in sensational pamphlets such as The Years 1914 to 1923 in Bible Prophecy (1914) and The Great War as Foretold in the Bible (1915), these intimations of apocalypse also stoked the widespread credence that was given to the story of the Angels of Mons, and lent credibility to rumours of a Canadian soldier who had been crucified by the Germans near Ypres – in a typically blasphemous parody of the crucifixion. Later, the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 fed apocalyptic speculation on both sides of the Atlantic, the British government’s pledge of support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine seeming to mark the beginning of the end times for many premillenarian evangelicals.16 Significantly, at the same time the war also served to undermine the credibility and respectability of higher criticism and other manifestations of German theological ‘modernism’.

With its intellectual roots in Germany, some British commentators were even tempted to link the gradual, pre-war undermining of Christian orthodoxy in Germany with its lapse into apostate barbarism in 1914.17 As one Anglican commentator lamented, ‘As a scholar you may cut the Bible into shreds, but as a citizen you must not snip a button from the Kaiser’s uniform’.18 In one vital respect, however, some of the bereaved appeared to look to the Bible in vain. Belief in Hell and in eternal punishment had been waning in British society since the mid-Victorian period, and the mass mortality of the war years did nothing to urge the revival of this old and fearsome orthodoxy. Unfortunately, for Protestants Scripture seemed silent on the nature of the afterlife,

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and especially on the fate of those souls that seemed unfit – for the time being at least – to enter heavenly glory. While this fuelled an often desperate dabbling in spiritualism on the part of some of the bereaved, a practice that orthodox Christians believed to stand condemned by the Old Testament’s account of Saul’s dealings with the witch of Endor (1 Samuel 28.3–25), it was also reflected in the fuzzy and allusive manner in which the war dead were remembered, there being no firms consensus as to their whereabouts.19 Nevertheless, the Good Book proved to be an enduring source of comfort, if not detailed explanation. Gathered at the war memorial in Royston in 1922, one speaker advised the bereaved that they should return to their callings, like King David had done, despite the loss of their sons.20 On a more intimate level, scriptural texts were commonly chosen as inscriptions for the headstones of loved ones- favoured texts being John 15.13 (‘Greater love hath no man …’) and Matthew 25.21 (‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant …) The Bible also influenced the design and inscriptions of large numbers of public war memorials. That of the Machine Gun Corps, for example, when erected in 1925, featured a statue of the boy David and bore the inscription ‘Saul hath slain his thousands but David his tens of thousands’ (1 Samuel 18.7). Under the aegis of the Imperial War Graves Commission, a Cross of Sacrifice and Stone of Remembrance became standard fixtures of every British war cemetery. The legend inscribed on the base of the Cross of Sacrifice was devised by Rudyard Kipling, inspired by a text from the deuterocanonical Book of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), ‘Their name liveth for evermore’ (Sirach 44.14). Furthermore, the ‘Great Stone of Remembrance’, a simple stone altar, evoked Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, and the angel’s consoling words ‘now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me’ (Genesis 22.12 KJV).

Conclusion Deserving of much greater and deeper study, the experience of the First World War underlined, rather than diminished, the abiding importance of the Bible in British society. A perennially complex, contradictory and perplexing text, it nevertheless conditioned the response of a whole generation of Britons to the worst conflict in their nation’s history. Simultaneously a source of legitimation and condemnation of the war, and of fevered speculation as to its meaning and outcome, it nonetheless provided millions of British soldiers and civilians with an indispensable sense of consolation, inspiration, unity and stability. Though the Bible was variously appreciated and digested in society at large, and although its integrity and standing had been challenged by scientific and scholarly advances in the nineteenth century, in the cauldron in the First World War it continued to inform and to fortify the soul of the nation, proving a resilient and vital means through which the war and its unprecedented sacrifices could be understood, remembered and endured.

Summer 2014

The memories that keep Judaism alive

Raphael Zarum Rabbi Dr Raphael Zarum is Dean of the London School of Jewish Studies.

Information is more accessible now than it has ever has been. The internet has brought much of the collective knowledge of humankind to our fingertips. So why should we try to actually remember anything when it is so easy to instantly look it up online? Why try to hold stuff in your head when you can download it from a device that you hold in your hand? The reason is that human memory is so much more than the mechanistic accessibility to storage data. When we re-member something, we re-connect with it in multiple ways and enable that information to shape our whole perspective.

Our sense of self is actually the meaning we weave together out of memorable experiences from our past.

Our conscious and sub-conscious memories frame our very being, provide us with a personal history, and so define our humanity.

That is why the Hebrew Bible employs the word zachor, meaning ‘remember’, so pervasively. It appears 169 times in its various forms. Through biblical festivals and rituals the people of Israel were commanded to remember decisive events in their history. This served to shape their national identity and map out their future. Such a religious awareness and focus on recalling history was unique in the ancient world. Time, back then, was seen as cyclic. Only the founding myths of pagan cultures were viewed as significant, not its ongoing history. This is borne out by the paucity of ancient historically focused texts that have been found. Though Herodotus came to be called the ‘father of history’, even for him it just served to prevent the glorious achievements and political realisations of the Greeks from being forgotten. But history had no religious meaning in itself, it did not have an overarching purpose. That notion was introduced

in the Bible: ‘It was ancient Israel that first assigned a decisive significance to history and thus forged a new world-view whose essential premises were eventually appropriated by Christianity and Islam as well. “The heavens,” in the words of the psalmist, might still “declare the glory of the Lord,” but it was human history that revealed his will and purpose. This novel perception was not the result of philosophical speculation, but of the peculiar nature of the Israelite faith. It emerged out of an intuitive and revolutionary understanding of God, and was refined through profoundly felt historical experiences.’1 Memory was, in fact, a religious imperative for both the Israelites and God. This essay will thus focus on three aspects of biblical memory from a Jewish perspective: the imperative for us to remember, what it means for God to remember and, finally, a comment on the intriguing issue of why God finds humanity memorable at all.

The six remembrances The Five Books of Moses, known to Jews as the Torah, commands the children of Israel to remember six particular events. Thus there is a Jewish tradition to recite these six memories everyday at the conclusion of morning prayers. They bring to mind key elements of the Torah as well as the living faith and historical mindset that it engenders. Here is how they appear in the Siddur, the Jewish prayer book: ‘That you may remember the day you left the land of Egypt all the days of your life.’

(Deuteronomy 16.3) 21

Transmission ‘Only be very careful and watch yourself lest you forget … the day you stood before the Lord your God at Horev (Mt Sinai) when the Lord said to me (Moses), “Assemble the people before Me and I will let them hear My words … and they will teach them to their children.” ’ (Deuteronomy 4.9–10)

NOTES 1. YH Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), p. 8.

2. M Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

3. J Sacks, Radical Then, Radical Now: On Being Jewish: The Legacy of the World’s Oldest Religion (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), ch. 9.

4. I Greenberg, The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), ch. 7.

5. M Halbertal & A Margalit, Idolatry (tr N Goldblum; Cambridge MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1992).

6. J Telushkin, Words That Hurt, Words That Heal: How to Choose Words Wisely and Well (New York: William Morrow, 1998).

7. AJ Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975).

8. This is similar to F Rosenzweig’s use of the points of the hexagram in, The Star of Redemption (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), a key text in modern Jewish philosophy.

‘Remember what [the tribe of] Amalek did to you on your way out of Egypt, how he met you on the way, cutting off those who were lagging behind, when you were tired and exhausted … do not forget.’

(Deuteronomy 25.17–19) ‘Remember, and do not forget, how you provoked the Lord your God [concerning the Golden Calf] in the wilderness.’

(Deuteronomy 9.7) ‘Remember what the Lord your God did to Miriam on the day when you came out of Egypt.’

(Deuteronomy 24.9) ‘Remember the Sabbath day to hallow it.’

(Exodus 20.8) Each serves as a daily life lesson. The redemption from Egypt is a reminder that no one has the right to enslave another and that all people are meant to be free. The revelation at Mount Sinai, when God pronounced the Ten Commandments, is the source of divine morality and our commitment to live by that code. The pernicious attack of the Amalekite tribe painfully recalls the human capacity for hateful cruelty. The story of the Golden Calf is a warning about worshipping idols of your own making. Miriam spoke badly of her brother Moses and was stricken with a disease which only ended when Moses pleaded to God on her behalf. This event prompts us to avoid disparaging others and not to abuse the awesome power of speech. Finally, the Sabbath is a reminder that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, teaching the need for a weekly cessation and respite from work.

Though all but one of the above quotations is taken from the book of Deuteronomy, most of them actually occurred earlier in the book of Exodus. Thus the deuteronomic referencing here serves to further highlight the memorial aspect of these historic experiences.

Through these daily acts of remembrance we amalgamate the past into the present and so calibrate a moral compass to guide us in a purposeful future.

The six events all play central roles in Jewish philosophy and are discussed and conceptualised within numerous books by Jewish thinkers. For instance, the Exodus is analysed as a political revolution,2 the Revelation as the birth of peoplehood,3 Amalek’s assault as a recognition of the reality of hate,4 the Golden Calf as the innate human attraction to idolatry,5 Miriam’s words as the importance of appropriate language,6 and the Sabbath as a palace in time.7 These memories thus serve to shape the beliefs and practices of traditional Jewish life.

These six can also be neatly divided into two subgroups. Three of them teach positive lessons, namely

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the values of freedom (Exodus), ethics (Sinai) and rest (Sabbath), while three provide negative warnings, namely the dangers of hate crimes (Amalek), idolisation (Calf) and slander (Miriam). If we represent the three positive lessons as the three corners of an upward-facing triangle, and the three warnings as the three corners of a downward-facing triangle, then the two triangles can be overlaid to produce a hexagram, the Star of David, which has been the symbol of the Jewish People for generations and is the centre-piece of the flag of the state of Israel. Thus the Star of David, which was thought to adorn the shield of King David, serves as a pointed reminder of the six memories.8

God’s memory As well as the injunction for humans to remember, God is also stirred to do so: ‘And God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the animals that were with him in the Ark, and God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters subsided.’

(Genesis 8.1) ‘And so it was when God destroyed the cities of the Plain [Sodom and Gomorrah] that God remembered Abraham; so He sent Lot from amidst the upheaval.’

(Genesis 19.29) ‘And God heard the cries of the Israelites and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.’

(Exodus 2.24) ‘I [God] will remember My covenant with Jacob and My covenant with Isaac, and also My covenant with Abraham will I remember, and I will remember the Land.’ (Leviticus 26.42) How does a divine being remember, and by implication, forget? Surely forgetfulness is not an attribute of the all-knowing God? Maimonides explained that the biblical use of anthropomorphic idioms for God, extends not just to the human body, but to human feelings and thoughts too: ‘What does the Torah mean by, “Below God’s feet” (Exodus 24.10), “God’s finger” (Exodus 31.18), “God’s hand” (Exodus 9.3), etc.? All these expressions are to enable human understanding, which appreciates only corporeal imagery because, ‘Torah is written in the language of Man’ (Talmud, Berachot 31b)’ ... Similarly, God does not really sleep or wake, get angry or laugh, become happy or sad ... all such descriptions in the Bible are metaphors and imagery’ (Maimonides, Foundations of the Torah 1.9–12).

Indeed, there is a pattern to God’s memory in the Bible. The phrase is generally used when the actions of people prompt a divine response based on a pre-existing commitment. In each of the above four examples, there is a pact (brit in Hebrew) between God and specific people which creates obligations on both sides.

Before the Flood, God made a pact with Noah (Genesis 6.18) to save him, his family and the Ark of animals.

In turn, Noah and his descendants were required to

Summer 2014 repopulate the Earth and not shed human blood (Genesis 9.1,6). God sent angels to save Lot (Abraham’s nephew) from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah because God had already promised to make Abraham a great nation (Genesis 12.2) and expected him take moral responsibility for this commitment (Genesis 18.17–18).

The redemption from Egypt was the fulfilment God’s eternal promise to Abraham to be the God of his descendants and to give them a homeland (Genesis 17.7). The fourth quotation above comes after a long chapter in which the many punishments (exile, death and destruction, etc.) that will befall the Israelites if they are not faithful to their covenant with God are listed.

However, this verse assures them that, nevertheless, God will ultimately make good on the covenant forged with their ancestors and bring them home to flourish again (Leviticus 26.44–45).

In each case, the idiom of God remembering is a result of a shared destiny between the Holy One and humankind. This reinforces the biblical idea that history has a clear purpose: it is the matrix in which the ongoing divine–human relationship is played out. God’s commitment to the redemption of history also means that he will never let the Israelites forget their role, no matter how much they are persecuted: ‘I [God] have said that I would scatter them and cause their memory to cease were it not for the anger of their enemy, and the misinterpretation of their tormentors’ (Deuteronomy 32.26–27).

Thus memory in the Bible serves to prevent ‘mission drift’ from both God and humankind. Memory serves as the unbreakable bond between heaven and earth, ensuring that history will stay on course, no matter how long it takes.

How memorable is humankind?

A third usage of memory in the Bible adds another important dimension to this concept. King David wrote: ‘When I behold Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars that You have set in place, [I wonder,] What is Man that You should remember him, and the son of mortal man that You should be mindful of him? Yet You have made him slightly less that the angels, and crowned him with soul and splendour’ (Psalms 8.3–6).

We are a few billion bipeds on a tiny planet sitting along a spiral arm of just one of the millions of galaxies that make up the ever-expanding universe. What makes us worthy of God’s interest and involvement? Why does God even notice us? The Talmud (tractate Shabbat, 88b–90a) relates to this issue through a fascinating story: Rabbi Joshua ben Levi said: ‘When Moses ascended on high [to Mount Sinai], the ministering angels said to the Holy One, blessed be God, “Sovereign of the universe, what business has one born of woman amongst us?”

God answered, “He has come to receive the Torah.” Said they, “But that is a secret treasure … and You want to give it away to flesh and blood?! ‘What is Man, that You

should remember him, and the son of man, that You are mindful of him?’ ” (Psalms 8.5).

‘God turned to Moses and said, “Give them an answer.”

“Sovereign of the Universe,” he replied, “I fear lest they consume me with the fiery breath of their mouths.” Said God, “[Don’t worry, just] hold on to the Throne of Glory and answer them.”

‘So Moses spoke up and said, “Sovereign of the Universe, the Torah which You are giving to me, what is written in it?” God said, “I am the Lord Your God, who brought you out of the Land of Egypt” (Exodus 20.2). Then Moses turned to the angels and said, “Did you go down to Egypt? Were you enslaved to Pharaoh? Why then should the Torah be yours?”

‘Moses then asked God, “What else is written in it?” God said, “You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20.3). Moses again challenged the angels, “Do you live among peoples that engage in idol worship?”

‘Moses continued, “Again what is written in it?” God, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20.8).” Moses to the angels, “Do you then do work, that you need to rest?”

‘Moses, “Again what is written in it?” God, “Do not take My Name in vain” (Exodus 20.7). Moses to the angels, “Do you have any dealings amongst you that might give rise to an oath?”

‘Moses, “Again what is written in it?” God, “Honour your father and your mother” (Exodus 20.12). Moses to the angels, “Do you even have a father and a mother?” … so the angels conceded to God’s plan.’

Angels might be close to God, but humankind too are valuable to God, not despite our limits and challenges, but because of them. Angels have no independence from God, their status defines them for eternity. But humankind are physical, exist in time, and are bestowed with free choice. This makes their actions worthy of God’s concern. That we might choose to live by God’s commandments makes us more precious to God than the loftiest angel. The depth of our divinely endowed consciousness is what memories are made of and thus is what makes us memorable to God.

Conclusion Rather than venerating a mythic pre-history, with its many and capricious gods, the Bible broke away from other ancient cultures by insisting that the history of humankind was unfixed, redeemable and worthy of memorialising. Charged with six daily remembrances, as well as a plethora of rituals, recitations and festivals, the Jewish people have transmitted their history for millennia. God is also bound to this history through the covenants formed in the biblical era. Added to this, rabbinic Judaism saw the physical, down-to-earth nature of the Torah, and the complex nature of our consciousness, as the reason that humanity is worthy of God’s memory, even more that the heavenly retinue. In the final analysis, we are our memories, and if we live by them then God will indeed remember us.

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Transmission

Pastoral care to those suffering from traumatic memories

Andrew Marin Andrew Marin is the President and Founder of The Marin Foundation, an Advisor to the United Nations and is working on his PhD in theology from the University of St Andrews, focusing on reconciliation between victims and their perpetrators.

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Harvard psychologist and memory researcher Daniel Schacter defines memory as ‘providing connections between the present and the past’.1 Fundamental in Schacter’s definition are the ingrained cognitive links that make us who we are. For each of the polarities of good and evil that inhabit memory, one cannot be fully human without them. In a world that flaunts its utmost resilience to create new ways to tear itself apart,2 clergy are most often the ones scrambling to keep up with the ever-changing constructions of experienced-trauma by people in their ecclesial communities. The difficulty in pastorally addressing trauma is not necessarily the trauma in and of itself, but the survivor’s3 autonomic memory that creates, stores and constantly replays the traumatic event in their mind for the remainder of their life. It is a cognitive impossibility for the human brain to forget a traumatic memory.4 In such times of desperation, pastoral care becomes more important to a survivor. However, few, if any, clergy are ever taught how to handle the unstoppable storage of trauma in a survivor’s memory – the same remembrance that irrevocably ties the survivor to the exact trauma they long to forget. In contrast to the ineradicable responses to traumatic memories such as ‘forgive and forget’ and ‘it’s time to move on’, cognitive research suggests that any attempts by the survivor to avoid or forget traumatic memories (the most frequently attempted coping mechanism) only further ingrain the unwanted memory into the forefront of their consciousness.5 It is thus important to note two major cognitive processes during a memory’s solidification process from short-term to long-term, that greatly influence a survivor’s post-trauma life.

First, during the event of the trauma, as the victim’s brain is autonomically forming a short-term memory, one of the most crucial and permanent physiologically – and psychologically altering moments occur: the memory is assigned an emotional context. Once assigned that emotion and its context of the place(s), person(s), reaction(s) and object(s) involved in the trauma are indelibly linked to that memory. And these indelibly linked emotions, when triggered post-trauma, show absolutely no reactionary difference in transporting a survivor back to their original trauma, even when compared against image-based memories.6 Second, the climax of memory retention is reached as the brain’s chemistry biologically changes when experiencedtrauma is solidified into long-term memory.7 And the human brain has no choice in this matter. For better or worse, the human brain is biologically changed by the retentive process of autonomic memory. Thus, if solidified memories biologically change the human brain, and those changes which individuals are helpless to control play a significant role in shaping identity, the next crucial movement is to pastorally figure out how to cognitively, theologically and emotionally assist a survivor with their ingrained traumatic memories. I will briefly explore three themes that provide a responsive framework to this reality.

Set proper expectations The irony is that memory is generally bad at its purposed function: ‘remembering’. The percentages of memory’s general accuracy range from only 65 per cent on the high end to 15 per cent on the low. These percentages plummet to a dismal 9 per cent accuracy when it

Summer 2014 comes to a survivor correctly recalling their trauma.8 Unintentional as this is, when facets of ‘truth’ are corrupted what is the survivor actually remembering?

Only some aspects of the most extreme moments of trauma are actually remembered. These particular extremes become the most frequently recalled moments and end up being the survivor’s full ‘memory’ of the trauma.9 The problem is that the less extreme moments, which still occurred during the trauma, and are no less important to a truthful and accurate memory, go unmentioned and quickly become inaccessible to recall.10 This process is called Retrieval Induced Forgetting, and suggests that over time traumatic ‘memory’ is really only a shell of the original event.

In response, clergy must first help the survivor set realistic expectations for their memory. As all survivors are aware, trauma cannot be unexperienced or forgotten.

A survivor must take a memory for what it is: an identityshaping, inaccurate at best, ingrained tool of images and emotions that are very real and yet can be extremely misleading. With this definition I am not suggesting that survivors do not remember the experience, feelings and ramifications of their trauma. They most certainly do!

What I am suggesting is that the process of memory retention is so unpredictable that post-trauma healing cannot be encapsulated in cognition alone.

An often overlooked safety net that many survivors shut themselves off to is that social support remains one of the strongest predictors to recovery from a traumatic event.11 Despite the survivor’s existential pull to avoidance by not wanting to relive their trauma in any form because of its intensity, embarrassment, or the like, immediately talking about the trauma increases the victim’s likelihood of future stability.12 Whether professional13 or lay, continuing to verbally reevaluate and process the trauma will give much needed structure and shape to the survivor’s future semantisised, or built upon, memories. This way the traumatic memory, still present and functioning in its rightful, unminimised form, is imbued with a different perspective by other ingrained memories gained over time.

The survivor is then able to assign a broader context to the trauma within their life’s narrative.

The goal for this cognitive process must not be ‘overcoming’, such that one views the trauma as never actually happening; nor displacing trauma’s impact in a survivor’s attempt to adaptively ‘pass’. Healing through trauma is about integration. I call this work of integration a cognitive embodiment of traumatic memories; defined as the full integration of the complexities of trauma’s internal and external interactions, and reactions, as the baseline measure for a survivor’s new ‘normal’ identity and existence. Such a definition depicts the multiple realities that are needed as a survivor continually evolves in their self-awareness through this new lens.

Grasping the process of cognitive embodiment begins with the survivor’s difficult decision to acknowledge trauma’s reality and impact. No amount of cognitive or theological gymnastics can undo reality. The survivor’s life has irrevocably changed; and so have their identity,

relational functionalities, worldview, memory and the emotional and spiritual cognition of how they processes information and stimulus. I understand how these statements might come across as hopeless. But they surely are not. Only with ‘acknowledgement’ can reality find its bearings.

it is a cognitive impossibility for the human brain to forget a traumatic memory Reflecting on her own life, Nancy Eiesland has come to understand that simply acknowledging experiencedtrauma must never be considered a defeat. In fact, it is in the acknowledgment of reality that a survivor is able to profoundly claim a hard-won battle against living a life not terminally overrun by factors out of their control.14 There is, however, a very real threat that acknowledgment can easily slip into an overidentification with trauma; shaping the victim’s worldview solely around their negative experience.15 Thus, room must be provided for the survivor to manoeuver through extremes within their healing process, as the long-view of cognitive embodiment understands one’s post-trauma identity will take on a variety of meanings as the survivor’s life progresses and changes. In this light, Eiesland sends a clear message that ‘fixes’ will never occur through an intense frenzy of work; and will never culminate in a survivor’s quick and glorious reveal on the other side.16 What setting proper expectations for cognitive embodiment will do is give the survivor safety to find a path to the Crucified’s suffering and ultimate integration of trauma as means to a reshaped post-trauma identity.

Practicing the cruciform For 2000 years, the divine symbol of Christian suffering has been the cross upon which Christ hung. Before and since, the ubiquity of agent-produced evil has not ceased to be an active and shifting presence throughout the whole of humanity and its structures. In opposition to the contemporary Western worldview where evil is a ‘thing’ to be righted and overcome, scriptural references to evil are situated without separation between their confrontation and derivation. Scripture highlights the persisting interconnectedness of evil’s horizontal and cosmic impact throughout all of humanity. To understand Scripture’s impact on contemporary evil, the New Testament thought world saw ‘religion’ not as a spiritual enterprise as many do today, but ensconced into all facets of daily life. John Walton suggests such worldviews are consistent as far back as the Ancient Near East where there was no such word as ‘religion’. The only suitably similar dichotomy would have been the realms of spiritual (heavenly) and physical (earthy). Thus, when anything went array in the physical realm, those in the first century believed the cause related to satanic interference (1 John 3.8–10).

Such interference pertained to not only relational (Mark 8.32–33), verbal (Matthew 5.11; James 4.16), and physical (2 Corinthians 11.23–27) social interactions, but

NOTES 1. D Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), pp.

50–1.

2. Some epidemiological studies report that over 50 per cent of women and 60 per cent of men will experience at least one traumatic event in their lives. Ibid., p. 174.

3. Each time I use the term ‘survivor’, I am referencing a person suffering from traumatic memories.

4. Schacter, Seven Sins, p. 183.

5. Ibid., p. 176.

6. Martin Conway, Flashbulb Memories

(East Sussex: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), locations 1,6361,637.

7. Ibid., location 1,791.

8. H Otani et al., ‘Emotion, Directed

Forgetting, and Source Memory’, British Journal of Psychology 103

(2012), p. 343.

9. CB Stone et al., ‘Forgetting Our Personal Past’, Journal of Experimental Psychology (November 2012), p. 1. doi:10.1037/ a0030739.

10. Ibid.

11. AD Brown et al., ‘Forgetting Trauma’.

Applied Cognitive Psychology 26 (February 2011), p. 33. doi:10.1002/acp.

12. Ibid.

13. Strongly recommended.

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Transmission to institutions as well. Scripture saves its most poignant naming of evil as religious leaders (Mark 12.38–40), their elitist hierarchies (Mark 10.13–16; 1 Corinthians 11.20–22), and bureaucracies (Matthew 21.12–13); none of which resemble mandated Godly reverence (Jeremiah 7).17 Until recently, modern theological scholarship has in many cases left the New Testament thought world behind, insisting that divine suffering must be explained through one of three questions:18 Did God kill his Son?; Did God abandon Christ on the cross?; or, Did God actually kill himself?

14. N Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), p. 13.

15. Ibid., p. 47.

16. Ibid., p. 42.

17. J Walton, Ancient Near East Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), p. 87.

18. J Pool, God’s Wounds: Hermeneutic of the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering Vol. 2 (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2010), pp. 311–14.

19. Schacter, Seven Sins, p. 183.

I argue that each of those questions, individually and as a group, are missing the fullness of their implications to those suffering from trauma. The crucifixion is trauma; and therefore this scriptural precedent needs to be contextualised to a much greater extent than the common advice for a survivor to ‘pray for healing because Jesus died to defeat sin’. I never want to minimise the impact of Christ’s crucifixion or the power of prayer. Yet it is through the cruciform process – Christ’s death, resurrection and ascension – that those searching for healing can find intensely practical pastoral care. I offer a brief narrative of the events shaping the cruciform.

During Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane he embodied the immanent bloody, torturous, spat-upon and unimaginable painful reality, regardless that he did not want to partake in any of the forthcoming evil (Matthew 26.38; cf.

Hebrews 5.7–8). During Jesus’ betrayal he acknowledged what must happen in that moment while simultaneously making a decision to submit to the difficulty that lay ahead (Matthew 26.50). Then while hanging on the cross Jesus embodied, literally, the trauma forced upon him while offering divine hope to another sharing in this torture (Luke 23.43, starting at v. 38 for the broader context). After, in Christ’s ascension he did not avoid or forget his temporal trauma, but is able to act as humanity’s High Priest through remembrance of the crucifixion (Hebrews 4.14–15; 6.10a). Finally, as Christ’s resurrection validated death’s defeat, the proof of his embodied remembrance of the torture was physically scarred into his body by the nail holes in his hands and feet, and the puncture of the spear’s blade in his side (John 20.26–27).

The cruciform demonstrates that Christ did not ‘forget’ or attempt to ‘ignore’ or ‘move past’ the experienced trauma in his temporal, resurrected, or ascended states.

Rather he fully integrated his temporal trauma within God’s larger eschatological narrative. Christ offered this as an example for how humanity can also embody the reality of their own experienced-trauma (John 13.15).

Survivors have scars, and that cannot be denied. Yet the integration process toward healing through traumatic memories begins when, like Christ, the temporal scars are embodied into the survivor’s new narrative based in God’s love (1 Peter 5.10).

Such a result is no different to how the divine Incarnate adapted the cruciform to integrate trauma through, (a) acknowledging reality; (b) integrating that reality into the overall arc of his life; (c) letting his integrated trauma lead the way to a reshaped post-trauma identity;

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and (d) allowing his reshaped post-trauma identity to not minimise the impact of what he went through on the cross, but embody the trauma, and its memories, with God’s love to create a full understanding of life’s experiences. This model of healing can still be used today, especially in conjunction with the aforementioned insights to the inner-workings of human cognition, producing more holistic ends to the healing process. The cruciform also launches a survivor’s healing work toward another movement; living into a reality of temporal hope.

Reality of hope is not the same as hope-escapism In recent years, cognitive research has revealed that a survivor who centers their post-trauma identity on the notyet ends up negatively impacting their present reality.19 Whether direct or indirect, a survivor pinning their conclusionary outlook on the eschaton can potentially lead to ‘hopeful-escapism’, or avoiding present reality.

Eschatological hope is a theology of hope, indeed. But in many scenarios with persons healing from trauma, eschatological hope cannot stand on its own. It needs to be intertwined with tangible temporal hope.

The teenage girl who was raped, brutalised and physically scarred from an attack of unsubstantiated evil feels very little affinity to being told that in heaven her bodily scar will be removed, virginity restored, and personal and communal knowledge of love made right.

The same is true for those with life-altering disabilities who are told they will one day dance on two legs in heaven with all the saints. Such disconnected theologies must be undone. Present acts of justice, activism, counseling and time-given to adjust to their new normal are all measures which can continue providing and refilling the survivor’s temporal hope until the eschaton, not because of it. I humbly contest that even with a reshaped temporal identity based in a hope of eschatological perfection, the elephants in the room are still temporal traumatic memories and their indelibly linked emotions.

Even if the survivor’s pain does lessen over time through this lens of eschatological reshaping of temporal identity, the survivor still has to figure out how to live with their relationally and reactionally triggered responses until their physical death. Therefore the process of practicing hope must inseparably be combined with embodied temporal works that provide hope done for hope’s own merit, to one day be continued, but not necessarily dependent upon, its continuation in the new creation.

I am convinced that billions around the world who are outside of the Church are intensely looking to find their whole by way of those practicing hope in the world.

Such hopeful acts of pastoral care in trauma through a proper set of expectations, practicing the cruciform, and working to realise hope in the here and now, can become more than a process of healing, it can one day become a survivor’s reality.

Summer 2014

News from Bible Society James Catford Group Chief Executive

‘The Bible Society has never passed through more fateful days than these.

Once again there is darkness over the earth. The angel of death is abroad and we can hear the beating of his wings. Yet above the ruins and the sepulchres rises one changeless rock – the Rock of Ages, cleft for our sakes; and faithful folk, who hide themselves there, dwell in peace which the world cannot give them and all the wars in the world cannot take away.’

With the guns in France being heard on the south coast of England and Zeppelins seen over London, the Annual Report of Bible Society for 1918 captured the mood of the Great War very well. The proximity to bloodshed struck deep into the national psyche. ‘The angel of death is abroad and we can hear the beating of his wings.’

When the war ceased, the Church was caught up in the popular desire to ‘dwell in peace’. Para-church organisations were seen as transcending established denominations and our own Bible Society, with its mission of ‘the circulation of the Bible without note or comment’, benefitted from this new hope. Owned by no church, but accepted by all, it was an early expression of generous orthodoxy of faith and witness.

Yet these stirrings for unity were put on ice by attempts to reframe the Bible in the context of the new scientific age. In 1921 the theologian Rudolf Bultmann introduced the idea of ‘form criticism’ which came to dominate theological education for the next 50 years.

Influenced by the work of Marx, Freud and Durkheim, New Testament scholars claimed that the true story of the Bible had been lost, or largely revised, in the 30 years between the death of Jesus and the writing of the first Gospel. As Ian Markham has put it, this view separated the reliable Jesus of ‘here is the news’ from the mystical ‘once upon a time’ Jesus with few historical roots.

Transmission is provided free by Bible Society as part of our mission to equip the church to live out the Bible’s message. We also work creatively and with passion to show that the Bible resonates with issues today – and to make Scriptures available where there are none.

The result was a considerable loss of confidence in the Bible and a settled view about Scripture became almost impossible for a generation. Organisations that spanned the churches, such as Bible Societies, became more cautious on the matters of Christian discipleship and devotion to Christ. How could they do otherwise and maintain their ‘no note or comment’?

A lowest common denominator approach became widespread in any attempt to bridge the divide in the Church.

Unsurprisingly this failed to capture the imagination of a new generation of believers.

It wasn’t until the Catholic Church rocked the Christian world in 1965, with the promulgation of the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, or Dei Verbum, that things began to thaw. Next year we celebrate its 50th anniversary.

Radically, it called on Catholics to embrace the Scriptures and set off a chain reaction that continues to this day.

Meanwhile, the local parish system was weakened by better transport and the closure of rural churches. Christians started attending places of worship other than the denomination of their birth. Today this is so common that few even comment on it, yet in over 500 years the Church has not seen such levels of practical grass roots unity.

Fast forward to November last year when the Vatican awarded the Dean of King’s College London, Richard Burridge, the prestigious Ratzinger Prize. The importance of this is that Burridge is the first nonCatholic to receive the award, which was set up as a kind of Nobel Prize for Theology.

We congratulate him on this achievement.

By careful scholarship Burridge showed that the Gospel writers were not simply throwing together a collection of sound bites about Jesus, but providing a reliable

portrait in the highest tradition of GrecoRoman biographies. Writing in the leading US journal First Things, Ian Markham said, ‘I suspect that historical scholarship might well divide into pre-Burridge and postBurridge, such is the significance of his work’ (February 2014).

Along with the scholarship of our former President at Bible Society, NT Wright, and others, Burridge’s work, and the Ratzinger Prize that recognises it, reflects a profound shift in the Christian landscape in our time.

Catholics have started to read their Bibles and Evangelicals have begun to read Catholic books on prayer. For 20 years in America both groups have been in frequent dialogue. In Britain, Bible Society has sponsored a ground-breaking series of seminars spanning almost a decade around Scripture and hermeneutics, at which a wide range of scholars have discovered how much they had in common rather than what divided them. And writers such as Henri Nouwen and Richard Foster have carved out a new consensus of spirituality drawing on the great traditions of the Church rather than one section within it.

All this makes a new future possible; one based on a shared and confident view of Scripture, the absolute centrality of Christ, and a firm commitment to public engagement and culture. Much is still to be done, but the hope born out of the hostility a century ago is becoming a reality. Bible Society wants to be part of it.

James Catford is Group Chief Executive of Bible Society. Email him at James.Catford@biblesociety.org.uk 27

Bible Society is an advocate for the Bible in contemporary cultures, resourcing and influencing those who shape society – making the voice of the Bible heard.

The Bible in Transmission is published by Bible Society, Stonehill Green,Westlea, Swindon SN5 7DG T: 01793 418100 F: 01793 418118 biblesociety.org.uk Charity Registration No. 232759 Incorporated by Royal Charter Chair of the Board of Trustees Philip Green Group Chief Executive James Catford Editorial Team Ann Holt, Steve Holmes, Michael Pfundner, Nick Spencer, Chris Sunderland, Matthew van Duyvenbode Editor Tony Graham ISBN 978-0-564-09056-3 ŠBible Society 2014