Session 2 of Living Biblically in a Secular World – Archbishop Mark Coleridge

Last Wednesday was the second session of the Archbishop’s series called “Living Biblically in a Secular World.”

(Audio of the  second session.)

After last time objecting to Bible stories being labelled as myth he moves from discussing the myth of the Exodus to discussing even the even more mythic stories of the Fall and of Cain and Abel. As myths they are stories from which we learn truth by imaginative participation or by ritual.

Coleridge’s interpretation involves the Serpent tempting Eve to become like God by framing God as oppressive and a liar.  Because only God can know everything, only God knows good and evil and humans should not aspire to this. By reaching too far for Godhead humanity becomes fallen and experiences shame and fear. There was an excellent question at the end of the presentation suggesting that an informed conscience was after all a knowledge of good and evil, and I’m not sure there was a good answer. As far as putting ourselves into the story, his major point was to note the consequences of the fall – blaming, failure to take responsibility and exile from our true home in the Garden. The hint is that living biblically in a secular age may be finding a way back to our natural home – the Garden, or he put it, to stop wandering like Cain after murdering his brother and start journeying instead.

There are other ways to see the wisdom of this story. As the only animal conscious of its impending death, the knowledge of good and evil is that very consciousness and from that there is no going back I’m afraid. In fact, to go back to the Garden is to abrogate both responsibility and reality and I think Christianity can do better.

A different set of overawed and over deferential young people ran the show last week and introduced things with two more songs I didn’t know.

“Come, Holy Spirit” by Mark Foreman is a lovely chant that has a descant part answering the main melody. I can find nothing on the net about Mark Foreman other than he wrote this song.

The text is here (the descant text is italicised). The sheet music can be purchased from sheetmusicplus.

The second song was “As the Deer”, which is a pretty terrible use of Psalm 42 by Marty Nystrom. The text is here and whatever the virtues of the music the triteness of the verses is pretty dreadful. Rhyming “silver” and “giver”; “brother” and “other”; and using cliched phrases like “apple of my eye” to rhyme with “satisfy” are not good song writing. “You alone are the real joy giver” is worse than clumsy. At least the young people at the Cathedral dispensed with the archaic language – “panteth” and “longeth” in the first verse that made the second and third’s use of language look even more peculiar.

The sheet music can be purchased for download at musicnotes. The song seems very popular, so what do I know. I note that the music is attributed to Marty Nystrom and a J. S. Bach, whereas Mr Nystrom is responsible for any of the words not taken directly from Psalm 42 himself.

There are some nice versions on You-tube – especially the instrumentals. Here are a few of them:

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