The Church and the Red Letters

Sacred Metaphysics · The Words of Jesus, and the Un-Veiling

Glennford Ellison Roberts · the Architect

TRUTH does its own work

Written by the instrument that helped build it. Discount the praise; weigh the objections. This is the book in which the volume’s central discipline is either kept or broken, and I can tell you which.

What This Book Is

Sixty-four thousand words in two sections. The first — four parts, some fifty-four thousand words — takes the words of Jesus and hears them four ways. The second, deliberately brief, reads the Revelation.

The structure of Section One is the book’s architecture and it should be described exactly. Part One tells how the house was built: the voice descending a stair of languages from Aramaic through Greek into Latin and locked there for a thousand years, then released into the mother tongues over the burned bodies of the men who dared it. Part Two takes seven sayings and sets three companies to hear each one — the Council who defined, the Breakers who broke the walls, the Mystics who walked through — each at full strength, and then stops without a verdict. Part Three reopens the same seven with a fourth hearing, the Vedic, held back until then by design. Part Four reads the Sermon on the Mount entire, from the ground the fourth hearing opened.

And then Section Two turns from word to vision: the un-veiling, read for the whole and never for the individual, and held under nine thousand words on purpose.

What It Delivers

The central achievement is a discipline, and I want to be precise about it because it is rare enough to be worth naming. The book promises, in Part One, that it will give three readings at full strength and will not tell you which is right. It keeps that promise for ten chapters. Every saying gets the Council’s best case, the Breakers’ best case, and the Mystics’ best case, and each is written by someone who has evidently understood why an intelligent person would hold it. Then: and there I stop. No thumb on the scale, no weak version dressed up to lose.

I have read a great many books that promise this. I can think of very few that do it. The temptation to let one’s own hearing win by giving it the last word and the warmest light is nearly irresistible, and the book resists it for fifty thousand words before finally, in Part Three, declaring its own position — and even then it declares the fourth way as a naming of what the other three were reaching for rather than as their refutation. That is a genuinely honourable piece of writing.

The second strength is Part One as history. The account of the stair of languages is the best short telling I know of what actually happened to the Christian message. The observation that homoousios — the word on which the whole creed turns — is a term of Greek metaphysics that appears nowhere in scripture and would have meant nothing to the men who heard the teaching, is not new to scholarship but is rarely put with such clarity. And the recovery of katholikos — the word meaning universal, according to the whole, captured and made the name of one house among houses — is a small devastating piece of etymology deployed exactly where it does the most work.

The Tyndale chapter is the best-written thing in the volume. Not the deepest — that is elsewhere — but the best told. The seven burned at Coventry for teaching their children the Lord’s Prayer in English; the bishop who bought up the New Testaments to burn them and thereby financed a better edition; the man in the cold cell at Vilvoorde asking only for his Hebrew books so he could keep working; and the last words, Lord, open the King of England’s eyes, answered within three years by a king who put Tyndale’s own sentences in every parish church having helped to strangle him. Nine words in ten of the King James New Testament are his. That chapter would stand alone in a magazine.

Third: the brevity of Section Two is itself an argument, and the book says so. The Revelation has been made to prophesy in ten thousand pages by men reading it for the future; it is read here in under nine thousand words because it is read for the whole and for the SELF. The discipline of the length is the guard against the vice of the genre. That is a clever and, I think, correct structural decision.

And the small technical thing that a reader will feel without noticing: the words of Jesus are printed in red throughout, including where he speaks from the throne in the Revelation. That is not decoration. It shows the reader, typographically, that the voice does not stop at the cross — which is the book’s bridge from Gospel to Apocalypse made visible before it is argued.

Where It Will Be Resisted, and Fairly

The confessional Christian reader will have the sharpest objection and it deserves the strongest statement. The book’s fourth hearing reads I and the Father are one as a claim available to every soul rather than as the unique claim of the incarnate Son. That is not a marginal adjustment; it is the point on which Christian orthodoxy has staked everything since Nicaea, and the whole apparatus of two natures exists precisely to affirm the oneness while denying that it is generic. A reader for whom the uniqueness of Christ is the faith will find the book has, in Part Three, conceded the thing that cannot be conceded.

The book’s defence is real and should be given: it presents the Council’s position at full strength and does not mock it, it acknowledges that the Mystics who said such things were tried and burned by their own church, and it never claims the church was stupid to have drawn the line where it did. But defence is not agreement, and a reader should know that this book, however respectfully, does not end where the creeds end.

The historical-critical scholar will note that the book treats the Gospels as a single voice to be heard, when the scholarship treats them as four documents of differing date, provenance, and theology, with the Johannine sayings in particular — which carry most of the book’s weight — widely regarded as the least likely to be verbatim. The book is aware of this: the introduction is unusually honest that there is no original, that the earliest fragment is a bank-card-sized scrap of John from a century after the events, and that no two of five thousand manuscripts agree. But having said so, it proceeds to read the sayings as sayings, and a scholar will call that having it both ways.

The Vedantin, from the other side, may find the accommodation too gentle — that a genuinely non-dual reading would not have spent fifty thousand words on the history of an institution that spent its whole existence refusing the recognition.

And the plainest structural criticism: Part One is very long. Twenty-five thousand words of church history before the first saying is read. It is excellent history, and it is doing necessary work — you cannot see what was lost in translation until you have watched the translating — but a reader who came for the red letters will wait a considerable while.

Who Should Read It

The Christian who has stopped being able to say the creed without a catch in the throat, and does not want to leave. This book is written, more than anything else in the volume, for that person — and the author says so in his own preface, which is the most personal thing in the whole work.

The ex-Christian who left over the institution rather than the man, and has never gone back to look at what was actually said. The reader of comparative religion who wants Advaita and Christianity held together without either being dissolved. And the reader who simply wants the best short account available of how a Galilean teacher’s words became an empire’s religion — Part One will do that job whatever he makes of the rest.

The Verdict

The Church and the Red Letters is the volume’s largest and most disciplined book. Its refusal to adjudicate between three honest hearings, sustained across fifty thousand words, is the single most impressive piece of craft in the whole work, and it earns the fourth hearing when it finally comes. Part One is first-rate popular history. The Tyndale chapter is the best writing here. And Section Two solves, by brevity, a problem that has defeated better-known writers by verbosity.

Its exposure is that it ends somewhere the creeds do not, having been scrupulously fair to the creeds on the way. Some readers will find that the most honest thing in the book. Others will find it the reason they cannot follow it. Both will be reading it correctly.

Claude · Anthropic