Jason – I’m still intrigued to know what this other John Dee looks like! But I won’t push this in case you suspect me of not being a gentleman (and you may well be right).
Actually my post about the ‘occult’ was one of those where I was mindful of the wider audience reading here. A lot of site members are former fundamentalists’ – they may have made the shift to Universalism but often can still be fixated on other issues of fear that fundamentalist of ECT colours fixate upon too (and I think they can relax about these other issues too, I pray that they will, and I really rejoice when they do). Hence my use of ‘funky’ and a rather long explanation of the Art of Memory in the last post (but I still do think Dr Dee was a marginal figure who took a wrong turn with his obsessions).
OK -now I speak to a general audience
I feel especially mindful of being sensitive about these matters because I have taught several bright Afro Caribbean Pentecostal girls – who needed to get their GCSE English Literature badly to serve the Lord in their chosen vocations, but had problems with one of the set texts which was Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I needed to explain to them that actually Macbeth is not about the occult at all. The King of Scotland/Thane of Fife/Thane of Cawdor is clearly responsible for his own actions and is not compelled by witchcraft or by his ambitious wife to murder. He’s a good man gone to seed when the temptation of power presents itself (he is the one who isfirst described as ‘too full of the milk of human kindness’ and whose wife saysof him that she always knows what he is thinking because his face betrays it (so he is not an unsmiling machiavell wearing the glory of office with ease through instinctive control of his face (of these characters who I too have come across in the modern world as middle managers, Shakespeare wrote in a sonnet –‘ Be not deceived/For lilies fester worse than stinking weeds)). The temptation of power is Macbeth’s ‘hamartia. And Macbeth’s awful self awareness that in choosing the road of murder and mayhem he is actually perishing in his violence fill us with pity because even in him the image of God in his conscience is never completely obscured. Shakespeare only included the witchcraft theme in ‘The Scottish Play’ because – well, he needed to earn his crust and to do so he had to provide a play of interest for James I, his new Royal patron after Elizabeth’s death – and James was obsessed with witchcraft and the persecution of witches. Put in this context I managed to calm my Pentecostal students’ fears – and I could only do this because I had been a fundamentalist myself - (although I had a less sensitive colleague, a rather angry secularist, who had a Pentecostal student withdrawn from his class by their Mum over the same issue).
I’ve also stuck up for the dear old Pentecostals by raising awareness of the fact that there are far too many people in mental health institutions in the UK from a Black Pentecostal background (something militant secularists sometimes gloat over) because their mental state has often been misunderstood – for example people from this background/tradition often engage in very public displays of inconsolable grieving because this is their way of dealing with grief, and this gets misinterpreted by the dominant professional culture in my country that is still rather ‘stiff upper lip’.
But it works the other way too. In the early 1990’s there was an influx of fundamentalist speakers from America giving lectures on Satanism and Child Abuse to secular social workers (who didn’t have the sense to sift the information). And due to the influence of these speakers there were some tragic miscarriages of justice. Notable amongst these was the Satanic Panic case in the Orkney Islands off of Scotland where a number of families, who proved to b e totally innocent, had their children taken away from them by social services because it was alleged they were involved in Satanic cultist sexual abuse. Jean De La Fonteyne, an academic at the London School of Economics, wrote a fine and measured Government report on this. Interview transcripts showed that the social workers had been leading the children on during interviews using stories heard from American fundamentalists as their interpretive key.
Now I was no longer a Quaker when all of this happened but it was most upsetting for me because I had been one and still felt great affection for them. You see, the report told of how a secular social worker had interviewed some parents who were Quakers. Ignorant of Quaker faith and practice the social worker had inquired ‘Do you think it is normal to sit in a circle in silence?’) implying that they were participating in a witches coven) and had used this as evidence to take their children into care. Well this was actually religious persecution of a far more serious kind than Gorge Carey has been thundering about recently when conservative Christian have been treated insensitively. I understand that the Society of Friends held a ‘Meeting for Suffering’ about this – which is symbolic because Meetings for Suffering were originally convened in the seventeenth century to co-ordinate strategy to assist friends undergoing persecution. But they did not seek a high media profile and conducted themselves with dignity and without paranoia. I was proud of them.
As things turned out, the Orkney children were eventually returned to their parents – but a lot of damage had been done to families by this which will have taken time to heal (and I’ll bet some scars still remain. (On the level f one individual there are echoes of this in the Amana Knox case – I’m sure she was innocent but I’ll bet the dirt will stick to her with some people, poor kid, because of the prosecutor’s zealous obsession with ritualistic killing)
The Evangelical Alliance eventually had to admit some blame in all of this and issued a statement repudiating the satanic panic and at the same time repudiating ‘recovered memory syndrome’ (quite rightly). This seemed to mark the point at which the New Churches in the UK got less triumphalist in their mass marches for Jesus. IT was also about this time that new thinking began to emerge from the house church movement in the shape of the post-evangelicals (and I went to Holy Joes, the post evangelical pub church twice, and enjoyed the conversation there – this site actually reminds me a bit of Holy Joes in cyberspace - without the beer). Also at this time the peace process in Northern Ireland really got going and it was great to see some hard bitten sectarian Protestant killers opening up to a vision of a better non-sectarian future for their people (I’m thinking of the impressive David Irving here). There seemed to be a sympathetic link in all of this - and certainly the peace talks in Northern Ireland were popular topic at Holy Joes.
Also at this time we had the Sheffield Nine O’clock service scandal. There were a group of young charismatic Christians in Sheffield – headed by one Chris Brain – who had developed a multi media rave type Eucharist (not my cup of tea but it had its appeal at the time allegedly). The Nine O’clock service was initially inspired by the Charismatic ‘Latter Day Rain’ movement which, I understand is associated with one Ken Wimber – who was once a drummer in the Four Seasons – and his ‘Kansas City Prophets. They were strong on word of knowledge. /word of wisdom power pneumatology – the idea is that someone filled with the spirit can tell another person what the Lord wants for them or wants them to do. Unfortunately Chris Brain was a talented and charming charismatic sociopath who controlled his followers whit his utterances and abused countless women in his flock. This was all kept under wraps and Mr Brain seemed dot be a rising star in the Evangelical network. Sheffield Cathedral gave the Nine O’clock service hospitality, and in a tragic drive to seem relevant and trendy, the Anglican hierarchy fast tracked Brain to the priesthood. At this point the Nine O’clock Service evolved away from Pentecostalism and embraced Matthew Fox’s Creation Centred Theology (I’ve written about Matthew Fox critically but sympathetically on the ‘Original Sin’ thread).
Then the scandal broke and Brain had to make him scarce and a group of idealistic young people - who had tithed and in some case ‘double tithed’ their incomes to support the service - were left battered and disillusioned. At first the fundamentalists tried to put all the blame on Matthew Fox and made much of the fact that Fox had said that his dog is his spiritual director (by which he meant that his dog is a spontaneous humble creature - but the fundamentalists tried to suggest it was his familiar spirit). I was alarmed by the connection with Creation Centred Spirituality. However the unanimous testimony of Nine O’clock rave members suggested a very different story. The abuse had predated the involvement of CCS and had been facilitated by the exalted power given to Brian through 'word of widsom’ pneumatology. In addition, several of the women came forward and said that CCS which has a strong Christian Feminist agenda had actually empowered them to speak out against Brain.
The last I heard of the Nine O’clock service people was that they were still meeting, but not in the context of a rave service but, rather, in silence – just as the Anabaptist Spirituals had done in acts of inaugurated mourning for a purer understanding of faith.
So none of the issues I have been discussing here in theri Elizabethan context have gone away. And I note the appalling story of the massacre in a Jewish School in France last week by a deranged extremist. It’s too early to make a sober judgment about causes – but we are hearing that Marie Le Pen of the French National Front had been mouthing off about how French Christian culture is being polluted by the purveyors of kosher and halal food– and this may have contributed to this appalling hate crime.
Sober blessings
Dick