Book Review: Christ of the Celts

Don’t think that this is just a mild little book with a romanticised look at a bygone and bypassed perception of Christianity. If the implications of the author’s insights were given expression in your average Anglican, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, or other Eucharist based Sunday worship they would make the Reformation seem like a very polite discussion about some unimportant aspects of church decoration. Mind you, one of the blurbs on the back of the dust cover gives no hint of the doctrinal demolition dynamite that lurks within. Here is what the “Publishers’ Weekly” says:

Diagnosing the human soul with a longing for peace in the face of fear and fragmentation nurtured by global political forces and fundamentalism, Newell offers the ancient traditions of Celtic Christianity as a way of healing humankind and the earth.

Hmmmm! Yes....But.

Newell starts with the “Christian household” as he calls the conglomeration of Churches around the world. He sees this household as a vital community for healing humankind and the earth. However, he also sees that the said household first needs to do a major clearing out of the rubbish that usually builds up when no avail is made of garage or rummage sales. This is because this clutter is in itself partly responsible for the misery and degradation that despoils this planet “our island home”. A bishop in our sister Church in the U.S. , Bishop Mark Dyer has said that the Church needs to understand that every five hundred years or so it needs to clean out its attic and have a giant rummage sale; enough is enough, already!

It’s that time again and Newell, by referring us to Celtic Christianity, which in a sense is the bedrock of our British Isles based traditions, identifies the items in not only our attic but also in those of our near neighbours. These include misinterpretations of Biblical passages or doctrinal perceptions arising from human hang-ups or plain lack of knowledge about the nature of the Universe.

We all know, only too well, how difficult it is to throw out familiar bits and pieces from the house when we move or need to make room for something more useful even though, intellectually, we recognise we have to do so. Perhaps by reading and applying Newell’s Celtic insights they will help us in this task.

As a way of describing these interesting issues I would would ask you to bear in mind the metaphor of “The elephant in the living room”; the delicate subject that is on every one's mind but by unspoken agreement is never mentioned. Expand that to a family of these metaphorical elephants shuffling and snuffling their ponderous way up and down the aisles during our Eucharistic celebrations. Many worshippers cringe as wafts of fetid air wiffle out of those swinging trunks or at an odd bump of a grey hip against a pew end or even as an ear splitting blat curls out of a tusky mouth. “Elephants, what elephants?” “The ones with their names written on their sides, of course.” “We still don’t see them!”. Like heck we don’t!

As for those names, Newell points out that Celtic Christianity knew nothing about Original Sin. Why would they, it being the brain child of an African bishop with a guilty conscience about his sexual depravities past and present. Anyway, the first book in the Bible clearly states that we are made in the image of God and therefor are essentially good and not “utterly depraved” or “born in sin”. So one elephant has “Original Sin” tattooed on its flanks. In another section from Genesis God entrusts the care of the nature to humanity and yet another elephant has the opposite; “abuse the Earth” on its rump. And so it goes on down through the pachydermic herd; “Created out of nothing”, “Angry God”, “Virgin Birth”, “Conceived in sin”, “Atonement”, “Jesus Sacrificed to Save Sinners”.

Newell describes how the Celtic Church, steeped as it was in the Gospel according to John, knew nothing of these weird ideas and misinterpretations which have given rise to our psychologically toxic doctrines and equally toxic wording in our hymns and prayer books. These concepts have supported colonialism, ecological depredation, corporate greed, political and religious fundamentalism and all the ramifications stemming therefrom. Accordingly, if the Christian household is to be an agent of peace, reconciliation, ecological remediation and overall global healing then it is high time that we rid ourselves of those “elephants” and had a long overdue rummage sale. Enough is enough!