Robbie Tulip Blog

The World Student Christian Federation is a remarkable organisation, though now little known in Australia.  WSCF has a rich history and heritage within the ecumenical movement and in connection to broader social movements through its mission to bring people around the world together in the ecumenical vision of Christ

I will fly to Berlin on 18 June to attend the General Assembly of the World Student Christian Federation on behalf of the Australian Student Christian Movement. It is an exciting honour to be able to do this. ASCM has been my spiritual home, as I have sought to integrate faith and reason in philosophy and religion. This journey to Berlin represents a sort of pilgrimage, combining my university studies in German philosophy and language with a critical approach to Christianity. Berlin is a place I have wanted to go to all my life (or at least since I was 20). The WSCF assembly runs from 23 to 30 June, so I have a few days in Berlin before it starts, and will then stay there until 8 July, with no commitments as yet. My only plans are to participate as fully as I can in the assembly, and to write a short blog every day, trying to be as honest as I can about what I see and what has brought me to this point in life, across my varied interests.

Christianity is such a vexed and controversial topic. I am a regular churchgoer, and an active participant in a range of church activities, but my approach to faith is primarily philosophical, looking to stringently examine and critique all assumptions against the primary values of logic and evidence. That leads me to the view that the meaning of all faith claims is primarily symbolic, not literal, and that all supernatural language has meaning only in so far as it symbolises natural truth.

At my church, Kippax Uniting Church in Canberra, our minister Karyl Davison yesterday preached on ideas that I felt relate well to this perspective, rejecting the church creeds in favour of the simple creed that God is love, and suggesting we are in the middle of a new reformation of Christianity. Such an approach creates an ethical coherence around faith in Christ, while placing the entirety of traditional theology into doubt. That is a complex perspective that most people find hard to understand, but it is something on which I warmly welcome courteous dialogue.

I hope the WSCF assembly in Berlin will be well placed to build engagement and momentum around such ideas. The long history of WSCF since its foundation in 1895 has centred on the theme of being the church ahead of the church, providing a safe and open space for radical exploration of new ideas against an ethic of humility, intelligence and respect. WSCF now finds itself at a crossroads, with traditional faith in disrepute within progressive communities. Restoring credibility to Christianity requires a systematic approach that finds its grounding in scientific knowledge rather than in traditional belief. This is a paradigm shift that calls for careful and informed conversation, aiming to produce a transformative vision of vital relevance for our world today.

Some big themes where a coherent Christian faith could usefully comment include climate change, the Ukraine war, inequality, social fracturing in the context of social media, and human identity. These are some of the topics I hope to discuss in this blog, while also recording some observations of the events of the assembly.

I plan to circulate this blog publicly at https://rtulip.net/blog/ and https://www.facebook.com/AustralianSCM as well as providing weekly email updates.

Out of the Depths

Robbie Tulip

Kippax Uniting Church

Sunday 6 June 2021

Our readings today are from the Old Testament, from Genesis, Samuel and the Psalms. The theme that brings them together is the fall from grace. 

The fall is a simplified mythological story told to explain why there is evil in the world. We hear in our readings of the expulsion of humanity from paradise, of the fraught decision of ancient Israel to put trust in a king rather than in God, and of the Psalmist

Cleansing The Temple

7 March 2021

Kippax Uniting Church

Robbie Tulip

Psalm 19:1-8, John 2: 13-17

Our readings for today are from Psalm 19 and the Gospel of Saint John.  The Psalm explains how the glory of God is revealed in the magnificent order of the visible heavens. The Gospel reading tells of Jesus driving the moneychangers and their animals out of the temple in Jerusalem.  I will use this opportunity to explain how these texts relate to my own theology, which differs quite markedly from conventional approaches.

Before getting into my own interpretation, it is important to reflect on the great power of the Gospel story of the cleansing of the Temple.  The courage and vision of Christ are presented by John at the beginning of Jesus

Robbie Tulip

Sermon delivered at Kippax Uniting Church, Canberra

6 December 2020

Bible readings:

Mark 1:1-8

Waltzing Matilda as Psychological Mask for Genocide
Robbie Tulip
(3000 words)

Australian history is founded on the elimination of indigenous people by the settler colony. The process of genocide, completely removing the original inhabitants from many of the most productive parts of the country through systematic murder, was enabled by the technological disparity between the local and invading cultures, and was carried out through a semi-secret pact of military conquest. Physical genocide was as much a factor as epidemics in the collapse of Aboriginal population, and was followed up by cultural genocide, banning and belittling the practice of indigenous identity. The overall destruction created profound inter-generational trauma which persists today in indigenous communities and serves to corrupt white culture as well.

The despising of indigenous people in colonial times was so intense that the frontier wars and massacres were presented as merely policing operations. The process of genocide was masked through a culture of silence that continues to cripple the Australian character, with the domestic conflicts excluded from any formal memorials of war. The arrogant superiority complex of the British obliterated ancient cultural and environmental heritage in ways that are deeply tragic and destructive. This immense damage should have been foreseen and avoided, in view of the scale of loss. Instead the process of conquest was paradoxically both celebrated and concealed.

Banjo Paterson

Here is the sermon I delivered to Kippax Uniting Church on Sunday 5 July 2020

Bible readings: Zechariah 9:9-12, Matthew 11:28-30, Psalm 145:8-14

Sermon

The statement by Jesus Christ in the Beatitudes that the meek will inherit the earth is counterintuitive and controversial. We usually think the strong, the powerful and the assertive will inherit the lion

The Canberra Jung Society has uploaded the draft essay I used for my talk on Jung’s book Answer To Job on 6 July, as well as recordings of the talk and of the question and answer session.

The link above is to the Society’s home page. Direct link to the talk is here. I will revise this paper for publication in the Canberra Jung Society Journal.

Here is the diagram mentioned in the essay, providing an astronomical framework for mythology.

Platonic Christianity
The text below is from an essay I wrote on The Precessional Structure of Time. PDF with diagrams is at Platonic Christianity.

Platonic Origins of The Christ Precession Story
The precessional model indicates that orthodox Christianity evolved from philosophical ideas about Jesus that have only survived in coded fugitive traces in the Bible. These ideas most plausibly arose from Gnostic Platonic schools. The Christ Precession hypothesis sees Christian origins in Gnostic philosophy and cosmology, syncretising Greek philosophy with Judaism. This syncretic vision defined Jesus Christ as the turning point of time, the beginning and end of successive zodiac ages, in a messianic theory to explain a terrestrial reflection of the observed heavenly movement of the equinox point from Aries to Pisces. This zodiac interpretation is not compatible with literal Christian orthodoxy about Jesus of Nazareth as a real historical person, and instead sees these stories as symbolic parables of hidden wisdom.
Given how astrology is despised and rejected, any effort to discuss such a framework remains a highly controversial and misunderstood reading among both religious and secular scholars. Esoteric Christian traditions were suppressed as heresy due to their incompatibility with literal myths about Jesus. Throne and altar entered a longstanding alliance under Christendom, requiring compliance, control and conformity, as part of the security apparatus of western empires, integrating church and state as a single power system with a single dogma. Such uniformity of belief had no place for the heterodox mystery traditions involved in seeing astronomical messages embedded in the Gospels.
It can be shocking to encounter advocacy for such a perspective that is so different from traditional interpretations, so I seek the reader