He lives on his own in a drab 1950s house opposite the Church of Ireland Cathedral in Trim, Co Meath. He had been married, but the marriage was annulled in 1994 and he doesn't want to talk about that. The drabness of the house is relieved by a huge back garden, most of the perimeter of which is walled. The most lived-in room seemed to be his study, and its focal point is the computer from which he launched his website last July. It has been the website that has caused all the trouble.
Having failed to get his controversial views on God and Jesus published in Church of Ireland outlets and in The Irish Times, he constructed his own platform on the web (www.cathedral.meath.anglican.org/dean.html).
His bishop didn't notice the articles he had posted on them until two church members called his attention to them, and earlier this month the Bishop revoked Andrew Furlong's licence (you have to have a licence to be a Church of Ireland minister).
He is hospitable, patient, quietly spoken and careful. He was uncomfortable at being drawn into areas other than his theological views (I asked him, as a Church of Ireland minister, what he felt about the complicity of the Anglican Church in the annual antics at Drumcree and after much hesitation said he was unhappy about it).
Andrew Furlong was born in Dublin in 1947. His father was professor of philosophy in Trinity College. He was brought up in Dalkey. He went to Brook House and then to St Columba's College in Rathfarnham.
He read philosophy in Trinity and theological studies in Cambridge followed by a term in the Church of Ireland Theological College. He was ordained in 1972 and worked in St Mark's Dundela Parish in Belfast for four years from 1972 to 1976.
Then he came to work in St Ann's in Dawson Street, Dublin, where he was a curate and hospital chaplain. He spent 11 years in Zimbabwe and returned to England where his marriage was annulled.
He worked as a hospital chaplain in Leeds for three years and then wrote to the bishops in Ireland seeking a position. He looked at several of them and decided Trim was the best, near Dublin but not in Dublin, and he has been in Trim for 4 1/2 years since March 1977.
VB: What are your views on the divinity of Jesus?
AF: I interpret Jesus as a remarkable member of the ancient community of Israel. I share those two things with Jesus, the belief in his God and the disbelief in the incarnation of his God (i.e. God assuming human form in the person of Jesus). Clearly there is a significant clash between what I think about Jesus and how I interpret Jesus (on the one hand) and the mainline Christian interpretation of Jesus (on the other), but in all religions there are differing views and differing interpretations of core beliefs, and this is just a reflection of a different view within the Christian tradition.
VB: This isn't just a matter of taking a different view on an incidental issue. Central to the essence of Christianity is the belief that Jesus was God and if you don't accept that you can hardly call yourself Christian?
AF: I can certainly understand how many people would view people such as me as betraying the central insights and message of the Christian Gospel. We are not people who believe in the incarnation of God. We don't believe in the Cross nor do we believe in the Resurrection in the sense that Jesus was seen again in some real and meaningful way by his disciples. Many of us do actually believe and have a belief in an afterlife but they distinguish that from the biblical understanding of Jesus's resurrection.
VB: If you don't believe that Jesus was divine you can't call yourself Christian. There was nothing fundamentally different or new about the message Jesus was said to have taught. The distinctive thing about Jesus, as far as Christians are concerned, is that he was God and if you don't accept that you cannot be a Christian, you are something else?
AF: I think that where people like myself see ourselves is within a changing and evolving religious tradition. We seek to be servants of the truth and we see that Christianity has always been changing and evolving and there are many issues which illustrate that, such as the change in the Church's understanding of the role of women in relation to ordination in many of the churches, in relation to family planning, in relation to the liturgy. But obviously this particular area is very close to the heart of Christianity. It seems to me that people like myself, brought up in the Christian tradition, are undoubtedly seen by others as having left it and we shouldn't have the title Christian, we shouldn't be members or working within the Church. For those of us who feel a sense of the reforming fire in our hearts, we feel that we have a call to remain within the Church and to present our findings as we have sought to research the early documents of Christianity and to interpret them in our own day.
VB: How is Christianity differentiated from other religions if it isn't on the issue of Jesus being God?
AF: One of the fundamental changes in relation to Christianity and other religions to people like myself is that where before in interface dialogue Christianity was seen by members of other religions as in some way presenting itself as a superior, more complete ,religion, because it has claims that Jesus was the unique revelation of God and the incarnation of God, which these other religions do not claim. What I am saying now is that in fact Christianity is on a level platform when the other religions are all part of humanity's search for meaning and purpose. Jesus stands to Christianity as Mohammed does to Islam, as Moses does to Judaism.
VB: So Jesus was just a prophet then?
AF: He was a remarkable member of the ancient community of Israel. Without him Christianity wouldn't have come into being but he was not more than human. This certainly means that one sees a great deal more in common between Christianity and the best insights of Judaism and Islam. They all believe in a monolithic God, that is to say a God who exists by himself as the only God there is, the Creator of all that is. I believe that we are actually at a new stage of our religious development and it may well be that all our religions, as we come to understand how religions have been constructed and developed, will now be perceived in a completely different light.
VB: Let's deal with the issue of the Resurrection. It is true that the Gospel accounts of Jesus being seen after the cruxification are not all similar, although perhaps not contradictory. And it is also true that if the central message of Jesus was that he rose from the dead, you would have expected more detail and precision in the Gospels on this point than there is. But it seems obvious that the early Christians believed in the Resurrection of Jesus and many of them gave their lives to assert that. Is it likely that they would have given their lives for something they knew to have been a hoax?
AF: Well, I'm not suggesting they thought they were proclaiming something that in their hearts they believed to be a hoax. I think they genuinely did believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead and the evidence in the New Testament is that on a daily basis, they were expecting his return as a judge, lord and Saviour.
VB: What do you think of the Gospel accounts of people seeing Jesus, conversing with him, of joining him in a room, of meeting some of them on the road, all that?
AF: Well, to my mind there certainly is plenty of evidence, as we find these stories in the New Testament, of internal contradictions. They differ as to where people met Jesus, how many people met him. There are all sorts of inconsistencies. But I acknowledge that people of integrity can come to other views of the Resurrection but I come to it from a different perspective. I begin first with his life and his death and how I interpret them before I come to his Resurrection.
VB: What are the main points in the articles that have given rise to this controversy?
AF: The main points are: I have a strong sense of the hiddenness of God. I would say that I know nothing about God and I, therefore, have problems with the ideas centring around the notion of revelation. I think of God as ceaselessly active and involved but we cannot observe his/her work. Revelation is conditioned in its character by a person's religious beliefs, culture and socio-economic position. It is influenced by the person's mental state and by their convictions of what would be appropriate for their God to do or not to do.
Regarding Jesus, in studying Jesus a starting point is to observe that John the Baptist, Jesus and his disciples all believed that the world was about to end; they expected a major intervention by their god. This "end time drama" came from the historical experience of Jews who had endured conquest, exile and rule by foreign powers and who had longed for independence again and peace.
Possibly Jesus came to believe that he would have to endure some of this supposed end-time tribulation resulting in his death, after which the new kingdom would come.
The disciples' belief in the Resurrection of Jesus is probably best explained primarily by their understanding that his death was part of this supposed "end-time drama" which they imagined would be followed by the coming of the new kingdom in which they would meet him again. In fact, no new kingdom ever arrived nor did Jesus return as judge and saviour and the world has continued on its way.
There are three main objections to the traditional beliefs that Jesus was a mediator and that by his death he saved humankind. From science we know that death is a natural process and not (as traditionally believed) a punishment for sin and a power needing to be defeated. From ethics we realise that an innocent person (such as Jesus) should not bear the punishment of the guilty. From theology we know that to require a human sacrifice for forgiveness and salvation is suggestive of divine sadism.
VB: When you applied for jobs in 1967/97, wrote to the Irish bishops looking for a job in Ireland, did you tell them what your views were on all this?
AF: No.
VB: Did you tell the people who appointed you here (in Trim)?
AF: The answer there again is no, I didn't.
VB: Do you think now that you then engaged in a deception?
AF: Yes. I acknowledge that through cowardice and a realisation that if I was upfront about my beliefs I would not get an appointment anywhere, I was not forthcoming. I was deceptive.
