Blogging is/not for everyone

[Apologies to Peter Rollins for the style of the title]

So, having been blogging on here for quite a while, I've finally come clean to lots of my real-life friends in the last few weeks about the existence of these pages. That's a little scary. Let me explain why.

In my professional life, I read almost no blogs. That's not because of a lack of stuff to read: working in networked software systems, there are probably more blogs in my field than any other. But most of them are a bit, well, ... poor. [Of course, there are exceptions :-)]. So, most just aren't really worth reading.

Now, here I am, trying to contribute to an emerging conversation which is by turns theological, philosophical, occasionally even missional. I can imagine professional philosophers and theologians rolling their eyes at this stuff, and wondering at the naivety of it all. And so I can imagine my friends doing the same. [Now, thanks to being slightly naughty, and signing up for Google Analytics, I have a reasonable idea how many readers this blog has, and I see how many comments my posts attract, so I'm under no illusions about my place in the conversation.]

But I rather enjoy doing this, anyway. And because I'm inclined to think that theology is for everyone, not just the professionals, I'm not sure if I should care about whether my ramblings are ham-theology/philosophy or not.

In the meantime, despite not being a highly creative person, I'm staggered at how many different meanings I can read into the title of this post...

Formative Moments (2): All Truth is God's Truth

As an undergraduate, I belonged to the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union. (Indeed, since I ran the PA, such as it was, one president described me as the Sound Man of the OICCU...). The OICCU embodies, or did, the term "Conservative Evangelical".

Many of the talks there had a profound impact on me. None more so than someone (I forget who) who, more-or-less as a throw-away remark commented that "All Truth is God's Truth". (Only recently did I discover that this was the title of a book from 1977 by one Arthur F. Holmes).

There's a sense in which the statement is tautological: God is truth; he is almost the very definition of what it is to be true. That line of thinking could disappear into a curious ontological argument about what God is anyway ... but I'll not go there: I'm content for now to talk about the God whose character is shown in the bible.

But the proposition "All Truth is God's Truth" is gloriously liberating. It sets us free to see the hand of God at work in mathematics and the physical sciences. It points us to the hand of the creator in the biological sciences, never once at odds with the objective and discoveries of the scientific method. And insofar as psychology or social science learns what makes people tick ... those too point us to the truth about God.

But it goes further, too. If students of business or management learn how to get the best from people, that is an echo of the truth about the creation, also. If some religious group discovers benefit in contemplation, that's because it's part of how God made us. If another group learns and propounds the value of families ... that's because God made families. If someone grasps the value of love, or non-violent protest, or self-sacrifice, that's because it is how we are made. The Christian doesn't need to feel guilty, or embarrassed, or downcast that there is some truth to be found in other religions or belief systems: it would be staggering if there were not.

We could trade proof-texts about the many and various ways in which God has spoken; we could talk about the witness of creation, and much else besides. You could say that this mantra "All Truth is God's Truth" is self-evident and shallow.

But as people who are invited to rejoice in the truth, I find it incredibly valuable to recognise and celebrate truth, wherever, and however it is to be found.

Formative Moments (1): Unresolved Issues

I was reflecting recently on a number of particularly profound insights given me by others, over the years, and how much impact they have on my present exploration of all things emerging. Here's the first one.

When I was a postgraduate student, I belonged to an Anglican church. The vicar there was an exceptionally wise pastor. He would occasionally be called upon to help facilitate selection conferences for would-be Church of England ordinands: the purpose of the activity being to confirm their calling from God to the ministry. He explained to me once that the key question he would pose, and work through with the candidates, was along the lines of "can you live with unresolved issues?"

Now, perhaps learning to do that is just part of growing up. But at the time, and still now, it struck me as pointing to a very valuable state of mind, both for personal happiness, and also for complex pastoral issues. Sometimes, the more we strive to tie up loose ends and put everything in a box, the more it all seems to burst out.

There are many things I don't know, and many situations I don't know how to approach (more on some of these another time). It's possible that failure to address them can simply be laziness, but sometimes, just being able to set them to one side, or even to live with their constant niggling, can be a real virtue.

This seems something of a development of the quote from Reinhold Niebuhr:

“God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that can be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish one from the other”

but I always preferred the alternative (though Google can't seem to find the definitive version, so I don't know whom to credit):

“God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that can be changed, and the wisdom to know where to bury the bodies of those who didn't want to change."

Review: God's Undertaker

God's Undertaker
Has Science Buried God?
John Lennox


This book caught my attention because I heard of a debate some months ago between John Lennox and Richard Dawkins, held in Birmingham, Alabama. I could guess where Dawkins would be coming from, but was fairly sure that Lennox was unlikely to articulate the naive creationism I've come to associate with the rednecks :-). Lennox has spoken at my church before, and having been a member of the same faculty as him, I've met him around the University once or twice. He's one smart guy.

So I was a little baffled when I heard that he was a proponent of Intelligent Design. I confess I've always been rather skepical about that: it just seemed a rather threadbare attempt to make creationism sound slightly more scientifically credible - itself a pretty hard task. What I knew of it was justifiably a stink in the nostrils of any serious-minded scientist.

As a result, I had to read the book.

Wow. Lennox takes no prisoners. From the outset, you get the sense that this man has read and comprehended the canon of literature on the philosophy of science - something almost entirely lacking from Dawkins' book. This book is something of a reply to The God Delusion, but not a surgically-clean refutation in the style of MacGrath. Rather, its an onslaught to the mind "have you thought of..." and "what are the implications of ... " and " doesn't this lead us to say ...", over and over. Not a point-by-point disagreement, but a highly cogent argument of its own, set out in it own terms.

And yet I have to admit that something about the early chapters left me cold. Lennox adequately demonstrates that scientific method doesn't have all the answers, indeed, cannot. [There's one point where the logic seems to fail:an argument about the universe being rationally comprehensible ... without any discussion of what rationality, or indeed consciousness, might be. I suspect one could find others, but I tend to read for the broad brush, not to take every argument apart.] But somehow making those arguments can do no more than give rise to a gap: a gap which might be filled by a creator, but might equally well be filled by something else entirely.

In the later part of the book, Lennox' pedigree as a mathematician shines. The statistical arguments of Climbing Mount Improbable are unpicked and found wanting. What really lit all my buttons at once, though, was an appeal to information theory and the Church-Turing thesis, to show that the initial creation of life itself necessarily breaks everything we know about computability. [This is a point in the book where an undergraduate mathematics degree helps immensely. I suspect there are others. The book would be very hard-going for someone who has not had exposure to some of these ideas, and the philosophy of science in general.] That argument is fascinating, and very, very profound: I fear a gap in it, related to probability/non-determinism, but I'm going to have to read some more there.

Over all, the book is impressive not just for its own arguments and Lennox' own reading, but also for the array of quotes he assembles - from 'believers' and others - to support his arguments. One comes away with an impression that the world of Nobel-Laureate-Nature-Paper-Writing science is far from entirely sold on a Dawkins-esque account of the way the world works. [But we knew that already: so much of the The God Delusion reads like a high school essay...]

I'm still far from convinced about the value of appeals to Intelligent Design (though I'm not sure Lennox ever uses the phrase in the book), but this is easily the most compelling presentation of those ideas I've ever encountered. I would, without fear of embarrassment, give this book to highly-qualified friends (of whom I have a lot! :-) ) of any persuasion.

Jesus as a failed leader

I don't often do the meme thing and blog about other blogs, but Ruth Tucker has a nice post recently about Jesus as a Failed Leader. That's not to say that Jesus failed at anything (many of the blog comments miss the point), but rather that according to 20th/21st century ideas of what makes a good leader, Jesus is a failure.

It seems to point to something deeper: is the very idea of "leadership" (at least, as conceived in our society) at odds with the new testament? As I remarked in my comment on Ruth's blog, I’m not competent to analyse the Greek NT, but in translation (TNIV), there are almost no “leaders” in the church in the NT: there are lots of “Jewish Leaders”, one reference to leaders of the Church in Jerusalem (Gal 2:2), and several references to leaders in Hebrews (interesting; c.f. those of the Jewish kind).

And that’s it.

Reference was made to 1 Timothy 3. I don’t know what the Greek of the time meant by episcopos, but the translation as “overseer” doesn’t immediately imply “leader” to me.

[I acknowledge the weakness of arguing this from a translation, not from the original text. But hey, this is a blog, not a theology essay. I'm also aware of a peculiar apparent (and perhaps actual) fallacy in my first paragraph. ]

I guess I had this in the back of my mind all along (hence my ambivalence about a certain Senior Pastor from Seattle), but Ruth Tucker's blog seems to put it into words nicely.

Review: Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church

[I wrote this review on holiday, months ago, but somehow forgot to post it. I think I still agree with myself.... maybe.]




Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church:
Understanding a Movement and Its Implications
D. A. Carson



I wanted to read this book, despite hearing bad things about it in other reviews: it's not healthy to read only one point of view. The pace of things is such that it is already rather dated, perhaps, despite being just three years old.

This book reminded me of all the reasons why I am deeply suspicious of academic theology. It's not that I am anti-academic: I make my living in that profession, after all. It might be because, as a scientist, I tend to distrust research in the humanities. But largely, I think, it is because theology seems to be calculated to take real, organic belief, and make it into something which can be the pursuit only of those with a lifetime of study and a PhD in the subject. [footnote: this doesn't apply to, say, Peter Rollins, who blows my mind, though I fear he knows far too much Philosophy. And reading Alistair McGrath or Tom Wright usually convinces me that theologians are useful for something, too...]

I have much respect for Carson, nevertheless: The Inclusive Language Debate, a plea for realism was a great and timely reflection on the very real challenges of trying to translate a text like the bible from its original language into a dynamic modern one. But in writing about the emerging church, he seems, more often than not to be tilting at windmills.

His task is a hard one, of course: the 'emerging conversation' is a sufficiently broad tent, as it were, that he is trying to do something which is somehow the metaphorical opposite of shooting fish in a barrel. So he picks on a few writers (McLaren, in particular) and tries to take them apart. Of course, I am reading his words at least a couple of years after they were written: things have, I guess, moved on in the conversation rather, so that some of his tilting seems terribly mis-placed.

For tilting it is. Far too much time is taken over a critique of postmodernism: Carson's criticism seems to be that emerging church thinkers invoke it without understanding it. He takes a whole chapter to explain how he understands it, without showing much evidence of taking on board what they mean by the term. He may be right in saying that sees postmodernism (as a variously defined intellectual movement) as having reached, or passed, its apex. But he is so taken up with postmodern epistemology that other big strands in postmodern thinking (such as, for example, the inseparability of medium and message) are not mentioned. The result is an extended argument which seems to say “you guys don't know what you're talking about; I do”, without any genuine attempt to understand what those authors do mean by their terminology.

Several of his criticisms do resonate for me, as questions or issues to which I yet have to find an answer:

1. There is a 'protest' element in the emergent discussion: it springs very evidently from those who have received their 'Christian education' in quite a conservative evangelical corner of the faith. This is very far from the norm for Christendom at large, and so to want to believe that the conversation is ushering in a new way of conceiving Christian faith, rather than a new perspective on evangelical thought, is a big step indeed: one might even say it entails a little hubris.
2. In a discussion about learning from, and embracing the wisdom of, other systems of faith, it doesn't do to loose sight of the context in which the New Testament was written – really quite pluralistic. New Testament writers do not display a generous orthodoxy towards proponents of idol worship, pantheism, or even, in a sense, Judaism: we should be very cautious in doing so.
3. More generally, though I am very open to finding new ways to read the scriptures as we have received them, and to contextualizing them better, I'm not sure I've discerned a workable exegetical principle in the emerging conversation: it seems too easy to dismiss the bits of scripture that we don't like.

[the obvious caveat is that I'm the late emerger: I still have a lot to read, and a lot to experience]

That western society is in a rapid state of change is unquestionable. In particular, mass peer-to-peer communication is an innovation unparalleled certainly since the invention of the printing press, and perhaps earlier. Meanwhile, we are fragmented as never before. We travel as never before. The prosperity of many is far greater than ever before: the poverty of those on the margins is sadly all too familiar. Whether or not we associate the term postmodern with the profound sea-change we observe, or whether it needs another word, is rather irrelevant. It will portend changes in our conversation about God – if the emerging response is not close to its final form, it is nevertheless most evidently part of it. I'm disappointed to find thoughtful leadership in the world of theology not reflecting such wisdom in this book.

And yet, what is evident is that Carson simply doesn't “get it”. It's as if he has written a “modern” response to a “postmodern” conversation (I put those words in quotes, since I think that is how McLaren would use them, but Carson says he should not). And that points me to my final concern: I think I do “get it”- but I belong to a different generation from Carson. How can I make sure that we are talking about something which will emerge as open and evident to careful and thoughtful people, and not something which is ultimately a new gnosis, accessible only to those who have their own secret insight?

I'm sorry to say that I concluded that the book missed the point. The author is too taken up with his own understanding of philosophy and theology to hear what is being said by those he seeks to critique. And that's a shame. The writing of McLaren and others needs to be subjected to searching analysis: this book falls short of doing so.