Late Emerger

when is a religious ceremony necessarily non-religious?

2011-12-04T18:02:00.001Z

Rather a lot of heat has been generated over the regulations to allow religious premises to be used for conducting Civil Partnership ceremonies, which come in to force this week, I think.

The gist of the so-called 'Ali Amendment' (named after Lord Ali, who proposed it), is that Civil Partnerships can be conducted in religious premises, if the couple in question wishes it, and the relevant faith community allows it. The new regulations implement this law.

However, this is ill thought out, because the law also determines that a Civil Partnership cannot be conducted within the context of a religious service (just as, at a Civil Wedding, prayers and mentions of God are strictly regulated, and generally prohibited unless in a very vague sense in a poem, etc.). By some oversight, that provision didn't get repealed.

Various groups - such as the Quakers - are overjoyed at this provision. Others, much less so. They are particularly concerned that the option of hosting these non-religious religious ceremonies might get turned into an obligation by equality legislation. The Anglican lawyers think they're off the hook because the arrangements under which the CofE conducts weddings are very far removed from Civil Marriage - so no dint of inequality arises, because there is no direct comparison anyway. [This seems to dwell on the letter, rather than the spirit of the law!].

Other churches feel themselves in a more vulnerable position, because both their ability to conduct weddings and the new opportunity to conduct Civil Partnerships (albeit without a religious service while the Registrar is present) are both licenced in the same way with the local Registrar's office (albeit via separate applications). Though they couldn't be compelled to do something for which they are not licenced, it might be discriminatory for them not to apply for a licence, I guess.

All this seems Pharisaically hypothetical to me. The idea that two people are going to launch a lawsuit to enable them to host the 'happiest day of their lives' in premises where they are manifestly unwelcome seems remarkably far-fetched. I suppose that after being turned down, some particularly vindictive person might seek damages - but to what end?

Perhaps it would be better to spend time not seeking safeguards, but in looking at what sort of damage this kind of argument does to the message of the gospel. Jesus pronounced a lot of woe on religious leaders trying to uphold their legal system: to the rest of the population, not so much. "Love your neighbour" he said - and who is my neighbour?

literally

2011-11-18T23:11:00.001Z

Nice :: (h/t Karl Hand).

disappointed

2011-11-16T18:09:00.001Z

Wycliffe Hall is next door to my College. Its Principal gives a surprisingly candid interview. I'm disappointed, but not surprised, by much of what he says. I'm uncertain as to why he is proud that Wycliffe Hall is a part of the University of Oxford, given that he rather clearly doesn't share the University's present values, on a range of topics.

A wise man said that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. I wonder if that's relevant here?

blogger gone crazy

2011-11-06T19:30:00.001Z

blogger is screwing up my blog layout. I don't know why. Sorry for the inconvenience.

[edit]

I think it's now fixed. Please let me know if there are still problems with comments.

Review: Fall to Grace

2011-11-06T18:17:00.003Z

Fall to Grace: A Revolution of God, Self, and Society
Jay Bakker with Martin Edlund

Amazon tells me I bought this book in January, so the fact that I've just finished reading it is a matter of some embarrassment, but that seems to be my common complaint - too many books on my 'to read' pile. So perhaps I'm missing the boat with this review - many others reviewed the book long ago. But it's a good book, so here goes.

Bakker's surname will perhaps ring bells: his parents Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Televangelists in the name of "Praise the Lord (PTL) Ministries". Probably more wholesome than some, the whole thing collapsed in the late 1980s, with stories (well-founded, sending Jim to jail) of financial irregularity, and stories (well-founded) of marital infidelity. Jay was 13 at the time, went proverbially "off the rails" - meeting his dad out of prison, he describes himself as "eighteen, pierced, and a raging alcoholic". His dad tried to help him reform - but instead he found himself digging a deeper hole.

Perhaps he over-plays that fall - I guess others have fallen further - and yet, it is an essential part of his tale. Through the patient help of a friend or two, and the help of a "twelve-step program", he not only cleaned up his life, he discovered a real revelation of God's grace. In place of the Christianity he thought he had received (despite some insightful pastoral wisdom from his mother, described later) founded on sin, guilt, and judgement, he learned instead a story of grace, of love, of acceptance.

Following this autobiographical introduction, he explores in rather more detail this theme of grace, tracing it through Paul and other biblical authors. With the zeal of a convert, he describes both the theology and the way it's worked out in his experience. He explores the ways in which the message of grace embodies the gospel so much better than the preaching of morality. In one sense, it's pedestrian stuff - but so often it isn't lived, it's just theory. Bakker puts this grace-laden gospel into practice, in the Christian community he now helps to lead, which meets in a bar and ministers to many on the fringes of polite society - precisely the kind of people that Jesus hung out with.

Besides this general interplay of theory and practice, of theology and a lived-out gospel, he spends a few later chapters exploring the outworking of this line of thinking in a few more detailed topics. In particular, he revisits the way that the church has treated gay people. Not only exploring the theology, he describes experiences in a national mission/conversation attempting to dispel fears and misconceptions (and his disappointment at the way Rick Warren and Saddleback church treated them). He describes how and why the church he serves - Revolution Church - is gay-affirming. He describes how this approach makes a difference for individual Christians.

This book is on the one hand an immensely personal book - the story of Jay Bakker's journey into understanding God's grace (I'm sure he wouldn't claim to have arrived yet). And on the other, it is a gentle tour of one of the absolutely central themes of the gospel - one that too often we overlook because somehow it is too generous, too outrageous, too loving, too much at odds with our cold hearts. His penultimate paragraph is this, it sums up the book rather well:

Grace is all about acceptance. By accepting grace we accept God, we accept ourselves, we accept each other.

You probably gathered that I rather liked this book. It's all about God's grace. What's not to like?

on the protesters

2011-10-31T23:23:00.002Z

Anne Atkins on Newsnight: "if the protesters had encamped outside St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, instead of St. Paul's, they'd have been evangelized within five minutes". How true! Would they still be in place, one wonders?

I genuinely don't know what to make of the protests. It seems that the poor erstwhile Dean and Chapter are confused also. It has been amusing to see politicians of every stripe trying to put their oar in, and entirely failing to understand what the issues are. The letters to the Daily Telegraph never fail to amuse - and miss the point, it seems.

Followers of Christ are called to seek justice for the poor - but whether that is the same thing as finding common cause with those camping in front of St Paul's is, well, unclear.

by their fruits

2011-10-22T15:29:00.004+01:00

alternative title: to whom would Jesus send a cease and desist notice?

Apparently, Mars Hill Church in Seattle has set its lawyers on to Mars Hill Church Sacramento. The combination of the name and logo is claimed to be too close for comfort. We're not talking about hamburger franchises here, we're talking Christian congregations. I nearly swore there. Sorry.

I was going to reproduce the logos here, for comparison, but that turns out to be difficult for silly technical reasons. You can see them here:

http://marshillsacramento.com/
http://marshill.com/

Is really the fruit of the gospel that Jesus had in mind? Are these Kingdom values? Somehow it's not surprising, but it seems desperately sad.

on gay marriage

2011-10-16T18:32:00.000+01:00

My blog post of last week left a loose end over the issue of gay marriage - or, as the advocates would prefer, marriage equality for gay people.

It does seem to have become a terribly polarizing issue - but my reaction is to want the middle ground.

In America, reactions to calls for people to be allowed to marry others of the same sex have certainly fallen out on largely political partisan lines - though by no means all Democrats are on one side, and occasionally a brave Republican will break ranks to call for change. In Britain, the Prime Minister (Conservative) recently suggested that having gay people marry each other was a thoroughly Conservative thing to do (since it tends to promote commitment, fidelity, stability; all [C]conservative values). Much of his party might disagree. Meanwhile, the Australian Prime Minister (Labor) seems to regard the idea as anathema, whereas her party appears largely to accept the idea.

Churches seem largely to be opposed - but my gripe with the EA last week was of course that the reasons for this seem to have more to do with either the practice of homosexual sex (which is not immediately relevant to he question), or to a somewhat circular argument that "marriage is defined as the union of a man and a women, so two men cannot get married". The bible largely takes man-women marriage as a given, but does not teach a great deal about it, and certainly doesn't set out to define it.

Undoubtedly, the first of those two positions is significant: it's a kind of rearguard action against society's broad acceptance of gay lifestyles. It's as if some want to say "well, we lost the argument long ago, but we want to continue to express our dislike." That's a powerful piece of prejudice, and leads to the rather curious argument which suggests that if gay people are married to each other this will somehow diminish the marriages of straight people. I can't quite fathom why. Undoubtedly, the aim is indeed to redefine the meaning of the word "marriage" to encompass more than it traditionally has.

There is additionally a red herring argument suggesting that whilst churches are not expected to be required to participate in solemnising marriages of gay people to each other (and, indeed, they may not be permitted to do so), some have thought that it will be only a matter of time before this is reversed, and equality laws will be invoked to force churches to act against their consciences. To this we might say that firstly if equality law were being invoked, the difference between marriage and civil partnership would be irrelevant - and even less speculatively, every church (perhaps excepting the CoE) has the right to marry whomsoever it chooses and deny marriage to whomsoever it chooses, according to its own criteria. That seems unlikely to change.

So the naming issue seems crucial, at least in the UK context. Civil Partnerships exist for gay people. They've been around for several years, and quite a few thousand people have taken advantage of that opportunity. Civil partnerships convey just about all the same rights and responsibilities upon those partnered and those who interact with them as civil marriages do. And many, colloquially, talk of them with the same vocabulary as is used for marriage - wedding, husband, married, and so on.

So it seems to me that all we must ask is "what's in a name?". To the gay community, I would have to ask whether it really matters what it says at the top of your certificate. the difference between "marriage certificate" and "civil partnership certificate" doesn't seem so very great to me - especially when your friends and family can and will call it the first anyway. There are many areas in society where the official wording differs from the vernacular.

But the same argument works in the other direction: it really is just a change of name, so why should anyone get upset about it happening? Of all the things to expend energy over, the use of one word instead of another seems among the most foolish. To say "it can be a partnership but not a marriage" really doesn't make a lot of sense, unless you want to argue that civil marriage is somehow sacred (which sounds like a contradiction in terms).

So, essentially I see no particularly strong reason for a change, and no particularly strong reason to deny a change. The difference is that making the change will make a few more people happy, and at least in their own judgement, reduce the total sum of iniquitous discrimination. That, in itself, seems a good enough reason to support the change.

a little milestone

2011-10-09T18:51:00.000+01:00

This weekend, I resigned my membership of The Evangelical Alliance. I've been a member for most of the last twenty years, so that seems quite a big deal, somehow. I did it with a heavy heart, but it's been becoming an inevitable step, for a while now.

The EA often seems to be a force for good. It has generally avoided narrow sectarian positions, enabling it for a long time to claim to speak for one million UK residents (through personal and church memberships). They've dropped that line from their promotional material now, but they still seem to have a large following. In general, the EA promotes the positive things its members have been doing, and frequently undertakes sensible lobbying positions in speaking to government.

There was a time when I thought those approaches were spot-on and just right: I was proud of the EA and proud to be a member. But somehow the things it does have become increasingly marginal to me - and, I'd suggest, to a lot of other people who might live with a label like emerging or post-evangelical. I know that I have moved in an inclusive direction - I rather suspect that the EA has moved in the opposite direction.

In thinking about membership, one might start with the basis of faith, since this is the thing that all members must agree on. It is an unexceptional list - and widely adopted by EA affiliates as their own basis also. Do I still believe it? Well, that depends what you mean. If I wanted to claim that I did, I would need to re-interpret several of the clauses to imply something other than what most would agree upon as their "plain meaning". But more than that, my problem really is with making such a list the basis of unity: it seems a category mistake. Where in that list is the teaching of Christ? Even is command to love our neighbours is relegated to something of an after-thought in clause 11, where the outworking of that command is given largely to the Spirit, not to the believer. Surrounded by people in need, is it really so important that we unite around the abstract idea of the Virgin Birth? And so on. The clause on the authority of Scripture is delightfully vague, but seems to mean something which I don't think I share.

Reaching the conclusion a while ago that the basis of faith was rather irrelevant, I wondered if I could continue membership. I decided to keep an eye on news, and decide whether I would wish to be publicly associated with the EA's positions. And so, on Friday, I came across two recent news articles:

Gay marriage will have to be the subject of a separate blog, but the linked article not only seems to take an unnecessarily argumentative position, it doesn't even have any evangelical methodology to it. I'm suspicious of evangelical methodology today, but even that would be much better than this statement based on prejudice. The other article seems to suggest that all points of view be given equal balance in the classroom - a position which would plainly do more to confuse than to educate.

I'm not leaving the EA on the strength of two short articles, but they are the proverbial last straw. Sorry EA, you don't speak for me.

excessively postmodern?

2011-08-15T09:26:00.000+01:00

I'm in Australia on holidays again, and as with last year, confronted by some of the presentations surrounding Aboriginal culture.

In Kakadu National park, Official notices on signs side-by-side (or, in some cases, even on a single sign) report both details of the billion-year-old rocks, and the news that the land was created in the dream time by the rainbow serpent. Not 'Aboriginal people believe that...', but 'it was'. These narratives are not entirely compatible. Well, that is to say, they are not compatible within our dominant system of epistemology. To ditch that system for this reason is something of a bold move, because it is rather a successful one. (We'll return to success in a moment).

To select those two narratives, and omit, say, 'creation science' or 'flood geology' seems a little arbitrary - not that I am uncomfortable with their omission, since they do not strike me as useful descriptions. One's own perspective is of course subjective: how is the National Parks Authority to select narratives, stories, and explanations? Do you privilege the Aboriginal perspective due to its longevity? Due to the sensibilities of the 'traditional owners' (a phrase itself laden with competing meanings)? Due to the expectations of the readers? Due to the long standing oppression and disadvantage of the Aboriginal people - to allow a voice that was for a long time denied?

Privileging the voices of the marginalized sounds like a good thing to do. But I can't help wondering if, applied naively, doing so is eventually self-defeating: you'd want to ask how those people became marginalized in the first place. The more successful voice/culture tends to overwhelm the less successful one, it was ever thus. In many walks of life, we would be in a parlous state if not. Perhaps that is an equally naive appeal to a kind of cultural survival of the fittest.

Success tends to be measured in terms of money, sex, and power. Perhaps it would be better if it were not. Instead, we might appeal to justice for the poor, living in harmony with the environment, self-giving, and a heap of other values that we tend to recognize as good humanistic qualities. Indeed, we might see those as biblical values, as Christ-like characteristics.

But does that really work? Would justice for the poor be best served by giving equal balance to the voices of the homeopath as to the voice of the scientific medical community? Will our emissions of CO2 be reduced by giving weight both to those who don't understand physics and chemistry, as well as to those who do? For the way that we understand the last 500 years of science, with all its very tangible benefits to the quality of life for all (all? most? some?) is very deeply rooted in a privileged narrative, with a value system of very definite 'right' and 'wrong', and based upon a culture which very often promotes those with sharpest elbows. Can we truly turn our backs on that - or embrace an epistemic humility - without losing its benefits? I guess it's a matter of scale.

I want to inhabit a world - and a system of knowing - where we give proportionate weight to every voice. But who decides what's proportionate?

review: Church in the present tense

2011-08-14T06:00:00.001+01:00

Church in the present tense: A candid look at what is emerging
Scot McKnight, Peter Rollins, Kevin Corcoran, Jason Clark

My rule these days is that I buy hard copy books if I expect to enjoy them and lend them to others, and Kindle books if no lending is anticipated. I bought Church in the Present Tense in hard copy. But I'm not sure I will be lending it to many others.

In terms of disappointment, this book most puts me in mind of D A Carson's book on the Emerging Church, but the comparison is hardly fair. Carson seemingly spoke from a position of little real engagement: these authors are clearly active participants in what is emerging. And yet, because each really only speaks from a narrow personal perspective, the picture is still patchy, and didn't seem to me to amount to a candid look at all. Perhaps I just expected the wrong thing,

The book consists of eight chapters, with each author contributing two. Corcoran is the editor and writes first, about philosophical realism. This is a curious wander through Postmodernism, epistemic humility, and a heap of related topics: I felt as if I was receiving lots of polemic from Corcoran and understanding his own belief system - but it did little to persuade me to adopt it for myself. The second essay in the 'philosophy' section is by Rollins: surely he is writing about his favourote topic. I'm not sure that excuses a line discussing "Heidegger's somewhat Kierkegaardian reading of Nietzsche ...", but over-all the is Rollins at his more readable.

The successive parts take us through Theology, Worship, and Bible and Doctrine. Each takes us on a tour of the author's perspective, which is interesting,but doesn't really pretend to be representative or typical of the emerging churches they invoke (patchily). McKnight's chapter on scripture in the emerging movement put me very much in mind of McLaren's distinction of bible as constitution versus bible as library. But I fear the latter made the point more clearly. Under worship, Rollins writes on Transformance Art, reprising some of the parable-based stuff from his recent Orthodox Heretic. He also offers the helpful observation "It is not difficult to avoid hipocrisy when you believe in nothing."

The book comes with a DVD - another reason to but the hard copy - but no reference is made to it in the pages of the book, and as I write this I haven't had opportunity ot view it.

Overall, this must be said to be a book at the 'academic' end of the 'popular' spectrum. It's well constructed, but I cannot really describe it as instructive. It's a bit disappointing; it feels like a lost opportunity .

the tension

2011-07-17T18:15:00.000+01:00

Recent posts by Ross McKenzie and Philip Jensen (h/t to Ross, again; I wouldn't have gone seeking out that particular blogger) remind me to try to sum up the tension that's really bothering me. Here goes.

My Christian friends are not nearly scientific enough. And my scientist friends are not nearly spiritual enough. It's a rather longstanding tension, of course, but that doesn't make it any easier to handle.

On the one hand, Christians (and especially Evangelical Christians) really are prone to lapse into a rather mediaeval understanding of the world around us. They are not alone in this, of course: woeful ignorance of, say, Newton's laws of motion is quite common in the general population. But as I've said previously, the theology of prayer really needs a radical overhaul. Many of the things which are said to arise through spiritual means are much, much better explained by chance or by psychology, or a raft of other sciences. Just tolerating the young earth creationists (even without agreeing with them) is a shocking piece of intellectual sloppiness. Failing to follow through and accept that archaeology casts doubt on the historicity of big bits of the rest of the Old Testament is equally a careless piece of head-in-the-sand thinking. Denying the results of good textual criticism of the biblical texts - and holding instead to vague myths about origin and authorship - is just setting yourself up for a fall.

And so it goes on. None of these things is essential or central to the Christian gospel, and pretending that the metaphysics of the dark ages is better than today's scholarship is just a distraction, and liable to make thinking people reject the whole package out of hand. Then there's issues of morality ... but those are best left to a different discussion.

On the other hand entirely, many scientists seem equally stuck - albeit in the nineteenth century instead of the fourteenth. There is an optimistic hubris which assumes every problem will be solved eventually. There is an appeal to a kind of reductionism which 20th century mathematics and physics showed to be fundamentally untenable. Some will point out that in the middle ages, the thinkers of the day were kept from certain topics whereas today everything is open for research: conveniently ignoring that there is a long list of areas in which you would truly struggle to get taken seriously, or even allowed to proceed at all. (I refer not to the periodic nutter who invents a perpetual motion machine, but to a range of questions whose answers are not incontrovertibly settled but are nevertheless entirely un-researchable. There are subjects for which we do not want to know the answer, or are unwilling due to concerns of ethics, to ask the question). Equally, epistemology has moved on immeasurably, even to the point of asking whether there are truths about the universe which human minds will never comprehend.

The language we use to describe those truths is of course instructive. If pressed, most will admit that they are dealing with models of reality, models which must be mutable to take account of new observations. Frequently that language is suppressed in favour of a discussion of "how it is" - deficient as such wording is, along with its cousin "existence". A fixation upon whether or not things "exist" seems awfully dated, and not terribly helpful - whether one is dealing with quantum theory or theology. Insofar as we can understand the cosmos from our position inside it, taking account of the role of the observer seems to matter greatly - and therein is spirituality.

So I find myself reluctantly living in that tension. I find a lot of people who want glibly to resolve it one way or the other, or who want to inhabit "faith with science-lite" or "science, with personal faith if you must" but both seem really quite unsatisfactory to me. Perhaps this is partly due to that unhealthy parting of the ways in the mid-to-late 19th century, wherein real rigorous dialogue dried up in favour of is/isn't debates which often miss the point. In many ways, I envy those priest-scholar-scientists who lived before that divide, for theirs was a more holistic existence. But we cannot go back there. The Universe is much more wonderful than they could possibly have imagined; life more incredible than they might have dared to think.

schism

2011-07-02T21:00:00.000+01:00

Insofar as I understand Anglican ecclesiology, this seems significant news:

A NEW conservative Evangelical group, the Anglican Mission in England (AMiE), already has three newly ordained clergy waiting to minister in the UK.The Society, launched at the end of last week, offers alternative episcopal oversight when diocesan bishops “are failing in their canonical duty to uphold sound teaching”.The three unnamed clerics were ordained in Kenya on 11 June by the Archbishop of Kenya, Dr Eliud Wabukala [...]The AMiE has appointed its own “panel” of five bishops “to provide effective oversight in collaboration with senior clergy”. The panel consists of one serving bishop, the Bishop of Lewes, the Rt Revd Wallace Benn, and four retired bishops [...]

To this outsider, flying people off on a rather hush-hush basis, on a long-haul flight, so that someone can lay on hands, and pray for them and their future ministry, seems a most peculiar way to pursue "biblical Christianity". But what do I know?

My impression is that this may mark the beginning of the end for conservative Evangelicals in the Church of England. I imagine that quite a few will be wondering now whether they want to be counted in the AMiE or in a gay-clergy-affirming women-bishop-consecrating Church of England. The whole thing has been played out in slow motion, and it's easy to be impatient for a resolution - but I have a grudging respect for the tortuous processes involved, which may yet lead to a compromise which keeps everyone in the fold. I used to despise such Anglican fudge, but am coming round to the view that it is preferable to open schism. That said, the polemic on both sides appears irreconcilable: if a parting of fellowship is inevitable, it would be best done quickly, for delay will simply inflame passions and raise the temperature to no good benefit.

Evangelicals surveyed

2011-07-01T22:27:00.001+01:00

[Where did June go? Blogs have been getting infrequent. Oh dear.]

A couple of weeks ago, the Pew Forum published the results of a substantial Global Survey of Evangelical Protestant Leaders.

It makes interesting reading for two reasons: first, because I think that many of its questions are quite insightful and go to the heart of quite a few matters. Second, because the answers are enlightening, and often scary.

Take, for example, these snippets:

More than half say that consuming alcohol is enough to stop you being a good evangelical. Ooops; that's 'Good Evangelical'. Oh dear. Then again, if 97% see it as essential to follow the teachings of Christ, but 27% don't see that as extending to helping the poor and needy, which bible did they read, actually?

It's interesting in the light of my blog from a couple of months ago that 76% have experienced or witnessed divine healing. I'm also a little blown away by the fact that 61% confidently assert that "the rapture of the Church will take place before the Great Tribulation". Perhaps it's more positive to learn that 13% think that homosexuality should be accepted by society (51% of those in Latin America; 23% of those in Europe), even if 55% think a wife must always obey her husband, and 33% think women should stay home and raise children.

I think the thing that struck me most was this question:

Firstly, missing is any kind of self-doubt. Perhaps that's the survey's fault, but if you fear a decline in Evangelicalism (and a small majority in the global North anticipate one), surely you have to ask yourself whether that decline is due to an inherent flaw - a mistaken theology, philosophy, or pattern of thinking or behaviour. But, more generally, what can "influence of secularism" possibly mean here? That there's a battle of ideas - and you're losing? Likewise, "influence of Islam": if you believe that the gospel of Christ is the truth, and that the teaching of the Koran is not, well, why fear the latter? And so on. Many of the other things are fears about the gospel or the work of the Holy Spirit being insufficiently strong to protect the faithful: that seems at odds with the rhetoric about the power of the gospel.

Over all, the survey gives me the sense of evangelicalism - at least, northern hemisphere evangelical protestantism - being a spent force, far more concerned with the maintenance of its own way of being than with an essential spark of a movement of the Holy Spirit of God. But perhaps I'm unduly cynical.

Review: The Outsider Interviews

2011-05-29T21:48:00.000+01:00

The Outsider Interviews
Jim Henderson, Tom Hunter, and Craig Spinks

Christians often spend time trying to understand the perspective of those outside the church. Or, rather, they should. Too often, we simply assume. Our unchurched neighbours might as well belong to a distant tribe on the far side of the planet, for all we really know of their lives. The Outsider Interviews sets out to ask a mix of churched and unchurched people - mainly from the so-called Buster generation - about how they perceive Christians and the church. An early discourse explains why "Outsider": Evangelicals tend to talk of "the lost" to describe those outside the church - but not to their faces. The authors want a more useful descriptive term with less of a pejorative overtone.

The perspective is entirely a USA-centric view. The authors visited Kansas City, Phoenix, Denver, and Seattle. In each place, they interviewed two Christians and two outsiders, in front of a live audience, and also filmed additional backstage material. There is nothing earth-shattering in the answers (depending on your starting point) but there is much to learn, much to be reinforced by the way that these articulate young people express themselves. Very often they have missed the point of what the gospel message is all about - without apportioning blame, we may readily say that evangelism has failed!

This is a DVB - a DVD/Book. The DVD and the book have distinct content. You're supposed to consume both. I first bought it as a Kindle book, saving 50p: but it didn't come with the DVD content - so I sent it back for a refund! [the Kindle edition no longer seems to be available.] The DVD contains the actual interviews; the book gives the back-story and some commentary. The DVD has high production values and is well-produced. You could use its segments in many contexts - as discussion-starters or jumping-off points for talks. The book is more self-indulgent, in a way. It tells us the interviewers' perspective on the topics, and their reaction to the Outsiders' comments. Several chapters are reconstructions of their discussion over dinner, after the interviews - with perhaps more contextual information than is really needed. The background is useful, but doesn't really add as much to the videos as I might have hoped.

The book has a good website, where you can see excerpts of the text and video content, as well as extras. For example, there is a small group study guide, and suggestions on how to run interviews in your own church - an interesting fresh spin on approaches to evangelism.

I said that there is nothing too surprising in the answers: that is not to say that they are pedestrian. Complex situations arise: one story is told of a Christian whose friend contemplates an abortion. She tells her that she dislikes that option, but will stick by her - even going to the clinic with her - no matter what her decision. This turned out to be a powerful witness to the love of Christ. Other hot button issues for the American church - such as the gay rights agenda - also get a good airing. It is always salutary to see ourselves as others see us.

That, I think, is the value here. If we don't listen, we don't really have the right to speak. The topics that come up in conversation should help to define how we describe the love of God. Craig Spinks' rather wonderful Recycle your Faith site explores them further.

Not raptured

2011-05-21T23:03:00.000+01:00

The media have been full of amused comments about the rapture occurring today, many perhaps understandably confusing it with judgement day or the end of the world. Evidently some Christian broadcaster has decreed that his infallible calculations point to 6pm today: predictions that even now seem to be unravelling - to a lack of surprise from most of the population of the planet. [Though the link above seems to be non-functional at present: either its administrator has left the planet, or maybe its attracted an uncommon level of demand today.]

I grew up with this kind of belief system - though I was firmly drilled with the confidence that Matthew 24:36 (etc.) means that prediction of or speculation about the date was a waste of time. Happily, I encountered relatively few who took strong positions on matters of eschatology, but premillenial dispensationalism tended to go unchallenged - to the extent of showing unchallenged "A Thief in the Night" to the church's teens. I know that film gave many some sleepless nights (gosh, it has five stars on IMBb) - but I guess I had confidence that I would be in the rapture when it came, and so it held no fears for me. There was a kind-of double-think going on there already, because there would also be discussion of the second coming when Christ would be seen, and worshipped, by all - with no mention of there having been a preceding rapture. As I say, there was a lack of dogmatism.

That didn't stop us in the 1970s having a Sunday School chorus, inspired rather transparently by the space race, with bad poetry and worse theology:

Somewhere in outer space
God has prepared a place
For those who trust him and obey.
Jesus will come again
Although we don't know when
The count-down's getting lower every day.
Ten and nine, eight and seven,
Six and five and four:
Call upon the Saviour while you may
Three and two, coming through the clouds in bright array
The countdown's getting lower every day.

[yes, I typed that from memory. I do that.]

And now? I don't think I live in expectation of rapture, nor even if I'm honest, the bodily visible second coming of Christ. All that end times theology is at best sketchy and at worst, downright absurdly made-up. It's difficult to argue that the biblical authors had a single coherent view of what to expect: and harder, I think, to reach the conclusion that they present a water-tight prophetic picture of the future. That's not a very satisfactory statement: and that's perhaps why this isn't the latest instalment in my "Here I stand?" series. I'm not sure where I stand.

I can't help thinking that I have that in common with most Christian people. There are lots of possible things we might believe about end times - from reading the scripture dispensationally as a "literal" (if perhaps contradictory) account of what is to come, through to a more alleogrical reading: and somehow we tend to manage to hold onto them all from time to time. I think I tend toward the allegorical hermaneutic, which puts me out of line with most evangelicals.

Why? Well, others (such as McLaren, or Ehrman) put it more eloquently than I, and with greater theological sophistication. I don't think the scripture invites us to read it 'literally' (mainly because I think that word meaningless in this context), and it is very clear that the primary events referred to in many passages are principally about contemporary problems (such as the Fall of Jerusalem) rather than predictions for hundreds and thousands of years hence. Does that downplay Christian hope? I don't think so - today's persecuted church can draw much strength from the church of bygone days. Looking to the resurrection of the dead - to rise with Christ - is the Christian hope for all ages.

The apparent confident expectation of some that today they would be raptured (to the point of paying to make provision for non-Christians to look after their pets) is touching if whacky. Since that's not me, and not most Christians I think, I do think that we need to find a new way to talk about these things that makes sense in the 21st century, and I know I'm not sure how that will work.

Review: Miracles for Sale

2011-04-25T23:13:00.002+01:00

Miracles for Sale, Channel 4
Monday 25th April 2011

Derren Brown is a TV hypnotist. He makes entertainment out of manipulating people's emotions and perceptions: but he is essentially open about this.

The premiss of this documentary is two-fold: firstly, that faith healers (every faith healer? Brown thinks so) are simply manipulative showmen who are out to make money; secondly, that Brown can train anyone to be a faith healer. He's quite exercised about this - and particularly concerned about those who suffer depression when their healing does not appear (or doesn't last), or throw away medication and become ill.

So he recruits a scuba-diving instructor, trains him over a few months, then takes him to Texas. There they see some faith healers at work, and learn a few tricks along the way - the best being the old favourite of leg-lengthening. He practices preaching, teams up with a worship group, does a bit of on-street 'healing', and then runs a public event and does the whole thing for real. At the end, he does a 'reveal' in front of the whole audience - telling people that faith isn't about handing over money to rich evangelists.

Throughout, he's eager to underline that he has no quarrel here with genuine faith, and doesn't wish to undermine it. He wants only to expose charlatans. He and his scuba-diving protégé are also very exercised about doing right by those they work with - to the extent of cutting ties with a Christian PR company which might have got them a much bigger audience, for fear that said company would crash when the truth was revealed. They suffer angst from the deceit they engage in, but remind themselves "we must be hypocrites for a while so that the reality may be shown".

All in all, the presentation struck me as thoroughly responsible and worthy. There are many "faith healers" who are plainly manipulative fraudsters, and the more they are exposed, the better.

But it's rather close to home, too. I've certainly encountered many within my branch of faith who will talk eagerly and in a convinced way about miraculous healing. Long ago, I even encountered people who'd experienced the leg-lengthening thing, though I haven't heard of that stuff for quite a while. But miraculous healing almost never seems to stand up to scrutiny. You'd expect the medical profession to be sceptical, of course, but given how many people believe in healing, you'd have thought that there would be at least a few well-attested, incontrovertible cases. But there aren't. As far as I know, the medical literature has none whatsoever. None at all. Even though there are plenty of Christian doctors - even plenty of Evangelical and Charismatic ones. None at all. None whatsoever. Isn't that odd?

Christian GP Peter May evidently set out some time ago some characteristics of biblical healing miracles, arguing that these form something of a "gold standard" for evaluating whether a miracle has happened.

The conditions were obvious examples of gross physical disease
They were at that time incurable and most remain so today
Jesus almost never used physical means
The cures were immediate
Restoration was complete and therefore obvious
There were no recorded relapses
Miracles regularly elicited faith

Miracles today? They remain widely discussed in Christian circles. Should we move on?

is Love Winning?

2011-04-03T17:45:00.000+01:00

This is the space where I might have reviewed Rob Bell's new book, Love Wins. But it has lit up the blogosphere so successfully (who'd have thought a book on heaven and hell would be a trending topic on twitter?!) that there doesn't seem to be a need. Countless reviews will tell you whatever you want to hear - that Bell is a heretic, a theological lightweight, a wise pastor, an opportunist self-publicist, or a fresh interpreter of sometimes-lost truth. Instead, these are my incoherent rambling comments on the brouhaha that has followed.

If you want to be outraged, the book will oblige. But being outraged at a refreshing look at God's grace seems inappropriate. Some purple passages have been widely quoted (and misquoted), such as:

A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better. It’s been clearly communicated to many that this belief is a central truth of the Christian faith and that to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus. This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’ message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.

But Rob always loves to be a little enigmatic, so people don't get to pin him down on "what he really believes": of course the result is that you can read it as "really" saying he's a heretic, or "really" saying he's presenting the historic Christian message in a a fresher way. But that dichotomy misses the point. I don't think he's interested in playing that game. His style is questioning: some love it, and some find it destructive. Many have an inherent distrust of a fresh hermeneutic approach. I have to say that the way that some have rushed in to defend their favourite doctrines makes them sound more like the dogmas of a faith community they would want to distance themselves from.

I think this is really quite an important book. Bell has an immense following. People know he's not entirely "safe" but he is a great communicator, and most would have said that his heart was in the right place. But writing as he has done here, he does move people forward towards a point of decision. Not because he wants to create division, I think, but because it is time to tell the Jesus story in a new way.

The theme of the book, of course, is that Love Wins: that God's way of dealing with us is radical and full of grace. What's very noticeable is that Love isn't the word that springs to mind when you look at the way Bell's critics would wish to deal with him. John Piper's by-now infamous tweet is a mark of something very much awry - perhaps it was just a rash off-the-cuff remark, but a wise many said we should be slow to speak. "Conversation ...full of grace, seasoned with salt" doesn't seem to cover it, for me.

Doubtless those who want to disagree with Bell - and with Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, and all the rest - would say that what they are doing is calling out false teachers. Does that relieve them of an obligation to grace? If you want a hint of the stress that the last few weeks have caused the man and those close to him, listen to the first few minutes of his sermon from Mars Hill last Sunday.

Thank you for continuing to remember that the gospel is known by its fruit, and that we can get all of the words right and we can have all the best doctrines and dogmas and we can actually be a clanging cymbal, and that love is what Jesus said is the greatest commandment.

If the media storm was not foreseen - as he implies - perhaps that was naive. But it's more generous to think of that than to suggest there was a cynical sales drive going on.

God is love. Love is the strongest thing imaginable. Of course love wins.

here I stand? part 6: morality

2011-03-20T23:17:00.000Z

I'm in the middle of a series trying to set out where I've reached in my thinking about how to describe my faith today. The previous parts are these:

Morality is a big issue for Christians today. In my country, at least, the perception of those outside the church is surely that Chrisitans are great moralizers - and probably hypocrites into the bargain. There's often the perception that those morals are rooted in the Iron Age, and wildly out of touch with the current language of rights and self-fulfilment.

And it must be said that there's more than a grain of truth there. Christians seem to hang onto a Victorian morality when the rest of society has thrown it away. And we have a propensity to imagine that the mores of the 19th century are in fact God's ideals. But it ain't necessarily so.

The Scripture gives us Christ's Golden Rule; it gives us all manner of good principles about how we should act towards each other. But it doesn't give us a whole lot of absolutes - we made many of those up. Or rather, we evolved them independently of scripture. A strong theology of marriage just isn't there. We made it up. Which might help to explain why the whole gay marriage thing has caused quite so much angst. How do two people become married? What "can't you do" before marriage? Who says so? The whole "gay community" thing is of course a political construction. The society of biblical times didn't recognise gayness as a state of being - nor have most other societies. But attitudes to same-sex relationships have been much more complex, ambivalent, often tacitly accepting, through the ages.

Most (much?) (all?) of morality is a social construction. We need morals in order to live harmoniously together - and to my mind morality is a better notion than rights, because it tends to embody mutual obligation rather than naive individualism. Few morals are absolutes: they evolve, and difficult cases cause adjustments. The morality - or ethics - surrounding developments in reproduction (from IVF, through sperm donation, frozen embryos, all the way to cloning, embryo selection, and many things we haven't thought of yet) raises profound questions for which there is no trite answer within the moral framework of former generations. [Court cases in which a divorced man withdraws his consent for a fertilized embryo being implanted in his erstwhile wife's womb - her ovaries having been removed in the meanwhile - spring to mind. A rare instance of the "man's right to choose"?] As medical technology advances, there will be more and more of these questions: and if Christians flee from them they will be perceived (rightly, I think) as being as out of touch as they now view the Jehovah's Witnesses for refusing blood transfusions.

Are there no absolutes? Well, I'm doubtful. I don't imagine that we are ever going to come out on the side of being allowed to shoot one another on a whim, but "ye shall do no murder" clearly admits a lot more nuances than one might first imagine. Debates around just war, capital punishment, abortion, and euthanasia have illustrated some of the complexities.

We need morality and ethics, and they will continue to evolve. It's a shame that Christians are seldom in the forefront of the development of these. Arguing for the right to discriminate isn't very helpful. Arguing for the right to be abusive or to lay heavy burdens on the most vulnerable is not necessarily in keeping with the Golden Rule. Would that Christ-followers were know for their compassion, for a caring attitude to fallen, broken humanity; would that our watch-word was "let the one who is without sin cast the first stone".

curious

2011-02-08T21:18:00.001Z

I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies (Genesis 22:17, NIV)

Here's a curious thing: the number of stars in the universe might be around the same number as the number of grains of sand on earth. That's a few billion billion. [it must be said that estimates vary widely]. Don't tell the literalists, though, because in the whole history of the world, there have been many fewer than a billion descendants of Abraham.

oh, Pete

2011-01-27T09:40:00.000Z

I love Peter Rollins' methodology, and his willingness to ask hard questions from new perspectives, but often I confess that I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about.

http://peterrollins.net/blog/?p=1570

here I stand? reflection

2011-01-09T18:00:00.002Z

I'm in the middle of a series trying to set out where I've reached in my thinking about how to describe my faith today. The previous parts are these:

here I stand ? the introduction

here I stand? part 5: spiritual formation

This post is just a reflective aside.

In writing this blog - and particularly this series - I'm often painfully aware that I'm not a theologian. I'm reasonably well-read; I have a reasonable mind-map of the relevant topics, but I'm not well acquainted with how to contribute in a way that meets the norms of the discipline. That much will be evident to the reader.

That's a curious tension: I've always distrusted professional theology because it seems to take the faith which belongs to all believers and turn it in to an academic discourse in which only the best-educated can participate. And yet, trust it or not, I am aware afresh how hard it is to join in.

I have lots of questions. This little "here I stand" series reflects that. Though there are some things I just don't believe any more (and there are a few new things that I believe perhaps) far more of this is about how I believe rather than what I believe. Asking questions seems a fair thing to do: but I realise that the more I question the less I am in the middle of the mainstream.

This series was prompted by a question from James encouraging me nail what my issues and problems are. Am I still an Evangelical? Well of all I have read so far, I have most sympathy for - indeed, tend to agree with - McLaren, Jones, and Tomlinson. They have done more than ruffle a few feathers in the Evangelical world, so if they are exiting that label, then so, I guess, am I. And they're more eloquent than me, too.

here I stand? part 5: spiritual formation

2011-01-09T17:38:00.000Z

After a break, I'm returning to my series trying to set out where I've reached in my thinking about how to describe my faith today. The previous parts are these:

here I stand ? the introduction

Now I want to think about spiritual formation.

How does one develop as a Christian? The Evangelical answer would have something about personal 'quiet times' with daily bible reading and prayer - coupled with weekly attendance at a service of worship, and preferably some kind of small group for bible study, prayer, and mutual encouragement (or, just possibly, mutual accountability). Other sections of the Christian church would have different mixes of mostly similar things. Some would speak of word and sacrament, for example.

Some of the spiritual practices adopted by some of those with the 'emerging' label - and those who have transcended the label, no doubt - are quite a departure from this. Frost's book told me of a "church" which consists of a group who go water-skiing each Sunday. Others meet with like-minded people in coffee shops ("neutral third spaces" for those who can afford the coffee!). Blogging and tweeting and commenting replace earlier forms of study. Action involves practical aid, or promoting ethical investments through Kiva, and so on.

The GenerationX response to the open-ended "small group" commitment has been the rise of the church-run, limited term course. Alpha is the example par excellence, of course, but there are plenty of others, not just for "new Christians", but to develop all kinds of skills, spiritual understanding, or practical abilities. Alpha has always bothered me slightly, but in my new questioning mode, I'm not sure I can handle a presentation which assumes there are simple right answers to questions - and assumes some naive apologetics along the way. I confess to being more interested in Rollins' idea of an Omega course: un-learning the things that should never have bound us in the first place.

What happens - and what should happen - when Christian people gather together. Should a pattern established in the sixteenth century guide us? Should we be bound up with the music and poetry of the nineteenth century, or be attempting to mimic the slickest of contemporary television - whether that's Ophra, or The X-Factor or something else? Is simplicity better? Is less more? Where does the idea come from that singing some songs and listening to a (too-often rambling, in my own case) preacher is "divine service"? With all the media available to us today, is a live third-rate speaker really preferable to a video watched in my own home anyway? There are many cultural expectations of what church is all about, but are they to be indulged or rejected? Some want to recover the practice of the first-century New Testament church. Is that possible? Even if it is, is it desirable?

Those outside the Christian community find their beliefs, morals, practices, shaped by all kinds of media which some believers may seldom touch - and certainly don't have a theology for. How can the Christian understanding of - and theology of - formation be essentially unchanged from centuries past? No wonder Christians often seem out of touch. I exaggerate for effect, of course, but I think that too easily we fail to grow up because we fail to engage with how people live today, we fail to make the most of the insights brought us by psychology, we mis-represent what living as a Christian is all about.

here I stand? part 4: mission

2010-11-21T17:55:00.000Z

I'm blogging about things I might believe differently now than I once did. The introduction is the place to start. This post follows on from the discussion of gospel and salvation, to ask of the implication for mission.

If walking in the way of Christ is what the gospel is all about, what is the implication for mission?

There's a curious tension in much Christian mission activity. On the one hand it sees that the scripture is full of a rich picture of what it is to walk in the light of God - tales of creation, liberation, and reconciliation, as MacLaren would have it. On the other, the objective seems often simply to be to bring people under conviction of sin, to repent and pray a prayer of commitment. The question to be asked about strangers (or an organisation or group) is not to ask whether they display the fruit of the spirit, but are they "committed Christians". This appears to me an absurd parody of salvation - indeed, if we wanted to talk Reformation language, it seems to re-instate a salvation by works, the main work being that repentance and commitment.

The gospels do call us to repentance - but then into a rich, holistic, joined-up life. How can we have taken Jesus' teaching and decided that the most important part was what written by Paul - say Romans 3:23 (even forgetting verse 24 very often)? I liked the premiss of Kimball's They Like Jesus, but not the Church for this very reason. Jesus, and what he is reported as saying and doing, is altogether wonderful, radical, and life-changing. His teaching is as fresh and relevant today as ever.

But we get hung up on our own sense of morality and forget to love our neighbour as ourselves.

Because we have buildings to maintain and salaries to pay, we easily see mission as the means of ensuring that our particular activity is still running tomorrow, and next year.

We buy into some pre-scientific weird metaphysics and imagine it needs to be a central message for people today.

We are so busy being righteous that we forget that Jesus kept company with prostitutes, extortionists, and rebels.

In a Europe obsessed with a particular view of human rights, we are increasingly keen to stand on ours, rather than standing up for those without a voice.

There are a lot of shouty people out there who want to say that faith is over, that the state and society must be aggressively atheist (or at least, secular), that (paradoxically) in order to protect people's religious beliefs we must de-privilege religious narratives. And there are other people telling us that atheism is actually in decline, that faith matters more now than it has for decades - centuries perhaps, and this is seen in endless court cases, religious leaders in the media, and many, many high-profile politicians with faith of one sort and another.

And alongside that hubbub, we have the meek man of Galilee who said "Love your neighbour as yourself". If that were the basis for mission, how happy we'd be.

review: Misquoting Jesus

2010-11-21T17:20:00.000Z

Misquoting Jesus: The story behind who changed the bible and why
Bart D. Ehrman

In our age of first ubiquitous printed material and latterly instant text-based communications, we tend to assume that a text is fixed and immutable, that we can know what somebody said, and we can enquire as to whether they stand by it. Writing is a big part of my professional life, and any writer knows the frustration and surprise which comes from having someone else edit one's words - even if the editing leads to an over-all improvement. Yet I also know that for all the ease of transmission, many of the papers I work with appear in a number of versions, conference and journal variants, as well as invited book chapters and technical reports and all the rest. One just tends to assume that similar papers say similar things - even if one goes to great lengths to eliminate flaws in later versions of one's own work.

We easily forget that it was not always thus: that there was a time when all manuscripts were copies; when variants arose and got copied, and the variant readings became dominant. The variations in copies of my own work are as nothing compared to the variations in the many manuscripts we have of the new testament.

This book is a systematic account of the reason we have so many manuscripts, and how they differ, and what the church has done about it. Here, Ehrman tells the story of how variations came about (very largely through copying by amateur scribes in the earliest years of Christainity), why they came about (through mistakes, and through well-meaning attempts to improve the text), and where they are to be found in the New Testament (in changes great and small).

The account is very accessible - bordering on the patronizing at times perhaps: I get the impression that this is a popularized version of some of his more scholarly writing. Surely most of us have noticed the footnotes that tell us to beware the last few verses of Mark's gospel, or the account of the woman taken in adultery. Perhaps, too, we have noticed the occasional footnotes in, say, the NIV, which give variant readings for all manner of passages. Ehrman seems to assume we have ignored all of those - but then goes on to paint a fulsome picture of the reasons for and significance of a number of those alternatives, so I can forgive him for treating me like an incurious naive reader. Although he dwells on a handful of examples (no doubt the more juicy ones), he observes that the collection of manuscripts known to us displays literally thousands of variant readings. The methods for trying to guess what the original may have been are indeed like a detective story.

The book is topped and tailed with accounts of Ehrman's own faith - or, rather, how he began biblical studies with a strong evangelical notion of inerrancy as a 'born again Christian' but arrived at a point of "seeing the bible as a very human book, with very human points of view". As I understand it, he would no longer describe himself as a Christian at all. The introduction surveys the steps in this process; the conclusion looks at the philosophy and hermeneutics which flow from the scholarship surveyed in the book. What sense is there in believing in inerrancy of the original text if that text is now lost to us? Worse, why would the Almighty go the trouble of providing inerrant scriptures and then not preserve them for our reading?

The standard evangelical response to the textual variations is to say that none of them touch upon important matters of doctrine. Ehrman challenges this, observing that some significant, well-known stories are in doubt. And if you set great store by that "All scripture is God-breathed and is useful ..." line, well, how can you decide which are the unimportant bits?

I guess - though I haven't really delved into it - that as a former Evangelical who became an ex-Christian largely through studying the bible, Ehrman is something of a bogey-man in your average bible college. If we are to take scholarship seriously and receive the bible without a naive simplicity (which it doesn't deserve), then voices like his must be listened to with care: I find much of what he says very persuasive. I shall read more of what he has to say.

not-so new international version

2010-11-19T21:49:00.000Z

This is a little depressing, though a few little searches on biblegateway.com suggests that at least some of the TNIV's readings have been retained.

here I stand? part 3: gospel and salvation

2010-11-13T12:01:00.002Z

I'm blogging about things I might believe differently now than I once did. The introduction is the place to start. This is an essay on how I'm trying to understand what being saved is all about.

One day, when I was a graduate student, one of my friends put me on the spot and forced me to explain the gospel, as if to a dying man. I think he wanted to check that I was 'sound'. At the time, I demurred, arguing that I wasn't fond of the hypothetical and that any real discussion would have a context. But eventually I think I passed the test: I successfully explained the evangelical gospel.

For it is, surely, a sectarian idea of the gospel which gets propounded in the churches of my acquaintance. Perhaps you could point to a broad sweep of reformation thinking and say that there is a protestant gospel, but even within that picture you would find nuanced accounts. Whether its the TULIPs of Calvinisim or the tongues of Pentecostalism, or, in classic opposition to the first, the wider doors of Arminianism. I've heard it said that the chief ongoing dispute between Protestants and Catholics stems from differing definitions of the term 'justification' - the former seeing it as a one-off; the latter having it encompass what the former would call 'sanctification'. I don't know if that's a fair characterization, but it sounds plausible. And then, at opposite extremes you have gospels of universalism on the one hand and a very particular elect (144,000) for the JWs - many would deny that either of these is a Christian doctrine, I guess.

Presumably, all of this matters very much. Is the objective of evangelism that those outside the church should come to understand that they are sinners, alienated from God, that Jesus died for their sins, and that they need to pray the sinner's prayer? Or is that born of a mis-reading of Paul's response to the Philippian gaoler's question "What must I do to be saved?" For that man and a great number of others in the New Testament, baptism followed immediately - are we propounding a New Testament faith if we do otherwise? Is mental assent to a series of propositional truths the essence of salvation, anyway?

Though we get some of this sense from Paul's sermons, you can't really - with integrity - describe the whole evangelical gospel from a single passage of scripture. Your handy tract on "Two ways to live" or "Journey into life" or "The bridge" or whatever, draws on proof texts from all over the new testament. If there was a single way to describe the gospel, wouldn't you expect to find it all together somewhere? Preferably in the teaching of Jesus?

I skated over the line above "Jesus died for their sins" above, but similarly, in the doctrine of the atonement we have a great many pictures on offer in the bible. And too easily, I think, we impose our particular favourites onto proof texts that could mean all sorts of other things. So penal substitutionary atonement has its firm proponents and trenchant critics, both arguing from scripture and both arguing that the other's perspective is nonsensical and unbiblical. [hm. my spell-checker didn't like 'unbiblical' and suggested 'Republican' instead. LOL]. These are not unimportant peripheral topics, they go to the heart of what Christian faith is all about. So it bothers me that I sincerely doubt that most sitting in our churches - our evangelical churches - could explain more than one, or at most two, pictures of what the atonement is all about, and the extent to which the pictures support and reinforce one another.

Perhaps I'm pessimistic in the preceding paragraph, but my preacher's experience, and my experience of bible study groups doesn't fill me with confidence. My fear is that we spend too long defining the gospel in terms of propositions that must be believed, and too little defining it in terms of living lives characterized by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Is that a retreat from a gospel of salvation by grace, through faith, not by works? Not at all, but I'll settle for mustard-seed-sized faith.

Walking with God doesn't, surely, depend on being able to explain Christus Victor any more than it means being able to draw the pictures of two ways to live. It does mean following in the way of the risen Christ. Isn't that what the gospel is all about?

here I stand? part 2: scripture

2010-11-09T19:30:00.000Z

I'm blogging about things I might believe differently now than I once did. The introduction is the place to start. This is an essay on where the bible fits in to that way of thinking.

First off, I think we can safely ignore the position which speaks of plenary literal verbal inspiration, and connects this with a strong notion of inerrancy. I've never believed that, and find it very unsatisfactory. Not least because all but the oddest of its adherents ascribe those characteristics only to "scripture as originally given" - something which is lost to us through the hands of scribes and copyists - so that the whole issue becomes rather a hypothetical one. And that's not even touching on the question of how the canon came about. However, it is worth lingering near that inerrancy idea for two reasons: firstly, because other watered-down notions of infallibility sometimes sail very close to the strong position (and do themselves an injury in the process), and second because those who want to knock down scripture as useless will often set up an inerrant straw man to knock down. So we must beware that we stand where we mean to stand.

Of course, that choice is a crucial one: the way that we receive the scripture affects so much. I came across a conservative Evangelical (sorry, I forget who it was) who remarked that by looking at what someone believes about women's ministry we learn all we need to about their attitude to scripture. I think he may well be right. I've written before about how that issue essentially re-moulded my thinking on how to read and interpret the bible. I respect those who think that you can take a somewhat conservative position and yet reach an inclusive opinion, but I admit that deep-down that seems like what Orwell called double-think. To summarise my earlier post: however you look at the details, Paul doesn't seem to anticipate men and women playing interchangeable roles in the church, as many of us assume today - but that doesn't mean that we, in our context, have to agree with him.

So I want to receive scripture with care and with great respect - but without the sometimes naive reading which says "the bible says it so I must do it". Far too much interpretation goes into the reading for that to be allowable. Far too often we do lip-service to interpretation in context, but then proceed to make the most egregious leaps in proof-texting. Too often, there is a cursory acknowledgement that there are different kinds of literature in the bible - and then suddenly an attempt to "prove" something by reference to a piece of poetry. I find it rather refreshing that emerging church writers don't tend to litter their work with footnotes and bible references - not because they want to propound something heterodox (necessarily!) simply because they assume a grown-up reader who can weigh the whole of a passage, or book, or biblical theme.

McLaren has a nice take on this in his A New Kind of Christianity. There he contrasts receiving the "bible as constitution", with the "bible as library". I think that's rather a good summary of the shift. It's no less reverent, no less inclined to ask the Holy Spirit to speak to us through the text, but much less likely to have us say "God says it, I believe it, that settles it."

I've referred, too, to the quote from Tomlinson: "Only the doggedly rationalist mind imagines that truth is equated solely with fact." A large number of Christians receive certain parts of the bible as myth: the first eleven chapters of Genesis particularly so, or the book of Jonah; maybe the book of Job. Saying that they're not set out as historical fact does not diminish them or their message; it doesn't imply that any writer set out to deceive or mislead us. It just reminds us that there are lots of different kinds of literature contained within the pages of scripture. To how many other parts of the text might we apply the same analysis? Well, there, Evangelicals quickly part company with others - even if evidence for the Exodus is scant, archaeological ties to King David hard to find, and so on. Faced with overwhelming evidence, many have rejected a 'literal' reading of Genesis (not that such a reading was completely pervasive in antiquity, it seems), but have been unwilling to go further and compare what they read in the bible with the best available evidence outside.It the historicity of these things necessary? Is it likely?What should be our working assumption? Or, is the point of the virgin birth supposed to be a historical fact, or principally a useful picture? As I said when I reviewed Tomlinson's book, he quietly dissuaded me from the former.

It is naive, though, to imagine that we can easily undertake this shift, or do so without significant consequences. The author of the first chapters of Genesis - even if separated by a millennium or more from the events described - gave us all those genealogies to tie them onto the more historical-sounding material. Even if we assume a certain latitude in the meaning of 'beget', that link is still made. Jesus could speak of the apocalypse coming "as it was in Noah's day" - should we read that as meaning he believed in Noah (and does that mean we should?) or can we read it rather like "as Banquo said to Macbeth". When Paul said that in Adam all die, was he speaking literally or figuratively? I don't think it is satisfactory to fudge these things - though we need humility to admit when we don't have the answer. My answer, consistent with the stuff higher up, is to say that Paul may have believed in Adam as a historical fact, but that doesn't mean that we must.

So, I think there are two shifts in my thinking. First is to say that although the bible is true (countless generations have proven this in their experience), there are many, many things in it which are not to be received as facts: including many things which I would previously have seen that way. The second is more subtle, but eventually much more profound: it's that library vs constitution thing. I don't think this diminishes the authority of scripture, but others may differ: I'll certainly agree that it changes profoundly our practice in interpreting it. I say 'our', but of course I'm thinking mostly of Evangelicals, or more broadly Protestants. Those standing in other Christian traditions have long received the scripture in different ways anyway. Casting our eyes wider, to the methods and exegesis of other scholars seems like rather a good idea.

here I stand ?

2010-11-07T21:40:00.037Z

Well, James suggested that after a while of saying I didn't feel like an Evangelical any more, it was time to try to nail what the issue (or issues) is (or are). I tend to be rather conciliatory when speaking face-to-face, and rather naturally slot into Evangelical language which is so deeply ingrained on my psyche. So maybe a blog post will help.

The first problem of definition arises because a lot of the changes I've seen in how I believe are not so much rejections of old things as embracing of the new. And where I do think I've stopped holding to the former things, it's often not so much an out-and-out repudiation, as a shift of emphasis. Although I've realised in a few stark ways that people I once regarded as fellow-travellers I now regard with great suspicion, far more often I just want to replace a hand which holds tightly to some doctrine to one which has a looser grip. Often I want to say "isn't there another way to look at this", or I'm just happy to replace certainty with doubt.

Doing such things doesn't immediately lead you to give up entirely on former understandings. It's more about a way of believing than a set of beliefs. And yet, for all that Evangelicals (and a wider Protestant church) have tended to define themselves by propositional statements and nice black-and-white answers, it is the way of believing which is just as important. So I can tick all the boxes, and still not believe like an Evangelical, because I no longer have the same approach to what believing is all about. Periodically I go and re-read the doctrinal basis of the Evangelical Alliance, to see if it's time to resign my membership. I'm finding some of the clauses a bit shaky, but I don't actually disbelieve any yet - or didn't, last time I seriously considered it. I just wouldn't sum up the faith that way.

I've never been entirely enamoured with such doctrinal statements: I remember my great amusement as an undergraduate at the DB being read aloud prior to the installation of a new OICCU president: the words seemed to be treated with more reverence than scripture. And I was very enamoured of Rob Bell's illustration that doing theology ought not to be like defending a wall (made from bricks of systematic theology) but rather like jumping on a trampoline, and inviting others to jump too (the springs being capable of being taken out - in small number - and flexed, stretched, and investigated, without making the whole thing collapse).

I'm not likely to get thrown out of the church for stretching a few springs, but you might have guessed that I think there's more going on than that. So, over the next few posts - which could take some time - I want to explore some totemic issues where my thinking has developed. I think the list might be something like this (but this isn't necessarily a table of contents for the next few blog posts):

the bible
the gospel and salvation
prayer (perhaps a reprise of this post)
belief (perhaps a reprise of several recent posts)
existence
spiritual formation
the gathered life of the church
sexuality

I feel as if this could be an awfully big adventure. Perhaps there's a lot riding - for me, and my role in Northway Church - on what I say next. But perhaps the time has come to start saying it and see what happens.

Reformed Boot Camp

2010-11-02T21:06:00.000Z

This raises so many questions for me.

I know I regularly vow never to comment on the Driscoll stuff, and then I fail.

The info on the Facebook page also sets me off. The first sentence gives me chills.

God is moving and creating a resurgence of young reformed church planting movements. Time magazine recently called this movement the third most world-changing idea in America. This conference will bring in a handful of the movement's leaders to connect what is happening today to what has happened in the past and to give a solid biblical theology of the Spirit and his work.

The third most world-changing idea in America? For just $150. Plus a $9.24 booking fee. Wow.

review: Christ Church, Oxford Cathedral

2010-10-17T20:32:00.001+01:00

The church: Christ Church, Oxford Cathedral
Denomination: Church of England (Anglican)
The building: The building is impressive and eclectic. It is part of Christ Church, and wholly surrounded by the college.
The church: This is the cathedral church of the diocese of Oxford, and also the college chapel. Somehow it manages this split personality: but I'm not sure it makes for a close-knit congregation. By its nature, it has several distinct sub-communities.
The neighborhood: City-centre Oxford; the heart of the University.
The cast: About five clergy (I didn't see any names); a verger in a cassock covered by a curious (i.e. not Oxford) black gown; a choir of around 10 men and 10 boys.
The date & time: Sunday 17th October, 6.00pm Christ Church time (which is 6.05pm British Summer Time).

I haven't been to Christ Church for years - I'm guessing, about 15. On a whim, I thought I'd drop in to Evensong, and see what's what. I remembered a fairly low-church austere set-up, with no announcements or concession to those unfamiliar with the service. I found an even lower set-up (all the genuflection has disappeared! and the odd bows in the Gloria patri, and no one making the sign of the cross at 'the resurrection of the body' in the creed), and a few interruptions to the liturgy of the 'now turn to page 45, paragraph 2' kind - which disappointed me a little.

What was the name of the service?
Choral Evensong
How full was the building?
Probably about 25% - but it has many parts, so it's hard to say.
Did anyone welcome you personally?
Someone handed me a service booklet; I'm not sure that they actually spoke.
Was your pew comfortable?
Not bad.
How would you describe the pre-service atmosphere?
Quiet and reserved.

What were the exact opening words of the service?

Welcome to Christ Church.

What books did the congregation use during the service?

A booklet set out the liturgy for the service; the hymn book (a new one on me; I forget the name) was needed for the two hymns; the prayer book was used for the psalm; and another booklet listed the psalms, hymns, and music chosen for the day.

What musical instruments were played?
Organ. And the choir - is the choir an instrument? They played a big role in the service.

Did anything distract you?
Not much. The chap sitting in front of me elected not to kneel for the prayers. He didn't even adopt a 'non-conformist crouch', preferring to sit bolt upright, so I found myself breathing down his neck, quite literally.

Was the worship stiff-upper-lip, happy clappy, or what?

Low and Liturgical. Cathedral worship in the finest Anglican tradition. The choir is probably still being broken in, as it were, it being the start of a new academic year. There was nothing wrong with the music, but nothing really stood out, save a curious emphasis/intonation in the psalm.

Exactly how long was the sermon?

Sermon? This was evening prayer. No sermon.
On a scale of 1-10, how good was the preacher?
Who needs a preacher?

Which part of the service was like being in heaven?

A sense of peace, of measured, dignified worship.

And which part was like being in... er... the other place?

Kneeling with my nose in someone else's back.

What happened when you hung around after the service looking lost?

Oh, I don't think you do that at the cathedral.

How would you feel about making this church your regular (where 10 = ecstatic, 0 = terminal)?

Oh, I don't think you do that at the cathedral. Well, I suppose some people do. But that would be a 0 for me.

Did the service make you feel glad to be a Christian?

Yes.

What one thing will you remember about all this in seven days' time?

The great familiarity of the liturgy (I gave up on the booklet half-way through the first page), and the surprise at not having any genuflecting to do.

Post-script: the organ voluntary was some kind of variations of the theme of the Westminster Chimes. Truly Bizarre. A glance at wikipedia suggests to me it was probably by Vierne. It was certainly in his style.

do you believe?

2010-10-05T21:05:00.000+01:00

Do you believe in ghosts? Do you believe in miracles? Do you believe in the supernatural? In spirits? In life after death? In literal plenary inspiration? In the Virgin Birth?

Christianity seems to be based on most of those (spot the odd one out!). And to those of a modern mind-set, they are concepts from the pre-scientific age. They are best dismissed as fantasy or mistakes, as neat ideas which turn out to be unsupported by evidence: like alchemy, the ether, or scientific determinism. Healing - like homoeopathy - is readily explained by the placebo effect; some other miracles by the human propensity to see patterns where none exist. As far as we can tell, the laws of physics (and other branches of science; indeed the laws of information theory which some now think make a better foundational theory than particle physics) are uniform and immutable across time and space - albeit with special perturbations near singularities and the big bang.

The last bit is, I fear, code for saying 'we're still working that bit out'. Since we plainly do not know everything yet - and some have begun to say that actually we never will; that the enlightenment itself is running out of steam - it is a little surprising that some will go so far as to say 'there is no such thing as ...', or even perhaps 'I don't believe in ...". It's a reasonable short-hand, but we can hardly say it's an accurate, scientifically supported statement: it's hard, after all, to prove a negative.

So, I think I'd rather prefer a different kind of dialogue. If we offer a Christianity based on miracles ("they happen today") we alienate a lot of scientifically-minded people. If we major on bizarre bits of the supernatural, we are liable to persuade people - at least the kind of people I mix with daily - that we are nutters. So let's not do it.

I'm not going to go so far as to say there are no miracles: we have much too much to learn about the world to say that there are no mechanisms which suspend the regular laws of physics. But I don't think it's very helpful to talk about them. If we're going to read biblical accounts of impossible things, I'd certainly rather dwell on the message and the point, rather than on their historicity. Does that defame the God of scripture? Is it dishonest?

the other point of view

2010-10-03T21:25:00.000+01:00

I saw something recently - I forget where, sorry - that in days of yore when people studied rhetoric, prior to the start of any debate, each antagonist was required to state the argument of the other. They had to satisfy each other that they understood the main points of the other's point of view, before trying to persuade anyone against it.

I don't know if that's a true characterization, but it's an attractive thought. Of course, in any dialectic one seeks to nullify each argument of the opponent, but too often we fail to grasp what's really on the mind of those we disagree with. Politicians seem to be particularly bad at this - the objective observer can see them scoring points against each other (all too often ad hominem, or against infelicities in the presentation) instead of engaging with the argument itself. This is either naive small-mindedness, or wilful misrepresentation. Neither is very attractive.

Sadly, the same thing seems to be all over the blogosphere in the 'Christian' blogs. The amount of bile poured out upon those perceived as somewhat heterodox sometimes takes my breath away. So much of it seems to come from those who don't want to see the other's point of view. I looked earlier today for some emerging church commentary/perspective on the Alpha course. Instead - as is the nature of a google search - I found endless blogs denouncing both as the anti-Christ. (Incidentally, one of the best, most balanced commentaries that I found on Alpha came from an atheist Nature editor, in the Guardian.)

Would that we had grace to understand properly the things that others would have us believe. And would that they too would engage and grasp that with which they would argue. Too much apologetics is quite introspective, built upon successive evangelical arguments, rather than being tested by real engagement with those who would wish to dismiss it all - which, in turn, makes it easy to dismiss because its content is rubbish. That doesn't honour the gospel; that doesn't direct people to the wonderful person of Christ - and that's the real shame.

faith and doubt and scholarship (part 2)

2010-09-28T21:10:00.000+01:00

A very different perspective on the previous questions occurs to me.

A friendly theologian explained to a member of the housegroup the difference between the assumptions made by scholarship and the assumptions made by faith. Hence, the confessing student approaches the text with the general assumption of truth; the unbelieving - or sceptical - mind-set requires proof.

And that in turn reminded me of a contrast someone made between the Oxford Theology Faculty - which sets out to be academic and objective - and the confessing faculties of some Universities, particularly (when mentioned) those in Switzerland. In the latter, we would find a generally very different approach to these questions. Indeed, the point was made that in the Oxford faculty, the question "how would the Catholics approach this" is a good one; in the Protestant confessing faculty in Geneva, the same question would be inadmissible and irrelevant.

And I'm left wondering which actually makes for better scholarship. The scientist in me says that the approach which is sceptical and aspires to be objective is best. But I wonder if that extends generally. Let us leave aside silly arguments about scepticism in the study of anthropogenic climate change. I wonder how many non-socialists you find studying Marxist economic theory. I wonder how many misogynists you find in women's' studies. I wonder how many Platonists you find studying intuitionistic logic. And so much else besides.

I may be mistaken, but we tend to assume that people are allowed to hold worldviews consistent with the research they undertake. But for students of religion it's not so good. Or is it?

oh my

2010-09-27T14:43:00.000+01:00

I used to have a lot of respect for Gerald Coates - whacky house church/'new churches' leader as he was. I haven't heard anything of him for years. Then I saw this (h/t The Register) which, I'm afraid, is too bizarre by half. Even if the newspaper story is half made up, as most seem to be, it doesn't sound good.

faith and doubt and scholarship

2010-09-26T21:43:00.000+01:00

At our homegroup last week, we watched a lecture about the Old Testament, by a Dr Amy-Jill Levine. This was the introduction to a long series - which we may or may not watch - so she was setting out her whole perspective. This involved discussing the various kinds of literature in the OT, and briefly touching on their literary influences and historical/archaeological evidence.

In one sense, it was unremarkable stuff. A little dated in places, but nothing you wouldn't hear in a run-of-the-mill theological college. Even though she advanced her own opinion that King David didn't necessarily exist as a real historical figure, I'd say that her perspective wasn't really more radical than you'd hear even in a fairly evangelical school (but I may be wrong, because I don't tend to hang out in theological colleges).

But those are things you don't hear from the pulpit in an evangelical church. Describing the early chapters of Genesis as 'myth' is a bit of a red rag to people accustomed to thinking that believing the bible is God's word means believing that everything which seems like it might be history is ... well, a forensic account worthy of Simon Schama, or Lord Dacre, or whoever your favourite historian might be. Suggesting that it might not have been written down until the time of the Exile, that as a result its account of events a thousand or more years earlier might be patchy, is liable to evince harrumphs and bristly responses. Suggesting that the early chapters of Genesis have material in common with the myths of Babylon, and the former might have been written in knowledge of the latter, is tantamount to some awful crime.

Where did it all go wrong? How did receiving the bible as God's word come to mean leaving hold of our critical faculties? If there's scant extra-biblical evidence for the Exodus, does it really destroy our faith to say so? Can you really read the book of Judges as if it were written according to the literary conventions of enlightenment Europe? Would it be so bad to fess up and say that Job and Jonah have more in common (in terms of historicity) with Falstaff or King Arthur than Queen Victoria or Winston Churchill?

Is that kind of doubt destructive? I don't think so. In fact, I think it's essential. Creation versus evolution has become the totemic issue for scholarship versus 'literal' biblical interpretation, but the same kind of issues arise over and over again. That's not to say that the scholarship should be accepted uncritically - a lack of archaeological evidence is not at all the same thing as a 'proof that it never happened'. But if Christian piety remains detached - and divergent - from the best high-quality thinking about its own core text, then it can only be impoverished, naive, and irrelevant. Can't it?

Is There a Future for Evangelicalism?

2010-09-13T21:58:00.000+01:00

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald asks this question over the Huffington Post. It's a shame he has an almost entirely US-centric answer - it half-defeats the point of the question, I'd say.

review: Enemies of Reason

2010-09-11T21:35:00.000+01:00

Review: Enemies of Reason / Slaves to Superstition
More 4/Richard Dawkins

Channel 4 has a series in homage to, and presented by, Richard Dawkins. I think some or all of it is repeated, but I didn't see it first time around. Earlier episodes featured his now-familiar criticism of religion, and Christianity in particular.

Now, I'm watching a recording of a later episode on Slaves to Superstition. He's been chasing down and ridiculing horoscopes, spiritualism, dowsing, conspiracy theorists, and more, with his familiar blend of scepticism and scientism. He explains the benefit of believing verifiable evidence over private feeling.

And I'm inclined to agree with him. Every bit. Science offers us strong, valuable insight into our world's systems. It has advanced medicine beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors. All this random spiritualism is largely flim-flam, with no substance and no real benefit - no impact beyond what you'd expect from random processes. Indeed, this line came from the middle of the programme:

Even in the 21st century, despite all that science has revealed about the indifferent vastness of the universe, the human mind remains a wanton story-teller, creating intention in the randomness of reality.

The whole thing is a bit of a hymn to rationalist enlightenment thinking,without a hint of any cracks in the edifice. His calm rational interviews of spiritualists, exposing their bizarre nonsense, is of course amusing. That their ways of thinking may give comfort and help is discarded: founded on nothing at all, their influence can only be malign. I think I agree.

And so two things bother me:

for what good reason do I think that Christian faith is any different?
is Richard going to be intellectually honest enough to ask whether the same purblindness afflicts the scientific community? It's much easier to build a theory based on the convenient data, and discard that which doesn't seem to fit. I don't suggest that a major scientific calumny is being committed - but I have to wonder whether it is more of a common human trait to discard the evidence that doesn't fit.

review: Re-enchanting Christianity

2010-08-30T21:03:00.000+01:00

Re-enchanting Christianity: faith in an emerging culture
Dave Tomlinson

I love this book. So much of the serious thinking about emerging things has come from a USA context. Most of the UK contribution has been around the alt.worship perspective, rather than creative thinking about understanding the faith itself in the 21st century (I over-generalize, of course). However, Tomlinson is decidedly British, and writes a very engaging account - in a popular theology sort of way - of a constructive but genuinely up-to-date way to understand following Christ today.

If I carry on my generalized sweeping statements, his book The Post-Evangelical was about things that were going wrong with the evangelical church; this book is the counterpart describing where we might go instead. The writing is approachable: theological, but grounded on Tomlinson's own experience, and showing the wisdom which comes from his own pastoral ministry. Of course, this isn't a work of deep theology - I struggle with those - but here you will find lots of references to Moltman, Crossan, Borg, Ward, Wink, and others. Tomlinson has done his homework.

I quoted previously two stand-out quotes from the book. They do give quite a good sense of the kind of narrative you should expect. That seems to have been a long time ago: I needed to revisit the book after the first read, before reflecting on it.

This is not a book for the faint-hearted. Those who are new to asking difficult questions about Evangelical faith will either dismiss it as liberal nonsense or will find their minds well and truly blown. As for me, I believed in the historicity of the Virgin Birth when I started the book, and now, meh, I rather doubt it. It just kind-of evaporated, as I read Tomlinson's discussion of how we might hold on to the mystery through metaphor rather than through historical interpretation.

And the key is that here we are not presented with some nihilist deconstruction of all that we have held dear, but rather something which is overwhelmingly constructive - as the title suggests. Tomlinson is looking for ways that historical texts - and the Spirit of God - can speak to our present era, remaining true to both. His final paragraph is this:

Christian mission in the twenty-first century requires kingdom-oriented communities, places of radical inclusion and empowerment, which say: You are welcome - whatever your ethnic or cultural background, however you look or dress, whether you are a man or a woman, gay or straight, whether you earn a pittance or you're worth a fortune, whether you have kids, can't have kids, don't want to have kids, whether you are full of faith or riddled with doubts, whether you feel hopeful or fearful. Gregarious or withdrawn - YOU ARE WELCOME.

That's as good a summary as any of the church - the kingdom values - he's been describing in the book. It's all rather wonderful.

review: The Joneses

2010-08-22T19:28:00.001+01:00

Review: The Joneses

Flying from Sydney to London offers lots of opportunities for watching in-flight movies (over and over again): so here's a film I wouldn't otherwise have watched...

[mild spoilers apply: don't read on if you're easily upset about learning movie plots before seeing the movie; having said that, I'm not really giving all that much away]

The Jones are a model family: we first meet them moving into an idyllic community and getting to know their neighbours. All seems a little too good for a while: but we quickly learn that this veneer is not all it seems: the Jones are actually unrelated to each other; they are a 'family' manufactured by a marketing company in order to promote products to their unsuspecting neighbours. They work by product placement, by encouraging others to push their products, through exquisite parties, through always having the latest and best stuff.

Here, then, is a 'family' at the apogee of consumerism: driven by nothing whatsoever except conspicuous consumption designed to engineer jealousy - and sales. All goes well for a while, then tensions mount
and, as befits a black comedy, the consequences spiral out of control. Tragic events lead some of the characters to reconsider what's important in life - without really concluding that consumption is of itself problematic - as befits a Holywood movie.

The plain 'message' is thought-provoking enough, though falling short of any sort of call to radical action. The mischevious thought that occurs to me, though, relates to the similarities we might see between the Jones's lifestyle marketing, and what some have called lifestyle evangelism. The Jones become apparent friends with many, look out for people of power and influence, and hold memorable parties with the intention of showing off all that's glitzy and expensive in their marketer-designed home.

That really doesn't sound so different to some 'evangelism strategies' we might encounter. Ok, churches don't go to the lengths of manufacturing fake families to achieve this (why bother, when you can be in the business of helping create the real thing), and would indeed eschew falsehood. Well, officially false testimony is out of the question, but there are all kinds of things which tread that line pretty close: whether friendships purely made with ulterior motives, or a variety of 'bait and switch' techniques like 'questionnaire evangelism'.

The Joneses are living the dream - till 'Mr Jones', at least, wakes up from it. May we live the truth, instead.

Australian churches: reflection

2010-08-20T18:52:00.000+01:00

So, as I sit on the plane ready to go home (flat bed in business class - thank you, frequent flyer points), some reflection on my church reviews seems in order.

First, a caveat: all my 'reviews' were based on truly limited data. A church doesn't consist solely (or perhaps even chiefly) of its gathered life in its principal worship service: there is so much more to it than that. The visitor cannot really know what else is going on behind the scenes. But, for most churches, much of the time, the public worship is an indication of something: it contributes quite significantly to the shared story which the church members tell one another.

The script I borrowed for my reviews asked the question about how happy you would be to make this church a regular part of your life: it's an interesting gut reaction, really. Crave MCC got a low score, and yet, putting those three side-by-side, it would surely be the only one I'd seriously consider: with hindsight and reflection I think a significantly higher score would be accurate.

One reason for this is the following observation: for most of my life, I have tended to be quite a few years younger than the average age of congregations and prayer meetings I've attended. As I get older, that seems more and more anomalous: in particular, aged 42, I'd hope to see lots and lots of people around who are younger than me. And two of those churches just didn't come close to that. I'm really not ready to hang out exclusively with grey-haired folk just yet.

Do those churches - and countless others with similar demographics have a future? No doubt some do: some churches just work out well for an older community, and re-invent themselves for each age of retirees. But statistics tell us that the entire church in the west is ageing, and that congregations continue to close at quite a rate. Some of that closure is offset by new church plants. I don't know if the trend is still downwards, but I have a hunch that it is.

Surely it's difficult for an ageing fellowship to re-invent itself. Human nature doesn't lend itself to that, and churches tend to be among the most conservative organisations out there, designed quite carefully to resist change. By God's grace, change does happen: the church I formerly belonged to in Oxford faced certain closure, a little over 20 years ago, but instead a string of good things has happened, and for the last 15 years or so, it has been full of young families, with new births happening seemingly every week.

Prediction is difficult, (especially where the future is concerned, as the President of my College used to say). But in the UK and in Australia, it seems, the church as a whole has a lot of ageing congregations: my own church included. 20 years from now, things are going to look very different. Without some changes in our
demographics, not only are we going to dwindle, I'm going to be heading for retirement and finding the church empty when I get there.

It would be wrong to confuse demographics with rightness, or even relevance. Some churches of a historically very conservative disposition are thriving and 'relevant' - Driscoll's Mars Hill, for example, or another I read of recently in LA, Reality. Liberal churches haven't tended to be the kind of place packed to the doors. But there are many shades and different mixes - sometimes with counter-intuitive matches of membership and outlook. Many emerging churches have eschewed the everlasting search for numbers in place of trying to live intentionally as a community.

The simple conclusion is just to say that the big shift we've seen in church-going in the last 60 years or so hasn't really finished running its course yet. That's kind-of scary for us all, but particularly for those stuck in a kind of demographic cul de sac. Undoubtedly, some of those who offer a certain evangelical certainty are thriving: I wish them well, and hope it's not an unstable kind of life. The emerging model seems much more organic: it may not be taking the world by storm, it may go under many names, it may not be a model or a movement at all. But as an idea, it works for me.

blog management: comments

2010-08-19T21:48:00.000+01:00

After being spam-free for years, this blog has attracted spam almost daily for the last week or so.

To avoid this, I've added the captcha option to the comments form - where you have to type in the words you see, before your comment is posted. Comments are very welcome; encouraged, even: sorry that there's this extra hoop to jump through now.

review: Christ Church, Lavender Bay

2010-08-17T01:29:00.002+01:00

Here's the final review of my trip.     (again h/t to The Mystery Worshipper, with whom I have no affiliation, for the headings).

The church: Christ Church, Lavender Bay,  Sydney
Denomination:  Anglican Church of Australia.
The building: The building celebrated its centenary on the preceding Sunday. It's a fairly straightforward late 19th/early 20th century Anglican church. Probably seats about 250 people, I'd guess.
The church: The church is, I think, on reasonable terms with the wider evangelically-minded diocese of Sydney Anglicans, but would shy away from the more fundamentalist elements of that mindset. The congregation reflects its neighbourhood - see below - though skewed, I'd say, towards the upper age range of that demographic.
The neighborhood: Sydney's north shore is home to well-heeled professionals - a former Prime Minister of Australia lives nearby and attends the church.
The cast: Rector, Patrick Collins, associate minister Ross McDonald (I think; he didn't have a speaking part); and a a choir of five; plus two people who read lessons and one who led prayers.
The date & time: Sunday 15th August, 10am.

What was the name of the service?
Holy Communion
How full was the building?
Maybe 40-50%.Did anyone welcome you personally?
Yes. I was with a friend, and so we had many greetings and introductions.Was your pew comfortable?
Not too bad, really.
How would you describe the pre-service atmosphere?
Quiet and reserved.

What were the exact opening words of the service?

Welcome to Christ Church, Lavender Bay.

What books did the congregation use during the service?

A service sheet contained the hymns; the liturgy was in the Anglican Church of Australia prayer book (an interesting reversal from last week!)

What musical instruments were played?
Organ.

Did anything distract you?
Not a great deal, besides sitting under an enormous electric fire, blasting infra-red at me as if I needed toasting.

Was the worship stiff-upper-lip, happy clappy, or what?

Low and Liturgical. Four traditional-style hymns; spoken liturgy, with all the main bits included but none of the theatrical flights of fancy some are wont to indulge. A distinctive and rather endearing feature of the church's worship is that at the very end of the service, all are invited to share prayer requests - generally by going forward for prayer - and after a little quiet discussion, the Rector prays aloud for each, with as much or as little detail as is appropriate.

Exactly how long was the sermon?

Around 20 minutes. Maybe a little more.
On a scale of 1-10, how good was the preacher?
5, perhaps.

In a nutshell, what was the sermon about?

It was a bible study on the Psalm set for the day, Psalm 92. Praising God for who he is; regardless of adversity. Nothing earth-shattering; perhaps naive in places; but good devotional stuff.

Which part of the service was like being in heaven?

hmm. That's a toughie.

And which part was like being in... er... the other place?

Being roasted by the heater above me. It's not as if the weather was cold. These Sydney folks don't know when they have it good...

What happened when you hung around after the service looking lost?

Being with friends, I had plenty of people to talk to.

How would you feel about making this church your regular (where 10 = ecstatic, 0 = terminal)?

Probably under 5. There's nothing offensive here, but no edge, either. I'd be 10 years younger than the average age, at least, and that would bother me.

Did the service make you feel glad to be a Christian?

Yes, in a light, middle-class sort of way.

What one thing will you remember about all this in seven days' time?

Going to communion with the ex Prime Minister of Australia.

review: The post-Evangelical

2010-08-11T01:05:00.000+01:00

The Post-Evangelical
Dave Tomlinson

This book is proof that I am the late emerger: it was published in

1995, long before I had begun to think about most of the topics it

discusses: but it sums up rather well the state of my thinking about

two years ago. Tomlinson was a big cheese in the British House

Church/New Church movement, at its zenith in the late 80s and early

90s perhaps: this book represents his decisive move away from that way

of viewing things, into a new, more tentative, dare I say humble, way

of looking at the world and the gospel.

With the benefit of 15 years' hindsight, much of the narrative is

dated now. Those were the days in the UK of evangelical resurgance -

there was a strong sense that evangelical Christianity had seen off

its rivals and arrested the decline in church membership. Chapter two,

indeed, is called 'we've never had it so good'. The Evangelical

Alliance was at the height of its powers, Spring Harvest was the place

to be, and the Charismatics were no longer a fringe - as evidenced by

widespread interest in the Toronto Blessing.

How dated that all sounds now. The counterveiling concern of the time

was the growing phenomenon of the New Age. Where has that gone? I

suppose the sillier bits have died a natural death, and the rest has

become mainstream.

Tomlinson's thinking - radical at the time - has some way to go before

entering the mainstream, even now, I think: though it is very much in

line with several threads of the emerging church conversation: albeit

from a refreshingly British perspective. He talks of how, even at the

height of that rosy glow of cosy evangelicals in the early 1990s,

people were beginning to see cracks and problems; a growing

dissociation between the rhetoric and the realities of life.

He talks of a growing chasm between Evangelical 'culture' and that of

the rest of society. The former tend to assume that this is all the

fault of the latter - but there are so many ways in which this is not

so. He talks of new understandings of personal intellectual

development, of the fear of becoming 'wooly liberals', the impact of

postmodernsim and a new appraisal of what truth is all about.

That leads to a chapter on how we understand the bible - surely a

totemic Evangelical issue - with a rather wonderful swift dismissal of

inerrancy as a waste of time. The account is, however, far from

negative, full of fresh vision (for the time) of how the message of

Christ can be relevant for many in the 21st century. This hopefulness

is surely attractive.

I'm glad I bothered to read this book, 'old' as it is. This is a

great reminder of the wide range of threads feedings the present

conversation: and my own late engagement with it.

Tomlinson has a later book, which I've quoted from here, but not yet

reviewed. Some relections on it will follow soon.

practical ethics

2010-08-09T02:04:00.000+01:00

Sydney's CityRail staff are not selling or checking tickets today, as part of a labour dispute. Vending machines will still sell tickets, but barriers will, apparently, be open.

So should I buy a ticket? Perhaps I should discover some socialist principles I never knew I had, and out of solidarity with the workers, go out of my way to ride the trains for free. Or perhaps I should pay a just price for services rendered. Or perhaps I should just be cheap. Ah, dilemmas.

review: St James Church, Sydney

2010-08-08T09:27:00.001+01:00

Ok. This isn't going to become a habit. But, well, on the theme of visiting outside my normal experience, here's the highest service I've been to in many a long year. (again h/t to The Mystery Worshipper, for the headings, with whom I have no affiliation).

The church: St James, King Street, Sydney
Denomination: Anglican Church of Australia.
The building: This is the oldest church in Sydney, apparently. Built in 1824, in the style that was common at the time - a big rectangular box, tastefully decorated. The chancel was separated from the rest of us by railings and substantial flower arrangements, which made for quite a barrier. The organ was big enough to have pipes on both sides of the chancel
The church: Sydney's Anglicans tend to be a low church evangelical lot: St James is anything but. This is Anglicanism at its most ritual, with not just a choir and processions, but incense too - I think the service would have been at least five minutes shorter if it weren't for having to pause to cense things.
The neighborhood: This is about as city centre as you can get - surrounded by banks and businesses, and the city's central Hyde Park.
The cast: It felt like a cast of thousands: Revd Dr John Beer (honorary associate priest) was preacher and celebrant; there were several other robed clergy, plus four or five robed servers, a choir of about eight voices, and a couple of laypeople who did the reading and led the intercessions.
The date & time: Sunday 8th August, 11am.

What was the name of the service?
Choral Eucharist

How full was the building?
About 20% full, I'd say. The congregation probably numbered 70 or so - plus the 15 or so in the chancel!
Did anyone welcome you personally?
Someone smilingly gave me the books/sheets I needed. Many people greeted me at the peace.
Was your pew comfortable?
Fine - I didn't really notice, so it must have been, although a lot of the service was done standing up. Standing for the confession seemed, well, odd.
How would you describe the pre-service atmosphere?

Quiet and reserved.

What were the exact opening words of the service?

Christ is the King, O friends rejoice - the processional hymn, which began without much warning besides a few chords from the organ. The first spoken words were "Welcome to St James' church this morning"; the first liturgical words were "In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit".

What books did the congregation use during the service?

The English Hymnal (melody edition), a 'Eucharist at St James' booklet, and a pewsheet for the day, with the propers printed.

What musical instruments were played?
Organ. Lots and lots of organ.

Did anything distract you?
The organ.

Was the worship stiff-upper-lip, happy clappy, or what?

Full-on classic High Anglican. It'd be hard to get higher - save perhaps that the communion was in ordinary bread, and not a wafer: I don't know if that's a local decision or an imposition from the diocese. The setting that the choir sang was in Latin - no concession to Reform here.

Exactly how long was the sermon?
About 15 minutes, I'd say.
On a scale of 1-10, how good was the preacher?
Content: 8; delivery, hm, unstructured. 4.

In a nutshell, what was the sermon about?

The gospel reading was about storing up treasure in heaven, and this was the point of departure for the sermon: contrasted with the spectre of Antiques Roadshow or Cash in the Attic. What is the treasure? It is to reach out with God's love. [I'm selling it short here - there were lots of good thoughts in the sermon; I just couldn't quite string together an argument or a narrative from them.]

Which part of the service was like being in heaven?
The contemplation and space which structured, unhurried liturgical worship allows: to focus your thoughts on the one you have come to worship.

And which part was like being in... er... the other place?

The organ. Really, I love organ music in its place. But the communion setting was 'Plainsong: missa de Angelis, with Organ Alternatim'. The latter involved long organ solos, interspersed with unremarkable music for the choir (the choir were rather good). I say interspersed, but even when the choir were singing, the organ dominated (moreso in the Psalm than in the setting, actualy) . Several of the pieces ended with particularly noisy, long, organ crescendos - just about plausible in the gloria, but truly out of place in the benedictus.

What happened when you hung around after the service looking lost?

Shy old me, I took off quite quickly, with a brief genuflection (in contrast to the full bows that were around me).

How would you feel about making this church your regular (where 10 = ecstatic, 0 = terminal)?

That's a tough one. I get the feeling that there is some genuine spiritual life at work there. I could fit into the choir thing - if they'd have me. Doing the liturgical thing properly has always struck me as making more sense than the half-hearted attempts of some who are lower down the candle. But that service is pure theatre. It's more like a living museum than a way to engage with the good people of Sydney in 2010. The gospel procession, complete with incense, feels like something out of the middle ages (well, I suppose it probably is, quite literally). I'm glad we can worship in continuity with our forebears, but if we want to be missional, we need some point of connection. So on the one hand, I'd say 7; but on the other - and the hand that would win - I'd say 2.

Did the service make you feel glad to be a Christian?
Yes; in the sense that we inhabit a big tent, and are in historical continuity with the church at rest.

What one thing will you remember about all this in seven days' time?
The memorial on the wall beside me, to a gentleman who was first a civil servant in the colony of New South Wales, and rose to become the first Speaker in the NSW legislative assembly. And to his wife, who bore seventeen children, nine of whom survived to erect the memorial. [Hm. Wikipedia thinks someone else was the first Speaker. Oh well.]

what's in a name?

2010-08-07T08:16:00.000+01:00

The issue of who is allowed to marry whom seems to keep rumbling round American politics - and other places too. As far as I can tell - and I'm not hugely widely read on this - the issue in California comes down not to whether two men are allowed to tie the knot, but whether it's deemed 'marriage' or 'domestic partnership'. Though I'm sure that matters very much to some of the people involved, it does strike me that there's a kind of law of diminishing returns setting in when you try to make a distinction.

In the UK, 'civil partnerships' carry just about all the same rights and privileges as marriages (there are some peculiarities about how they are enacted, and the permitted role of churches in those, but it looks like those will soon be resolved). The result is that those entering civil partnerships seem invariably to call them weddings, and to use all the customary vocabulary thereafter. That seems to make sense, and be unobjectionable: there are many official functions which are known colloquially by words other than the government term; here is another. Conversely, if calling civil partnerships marriages would make their participants happier, then it doesn't seem as if society really has very much to lose by doing so.

Suggestions that making that equivalence undermines 'true' marriage seem quite unsustained by evidence: it's not as if people will confuse one for the other. It's not even as if those partnerships/marriages form a significant part of the total, still less that their existence should in some way change the nature of a more traditional kind of marriage in some way. Some will argue that whereas a civil partnership can be a matter of civil law, marriage is chiefly a religious notion. I'd like to see the anthropological evidence for that - it seems most implausible to me. Even from the Christian perspective, it's not as if the bible gives a thorough-going account of marriage: how one comes into being, and precisely what to do with all the unusual corner cases that arise. It gives us instead pictures of love and mutual fidelity - and a picture of the church relating to Christ.

It seems to me - not that I'm an anthropologist either - that marriage doesn't 'belong' to the state or the church. It is - rather self-evidently - a primitive notion that pre-dates either of those. Marriage is what happens when two people come together - in the presence of their community - and commit themselves to each other. Marriage is agreed in front of your friends, in front of your family, in front of the family friends who helped in your formative years. It is cemented with prayer if prayer is important to you - and good wishes if they matter to you. It is a time of happiness and rejoicing - because those being married are happy with each other.

There's a notion gaining popularity which says the civil union and the wedding should be separated - let the state do the first, and the church (or whatever gathered religious community you wish), if you wish, do the second. That has a certain clarity to it, and it would surely let some politicians out of a tight spot in allowing that all and sundry can do the first, in whatever combination they wish, but that the second happens on whatever terms the church (or whatever...) chooses. But it seems a cop-out to me. It seems to concede that spiritual life is an optional extra, not inherent to life itself. It seems like a retreat - as if the church wants to say to the wider society 'we have no interest in you, as long as we can keep our doctrine pure'. It seems unwise and unhealthy.

What if history had been different. What if we had taken Paul's words

"accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God."

seriously? What if Christians were known as those who brought good news to the poor; release for the oppressed; and all the rest? I can dream.

information runs the world

2010-08-04T10:39:00.000+01:00

I know I'm on a daily blogging roll - and it can't continue indefinitely. But today was rather interesting: despite being on holiday, I went to visit a colleague in one of Sydney's universities.

We fell to discussing some of the foundational theories of our discipline. He reminded me of a perspective I've heard of but not studied: namely that the theory of information (best associated with Claude Shannon) is regarded by some as a better grand theory of the universe than particle physics. A bit of googling tells me that this line of thought is known as digital physics (intrestingly, that wikipedia page doesn't, as I write, mention Shannon: proof that wikipedia is ever deficient).

Why is this of interest here? Simply because this line of discussion led my interlocutor to invoke an information-theoretic notion of God. As a young computer scientist, although I hed long recognised the hand of God in the beauty of mathematics, I never would have thought that my discipline would have anything of interest to say about theism. It's all rather exciting.

There are two reasons not to go into details here. One is that I don't understand them all. The other is that I don't think that any of you, dear regular readers, are information scientists. I'd be happy to continue the line of thought further, and clearly have some more reading to do. The idea is not unrelated to something raised by John Lennox, which I mentioned when I reviewed his book: "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." [Wow. I don't think I've ever quoted myself before :) ].

This mathematical corner of philosophy is close to my heart. I wouldn't want to over-claim, but the very notion that deep questions of metaphysics can arise in my professional life is rather exciting. That's all.

review: The Great Emergence

2010-08-03T11:39:00.002+01:00

The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why
Phyllis Tickle

I should begin with a confession. When I first started reading about the emerging (emergent, etc.) church I saw the name of Phyllis Tickle, and kind-of imagined that she was some kind of spoof. British comedienne Caroline Ahern has a character Mrs Merton who hosts a saucy chat-show. I quite thought that Phyllis was another Mrs Merton. I couldn't be more wrong.

Tickle is written up as 'founding editor of the Religion Department of Publishers Weekly': there's no obvious academic credentials here, but the book is thoughtful and well-read. It's a popular rather than scholarly book, yet is not simplistic in its treatment: it is easy to follow, but does not trivialize the subject material (I have no idea what a professional social historian might make of it).

For this is a broad-sweep social history Christianity: specifically, the branch which became Western Christianity. I say 'social history' but it's mixed, really: there's an underlying philosophical thread, too. The central idea is that every 500 years or so, the church has undergone profound change - and that we are in the middle of the latest one. The sixteenth century saw the Great Reformation; the eleventh, the Great Schism, and the sixth, er, Gregory the Great, who was the final tipping point between the Roman Empire of antiquity, and the new shape of Christendom in the Dark Ages. Yes, the last of those is a little arbitrary, and that slightly undermines the 500-year argument, but let's run with it anyway.

Those huge upheavals took, of course, about a century to work themselves through. They coincided with changes in dominant philosophy, learning, science, technology. This is not a simple story of progress,. a single narrative leading to specific goals: reformation was matched with counter-reformation, for example. The Great Reformation gives Tickle her main template for studying the Great Emergence: discussion of the earlier upheavals (she calls them 'rummage sales') is quite limited. The model and analogy works, though.

So the present rummage sale is portended by voices like Darwin and Freud; carried and discussed by mass communication technologies which have profoundly changed how individuals interact with centres of power, and so on. Onto this canvas comes 20th century physics (and maths, which she overlooks) with deep profound uncertainty in its heart, technologies and emancipated lifestyles which have disrupted traditional families, and social movements like a-religious 'self help'.

Against that context, what is happening to the church? There's a big movement to the centre - a loss of many traditional barriers among believers - and a counter-movement to cling to the certainties which distinguish one tribe from another: that centre surrounded by people at varying levels of emergence, from traditionalists through progressives to 'hyphenates'. The latter are the tongue-in-cheek epithets of Angl-imergents, Presby-mergents, and the rest who tend towards the new centre, but want to bring something of their heritage. (Personally, I've .been disappointed never to come across any fellow Brethr-emergents).

The final chapter sets out 'The Way Ahead'. I won't steal the plot by telling you what happens :) It's strangely ethereal: the book seems suddenly to run out of steam. I kind-of expected a conclusion, a reflection on the shape of the Great Emergence, a discussion of how much further it has left to run. There's a little of this, but largely the reader is left to draw their own conclusions: this chapter is the most speculative, and the least satisfactory.

Over all, this is a great counterpart to 'The New Christians' which I reviewed recently: not dwelling on what emerging churches are up to, but exploring the context and reasons why such things are arising. The notion that this is as big a shift in Christendom as the Reformation was is something which you can pick up in McLaren, also: Tickle doesn't claim any originality for either the ideas or even the formulation she presents - there are extensive footnotes. Of course, some have claimed that 'emergent' is running out of steam: Tickle's perspective, I think, and one I share, is that change is undoubtedly happening, and it will be far-reaching and has gone past the point of no return. I don't think we can quite picture where it will land, where stability will arise, but there's no going back.

post-modern dominant narratives

2010-08-02T11:27:00.001+01:00

Since I'm on a roll as regards blogging, here goes another...

I visited Australia's National Museum in Canberra this week. It's a curious place.

Constructed in the last decade, here is a museum of the current age. It is far from being constructed along 19th century lines, with separate galleries for natural history, technology, artifats from colonial days,and so on. Instead, there is a blended presentation, exhibits arranged according approximately to a time-line of Australian existence. Many are presented alongside words from those for whom they were of particular significance: the whole impact is multi-voiced, with a sense of the rich diversity of cultural heritage.

And yet, there is unmistakably a single framing narrative. The Story of Australia --- that time line --- is even set out at the beginning, in an expensively-produced multimedia presentation (complete with multiple screens and seats on a rotating dais). Without any narration, it shows a series of images (many at once, on different
screens), but the totality is the single Australian Story. [For those unfamiliar, The Story is one of a unique and diverse ecology, with the Aboriginal people living in harmony with it; European colonial settlers bring great dislocation and more than a little pain; eventually colonialism declines and Australia takes its place as a nation in an increasingly interconnected world; previous hurts are gradually diminished through reconciliation with the Aboriginal peoples. This is The Story; there is no other.]

There is essentially just one path through the museum: it follows The
Story. The perspective is almost entirely a social history: the
nautral history, for example, is presented through the narrative of
those who helped to understand it. We learn about the duck-billed
platypus from the tale of the fellow who established that though it is
a mammal, it does lay egges: he proved this extravagently by
collecting a thousand of them to study.

This presentation leaves little room for science, or anthropology, or,
indeed, much rigorous mind-stretching at all. I was reluctantly coping
with that lack, when I came upon a gallery devoted to the Aboriginal
Australians. Here, the over-arching story was The Dreaming: the
Aborignial mythical creation tale. Here, we had a largely
uninterpreted presentation of Aboriginal myth and culture, including
the poentially surprising information that Aborginies have lived in
Australia "since time immemorial" (because that is how they conceive
of themselves).

Presenting that history is fine, but it did seem a little reminiscent
of what I've heard of being in the Creationist Museum. It's an
interesting story, but quite out of keeping with scientific - or even
historical - scholarship. There seems a missed opportunity here to
present - perhaps in a separate gallery - what we know about early
migration into this continent. There was a tantalizing mention of
some cave paintings which date from the time "when the sea-level rose
150 metres and changed the whole landscape": but no mention of
time-scale (nor facsimiles of the paintings - I recall that
photographs of these are taboo). An interpretation of the changes to
the landscape over millenia, illustrated by aboriginal artifacts,
would have been fascinating.

My point, and my fear, is that it is too easy to allow acceptance of
many voices to become a substitute for critical thought. Mistreatment
of Aboriginal people has made their culture and history politically
sensitive, of course, but I fear that to refuse to ask rigorous
questions is a cop-out. There were lots of children in the museum:
I'm pretty certain that they went away with The Story strongly
impressed upon them. I'd be quite surprised if many went away
stimulated to think hard thoughts about how we know what we know as a
society, how to organise ideas, and how to make sense of the world we
live in. That seems like a decadent waste of a museum; a true missed
opportunity.

review: Crave MCC

2010-08-01T09:43:00.001+01:00

I've only occasionally done church reviews on this blog: if you say very much, it seems a bit personal and unfair. But perhaps I should do more. So here's one. Being away on holiday, I wanted to step a little beyond my comfort zone and see the world through different eyes. Here are my reflections (headings stolen from Ship of Fools: The Mystery Worshipper: I'm just borrowing them; I'm not in any way associated with SoF):

The church: Crave MCC, Sydney Denomination: Metropolitan Community Church. The building: Crave MCC meets during the afternoon in the building beloning to the Uniting Church, in Oxford Street, Sydney. The church: The church subtitles itself Dynamic--Inclusive--Progressive. Their web site's "about us" section tells you more about their perspective.The neighborhood: Oxford Street is in Darlinghurst, which Wikipedia says is "is widely-recognised as Sydney's main gay district": from the direction I approached from, simply 'eclectic' would be a better word, I think. The cast: The music/worship was led by Natasha (I think) (vocals and guitar), together with three singers, one playing a drum; the speaker and celebrant was Pastor Karl. The date & time: Sunday 1st August 2010, 3pm

What was the name of the service?
I don't think it had a name.

How full was the building?
Not very full - but the chairs were arranged to accommodate comfortably the 20 or so who gathered. It was explained that the previous Sunday had been a Big Event, and quite a few were missing this week.

Did anyone welcome you personally?
Several people welcomed me and introduced themselves and others.

Was your pew comfortable?
Chair, yes.

How would you describe the pre-service atmosphere?
Very relaxed, quite chatty. It carried on well-past the 3pm start time: there was a sense of community and gathering.

What were the exact opening words of the service?
Er, I can't remember. Welcome, perhaps.

What books did the congregation use during the service?
Books? C'mon. This is 2010. All the words you wanted were projected with tasteful backgrounds onto a medium-sized screen.

What musical instruments were played?
Acoustic guitar and tom-tom-type drum.

Did anything distract you?
Not a great deal. The space was quite tranquil.

Was the worship stiff-upper-lip, happy clappy, or what?
Low-cringe contemporary. Songs - I knew none of them; maybe they were written by the musicians - were singable tunes, though the band gave a strong (and very musical) lead, so you could stop and listen if you wanted to.

Exactly how long was the sermon?
I didn't time it. I'm guesing about 20 minutes.

On a scale of 1-10, how good was the preacher?
6. Engaging and clear (but see below).

In a nutshell, what was the sermon about?
There were two parts. The first, shorter part, was a report on an international conference Pastor Karl had recently attended. We were left in little doubt that Crave MCC is part of MCC and that MCC helps to define what Crave MCC is all about, and that MCC had lately had a conference in Mexico. (yes, MCC featured heavily - yet is not, evidently, over-prescriptive).

The second part was about Amos. There's a theme of justice - and judgement. Judgement is hard for people with an inclusive ethos to hear about, but justice puts us in mind of the kind of justice God likes: justice for the oppressed. At least, I think that was the gist, but I couldn't really swear to it. I think I got the wrong end of the stick in the middle somewhere, and I lost the thread thereafter.

Which part of the service was like being in heaven?
The easy-going welcome, leading almost seamlessly into worship centered on the person of God and knowing Jesus.

And which part was like being in... er... the other place?
Being a fairly reserved Englishman in the company of some fairly demonstrative Australians; being an outsider in a somewhat close-knit community: feeling welcome in principle but awkward in practice.

What happened when you hung around after the service looking lost?
I took off fairly quickly - it was some distance from where I'm staying, and I had a dog to feed.

How would you describe the after-service coffee?
There was the offer of going to the road to a pub after the service, but I didn't take it up (see above).

How would you feel about making this church your regular (where 10 = ecstatic, 0 = terminal)?
3. Firstly denominations make me uneasy, and I got the impression that MCC, for all its broad-mindedness, is more of a close-knit organisation than, say, the Baptists. Secondly, every church or denomination is I suppose shaped by the circumstances of its founding. The MCC website begins its history like this: "In 1968, a year before New York’s Stonewall Riots, a series of most unlikely events in Southern California resulted in the birth of the world’s first church group with a primary, positive ministry to gays, lesbians, bisexual, and transgender persons". That primary ministry appears to shape everything - including, I'm assuming, a large part of the congregation. That this should be necessary is largely the fault of the rest of the church militant - but it left me feeling that there was a bit of a narrow focus here. The obvious caveat is that this is a first impression, and may be quite mistaken.

Did the service make you feel glad to be a Christian?
Yes indeed.

What one thing will you remember about all this in seven days' time?

The permeable openness of the fellowship, and the connectedness of its life and worship.

war and parliament

2010-07-31T06:35:00.004+01:00

Visiting Canberra this week, I've been struck by the arrangement of
the national Mall. Inspired by Washington DC perhaps, a broad green
sward descends from the parliament house to the lake: and across the
lake, it continues in an avenue of memorials leading to the Australian
national war memorial.

The effect is impressive: from the door of the Parliament, your eye
cannot help being drawn to the war memorial. It's as if the war dead
are watching over all who come and go from the seat of Australian
Democracy, reminding them of the blood-price of that place. I guess
the American Mall includes a number of war memorials, and the British
Offices of State overlook the Cenotaph, but the effect in Canberra
seems particularly striking: attention is not on a statesman, or a
nation-builder, or a king, but upon those whose lives were laid down.

Each name on that memorial represents a life broken, a family
shattered. Each individual loss seems callous and senseless. Each
individual could have been someone else, were it not for that stray
bullet, that piece of shrapnel, the path of that disease, that
particular fire: though some undoubtedly were in harm's way precisely
because of a sense of duty or as a result of conspicuous valour.

But the combined effect of those individuals is something else
entirely. Wars arise for good reasons and bad: undoubtedly, some
should not have been fought. Some have genuinely, measurably, reduced
the amount of tyrrany in the world. Notwithstanding a few WW2
expeditions by the Japanese, Australia's borders have never really
been threatened since European settlement: but her sons (and
daughters) have travelled to Europe, Asia, Africa, for causes
percieved as just.

Can we decry that? The criteria for a Just War seem defensible: there
are situations when an aggressor can be stopped only by the use of
deadly force. Our willingness and ability to act may be patchy, but
that does not diminish the value or worthiness of doing so.

Where is today's Christian in this? In the days of conscription, our
parents and grandparents struggled with this issue in a way that few
of us have to: pacifisim and conscientious objection was no coward's
way, but it certainly wasn't the route of social acceptability. Most
of the time, few of us think about it at all, I imagine.

When bringing military remembrance into church, we often give thanks
for the freedoms we enjoy - not least the freedom to worship - these
having been brought about by those who fought and died `for freedom'.
Whether freedom to worship is the thing we should be most thankful
for, I'm not sure. But more importantly, I'm not certain that that
line of thinking holds water in every case - the Just War criteria are
not crafted around the concept of freedom, as such. Its undoubtedly
true that in some conflicts our own freedom has been enhanced by
fighting to install decidedly non-freedom-loving regimes in foreign
parts.

It seems to me that the main point of occasional wartime remembrance
in worship is for the sake of the pastoral care of those touched by
war and conflict: delving deeply into geopolitics is better left to a
differnt context. Too readily we wander into a kind of Christian
nationalism which rather confuses the kingdoms (and republics) of this
world with the kingdom of God: there's much sloppy thinking here, and
its best avoided altogether.

I can only respect those named on the Australian war memorial: and on
memorials in towns and villages across the whole of Europe - and I
imagine America and much of the rest of the world. Would that we
could say "never again": but while the world contains leaders bent on
violence, "never" seems wildly optimistic. In the meantime, the
location of that Australian memorial contains much wisdom. Our
leaders, and we who put them there, would do well to look daily into
the eyes of those commemorated in memorials across the world, and
recall the cost of our way of life.

gay bishop shock

2010-07-07T21:54:00.000+01:00

This is getting to be rather a long-drawn-out saga.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/7877839/Gay-cleric-blocked-from-becoming-Church-of-England-bishop.html

Blocking the man's appointment "because it would split the church" seems expedient in the short term, but the issue isn't going to go away, is it? And there seems little prospect of it not causing a split, when it finally does come to a head. So is there really any merit in deferring that day?

strange juxtaposition

2010-06-28T18:53:00.001+01:00

I was walking past the University Museum this morning when I saw that they were setting up for (or maybe tearing down after) some kind of festival. The Museum is famous for having been in the 19th Century the location for an early debate on Darwin's Origin of Species, between T.E. Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. As I recall, Huxley convincingly won the day. It is, rather self-consciously, a cathedral of science, and a humanist icon.

So I was a little perturbed to see as part of whatever was going on on the lawn outside seemed to include something looking suspisciously like an ark. My first reaction was to think "don't go there": surely this will get the nutters all excitable.

But on reflection, that seems far too defeatist. The story of Noah and the Ark plainly isn't about global geomorphology of 5000 years ago; it plainly isn't a treatise on practical biodiversity. We can benefit from it without taking those perspectives. Surely it's a story of wickedness and faithfulness; a story of redemption; a story of care for creation; a story of hope. It does belong to those of a rationalist disposition (as well as to those who believe that however many gigatonnes of water came into being briefly for a year, and then vanished again leaving little or no trace behind them).

I think that since I decided that the global cataclysm wasn't a matter of 'fact', I've been scared of to think of it at all: I'm a bit of a literalist at heart, still. But as a tale to teach us, it has a lot to say, and we mustn't shy away from that.

quotes from Tomlinson

2010-06-17T22:20:00.000+01:00

I'm reading Dave Tomlinson's Re-enchanting Christianity. I normally wait until I get to the end of a book before commeting, but this is so rich with pithy little thoughts that I have to report some of them. A proper review will follow.

One particularly striking section is about how we understand who Jesus is - this after a discussion of how to understand the bible and a contrast of 'literal realism', 'critical realism' and 'non-realism' in thinking about who God is. I was left gasping for air after I got to:

Only the doggedly rationalist mind imagines that truth is equated solely with fact.

Well, if you put it that way, suddenly everything makes sense.

And then, there's the section on atonement. After discussing a number of ideas, we get something which perhaps we can put ona par with Chalke's 'cosmic child abuse; line which caught so much flack.

Substitutionary atonement theory could be seen as a crime against divinity!

Ho ho. Nice pun, but makes the point well: he quotes from Wink who says that this theory portrays God as a cruel and unforgiving patriach 'unable to love as a decent parent should, trapped in his own rules that force him to commit a ghastly crime.'

All in all, this isn't a book for those of a sensitively evangelical disposition. But it's littered with food for thought. I love it!

sometimes

2010-06-06T18:30:00.000+01:00

Sometimes, I feel a great urge to tell people just to get over their hang-ups.

Divorced-bishops-to-be-permitted-for-first-time-by-Church-of-England.html

alternative reality

2010-05-30T22:19:00.000+01:00

I suppose that many of use inhabit alternative universes from time to time. A century ago, they existed mainly in literature, in theatre, and in children's games. Today, adults play role-playing games in alternative worlds, too, and computers exist to provide immersive experiences where you can be an Orc or an Elf; can defy gravity, or can explore the stars, or, Grand Theft Auto-style, can visit mayhem on a city without serious consequences.

But many people inhabit seemingly alternative realities without using such tools. The fanatical campaigner sees every event through the lens of their particular concern. You don't have to be clinically paranoid to worry about unwelcome stalkers or over-zealous government security agencies: many people's perception of the extent of monitoring is surely wide of the mark. One person's crazy obsession is another's real and present reality. The way the western education system has developed means that users of technology often have less than no understanding of how it works - that is, their ideas are actually wrong.

And as a member of the Christian community, this bothers me, because we seem to inhabit a reality far removed from that of our neighbours. It is not simply that we talk in jargon - every shared interest group does that. It is that when you strip this away, you still have a group of people whose view of the world is truly other, compared to that of those outside - those to whom we aspire to explain the reason for the hope we have ... This is a community which is profoundly odd compared to those with whom we rub shoulders with every day.

Was it always thus? Is this an inherent feature of being called out and different?

I'm not sure. It seems as if many of today's Christians are far more at odds with today's secular society than they have been for a mighty long time. Sure, when Europe was largely co-extensive with Christendom, there was a very widely shared view of a whole heap of topics - both among those we'd today identify as 'believers' and among those with a more tenuous or nominal connection with the Church. Today, Chrisitans generally embrace a kind of metaphysics which is pretty much incomprehensible to outsiders: to many, it must be considerably more weird than, say, The Force of Star Wars' Jedi Knights.

Does this matter? I'm inclined to say yes: we can construct all sorts of realities in our heads; we can reinforce them by rehearsing them together; we can embrace the most exotic metaphysics; we can build castles in the air. But that fervour doesn't make things true; it doesn't automatically make us closer to God; it sometimes seems to get in the way of our participating in his mission; it can distract us from truly following Christ; it really runs the risk of alienating the very people who need to see - and experience - the most excellent way.

review: A New Kind of Christianity

2010-05-23T17:09:00.004+01:00

A New Kind of Christianity: ten questions that are transforming the faith
Brian McLaren

This is an important book. Since I attended the UK launch a mere three months ago, and have already (!) finished it, I guess you'd have to say it got my attention. McLaren has written enough that he must by now be regarded as "prolific". This book strikes me as one of his most important, though he seems to set more store by Everything must change. I think the new book is much better-edited than that one.

I do have the same criticism, though, as I wrote in my review of that book (and various commenters helped to explore): for all of wanting a new, more inclusive, less certain, more dynamic kind of faith, he does seem to dwell rather heavily on a dichotomous presentation: people used to think X, but a new way of looking at it is to think Y. For nearly all of his points, I'd much rather say that there tended to be an emphasis on X (but Y was present), but if we expand the emphasis on Y, we get a more rounded view, and that leads us to de-emphasise X.

Examples? Well, when you're talking about a question of emphasis, it's hard to pin them down. But let's try: he discusses various approaches to eschatology (that's the study of end times, not escapology :) ). And observes that these things shape our behaviour and priorities in the here and now. I don't doubt that - but the idea that we are all in thrall to whacky dispensationalism of one kind or another doesn't really seem to play out in the evangelical churches I'm familiar with. There is generally a very open-handed 'we can't really know for sure' kind of perspective preached: which also has an impact on how we live right now.

But for all his over-stated rhetoric, the perspective he brings is fresh, and his emphasis distinctive - even if I don't think it's all truly as novel as he (or his detractors) would suggest. And I know that he has many detractors. His writing has been criticised as theologically naive or historically amiss: there are certainly bits that I'd take with a pinch of salt, but this is a popular book, not a dry theological essay. I find proper theology very hard to cope with, but can read McLaren quite comfortably.

And for all my complaining, I certainly wouldn't claim we've "seen it all before". The first of his ten questions asks "What is the overarching storyline of the bible?" and the answer certainly isn't the one you learned in (evangelical) sunday school. He talks about this 'six-line diagram':

(h/t: thoughtsinpencil whose reproduction I have borrowed to save me drawing it for myself)

and he goes on to argue that, far from being the biblical story, this is the Greco-Roman Platonic story. I understand this is far from being a new observation. But he goes on to suggest other ways to frame the biblical story. This, in a sense, is fairly radical for an evangelical - as is the suggestion that the bible be read not as 'constitution' but as 'library'.

For his methodology remains evangelical, it seems to me: over and over, the chapters contain substantial exposition of particular passages of scripture. From his way of understanding the bible text, I guess we'd have to say that he does this because they are useful passages from which to draw lessons, rather than because they can be plucked from obscurity to prove a particular point. But his exegesis is generally convincing and helpful.

The methodology seems a little wanting in the chapter on "How should followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions?" I can't help thinking that drawing on the experiences of those contemporary with Jesus - in a very pluralistic society - would give us some insight. But his approach takes another line - based upon the Golden Rule.

I began by saying that this is an important book. I hope that many close to me will read it - I shall encourage them to do so, so that we can discuss it. A consistent theme across McLaren's writing is that we are in the midst of a shift in Christian thinking as profound as that which took place at the Reformation. I find it hard to imagine in 500 years that his name and work will carry the weight of Luther's or Calvin's today - but at least a part of me hopes that he will carry large numbers of people with him. I don't suppose he cares whether it's his name that gets attached to a new kind of Christianity, but he does look forward to something renewed. I'd have to agree with him that such thinking - and, as he stresses, acting too is needed and timely.

not loving Oxford

2010-05-23T15:03:00.003+01:00

Today - Pentecost - was the occasion of the fifth Love Oxford event: a combined churches jamboree celebration/praise-up/open-air-preach/whatever. This year was the first time I deliberately stayed away. I've blogged before (and before) about the event. Indeed, re-reading what I wrote last year kind-of explains why I'm not there this year, to my surprise (the blog has value even if no one else reads it!). Our church supports the event (and cancels normal activities to allow people to attend) so missing it seems a little naughty.

To be glad of staying away is surely a symptom of a changed understanding in me: a few years ago, I'd have been exceedingly in favour of such a visible, open demonstration of Christian unity around the gospel. But today, not so much. Part of me wants to say 'why invest all that effort?': couldn't the time and money better be spent in serving this community and its needy? But that would perhaps to be to miss the point: extravagent acts of worship are not condemned by Jesus - when they come from the heart, that is. And it would be unfair to suggest that those leading the event are not also very active - much more than me - in practical aid locally and further afield. But the whole thing still leaves me uneasy: it's just a little too ebullient, a little too suffused with evangelical certainty, a little, well, to be honest, creepy.

So instead, I did my own ecumenical thing, and went to St Matthews, the church near where I live (they too are notional supporters of Love Oxford, but not to the extent of, well, giving up their normal activity to attend). I was struck by the fact that I was probably above the median age of the congregation (perhaps considerably so ... there were a lot of children, and many of their parents could be younger than me) - a novel experience. I was struck by the inclusivity of it all (though I've no idea really whether an 'uncurched' person would find it so). I was very struck to see young children participating in communion: it's something I've tended not to like the idea of, but it seemed to happen with much care and reverence from even the youngest, and so was rather lovely. I was struck by a certain timeless quality to the music . I was struck - as I always have been at St Matthews - by the sense of it being the community coming together to worship, rather than it being a 'service' provided by a 'clergy'. So, despite not loving Oxford, it was a morning of refreshment and renewal, and altogether a good way to celebrate Pentecost.

ascension

2010-05-14T18:21:00.001+01:00

Yesterday was Ascension day. However did it pass out of reformed spirituality and get forgotten?

parallel lines (part 2)

2010-05-10T21:29:00.002+01:00

Yesterday's post was quite abstract. Let's make it more concrete.

I'm embedded in the Christian community. And I see much that is excellent and praiseworthy there. Christian charities achieve a huge amount - historically they have been leaders in whhat they do, and remain massively influential. Indeed, the evidence seems to say that they are better, and more cost-effective than other means of achieving desirable social outcomes. And the average Christian gives far more to charitable causes than the average non-Christian. And so on.

The warm, open, accepting, unconditionally-loving community which so often flows from a shared faith is a remarkable thing to behold, and really gives the lie to a purely biologial or economic or political analysis of human existence. British society seems to know that it has forgotten how to live relationally - but truly there are little pockets of faith where this works. I want to celebrate that and share it.

But on the other hand, I have a huge amount of sympathy for the naysayers. The warm fuzzy stuff is nice, but the crazy metaphysics that goes with it is, well, bokners. The 'unprovable' stuff - likened by some [originally Russell] to an assertion of the existence of a teapot the sun between mars and the earth - seems at best a curious intellectual distraction; at worst a diversion from the real message, the real good news. Christians can be awful hypocrites; some of those warm loving communities can be cold and savage if you have the wrong outlook on life. That the Catholic church faces damages claims for years of alleged complicity in child abuse seems entirely just (where cases are proven) - even if amidst the real anguish there will surely be some opportunist litigants as well. The notion that religious faith should be privileged in society, and permit exceptions to dress codes or working duties, seems backward.

Or, it would seem backward, were it not for the preceding paragraph. Maybe faith deserves privilege because it demonstrably has an effect: but this tension of private faith and community impact is one I've rambled about before.

So, again, I find this tension at work. I often love the Christian community and much of what it stands for - but often I also find the deconstruction from the secular humanists quite convincing as well. Far too much Christian dialogue is routed in the epistemology of a previous (long-dead!) era.

In Douglas Adams's book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the eponymous eating house advertised itself thusly: "If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe" [homage along the way to Lewis Carroll]. Sometimes it feels as if being a Christian requires you to belive impossible things - not to accept things through faith, but simply to take leave of your senses. It really won't do: perhaps I need to re-learn which impossible things are true, and which cannot be (ironic and self-consciously nonsense as that sentence is).

parallel lines

2010-05-09T20:51:00.002+01:00

I've been wanting to blog for some time about where my thinking has reached, as I have surveyed all this emerging stuff. But it is hard to reach conclusions, because the process still seems to be ongoing. And I'm aware of the danger of stumbling into some ham philosophy which will not bear scrutiny.

But I have reached an emerging point of accommodation. Or perhaps you could say that I'm holding some parallel narratives in my mind, and am for the time being unconcerned that they don't seem to join up.

So, on one hand, there is the story of God. The story of the bible; the story of the church. I have a 40-year-old mind-set filled with lifelong Evangelical thinking. I can talk the talk - by grace I sometimes manage to walk the walk. I read the bible in public; I expound it; I lead people in prayer. The bible holds a privileged place here: I've never held an exceedingly conservative evangelical view - plenary verbal inspiration of scripture, and all that follows from that, is something I'd want to hold lightly. An inspiration of sense, not each word, has always seemed much more attractive. Nevertheless, it follows that the bible is and should be normative for the Christian community. Whatever that means.

Of course, that asks more questions than it answers: how are we to read and understand the bible? This is a big theme of MacLaren's A New Kind of Christianity, which I'm reading at the moment - so we'd better return to that later. But we could certainly say that we need to understand the gospel as being about reconciliation, about unconditional love, and a few other things which are often missing from our society.

But on the other hand, I am emphatically a scientist. It really does seem that the Universe is ordered according to a number of simple laws: it seems that cause and effect is universal, and immense power flows from the ability of the accompanying method to allow us to make predictions about the future behaviour of our world. The last two centuries have opened so many doors for us in understanding how things came to be as they are: astrophysics and evolutionary theory open our eyes at once to immense beauty and to simple ideas giving rise to staggeringly complex systems.

Of course, that's a classic dichotomy: but I'm not so bothered by that. There's no a priori reason why I cannot hold onto both at once: but I'll agree with Dawkins that the idea of 'separate realms' is too simplistic. Prayer just doesn't makes sense in the second model. But for all its advances in psychology, it is far from clear that science is competent to address our social and emotional questions - still less to give us real foundational understanding. 20th century advances in maths and physics put paid to any idea that scientific method can give us a firm foundation on which to build.

Strong adherents of the scientific approach try to invoke Occam's razor to suggest that we don't need God to exist. But that notion of existence seems to miss the point: it isn't really very helpful. Do quarks exist? Do Platonic solids exist? The God of the bible isn't an abstraction; he isn't a theoretical omnipotent agent; he is a character who interacts with creation. Whether he 'exists' seems much less interesting than what he does, and what he calls us to do.

I'm not an agnostic: I want to have my cake and eat it. I don't see why these parallel lines cannot exist (oops!) together. They do challenge each other: there is certainly an unresovled (unresolvable?) tension. Am I allowed to use different narratives in different contexts, or is that cheating?

review: The New Christians

2010-05-03T21:47:00.004+01:00

The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier, by Tony Jones

This review has been a long time coming. Indeed, you might say it's overdue. Since various bloggers have heralded the death of emergent, you might even say it's past its best. But hey, I'm the late emerger, so I can be late. The book is only a couple of years old, after all: I've probably been reading it for a year or so, in parallel with lots of other books.

If you want to know what emergent - or, maybe even, emerging - is (or was) all about, then this is a pretty definitive text. I wish it had been available when I first started wondering about all this stuff. Of course, Jones, having been the national coordinator of emergent (or is that Emergent ?) is rather well-placed to discuss the subject.

He observes how spirituality in America (in particular; the main subject of his discussion, anyhow) is in a state of flux, that many of the old expectations, particularly about denominations but also more broadly than that, are disintigrating. The text is interspersed with little one-paragraph 'disptaches', and dispatch one addresses this:

Emergents find little importance in the discrete differences between the various flavors of Christianity. Instead they practice a generous orthodoxy that appreciates the contributions of all Christian movements.

These little dispatches seem rather well-written and good pithy summaries of what he is trying to communicate. Not that Jones needs to resort to little summaries to make his points: his writing is clear and engaging, and 'just right' in its weight and depth. He also includes some inline glossary entries - so the text should be approachable even if you're not well-versed in the ecclesiology of late 20th century/early 21st century evangelicalism. Finally, besides the main text, there are some biographical or personalized asides: a few pages each, to keep the discussion grounded in practice (again, not that there's a real danger of it drifting off into theological abstractions).

I identify with Tony Jones. I think he's about my age. He talks of recoiling when an undergraduate from the concept of 'questionnaire evangelism' (door-knocking in student accommodation, on the pretext of wanting to collect questionnaire responses, but actually seeking an opportunity to hit the victim with a 'gospel presentation'): at about the same time, on the other side of the atlantic, I was having the same reaction. In the book, he explores how good and gentle people find themselves wrapped up in a broken theology which begets a wrong-headed, narrow, constraining Christianity - and a narrow, constrained understanding of God. Dispatch 9 says:

The emergent movement is robustly theological; the conviction is that theology and practice are inextricably linked, and each invariably informs the other.

And so it goes. Here is an account of faith that is always provisional, relational, postmodern (maybe), generously orthodox, and so on. Here is a movement built out of grassroots practice informed by academic theology. Here is a movement populated by people like me (whatever that means) - which is quite reminiscent of the good bits of the Christian Brethren heritage I grew up with.

A chapter seems to have closed on emergent since then. But I doubt that that matters. There's a richness here, a life and vision which is transforming some part of the christian church. The extent of that transformation is hard to judge, but my judgement is that it will remain significant, whatever it's called. This book is a good way-point on the journey.

ark rediscovered

2010-04-30T22:14:00.003+01:00

The latest group to have "found" Noah's ark evidently has radiocarbon dating evidence. (h/t Matt's facebook status; otherwise I'd have missed this story altogether)

Well now, where to begin? If this were 'true' it would be about the biggest story in archaeology since ... well, I struggle to think of a bigger one. The claimed ark is at an altitude of 4000m, which implies one serious flood.

There are lots of reasons to suppose that the story in Genesis is more allegorical than historical. I don't doubt that quite a few communities in the ancient near east encountered catastrophic floods, and indeed that at least one saw a family saved with some livestock in a boat or ship of some kind. The details presented in Genesis seem to present a whole bigger story than that - and, to be honest, I can't say I think could sustain the 'obvious' interpretation.

But if there were evidence of a boat which floated to 4000m, well, I'd need to reconsider a lot of things. All the commentators seem to say that the evidence won't withstand scrutiny: some think that the "evangelists" (hmm. good research there, eh?) have simply fabricated the evidence, others think that an ancient theme-park attraction has been (re?)discovered. Perhaps other explanations will come to light: I'm rather taken with the skepticism from the young-earth creationists (because radiocarbon dating is clearly bogus because it gives some dates older than 6000 years).

The other rather great quote comes from 'Paul Zimansky, an archaeologist specializing in the Middle East at Stony Brook University in New York State.'

"I don't know of any expedition that ever went looking for the ark and didn't find it,"

So my hunch is that I'm not going to have to reconsider my understanding of the early chapters of Genesis. But the jury's out, I suppose.

leadership lessons from baseball

2010-04-14T23:33:00.002+01:00

I did tell myself I'd stop re-posting blogs from Mark Driscoll, with incredulous comments added.

But then I looked at his latest series: leadership lessons from baseball, and I had to share. It's scary; it's alarming; I'm starting to wonder if we should see it as cultish. Except that I've never heard of a cult modelling itself after baseball (yawn!) - save for the cult of baseball itself. Lesson 2 is particularly encouraging, as is the under-defined notion of "underperforming" in the later lessons. Though there is more to leadership than this, I can't help thinking that the first things I'd look for are abundances of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. But those do not seem to be the characteristics of interest. Indeed, one forms the impression that Jesus wouldn't fare well as an elder at Mars Hill.

You see, I have this love-hate thing going on with Driscoll's writing. Most of it, frankly, revolts me. But - like so much else - it contains nuggets of value, some of great value. The observation in the latest of these leadership lessons that Christians would rather soldier on with something that's not working - inventing a theology of suffering to cover it - rather than address the problem itself (my paraphrase), is a good one. That's a perspective we hear too rarely, and I'm glad he brought it up. But the idea that we must sack underperforming and overpaid pastors (who? I've never met such a person), not so much.

shroud enigma

2010-04-10T17:29:00.003+01:00

The Shroud of Turin goes on display today, apparently. This thing fascinates me: not in an obsessive way, not because I'm particularly bothered about whether it really is the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth, but because of its enduring enigma.

Countless people have analysed the thing, and written peer-reviewed scientific journals about it. TV documentaries about it crop up regularly. And now two million people are expected to go and see it in the six weeks it is on show. The present Wikipedia text about it remarks, with some justification

The Shroud of Turin is one of, if not the most, studied artifacts in human history.

and yet, its exact nature remains something of a mystery.

You may recall that radiocarbon dating undertaken in 1988 gave, with a high degree of confidence, a date for the cloth of between 1260 and 1390. That has since been disputed, on a couple of grounds. Numerous theories have been put forward for how the image - the 'face of Christ' - got onto the cloth: maybe it was a photographic process, maybe it arose from clever image transfer techniques, maybe it is a radiation burn. Nobody is entirely sure.

Doesn't that strike you as curious? In our present age when science leads and directs much of our society - and take the place of a religion, for some - we have an over-studied object whose nature (never mind whose provenance) is uncertain. Although various explanations have been backed by the creation of facismile shrouds, none really matches the characteristics of the original, it seems - at least, not to the satisfaction of all concerned. And it appears to be unique in history: if it was created by an artist or 'forger', whatever technique was developed to make it does not appear to have been re-used in any comparitive object. Maybe it was the work of a genius like Da Vinci, etched onto the oldest cloth he could lay his hands upon. But if so, he took the technique to the grave with him.

Of course, the approach of the shroud's custodians does not particularly help the analysis: no doubt, with more willing curators, a fresh carbon dating round could have been completed by now. More invasive analysis could surely tell us what the image is made of, and perhaps how it got there. Or maybe not: they are cautious, but have allowed all kinds of analysis to be done. Some have argued that recent restoration work will have destroyed a huge amount of potential evidence in any case.

So we have this rather remarkable artifact, which exists in plain sight and yet whose true nature is most uncertain. It presents a riddle that may never be solved, despite the power of all we know today and the attentions of hundreds of scholars. As a counter-example for the omnipotence of the scientific method, it takes some beating. For that it deserves veneration, no matter what it 'really' is.

go the extra mile

2010-04-06T20:46:00.002+01:00

The Tories got into a minor squabble over the weekend, after one of their senior MPs was reported as having been recorded saying that people who offer Bed and Breakfast in their own homes (a common enough small business; the bottom end of the travel accommodation market) 'should "have the right" to turn away homosexual couples.'

It's rather a storm in a tea-cup (because the same man voted in favour of the legislation which criminalizes precisely this behaviour), but it raises a few questions worth revisiting. The ostensible reason for wanting to turn away such guests is a religious - specifically Christian - one.

Firstly, it seems profoundly illiberal to legislate about who private individuals may or may not do business with - especially when we are talking of (paying) guests in their own homes. And yet we would now look ascance at someone who declined to take particular guests due to the colour of their skin, or to being in a 'mixed marriage'. It matters not whether you or I would make a moral equivalency between racial discrimination and issues around gay rights: society has chosen to do so. Race relations laws have helped to shift and shape public opinion over the last generation or so. We can discuss elsewhere how successful they have been in that; but even so, there is little doubt that significant change has happenened. Moreover, if we argue that religious conscience should trump such societal consensus, then we have little grounds to argue that sometimes in Islam women receive less than the equal treatment that our society has come to expect. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander: Christians can't appeal to the notion of human rights only when it appeals (human rights may be a bogus simplistic notion, but that's a separate discussion).

But suppose you do take the view that a gay couple sharing a bed under your roof is morally reprehensible - and you feel persecuted because the law says that if you want to rent rooms to anyone, you have to welcome those guests like any others. What then?

Well, didn't Jesus say something about good behaviour in the case where an unpleasant burden is placed upon you by the law? Isn't the way of love to bit your lip, suck it up, and take the guests? Which behaviour is most likely to win people over? Shutting the door on them, or lavishing love on them - in a household run along the lines which meet the standards you believe are the right ones? Of course, this runs a risk: you might discover that the people in question are human. You might discover that they are ordinary, frail, complex, warm-blooded people who need love. But if you believe in the transforming power of your faith, maybe they are the ones who will be persuaded. Here's the crucible of ideas and idologies: not in the forum or the academy, but in the B&B lounge.

That sounds a bit gushing, I know. It took me a while to get to that conclusion, but it seems robust. If the gospel is about anything, it's about bucking the trend, the tit-for-tat behaviour of the world. About giving without holding back, not about asking for special rights, or equality for ourselves. Isn't that the way to win the world?

Jesus good/Church necessary

2010-04-03T09:56:00.000+01:00

An interesting polemic against the 'Jesus Good/ChurchBad' perspective.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/charlesmoore/7547600/Without-a-Church-there-would-be-very-little-Christianity.html

review: The Hopeful Skeptic

2010-04-02T20:59:00.003+01:00

The Hopeful Skeptic: Revisiting Christianity from the Outside, Nick Fiedler

I haven't posted a book review in a long while. I have rather a big pile of half-read books waiting to be finished. The Hopeful Skeptic had to go to the top of the pile, for a few reasons, and is not a difficult read, so I actually have managed to get the end.

Oh dear, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement. Let's try again. Nick has written a light, chatty book which is thought-provoking and engaging. It's certainly not your average IVP book, as he discusses in the first few pages. The style draws you in, and it's full of tales, anecdotes, and analogies.

I first encountered Nick when I was beginning to explore the whole brave new world of emerging church - or whatever you want to call it - and found The Nick and Josh Podcast. Subsequently, as he was beginning his year-plus round-the-world adventure I drank Guinness with him in a bar in Sydney.

Packing up his appartment in advance of that trip provides the metaphor to hang the book on. What to retain, and what to leave behind? For someone wondering about all the Christian things he's held onto in the past, the same question arises. For Nick, the approach is summed up in his phrase hopeful skeptic.

He toys with the word agnostic, but decides it comes with too much baggage. I'd have to agree. So he prefers skeptic. But it seems to me that skepticism gets a bit of a bad press: perhaps it is too readily confused with cynicism. But even if not, Christians are often encouraged to be highly credulous, to ask questions in convenient places, to feel inadequate if they are not quite as confident as their peers. But a healthy skepticism is part of the path to wisdom; the foundation of scientific endeavour (perhaps even the whole academic venture). If you don't believe me, try convincing a room full of scientists that you have a new theory, a new approach better than their existing one: it quickly gets ugly.

But Fiedler's approach isn't purely skeptical - it is most definitely hopeful. In fact, the whole narrative is so suffused with hope that you can easily forget the subtitle about "revisiting Christianity from the outside", for these don't seem like the sentiments of someone outside the Christian community, just somone who has grown tired of the baggage that comes along with the term "Christian". The skepticisim is almost apologetic at times: much of the book seems addressed to an imagined individual who is fully immersed in the Evangelical world, and needs broadened horizons - but without wanting to give offence.

So some of the chapters address familiar topics of Christian formation: prayer, scripture, community, views of Jesus. But Mr Web 2.0 has to give us a chapter on "technianity", looking at how our emerging technologies can radically re-shape what we mean by church and faith.

Is it surprising and earth-shattering? That probably depends on where you're starting from. For me, no, I don't think there's too much which messed up my world view. Is it full of seminal theology? Er, no. Is it destructive or divisive? I wouldn't say so: I'm sure that's not the intention, anyway, and I can't really see it falling that way. Is it an honest and entertaining traveller's tale, a snapshot of what early 21st Century post-evangelicalism might look like? Absolutely.

Faithworks 360 Conference (part 3)

2010-03-14T21:13:00.004Z

Brian McLaren was a big speaker at the Faithworks conference. He put up this slide - as did Steve Chalke! - I think he's been using it for a while, but it bears repeating.

In case that gets too small...

Our contemporary gospel is primarily: INFORMATION ON HOW TO GO TO HEAVEN AFTER YOU DIE (with a large footnote about increasing your personal happiness and success through God. (with a small footnote about character development (with a smaller footnote about spiritual experience (with a smaller footnote about social/global transformation.))))

He says we do lip-service to all sorts of ideas, but eventually, we have a naive, narrow simplistic gospel very often: something that Jesus really, really didn't.

So what is the theology of 360-degree mission? Well, he began with the observation that "Our theology is perfectly designed to produce the results we are now getting." That is, it seems, bad things, with a disconnect between how we think of the gospel and the way the world to be evangelised thinks of itself. So, he says, in place of a "church that meets my needs" we need to think of all the ways in which society is interconnected - business, government, charities, much else besides - and a world in which God's will is done ... as it is in heaven.

So we recognise that insitutions give stability to our communtiy, and movements try to disrupt them. Institutions preserve the merits of past movements, and movements succeed by creating new institutions or by embedding their new perspective in existing institutions. So the way we understand the gospel right now will - if it is dynamic - bring it into conflict with existing institutions, and require a creative tension as we try to work out how the gospel will transform the lives of people in 21st century Britain.

How do we understand Jesus' message? McLaren's illustration was to get a group of people to come out to the front. One represents Christ. Another represents Augustine, who looks to Christ. Another represents ... Acquinas, who looks to Augustine, who looks to Christ. Another represents Luther, who looks to Acquinas, who... Another represents ... whoever ... Barth, Billy Graham, Bill Hybels, Brian McLaren. The point is that we cannot possibly look straightforwardly at Christ - we have too many interpreters in the way; too many ideas that we bring and apply to the text. (Pick your own teachers; your own chain of thought; the same applies). Perhaps we can gain traction by looking instead at the way Abraham looks to Israel who looks to David who looks to the Prophets, who look to Christ - but he didn't really explain how this helps (given that for all those people, we have the same chain of interpreters, if not more).

There may not be much we can do about that - but we need to be aware that it's there and it's happening.

A development of this was his suggestion that we need to move past a traditional theology - a 'primary narrative'' an over-arching story - based on "six lines" : a picture depicting paradise-fall-rebellion, then a choice between destruction and redemption, the latter followed by a new paradise. I don't think those were his words, but that was the gist. Instead, he talked about a new metanarrative, described by three axes describing the major activity of God: creation, liberation, and reconciliation, with the mission of God - and our mission - being to strive towards all three. [I don't claim to fully have grasped his point, yet: I think there is more about this in his new book A New Kind of Chrsitianity.]

In the final session, McLaren was careful to say that he was not wanting to claim that the past was bad and to be discarded: it's not necessarily so helpful to think of the "wrong" received ways of thinking and new "right" ways: we learn and grow. Understanding evolves: we want to know the gospel better next year than we do this year. What we need to be is a community of humble learners.

Faithworks 360 Conference (Part 2)

2010-03-09T23:16:00.001Z

Sorry this has been slow coming: I intended a series of quick reflections, but somehow events overtook me.

I was tired/jet-lagged for the first session, and my laptop let me down, so my notes are poor. But I was immediately struck by the 'can do' attitude of those who spoke - David Lammy MP, Robert Beckford, and the ever energetic Steve Chalke.

I guess the take-home message of that session was that society and community are broken and needy. Churches have a long history of making communities work, of being at the heart of the community, and that's where they need to aim to be once again. And there are grounds for encouragement, because lots of people have demonstrated that faith-based charities are rather good at this. Evidently, there is much objective evidence that initiatives born out of faith - specifically Christian faith; not necessarily ruling out others - are more effective than others. For government agencies they represent better value for money: simple as that. Faith works !

This is why faithworks is promoting its '2010 declaration': the objective is to challenge the next British Prime Minister (whoever that may be) to recognise what Christians are doing, acknowledge that they do it because of their faith and to do more of this. Conference participants were invited to sign the declaration, and to encourage others to do so. So here we go, gentle reader: if you are a British voter, please click the link, and add your name.

Chalke went so far as to say that there are more opportunities than ever - and specifically in the next five years - for churches to get involved and be truly at the heart of work in their communities. So Faithworks has two perspectives: helping Churches and Christian charities to reach their own potential; and speaking to Government about how to help partnerships to happen.

In another session, he talked about the efforts involved in getting the Oasis Academy set up in Enfield. This is a (largely) government-funded secondary school, a brilliant brand new building which was hosting the conference. They run not only a school, but also community workers, a church, and so on - and are planning a health centre on adjacent land. Truly this is the embodiment of this 360-degree vision for engaging with the whole community, with faith in Christ unambiguously at the centre.

In trying to set this up, he had met great skepticism from the local council: Oasis is known as an Evangelical group: would they be using public money to proselytize? Would they discriminate? After much debate, he had remembered The Faithworks Charter which he had written some years previously (!). The charter begins with a clause which is a commonplace notion for public sector organisations, but a true breath of fresh air as a Christian statement:

We will provide an inclusive service to our community by:

1. Serving and respecting all people regardless of their gender, marital status, race, ethnic origin, religion, age, sexual orientation or physical and mental capability.

It's unsurprising as a 21st century satement, but as the first clause of a Christian identity statement ... I could imagine some debate. The next clauses, likewise...

2. Acknowledging the freedom of people of all faiths or none both to hold and to express their beliefs and convictions respectfully and freely, within the limits of the UK law.

3. Never imposing our Christian faith or belief on others.

Within a few days of forwarding this to all members of the council, Chalke got his Academy approved.

I have lots more notes to condense down to this blog. I'll try to carry on to Part 3 soon.

Faithworks 360 Conference

2010-02-28T16:54:00.003Z

This weekend I attended the faithworks 360 conference.

The event included the UK launch of Brian McLaren's new book A New Kind of Christianity. So I heard Brian speak several times - a good experience.

I want to blog about several aspects of the event, but first some general impressions:

Here is a group of people passionate about finding a "360 degree" theology, and applying it to all parts of life. This is a good thing.
They're enthused about working in partnership with the community - and with government bodies - to deliver things which help the poor and needy in society. This is a good thing.
Some manage to retain a fairly traditional understanding of Evangelical faith: others were probably more alarmed by Brian's ideas. This is interesting.
I'm not used to hanging out with big groups of people so implicitly aligned with the left of politics. I'm not saying they were partisan (both Labour and Tory MPs spoke at the event), but you knew which kind of people were the fellow-travellers of most of the organisations represented with stands etc.
For an event so well connected to such right-on action, it was surprisingly middle-class, white, and middle-aged. There were some younger people, there were a handful of black people; I don't think I saw anyone obviously from an Indian or Chinese ethnic background. The majority were well-distributed around my age - many older; some somewhat younger. This is surprising. [I was minded to wear a baseball cap for the whole weekend, as I often do. But I would have been in a minority of one, had I chosen to persist. I caved in.]
Perhaps as befits that demographic, the engagement with new media was decidedly patchy. That was a big surprise. [I would have written a live blog, but there was no wireless on offer. I could probably have done so via my phone, but wasn't ready to jump through hoops to do it. Doesn't everyone have wireless these days?]
I struggled for a while to work out quite why the whole thing seemed quite 'other' to me: in the end I worked it out. I had spent the whole of the preceding week at a very different conference - a business event, in Miami, populated by all the multinational names familiar to you from the world of IT. Moving from that very big business picture to the world of small-scale charities, volunteers, and government grants gave rise to more than a little ... cognitive dissonance! This was a surprise.

As I say, these are just first impressions of a process kind. More about the content, later.

Note on commenting: I don't want to have a 'comments policy' - I don't think there are enough comments on the blog to warrant it. But I will delete comments written in any language I don't understand, for fear that they may be offensive (or worse). Sorry about that.

evolving Christianity

2010-02-16T20:01:00.004Z

Michael Dowd has a nice, thought-provoking piece on his blog on 'the salvation of religion: from beliefs to knowledge'. It won't sit well in an Evangelical stomach, but it is not unrelated to my post on why praying for changes to the laws of the universe is problematic. He sets out his core idea thus:

The primary cause of the Church’s decline in size and influence in Europe, and now also in America, is this: valuing the Bible as scripture while failing to see that today’s science, interpreted meaningfully and mythically, reveals God’s nature, God’s ways, and God’s guidance far more accurately than anything the biblical writers could have accessed millennia ago.

Then he goes on to discuss how the advances of science in the latter part of the last millenium, and in particular the 20th century, reveal a world more wonderful, more marvellous, more exquisitely beautiful than anything the biblical writers could see.

And as any kid will tell you, dinosaurs and black holes are just way cooler than bible stories.

Now, Dowd's perspective is outside even my post-evangelical realm. He is happy, I think, to remove the bible from the normative role that most churches would give it - whatever their doctrine of inspiration. I'm at the stage myself of wanting 'both, and': but I find his perspective most refreshing and more than a little inspiring.

When church leaders study the Epic of Evolution as they now do the Bible, and when they teach and preach the discoveries of science as divine revelation—God’s word for us today—Christianity will experience a revival unlike anything the world has ever seen.

private religion

2010-02-09T22:30:00.002Z

There's a meme with an ever-growing strength. It says that religion (or faith, or belief) is for the private sphere, and not something that should impact public life. It says that the state should be neutral about the faiths which compete for attention, and favour none. It says that equality and fairness can be achieved only if we demote religion from its previous normative role. It goes so far as to say that previously long-held beliefs are not merely out of date, they are positively damaging.

In some lights, that perspective seems entirely rational and reasonable to me. If we are not to organise our state as some kind of theocracy (or do I mean thearchy?), then eventually its norms and ruling principles must come from somewhere else; somewhere other than religious faith. Of course, the foundation of the British state is almost postmodern in its multi-faceted splendour: to suggest that church, government, and justice flow from the Crown is just to repeat a convenient fiction; it doesn't really work that way. There are many influences, many norms, and their pattern is constantly shifting.

Should the state get out of the business of who may marry whom, and just register civil partnerships instead? Should a Prime Minister who invokes faith as a basis for decisions of state be excoriated? Is it professional misconduct for nurses to offer to pray with their patients? Can religious symbols co-exist with official uniforms?

I heard a lecture recently by Roger Trigg, a philosopher. He was talking about religion in public life. He was most scathing about a modern tendency to identify religious faith with other kinds of belief (so he dislikes making being a Christian and being a Vegetarian into equivalent categories). I rather disagreed with him, but he put his finger on (but didn't explore) an important point: religious faith matters precisely because people believe it. I could expand: being a servant of Christ is manifestly different from being a follower of Dawkins' flying sphagetti monster, exactly because the former does, actually, in practice, change how a community of people acts, whereas the latter does not (the creative web site linked here notwithstanding).

Many seem to want to argue that faith should hold a privileged place in society because it is religious faith, long-held, and deeply believed. But that seems as amiss as arguing that faith should not be allowed a place in public debate: that an opinion arising from faith is somehow unacceptable (whereas an opinion arising for some other reason is not).

Perspectives which arise from and within community do matter, because people hold them. That doesn't mean they can't be challenged, poked, prodded, re-shaped: unless of course your faith doesn't allow any of that. The idea that we can disentangle this from everyday life is truly fanciful.

Value-free individuals don't exist; value-free education doesn't exist; value-free public policy doesn't exist. I don't necessarily want to elevate my value system above that of others - but to imagine that we can find a neutral place is absurdly optimistic. Being inclusive and affirming is not the same as being neutral or faith-less: indeed, the two can be at odds.

Many/most/much faith cannot be purley private, because it presumes to inform the whole of one's life. That doesn't mean I can impose it upon others given free will in the image of God, but I can't hide it, either.

on prayer (part 2)

2010-02-02T21:10:00.004Z

So what can we say about prayer - intercession and suplication, in particular?

Undoubtedly, it helps to calm and focus the individual pray-er. Many religious traditions involve prayer and/or mediation, and as far as I know, there is evidence that those who participate enjoy a better quality of life, less stress, maybe even better mental health. Does that make sense? Well, it seems to me, yes: prayer makes us think about what really matters to us. It gives us space and time to think about what we hope may happen. It tends to cause us to be less superficial in our treatment of whatever we are praying about (though I find that it is easy to get stuck with trite vapid prayer). I think that this applies whether the tradition of prayer is one of quiet contemplation, or extatic exuberence.

Corporate prayer helps to strengthen the community, too. We rehearse together the things that matter to us, and so strengthen the shared vision, the shared ownership of the ideas. Some people's prayers are quite evidently more directed to those around than to the Almighty: but even the others give us a shared language, a common purpose, and a perspective it's hard to dissent from. It is very difficult after someone has just prayed for some particular outcome to say that one hopes that outcome does not come about.

And then, they say that prayer - the listening kind of prayer - entails learning what is on God's heart. I wonder to what extent our understanding comes from God, and to what extent it comes from the two things above - sorting out your own thoughts, and learning what others are thinking. And I wonder why it should be that God talks to us when we adopt that prayerful attitude: rather than, say in the hubbub of busy life, or when watching the television. But I suppose we find that God works in all sorts of ways.

Of course, our first idea of prayer is of sharing with God what is on our minds: albeit, theoretically, as a two way conversation. And asking him to do things. A prayer of request or supplication entails asking him to intervene, to make things right. And that, for the reasons I set out in part 1, is where the problems seem to come from. Prayer which changes me, rather than God, I can comprehend (though I'm not entirely sure I've explained it well).

on prayer (part 1)

2010-02-01T22:27:00.008Z

Blog posts have been rare lately. I have a lot of half-baked thoughts, but am in two minds about sharing them. This, however, I wanted to get off my chest, and is based on something I wrote last year which never saw the light of day.

Prayer is problematic. Someone remarked to me recently that they like to know who will lead/speak at church on the coming Sunday, so that they can pray for them. But presumably God knows who will be speaking: do I necessarily need to know, too? Is my prayer less effective if I don't?

In Richard Dawkins’ bestseller The God Delusion, he cuttingly tries to explain his problem with prayer:

“Remember Ambrose Bierce’s witty definition of the verb ‘to pray’: ‘to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy’. There are athletes who believe God helps them win – against opponents who seem, on the face of it, no less worthy of his favouritism. There are motorists who believe God saves them a parking space – thereby presumably depriving somebody else. This style of theism is embarrassingly popular...”

It would be easy to dismiss this as a strident dissenter woefully (wilfully?) missing the point, but sometimes I’m fearful that he actually comes close to the mark. Indeed, just a year ago, I heard a preacher in a pulpit say that he did indeed pray for parking spaces, and that God invariably came through for him. The preacher was Mark Driscoll: whether he also prays for his preferred winner in The Ultimate Fighting Championship, he did not say. I was struck, too, when touring the USS Midway (now a museum) in San Diego last year, by an exhibit in which the ship’s chaplain in a recording recalled the night before operation Desert Storm: he had prayed with the crew for “absolute victory”.

It’s easy to call out others, but I find myself confused as I approach prayer too, I confess: I would primarily talk about prayer in terms of relationship; in terms of opening my heart to God’s – wanting to be changed in the process; in terms of seeking that my will might become more like his. But all too often, a casual rider will be there – spoken or in my thoughts – that it would be most convenient if the laws of physics could be bent for a little while. When it comes to petition, my expectation of the orderly progress of the processes of chemistry and physiology seem to go out the window. More often, I suspect, my prayer is of a more vague character: for someone to be encouraged, or blessed, or to have wisdom or comfort – or is that really a request for an interruption in the normal processes of psychology?

I’ve lately become kind-of agnostic about most miracles: there are not a huge number in scripture – each is somewhat noteworthy, precisely because it is out of the ordinary. Maybe they really represent suspensions of the laws of the universe for a little while – or maybe they are about inspired timing and the lessons we can learn from the impressions of those who observed them. And maybe there are some of each kind: the resurrection of Christ is one which it is perhaps hard to fudge or be agnostic about. In any case, are we right, on the evidence presented, to expect to encounter lots of such miracles?

So therein lies my concern. A God who periodically grants wishes, a little like Aladdin’s genie (with some attendant capriciousness perhaps), is plainly not the God of the bible, but, as Dawkins says, that kind of God is embarrassingly popular. I sometimes find myself sucked into that way of thinking: it is very easy to do. An omnipotent God holds no philosophical problem for me, but a world in which the laws of physics are re-written every second, in answer to prayer, would.

That kind of approach is clearly more suited to a pre-enlightenment world when many of the laws of cause and effect were not so well understood: to appeal for a miracle seems not unlike appealing to a “God of the gaps”. And yet to do so is foolishly to dismiss the people of ancient times as simpletons: rising from the dead was no more common then than it is now; nor was the parting of seas or the turning of water into wine. Some would say that great events took place at pivotal moments – and did so with a purpose. That is almost a tautological point, however, I fear.

So where does that leave me with the supplication and petition aspects of prayer? I confess that I do not know – sorry to be negative – and that so far I have not encountered anyone with a constructive theology of this for the present age. I’m increasingly convinced that I need one, however, because the one I’ve received didn’t work very well in the modern era, and now looks far past its best.

If this is rather negative, I will try in Part 2 to be a little more constructive, though I'm concerned that I don't have much of an answer.

Formative influences #8: tell it like an evangelical

2010-01-04T21:33:00.002Z

Happy New Year to all. Yes, both of you :)

Back in 2008, I had a series of blog posts on formative influences and formative moments. I think it's time to share some more, not least because they've been on my mind a lot lately.

This nugget comes from a meeting of the College Christian Union while I was a graduate student. The CU wasn't really set up for graduates, so I don't really recall whether I was there very much. It was a staunchly evangelical set-up, evangelistic, too. I remember well a particular evening when various people were sharing words of "testimony" or faith stories. Another couple of graduate students were there, one of them from an Eastern Orthodox tradition. He was going to speak, but perhaps reticent in getting going. I remember Ruth saying something along the lines of "go on, Tim, tell it like an evangelical".

That put into sharp relief something I knew subconsciously already: that we can tell our story in a number of different ways. Indeed, that even within the Christian sub-culture there are many very diverse strands that don't really communicate. But with exposure to the right groups, you can learn to tell a tale in a different genre: the Orthodox believer can tell it like an evangelical - and, I presume, vice versa.

Some who use the postmodern label would throw in the word metanarrative at this point: my point, though, is the rather simple one that there are many ways of seeing the same thing. We adapt our discourse to suit our surroundings, and that affects not just the vocabulary and syntax: it also means that different aspects get emphasised, different perspectives described, different conclusions reached.

Which of those stories is true? Well, that all depends on what truth is all about. And there lies deep water. What if those stories become mutually contradictory? Well, that depends on the framework of reasoning to which you expose them. And there lies some more deep water.

Too readily such discussions disappear into abstruse philosophy. But they matter very much, because I for one know that I inhabit several stories, and I doubt it's possible to reconcile them into a single coherent whole. I don't want to be a liar, a two (or multi)-faced individual who makes out he is one thing to one group, and something else to another, and yet I certainly don't know of a way to sum up all that I think/feel/believe in a single narrative any more.

Am I allowed to be plural?

provocative

2009-12-16T15:57:00.001Z

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/3168791/Church-courts-controversy-with-Christmas-billboard

(may offend)

more dissonance

2009-12-15T20:24:00.002Z

I was a little taken aback to read that Peter Rollins was in Seattle visiting Mars Hill Graduate School. Pete Rollins and Mark Driscoll are both cool in their own way, but theologically they surely have as much in common as ... some very unlike things. I understand a lot more of Driscoll than I understand of Rollins. But I like much more of the latter than the former. Perhaps there's a reason for this.

But evidently Mars Hill Graduate School, despite being in Seattle, seems to have nothing to do with Seattle's Mars Hill Church. So that's all right then.

I'm not surprised Evangelical Christianity is on the rise

2009-12-15T09:41:00.000Z

Ooh. Now, this is scary. But it doesn't seem to be backed by any hard facts. So perhaps we can ignore it.

I'm not surprised Evangelical Christianity is on the rise

Review: A History of Christianity

2009-12-05T21:15:00.003Z

The BBC is running a series at the moment on the history of Christianity. It's got a very different approach from last year's Channel 4 series, which impressed me greatly although many critics slammed it.

I wish there were transcripts available online, because the script has lots of lines dripping with nuance, deserving to be discussed. But I cannot find any. So we must settle for a quote from the website describing this week's epsiode:

Diarmaid MacCulluch traces the growth of an exuberant expression of faith that has spread across the globe - Evangelical Protestantism.

Today, it is associated with conservative politics, but the whole story is distinctly more unexpected. It is easily forgotten that the Evangelical explosion has been driven by a concern for social justice and the claim that one could stand in a direct emotional relationship with God.

It allowed the Protestant faith to burst its boundaries from its homeland in Europe. In America, its preachers marketed Christianity with all the flair and swashbuckling enterprise of American commerce. In Africa, it converted much of the continent by adapting to local traditions, and now it is expanding into Asia. But is Korean Pentecostalism and its message of prosperity in the here and now an adaptation too far?

He introduced the segment about Pentecostalism (and the prosperity message) by asking if some forms of Evangelicalism have wandered too far from the message of Jesus. It's an interesting question - and are the prosperity gospel folks the right ones to pick on as outliers? As he toured one or two African indigenous churches, the thought occurred to me: just how wide is the Christian family?

It seems an unanswerable question. His recurring theme in the series is that the strength of Christianity has been its willingness to adapt to local circumstances. Doubtless, that's true. But where does truth end and heresy begin? Is that, indeed, a sensible question?

Everyone tends to describe the answer by looking at their neighbours, and those they come into contact with. Some are 'in' and some are 'out'. But of course, if you look at their opinions of their 'in' neigbours, and so on, you will eventually get to places where you wouldn't be so comfortable. (I think there's an analogy to be made with inter-breeding bird species around the North Pole, but I can't find a reference).

It's tempting to think that we know what the faith truly is. But perhaps it isn't so. We tend to construct it in terms of its unchanging truth: but maybe, just maybe, it is its adaptability which is a much better way to look at it. Somehow that feels really unsettling.

the summary

2009-11-25T21:17:00.002Z

Having hashed out the argument of my previous post on my facebook status, I think I've come to a much more succinct statement of my point of view: the rich irony is that the British Humanist Society presumes itself able to set a privileged metanarrative for the whole of society. How absurd.

Christian Children

2009-11-22T14:36:00.003Z

The British Humanist Association is running an advertising campaign "Please don't label me", inspired by a quote from Richard Dawkins:

There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents. ... Catholic child? Flinch. Protestant child? Squirm. Muslim child? Shudder. Everybody's consciousness should be raised to this level.

[amusingly, the children featured in the pictures belong to a family of Evangelicals, and just happen to have found their way into a photo library]

Many Christians would agree that people have to find their own way, and come to their own "faith decision" at an appropriate time. Many would say that there are a whole series of faith decisions to be made, perhaps (why else did Christ talk of taking up one's cross daily?)

But it seems stunningly naive to suggest that we need our consciousness raised to the point where we realise that children are blank canvasses, and that "religion" is something which may or may not be foisted upon them. Never mind whether it's desirable, is it possible to step outside our own prejudices and give the next generation an unfettered, un-nuanced choice?

Of course not. The child raised by socialists will look at the world differently from the neighbour raised by aspiring middle-class entrepreneurs. The child raised by vegans will make different life choices from the one who starts boxing lessons at the age of four (ok; those are not quite mutually exclusive, but I'm thinking that the overlap is tiny). The child raised by atheists will view the world differently from the ones who are active, philosophically-inquisitive agnostics. These points of view do not necessarily give rise to a simple causation (vegan parents means life-long vegan child) but they are undoubtedly affecting.

There is no "neutral" position. There are many possible beliefs and practices. The stuff that society generally agrees on is pretty slender. "Stealing is bad, and violence is only possible as a last resort, and perhaps not even then" might seem a common credo, but I'd wager plenty of people would want to qualify that slightly before instilling it in their child. The assumption that "no religion" is a better default than this faith system or that seems equally arbitrary - especially when the majority of the population has an explicit faith of some kind (and a significant proportion of the rest will hold onto some intangible, unprovable mystic beliefs of some sort or another).

People have tried interfering with what may or may not be taught to the young before. It seldom ends well. There will always be extremes that society decides are too damaging - and I wouldn't rule out evangelicalism some day receiving that label -but the diversity of society arises precisely because families, extended families, and communities all have an influence on the way children grow up. And that, as far as I'm concerned, is not just a good thing, it's essential.