Review: Miracles for Sale

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?

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

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 2: scripture
• here I stand? part 3: gospel and salvation
• here I stand? part 4: mission
• here I stand? part 5: spiritual formation
• here I stand? reflection

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

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

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

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 2: scripture
• here I stand? part 3: gospel and salvation
• here I stand? part 4: mission

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

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

• here I stand? part 2: scripture
• here I stand? part 3: gospel and salvation
• here I stand? part 4: mission

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.