face-palm

I've seen many permutations and combinations of life, lifestyle, opinion, and more, but this one still took me a little by surprise, together with the next tabs on the same page. All part of life's rich tapestry, I guess -  but maybe only in America?

retrospective

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/02/18/the-biblical-view-thats-younger-than-the-happy-meal/

This is a nice discussion of a little bit of history. It has broader implications for epistemology and hermeneutics also.

sufficient grace

I was struck by a comment from Rick Warren.  He was apparently being interviewed on ABC, repeating some nonsense about his principled objection to "same sex marriage".  He was asked about the prospect of his church adapting its views, as wider culture changes.  His response:

WARREN: Actually, history shows that when the church accommodates culture, it weakens it. This is why there is a very weak church in Europe today. It’s almost non-existent in many areas.

Now, that is hard to defend - and shows a staggering lack of self-awareness.  But the striking sentence is the middle one.  The implication is that strength is good and weakness is bad.  But I'm just not sure that that is a Kingdom principle.  Of course, context is all-important.  But in general, I'm not sure that the message of Christ is about a need to be strong, powerful, or influential.  St. Paul was assured that God's strength was made perfect in his weakness; he said that God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.

All this is a little reminiscent of the view of a certain man from Seattle who bemoaned Great Britain's lack of famous bible teachers.

Oh the irony.  If we have a business model of church, with franchises spread around the country (or the world), then fame, strength, and influence will be all-important.  But might there not be a chance, just a little one, that this is the embrace of wider culture, precisely the thing Warren complains about?  The Kingdom is different from that.  It's summed up by a man at the end of himself, hung on a cross. 

feeling unapologetic

Some spam in my mailbox asks if I'm Fed up with being told that Christianity is a fairy-tale?  Premier Christian Radio is evidently hosting an event on Reasons to Believe, with catchy talks on topics like God & Science: Cosmic Reasons to Believe in Christ.  I confess to having more than a little sympathy with the fairy-tale side of the house.  Not because I think that Christian faith is as useful today as the story of Snow White, but if anything quite the contrary.  There are rather too many Christians whose pitch seems to have the implicit sub-title "Fairy tales you can believe in".  Traditional apologetics seems to be busy answering all the wrong questions.

A new book by Richard Beck apparently brings a related perspective.  Richard writes a good blog, so I'm hopeful of a good book - when it eventually hits these shores.  He writes

The goal of this book is to answer a question: Why do people believe in God? More specifically, this book is aimed at answering a particular form of this question, a nuance that emerged in the modern period through the work of thinkers such as Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and, of particular importance for this book, Sigmund Freud. The shift in emphasis in “the God question” occasioned by these thinkers has rendered much of Christian theology and apologetics effectively useless in addressing many contemporary criticisms of religious faith. The playing field has shifted. And a new kind of apologetics is needed.

And that opening line makes for an interesting question.  Not one best tackled by rehearsing the tenets of mediaeval metaphysics.  Dawkins poetically and accurately observes that believing in God  is as rational as believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster (with all his noodly appendages).   Well, it's accurate in one particular form of rationality - but the notable, gaping hole in the argument is that there are a large number of people who do believe in God (generally involuntarily, as I discussed previously), and for a large number of these, that belief leads to action of one kind or another.  Notwithstanding the adherent of the Jedi creed who had a place on Channel 4's 4thought.tv slot, I don't think that the church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has any active communicants.  The interesting, rational, testable bit of Christian Faith is the impact it has upon the lives of its adherents - and the impact (for good or ill) which they have on the rest of the world.

If objective truth exists, it does so independently of the democratic will  Things can be true even if no one believes them, and having two billion adherents does not necessarily validate a belief system.  However, things done in the name of Christ have a substantial impact on the world today, and for that reason alone, his followers need to be taken seriously.  Moreover, they need to take themselves seriously, since it is surely by clinging to the outdated (and the already falsified) that the central message of Christ is obscured, and worse.

I can think of many reasons for the life of faith - and I don't think they need apology in either sense of the word.  I think I'd find the Rollins school of faith and philosophy the source of some better questions (if only I understood him better) - with his current blog title to believe is human; to doubt, divine.  

more in sorrow

I've always had this love/hate thing with the Mark Driscoll phenomenon of Mars Hill in Seattle, and have blogged about this here, here, here (I even visited for myself), here, and probably several more. Often, my perspective has been one of wry amusement and bewilderment - and I keep resolving to avoid paying any more attention to what sometimes seems like a bizarre self-parody.

But lately, there's been a slew of rather more disturbing blogs, including

• Joyful Exiles  (the latest, and rather alarming, on several levels)
• Mars Hill Refuge (a whole collection of tales, rather too many to dismiss as the ramblings of malcontents)
• UnReformed (one man's experience, and aftermath)
• ... and countless media stories.

Mars Hill has also issued a Call for Reconciliation.

I suppose the latter is helpful, but, wait: how many churches of a few thousand members (or tens of thousands of members, is it now?) have sown so much discontent that they need to issue such a call?  Perhaps theirs is a righteous prophetic ministry, and the dissenters just can't handle it.  Perhaps not.

To this outsider, it seems like a change of phase, that the end game is on its way.  An organisation with this many structural tensions doesn't end well, unless you work very actively to resolve those tensions.  Driscoll has many followers, and I assume has strengthened the faith of many. Explosive fallings-out would have much fall-out. May the whole thing get unwound gently and with grace.  Lord, have mercy.

a matter of choice

The competing concerns of various kinds of rights seem to be seldom out of the news at the moment.  This is not least because of the government's consultation on marriage equality, and the fear of certain churchpeople that this is somehow (despite being explicitly not related to religious weddings) an attack on faith (if not civilization itself).  I've blogged on that topic before, and will try to do so again soon.

British law on equality protects against discrimination on the grounds of a number of protected characteristics.  These include age, sex, orientation, religion or belief.  I've seen quite a few comments suggesting that this is uneven, because many of these are innate, whereas religion is a matter of choice - and so religious discrimination is more forgiveable (or its protection a lower class of right) than, say, discrimination on the grounds of age or sex (or, at the most politically charged point, sexual orientation).  If religion is a choice - on a par with choosing MacDonald's over Burger King, or Mazda over Honda, or real ale over lager - then it is plainly not as worthy of respect as some other protected characteristics.

But is faith a matter of choice?

I can't speak for everyone, nor every kind of faith.  In our society which celebrates consumer choice, shopping for a religion, eventually choosing the Marks and Spencer version, seems to make sense.   But is it really like that?

It strikes me that if you believe in God - for whatever reason - it is very hard simply to choose to stop. You could announce that you no longer believe - but that could easily be a lie.  Belief strikes me as a deep-down - possibly irrational - confidence in something, which is hard to shake.  Perhaps the gulf between people of faith and those with none is that either struggles to comprehend the state of mind of the other.

Lots of people believe things on the basis of flimsy evidence, or indeed, believe in a counter-factual kind of way.  Decades (centuries?) of science teaching have failed to persuade large numbers of people that heavy and light objects fall at the same speed [ok; they fall with the same acceleration, to be more precise].  Belief is hard to shake - whether based on truth or falsehood, or something else.

I assume that this isn't a new thought: presumably the framers of statements of human rights gave status to belief alongside race and sex and the rest for higher reasons than being afraid of the religionists.  And yet it seems to be being missed by a lot of well-meaning but rather shrill people.  

I'm not for a moment arguing that people of faith should be able to ride roughshod over the sensibilities of gay people - but the converse is also problematic.  The way of Christ seems altogether a better account of how to bear with each other:

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.
(Philippians 2:3,4, NIV)

when is a religious ceremony necessarily non-religious?

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?