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.

here I stand? part 4: mission

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

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.