Worship Music/Institutionalised Homoeroticism

Whether it be the faux-American accents that everyone insists on singing in, the awful singing/harmonising that usually accompanies it, the implicit eroticism with which spiritual themes are addressed, or the psychological manipulation of ecstasy coupled with hard-hitting and unequivocal sermons that usually accompany it – I feel rather uneasy about it.

My personal favourite is ‘Jesus, take me as I am’.

Jesus take me as I am,
I can come no other way.
Take me deeper into You,
Make my flesh life melt away.

Or:

I want to know you,
I want to hear your voice,
I want to know you more.

I want to touch you,
I want to see your face,
I want to know you more.


Or:

And Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii. I’m desperate for you.
And Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii. I’m lost without you.


When Jim Chew referred to much of what happens as (something like) a huge white, middle-class love-up, I don’t think he was very far wrong.

Worship music is so Protestant. It has ticks in all the right boxes:

• No talent required at all (a monkey can learn four chords on a guitar)
• Everyone is invited to participate (ie, sing along)
• Popular, emotive soft-rock ballads become personal salvation drivers

A wonderful South Park episode gets it about right. Cartman sings in a worship band, who perform such tracks as ‘I wasn’t born again yesterday’. One track contains the words:


I wanna get down on my knees and start pleasing Jesus
And feel his salvation all over my face.

Whatever you think of South Park, they certainly know how to parody things.

But I do like good music. I do love listening to choral music, which seems increasingly rare in churches, and least of all in churches that regard themselves as ‘cutting edge’. So what’s the difference?

1. Choral music uses the same words all the time (in a literal sense – worship music does this, of course, but without acknowledging it). The repetition of familiar words with different musical settings encourages one to engage with them in different ways.
2. Choral music is often genuinely difficult to perform, and beautiful to listen to. Engaging with spirituality through excellent music is a good thing.
3. Choral music is based around the liturgies of the Church, and recites actual bits of the Bible! Incredible! Interesting that those adopting a particularly high doctrine of Scripture are often those whose worship involved precisely none of it, whereas choral evensong has the songs of Mary and Simeon, and a WHOLE Psalm! I remember one advocate of worship music advocating Hillsong on the grounds that it had ‘some really biblical lyrics’. This is certainly not the case in every Hillsong tune I have ever heard, and is the case in liturgy that, err, is straight out of the Bible. Simple really: use beautiful language and concepts directly, rather than putting them through the triple beauty/content bypass from which most worship songs have suffered at is a rather good thing.

The Tooth Fairy

Richard Dawkins loves the tooth fairy. Indeed, there is no more evidence for the existence of the tooth fairy than the God so many people believe in. Correct.

But is affirming the ‘existence’ of the tooth fairy (whatever that would mean) the scope of language about her? No – else parents across the globe be accused of systematically lying to their children, or of deluding themselves into belief that such a being exists without any evidence, and with strong evidence to the contrary.

Question: is affirming the ‘existence’ of God (whatever that would mean) the scope of language about God? No. As said before, talking about God is not a matter of affirming the existence of an extra-big thing that exists. It is more complex than that: it uses symbolic and metaphorical concepts to make sense of the life that we live; to engage ourselves with the mysteries of our existence; to shape our experience of and action in the world in wholesome and good directions; and to inspire, challenge and nurture our emotional selves.

I always find it interesting that Dawkins has never, to my knowledge, suggested that parents stop telling their children about the tooth fairy or Father Christmas, though of course the lack of evidence for their existence is equivalent to that of God.

But, of course, nobody has ever died as a result of belief in the tooth fairy. Nobody has ever made others suffer as a result of belief in Father Christmas. Nobody has set up a school and systematically brainwashed children in the name of the fairies at the bottom of the garden. Indeed – now we’re having an interesting debate. So forget the science of it; forget the lack of evidence for God’s existence and the countless reasons for doubting it; forget all the good reasons that evolutionary biology renders belief in God unnecessary. These are not the questions that matter, for, unless most parents commit similar child abuse to that of Priests, evidence (or lack of) for and against the existence of these beings is not the point (it is, however, the content of most of ‘The God Delusion’). A rather confused argument, then, is used by Dawkins: scoring cheap points on belief in God by using tooth fairy analogies regarding God’s non-existence; but failing to answer the real question of how humans use language about ‘false’ things (like the tooth fairy or God on the clouds), and whether this is a good thing or not.

Bus Theology

I have a few problems with putting a summary of one’s faith on the side of a bus.

This week it has been announced that the British Humanist Association will be placing Alpha Course-style adverts on the sides of London buses this January, reading ‘There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’

I have read a few blogs on this so far. Responses are varied, from:

• Fantastic – now a change to show religious people what a bunch of illogical idiots they are so people stop talking God
• Isn’t this terrible – liberal are at it again, trying to remove God from everyone’s conscience because of their own hardness of heart
• They only say probably no God – therefore there are plenty of opportunities for Christians to tell them just how accurate the Bible is, and how evolution was made by God etc
• Isn’t this wonderful – people are being open about their beliefs. This should encourage Christians to be as well, and create opportunities for dialogue

I agree with some of these more than others, and hope to offer a few thoughts that I haven’t read anywhere else. They focus on a simple question: what is God?

The assumption of these adverts is simple: God is a big man in the sky who doesn’t exist.

The assumption of the Alpha adverts is simple: God is a big man in the sky who does exist, and you can learn some more about him here. He’s the kind of person who you can ask questions to and expect answers from. God is an active subject: he does things, answers people’s questions and tells them ‘what it’s all about’.

I don’t think this, and I think that God is rather different to this big man in the sky.

Yet again, we’re back to Nicholas Lash. God is not, Lash suggests, one of the things that there are, in order that one can doubt God’s existence. In his own words:

‘[atheists] take for granted that ‘belief in God’ is a matter of supposing there to be, over and above the familiar world we know, one more large and powerful fact or thing, for the existence of which there is no evidence whatsoever.’

Or Karl Rahner:

‘God really does not exist who operates and functions as an individual existent alongside other existents, and who would be thus a member of the larger household of all reality. Anyone in search of such a God is searching for a false God. Both atheism and a more naïve form of theism labour under the same false notion of God, only the former denies it while the latter believes that I can make sense of it.’
Or Lash again:

‘Take a word with which we usually have less trouble than we do with ‘God’: the word ‘treasure’. A treasure is what is valued, held in high esteem. Notice that, when we say this, we are not implying that the word is the name of a natural kind the members of which, it so happens, are valued. There is no good going into a supermarket and asking for five bananas, three rolls of kitchen paper, and four treasures. To call something a treasure tells you nothing about it other than that it is treasures, valued, held in high esteem. Smilarly, a ‘god’ is what is worshipped, what someone has their heart set on… To call something a ‘god’ tells you nothing about it other than that it is worshipped.’

If this is the case, is it possible for God not to exist? If God is not a member of the community of things that exist, in the manner that ‘my left shoe’ or ‘Kofi Annan’ exist, but is, instead, that which we have our heart set on, I feel atheism is an impossibility because (Lash, yet again):

All human beings have their heart set somewhere, hold something scared, worship at some shrine. We are spontaneously idolatrous – where, by ‘idolatry’, I mean the worship of some creature, the setting of the heart on some particular thing (usually oneself). For most of us there is no single creature that is the object of our faith… and none of us is so self-transparent as to know quite where, in fact, our hearts are set.

So what, then, is the point of religion? Twofold, suggests Lash: to wean us from the idolatry of worshipping ‘creatures’ (including, I might add, a despotic God who will perform particular favours for you if you pray sincerely enough); and to purify our desire onto the mysterious, life-giving wholeness that life is really about:

Against this background, the great religious traditions can be see as contexts in which human beings may learn, however slowly, partially, imperfectly, some freedom from the destructive bondage which the worship of the creature brings.

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Ah, Dan. Nice thinking there – but you have two theology degrees and spend huge amounts of time thinking about this stuff. Why should anyone else care/believe you?

Perhaps you shouldn’t, whether you are an atheist or a diehard theist. But here’s why I think you should:

• Theists: the God in whom many churchgoers believe is an idol. Talking about ‘God’ is a complicated business.
• Atheists: the God in whom you don’t believe is an idol. I don’t believe in him either. Yet, I think the language of divinity and the existence of religious tradition forms a wonderful and liberating method of approaching life.

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I may or may not have convinced you, but convincing you is not my intention: instead, I hope to start a discussion. One of the great things about the Humanists’ campaign is that it does exactly that: makes people think, and legitimises discussion about God and spirituality. If there is something you think I should read/you think I am completely misguided/anything else – let me know. This is interesting stuff, and worth thinking about..

Good Nose

Good nose, hints of raspberry, soft bouquet with a long finish.

Wine is an interesting phenomenon, and wine buffs even more so: their eloquence in describing the precise nature of a wine, its character and feeling, is often rather amusing.

I don’t drink white wine very often, but did recently with my parents. I noted that the wine tasted of elderflower, which provoked some interesting discussion.

My mother was bemused, thinking that her son had become Oz Clarke. What could that possibly mean? Two things were central to this:

• I was talking rubbish.
• Was I suggesting that simply on the grounds of the briefest of sips I could ascertain that elderflowers were in close proximity to the grapes that produced the wine?

I responded to this with a comment on the nature of the language that one uses about wine. I suggested that drinking wine is a delicate and subtle experience, and one that transcends many of the normal means of talking about the flavours and sensory stimulation that comes from drinking. But is does taste of something, and the elderflower taste that I felt was an imperfect, but helpful, way of talking about it. When understood like this, I don’t think I was talking rubbish.

Also, the suggestion that in order to use that sort of language about elderflowers and the wine there must have been elderflowers in close proximity to it at some significant point in its lifetime, also misses the point. I was not suggesting anything of the sort, but was noting that this particular wine tasted something like elderflowers – I was making no comment on the wine’s history, or no hypothesis regarding its relation to the elderflower of which is tasted.

I wonder if this is rather like God.

Some people think that talking about God is pure rubbish: misleading lies that serve only people’s own self-interest. I don’t deny that this is often the case, yet think the history of Christian theology and the worshipful traditions of the Church have something rather positive to contribute to our living of life.

I wonder if religious language is rather like the words and concepts that we use to talk about wine. They are not the wine, but an imperfect and wholly inadequate attempt to understand the wine, for they are all that we have. And so it is with God: people tell stories about God to provide some narrative unpacking of God’s nature; people talk about God ‘saying’ and ‘doing’ things, though God surely has no voice or hands in any literal sense. This language and these symbols are all that we have in trying to make sense of the deepest levels of our experience, of that which we accept to be true without condition, and of that which inspires, motivates and transforms us.

So what about the Church?

The tradition of the Church in which I am most comfortable is fairly high Anglicanism. It takes these concerns rather seriously, and attempts to address them through the sounds of beautiful music, the smell of incense, the sight of one another and the priest, the touch of a hand being shaken, and the taste of bread and wine. Boring, dull ritualism, some say. Again, no doubt that this can be the case. But I wonder if this focus on the sensory engagement of one’s self with the mysteries of divinity might provide some excellent opportunities to pick up some of the elderflowers in the wine, or the Godness of the divine.

Dancing Weddings

I went to a wedding recently. The bride and groom had met through morris dancing, and so decided that their day would include a huge amount of the stuff. So, there was midday dancing in the park, plenty of warm beer and people dressed up, as well as a procession of dancing from the park to the bandstand.

When it came to walking up onto the bandstand itself – where the ceremony was to take place – a particularly well-known tune was played: ‘Simple Gifts’, a Shaker (dancing quakers from Manchester in the 18th century) tune. This was adapted by Sydney Carter into the tune of the well-know schoolboy hymn, ‘Lord of the Dance’. Which made me think about two things.

Firstly, here were two people doing some rather unusual things at their wedding. No hotel, white dress, church service, flowers etc. But people getting married in the public park, with stacks of dancing and a mood of great celebration.

Secondly, I thought about the hymn ‘Lord of the Dance’. I wonder if this isn’t such a different thing to the experience I had on that day. Sydney Carter writes about the words to the hymn:

‘I see Christ as the incarnation of the piper who is calling us. He dances that shape and pattern which is at the heart of our reality. By Christ I mean not only Jesus; in other times and places, other planets, there may be other Lords of the Dance. But Jesus is the one I know of first and best. I sing of the dancing pattern in the life and words of Jesus.’

I find Carter’s imagery of Christ as the dancing incarnation fascinating, as well as considering the concept of God being someone calls us to dance with him. A beautiful image, for sure, but what does the dance consist of?

Perhaps the dance consists of discovering, slowly and often painfully, who it is that we are, and then wishing to share who we are with others, that they may discover who they are. This process of being led into dance by others, through dancing finding our true identity, and then calling others still into this dance of life is rather wonderful.

I wonder as well if the wedding wasn’t a good example of this: two people expressing their identity and love for each other, dancing with their friends. Anyone who saw them (in a busy park on a Saturday), as well as all of the guests, knew that this was something profoundly different to the usual ‘white wedding’ – and they liked it, and were blessed by it.

Ethnic Cleansing

At camp this year an interesting subject came up for discussion: how is it that Scripture contains tales of merciless ethnic cleansing in the OT, which is never condemned anywhere else; and why did this stuff make it into the Canon of Scripture in the first place? After a brief conversation this weekend I thought I would offer my thoughts.

There are several points that I want to make:

1. The nature of the historical material in the OT is not the same as modern history. It was a dynamic entity, and did not amount to eyewitness accounts of actual events.

2. This encourages us to explore different ways of reading the material, and may have something constructive to say in answer to this question.

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An example.

In 2 Kings 22, the High Priest Hilkiah finds the book of Deuteronomy in the Temple. This comes right at the end of four books of history, centring on Israel’s ups and downs with kings and all the rest. The canonical order of the books (ie, Deuteronomy, then the Deuteronomistic history) encourages the reader to read the history in light of the road map. This, of course, is a fairly standard literary device.

What if, though, the history happened first? What if the road map was written after the events that it makes sense of?

Josiah’s reform in 2 Kgs 23 seeks to address many of the things that Israel has failed to do in the Deuteronomistic history, and which were outlawed in parts of Deuteronomy. A friend’s OT exam paper once asked whether the writers of Deuteronomy (known usually as ‘D’) and the Deuteronomistic history were ‘pawns of Josiah’. While this might be a little strong, the sense, I think, is about right – Israel’s history was not written by eyewitnesses, but by people seeking to make sense of the present with reference to the past.

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If this is the case, what then of the book of Joshua? What of the destruction of Jericho and Ai?

Tales of origins are a central component of our identity. People write creation stories (like Gen 1-3) and calling stories (like Gen 12 and Ex 3) to make sense of where they are now by referring to where they have come from. I wonder if Joshua might be a similar story? A story of people making sense of their current situation by writing stories about how the present came to be.

I am very comfortable with using the category of ‘myth’ in the interpretation of Scripture. Some are less so.

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At camp I talked about Deuteronomy 7, in which the notion of ‘herem’ is introduced. ‘Herem’ is the word most often used about this ethnic cleansing, and is an interesting word grammatically: firstly, it is usually used in the active causative (e.g., “you will cause them to be ’herem’”); and secondly, it means ‘to set aside for destruction’ – in modern Judaism, if someone is ritually put out of the community they are said to be ‘herem’.

When dispossessing the current inhabitants of the Promised Land, Israel are to not do several things:

• Make no covenant with the numerous –ites
• Show them no mercy
• Do not intermarry with them
• Smash their asher poles and other items of idolatrous regalia

These show several things:

• Making no covenant and intermarriage require these people to be alive – ie, not having been ethnically cleansed
• The only violence is to be committed against the objects of their religions

No violence against people is talked of in Deut 7, and the other elements of their commands expressly require the current inhabitants of the land to be alive.

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I wonder if, then, the book of Joshua is a myth. That is, a good story, expressing huge truths about the nature of Israel and its land; its commitment to the worship of the one God, YHWH; its stimulating a strong sense of national identity through great tales of military victory; and offering a symbolic manifesto for the way in which Israel is to act in the present: expressing Joshua-like unswervingness in following YHWH’s call.

The cogs are turning! The slippery slope has been engaged! Surely if this ethnic cleansing didn’t happen then the story is a load of rubbish? Doesn’t the ‘truthfulness’ of Scripture require the history it records to be ‘accurate’ (whatever that means)?

Not at all.

The Psalms are poetry; the Proverbs are based on sayings; Qoheleth/Ecclesiastes defies genre. Reading texts – any text – well requires us to, in the first instance, determine its genre, for only once this has been done can the development of good questions to ask the text be commenced. Different genres require different modes of analysis.

History in the modern sense (ie, eyewitness accounts of actual events) is a concept alien to the ancients. Instead, history and myth were rather more closely linked than many would care to believe: people made sense of their situations by telling stories, by embellishing them with meaningful additions, and by faithfully continuing the tradition of these stories’ influence on the present.

So what is the genre of Joshua, and what are its concerns? Well, the genre is not modern history, and is more like myth – meaningful stories told to make sense of particular things about the world. As a result, it is not remotely concerned with the ethical questions regarding the merciless destruction of cities and their inhabitants. This means one of two things:

- this makes it even worse. Not being concerned about such obviously immoral things shows an unforgivable hatred of the human race.
- the text is concerned with other things; its scope is beyond these factors, and to get hung up on these factors risks missing the real point of the narrative, which was written as a story, not as an account of actual events.

It won’t surprise you, I’m sure, to know that I veer much towards the second option, while acknowledging that there are substantial interpretation difficulties when dealing with the stories of Joshua. I hope that this attempt to voice and explore some of them might be helpful.

'Je suis seule'

I was on holiday in the south of France last week. One morning I went to the supermarket to buy some food, and saw a homeless man at the exit. I did my shopping and came to leave.

I find homelessness a very difficult thing to deal with: firstly, I am conscious of the balance between helping people in the most effective way possible and the most direct way possible: ie, giving a homeless person a pound may be more direct, but it may have a less positive effect on their overall well-being than giving that pound to a charity, say (this is a complex debate, and my presentation is a simple one – the empowerment of one’s own money, even if it spent on ‘unhelpful’ things, is something that the second of my options for the pound misses). Secondly, I find it completely unacceptable that people are homeless in our society. We are one of the richest countries in the world – it is unacceptable. I share the disgust of an Australasian tribesman in a recent C4 documentary that anyone in such a rich country can be without somewhere permanent, warm and secure to live.

One thing that I have done is to buy things for people. Nothing too special usually: some orange juice, more often than not, sometimes a cup of coffee. So when I walked out of the French supermarket I saw that the homeless man (accompanied by his sleeping dog) had a baguette by his side. I walked past, and then turned around, for I had two baguettes in my hand – ‘a baguette, sir?’, I asked in my GCSE French. ‘Non, merci. Je suis seule.’ – for those whose French is worse than mine: ‘No thanks – I’m on my own.’ He was on his own, and so didn't need another one.

I was so moved it was incredible. Mary’s song in the Magnificat says that the Lord ‘has put down the mighty from their seat – the rich he has sent empty away.’ I felt amazingly humbled by the man’s response:

• In one of Rob Bell’s better moments he chastises Christians for praying that God will feed the hungry when we have more than enough to eat.
• Mother Teresa said the sea is made of many small drops – small actions that affirm God within us and within others start to change the tide.
• A homeless man (called ‘Christian’, as I later found out) in a brief encounter gave the best rebuttal of our Western consumerism that I have ever heard: I have enough already, and I don’t need any more. But coming from a marginalised person with far less than myself it seemed rather more powerful.

I am a child of the contemporary consumer culture. I type this blog on a £1300 laptop, listen to podcasts on my ipod, spend £20 each month on my phone bill, and buy £3 cups of coffee. For Christian to tell me that he didn’t need what I was offering because he already had enough seemed pretty upside-down. But then the last shall be first, and the mighty have been put down from their seats.

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So each day that I went shopping Christian was there. I bought him a bunch of grapes on each day after that one, figuring that he probably didn’t already have some. We chatted a little, and he wished me a happy day each time. Our parting goodbye was rather ruined by my appalling ineloquence in French, but the sentiment was there: meeting him was one of the highlights of my holiday, and I’m sure he enjoyed the grapes that I have bought him.

I have blogged before about the significance of giving in our lives, and how we often discover who we are by giving of ourselves, rather than receiving from others. We gain infinitely more by giving of ourselves than we could ever hope to acquire through chasing after more and more of whatever we seek. St Francis was right: it is in giving that we receive.

So Christ. Born to a single mother, a displaced family of refugees, disgraced as a result of his disputed paternity. Spent his life with the dropouts, the down-and-outs and the nobodies. He learned that often it is these people, rather than the religious, who know what life is really about.

Ubuntu, The Kingdom of God and the American Dream

The words of two men that I like and admire intersected this week: Russell Brand and Barack Obama. Brand’s introduction to the MTV Awards in the US began with a tirade against George Bush, and an endorsement ‘on behalf of the world’ of Barack Obama. Brand’s humour was wicked and cutting, and caused uproar (no bad thing if he is correct, I feel).

But what about Barack Obama? I feel such hope for the world when I look at him, and his weaknesses in experience are more than overcome by his vision, charisma and oratory skills, which the US needs far more than an experienced hand at foreign policy (he also isn’t Sarah Palin, and so receives about a million bonus points as well).

Obama made a speech in 2004 that propelled him to the forefront of the Democrats’ consciousness. In it he said this:

‘If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child.
If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription and is having to choose between medicine and the rent not my grandparent.
If there's an Arab-American family being rounded, that makes my life poorer, even if it's up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.’


I find this quite an inspiring model for social organization, and an interesting challenge to the dominant individualism demonstrated by much of our culture. I wonder if it is also a rather good reading of St Paul’s analogy of the Church as a body in 1 Cor 12. It is also rather reminiscent of the African spirituality of ‘Ubuntu’, in which our own well-being is placed within that of the communities in which we find ourselves, and to which we give and receive. This radical notion of living in community, and of giving to and receiving from that community is a quite wonderful thing.

I have commented before on Desmond Tutu’s reading of the story of Christ and the ten lepers, which I think also has a lot to say here: our dependence on the good grace of others is to be matched by a deep thankfulness for the goodness that we have received. I wonder if this might be what the Kingdom of God is like – people realizing their communal interconnectedness, and the ways in which our lives are shaped by the good and bad actions of others, which, in turn, shapes the nature of our communities as a whole. The relationship of individuals becomes a microcosm of society as a whole, which is comprised of an enormous number of these relationships.

So Ubuntu, The Kingdom of God, the American Dream. Spot the difference?

Anglicans, OT/NT and Inerrancy

The current situation in the Anglican Communion is rather difficult: some within it have difficulty loving those who are seen to be eroding the very nature of Anglicanism, expressed in the authority of Scripture; others have difficulty loving those who condemn gay relationships as unscriptural as something that Church ought to oppose, rather than bless. How to deal with such diversity is a difficult question, with which many senior Anglicans – not least Rowan Williams – have been wrestling.

I had an interesting conversation with a lecturer yesterday, about an essay he was writing for a popular book on the Old Testament in Christianity. This, I think, discussion offered a profound insight into the current debate.

He used two NT examples of Christian engagement with the Old Testament:

- Jesus and the Rich Man - Then someone came to him and said, ‘Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?’ And he said to him, ‘Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.’ (Mt 19)

- Paul on Abraham in Galatians - Just as Abraham ‘believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’, so, you see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.’ For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed. (Gal 3)
These two passages adopt rather different understandings of the OT: the Matthew passage places the Law as the defining feature of faithful response to God; Paul, however, uses Gen 15:8 to advance his justification by faith rhetoric against the Law.
I have often heard preachers dismiss the gospel story (or any number of others, also) as Jesus encouraging the man to keep the commandments in order to show him how much he needed to have faith, and thus inherit the Kingdom. This is a fine example of the substantial misrepresentation of important canonical texts in the service of an allegedly ‘high’ doctrine of Scripture (ie, iron out any difficulties in the biblical text in order to preserve the credibility and uniformity of the whole).

But this is precisely what the text does not do. The canonical editors, in particular, make no attempt to dot all the I’s, and cross all the T’s; or to ensure that ambiguities are resolved and difficulties removed. Instead, they canonise the diverse witness of the Church and its authors.

Before returning to the current state of the Anglican Communion, a brief comment on the inerrancy debates, to which I alluded earlier.

Some Christians are deeply concerned with ‘preserving’ and ‘upholding’ the inerrancy of Scripture – ie, that Scripture contains no errors, and that any error emerges out of poor interpretation rather than ‘fault’ in the text itself (in effect, creating a position that could never be denied, even in principle – a nonsense). One of my conclusions is to suggest that this approach inhibits, rather than enhances, a searching engagement with the scriptural witness. Rather than hearing Christ’s words to the rich man as they were intended, and exploring the tension between these words and, say, Paul’s in Galatians, this tension is explained away. Easy answers are preferred to good answers, and an interpretative monopoly favoured over genuine dialogue.

Returning to the current debates concerning the place of women and homosexuals in the Anglican Communion, I think that my lecturer’s argument has something to say: diversity is canonised, and held to be scriptural by the Church. Faithful witness does not require uniformity in experience and opinion, expression and doctrine. The subject matter to which Scripture points is more mysterious than anything else in out experience, and resists the formulation of simple, monopolising interpretations. Diversity in the Anglican Communion, then, and in our experience of God seems to have some legitimacy in the scriptural texts that form a basis for the Communion’s existence in the first place. Perhaps Scripture’s own diverse and unconcluded explorations of the nature of God, humanity and the world might offer hope to a divided Church, and encourage debating with and deep listening to each other, rather than dominating each other.

Camp Values

n light of lots of things really, and particularly some recent discussion that have occurred on here I feel that saying something about what I feel that camp is might help somewhat.

I fell in love with camp quite early, when I was about 14. I arrived and found a community of people who asked difficult questions and thought about religion in interesting ways. It was a place that had something about it – it’s hard to say precisely what – but there was definitely something.

I have always been aware that my thoughts about Christianity and religion more generally have been rather different to those of many people at camp. This is always difficult, and is something that I often struggle with in religious communities. In particular, I struggle with those who are unwilling to ask difficult and searching questions about religion, or whose difficult and searching questions stop well short of anything of genuine challenge or difficulty. So questions about what Richard Dawkins might have to say to Christians (rather than the tiresome polemic that many Christians direct against him)’ about what it might mean to speak of that which we can only call God, ‘who’ is beyond language and conceptuality; about what it means to hold a Canon of scriptural texts with some degree of authority given that their development, construction and authorship is rather more compex than some give account for, and, in any case, how to use such two- or three- millennia old texts in 21st century faith. These are all big issues for me, and I am glad that camp is a place in which thinking about them is not off limits.

So when I heard that camp was introducing a list of values, my heart sank. But this was short-lived. Instead I was left with a list of things about camp that captured in far better form than I had ever managed without them to encapsulate most of the things that I really love about camp: openness, unity in diversity, inclusion, respect for others, valuing people without condition, not taking oneself too seriously etc. They remain the best paper expression of what camp is about that I have ever seen, and start to explain to those who have never been precisely what it is about this community that is so special.
So here they are:

Our Values

Reality. 
We won’t hide who we are – with all our flaws and failings – because God loves us are we are.

Generous Community.

We live our lives together and share ourselves with each other. It is a big ask, and daily surrender to the Holy Spirit as a team and individuals is the only way – it is costly stuff!

Acceptance and Healing.

We are a community of unconditional love in which people are enabled to find acceptance and healing.

Creativity.

We allow each other to be spontaneous and creative, and allow the surrounding beauty to inspire us. We want t reflect the creativity of our father – the Creator.

Space and Beauty.

We provide space for campers to be. To enjoy and breathe in the beauty of the creation. The ‘wow’-factor of the site shouts of the glory of God.

Laughter
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We take God’s calling seriously, but we don’t take ourselves seriously. We believe in a God who has a great sense of humour.

Simplicity
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We live simply – an open fire, coal-fired boilers, shared tents, hot but basic showers. And it’s worth it – without the layers of complexity the pressure of normal life, we make space for God

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I think the are something to be proud of, to own and to be challenged by.

Natural and Conceptual Disasters: Where is God in the Chinese Earthquake?

I preached in our college Chapel last night. Here is what i said:

Knowing quite what to talk about in one’s first sermon is rather difficult; and the brief of ‘something from the news this week’, while broad, both frees and limits one somewhat. I hope in this brief slot to demonstrate something I believe very profoundly: that the resources of religious tradition – in this case the Christian tradition, with which I am most familiar – remain important resources that may enhance, rather than impede, the good living of human life. A great number of my sentences will begin with variations on a reflective ‘I wonder if’. This is entirely intentional, and, I think, the only legitimate response to some of the issues that I will talk about. To speak with certainty about God is surely to speak of an idol; and easy answers to these issues are rather more commonplace than good answers.

The last fortnight has seen China devastated by an earthquake, and Burma’s already suffering people inflicted by the presence of a massive cyclone. The Boxing Day tsunami a couple of years ago is also still in the back of our minds. My chosen angle of discussion is to ask where God is in all of this?; and how the resources of Christianity might be of help in formulating sensitive and searching means of engaging with these difficult issues.

The so-called ‘problem of evil’ has been the subject of many an A-level exam answer, pub conversation, CU event and even a sermon in this Chapel last term. Adopting largely philosophical and abstract understandings of the nature of divinity, these events may come to a variety of conclusions – some less awful than others. I hope to adopt a different way of thinking about God and the world, and see how things might work out as a result.

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Our first reading today tells surely the most horrifying tale in all of Christian Scripture: a concubine, who is entirely under the control and influence of her religious master, ends up dying a lonely and painful death in order to preserve the sexual purity of her master’s host’s daughters, as well as that of her master himself. As a result, she is raped all night, and eventually cut into twelve pieces by the man to whom she is object – the man who sanctions her abuse in his place. In the whole story she isn’t the subject of a single active verb, and this dehumanisation is completed by her lack of even the dignity of a name.

As a brief aside, one might remember the recent finding of a Lithuanian woman’s dismembered head and hands on a beach in Scotland; the woman was a migrant worker. I can’t help but see some connection between the two women’s social status of vulnerability, as well as the mode of their being murdered.

An obvious omission from the Judges story is the intervention of God. Why does God not appear in this story, convicting the Levite, his host and the men of the town of the atrocities they have committed; protecting the woman from their malicious and murderous intentions? In a similar way, where is God in this week’s stories coming out of China and Burma? It appears that God is all but absent.

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I wonder if we can continue to believe in a God who does things like we do things, says things like we say things, and exists in a personal form like we exist in personal forms? I wonder what it might mean to pay more than lip-service to God being beyond language and beyond human conceptuality, and to see language of God ‘speaking’ and ‘doing’ things as rather more symbolic than descriptive or propositional? I wonder what a rejection of God as the cosmized projection of the self might mean for our understandings of divinity?

I wonder if God might be in things, rather than outside of them; a presence that resonates deep within the depths of our experience, rather than one that acts on them from outside; if God might be the language that expresses – ever more partially – in symbolic and poetic forms the transcendent mysteries of existence, which are by definition beyond the remits of experientially-derived language. I wonder where this God might be in the story of the Levite’s concubine if God isn’t zapping the wicked, protecting the righteous and ensuring that they all live happily ever after?

To say a little more about this understanding of God, I note my indebtedness to Paul Tillich, a twentieth century theologian. Tillich suggests that:

‘The name of the infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means.’

God, then, is not a being, like you or I are beings; but the depth of being itself. This is mystical, for sure – but then the God of certainty is most surely an idol.

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Commentators – not least Phyllis Trible, a feminist scholar – have drawn many parallels between the death of this woman in Judges 19 and the traditions of the death of Christ. She talks of this ‘text of terror’ in deeply moving terms: ‘Of all the characters in scripture, she is the least. Appearing at the beginning and close of a story that rapes her, she is alone in a world of men. Neither the other characters nor the narrator recognizes her humanity… Her body has been broken and given to many. Lesser power has no woman than this, that her life is laid down by a man.’

The Eucharistic and Christological undertones of Trible’s comments ring clear, and I wonder if our second reading might supplement this understanding: Christ’s presence in the poor, the naked, the imprisoned, the sick and the displaced locates divinity in the suffering of humanity – it is here that we should look for God, rather than in the grand actions – or, in these cases the lack of actions – that would appear to solve these problems in an instant.

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Where might this understanding of Judges 19 leave our understanding of God, and how does this, in turn, offer a life-giving understanding of faith in response to natural disasters?

This is a difficult question, and one in which a brief bit of Hebrew might offer some help. Hebrew nouns are constructed from verbal roots, so ‘melek’ – ‘king’ – is derived from the verbal root ‘maalak’, which means ‘to rule’. As such, the root from which nouns are constructed most often offers a window into the scope and intention of these words’ usage as nouns. The Hebrew word for wilderness – ‘midbar’ – is interesting; it is made from the root ‘dabaar’, ‘to speak’. Precisely what the significance of ‘speaking’ in concepts of wildernesses is is open to much discussion, and the sense of finding quiet and potentially painful places to be ones in which speaking – the speaking of God, perhaps – might occur is an interesting understanding of such places. Of course, God does not have a voice and so does not speak as humans speak – but the use of the discourse of divinity in making sense of these experiences of ‘otherness’ may, as I have suggested, be a fruitful endeavour, and a persuasive remodelling of traditional theistic concepts.

In addition to this, I propose another verse of the Bible, from St Paul, to be of help in understanding how these ideas might be of some use in understanding the presence of divinity within suffering:

‘I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.’

The precise scope of this rich verse is hotly debated, and I can only offer one particular understanding within the chorus of other understandings: in our suffering we become enjoined to the crucified Christ, who lives in us through both our suffering and self-giving for the good of others. When we become the wilderness Christ lives in us – for the wilderness is Christ’s home. See, the home of God is among mortals.

The paradox if finding of one’s home – finding one’s being – in the wilderness, rather than in the comfortable times of life, marks a rather different response to suffering than is often suggested in religious circles: Christ’s being was nowhere more revealed than in the suffering and desolation of crucifixion; similarly, through suffering we too may be brought into close relation with the depths of our being also, and may be open to the speaking of the divine in our experiences of midbar, our place of speaking, our wilderness. Through suffering, we become open to a deep engagement with divinity within, and as a result of this openness we may discover who it is that we are, and what God is in us. Through the pain of suffering we may discover true strength, which is found not in the preservation of comfortable life at all costs, but through a searching and authentic connection to the ground of our being: God, who is enjoined to humans in their weakness, and shares their pain.

But what comfort is this to those who are suffering as a result of recent natural disasters? I don’t know. But if the narrative of Christianity is about anything it is about hope, about true strength being found in the pain of weakness and despair, rather than the exaltation of power and strength. And out of this hopelessness and desperation can emerge peace and life and goodness. Not as a result of God poking his finger in and making everything alright again – for that is not the God of which I speak. Instead, God is somehow in the suffering of humanity in some mystical and unknown way, a compassionate presence that finds its being in all things. And through engaging with this God within we may be transformed.

Hope does not and should not do two things: firstly, belittle suffering in the present through a speculative ‘better future’; and secondly, offer mistaken hope through easy answers and clear solutions that ultimately end in disappointment and resentment.

I wonder what it more affirming and more hopeful than to acknowledge the presence of the divine in the suffering of humanity, and out of this to seek hope and life with the familiar discourses of divinity, which may articulate these experiences of ‘otherness’ in beautiful and poetic forms.

I have never heard a sermon on Judges 19 – in fact, I only came to know the story myself after a lecture in my first year. This is a great shame. To acknowledge religious tradition’s place in the articulation of that which grounds human existence requires that these most challenging and most dangerous modes of human being be not left without sacred symbol and story to engage and dramatise them. I find it deeply liberating that the Canon of Jewish and Christian Scripture contains stories such as these, as for many people in the world these events are not something that can be implicitly ignored at will, but are everyday reality. These stories contain nothing for religious people to hide – they say it like it is, and they don’t come up with easy answers to the issues that they raise. Instead, they invite us to think about them, to live them out, to listen for traces of these stories in those stories that happen to us and our fellow humans today, in the hope that they, and their broader context in Canon and Church might offer hope and life those who experience them in the present. As Denise Ackerman has said about another rape story in the Old Testament:

‘There is no prevarication, no avoidance of the horror, no cover up. "Saying it as it is” is the place to begin.’

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I have made several points here:

• God is not a cosmic version of myself who either fails to or cannot act to prevent evil; instead, God is mystically intertwined in the everyday realities of human beings – an underlying mysterious presence that is present particularly in the poor and needy
• As an example of this, Judges 19 is a story in which God appears to be absent – yet it is actually a story in which the crucified Christ is the narrative’s victim: a nameless concubine, an object not a subject, who is mercilessly abused by the powerful
• God – the ground of our being – may be found in weakness rather than strength. The examples I have suggested offer some playing out of concepts of divinity within things, and particularly within things of suffering and hopelessness. It is here that God might be found in natural disasters, and this finding of God within these places may transform us and bring us life and hope
• And as a result of this, Theology – ‘God-speak’ – when thoughtfully and sensitively deployed, may offer suggestive and searching resources for coping with the otherness of suffering, and offer grounds for hope not rooted in the more or less subtle variants of ‘God is in control so don’t worry’ that many Christians espouse. The deployment of Christian jargons in affirming the suffering of the needy, and seeking to transform their experiences through an engagement with the ground of being is central to this

Whether this is of any consolation to the victims of the world’s recent natural disasters – or, indeed, those who are suffering here or anywhere – I am not to judge. But I hope that the conceptual disaster of the God of many Christians might have been restated in rather more helpful and humane terms as a result of these reflections, and that the thrilling, despairing and challenging resources of the Christian tradition might retain at least some usefulness in this crisis and those crises to come.

So my final reflective question is about the nature of God, and completes Paul Tillich’s paragraph from which I read earlier:

The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps, in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself. For if you know that God means depth, you know much about [God]. You cannot call yourself an atheist or an unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. Being itself is surface only. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not. He who knows about depth knows about God

My question – and it is a question, not a confrontational challenge – is exactly as mine at the outset: ‘where is your God in the sufferings of people in Burma and China; and where was your God in the rape and dismemberment of a nameless concubine?’

Jonah II

Is there room for mystery in our understanding of God? Yes of course we will never get round all that God is - that goes without saying.
But I want to pick up on your question:
"What does it mean to say that ‘God spoke to Jonah’?"
As far as I understand the question, it can only come from a person who has never heard God speak; who doesn't have an understanding of a God who does perform miracles(similar to those recorded in the 'stories' of the Bible)in people's lives and intervene in a personal way; who doesn't have a personal relationship with God and who has never received direction from God.
Or else why ask the question? God speaks all the time and to me he speaks in English to Jonah he spoke in his native language.
Dannj I am intrigued by people who want to ask questions and would love to here your perspective (answer?) to that question:
"What does it mean to say that ‘God spoke to Jonah’?"
Surely we can only answer that question from experience, whilst checking our experience out with the way of the Bible?


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First of all, thanks for this (Neil?). It raises a number of interesting and important questions that I hope to offer some comment on.

I must admit at the outset that some things in here may go deeply against the way you understand God and faith. I say these things not to offend or undermine, but to answer the question about how I would read things like God speaking to people. My intention is not to belittle anything you may think or believe, but simply to offer my reasons for not sharing the same understanding.

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My posing of the question is based on an understanding of God that is entirely beyond our comprehension. Many people pay lip-service to this, and then go on to adopt rather crudely projected understandings of God as a more powerful, invisible version of humanity. As someone once said: ‘God made man in his own image and likeness; and man, being a gentleman, returned the compliment.’

Given that this is the case (go with it), God does not have a voice, and does not speak in the way that humans speak one to another. Similarly, as I may knock a wall over, God does not, because God is not simply a super-sized version of myself, speaking to people, doing stuff and all the rest. God is beyond our understanding. But language and conceptuality can be of some help in understanding the nature of divinity – so long as this language and conceptuality is not absolutised and ‘realised’.

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In the sense of God speaking like I may speak, you are right that I have not heard God speak. But in the sense of connecting on a deep and profound level with that which we consider to be divine, beyond description and ultimately a mystery, I have experienced things that may be put into the language and conceptuality of ‘God’ ‘speaking’ – though, of course, this language is used symbolically to express the inexpressible. Through doing this, I claim an element of continuity with the scriptural traditions that use these systems of language and conceptuality as well, and through doing so my own spiritual journey is enhanced and resourced.

Similarly, I have not seen someone get out of a wheelchair as a result of prayer or whatever (as an aside, I do believe very strongly in the placebo effect). I have, however, experienced and been on the receiving end of profound, inexpressible experiences as a result of the forces of nature and fellow humans – having wonderful conversations with friends, the thrill of white-water rafting, the joy of friends getting married or moving in together, listening to beautiful music, or the glimmers of hope and humanity among intense despair as I visited a friend in hospital at the weekend. These things can be described in physical terms (like I have done), but the depth of experience that makes them so special is beyond descriptive language. Language of miracle, transcendence and divinity provides a symbolic vocabulary for the expression and making sense of that which is beyond linguistic description.

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So what does it mean to say that God spoke to Jonah?

I think it is making God into a character in the story, with ‘human’ attributes and practices as a result. Stories are an immensely powerful way of engaging with the nature of reality, and this is what I think is going on here. I have noted the strong literary devices at work in the narrative, which I think do a good job of telling the story. One might compare it to ET speaking to the children in the film – aliens don’t exist, and if they did they wouldn’t have a voice like that; but you go along with the story because it is a good story, and seek to learn from it in whatever ways one can.

A brief aside here may help. I think that the Church has an important role to play. I see the Church as the community of people who seek to dramatise and live out these ancient stories, and in so doing work out what it is that they might mean. The commitment of faith is the commitment to participate in this process through one’s everyday actions and experience, through study, through ritual, through dialogue etc; as well as being a commitment to these texts and traditions offering a meaningful and life-giving means of engaging with the world. The texts are the texts of a community, and to remove them from that context is to miss the subtlety of their scope.

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With regards the final point about checking experience against the Bible, I have deep difficulties with this as a method. In my previous post I put something about how it is that Theology is done, and how I feel that notions of authority (scriptural or whatever) are often barriers to a searching engagement with God. As a result, seeing ‘the Bible’ (as a standalone authoritative entity, independent of interpretation or the communities that have preserved its contents) as the final arbiter of theological truth can be misleading, and negates the processes of interpretation that have to happen for its contents to become useful. There is no such thing as ‘just reading what it says’ – this is merely a rhetorical claim for power, of the type that I mentioned in the previous post. Of course, the processes and journey of theological interpretation can be deployed in the service of this ‘verification’ (for wont of a better word) – but the presence and legitimacy of these processes must be acknowledged.

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Finally, I hope this has offered some answer to the questions posed. I don’t know all the answers, of course, and these are merely some reflections on the issues raised. It would be good to continue this dialogue.

Authoritah

In response to Jon’s questions about authority, I will offer a few comments.

I’m not a terrible fan of notions of authority, and least of all authority in interpretation. I think that ‘authority’ is more often than not a claim for power, which I have deep problems with (if anyone is interested, I rather like Michel Foucault). The possession of ‘truth’ or ‘authority’, then, is something I am rather suspicious of. Instead of this, I feel that good leaders, good interpretation and good truth speak for themselves, and do not require such buttressing with labels of ‘safety’.

A simple matter of fact is that Christianity possesses a rich legacy of interpretation and theology that has contributed enormously to its development. As a result, to use the resources of Christian tradition in the formulation of interpretation is a helpful and legitimate practice.

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In terms of Genesis I reject any suggestion that until the dawn of Darwin all Christians were good bible-believing literalists. This is a simple factual error. Most of the Church’s great thinkers adopt a far broader understanding of truth than many Christians today, one that includes knowledge not derived from ‘Christian’ reflection on the nature of reality. Theologians, scientists, and all of us do the practice of natural Theology, of working things out about the nature of God from the way things are in the world, all the time. Augustine (from a simple Wikipedia search, in which he is quoted) was not a literalist on Genesis, and talked of Christians ‘speaking so idiotically on these matters’ as a result of ‘[affirming] rashly some one meaning to the prejudice of another and perhaps better explanation.’ No opposition of conflict is envisaged between different ways of knowing things, and where one understanding (such as a literal reading of Gen 1-3) is rendered null because of advances in another discipline (such as science), one ought not to oppose knowledge derived from outside one’s own tradition, but embrace it as part of the broader task of understanding the world as it is.

Concepts of authority, then, can serve to stifle this. Where some place authority on the Bible (with concepts of inerrancy etc), this prevents the engagement with and affirmation of truth from other sources. Further to this, concepts like scriptural literalism substantially misread the texts they attempt to ‘defend’ – as I have noted countless times before, a great number of texts in the Bible were not written as accounts of history in the modern sense. Placing authority on the Bible can obscure a thoroughgoing engagement with the texts’ own concerns, as well as negating legitimate and valuable truth from other sources.

Theology and science are different ways of engaging with the world, with different remits, different languages, different methods, different intentions etc. They form part of the rich tapestry of human experience that seeks to make sense of the world, and need not compete with each other in this end. Giving ‘authority’ to one over the other (or any other) risks negating the legitimate placing of others within this broad framework.

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So how is it that theology is done in this context? I think that Anglicans have it about right: a starting point of Scripture that has been handed down through generations; interpreted in the light of tradition (theology, experience etc); and also through reason. This is a deeply Catholic method, seeking to embrace a variety of things in the service of truth. I conclude this section with a quote from Luke T. Johnson, a RC biblical scholar, from an essay entitled ‘What’s Catholic about Catholic Biblical Scholarship?’:

‘The truth of Christianity does not require the denial of truth and beauty everywhere else. Catholics celebrate God’s capacity for self-disclosure to both Jews and pagans. Such traces of God’s revelation are the surest pledge that God is also capable of revealing Godself to Christians.’

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In summary, bullet-points will do:

• Inerrancy and literalism are not present (at least significantly) in Church tradition before modern fundamentalism
• Augustine in the 4th century (among countless others) saw no conflict between science and religion. Both play an important part in understanding the world, and they need not compete over the same territory
• Notions of scriptural authority can obscure good interpretation – reading Genesis historically refuses to take its authors on their own terms, and misses the subtlety of their means of communication
• An Anglican understanding of Theology is a helpful means of proceeding: the continual dialogue of Scripture, tradition and reason

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As an afterthought, and in response to Jon’s instigation of these questions, it would be great to talk about these issues. If doing Theology is a decentralized, deauthoritized process then through dialogue we can continue the tradition of interpretation, and resource both others and ourselves. It would be wonderful to talk about the nature of Theology, concepts of authority, the ways in which people do it, the relationship between religion and science etc. One thing I am deeply unwilling to debate is the notion of inerrancy – for me, it is no more defensible than flat-earth cosmology and obscures genuinely interesting things from coming to the fore.

Ten Lepers, Tutu and Faith

Luke 17:11-19 is an interesting story. In it, Jesus heals ten lepers – but only one (a Samaritan) returns to thank him. Then (ie, post-healing) does Jesus reply to the man’s exuberant thanks:

‘Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? … Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.’

There are many interesting things here, most notably Jesus’ parting words to the Samaritan: ‘your faith has made you well.’ What is this faith? And how has it made the man well, particularly given that he had already been healed of his leprosy?

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I recently found a piece from Desmond Tutu about this story:

‘It seems odd that Jesus should appear to repeat his cure, since the story has already recorded the healing of all ten. I have thought that perhaps this Gospel story points to a deeper leprosy in the spirit, the leprosy of ingratitude. To be unthankful, to be unappreciative, is in fact to be diseased. To cleanse our spirits of depression, of self-pity and other forms of spiritual leprosy, we have to be thankful, appreciative persons.’

The sense of faith (whatever faith is) working itself out in the inner workings of our being, and shaping the nature of our motivations and desires is something that resonates with me. The healing act of Christ in the narrative occurs once in the gift of healing, and again in the outworking of the man’s response to this gift through a thoroughgoing evaluation of his own inner processes and workings. Faith, then, might be the process through which one commits to a rigorous process of self-evaluation, which can be stimulated by both the graceful and graceless actions of others. Out of this may come healing of a deeper sort – in Tutu’s imagery, healing of the leprosy of self-obsession.

Oxfam, Prosperity Gospel and the Meaning of Life

Whilst in London recently, a good friend of mine raised an important and interesting question: what is the meaning of life? His answer, with which i have an enormous amount of sympathy, is that there is none, that life is meaningless. But rather than being something that causes pain and existential angst, he (and I) saw it as something profoundly liberating and empowering, for if meaning is to exist at all we must create, and in that lies a challenge, a spark for creativity, and a mandate for innovation. I agreed with my friend’s suggestions, and developed them in my own way, modelling my own understanding of how I adopt an innovation of meaning.

I suggested that the meaning of life was to learn to know oneself, and to be the person that you are, whoever it is. Through a process of continual discovery, humans become themselves.

I will fill out these comments a little more.

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I consider myself to be a Christian, though many Christians have deep problems with my understanding of faith being labelled ‘Christianity’. Why, then, as someone who considers life to be essentially meaningless, and that meaning must be created rather than simply absorbed from its legitimate source outside of the self, do I adhere to a particular religious tradition?

The answer is quite simple, and results from a simple matter of fact: Christianity is the understanding of reality that I am most acquainted with (having spent rather a lot of time in churches, gone to a faith school, studied Christian theology for 4 years and lived in a ‘Christian’ country all my life). I see doctrine as, in some sense, providing a narrative in which to live – the half-written pages of a book that inform and shape the writing of the other half as I live the doctrine out. Christianity is about living the story, and using the historic resources of others who have lived the story to inform one’s own journey. Through this living, contextualised within the doctrinal and scriptural traditions of the Church, one learns to become oneself.

My understanding, I suggested, can be placed in Christian jargon (ie, given a symbolic representation using the language and conceptuality of Christian tradition) through the use of concepts of humanity being made in the image of God – the task being to discover and engage with this inward godliness.

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A further part of my answer talked about the process of discovering who one is through giving of oneself. I will use three images to explore this a little.

1. The Prosperity Gospel

The prosperity Gospel is a rather wicked teaching that suggests that as people give (usually to televangelists or already wealthy churches) they will receive financial blessing from God as a result. A few passages from scripture are used to offer some legitimacy to this position.

2. Oxfam

Oxfam have a new slogan as part of their ‘Be Humankind’ branding package: ‘Get Rich Quick. Give.’

3. The Crucifixion of Christ

Christ’s death models the principle of finding one’s identity through self-giving and self-sacrifice, rather than simply receiving and taking from others. Christians throughout history have found liberation and freedom in commitment to this pattern of giving; and when placed in Christian cosmology, in which Christ gives himself ‘for us’, people have committed themselves to a response of giving. This is found in what I think is one of the most searching verses of Scripture, Galatians 2:19b-20:

I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Committing oneself to the pattern of Christ’s self-giving results from the narrative of Christ’s death being for the benefit of others, and one responding to this be enjoining oneself with the crucified Christ, in order that others may benefit from this commitment to self-giving.

In this sense the prosperity Gospel has something right: through giving of ourselves we receive. Oxfam’s slogan gets this about right, I feel – or at least, rather better than those Christians who talk of it. The Christians advocating this position construe giving and receiving in narrow, overly financial terms: financial giving is a means of acquiring further financial wealth. Perhaps, though, suggesting that we may discover ourselves through the process of giving rather than simply receiving enacts the reciprocity drama in far more accurate and far more interesting terms than the prosperity bunch.

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In conclusion, the meaning of life is that there is no ultimate meaning that exists independently of our creation of it. My created meaning is one of finding oneself and being oneself, and the context of religious tradition may be a helpful means of achieving this. Of particular importance is the notion of finding oneself through giving of oneself – enacted through the death of Christ, prophetically taught by Oxfam, and wildly misunderstood by prosperity Christians.

Jonah and God

A thought came to me today. I find what I think about the nature of God to be rather difficult to put into simple concepts or words, largely because I don’t understand what it is that I think. In previous posts I have drawn attention to some reflections on the nature of religious language, in particular, which go part of the way there. I thought that a blog post might help clear up my thinking a little further.

I wish to make two points:

1. That which we call God is beyond human language, conceptuality
2. God in Scripture is a literary character, that imperfectly reflects aspects of the divine mystery.

Point one is something I have said before, and so point two will be my main focus.

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I take the book on Jonah as an example.

Here are some reasons to think the story is not historical (for those obsessed with history):

− No city called Nineveh has ever existed
− If it had done, it would have been larger than the biggest cities today – a nonsense if read historically
− Jonah is the worst prophet in the OT – he utters a single line prophecy, with a 40 day – rather than the more imminent (and standard) 3 day – warning time
− But he elicits the most comprehensive repentance in the whole OT
− The book is full of such irony, some of which I have mentioned before
− Folks don’t get swallowed by fish and survive in their bellies for three days…

So, given that it didn’t happen, what is my point?

Most people are happy to accept that Jonah is a character in the story; that Nineveh is a fictional city, constructed to make particular points relevant to the story’s audience; that no such fish existed, and that it played a part in the story, etc... And so on: all of the narrative’s characters and actors are seen as part of a literary genre that seeks to use language symbolically to tell stories. All of the narrative’s characters, that is, save one: God, for whom a special case is made.

One can, of course, argue for a special case – but that is not my concern. I wonder how a commitment to how the radical ‘otherness’ of God requires one to read stories in which God is an actor, in the same way as Moses, the fish, the sailors, the city of Nineveh, or the castor bean plant. What does it mean to say that ‘God spoke to Jonah’? Does God have a voice? Or a rational mind? Or the ability to encourage fish to choose Jonah to eat? Or make fish belch? Or plants grow, and then die? [Or fingers to write the Ten Words? And all the rest.] What if the concept of God as a big and powerful human (which all of these attributes suggest) personifies God, and makes God a character in a story? What if just as to reduce the theological truth that the story may contain to the requirement of a historical Jonah, the same might be said of the story’s concept of God?

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Where, then, does this leave God? In short, I don’t know. What is God? Who is God? What does it mean to use language to express the inexpressible, or conceptuality to express that which is beyond comprehension?

I think this is where narrative comes into its own, and embodies my dislike of rigid doctrinal statements and propositions. Narratives encourage one to participate in the drama of theology, to use stories and traditions to engage with ultimate questions of theology, To reduce narratives to a series of doctrinal statements (such as ‘a personal God, as revealed in the Bible, exists’) misses the point of narratives, and the symbolic nature of their language – to point to something greater than the sum of their parts, and provide a context in which one can engage with the nature of God, whatever God is.

What makes a Christian? Part I

Ask most Christians what makes them a Christian, and they will say how they have accepted Jesus as their Lord and Saviour. This is all rather vague, but is usually taken to mean belief in Christ removing one’s sin from you through believing that he died in your place and rose again; and as a result to make him Lord of your life, dictating everything that you do.

I have profound difficulties with this understanding, not least that when asked for ‘biblical’ arguments for this understanding (‘biblical’ being the rhetorical arbiter for many of these Christians) they flounder hopelessly. It seems that a searching engagement with biblical material is stunted, rather than enhanced, by the teaching of some in the Church, for whom the precise definition of what makes a Christian is accepted so implicitly, without the same sort of critical acumen that they may (or often, may not) apply to other scriptural texts and ideas.

As a result of this, I have had profound problems with this understanding of Christianity, probably because I don’t think that Christianity can be summarised or defined in a single line, to which one can respond with acceptance or rejection. I wonder if the richness of the scriptural witness to God might permit a broader and less monopolising understanding of what a Christian is.

A preliminary concern regards the nature of some elements of Christianity, which seek to divide the wheat from the chaff through clearly defined boundaries, which encourage those caught on the wrong side of the boundary to cross over to the right side. I have deep difficulties with the drawing of clear boundaries also, not least because it excludes people whose insight and experience may speak profoundly of the reality of God, but also (in theological speak) because the kingdom of God is not the same as the Church, because God is active in the world outside of (or perhaps, despite) the Church, and that each person, made in the image of God, ought not be excluded from God’s family.

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Coming back to Lingo’s suggestion about James and John (Mt 20:20-23), I wonder if there is an understanding of what a Christian is, that relates to some broader concerns of Paul in particular. Here is the text:

‘Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee came to him with her sons, and kneeling before him, she asked a favour of him. And he said to her, ‘What do you want?’ She said to him, ‘Declare that these two sons of mine will sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.’ But Jesus answered, ‘You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?’ They said to him, ‘We are able.’ He said to them, ‘You will indeed drink my cup, but to sit at my right hand and at my left, this is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father.’

I wonder if Christ asks all of us whether we are able to drink the cup that he drank: the cup of suffering, of self-giving, of challenging that which is dehumanising and all the rest. To drink the cup of Christ is to participate in his sufferings, in which Gal 2:19-20 comes out again:

‘I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.’

Not much substitutionary escape from suffering there, and lots of participation in the Being of Christ.

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I wonder if this understanding of Christianity as being crucified with Christ and drinking from Christ’s cup marks an interesting and suggestive understanding of the nature of Christianity – sharing in the suffering and weakness of Christ, rather than escaping from that.

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PS. I find it rather ironic that the ‘bible-believing’ Christians who frequently come out with the tag line that formed the introduction to this post find it so difficult to isolate particular biblical passages that lend support to it. Such a vague and pithy sentence, though, could mean almost anything to anyone. // Wooly, fence-sitting liberals (‘liberal’ to many Christians simply meaning ‘someone who is wrong’, usually because they don’t take the bible seriously enough) like myself, on the other hand, seek to actually read some of the bible and unpack what it might mean. I don’t claim this to be the only way of understanding what a Christian might be, but it can be a single voice within a chorus – and to deny its place within the choir altogether misses the richness of the biblical witness in favour of a dull, lifeless, static and inaccurate picture that just comes more simply.

The Son of Man

Lingo and I were chatting on Friday night, and he brought up this possibility for interpreting a particular story in Matthew in an innovative and novel way.

Matthew’s concern with ‘Son of Man’ (SoM) language, particularly in terms of the ‘coming’ of the SoM, is a central feature of Matthew’s Christology and eschatology. This takes particular note in the parable of the sheep and the goats (Mt 26?), which is talked about a great deal at camp, and for good reason. This coming is envisaged as an apocalyptic future event, in which the triumphant return of Christ marks the defining point in history, in contrast to the weakness and isolation of the cross.

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The episode that Lingo drew attention to is Peter and Andrew (??) asking to be on Christ’s right and left hand at the coming of the SoM. But what if this coming of the SoM has already happened, on the cross? Here, and not in the triumph of an apocalyptic victory over the forces of evil, does Christ become the SoM, instigating judgement and showing a new way to live as a result. Authentic power is found in the weakness of self-giving and the isolated pain of death.

Back to the sheep and the goats, at the coming of the SoM on the cross, Christ becomes the least of his brothers, such that the embodiment of Christ within the needy takes on a deeply literal significance, as Christ himself embodies the pain of the needy.

What, then, of Peter and Andrew (??) asking to be on Christ’s left and right at the coming of the SoM? Are they asking to be the two robbers who are literally crucified with Christ, in order that they might share Christ’s triumph through the pain of insignificance and powerlessness, out of which the being of authentic humanity can emerge? In this sense, Galatians 2:20a takes on a profound relevance:

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

Being crucified with Christ is to participate in the coming of the SoM, and through participating in this way of being Christ lives in the participant as a re-formed human being. The concept of Christ living in people is central to the sheep and the goats story, also.

In summary, what if the coming of the SoM happened on the cross, in which Christ became weak and powerless – like the needy in the sheep and the goats – in order that humans could participate in his Being, in order that Christ may live within us, as Paul says. To sit on Christ’s right and left hand at the coming of the SoM is not the share in the triumph of victory, but to share in the desolation of rejection and death.

Religious Language

After last weekend’s preparation weekend for this year’s camp, I think that writing up some thoughts that I have had over the past few months, some of which came up in debate on the Friday night.

My main concern is with the nature of religious language and conceptuality, posing the age-old question of what it means to speak about God. Back to Aquinas, God is not a ‘thing’ in the universe like other ‘things’ – God is of a different order altogether. Further to this, the centrality that God is not just a big version of myself – most usually called anthropomorphism, the projection of human being onto the divine – is deeply significant. Given that this is the case, what does it mean to use language and conceptuality ‘about’ God, who is beyond linguistic description or conceptual analysis?

− What does it mean to talk about God as a person, given that he is not a person?
− What does it mean to talk about God saying something, or doing something, given that God has no mouth to speak, or hands to do something with?

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Firstly, an example of how not to do it is, I think, illuminating: concepts of God as a person, or as an active agent who does things in the way that you or I do things remain of profound help and significance – but to become attached to any of these elements in their own right, as ‘defining’ or ‘fundamental’ elements of describing God’s Being, is to miss the subtlety of their scope. So, lots of Christians became irate when John Robinson (in a 1963 book, ‘Honest to God’) popularised the work of Paul Tillich, which stated that God was not a person who is ‘out there’ in the ‘real’ world, but the very ground of Being itself, for whom these concepts miss the point.

If, then, God is not a person as we are persons, and does not converse with people in the same way as humans do, because God is not a human – even a super-powerful human; what about all the stories in the Bible that seem to present God as speaking to people, walking around and all the rest?

Here, I think, my recent comments on the importance of genre in reading Scripture come into their own: given that many of the biblical writers are unconcerned with ‘historical’ accounts, but instead tell stories – rather like Christ did – this language becomes easier to understand: the writers are placing concepts about God into familiar language, in order that elements of the God who is beyond language and conceptuality be, in some sense, made known through this meaningful speech about God. So, telling stories and acknowledging both that they are stories, and also that the frames of reference in which they operate are not descriptions of the nature of divine Being, but attempts to make sense of and comprehend the incomprehensible. As long as people are conscious that this is what religious language is doing, then I have no problem; but when this religious language becomes made equivalent with the Being of God Godself – ie, realizing (that is, making real) the language, without realising its real significance – do the overly defensive elements of rhetorical defence come into play.

Genesis and Genre

While at the Tomlinsons’ recently, Emma Bush asked how I read Genesis 1. This is an extremely good question, and engages many of the interpretative conundrums that scholars produce learned work on. Without wanting to appear like an oracle with all the answers, or even all the answers from four years of theological study, I hope to offer a few brief comments on the nature of Scripture, and how best to read it.

By far the most important thing when reading a biblical passage is not the context in which it was written. Though this is an important insight, and can lead to suggestive readings of biblical material, its place is secondary to my suggested focus of analysis, which stresses the centrality of genre.*

Genre is the type of writing that the writer of a piece of work is engaged in, and can take many forms – songs, poems, historical accounts, myths (by which I mean meaningful stories, rather than untruths) etc. So, Proverbs (sayings and philosophical proverbs) is a very different genre to Psalms (songs, laments); and both are very different to the gospels, say. To read a Psalm like a Proverb is to miss the point, and as the answers that one receives from a text depend on the questions that one asks of it, and the questions that one asks depend on the genre that it is seen to reflect, the classification of a work into a genre is essential for the formulation of searching readings of scriptural passages. So far, so good.

But what about the genre of ‘history’, which is seen to take up large amounts of the OT and the gospels? By history, most people mean the record of events that happened in the real world, usually recorded by eyewitnesses in an unbiased and objective manner. This is certainly how modern history is done – but is alien to the ancient world. Only in the 18th century onwards did truth become equivalent to historicity (ie, whether something happened or not) – such that apparently historical material like the gospels, if seen to be imperfect records of history because of theological bias, inaccurate sources, textual tampering etc, is rendered untrue as a result of these difficulties.

If, then, the modern concept of history is alien to the biblical writers, who see truth as a deeply more searching question than whether something happened or not, how to approach the biblical texts which appear to be historical accounts?

I offer two models, with an example of each.

1. Fictionalised history. The components of the story, broadly speaking, happened – the people in it existed, and the bare bones of the story are historically accurate. The detail, however, is filled out and explained through the insertion of ‘fictional’ elements, which give broader significance to the narrative as a whole and play out some of its themes. As an example, Matthew 27:52-53, in which at the point of Christ’s death the tombs of the dead are opened and their bodies raised, such that they walk around Jerusalem and are seen by lots of people. Had this happened historically, records would surely abound; and might the resurrection of a single man be rather overshadowed? To read this element of the Matthew as history misses the point, and to defend its historicity misses the nature of Matthew’s writing here – rather than making a point about an actual event that happened, he is drawing out the significance of Jesus’ death with reference to concepts of eternal life. // Jesus certainly existed and was crucified (history); here Matthew uses fiction to play out the significance of these historical events.

2. Historicized fiction. The locations, names, context and modes of relationship found in the story are from the real world – but the narrative is entirely fictional. As an example, Genesis 4, in which Cain kills Abel. These are the third and fourth people on earth, hence several questions for a historical reading: where does Cain’s wife come from? Who would have killed him, hence the need for a protective mark? Why does he build a city and who would live there; did he do it on his own? // The story is not concerned with these questions, and addressing these issues misses reading the story on unfamiliar terms to its authors’ – it uses the historical context of Israel’s life and experience (of murder, wives, cities and the need for protection) as the setting for a fictional story that plays out the significance of relationship to God and fellow humans. This doesn’t make it untrue, it simply takes the story on its own terms as unconcerned with historicity.

So, Genesis 1 is a myth – it is unconcerned with historical events (whether a literal 6 days or geological ages, which relies on bad science and tenuous links, in my view), and deeply concerned with the nature of human relationship to the cosmic order of things, and the classification of reality into three spheres – air, land and sea – which is central to the Priestly order of things, especially in Leviticus, but that’s another post…

I don’t think anything I have said here is too controversial, but some may disagree. It would get rather more controversial if I said I thought Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Samuel and Kings are not historical accounts but interpretations of history that play out the significance of present life; and that some components of the gospels are fulfilling a similar purpose.

In summary, the accusation that I am adopting a ‘liberal’ model of Scripture is more of a libellous rhetorical insult than an accurate description – unless, of course, ‘liberal’ means taking biblical writers on their own terms and seeking to hear the work that they produced within the correct frames of reference, in order that theological truth be sought in it through the asking of good questions…

* It might be noted that my emphasis on the importance of genre is itself part of the ancient world’s context – ie, modern concerns about the nature of history as objective, factual records of actual events are alien to the context of the biblical – and, indeed, any – ancient writers.

Lash, again...

The patron saint of much of my theological thinking, Nicholas Lash, again springs to mind in response to Lingo’s reply to my previous post on interpretative method.

Lingo raises the important issue of tradition, and how we can know what tradition is, particularly the early traditions, which are obviously of deep concern and interest. I have a few points to make in response.

1. The questions of what tradition actually is is central: what do we mean when we talk about tradition as an entity, or something that can yield theological insight? Here, Lash comes into his own, particularly as a Roman Catholic, for whom tradition is highly praised, rather than some Protestant traditions (ironic?) who see tradition as a dirty word. Lash writes a wonderful piece called ‘Performing the Scriptures’, in which he proposes a model of interpretation based on the Church’s continued performance and dramatisations of the concerns of Scripture. In this sense, tradition is simply the experience of and reflection upon the scriptural texts in the light of experience of living them out. Two examples of this are clear: firstly, the rabbis, who sought to draw out the meaning of the OT through telling stories about it, and interpreting it in the light of those who seek to live out its concerns; secondly, Shane Claiborne, who I know Lingo knows about. He deserves his own number.
2. Shane Claiborne is an American, who lives in a hippy commune in Philadelphia (though he would, I think, be unhappy with that description…). They embrace a model of becoming poor, rather than remaining rich and giving to the poor, for Jesus didn’t ask the rich man to tithe 10% or give some money to charity, but to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor – ie, become poor himself (Mark 10; Luke 18; Matt 19). Shane is dramatising the Scripture, and working out what it means through a dialogue of his own life with reflection about what some things in the Bible might mean. This is tradition.
3. Tradition, then, is the faithful response to Scripture that emerges in changing circumstances. It might also be called ‘Theology’. There are some classics of tradition, which are the great theological works: the rabbis, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and a hundred more.
4. The early church traditions are notoriously difficult to pin down. Little is know about the communities that Paul wrote to, for example; the only information about them coming from the letters themselves, which are a fraction of what Paul probably wrote. The Bible, to some extent, is itself the product of a tradition of interpretation – Matthew’s well-documented concern with the Jewishness of Jesus is a traditional interpretation of the historical events, attempting to play out their significance in terms of the Law and the great heroes of OT faith. Matthew is a theologian, not a historian – and even the earliest gospel (Mark) was written more than ten years after the latest authentic Pauline letter (Romans); the tradition of living out the Jesus story was established before the production of the gospels, and this experience plays into the writing of the gospels themselves.

This has all been rather sketchy, but for this I make no apology; theology is a messy and difficult thing to do well, and easy answers are easy to come by, while good answers are achieved only be humble and faithful reflection, guided by the Spirit. Sam’s original post made a wonderful point about how easy some Christians find it to speak clearly about what God thinks about particular moral issues. I remain committed to theology being a difficult task, without a simple, all-inclusive method of ‘just looking at what the Bible says’ – which is a nonsense, anyway.

In a final point, Shane Claiborne is a wonderful man, doing theology and creating tradition. As someone who is paid to study theology, I find his method, as well as what he does with it, profoundly liberating and suggestive – we learn what Scripture means by living it out, and by placing our living it out within the broader traditions of church and synagogue. Only then can we begin to encounter the living God through the Scriptures that speak of God.

What does the Bible say about Facebook?

In response to Sam’s thought-provoking and insightful post on the nature of Christian ethics, I though I’d post some thoughts…

I formulated this into a rather nice (if I may say so myself) question while at the Tomlinsons’ house this week: what does the Bible say about Facebook?

Nothing, of course. Facebook appeared a couple of years ago, and social networking sites were nowhere to be seen in the first century, of course (let alone then second millennium BCE). Discerning appropriate responses could take several forms (though this is not, of course, definitive):

1. Try to make verses that clearly do not apply to Facebook apply to Facebook. So if, for example, the Sermon on the Mount made some reference to not writing on people’s walls, or poking people, these things can be seen to condemn social networking sites.

2. Sack off the Bible altogether, for it is out of date and of no use in formulating a contemporary ethic – its validity ended as soon as society changed away from its immediate context.

3. To adopt an Anglican-esque model of theology, with its characteristic tripod/milking stool of Scripture, tradition and reason/experience. This sees God as greater than the words of Scripture, the interpretative moves of tradition, and human reason/experience – but the faithful combination of these elements permits a dynamic and open understanding of what it means to discern theological truth.


It won’t surprise you to know that I veer towards the third suggestion. God is not the Bible, and new things like Facebook require careful consideration, rather than a naïve shooting from the hip with Bible verses that ‘apply’ to them. I feel wildly out of my depth past about the third paragraph here, and people write PhDs about this sort of thing and don’t come to answers.

My conclusion would be that the third option offers a difficult and challenging interpretative method, in which careful and faithful reflection – in the context of Spiritual guidance, as Sam mentioned – is done. My big problem is with the first option, which many Christians implicitly seem to adopt – the sooner we get over the fact that the Bible is not a moral answerbook with easy solutions to every moral dilemma, the better. It may, of course, be that Scripture’s moral pronouncements are still valid – but the fact that they are in the Bible does not guarantee this, and this conclusion should be made as a product of careful reflection, in which the possibility that they may no longer be valid is taken seriously.

To conclude with reference to Sam’s post about some contemporary moral issues, I think Facebook becomes a less loaded model for many contemporary ethical questions: the modern phenomenon of committed and mutual homosexual relationships, stem-cell research and IVF, terrorism, immigration and ethnic tension etc. Easy conclusions about these issues are often suggested, but real answers come from a discerning and searching dialogue between Scripture, tradition and reason/experience.