DNJ: Theology 2.0

Folk music and the financial crisis

2010-01-26T00:14:00.000-08:00

The following is the text of a sermon given at the Chapel of the College of St Hild and St Bede, Durham in mid-2009:

Davey Moore was a boxer. On March 25th 1963 he was killed in a boxing match from a punch from his opponent, Sugar Ramos. Bob Dylan wrote a song about the death of Davey Moore in style of the nursery rhyme ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’, which asks the repeating question of the chorus: ‘Who killed Davey Moore? Why? And what’s the reason for?’

Dylan’s verses call upon five possible answers to the question from different candidates: the referee, the boxing writer, the angry crowd, his manager and ‘the man whose fist laid him low in a cloud of mist’. Each verse starts with the line “Not I!”, and finishes with “It wasn’t me that made him fall. You can’t blame me at all.” So we have the first witness – the referee:

"Not I," said the referee,
"Don't point your finger at me.
I could've stopped it in the eighth
An' maybe kept him from his fate,
But the crowd would've booed, I'm sure,
At not gettin' their money's worth.
It's too bad he had to go,
But there was a pressure on me too, you know.
It wasn't me that made him fall.
No, you can't blame me at all."

The recurring theme of the song is, quite obviously, that the question of ‘Who killed Davey Moore?’ is a complex one, and one in which all parties protest their innocence – ‘it wasn’t me that made him fall, you can’t blame me at all.’

The world is facing rather uncertain times, not least on the back of the global financial meltdown that has entered our collective bloodstream so dramatically over recent months. The immense disparity in earnings between RBS’s executives and its sales clerks is only confounded when your and my tax dollars now pay these wages.

I live and work in London – not in banking, i might add! – and get off the tube every morning at Moorgate station. As i leave the station, i walk past a deep etching in one of the stairwells that reads ‘burn the bankers’, and i don’t know about you, but i didn’t shed a tear when Fred Goodwin’s car was vandalised earlier this year. Largely as a form of masochism i read The Guardian’s comment section most days, which always contains the next piece of vitriolic, tired drivel about how awful everyone else is. This anger is understandable, and i hope not to argue against it. Instead, i hope to offer some insights into the responses to the financial crisis from 60s folk singers, and also from the Easter story – suggesting that both may have something profound to say in our conversations and reflection in this area.

Dylan’s song charts two responses to a terrible situation: firstly, ‘it wasn’t me that made him fall’ – a denial of responsibility for oneself; and secondly, an affirmation of someone else’s guilt. ‘It wasn’t me that made him fall, but it was them’. There seems to be to be a certain amount of this going on in the recession also: the media blame the greed of the banks, who blame the lazy eye of the regulators, who blame the poor financial planning of the government, who blame rich people’s greed, who blame the aspirational who borrow more than they can afford, who blame the media for instilling consumerism in them..... And we’re back where we started. It is always somebody else’s fault.

Two pieces of work by Leonard Cohen will now be mingled with Easter themes in trying to comment on and fill out some of my comments above.

Leonard Cohen – a secular Jew – wrote a poem entitled ‘Everything There is to Know about Adolph Eichmann’, Eichmann being the member of Hitler’s cabinet responsible for engineering and delivering the final solution.

"EYES:..................................................Medium

HAIR:..................................................Medium

WEIGHT:................................................Medium

HEIGHT:................................................Medium

DISTINGUISHING FEATURES:.................................None

NUMBER OF FINGERS:........................................Ten

NUMBER OF TOES:...........................................Ten

INTELLIGENCE:..........................................Medium

What did you expect?

Talons?

Oversize incisors?

Green saliva?

Madness?"

Eichmann is surely one of the easiest people to scapegoat in the history of planet earth. Nobody denies his appalling acts, the wicked genocide of ‘the other’ in the Third Reich’s warped understanding of the world. But to scapegoat Eichmann is perhaps to miss the point – the fact that we neither have talons, oversize incisors or green saliva, but we too can be capable of great evil. I wonder if when we think that Fred Goodwin and his cohort of overpaid bankers as the root cause of the world’s financial problem we distance ourselves from our own greed and our own arrogance. One cannot help but feel that most people in the world would regard you and I as wealthy beyond belief on the grounds of sheer luck, with apparently no deserving reason. Scapegoating places distance between ourselves and those that we do not like – we assert that they are not like us.

The Easter story also has something to say about scapegoating. The sense of Christ becoming the one at whom anger is directed seems clear, and as a result of this Christ’s death exposes a vicious system of religious oppression, exclusive social ordering, and violent responses to quell the radical desires of life’s subversives. Christ’s resurrection transforms, rather than supplants, this experience – violence doesn’t triumph over goodness, women are still to be liberated as the first witnesses of the resurrection, and the prophets’ vision of a just and peaceful society continues to be fulfilled on the road to Emmaus.

Another of the great Easter paradoxes concerns the binding of immense pain and great joy into a single continuum. I can’t help but feel that any simplistic explanations of the financial crisis, in which blame is clearly laid at the doors of an easily distinguishable and clearly guilty party, is surely a crude and unproductive move, for life is just not that simple. If any answer can be provided to the question of who killed Davey Moore, it must surely be that all of the parties in the verses bear some responsibility. Further to this, it is all too easy to pretend that we don’t have huge power to change things – i wonder if what would happen if we all stopped blaming everyone else for the financial crisis and became the change that we wanted to see – whatever it was – that would restore justice to the system. In so doing we affirm both our complicity in the problem itself, rather than palming that off onto someone else; and also empower ourselves to change the things that we find unacceptable, rather than regarding everyone else as the core agents of better world.

In summary, i feel that the ambiguity of the current financial crisis resists easy answers, and that one easy answer – scapegoating – has rather unhelpful consequences, not least in that it pretends that we have nothing to do with causing the world’s problems, and that it disempowers us from changing the things we find unacceptable. On this note, the final verse of Leonard Cohen’s most famous song, ‘Hallelujah’ – which is tragically omitted in the Jeff Buckley version – captures some of the response the life’s ambiguity: the broken hallelujah of Good Friday and Easter Sunday; the broken hallelujah of global inequality, brought to the boil by the financial crisis; and the response of Christ in giving of himself, rather than blaming everyone else – of being the change that he wanted to see in the world, and showing the way of self-giving rather than shifting the blame. Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ finished with this verse:

"I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah."

Christ, the giver, became the world’s scapegoat, and showed a new way of responding to the pain and ambiguity of life through selfless giving. I wonder if this sense of giving, rather than ‘it wasn’t me that made him fall’, might be a better response to the global recession that most of those that i have seen so far – to transform the ambiguity, rather than explain it away through scapegoating.

Putting faces to names

2010-01-26T00:11:00.000-08:00

I have spent the last few days in hospital recovering from an operation. This has offered some time for reflection that, i am sorry to say, is all too rare these days. I thought that a celebratory blog would be worthwhile in response, noting a few observations.

Firstly, i reiterate how proud i am to live in a country as diverse as the UK. Far from Nick Griffin’s suggestion that the white race that i am a part of has been the victim of a ‘holocaust’ at the hands of multiculturalism and immigration, i feel that our country is enriched and sustained by our welcoming of those from different cultures to our own. I wrote some time ago about the pride that i felt when i saw Monty Panesar (England’s first Sikh cricketer) take a wicket and explode in rapturous celebration. Even cricket, the most white, middle-class of British sports, was not beyond the liberating energy of those different to ourselves.
In further response to Griffin, the role that immigrants play in staffing the NHS is both vital and enormous. The NHS and the BBC are the two British institutions that most of us are most proud of: they are the envy of the world. To a great extent, both, but particularly the NHS, embodies and enacts that central tenet of Britishness, diversity and multiculturalism, that give me immense pride as a quietly patriotic, proud Englishman.

Secondly, the notion of diversity, especially in relation to Britain’s relation to the rest of the world in general, and Africa (where the majority of the nurses that care for me are from) in particular, was extended to discussions of faith and the current state of the Anglican Communion.

We often speak of how nice it is to “put a face to the name”. That is, to recognise in person someone that we have hitherto known about only in words, and particularly by the chief words that bear their identity: their name.

I have been rather good in recent times of expressing my dissatisfaction and disagreement with people by writing them off, homogenising the group from which they come, and then labelling this homogenous as a convenient and negatively-construed ‘other’, who expresses in a neat fashion some particularly facet of who i am not. The best examples of this occur, as usual, with religion, and with the African church’s apparent unwillingness to accept the West’s moves towards the incorporation of homosexuality into its cultural mainstream, and willingness to sanction the mistreatment (in some cases, to the point of death) of gay people living in their proximity. My attitude towards those operating with similar beliefs in the UK has often been to suggest that they “fuck off to Africa”, or something similar – at least that way they would only spoil the churches of a single continent, and leave the West to bask in its social and theological liberalism. The implicit process of writing people off, homogenising them, and then labelling them has certainly occurred here.

One nurse that cared for me in a particularly gentle manner was Grace, who comes from Nigeria. She is a woman true to her name, with a beaming smile, a piercing laugh, a soothing voice and gentle hands with which she conducts her work with great skill and professionalism. She goes to church in Ealing, and i suspect has a rather conservative social morality (or, for the sake of argument, i will assume so, aware of the risk of homogenising another person into a stereotype in the process). The more time that i spent with Grace, the less i felt able to talk again of African Christianity in a negative manner: despite my presumed differences in belief with Grace, i was struck by her warmth of spirit, her joy with being alive, the excitement with which she spoke about her children, and her very profession of nursing, of caring for the sick.

I think a few things on the back of this:

• How wrong it was of me to label and stereotype. These things close the mind rather than opening and enriching it, and prevent the possibility that one’s experience of the world can be changed by someone that you think you disagree with.

• How important it is that we affirm our ability to learn something from everyone in the world, whether or not we like or agree with them. Grace and I may disagree on some matters of doctrine – but if i let this cloud my engagement with her then i am poorer as a result, as i will not learn about the gifts of compassion, care, gentleness and peace.

• How important it is to expose oneself to, and make friends with, those with whom one disagrees. When speaking negatively of ‘Africans’ in the future i will not be without an image to place on this label. When we are aware that our use of a label requires us to include someone we know and respect within the bounds of those being labelled, it makes us think twice about using it in the first place. Increased exposure to gay people is well evidenced to liberalise people’s views of homosexuality: people put Gary’s, or Megan’s, or Phil’s face to the name of ‘homosexual’, and we realise that behind the label are simply people like us.

Overall, i feel rather ashamed of my (i hope, former) labelling of those conservative (label-alert!) Christians (and another one) who oppose the steps taken by countries in the West towards the equalisation of rights between heterosexual and homosexual people, and those commending similar steps within the Church. The diversity that i prize in the UK as a whole must surely be replicated across the Church domestic and global, even (or especially) when it is difficult to do so. One way of doing this is to meet those that one labels, and to learn from them. Once we have put faces to the names we use about them, our embrace of diversity can only flourish.

Slumdog Easter

2010-01-26T00:10:00.000-08:00

I saw Slumdog Millionnaire a couple of weeks ago. It’s a great film, beautifully made and wonderfully acted. Its message also shares rather a lot with the Christian season of Easter, i think.

The story is about a young boy, Jamal, who has had a troublesome life. Eventually he gets onto the Indian version of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionnaire?’, and ends up winning the show’s top prize. Given his poor education, he is thought to have been cheating somehow, but the truth is that the answer to each question has come up at some point in his varied and challenging life as a poor orphan in the Indian slums. The film tells his story through the different questions asked to him in the gameshow, and how the appropriate nugget of information came to be known through various episodes.

The film’s vision of gaining immense triumph through a radical acceptance of one’s past is fascinating. Many people regard the past (and especially the bits of it that they don’t like) as something to be forgotten in search of a brighter future, or something to hide from for fear of reopening old wounds. I can’t help but feel that Slumdog is rather a call to affirm one’s past, for once we accept and validate the things that have happened in our life we achieve unity with ourselves, because – for good or ill – our past has made us who we are today, and who we will be in the future.

So why the Easter story? The sense of transforming our experience in the present through a radical acceptance of the past, and a hope for the future based on, rather than in spite of, the testing times of the past, seems critical to the witness of the early Church. Christ’s painful death was never denied, never covered up, and never apologised for, vicious and embarrassing though it was. But instead the early Christians knew that this pain and suffering had been transformed by the new life of resurrection. The past is not forgotten, but through radical acceptance of it the future is transformed.

Dealing with testing things in life is never easy. But i think that the Slumdog story and the Easter narrative give hope that out of even the most difficult things we experience can come hope, peace and joy. We don’t need have chosen our story, but we must affirm that our story is ours, and be hopeful that affirming and engaging with our story and the lessons that it has taught us gives hope when looking forward to those chapters in the story that have yet to be written.

Tom Hogan and St Francis of Assissi

2009-02-02T02:46:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I met a man named Tom. He is homeless, and is 17. He has been homeless for six months and has sold The Big Issue for the last 15 weeks. He was kicked out of his house by his mum’s boyfriend after he finished school. He sleeps on night trains (in the first class section, to that he can charge his phone). Regularly he gets mugged for his Big Issues ‘by crackheads’, and last week he had his coat stolen – but someone gave him another one. I find it deeply disturbing that a bright, socially-ept and genuinely interesting 17-year old could be in his situation. Homelessness is a genuine evil, and when it happens to someone so young you can help wondering whether Tom has been given a life sentence.

When I bumped into Tom yesterday he was selling at Clapham Junction. I was on my way to a friend’s house, and decided to have a chat with him. Went to a coffee shop and had something to drink, which was great. I now have his mobile number, and will see him again. A few things hit me:

1. That Tom is just like most 17-year olds. He saved up for 5 days to buy a mobile phone (earlier that week). He played me the songs that he had on it (downloaded from an internet café), and sang along while dancing in his chair. He MCs, and spat some lyrics over the beats. He really likes drinking Guinness and gets annoyed when people think he shouldn’t because he’s homeless – he’s as entitled as anyone to a drink. He thinks that most people don’t understand him, or think he’s got ‘Joe Cunt’ written on his face – actually, his name is Tom Hogan and he certainly isn’t one of those. He had a girlfriend who he wants to get back. He longs for the days at school when he had no problem picking up girls, and mourns his homelessness because no girls are going to fall for that. He loves music (which is ‘his life’). He hears that Jamie Oliver is opening a ‘Fifteen’ near Clapham Junction, and really wants to get a job there – he doesn’t mind if it’s just washing the dishes, but he’s always fancied being a chef. If he got a job, of course, he could get a house, and everything would be alright. Tom is just like any 17-year old – he hopes the same things for the future, and likes doing some of the same things for fun.
2. When I met Tom, I had had a pretty garbage day. A few things had happened and was feeling pretty rough. Shane Claiborne talks about Jesus’ command never being to give to the poor, but being to become poor yourself. Without glorifying poverty, I think this is right – there is something of immense healing power in giving of ourselves, rather than taking. A lot of people seem to regard Church as an opportunity to receive lots of spiritual wisdom, self-help books as a way of cultivating a sense of worth and value for oneself, and of learning to feel better about yourself. Yesterday I bought Tom a drink, a sandwich and some cake. But I also offered him my time, my experience, my ears and my words – these things are invaluable. But giving of oneself is not one-way traffic, for our meeting changed me beyond belief. Quite how is difficult to say, but it did and that is a good thing. I wonder if Church might be somewhere where we learn to give of ourselves, rather than somewhere from which we take whatever is offered.
3. St Francis of Assissi talks about receiving as we give, not as we seek to gather more for ourselves. I was in Francis House at school, and have always had rather a lot of time for the 13th Century nature mystic whose prayers have become engrained on the hearts of most Catholic schoolchildren. I find his most famous prayer deeply engaging, and one that, when placed within the context of my experience with Tom yesterday, speaks volumes about how I think Theology works. The interplay of past and present, of experience and reason, of tradition and not-yet tradition makes for a wonderfully rich means of engaging with life – the good bits and the bad. It is something that informs and directs my experience of the world, never knowing the answers or even the questions. It frames the actions that I take and the instincts that I cultivate, and makes like interesting beyond belief.

So here it is:

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love;

For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Come and See

2009-01-18T12:35:00.001-08:00

At church today I heard a familiar reading from John 1, in which Jesus meets Nathaniel. Nathaniel starts by questioning Jesus, and whether anything good can come out of Naxareth. Jesus’ reply is simple: come and see.

The passage ends with a reference to angels ‘ascending and descending upon the Son of Man’. This, of course, is a reference to Jacob’s ladder, which appears when Jacob is resting at night on the way to Haran. (Also, Nathaniel regarding Jesus as an ‘Israelite’ is surely a further reference to Jacob). A couple of things are to be noted here:

• Haran, wherever it was, was not in Israel
• Jacob names the placed ‘Bethel’ (ie, ‘house of God’)

I wonder if Jesus’ reference to the angels going up and down might have another thematic connection to the Genesis text.

Firstly both Haran, as somewhere outside of Israel, and Nazareth are regarded as inappropriate places for good, godly, things to come from, such that both offer a surprise when something positive is to be regarded.

Secondly, both Jacob and Nathaniel respond to this with a recognition that God may indeed be found in surprising places: Jacob notes that ‘surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it’; Nathaniel with a rousing ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are thee King of Israel’ after his initial doubt.

So drawing these together, an unsuspected location for divine appearance, coupled with initial scepticism, is met with surprise when a positive result ensues. As a result, these original views are changed.

What really fascinates me in this story, though, is what Philip (who first met Nathaniel) says in order to instigate Nathaniel’s engagement with Christ: ‘Come and see’. That is, come and see whether anything good can come out of Nazareth. Not ‘here is a good argument about why something good might come from Nazareth’; not ‘how silly of you to ask such a question’; not anything other than a simple call – go and have a look for yourself.

Experience and reason are critical in the way I regard Theology. I shouldn’t have to believe something that every ounce of good sense that I have tells me is incorrect, and shouldn’t regard life as a competition between religious and secular explanations f everything. Also, particularly on the grounds of ethics, I think we can learn a huge amount from experience first hand. I wish fewer people would decide that abortion, homosexuality, women bishops and the like without talking to people who live with these issues every day, without listening to the experiences of someone who has had an abortion or a civil partnership. Sometimes it is only when we go and see things for ourselves that we see God in them.

Sad News

2009-01-14T11:18:00.000-08:00

I got some bad news today. A wonderful woman, who was out cleaner for many years, died in a car crash last week. She was from Newcastle, and moved to Buxton to move in with her partner, who subsequently got rid of her. She has two grown-up children and a grandchild who she would talk about a great deal.

I didn’t know much about Janice’s life history, but I suspect that it was a rather familiar story of a working-class girl from the north growing up, having children early, and never losing both her passion for life, and her desire to make the best she could of her life. One of the many tragedies of this story is that learning to drive was a key turning-point for her, which gave her independence and empowered her. She had passed her test only a few months earlier, and I remember her enthusiastically telling me about her driving lessons – she lent me her driving theory DVD to encourage me to learn.

Life is a fragile thing, and can be gone in an instant. At least twice a day I (and most who live in London) stand feet away from an electrical line that would kill us instantly, and that has little by way of protection. I find this thought rather difficult, and also quite empowering – through the death of others we may learn the joy of simply being alive, of meeting people, and having thoughts, hopes and loves. Sometimes it takes this to get out of our emotional inertia of doing things all the time, without taking stock of life’s joys – and sorrows – that make out existence such an incredible thing.

I have never lost anyone that I was really close to, and don’t look forward to the day when it will arrive. I think one must meet death with two things: firstly, acceptance that death is part of life’s rich circle and is nothing personal – no God decided your number was up, or could have prevented death if only someone had prayed harder; and secondly, almost uncritical optimism and affirmation of life with all of its high and low points – experiencing the death of someone may encourage us towards a reflexive sensitivity, that affirms and seeks to enhance all that works for life, and to challenge that which diminishes it. The fact of simply being is hard to talk about, but I think it’s something that the death of someone might be able to enhance. Perhaps this, then, is life after death – that the gusto with which Janice lived life, the aspirations she had, the faith she had in the goodness of people may perpetually exist in those that know her through memory, and the grief felt by those in mourning be brought together into the unified oneness of being, whatever being is.

So Janice, rest in peace. And may your kinds words, thoughtful acts, generous spirit and hope for the future continue to inspire us all.

Worship Music/Institutionalised Homoeroticism

2008-11-04T04:15:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-25T05:06:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-25T04:51:00.001-07:00

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

2008-10-20T02:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-09T01:09:00.001-07:00

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

2008-10-09T01:08:00.001-07:00

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'

2008-10-09T01:01:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-15T13:27:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-15T13:26:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-29T21:51:00.001-07:00

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 .
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 .
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?

2008-05-26T01:01:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-20T03:55:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-20T02:52:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-18T12:23:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-17T02:20:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-12T15:09:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-01T01:24:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-27T10:42:00.002-07:00

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

2008-04-27T10:42:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-20T02:22:00.001-07:00

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...

2008-04-19T01:36:00.001-07:00

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?

2008-04-18T02:38:00.000-07:00

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.

Dawkins, part II

2008-02-26T02:14:00.000-08:00

Having written a short appendix for an essay on Richard Dawkins, for which the prime content was an engagement with the aforementioned suggestions of Nicholas Lash, my attention was drawn to a critique of Dawkins by Lash himself.

Theological critiques of Dawkins are numerous – and, from my experience, largely based on the wooden almost fundamentalist Christianity which forms Dawkins’ core frame of reference in the first place for the complex phenomenon of ‘religion’. Lash, however, comes out with some profoundly engaging points, particularly in terms of Dawkins’ total failure to engage with the countless volumes of stuff that has been written since time began on the mystery of divinity.

You can access the article here.

Thy Kingdom Come, on Bended Knee

2008-01-31T09:23:00.001-08:00

My adoration for hymns and pretty much everything from high church liturgy has been developing for many years. At chapel last Sunday, we sung a hymn that I had never heard before: ‘Thy Kingdom Come on Bended Knee’. It is an odd first line but the words are incredible, and give a fantastic exposition of some elements of kingdom theology. You can get music and words here. Though the rhythm is very slightly wrong in the quick steps down twice toward the end (about the only bit that isn’t crotchets and minims), you get the picture…

Gok Wan II

2008-01-30T08:16:00.001-08:00

In an addition to my earlier post, i think saying something about Gok Wan's sexuality is important, and not something i'll be posting on the Camp blog page.

Christians frequently suggest all sorts of reasons why gay people, usually men, offer little or nothing to the lives of anyone other than themselves - they have no biological children, masses of disposable income, break natural law and offer nothing that cannot be achieved from elsewhere. While i would challenge each of these individually, i think the last one is an important thing, which many people miss.

Having earlier sung Gok's praises for his valuing of women, i would extend this to many gay men as well. Women are frequently abused by men - physically, mentally and emotionally - and the existence of male friends who are certain to have no interest in them sexually is surely of profound significance to women in this situation. Of course, gay men can abuse women in all sorts of ways, and straight men can value and support them also - but there seems to be a genuine point of contact between gay friends of mine and their female friends, which transcends a shared love of Smirnoff Ice. Women feel safe with gay men, which is good.

Gok Wan

2008-01-30T02:54:00.001-08:00

Gok Wan is not someone to whom I am instantly drawn with great affection. But I have learned two lessons from him (as well as lots of ways to dress better and how to look good naked if I ever have a sex change).

Firstly, the value of valuing people for who they are, rather than who they try to be. The women on his show seem to really trust him. He listens to them, asks counselling questions and tries to encourage them to engage with their self-identity in interesting ways. He suggests a holistic approach to feeling better about oneself – dress, diet, exercise, self-worth and all the rest; and constantly slags off cosmetic surgery – the ultimate in easy non-solutions to the real problems, which are addressed only from within. I think he is a model for how men can be in relation to women.

Secondly, he taught me to not judge a book by its cover. I saw him and instantly made huge judgements about the person that he was, only to be embarrassed and put wrong later when his sensitivity, warmth, hospitality and welcome to potentially vulnerable people shone through in his programme (which I now watch religiously).

Not very theological in one sense, but perhaps these distinctions are always more difficult than we may claim – I think Gok Wan is doing the work of God: valuing women who feel oppressed by male expectation and suppression, and encouraging them to develop ways of valuing themselves. Loving oneself is such an important part of being at peace with all things, and I apologise for my judgmentalism, and seek to learn from his example.

Camels and Bells

2008-01-27T09:06:00.001-08:00

Having sort of (or not really) had a go at Rob Bell in a previous post, I now think some other stuff I wrote comes out quite in favour of what he’s up to.

Bell understands that Jesus was a Jew, and his social position was what of a rabbi – a ‘great one’ (‘rab’ in Hebrew is from the root rbh, ‘to be great/many’). They were, and still are, wise people, highly respected and knowledgeable about the Scriptures.

I was fortunate to spend an hour doing Hebrew with a Rabbi a couple of months ago. He was less than thirty (or certainly less than thirty-three), and knew so much. His wisdom and insight used the great Rabbis of Jewish tradition and applied their insight to how the text might function in faithful communities today. I had the most profound respect for him.

Back in the first century, people were rather more mobile and less tied-down than today. They could up and leave, following a wise teacher and committing themselves to learning from them if they so chose. Bell talks of those who followed Rabbis as ‘talmidims’, which comes from the Hebrew root lmd, which means ‘to learn/teach’. The followers of Jesus were committed to learning his ways and coming to know his interpretation of the Law, Jewish tradition and contemporary society.

Perhaps the best example of Jesus’ rabbinic teaching is Matthew 23 (it’s in Luke too), with the seven woes to the Pharisees. Jesus interprets the Law in his way, and denounces the interpretations of some others. My favourite is:

‘Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practised without neglecting the others. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!’

Rob Bell preached a series before Christmas about the seven woes, and had lots of Rabbinic stuff in them. I like that he is a Pastor of a megachurch, but one who actually engages with some real Theology and recognizes the Jewishness of Jesus and his message.

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In summary, Rob Bell is far from the greatest theologian ever – but then, he’s not trying to be anything other than, well, himself. But he does take the Jewishness of Jesus seriously, and engage with some rabbinic commentary on the OT, in order to understand something of what Jesus was trying to do.

Dan’s tips for the day:

1. Have a go at reading the OT with some Rabbis to help. Rashi (ie, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaqi) is a pretty good place to start.

2. Get in touch with a Rabbi and see if you can chat with them. All the ones I’ve met are extremely wise and really happy to share their knowledge, tradition and faith with pretty much anyone who wants to know. They’re great.

Dickie Dawkins etc.

2008-01-27T01:19:00.000-08:00

After the reference section (Bible, Hebrew Bible and Dictionary) of my bookshelf lies a copy of Richard Dawkins’ work ‘The God Delusion’ – in pole position, one might say. Yet while its placement as such is entirely the result of my categorisation strategy and not a desire to hold him above some of the genuine heavyweights of historical and contemporary Theology, I can’t help but feel he’s a rather good thing.

Lots of Christians spend lots of time slagging Dawkins off – indeed, with good reason; Dawkins’ understanding of Christian Theology is wildly simplistic, and shows a total lack of engagement with most of the classic pieces of Christian biblical interpretation and Theology. But something came to me last night: I a fortunate enough to know a tiny amount of the rich heritage of the Christian tradition and its Theology (which does, literally, mean ‘talk about God’), and so can see the simplicity of Dawkins’ work, but a lot of Christians don’t know some of the most central theological things written by the Church’s great authors.

I came across a wonderful example of this on Thursday this week, yet again in a brilliant module I am fortunate enough to take. We spoke briefly about Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of God being not a ‘thing’ like other things in the universe, and the difficulty of much biblical language speaking of God in very anthropomorphic (ie, human) terms, having conversations with people and doing things and using human words in the manner of a big human from up above. How to reconcile this with a view of God as NOT a ‘thing’ in the universe, but, as Nicholas Lash says, the mystery of existence which we may speak about but never tie down, is a big issue.

I think Dawkins is a remarkably naïve writer because of his overly simplistic view of God and Theology, and I also think that the God he rejects is the God of many Christians, who also operate on a similar understanding. I feel very uncomfortable being patronising to the faith of many, which is deeply-held, profoundly liberating and life-giving – that is certainly not my intention. I think my problem is with some of the leaders of some churches, who largely are not interested in these great works and ideas, such that they may not be passed on to those to whom they minister. There’s a lot of emphasis on leaders engaging their congregation’s hearts and emotions (which is no bad thing), and not a lot on engaging their heads and really encouraging them to think about some of these big issues about the nature of God. If that were the case, I think Christian leaders and those to whom they are accountable could give Dawkins a far better ride than the ‘well he’s an atheist so I don’t take him seriously’ one finds quite often.

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I think qualifying this post is a little important. I am fortunate enough to be paid to study some of the classic works of Theology full-time, and when writing things like this it is easy to drift into ‘it’d all be so much better if all Christians were like me’ mode. That really is not my intention. Of course, I think that Christians should get past the idea that Rob Bell is the most radical theologian ever to have written anything, and would benefit massively from reading some Augustine or Rashi or Aquinas – but I acknowledge that time is short and life busy, often filled with other profoundly liberating and worthwhile practises which my life lacks; for sure, I also have plenty to learn from those whose emphasis lies elsewhere. Yet I do challenge church leaders’ lack of engagement with their rich heritage, which fails to offer the intellectual stimulation and theological brilliance that Dawkins’ simplistic account also misses.

Interestingly, the work of perhaps the greatest Rabbi (Rashi) is available here. You have to negotiate to find the chapter a bit, and then click to add the commentary to the translation – but it’s well worth it ☺.

Dates

2008-01-18T04:32:00.001-08:00

Opposite the bus station in Durham is a grocer’s shop, Robinson’s. It reminds me of old Mrs Derbyshire’s grocery in the village where my parents used to live – friendly, good people who care about their produce, and run a small business to pay the bills. I just picked up about 1.5kg of fresh raspberries for £3, and a huge packet of (about 30) Medjool dates (which sell in Waitrose down the road at about £2 for 8) for £1 – not only is the shop locally-owned, the produce largely locally-sourced and fantastic quality, it’s mighty cheap.

Opposite Robinson’s is currently a building site, which is renovating an old wine shop into a Tesco Metro, opening in a few weeks’ time. I was discussing this with my housemates a day or so ago, and contemplating what this will mean for the grocery shop, fearing that like so many small businesses, it will suffer or even close when a supermarket opens nearby. Needless to say, I will definitely be shopping at Robinson’s until I leave Durham.

I value Robinson’s very much, and will be sorry for both them and myself if they close. Capitalism does tend toward monopoly, but only if price is the dominant factor in attributing value to goods – I hope this test-case will disprove my fears about the things people value…

Barth/Bart - all the same to me

2008-01-17T16:03:00.000-08:00

Today I had a seminar about Karl Barth (pronounced ‘Bart’, as in Simpson – he was German), for which I read some very interesting stuff – most notably, his commentary on Romans from 1933.

As a Christian interpreter of the Bible, he was in a rather difficult situation, feeling somewhat out of place in both the University and the church. I feel somewhat similar for much of the time.

University Theology departments in Barth’s day were into historical criticism, which looked for the historical circumstances that gave rise to the production of the biblical texts. It was largely uninterested in questions of truth or meaning – only questions of history: did this happen? Why did people write it down? What purposes was the writer (and any who modified the work after its original conception) writing/changing it for?

Partly in response to this, many Christian adopted a view of biblical authority based on its ‘inerrancy’ – simply, there are no errors in the Bible, as though it dropped from the sky, Special Delivery from the mind of God into those who wrote it (though this is a little crude). Cue lots of ‘all Scripture is God-breathed etc’ from Timothy (I think).

I have experienced the views of lots of academics on the side of the historical critics, and even more on the side of the inerrantists. I agree with neither, and neither did Barth.

I quote an analyst of Barth’s legacy:

‘[for Barth] Scriptures are not in and of themselves the Word of God, but they bear witness to the Word that always lies on a horizon beyond themselves… Thus… biblical authority does not reside in any inherent property the texts supposedly possess (eg, inerrancy) but in the nique function they perform in the life of the church.’

This is called ‘functional authority’ – the texts have authority not because of their essential nature, but because of their ability to point to God who is the truth, made known in Christ.

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Turning to Barth himself, he received much criticism from historical critics who saw him as smuggling in Christian principles to his readings of the texts, and finding nothing wrong with the teachings of Paul in Romans. They call this ‘Biblicism’.

Returning to his view of Scripture as pointing towards God, rather than possessing authority in and of itself, Barth replies in a beautiful way:

‘When I am named ‘biblicist’, all that can rightly be proved against me is that I am prejudiced in supposing the Bible to be a good book, and that I hold it to be profitable for [people] to take its conceptions at least as seriously as they take their own.’

As someone who has great difficulty with many Christians’ view of Scripture as a simple answer book, I like Barth very much. I find a lot of Christians are rather naïve when it comes to interpreting the Bible, and his views offer a means of opening oneself to and participating in the drama of interpretation that seems to be wanting in a lot of churches.

Anyway, if anyone reads Barth’s ‘Church Dogmatics’ (about 40 volumes I think), there’s a cream tea in it. Or any of it, to be honest (which would be more than I).

Life, and life to the full.

2008-01-16T12:49:00.001-08:00

I watched the news today, which contained a piece about the changes to the transplant law in the UK. The piece was about the death of a seven year-old, Jade, and how her family came to the agonising conclusion that her life support machine should eventually be turned off.

Jade’s mother was recounting the process after Jade’s death, and how they decided very quickly that if Jade had understood what was going on, she would have wanted to help others in whatever way she could – she was just that type of person, who would give away her last sweet if it would bring a smile to someone’s face, intent on making people happier and serving them. The donation of Jade’s organs saved the lives of four people.

Christ came to bring the fullness of life, to show us how to live in line with God’s priorities where Israel had failed. This mission is achieved and embodied most significantly in his brutal and agonising death. Christ was, in some sense, resurrected: new life arose from the despair and agony of death.

Bodies symbolise our identity, they are important to who we are and how we relate to others. Our body parts are also like those of almost everyone else – an ear is (more or less) an ear, and a right leg is (more or less) a right leg. As such, at death our body parts become useless to us as biological components, yet still retain something of our identity. I wonder if the giving of transplants offers a means of resurrection – life beyond death as the result of profound generosity and self-giving.

The tragedy of death may yield new life – continued life for the transplant’s recipient, and resurrection for the donor. Jade’s body was broken and given to many, that they may have life.

French anthropologists, moustaches, going to the pub, and poor widows...

2008-01-12T10:34:00.002-08:00

Until recently, my interest in Marcel Mauss stretched little past his amusing name and very French moustache. But then I read his 1925 book, ‘The Gift’, which examines the nature of social gift structures in Polynesian society. Mauss suggests that society operates on a system of gift exchange, enacted in three-part sequence of obligation:

1. The obligation to give.

2. The obligation to receive.

3. The obligation to give in return.

The everyday examples of this are, of course, many; and the underlying system of relationship embodied by this system is deeply felt by lots of people, especially when it s broken.

I have many more than two thoughts on Mauss, who I find thrilling – but two I will write here.

Firstly, I find the second part the hardest.

The Christian tradition’s emphasis on the receipt of gift comes through its concepts of ‘grace’. I see the gift of grace as something like an enlightenment, where one’s view of the world and oneself changes, and one (at least in Christian terms) seeks to commit oneself to the pattern of Christ’s life through learning the practices of discipleship.

I think that Christ would have let people buy him drinks and not immediately sought to buy them one back, or have accepted the kind words of someone else without seeking to repay them. Not that these are bad things or bad responses to gifts, but they insist that grace is a transaction, which I find difficult.

Many Christians talk of being ‘saved’ as a transaction, where for one’s faith in Christ is ‘rewarded’ by being welcomes into God’s fold, usually through a substitutionary model of human sin and Christ’s death. I acknowledge the significance of this model in Christian tradition, and the importance it holds for many people, yet I find it rather cosmic and mythical, and rooted ultimately in transaction, rather than grace.

I would offer a different construal of being ‘saved’, as the process through which one comes to see the world in a way different to one’s evolutionary and social hardwiring has taken place, particularly towards self-obsession and idolatry (see my earlier post on Nicholas Lash). When one’s desires are purified after the example of Christ’s self-giving, made especially known on the cross.

My final point here leads seamlessly onto the second suggestion. Perhaps this purification of desire as the receipt of salvation/grace/gift (from that which we call ‘God’) does require giving in return but not in a transaction model. Most obviously this is done through the enaction of one’s salvation in the lives of others through compassionate, justice-seeking action and mercy.

My second point regards a recent interpreter of Mauss, Maurice Godelier. Again, after an initial period of name amusement and moustache contemplation, I found Godelier’s work exciting as well.

Godelier distinguishes between two types of gift: alienable, and inalienable. Alienable gifts are exchanged through transaction, and can be ‘alienated’ from their current owner – eg, I bought my mum some jewellery for Christmas from a nice shop where I live. I have no attachment to the gift, other than that I bought it for my mother. Inalienable gifts, though, are of a much deeper significance, such that their transfer of ownership does not ‘alienate’ their current owner from the gift – the best example is the transferral of tribal land from one generation to another: the former owners are inalienable from the gift’s significance, which is not conceived in transaction value. A wedding ring is another example.

I think the NT has an interesting example of gift giving, in Luke 21:1-4:

[Jesus] looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasury; he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. He said: “Truly, I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on.”

Question: is the woman’s gift alienable, or inalienable?

On one level, it is certainly alienable – money is a rational form of quantified transactional exchange, and is transferable between different people without loss to their identity. But I suggest the actual substance of her gift is not two small coins, but commitment to the values of self-sacrifice and costly giving, putting in ‘all she had to live on’. Godelier’s insight that gifts need not be physical, quantifiable or transferable is sharp – giving to God of these things makes them all the more significant in these terms.

This poor widow has been saved. Saved from our social hardwiring that tells us to take, rather than give. Saved from the conception that her small offering is worthless against the heftier gifts of the rich. Saved from the conception that her low status render her incapable or unworthy of participating in the religious life of the community. Her inalienable gift express her values in the same way as a tribal head passes on land to his eldest son – her commitment to the demands of discipleship: Christ-like self-giving.

Eve and Adam

2008-01-12T10:34:00.001-08:00

My endebtedness to Nem, and particularly her post yesterday, is important to note at the outset here!

I briefly mentioned the nature of ‘fallenness’ in the Lash post yesterday. I have just read some interesting comments by Phyllis Trible, an American feminist OT scholar whose lucid and profound interpretation of some particular ‘problem texts’ in the OT is well-known – I will write about her and Judges 19 (surely the most horrifying of all biblical stories) at some point.

She was asked in an interview if she would talk about ‘Adam and Eve’. She replied: ‘Eve and Adam would be better’. Asked why, she suggests: ‘It got your attention for one thing. If shifts the whole discussion. It undercuts the concept of order, the man first and the woman second.’

It’s interesting what happens when our familiar language is subverted. Perhaps most noticeably, we take a second look and think about something in a fresh way that our former familiarity with the language may not have permitted. This is a central feature of Trible’s scholarship, of looking for the voice of the woman in a story told almost exclusively by powerful men.

I was schooled in the Roman Catholic tradition, and most of my teachers were women. The Romans get a rather bad press about their view of women, particularly in the priesthood – and not without good reason. Yet the centrality of Mary in its liturgy and symbolism makes an important commitment to the witness of women in Scripture, and especially the story of Jesus. After the festive period, the person of Mary is often forgotten, and even during the festive period the gospel of Luke is not read very often. The Magnificat remains one of the central pieces of Anglican liturgy, with its message of humility, peace and the inversion of power structures nowhere better embodied than in the one who sings it: Mary, a young girl.

Dan Brown’s stuff about Mary Magdelene marrying Jesus is interesting enough, but risks drawing attention away from the real concerns of women in Scripture. Interesting that in Brown’s view, Mary Magdalene is associated with scandal and illegitimacy – a persistent and damaging view of women. Forgetting Brown’s mention of the apocryphal ‘Gospel of Mary’, perhaps feminist scholars are attempting a construction of the testimony of women in biblical stories, of using different language and ideas as a way of shedding some new light on these ancient texts.

A further point about Dan Brown is his seeming unwillingness to actually get the real shape of the gospels’ portrayal of women, in which Mary Magdelene is a part. If the early church sought to discredit Mary Magdalene through giving her the traditional status of a prostitute, they did a rather bad job. Mary’s clear place within the gospels’ array of usually poor and devout women, attentive to the words and works of Jesus (I might add, because of his hospitality and welcome towards them) makes their place in the narratives hardly worthy of one sought to be ‘slandered’, as Brown suggests.

If you’ve made it this far, my sincere thanks, and apologies for a second essay-length post. Perhaps being more concise might be a wise new year resolution.

Lash-tastic

2008-01-12T10:33:00.001-08:00

Phew. Formalities done.

I’ve been reading lots of Nicholas Lash recently. He was until recently a long-time academic in Cambridge’s Theology department and taught one of my current tutors there. His personal history was influenced by lots of time in India, where his grandfather was a Bishop. As a result, he engages in conversation between Christianity and Hinduism, which he sees as a helpful way of rediscovering some classical Christian ways of thinking about God which were lost post-seventeenth century in the west (see lots of later posts I hope).

He makes several suggestions about the place of religion in the modern world.

Lash has a fascinating view of humanity – particularly interesting in terms of Christian concepts of ‘fallenness’, from which we are somehow ‘saved’. I quote:

‘All human beings have their hearts set somewhere, hold something sacred, 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).’

Also (though I would wish to note that rather a lot of the people who do worship God are reactionary and simple-minded):

‘It is taken for granted, in sophisticated circles, that no one worships God these days except the reactionary and the simple-minded. This innocent self-satisfaction tells us little more, however, than that those exhibiting it do not name as ‘God’ the gods they worship.’

In this context, Lash searches for the place of religion.

His suggestion is that religious traditions – understood properly, having broken the shackles of the Enlightenment’s misunderstanding of the nature of God (again, see lots of later posts I hope) – may offer a helpful context for ‘the common twofold purpose of weaning us from our idolatry and purifying our desire.’

Again:

‘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.’

The characteristic Christian emphasis on the self-sacrifice of the one in whom the supreme presence of God in human history came to dwell serves to enlighten this purpose of religion. The formation into ever-increasing Christ-likeness is the central concern of the Christian tradition. In my essay, I have argued that Christianity’s focus on the self-giving of its patron and the perpetual desire to be formed into the likeness of Christ accurately models Lash’s typology of religion as a helpful context for the purification of desire. Christ is the embodiment of pure desire.

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I like Lash a lot. His desire to engage in multi-faith dialogue as a resource for better understanding what Christians mean when they speak about God is admirable and very successful. Further, his engagement with ‘eastern’ traditions (mainly Hinduism and Buddhism) offers a helpful critique of many contemporary ‘western’ models of God, which distort the traditions that produced them. I am sure I will write more on him.

That mandatory introduction post in full...

2008-01-12T07:50:00.000-08:00

So, it’s blog time.

The mandatory introduction post will hopefully introduce my intentions for the blog, as well as me as a person.

I like lists:

1. Intentions

Focus my thoughts and give me an outlet for them
Let people know some of the ways I think about things to do with faith, God and religion
Let people know it’s OK to think about things in different ways to other people
Encourage people to think about what they think, and engage in dialogue with those they disagree with

2. Me

Dan
Theology and Religion MA Student
21
Musical
Thoughtful
Inclusive
Creative with punctuation