Category Archives: theology
From Eden To Eternity
Last night, I went to see a performance at Central Baptist Church, Chelmsford, of From Eden To Eternity, a play by Saltmine Trust in support of Wycliffe Bible Translators, whose Bible translation work in Nigeria was movingly featured. It is on a national tour, but played locally as part of this year’s Chelmsford Christian Festival. The acting was first class, and the script was full of humour, pathos and pain – just as an attempt to retell the highlights of the whole Bible should be. For me, the scene depicting Abraham’s call to sacrifice Isaac almost matched the agony of the crucifixion: it ripped my heart open.
Covering the main themes of the Bible is, of course, an ambitious aim, and it must have been a near impossible task for the playwright to decide what to include and what to omit. Whatever choices s/he made, not everyone would agree. (It might as well have been Fabio Capello choosing an England football team.)
What interested me was that the choices seemed to follow standard traditional evangelical priorities. We got a fairly literal Adam and Eve. There was no exile and return (Tom Wright, where are you when we need you?). There was little or no obvious connection between the Old Testament before the interval and the New Testament afterwards. We had no Incarnation (maybe Christmas is just a necessary prelude to Easter).
Having said that, what would I have dropped in order to make space for what I consider to be other important themes? I wouldn’t have liked to have faced that question. Maybe the extended dialogues between Simon Peter and Andrew could have been cut, but I’m sure they were in to bring some important connections between biblical characters and ordinary twenty-first century people.
So – two questions:
1. Has anyone else seen this production, or are you planning to? If you have seen it, what particularly struck you?
2. If you had the unenviable task of the playwright, what would you have included or excluded, and why? (Sorry if that sounds like an exam question! But I’m interested in your thoughts.)
Meanwhile, here’s a video trailer:
The Effortless Superiority Of The Church Of England
I use that title for this blog post, being a version of what we in the free churches sometimes label ‘Anglican imperialism’. It is that unequal relationship which the Church of England maintains with us, despite protestations to the contrary.
I encountered it again last Sunday. My Methodist church in Broomfield is in covenant with the local parish church, St Mary’s. We share a very warm relationship.
Recently, their vicar retired, but before he stepped down he booked me to preach a farewell sermon there prior to our looming departure. It was fixed for last Sunday. Here’s the thing: when Methodist and Anglican churches are in formal LEPs (Local Ecumenical Partnerships) I can preside at a communion service. When we are only in covenants, I cannot. So I was expecting that a visiting Anglican priest would preside at the sacrament while I preached.
In fact, no priest was available for that 10:30 am service, so the church wardens had to ask the visiting priest at the 8 am communion to consecrate enough bread and wine for the later service, too. The Reader who led the service with me had to use a newly authorised liturgy called Public Worship with Communion by Extension. (And every time this comes up, she has to apply for permission to use it. Imagine how often that will be during a vacancy.) Strictly no-one must stand behind the communion table.
My Anglican friends were upset that I was not allowed to preside. Their support was touching, and came through very Anglican lenses. “Why can’t you exercise your priestly ministry with us?” Er – because I’m not a priest? The C of E would say I’m not a priest, because I haven’t had hands laid on me by a bishop who is part of that theological fiction known as the ‘historic succession’. (However, we did smuggle into the service me pronouncing what I would call ‘assurance of forgiveness’ and my Anglican friends with their priestly language would call ‘absolution’. And yes, I do normally use ‘you’ language rather than ‘us’ language in those prayers - not for ‘priestly’ reasons, but because people need to hear ‘you are forgiven’.)
Methodism would say I’m a priest in the same way that every Christian is a priest, and that I am not ordained to a separate priesthood. It still smuggles ordained presidency at the sacraments into our practice as the norm, on the grounds that good order should be kept at Holy Communion. And of course, I agree that the Lord’s Table is a place for good order, I just point to 1 Corinthians 11 where there is a massive problem of disorder at the Lord’s Supper, which Paul solves not with trained clergy but apostolic teaching.
So I’m not about to want to claim a separate priesthood for myself – I believe that is contrary to the New Testament. But Sunday’s experience reminded me of the institutional inequality between our traditions, and the way in which the grassroots are often ahead of the hierarchy in Christian work. I get angry at the legacy of Anglo-Catholic domination in past centuries that has led to this institutionalisation of inequality, where some are more equal than others. I recall an article in the Church Times in the late 1980s which pointed out that a nominal Catholic who finds living faith in Christ in an Anglican church can be received by transfer, because his or her Catholic confirmation is regarded as valid, since it has been administered by a bishop in the ‘historic succession’. However, should a free church Christian with an existing live faith who joins the Church of England must be confirmed as if they had never been received into the Christian church at all. Their prior Christian experience is effectively trashed in the so-called name of church order.
Anglicans refer to a triad of sources in determining Christian truth: Scripture, tradition and reason. Methodists add a fourth to make a quadrilateral: experience. To me, this is one area where adding that fourth source makes the difference. It exposes the ‘historic succession’ for the theological sham that it is. People’s experience of Christ must be allowed as a valid contribution to understanding Christian life and doctrine, just as in Acts 10 the Gentile reception of the Holy Spirit changed the church, as when Peter cited it at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. Experience cannot trump everything else, but it must be allowed a place at the table. For too long, the rigid insistence on the ‘historic succession’ (and yes, I continue to put it in quote marks because I don’t accept its reality) has caused pastoral and ecumenical damage.
Not that I think there is any hope of the Church of England listening, mind you.
The General Election Debate, Stories And Preaching
Jon Snow comments today on last night’s ‘historic’ (the mandatory word, apparently) first ever live television debate between party leaders in a British General Election campaign:
The most notable American influence in the debate was the wheeling out of individual and anecdotal stories. They didn’t work – they were thin and largely inconclusive, sometimes begging the question as to whether they were true. They don’t seem to work in a UK context.
I heard the same observation on television news last night. (Can’t remember who said it.) Does this say anything to us about the church and communication? We are told to preach stories. We are told that people ‘think in stories’ and ‘live in particular narratives’. I’ve thought for years that stories help. But political reaction to last night’s debate is starting to make me wonder.
What do you think?
Taking The Good Friday Journey
Last year, Nick Baines wrote a helpful and provocative post about embracing the desolation of Good Friday (and, indeed, Holy Saturday) without importing the triumph of Easter Day. In it, he argues that we should restrain ourselves from singing the joyful songs that come from knowing the outcome of Easter, and embrace the darkness.
I can see his point, and it has much to commend it, especially in evangelical Christian circles where we can default into triumphalism at all sorts of inappropriate times. Think of the ways in which some funerals become only a celebration of the deceased’s life, and leave little room for grief. That isn’t limited to evangelicals, or indeed Christians. It is part of a wider cultural movement that does not want to feel the sting of death.
I can see Nick’s point too, when I consider the members of churches who avoid Good Friday worship, but who will be at church early on Easter Day. We have people in our churches who can’t cope with the Cross. Not that anyone should cope with it in the sense of managing it – you could say it is meant to be unmanageable – but there are many who wish to live in denial of it, even referring to it as a tragedy or a defeat, completely failing to appreciate the magnitude of its victory.
Yet I wonder too whether this last group of people might be the very ones who especially need the linking of Good Friday and Easter Day. Not that I mean to let anyone off the hook in contemplating the sufferings of Christ, but because it is central to our faith to believe in the victory of Christ, and you can only appreciate that when you link the death and resurrection of Jesus. And given the way I have heard some church people say that Good Friday is ‘the most tragic day of the year’, I do wonder whether they believe the Gospel.
Like it or not, we cannot approach Good Friday without a measure of interpretation. It is there in the inspired writings of the Gospels, although we are perhaps so used to the text that we don’t always see it. And one thing is for sure: for the Gospel writers, the death of Jesus was not a defeat.
And also, whether we like it or not, it is (near) impossible to read the text as if we don’t know what is going to happen next. When I hear people ask me to read something ‘as if for the first time’, I know they are going to ask me something I probably can’t achieve. The trouble is, we do know the ending.
So how do you prefer to approach Good Friday? With a knowledge of the ending? Or trying to enter into the story as if you don’t know what will happen? What are the pros and cons for you?
Richard Bauckham
The other day I discovered that my research supervisor of twenty years ago, Richard Bauckham, now has his own website. (No blog, alas!) When I studied under him he was already a respected and renowned scholar, not least for his commentary on Jude and 2 Peter, and his work interpreting Jürgen Moltmann. It was the latter interest, and his work as a theologian rather than a biblical scholar, that made me want to have him as my supervisor. I was relating the doctrines of ecclesiology and eschatology, and Moltmann’s book ‘The Church in the Power of the Spirit‘ was probably the most important text at the time for me, along with Howard Snyder‘s less technical volumes.
Richard went on to become much more well known, not least in the last four years for his book ‘Jesus and the Eyewitnesses‘, which claims to turn many long-prized assumptions of New Testament scholarship methodology on their heads. But what was it like to have him supervise all those years ago?
The simple answer is that it was a wonderful privilege. Richard doesn’t merely have ‘a brain the size of the planet’, he has a humility and gentleness about him. I recall once turning in some work that really wasn’t up to snuff, but the way he let me know that was so gracious that I didn’t go away crushed but felt I had a way forward.
He is also a man whose faith and scholarship are deeply entwined. One consequence of being registered as a Manchester University student then was that you were entitled to attend any lectures you liked outside your own studies. I chose to audit two of Richard’s undergraduate courses. One was on Christology, the other on the Holy Spirit and Eschatology. I used to come away from those lectures knowing I had been both academically stimulated and spiritually fed.
The nature of his supervision and his faith came together in the way he drew together four of his research students, all of us ‘mature students’. We met every couple of weeks to discuss Moltmann’s then latest book, ‘The Way of Jesus Christ‘. Not only did we have an hour of lively conversation, we then went for lunch together in a university refectory. Over lunch and coffee we often discussed important matters of faith. It was there that I first discovered his passionate commitment to green issues as intrinsic to Christian faith. Richard is an evangelical, and while such a commitment is much more common today thanks to organisations like TEAR Fund and A Rocha, it wasn’t then. I knew he was clear about the Bible’s political dimensions – I had read his book ‘The Bible in Politics‘ – but this was a new departure. One of that research group was Celia Deane-Drummond, a former botanist working on her second PhD, studying Moltmann’s ‘God in Creation‘. Celia is now a leading lecturer and writer in the field.
So if you haven’t discovered Richard’s work yet, why not start? Try his website. There are essays, lectures, sermons and poems to read. Then why not treat yourself to one of his books?
The Wife-Swapping Club
(My last repost in this series. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to tell you what’s been happening.)
“If you get bored, then look at the windows.”
So said our leader at the beginning of a course I attended.
“They are beautiful stained glass, I’m sure you’ll enjoy them if you find what I say is boring.”
I didn’t need to gaze at the windows. But her self-deprecating comment reminded me of other occasions.
There was my friend Pete, struggling through a boring and lengthy sermon by an earnest and well-intentioned preacher. “I know exactly how many window panes we’ve got in the church,” he told me a few days later.
But there was also the time at college in Manchester. Once a year the college put on a lecture to which old students and friends were invited. A distinguished speaker was always invited. This was my first year. I wasn’t any the wiser.
He was well-known for his views on marriage. We, however, remembered very few of his views from that lecture. His inspiration level was that of window-pane counting.
Except that … we all latched onto one of the things he advocated. He said that given the fragility of marriage today, it should not be viewed as a life-long commitment but as something that should be reviewed by the couple after ten years. More like a fixed-term renewable contract. This was not what we expected to hear from a Christian speaker on the subject.
And so it was that over coffee afterwards, one of the students went around canvassing to start up the college wife-swapping club. He was generous enough even to include the single students.
Christians may be known for sharing (or we should be), but this is not an area to which our generosity is expected to extend. An early Christian leader called Tertullian said, “We share everything except our wives.”
I suppose our distinguished speaker wanted to take seriously the tragedy of relationship breakdown in our society. Being married now to a divorcée myself, I am not without sympathy to that concern.
I know too the statistics that suggest second marriages on average last fewer years than first marriages. I have heard the saying that a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
Yet for all this there is no way I want to model a relationship on the fixed-term renewable contract idea. My understanding of love must come from Jesus, whose love is unconditional, unchanging, and a covenant commitment of faithfulness.
Yes, that means relationships where we burn our bridges. But what kind of love is it that does not have risk and vulnerability at its heart?
Women With Strong Personalities
Dave Warnock has recently written two storming posts on the problems of ‘complementarianism’, the view that takes the New Testament scriptures about ‘male headship’ in a highly literal (and I would argue, wooden and out-of-context) way. Read ‘The forgotten victims of male headship‘ and ‘My wife …‘. Both these posts talk about the demeaning of people (of wives who are only valued for their beauty, and of all sections of society). His writing made me think about a recent conversation with a friend. I found it quite startling.
“Dave,” said my friend, “thank you for modelling the fact that it’s OK for a Christian man to marry a woman with a strong personality.”
Huh? I mean, I just fell in love with her? And no-one who meets my wife can miss the fact that she calls a spade a shovel.
“I wish more Christian men would model this,” said my friend. “I wonder if it’s why I’m still single.” For my friend is a gently outspoken single woman.
How much more damage must we let complementarianism do?
On The Problem Of The Writer’s Craft In Protestant Christianity
Oh dear, that title sounds like a thesis, doesn’t it? The issue came into my head the other day when I received the quarterly ‘new titles’ email from Grove Books. They featured a booklet called ‘Telling Ourselves In Ink: Creative Writing in the Church‘ by Corin Child. Just to come across it associated in my mind with critical comments I’ve heard in some church circles directed at people who enjoy writing.
This is personal for me. I enjoy writing. I don’t think I’m great, but I think I have something to offer. Some people have been kind in telling me how my writing has helped them. On my first sabbatical (not the one I recently finished), I spent a week on a creative writing course at the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, run by the Association of Christian Writers. During that course, one tutor said, “Don’t be afraid to describe yourself as a writer.” I found that liberating. Others, who don’t appreciate my love of writing, don’t. “Why are you wasting time with that?”
So when I saw the Grove book, I mentioned it on the email discussion list of Subway Writers, to which I belong. I don’t feel I should be in their company half the time, most of them are professionals. The book title made me wonder whether they feel understood in their churches. One person emailed about the terrific support she receives. In reply to another member, I wrote a longer screed which set out some of my thoughts and feelings on the subject. This person observed that because ‘the word’, the Bible, has been central in Protestant churches, other uses of words, especially creative ones, can be seen as superfluous or dangerous. Most of the rest of this post is a lightly edited version of what I said there. I’d be interested in your comments.
Yes, [name], I think this is often a particular problem for Protestants. Catholicism and Orthodoxy know the long history of Christian involvement with the arts, and (at least in the visual arena) celebrate it, even depend on it. I heard it argued not so long ago that there are proportionally more Catholics involved in the film industry than Protestants.
Protestants, as you say, focus historically on ‘the word’, and this has the effect of devaluing other words. I’m not about to have a downer on the primacy of Scripture – far from it, as an evangelical! – but I suppose it got taken to extremes in churches that would only sing Scripture, and not other hymns. Hence the Scottish Paraphrases of the Psalms.
The evangelical emphasis on evangelism (especially since the split with liberals over the ‘social gospel’ a hundred years ago) meant that anything not concentrating on evangelism was inferior – especially something as indirect as writing and novels, with the ‘show, don’t tell’ principle. You have to tell, they would say! (And does that explain the ‘preachy’ nature of some written evangelical work? I can think of perfectly good sketches by Christian drama companies that spoke for themselves, only to be ruined by the ‘explanation’ tacked on the end.)
Not only that, the evangelical suspicion of the imagination has a lot to answer for: it seems to pick the word ‘imagination’ out of a concordance and noticing its association with another word, ‘vain’, in Scripture, has led to an erroneous assumption that all imagination is bad. No wonder historians such as David Bebbington see evangelicalism as a creation of the rationalist Enlightenment. That suspicion of imagination has been underlined in recent years by its association with questionable New Age visualisation techniques. So not only is it vain, it’s also demonic!
Add in a particular concern with historicism, and novelists in particular might be marginalised. Evangelicals have a right and proper concern for historical truth. If the story of Jesus is not true, then (as Paul says about the Resurrection) our hope is in vain. Yet as we know, the Bible is a collation of many different types of literature. Fiction can be used to show (not tell, again!) a message – something surely Jesus himself knew in the creation of his parables. Therefore, does it matter if some scholars argue that the books of Job and Jonah are inspired fiction? I think not – and, I think in doing so, they add to the legitimacy of the novelist’s art.
But I also suspect this is a problem for some liberal Christians. While they have been welcoming of things that are not overtly in-your-face-and-down-your-throat Christian, their commendable emphasis on social action means that if you’re not getting your hands dirty serving the poor, you must be wasting your time.
It is reasons like these that made me wonder what reception some of you pros get in your churches. I must say, it was heartening to read of [name]’s positive experiences.
Sabbatical, Day 88: Body Image, Self-Esteem And The Gospel
“When I grow up, I want to be slim like Sophie, not fat like Louise.”
That was Rebekah (aged six, if you’re new here), at bath-time tonight.
She had said the same during the Easter holidays when she returned from a two-night sleepover.
Six years old and worrying about body image.
The other day, she’d been telling me she was stupid.
“Who tells you you’re stupid?” I enquired, knowing that we might get frustrated with her but we never call her that.
“I do,” was her reply.
So tonight when she came up with the slim versus fat line again, we reinforced all we’d said before (to no avail). The most important things are to know you are loved, and therefore to be happy and want to be healthy. Yes, slim is better than fat, but only if you are loved and happy.
But with it not having worked before, we explained further. Big mistake. We explained about how some get so obsessed with being slim they make themselves ill, and even die.
Whoops.
At this point, Mark starts wobbling and dissolves into tears. “Am I going to die because I’m not eating?” He never eats much when he’s ill (as at present), and we’d totally put the wind up him.
It took a lot of reassurance. No Mark, remember how we’ve been saying that you’re heavier than your sister, even though you’re younger? This sort of thing generally happens to girls. Etc.
I think we got out of jail alive. But were we both devastated to have that effect on our son.
It’s one of our major goals to build up our children’s sense of self-esteem and self-worth, not for any pop psychology reasons, but because we believe that’s a consequence of the Gospel. It’s in creation: we’re made in the image of God. It’s in redemption: God loves us so much he gave up his Son, and even wants to dwell within us by the Holy Spirit. We even build something into our nightly prayer with the kids, where we pray that they will know how much God loves them and we love them, and that this will have a positive effect on them psychologically and spiritually. OK, we don’t quite use that language, but that’s a summary for grown-ups.
In my work as a minister (to which I shall be returning in an active sense on Sunday week), I find there is an epidemic of low self-esteem in our churches. It isn’t just the obvious theological causes, where people have been brought up to live in permanent fear of divine wrath, or with ‘worm theology’ (“I’m just a worm”). There is also the damage so many carry around from various life traumas, not least their upbringing. These damaged people then damage others, both within the church family and in the next generations of their biological families.
And yes, I know that a central component of the Gospel is that it addresses the problem of human sin. And yes, I also know that ‘grace’ makes little sense without an understanding of why we need it. And yes, I’m aware it’s easy to turn talk of God’s love into ‘Jesus is my boyfriend’ slogans. But – without losing those things – I want to share all the more the knowledge of a God who is passionately committed in love to his creation, who doesn’t stop with weeping over human sin but who also, in the words of Zephaniah, rejoices and dances over that creation.
Of course, I could be crazy. What say you?
