Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are just like Britney Spears and Beyoncé Knowles. Yes, really. Big loud professions of Christian faith but when the rubber hits the road their behaviour is no different from their peers. With Britney and Beyoncé it’s sex, with Tony and Gordon it’s hatred and power.

I know it’s only the one who is without sin who should cast the first stone, but maybe I’m just frustrated that non-Christians can so easily say, “You Christians are just like the rest of us.” It isn’t, then, just about those Christians who live out their faith in the noise of the media. We all live our faith in public.

So if someone like me gets wound up by ‘famous Christians’ their conduct is only a magnified warning to us all. No room for complacency here. The spiritual disciplines and accountability are for us all.

Technorati Tags: Tony+Blair, Gordon+Brown, Britney+Spears, Beyonce+Knowles, Christianity

Chelmsford is a possible location for a casino after the recent legislation. Here is  a useful resource paper from the Evangelical Alliance advising Christians how best to lobby against such socially damaging establishments.

Technorati Tags: Chelmsford, casinos, Evangelical+Alliance

Christianity Today‘s series on the war involving Israel and Hezbollah today features a piece by a Chicago rabbi. He writes on how evangelicals and Jews might listen to each other through reading the Scriptures they share (he quotes several times from the Torah/Pentateuch). He is aware that evangelicals are suffering in Lebanon, though strangely seems unaware of evangelical Zionism, given the tone of his appeal for understanding of Israel’s response not simply to Hezbollah’s recent terrorist actions but their overall threat. He makes implicit comparisons between the call for the annihiliation of Israel with Nazism.

Having said that, I struggle with his idealistic description of Israeli military action. Yes, Israel may have warned people to flee and it certainly is difficult militarily if Hezbollah has ensconced itself in civilian areas (as seems doubtless true). But there is no acknowledgement of the testimony from some injured civilians – that fleeing convoys have been bombed and there is no hope for those without cars to escape.

I found a more balanced condemnation of the evil on all sides here from Jim Wallis. Hezbollah provoked this, but Israel’s response is immoral, as is western ‘diplomacy’.

‘Condemnation’, I said. Perhaps a bad choice of word. But in Gospel terms will there be any hope until there is confession?

Technorati Tags: Christianity+Today, Israel, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Jim+Wallis

Read this: do we want water into blood or water into wine?

A ‘Prayer’ to Condoleezza Rice – Christianity Today Magazine

Technorati Tags: Israel, Lebanon, Hezbollah

PamBG has reminded me of this important perspective from the academic dean of the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary. I saw this article last week and didn’t have time to post on it. See the posts on Pam’s site here and here. She also posts the timely words of Alan Gaunt‘s hymn ‘We pray for peace’ here.

I post this as someone who as a young Christian only ever heard the evangelical Zionist viewpoint from the books of writers such as Lance Lambert. Later I changed my views, whilst trying to remain faithful to Scripture. It came first of all from reading Colin Chapman’s book Whose Promised Land? and later having him as a theological lecturer in Bristol. (NB There is a critical review of the book here and you can find some more recent articles by Colin on Islamic terrorism and the Israel-Palestine conflict here.)

Israel was promised ‘the land’ by God in the Old Testament. It was given unconditionally but they were also expected to care for ‘the alien in [their] midst’ on the grounds that they had been slaves in Egypt. This seems particularly pertinent to the question of land for Palestinians. But further in the New Testament scholars such as Kenneth Bailey have argued that Jesus ‘de-Zionised’ Isaiah’s prophecies. And Jesus’ own quotation in the Beatitudes from the OT that ‘the meek shall inherit the earth‘ could legitimately be translated, ‘The meek shall inherit the land’, which would be potentially more consistent with the original quote in Psalm 37. What might that mean today?

Of course the apostles just before the Ascension ask Jesus if he is about to ‘restore the kingdom to Israel’ but he tells them it is not for them to know the times or dates the Father has set. Chapman points out that after that the subject doesn’t come up again.

Does that mean that God does not have a special concern for Israel? Far from it: Romans, with its repeated refrain of ‘to the Jew first and then the Gentile’ and especially the difficult chapters 9 to 11, puts paid to that idea. But we cannot take OT texts that prophesy the retun from Babylonian exile and take them without warrant to prophesy the establishment of the modern State of Israel.

So do I have sympathy for Hezbollah’s violence? Not a bit. It is evil, and to speak of exterminating Israel is contrary to God’s concern for peace, reconciliation and justice. Nor, though, can I bless the dreadful violence Israel has unleashed. The experiences of persecution and injustice have fanned the flames of hatred on both sides.

An Anglican lay reader friend of mine who has training both in theology and psychology once observed in a sermon the difference between post-apartheid South Africa and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. The difference, he claimed, was that South Africa was willing to engage in its process of truth and reconciliation, whereas Mugabe and his régime allowed the hatred of what had been done to them to fester in their hearts and become political policy.

If that is true, then may God have mercy not only on the Middle East and the Western governments and worldwide organisations that may or may not help, but also upon us all and the darkness of our own hearts. Let us pray for the world and for ourselves.

Technorati Tags: Arab+Baptist+Theological+Seminary, Alan+Gaunt, evangelical, Zionist, Lance+Lambert, Colin+Chapman, Israel, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Kenneth+Bailey, South+Africa, Mugabe, Zimbabwe, Middle+East

The Methodist Church, in which I am a minister, is desperate to maintain unity and avoid a split, especially over homosexuality. Yesterday’s Conference decisions on civil partnerships illustrate this. Evangelicals like me get the decision that we shall not conduct formal blessings of civil partnerships and a reaffirmation of the traditional teaching that requires fidelity within marriage (which can only be between a man and a woman) and chastity without. Liberals get the chance for ministers to pray privately with couples plus reconsidering the resolutions of the 1993 Conference in Derby that have just about held us together so far. Paul Smith of Headway clearly knows the danger that what ministers might pray in private might not reflect the official position, but has to leave it to trust.

This is the same Conference that has received a report from the Faith And Order Committee entitled, ‘Living With Contradictory Convictions’ (Word document downloadable on this page). It is a report that does somersaults to emphasise the ‘contradictions’ in Scripture (e.g., Paul versus James), many of which have been rebuffed by scholars over the years. It makes huge play of how Christians have changed their minds on various issues down the years (e.g., slavery) and is right to a certain extent about the need for humility in holding certain convictions. But the real danger is that we are being asked to be short on conviction and long on unity, without sufficient foundation for that unity.

It is an important question to ask exactly what does unite British Methodists. Some at theological college put it satirically this way: “You can doubt the Virgin Birth, you can doubt the Resurrection, but God help you if you doubt infant baptism or feminism.”  (And feminism has of course become the major issue between ourselves and the Church of England in talks regarding the Covenant we agreed.) Others would add matters of ‘connexionalism’ – the idea that we are all connected, and that with the circuit system we endorse a system in which the strong support the weak. Fine – there’s something quite apostolic about that to me. Or John Wesley’s notion of holiness as social holiness – except that seems to be pushed in a direction that sees holiness as no more than social justice.

Now I practice infant baptism (although I tend towards a rigorist position). I hold an egalitarian view of the sexes. I think connexionalism has much to commend itself. And I believe in social justice. But important as these things are, they are surely not foundational Gospel issues, even if they most certainly express the Gospel. What worries me in a nutshell is that we are not seeking to establish unity on a Gospel foundation. Where is the Christology, for example? Where is the soteriology? The civil partnerships resolutions and the Faith And Order report both suggest to me that the dubious path of ‘unity at any price’ is being trod by some.

Technorati Tags: Methodist+Conference, civil+partnerships, Headway, unity