The Radical Methodist

The Nicene Creed

2012-02-23T22:30:00.000Z

We used the Nicene Creed in church last Sunday. We hardly ever say it at my church, and I find I dislike the thing more every time. I began to dislike it twenty years and more ago, when I found out about the filioque controversy. The Creed is supposed to unite the church, but here it was being used in a divisive way. The Western Church added 'and the son' in early medieval times, and this contributed to the Great Schism of 1054, when Eastern and Western Churches mutually excommunicated each other.

The Western Church regularly claims that the Eastern version subordinates the Son, but there's not much evidence of it in Orthodox practice. The Eastern Church, on the other hand, accuses the Western of subordinating the Spirit, and there may be something in that. Embedded in both these claims, however, is an assumption that the internal structure of God can be adequately described in a form of words. But how can language, the creation of a created being, suffice to describe the infinite? My own belief is that if we can describe or understand something, it isn't God. The danger of absolutising language is that we risk creating an idol; the form of religion is threatening to become more important than the ultimate truth it strives after.

If we go back to the original form of the Nicene Creed (the Creed we use is actually a revised version of a 'second edition' issued at Constantinople in 381), the divisive intent is clear.

We believe in one God, the Father, Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible;
and in the one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father,
only-begotten, that is, from the substance of the Father; God from God,
Light from Light, Very God from Very God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father,
through whom all things were made, both in heaven and in earth;
who for us men and for our salvation came down and was incarnate, was made man, suffered, and rose again on the third day,
ascended into heaven, and is coming to judge the living and the dead; And in the Holy Spirit.

And those who say: "There was a time when he was not",
and: "Before he was begotten he was not", and: "He came into being from nothing",
or those who pretend that the Son of God is "of another substance" [than the Father] or
"created" or "alterable" or "mutable", the catholic and apostolic church places under a curse.

(Translation stolen with great daring from http://www.thenagain.info/webchron/Mediterranean/ConstanChrist2.html)

The Roman Empire was too big for one man to rule effectively, and almost collapsed during the 3rd Century. It had been divided from the establishment of the Tetrarchy in 293, until Constantine's defeat of Licinius in 324. Now Constantine was faced with the task of reuniting it, and found the church and the skills of its bishops to be a useful tool. I don't believe the oft-repeated claim that Constantine was a Christian, even a saint, but that's another story.

The church, however, was divided itself, over Christology. Constantine called 318 bishops together, in 325, to settle the issue by fiat. They met at Nicaea, in what's now western Turkey. The Arians believed that Christ was the first created being, as per Colossians 1:15, and all else was created through him. The Orthodox had a higher Christology, and held that he had existed from eternity, made of the same substance as the Father. (It feels unnatural to me calling Jesus 'Christ', but I don't think I can avoid it here. It's actually a title, 'Anointed One', but that meant nothing to Gentiles, so Paul and his successors used it like a name, and we still do so today. It's like bumping into Mrs. Windsor on one of her walkabouts: 'Good morning, Queen, how are you today'. It doesn't feel right.)

After a long debate, the Council declared that Christ was made of the same substance as the Father, co-eternal, and that all things were made through him. A letter of Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, suggests that the vital term 'homoousios' ('same substance') was dictated by Constantine himself. A couple of bishops who refused to sign were excommunicated and sent into exile. Constantine subsequently changed his mind, and supported moderate Arians, such as Eusebius, who'd developed a compromise, that Christ was made of 'similar substance' (homoiousios) with the Father.

This set the scene for a series of divisive creeds, written by one side or the other in accordance with the preference of the reigning emperor. Under Constantius II, a son of Constantine who won a civil war against his brothers, and came to be sole ruler of the empire, a series of Arian creeds was produced. The controversy even reached the coinage, with the short-lived emperor Magnentius issuing a large coin with a chi-rho reverse, carrying the letters alpha and omega.

(Image nicked from forumancientcoins.com)

It's an obvious reference to Revelation, where the phrase is used repeatedly. The intent seems to be to declare Magnentius' orthodoxy, in contrast to the Arianism of his enemy Constantius. Orthodoxy was finally restored, at least in the empire, by Theodosius I, the last man to rule the united Roman empire.

The end result was that the imperial heartlands in Europe were orthodox, the 'barbarians' to the north Arian, the Egyptians and others Monophysite, the North Africans divided between the orthodox and the Donatists, and the east was Nestorian. The creed could be described as 'ecumenical' only to the extent that everyone who disagreed with it had been flushed out and excommunicated. One might well speculate that the concentric pattern, with orthodoxy in the centre and 'heresy' on the periphery, might be due to political tensions underlying the theological controversies.

The Nicene Creed, then, is the product of a divided church, and it played its part in the development of that division. Not only that, it takes study to understand it properly. The modern version used by the Western Church is:

We believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, and the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father. And he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end.

And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets. And we believe one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. And we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

How many people walking in off the street would get all that stuff about 'eternally begotten' or 'of one being with the Father'? How do we allow for the fact that the Greek can't be translated exactly, and in making a translation, we subtly alter the meaning? Do we need all that detail anyway?

Some would say that we do. But my own view is that all those dreadful 'heretics', Arians, Monophysites, Nestorians and the rest, were just Christians who happened to intellectualise their faith in somewhat different ways. Some of them are still with us; I have a liturgy belonging to the Church of the East, which contains the 'Creed of the Three Hundred and Eighteen Fathers', which, as far as I can tell - I have one in English, and the other in Greek - is identical to the creed of Nestorius, who held that Mary was the mother of Jesus' humanity, but not of his divinity, since the two natures remained separate. The Coptic Orthodox Church, which has often been called Monophysite, though they themselves deny it, is still going strong in Egypt, and twenty years ago I had the pleasure of meeting the then Coptic Pope, and visiting a Coptic church in Birmingham. Faith is a matter of the heart, not formal theological statements, and I can't believe those people weren't legitimately Christian!

It could be worse, of course. Some statements of faith are horrendously prescriptive; leave out a comma and you're bound for hell. But I think it goes too far, and its history demonstrates that. I've nothing against the idea that we can use a simple summary of the Gospel, based, as the historic creeds are, on the story of Jesus. I wouldn't be comfortable with a doctrinal statement, however basic, as the Gospel isn't a doctrine. It needs, however, to be comprehensible, inclusive rather than exclusive, and expressed in everyday language. We need to be open to the possibility of change in the wording; not everyone expresses themselves in the same way, and why should they?

Winter night shelter

2012-02-10T12:10:00.002Z

I spent the other night helping at a pilot for a winter night shelter using church premises. We only had one customer, when we had ten beds available, and there are probably 300-500 people sleeping rough in Birmingham. It's the first week, and obviously something isn't working. It seems to be partly the referral system, operated from the city centre, and partly the churches being out of town. this one's only a mile and a half, but it's not visible from the main road, and there's a possibility some people may have got lost. A bus from the city centre might fix it, but no doubt we'll get things ironed out over the next month. Next year, we hope to run it on a larger scale.

Looking at Jesus

2012-01-26T19:00:00.002Z

Recently, I was involved in an online discussion about some of the problems we have in the church, and someone said we should get people to look at Jesus not at the church, or words to that effect. I can't remember the exact phrase they used.

I've heard things like that many times over, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. It's a standard response to criticisms of the church, which I suppose sounds a bit more 'spiritual' than another one I've heard: 'Look at that lot over there, we're nothing like as bad as them'. We are, after all, supposed to be following Jesus.

Unless someone claims to have had a vision like Paul's - in which case we might wonder about their sanity - our one source of information about Jesus is the New Testament, principally the Gospels. These were, of course, written by people in the church, for people in the church. They were preserved by the church, selected and labelled 'holy scripture' by the church. They were interpreted and reinterpreted over a couple of thousand years, by the church. So how can we separate Jesus from the church, when everything we think we know about him is mediated by said church?

This comes down to the relationship between scripture and church tradition. The Orthodox maintain that the Bible is part of the tradition, albeit a rather special part. I don't know a lot about how this works out in practice, but it seems realistic. The New Testament is wholly a product of the tradition; the Old may have been inherited from the Jews, but the fact that the Orthodox use the Septuagint, the Ethiopian Orthodox add 1 Enoch to that, the Catholics use the Hebrew scriptures, but add the extra books form the Greek, and the Protestants eliminate everything but the Hebrew books, is all down to the various church traditions.

The Western Church traditionally exalted tradition alongside the Bible. This is all very well, but it makes me uncomfortable. What happens when it's wrong? How do you correct it?

The Reformation was both a reaction against the corruption of the late medieval church, and a political movement. In many ways, inevitably given the bitterness of the time, it over-reacted. The Reformers needed an alternative authority to put in place of the Roman Catholic church hierarchy and tradition, and chose the Bible, meaning, of course, the Bible as interpreted by them. However, the reality that it's always the church which interprets scripture remained unspoken. The result is a tradition where most people are unconscious of the church's influence on their understanding of what they read.

At the same time, Protestants don't have much theology of the church. Most of the time, they think in terms of the local congregation; if they think of the wider shurch at all, it's normally in terms of the denomination. When it comes to church unity, there's a tendency to slip back into the western tradition of monocephaly; and dream of 'visible unity', the church as a single organisation under a single head. This is, of course, the Roman Catholic model which broke down before. The part-Catholic, part-Protestant Anglicans try to maintain a version of this model, and all I can say is that it doesn't seem to work very well.

It might be more practical to work towards something more akin to the Eastern tradition of polycephaly, where churches retain separate orgaisations, but fully recognise each other. We'd have to get a bit less precious about the things which divide us, whether that be the 'Apostolic Succession', baptism, women bishops or women's hats (seriously, I was once told that Methodists don't worship God properly because we don't make the ladies wear hats in church), but I don't think that would be any bad thing!

There's a fissiparity in the Protestant tradition which has both good and bad aspects. On the one hand, it can renew itself relatively easily. On the other, anyone can go off and found a church if they're disgruntled or want to be important. At the extreme and of this, we get something like the Westboro Baptist Church, which seems to be little more than a single family with a gift for rather nasty attention-seeking. Anyone can take whatever little snippet of the Bible they like, and use it to justify pretty well anything. The widespread use of God's name to legitimate pure homophobia is a perfect example of what can so easily go wrong.

The problem here, of course, is that homophobia is part of the tradition, though it's never been emphasised before. So it's as easy for Catholics to trot it out as for Protestants. It may, perhaps, be harder for the former to move on, just as it took them longer to adapt to Biblical criticism, and it still can't handle the idea of women priests. When they adapted to criticism, though, they managed to do so together, while Protestants split, with some adapting - though we still lack a tradition of liberal exegesis - and others reacting and heading off towards the slough of young-earth creationism, just as we remain divided over homophobia, wonens' ministry, and a host of other things, from the essential to the utterly trivial. Very often, people remain dogmatically wedded to traditional positions, without realising that tradition is what underlies their claims that their positions are 'biblical'. Because they've never considered the relationship between scripture and tradition, they have no idea of where they actually are.

Occasionally, I've come across people trying to contrast scripture and tradition; essentially, they were engaging in a polemic against churches which they maintained 'follow tradition'; they were 'biblical', and hence better. Yet these people were more firmly wedded to tradition than those they criticised. This is the danger when we try to contrast Jesus and the church; there's a failure to examine our idea of Jesus. The Jesus we're supposed to look to is always traditional, always utterly tame and unthreatening. So much so, if fact, that I wonder why they wasted wood and nails on crucifying someone so transparently harmless.

We have, of course, got four portraits of Jesus in the New Testament. Unfortunately, we don't often read them side by side, and people don't normally become aware of the quite significant differences. However, they portray him as someone who could get quite narked with people from a different strand of Judaism, who had a major quarrel with the religious set-up and the people who ran it, and who seems to have been quite happy with one of his disciples carrying a couple of swords. He allegedly predicted that his followers would get into dire trouble with the authorities, but his portrait has been reworked into something which could efficiently transport butter in its mouth. The groggy old church has gone toothless, as James Joyce put it, but because we're not aware of the real relationship between the church, its tradition, and scripture, we're not able to correct ourselves. The real Jesus was a dangerous fellow to know; most of his inner circle got themselves martyred, according to tradition. If we start looking seriously for that Jesus, the church won't know what's hit it.

In the Beginning 4

2012-01-21T18:56:00.002Z

I've gone through the first creation account in Genesis, but haven't really looked at the theology we can get from it. It looks rather like the stories told by other Near Eastern peoples of the time, but at the same time we can see how it's evolved, from the conflict between God and the Chaos Monster which we glimpse in Psalm 74, to a position where great sea monsters are now a detail, created by God along with everything else.

Any careful reading of the Bible will show beliefs evolving, and that's an important lesson. They're not set in stone for all time. Similarly, these stories have to be read in the context of their own time and their own culture, if they're to be understood. They don't relate to our modern scientific worldview at all, and if we read them as though they are, we're likely to end up with a nonsense like young-Earth creationism.

The great difference between this and the creation narratives of other peoples is that it makes God wholly and solely responsible for creation. Without him, there would be nothing but the primal watery chaos. No being exists without his command; there is no earlier chaos monster. It's there in earlier Israelite belief, but by the time Genesis 1 was written - I suspect some time after the Exile - God has grown considerably, and the monster has shrunk to a mere creation. The result is a picture of creation which is still relevant to our modern belief system.

I can never quite make up my mind whether trinitarian Christianity is a form of absolute monotheism or not, but if not, it's pretty close to it. We believe that God is unique, the only uncreated being, intrinsically different from anything in creation. The Israelites were a long way from this; they believed in many Elohim, divine or heavenly beings, of whom one was God. Much of the Old Testament was written be people who believed in many gods, only one of whom could legitimately be worshipped by Israelites, but the author of Genesis 1 has moved beyond that. Like the author of 2 Isaiah, he believes in a single God, who he portrays as uniquely creative. He may be one among many Elohim, but he's a bigger and better version than the rest. It's sufficiently like our monotheism to pass, even if we have to pretend that the 'us' of 1:26 refers to the Trinity, not the heavenly host. It remains useful as witness to a belief in a creator God who we share with the ancient authors and editors of the text.

A new discovery

2011-12-31T20:49:00.002Z

I was clearing out the allotment shed today, and somewhere down among the mouldering remains of old seed packets I found a book. It appears to be an account of how God gave an onerous list of rules to one of his prophets; the guy's name is unfortunately obscured by beetroot stains. If you keep the rules you'll live long and prosper, and become a rich banker. If you don't, and especially if you worship anyone else, you'll end your days as a homeless alcoholic living in a night shelter. If you escape being hit by a thunderbolt that is. Foreigners are to be exterminated without mercy. He claims to love us, but it it really the sweet scent of our whole burnt offerings he wants?

The big question is, do we bow down to this God, and keep all his rules in hope, or do we decide he's a psychopathic narcissist who probably runs a bank, and is unfit to be worshipped? Should I report my find to the government so they can put all the rules into law, or should I burn the thing before it can do any damage?

Happy New Year, by the way.

Felix Dies Natalis Solis Invicti

2011-12-22T01:32:00.000Z

Happy Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun! Which, of course, happens to be 25 December, which was the shortest day of the year when Julius Caesar established his new calendar in 45 BC, though it's drifted a little since. The Romans had always worshipped the sun, alng with many other deities, but Aurelian made a new version, the worship of Sol Invictus, an official cult in 274 AD. It was popular with several succeeding emperors, and Constantine I, who legalised Christianity again after the pagan backlash of the Great Persecution, celebrated the god as his 'companion' until long after his supposed conversion to Christianity. Here he is, on a coin struck in Londinium, with Sol Invictus himself on the reverse.

Constantine favoured the church, and declared its tolerance in the Edict of Milan, issued with his co-emperor and rival Licinius in 313, but despite centuries of claims to the contrary, there's no clear evidence that he ever committed himself to Christianity. He issued two rescripts regarding working on 'the venerable day of the Sun', when he wanted people to abstain from any work apart from a few specific things like manumitting slaves. Neither, however, makes any reference to Christianity, which only became the official religion of the Empire in 380, under Theodosius I.

In the following century, Pope Leo I (reigned 440-461) said, in a sermon:

From such a system of teaching proceeds also the ungodly practice of certain foolish folk who worship the sun as it rises at the beginning of daylight from elevated positions: even some Christians think it is so proper to do this that, before entering the blessed Apostle Peter's basilica, which is dedicated to the One Living and true God, when they have mounted the steps which lead to the raised platform, they turn round and bow themselves towards the rising sun and with bent neck do homage to its brilliant orb. We are full of grief and vexation that this should happen, which is partly due to the fault of ignorance and partly to the spirit of heathenism: because although some of them do perhaps worship the Creator of that fair light rather than the Light itself, which is His creature, yet we must abstain even flora the appearance of this observance: for if one who has abandoned the worship of gods, finds it in our own worship, will he not hark back again to this fragment of his old superstition, as if it were allowable, when he sees it to be common both to Christians and to infidels? (http://www.ancient-future.net/leosermonxxvii.html)

So it seems that some were mixing the worship of the Sun with that of the Son. It was an age when the old polytheistic religion of Rome was effectively dead, and people were experimenting with various monotheisms, dedicating themselves to an array of alternative gods. At the same time, there was no hostility beteen the cults, apart from Christianity and Judaism. People were fee to mix and match, and so syncretism within the church shouldn't be seen as surprising. Constantine I may have been such a syncretist, or he may just have found the church politically useful in reuniting the empire after a series of civil wars. As the first sole emperor in almost 40 years, he must have faced an uphill task, and probably needed all the help he could get.

It was in this context that the church adopted the midwinter festival as a celebration of Jesus' birth. It was the time when the days were darkest and shortest, the old year died, and the promise of its rebirth in the spring must have been uppermost in peoples' minds as they faced the long, cold winter, and the 'hungry gap' in early spring, before the first of the new season's crops came in to fill their bellies. Famine was never far away in a subsistence economy, and malnutrition and disease must have been regular features of everyday life at this time of year. The further north you went, the longer and darker the winter, and the greater the likelihood of shortages. The midwinter festival seems to have been almost universal, attached to whatever gods were worshipped in a paricular culture. Essentially, it was cultural, rather than a feature of any specific religion, but in an age when religion permeated almost every act, it was inevitable that it would take a religious form. The Greeks celebrated is as Lenaia, a feast dedicated to Dionysios, when a bull, or originally a man, was sacrificed. The Romans had a tamer version, Brumalia, dedicated to Bacchus.

Decmber 25th is first mentioned as the date of Jesus' birth in 354. There was a belief that he was concieved on the same date as he died, and conception around April would obviously lead to a birth about December. It fitted the midwinter festival, though Christmas remained fairly low key for some centuries, only slowly gaining in importance.

How much was taken over from the pagan festivals of the time isn't known. One thing's certain, though; the religious aspects were rejected, and if anything was absorbed, it was what we nowadays recognise as cultural not religious. There's nothing particularly Christian - or unChristian for that matter - about having a feast in the darkest time of the year. Occasionally, we meet Christians of a rather narrow bent, who claim that we shouldn't observe Christmas or Easter because they're 'really' pagan observances in disguise. It's sheer nonsense. We don't know when Jesus was born, but obviously the even has to have happened. He can't have been resurrected without dying; he can't have died without being born. It's entirely appropriate that we should celebrate all three.

Happy Christmas, Holidays, Winterval, or whatever you want to call it!

In the Beginning 3

2011-12-10T19:40:00.001Z

We left Genesis at Chapter 1:19 (here; the first post in the series is here) ; God has brought forth order, and made land, sea and sky. He's created plants, immediately after separating land and sea, then put lights in the sky.

Genesis 1:9-19 And God said, "Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear." And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, "Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it." And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day. And God said, "Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth." And it was so. God made the two great lights-- the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night-- and the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

Since the plants and animals which are brought forth are living beings, that implies that the heavenly bodies may well have been thought of as somehow belonging to the same order of things. To other peoples of the Ancient Near East, and evidently to many Israelites, the heavenly bodies were objects of worship; their cults are referred to in 2 Kings 23:5 and Amos 5:26. The fact that they're said to have been established within the royal temple in Jerusalem, and perhaps that at Bethel, points to their importance. Here, of course, they're relegated to the status of nameless created beings, but they're still beings, not inanimate objects. Even the word 'shemesh', meaning sun, is, however, closely related to the name of the sun god, Shamash. The divine association is still there, embedded in the language. The 'great lights', sun and moon, are given roles, to rule day and night, which they separate. So they have a specific function, upholding part of the order God has brought forth out of the primal chaos. They act, as it were, as God's viceroys, set over one aspect of creation.

Genesis 1:20-31 And God said, "Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky." So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth." And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day. And God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind." And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." God said, "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Birds and water organisms are brought forth, and told to be fruitful and multiply; fish are to 'fill' the waters, and birds are to multiply on the earth. Sea and sky are thus populated with animal life. v21 uses bara', to create, which hasn't been used since v1. The tannin, 'sea monsters', probably represent the chaos monster of myth, but God has got bigger, and the monster smaller. Now, the monsters are created in the same way as any other living being, and, like the rest of them, are subject to God's authority. In Ps 104, which contains similar language to Genesis 1, Leviathan is created to 'sport in the waters', a far cry from the Leviathan God destroys in Ps 74. The process reaches its climax in Jonah, where the monster, now a mere fish, proves to be a better servant of God than his recalcitrant prophet.

Then God authorises the earth to bring forth animals, but the earth isn't 'filled' with them. That is reserved for humans, who come next, and, like birds and fish, they are to be fruitful and multiply; like fish, they are to 'fill', but this time, the land. No doubt this is, as much as anything, a comment on what the authors could see around them; shallow seas, and lowland water courses, will indeed teem with life as long as they're not affected by pollution or overfishing. Similarly, a settled country would have been 'filled' with people, wherever there was agricultural land to support them.

When humans are made, we suddenly find that God isn't alone; he says 'Let us make...', though he alone gets credit for doing the making. The church likes to see the Trinity in this, but of course this was an idea which evolved after the New Testament was written, never mind Genesis. The first question has to be, what was in the minds of the authors? Nowadays, we come very close to absolute monotheism; we see God as a unique being, alone in his divinity, tempered only by the idea of his being three in one. the Israelites, however, believed in many divine beings, the Elohim.

Elohim is often used as a name for God, but it's also used for gods or angels (Ex 12:12, Ex 32:1, Deut 13:18, Ps 8:6, etc), or even the spirits of the dead (I Sam 28:13). God is the greatest of the Elohim, the one who is God, who alone may be worshipped, but he is surrounded by the heavenly host, and here, in the creation of humanity, we catch a glimpse of them at work. In this passage, creation turns out to be a team effort.

Just as the sun and moon are to rule the heavens, so human beings are to have dominion over living things; over fish, birds and land animals, but not over the lights in the sky. Again, to some extent, this is a simple statement of observed fact; humanity was indeed the dominant species. It is also a commission from God; humanity is to rule as his viceroy on earth, just as sun and moon rule in the heavens. Human beings are thus put on a level with beings which, to any of the surrounding cultures, were mighty gods. It's a very different picture from the one painted by their myths.

In the story of Atrahasis, the lesser gods have to dig ditches, and they rebel because the work is so hard. So the great gods sacrifice one of the lesser, and mix his blood and flesh with clay, to make mankind. The men do the work, but they breed so much that the noise they make disturbs the gods. Eventually they make a flood to drown them, and only Atrahasis and his family, forwarned by one of the gods, escape with an ark full of animals. Of course, this is much earlier than Genesis; from the Babylon of the 18th Century BC, while Genesis 1 is 1st Milennium BC certainly, and probably post-exilic. Ideas have moved on, and now the Israelites are asserting a much higher role for humanity than that of a useful beast of burden which has to be culled now and then to keep the numbers down!

However, humanity isn't the centre of creation. The story is primarily one about God and his relationship with creation, rather than that of the creation of a single species. We may have dominion over the earth, but the sun and moon rule the sky. We may be told to multiply and fill the earth - without which, we cannot exercise dominion over it - but the fish are told to fill the sea. Rather, we're an important part of an interlocking system, not put there to dominate and destroy, but to act under God's authority, as his viceroy.

Right from the beginning, we're sexual beings, created as male and female, intended to multiply and breed. Unlike the story of Atrahasis, and its parallel in the Gilgamesh cycle, this breeding isn't seen as a threat. Nowadays, of course, we know that it can be, but we live in a very different age to the authors of Genesis. In those days, population levels were sustainable, and pollution remained within manageable limits. There's no hierarchy here, no hint of male superiority. The sexes are created side by side, and commanded to breed. The story of the Fall, if that's what it is, belongs to a different version of the creation story.

Genesis 2:1-3 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.

The climax comes on the seventh day. God's finished the job, he has a nice lie in, and he blesses his work. Combined with the repeated statement that what God made was 'good', this affirms creation in a way we can't afford to forget. Sabbath is built into the fabric of the story in a way which provides a theological basis for the practice. The cycle of time which began with the first day ends in the rest of God.

Creation ex nihilo

2011-12-04T20:20:00.001Z

Rabbi Michael Samuel suggests here that the idea of creation ex nihilo may be older than I thought. He hasn't got any clear statements of it though, only texts which might suggest some such idea at the back of their authors' minds. There's certainly nothing which would stretch it all the way back to Genesis!

The Wearing of the Red 3

2011-11-13T19:51:00.001Z

Entirely predictably, the media have been assuring us that Remembrance Sunday is about servicepeople. Many churches, I hope most of them, make a point of saying that it's about all the victims of war, but as always, we're drowned out. To those outside the church, we seem to be supporting the official agenda, no matter what our motives, no matter why an individual chooses to wear a poppy. Everything else is drowned out.

So what do we do, pick another Sunday to remember the horrors of war, or try to redeem today? To do that would require rather more courage, a greater willingness to stand up and be awkward in public, than I think the church is capable of. But maybe I'm wrong. We're going to have a serious think about how we're going to handle it next year. Maybe other churches will as well.

The Wearing of the Red 2

2011-11-11T18:06:00.001Z

Remembrance Sunday always gave me the creeps. We once - a long time ago - asked everyone at church what it meant to them. It didn't mean a thing to anyone. We thought about ceasing to observe it but the leadership we had at the time was too weak to tell the preachers they weren't to do it. We should ask again; it's the one church where I know I can say what I think about war, and all the claptrap we hear about it, and people are going to agree with me instead of getting upset.

For years, I tried to avoid Remembrance Sunday, and dreaded having to take a service that day. Then, in 1997, my girls were caught up in fighting after a coup in Freetown, capital of Sierra Leone, just as we'd got clearance from Immigration to bring them over. All hell broke loose, and for three days we thought Kumbi, then 11, was on some rustbucket heading for Ghana. Then we found that the ship had fled without the refugees, and that she'd been rescued by the US navy, and put on a plane from Conakry, over the border in Guinea. She'd been in the fighting, arrived very badly traumatised, and she still suffers as a result of what she went through.

Mina, then 5, was taken up country. The phone lines were down, we knew cars were being stopped on that road, and the people killed, and you can imagine how we felt for the next six weeks before we managed to get in touch, and found that she was safe. It took another six weeks to get her put on a plane from Conakry, and shortly after, the rebels went and burnt the town where she'd been staying.

After that, I couldn't handle Remembrance Sunday at all for years. I still struggle; it strikes me as a thoroughly dishonest figleaf for war. We hear a great deal about the military, and next to nothing about civilians. I'm aware of one war memorial for civilians, in Birmingham. Does anyone know any others? That was fair enough when it started; the overwhelming majority of the dead in the Great War were military. Around half the bodies on the Western Front were never found - they're still turning up now, in significant numbers - and families were desperate for closure. However, these days, the overwhelming majority of the dead are civilians. When are we going to start remembering them?

In the Great War, people were suckered into volunteering on a wave of patriotism, or pressurised into doing so; those who didn't were liable to be abused on the streets. Later on, they were conscripted. They found themselves in a war the like of which the world had never seen. It wasn't the first industrialised slaughter; that took place in the US Civil War. It was, however, the first industrialised trench war, with human wave after human wave going to their deaths. British casualties alone on the first day of the Somme amounted to almost 20 000 dead and 40 000 injured. For what, since it was a war fought over nothing at all?

We hear all about Britain and Germany, not very much about France and Belgium, and it's easy to get the impression that it was a Western European conflict. It wasn't; it started over the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo, by a Serb nationalist. There was no diplomatic mechanism which might have defused things, and, led by a poisonous mix of pre-existing treaties, nationalism, jingoism, militarism and commercial rivalry, one imperial power after another was sucked in. We need to stop the rubbish about the victims' 'sacrifice', and admit that they were sacrificed, passive tense, as victims on the altar of sheer nonsense.

In the end, the war came down to a toss-up as to who collapsed first. It happened to be Germany; they got the blame, and had the punitive Treaty of Versailles imposed on them by the victors. The Weimar republic of the 1920's lacked legitimacy; it was imposed from without rather than being an organic development. It collapsed under the pressures of hyper-inflation, caused by the immense reparations imposed at Versailles. Hitler rose to power in the ensuing chaos, and doubtless appeared as a saviour; bringing order, restoring the country's pride and prosperity.

It's not good enough to say that all the bloodshed in the WW2 was justified because Hitler had to be stopped. We need to look deeper; every monster has his Viktor Frankenstein. The Second War was a consequence of the First, and the failure to establish a viable peace. It's all very well to say that Hitler should have been stopped at the Rhineland, but that had been part of Germany before 1918, as had the Sudetenland and East Prussia. It's hard to deny the legitimacy of Hitler's original territorial claims.

When it comes to modern wars, many of them have little or nothing to do with the interests of the nation. Sierra Leone at least had a clear moral imperative behind it; I know far too much about the rebels to criticise, but then I'm biased. At least British casualties were limited to one. Iraq was a straightforward war of aggression; a disaster for the Middle East, for which there was no excuse. I won't comment on what it supposedly did to Britain's moral standing; I don't think they ever had any outside their own vainglorious imagination. Afghanistan had the figleaf of a need to remove al-Qaida, but that withers before the conveniently unpublicised fact that the Taliban offered to put him on trial, and the US refused to negotiate. Again, it was essentially a war of aggression. One again, young men and women are being sacrificed for someone else's political agenda, and for the profits of the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about so long ago. Once again, it's being covered up with pious bullshit about 'their' sacrifice. And the church allows itself to be used to give added legitimacy to the slaughter, by unthinkingly participating in the cult of this modern version of Molech. Even worse in a way, we willingly spend the day ignoring the mass killings of civilians. You can't pretend they made a 'sacrifice for their country', so we ignore them altogether.

Remembrance Sunday could be made into something legitimate - I may try to do something with it at my church next year - but only if we resolutely turn our backs on the secular agenda underlying it, and make it into a genuine memorial for all the multifarious victims of mass murder by governments and their allies.

Reading the Bible

2011-11-05T18:04:00.000Z

Great post from Derek Leman here on 'Reading the Bible Realistically'. It pretty well sums up my own approach. I encountered the Bible - or rather, selected bits thereof, well predigested - at Sunday School, and soon decided that as prople don't really walk on water and stuff like that, I wasn't going to believe any of it. I got bullied, which didn't help, and it wasn't very exciting either, but I've a very clear memory of rejecting the stories.

I got involved in the church again in my late twenties, and soon, like a lot of people, came across fundamentalism. We'd looked at the Synoptic Problem briefly in RE lessons when I was 11, so I was well aware that different Gospels have different versions of the stories. So I wasn't very happy when I found that they read Matthew's version of one of the Beatitudes - 'Blessed are the poor in heart' - and I got jumped on when I quoted Luke's version, 'Blessed are the poor'. This is one of the problems with the way we read the Bible; we read one version of the story, and ignore another. Leman cites the story of the Gadarene demoniac; in Mark, the oldest version, the story takes place near Gerasa, not Gadara. Luke follows Mark; Matthew changed the city, and adds a second demoniac. So how is it we insist the story takes place near Gadara, and only mention one demoniac? We're not looking seriously at any of the three versions of the story.

This brings up another problem; harmonisation. The Christmas story is the classic example; we have two very different, irreconcilable, versions in Matthew and Luke. We take a bit from one, a bit from the other, patch them together with the odd bit from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas - there are no animals in Luke's stable - and by the time we've finished, we have a nice cosy tale which completely fails to take the text of either with the slightest seriousness. It's an old tradition, going back to the days before printing. A complete Bible was about seven years' work, give or take, for highly skilled craftsmen. Books were so expensive that even kings didn't have a complete set of Gospels. People used harmonies, which retold the story using bits from here, there and everywhere, sometimes from apocryphal material, and doubtless a good deal of interpretation thrown in.

And there we have yet another problem. We read the bits of the text with fit - or can be made to fit - our expectations; the nice bits about blessings, not the bits about curses (ever looked at the lectionary readings which miss out chunks of text?); the bits which can be made to affirm doctrines, not the bits which don't. We like the prologue to John's Gospel, for instance, which sounds a bit like trinitarian doctrine (it isn't), and we ignore Mark 13:32, which makes Jesus sound rather too human. The result of our highly selective approach is that we use the Bible to 'prove' docrinal positions which weren't invented until long after it was written, and at the same time, all too often, fail to see what's actually there.

I wiped the dust of conservative Christianity from my feet, and went looking for a healthier way to use the Bible. I've always felt that if we want to call it a holy book, we have to take what it says with the utmost seriousness; if one text disagrees with another, we have to be honest about it. If it contradicts our most precious doctrines, we have to be honest about that too. If it ends up looking like a very human collection of books, rather than something dictated by the Holy Spirit, then that's where we need to be. It doesn't stop God speaking through it, so what's the problem?

The Wearing of the Red 1

2011-11-05T12:28:00.000Z

Brilliant article here from Robert Fisk, about wearing poppies for Remembrance Sunday. It's a theme I'll return to, but I have to go to a church meeting (when I ought to be on the allotment!) and I don't have time for a proper post.

Revival

2011-11-03T18:31:00.000Z

Liberals like me don't talk about this subject very often, but it's something I read quite a lot about way back before I wiped the dust of conservative theology from my feet. Even then, I felt there was something wrong.

Revival was constantly portrayed as a work of the Holy Spirit; we were just supposed to pray for it, and in God's good time, it would happen. They forgot that the church is also a thoroughly human community. From my reading of church history, I found that lots of people join churches - I think this is as good a definition of revival as we're likely to get - when they see those churches as offering something relevant to their needs. It's no good standing in the market place shouting about people needing to be saved from their sins, if those people don't feel themselves to be sinners. Not only that, I think the Gospel is rather more than justification alone. But that's another story.

Being a Methodist, I tend to think first of the Methodist Revival, as it's sometimes called today. It happened at a specific historical moment, like most of the things which happen to human beings. The old agricultural society, which had been based on access to land, rather than ownership of it, was collapsing. In modern terms, the land was being privatised. The process had been going on for several centuries, but now it accelerated, with the result that large numbers of people were forced off the land. Some of them ended up working in new industries, like the Kingswood miners John Wesley preached to. New communities sprang up, and there was an inevitable increase in poverty.

The Church of England wasn't able to adapt to population movements; it was extremely hard to change parish boundaries, and the normal rule was that there was only one church per parish. I used to live in an area of moorland near St Austell in Cornwall. There was nothing there except a few farms until the development of China clay mining in the 19th Century. The only Anglican church within reasonable walking distance was built in the mid-20th Century. Every village, however, had its Methodist church.

In the 18th Century, everyone, to all intents and purposes, believed the Christian message. They took it for granted in a way we don't today. The dominant Protestant theology was Calvinism. If you went to church, and followed the rules, there was at least a fair chance you were one of the elect. If you didn't - and if you lived too far away to get there, that wasn't your fault - they you were likely to be under the decree of reprobation, predestined from eternity for a one-way trip to the eternal gas chambers. There may well have been people going in real fear of hell. When the Wesleys and their friends went and preached to them, taking the church to the people rather than waiting for them to turn up at the door, then of course they responded.

But it didn't stop there. John Wesley was a thinker and a theologian as well as an evangelist. His theology was a response to the situation he found himself in, tailored to the needs of an age which needed to emphasise that everyone, including the reject, may be accepted by God. He did everything he could to meet the practical needs of the poor, and he developed the class system.

This fell apart in the 19th Century, but it provided a community structure for people who'd been displaced and lost their original communities. That may not have been the intention, but it provided something which had never been needed before. We let it die, but other churches have developed it into the house group. It also evolved in a secular direction, of course. Early trade unions grew from Primitive Methodist roots. There may be more radical offshoots as well; I don't know whether there was an organic link, but the class meeting looks rather like the cell structure developed by Victorian revolutionary movements like the Fenian Brotherhood.

Some things have changed; you'd go a very long way to find anyone outside the church thinking about eternal damnation these days. However, lack of community is at least as much a feature of modern life, and probably more so. We're far more mobile, and ever fewer people have extended families around to offer support. Nuclear families often don't cope, raising children who may well be unable to cope in their turn. There's an opportunity there, to offer people a place to go for support and companionship. The church is intended as a radical community, where anyone and everyone can find their place, and that's surely an essential element of the Gospel. I don't believe it can be reduced to a form of words!

There's another thing we can offer people. Value. We live in a world where people have none; where they're treated as commodities. Years ago, when black people came here in large numbers - often at the invitation of the government - they could only get the worst jobs and accommodation, and, all too often, they weren't made welcome in our churches. So they brought their own. I remember meeting an old guy who came here back then, as a missionary from Jamaica. They might be nobody all week, but on Sundays, they had a valued place in the church, and probably a vital job. They might be a bishop or an apostle. I remember a Nigerian woman who was an Archbishop, properly ordained in the Apostolic Succession. I wonder what the Pope would make of that? If we can get rid of our ingrained cliquiness, and put an end to the endless empire-building, we can offer the same. You don't need robes or a fancy title to find your place in God's church.

If we want to build our churches up again - or see revival, which means the same thing - then we've got some serious work to do.

In the Beginning 2

2011-10-31T18:01:00.000Z

It's been a while since I posted on this subject (here). I had an appeal hearing over my sick benefit - which I won - but I got extremely stressed over it. Any time that happens, my CFS gets the better of me, and I find stuff like academic commentaries too much to handle. However, I'm more or less coping now.

I got as far as the third day, when God gathers the water together, leaving the dry land. There's no creation ex nihilo in this; we read that into the text from later tradition. As I mentioned before, creation out of nothing is a later idea; as far as I'm aware it's first mentioned by Tertullian, a century and a half or so after the Crucifixion. He rejects it; creation is from matter, which is assumed to be pre-existent.

There's a problem here; the church likes to claim that its ideas are based on the Bible, then it imposes its own ideas on the text. In one way, that's valid, or we'd still be stuck with a 1st Century mode of thought. On the other hand, I'm not comfortable with claims that those ideas are in the text. They're not; they're interpretations. When it comes to creation, science, of course, maintains that it wasn't ex nihilo. It was from whatever was there before the Big Bang, and being no sort of physicist (my background is in geology, biology and theology), I'm not going to attempt to describe it. Contra Tertullian, it wasn't matter. However, it was matter's precursor, so he wasn't far wrong.

What we have is a description of God bringing order out of chaos. First he divides the waters, then he gathers together the waters below, and limits their extent. Something like the world we know appears, but it's still lifeless. There's light and darkness, but no sun, moon or stars.

But we haven't finished with the third day yet. Immediately after separating land and sea, God calls vegetation into exisence. Once again, he's not creating it out of nothing.

Genesis 1:11 Then God said, "Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it." And it was so.

The author's interest is in fruit trees and seed bearing plants; that is, plants which are useful for agriculture. The land is empowered to 'bring them forth' in a way which sounds very much like spontaneous generation. This is a very old idea; maggots, for instance, were believed to be generated in meat. This, of course, is the generation of the organic from the inorganic, but the difference is only one of degree, and I'm not sure whether people would have been aware of it when Genesis was written.

On the fourth day, we return to the heavens.

Genesis 1:14-19 And God said, "Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth." And it was so. God made the two great lights-- the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night-- and the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

It's a long and elaborate description, suggesting that the 'lights' have a particular importance to the author. Sun and moon, of course, were important deities in the region; the difference here is that they are now created objects, and are not explicitly named, perhaps to avoid identification with their respective deities. Their purpose is to 'rule' over day and night, to divide them, and to give light. Once again, God is separating what had been confused, bringing order out of chaos. The lights are for 'seasons, days and years'; not hours, as these are a human invention which may not yet have raised its head, but the obvious, natural divisions of time. And, they are for 'signs'. The calendar is set by reference to the heavenly bodies; passover, for instance, takes place at the first full moon after the vernal equinox.

They can also be signs of other things. Matthew uses a star as a sign of Jesus' coming; Josephus mentions a 'star shaped like a sword' as one of the portents which presaged the outbreak of the First Revolt. Astrology may be seen as rather dodgy nowadays, but at the time, it was taken for granted.

The whole scenario is clearly geocentric. The heavenly bodies are there to serve earthly purposes. The ancients, or at least the educated minority, weren't as ignorant as often supposed; Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the Earth, accurately, around 200 BC, which rather gives the lie to the idea that they all thought it was flat. The heliocentric theory, which says that the Earth revolves around the sun, was first proposed by Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd Century BC, but nobody believed him. Geocentricity, the idea that the Earth is the centre of the universe, was taken for granted until the early 16th Century, when Copernicus used observations of the movements of the planets to demonstrate mathematically that they orbit the Sun.

It's not surprising that the people who actually wrote Genesis would have taken a geocentric universe for granted; everyone did back then. The question is, what do we do with it now? Any 'literal' interpretatin goes out of the window once we start looking at the text seriously; not even the most extreme fundamentalist argues that the Earth is the centre of the universe. Tentatively, a theological geocentricity might be possible. Deuteronomy 7 maintains that God chose the Israelites, the weakest of peoples, because he loved them. Perhaps we could argue that he chose this insignificant planet as the centre of the cosmic drama, the bearer of his image, no less, because he, somehow, loved it? However, there's a gamble involved. If we then discover life elsewhere in the universe, we could be in trouble. Theologies are relative; they're produced by specific communities, in their specific times, places and cultures. None of them is ever fully satisfactory; no mere human can comprehend God in his fulness, after all. The trouble is, we then absolutise them, claim they apply universally, and, if we can, try to impose them on everyone. How exactly would we cope theologically with extraterrestrial life, I wonder? Is the alien in his flying saucer also made in God's image? Is a dalek of the Devil, or is he capable of redemption? Do bug-eyed monsters have souls? One day, we might seriously be looking for answers to qustions like this. It's possible that geocentricity in any form may prove to be mere hubris.

I think that's enough for one post; more later.

Ola the Poet

2011-10-19T22:44:00.001+01:00

This is my daughter's latest video; she's getting more professional every time.

http://digitallydisturbed.tumblr.com/post/11617647723/video-ola-the-poet

Who's the king of the castle?

2011-10-18T23:22:00.000+01:00

We believe - formally at any rate - in a God who's omnipotent, onmiscient, and all the rest. He's the biggest the strongest, the king of the ubercastle. Yet we hear that it's possible for the human will to trump God's. God wills our salvation, yet we can resist it, and go marching off obstinately into hell. It's never made a lot of sense to me; I could easily have been a Calvinist - which at least makes logical sense - except I can't stomach a God who acts like a bigger and better version of Adolf Eichmann, sending people off to the eternal gas chambers.

Once you have the idea that God 'can't' do X, it's not a big step to say he 'can't' do Y either, and before long we have a God who can't do very much at all. Seriously, I've listened to preachers - fortunately not Methodist ones - who seemed to think that God couldn't do anything for us unless he was assisted by our faith. No salvation without our faith, no healing without our faith, and so on. It gets very Deuteronomic; if things aren't working out for you, it's your fault for not having faith.

That's a blatant example, but we meet a subtler one the whole time. All possibility of salvation ends if we die in our sins. Death is bigger than God. That's not what Paul thought, though, is it? I detest proof texts; you can prove anything by quoting half a dozen words out of context, buttressed by 'The Bible says'. Trouble is, what it says in one place, it often unsays in another. You want to promote infanticide? You'll find a nice quote in Psalm 137:9. But Paul undoubtedly does say 'The last enemy to be destroyed is death.' (1 Corinthians 15:25-26), so at least he thinks God is the stronger of the two. But if death can die, what price mercy after death? An omnipotent God surely isn't going to be beaten by the mere ending of bodily life.

I'm not going to pretend I know what happens after death; only God and the dead can answer that one. But all Christians agree that there's hope (one of the very few things they do all agree on!), and we may be mistaken in putting limits on that hope. I don't know whether everyone ends up being 'saved' or not, but if they are, that seems to me to make a lot more sense that the God who wants to save them all, but simply can't manage it.

God's will and ours

2011-10-17T20:16:00.000+01:00

In Wesley's day, the dominant Protestant theology was Calvinism. Calvin didn't invent the idea of predestination; he inherited it from Augustine. Calvinists did, however, put a new emphasis on it. There was nothing good in humanity; we were, in Cranmer's phrase, 'vile earth and miserable sinners', totally dependent on God's grace for salvation. that grace was irresistible; if God had decided you were to be saved, you would infallibly be saved; if he had decided you were to be damned, you knew where you were going. Naturally; it wasn't God's fault if you went to hell; it was because of your own wretched sins, even if God had predestined them.

It doesn't add up. I get a picture of God sitting there in eternity, tossing dice. If he gets six sixes in a row, the soul goes to heaven. If he doesn't, it's fuel for the eternal fires somewhere down below.

The Wesleys were born into a world which was beginning to change; they lived through the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, and John was still alive when the Bastille fell. At the same time, they also saw Britain's last civil war, the Jacobite 'intestine jar' in 1745. Populations were beginning to shift; new mines were opened, and communities sprang up around them. Centres of industry began to grow. The Anglican parish system was unable to adapt, and people were living beyond the reach of the church. They were still essentially Christian, and with a bit of reading between the lines, it sounds as though some of them were going in real fear of hell fire. Not for the last time, it looked as though to be poor was, in many cases, to be damned as well.

The Wesleys and their friends found a practical answer; they went and preached to communities like the Kingswood miners, near Bristol, and they flocked to hear them. The theological answer came later, encapsulated in Wesley's 'alls'. All men (sic) need to be saved: All men can be saved: All men can know they are saved: All men can be saved to the uttermost. They only go back about a century, but they do sum up his message. God offered his free grace to everyone, and it was up to us whether we accepted it or not. Grace was resistable, and if we were sinful enough to do so, off we went to the eternal fires.

That's all right if everyone is, more or less, a believer. If anyone scoffs at the message, it's clearly because they choose to reject it. However, what of the person who's born in a village in Saudi Arabia, becomes a devout Muslim, and never meets a Christian? Or the one born to militant atheists, who never knowingly meets a Christian socially, and only encounters Jehovah's Witness types on the doorstep? They've never heard the message in any meaningful sense, so how can they be said to have rejected it? In a world which is essentially non-Christian, we're in trouble again.

I remember a particularly daft fundamentalist pastor who insisted that Methodists were hypocrites. He had all sorts of excuses for this claim, but the one that struck me was that we'd bury a 'sinner', who might not have gone to church, might have spent their evenings in the pub, and, horror of horrors, might even not have been officially married to their spouse (I've got particularly strong views on the latter nonsense, but that's a subject for another post), and we wouldn't mention at any point that they were going to hell. Well, how could we say that? I think most people can see that any such stuff would be fundamentally wrong.

I wonder how many Methodist preachers ever mention hell at all in their sermons? I remember one from years ago, with a habit of striking a pose and punching his Bible with vast emphasis whenever he wanted to condemn something he tought was terribly sinful. He did this in every sermon, and managed to look extremely silly in the process. But he was an exception. Hell has effectively disappeared from British Methodism, and no loss either in my view. I read my Bible, and it seems to me that judgement is followed by mercy. God gets terribly upset at the Israelites because they won't stop bowing down to the Baals, and sends them all off into exile. Then he calms down, and raises up Cyrus to let them go home again. Perhaps there's mercy for us after all, even after we die in our sins. If not, Heaven's going to be pretty empty.

That brings me back to grace. It's hard to see how a miserable human can resist God's mercy indefinitely, but maybe we can square the circle and suggest that he has eternity to work with. Death may be the last enemy, but he goes down before the divine legions in the end. Our obstinacy is merely human, and thus limited; God's patience is infinite.

The Height of Goliath

2011-10-15T23:12:00.000+01:00

When I was a kid, I was a militant atheist. I got bullied and bored at Sundays School, found the stories I was told somewhat implausible - even at that age I knew that people don't really walk on water - and when I was six I told my mother I didn't believe in God. So that was the end of religion, for many years.

One of the stories I objected to was that of David and Goliath. Come off it, people don't really grow to six cubits and a span, or about nine feet nine inches (1 Samuel 17:4). I've occasionally heard fundamentalist preachers tying themselves in knots with dubious attempts to convince congregations that this was possible, but one of the advantages of being a Methodist is that people are far too sensible to take any notice of the nonsense they hear from preachers. I am a preacher, so I can say what I like about them!

Then there's a different story in 2 Samuel 21:19, where Goliath is killed by a man named Elhanan. There's no detail, it contradicts the well-known, romantic version of his demise, and anyway we all know that the Bible can't possibly contradict itself, or the sky will fall. So it gets ignored.

I never took much notice of the tale till I got a copy of 'The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible' (Abegg, Flint & Ulrich, 1999). It gives a translation of the Biblical material from the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Hebrew manuscripts traditionally used as the basis for our translations are medieval; the earliest complete copy of the Old Testament is 9th Century. The DSS are from around the 1st or 2nd Century BC, and get us far closer to the 'original' text. It gives Goliath's height as 'Four cubits and a span' or about six feet nine inches. This is massive, especially for a time when people were far less well-nourished than today, but not beyond reasonable bounds. Men of similar size are reported from the ancient world; according to the Historia Augusta, for instance, the Roman emperor Maximinus Thrax was well over eight feet high. It's not a reliable source, but no doubt he was extremely large. When 'Little John's grave' at Hathersage in the Peak district, was opened in 1784, they apparently found a human thigh bone 32 inches long, which would make the occupant at least seven feet tall. I say nothing about the historicity of the Goliath story.

Of course, the Hebrew wasn't the only version of the Hebrew Scriptures circulating in the ancient world. There's also the Septuagint, a Greek version produced some time after Alexander conquered the world, or at least the bit of it known to the Greeks. The earliest manuscripts, from the 2nd or 3rd Century AD, make Goliath four cubits and a span, the same as the DSS. Manuscripts from a little later make him five cubits, and medival ones, six cubits and a span. You couldn't have a better example of copyists 'improving' a text.

Why nobody really takes every word of the Bible literally

2011-10-05T22:08:00.000+01:00

Good post here from Randall Rauser. I've met a good many people over the years who honestly thought they belived every word of the Bible literally, but I doubt whether I'll ever come across anyone who really does. How do they manage to kid themselves?

Changing the church, or changing ourselves

2011-10-02T23:23:00.000+01:00

This post with its quote from his - um - holiness annoyed me this morning. I've heard the like so often, from conservatives on both Catholic and Protestant wings of the church. As John Donne said though, no man [add women here] is an island. We're designed to work in community, and the church is precisely that; a community of people trying to follow Jesus together. We work out our salvation in fear and trembling together (Philippians 2:12; I don't like quoting little out-of-context snippets, but Paul uses the plural 'you', and illustrates the point perfectly. The Philippians were advised to do exactly what I'm describing).

So it's not a matter of retreating into my closet or wherever, and trying to change me, or even trying to get God to change me. It's a question of advancing - or not - together, with the community's support, and their wisdom to keep us on the straight and narrow. Individualism is a modern invention, it destroys community, and it paralyses the church. Everything is narrowed down to me and my Jesus, me and my salvation, and there's no concept of church or community at all. It challenges nothing, changes nothing, and that, of course, is the point when we hear rubbish like this from church leaders. It prevents any challenge to them and their ideas. If you persist, you probably find - as I have - that there's something wrong with you, not them. In their own opinion anyway.

Surely Wesley had it right in emphasising both faith and works. It's in our deeds, in changing the church, and building it anew for this generation, not the last, that we're changed ouselves. Together, not separately, we become - perhaps - more what God intended us to be. You can keep the Beatific Vision; I'd rather feed the hungry, and try to make the church something people are going to want to belong to. It's not either/or, it's both/and. You won't change on your own, and we won't build the church unless we change, together. Even the pillar saints were still part of a community; the emperor himself visited St Simeon Stylites, and apparently went away most impressed.

Martyn Atkins podcast

2011-10-01T12:04:00.000+01:00

I don't usually watch podcasts much as I find it far easier to absorb the written word. This one Methodist Preacher has posted from Martyn Atkins, General Secretary of the Methodist Church, is worth watching, though, as it pretty much sums up where my church is trying to be.

The Rage of God

2011-09-30T18:03:00.000+01:00

Good post here from Richard Beck. He's quite right, Revelation is a text about martyrdom. We really need to take it seriously, rather than leaving it to the nutcases! My interest is a little different from Richard's; he ignores the angelic struggle, which echoes the angelic revolt in 1 Enoch. I get fascinated by stuff like that. But never mind; on other aspects of the book we sing from the same hymn sheet.

Trust in God and keep your powder dry

2011-09-28T22:00:00.000+01:00

I very much hope this is a spoof!

An immoral trade

2011-09-18T21:53:00.000+01:00

I don't use the word 'immoral' lightly; it brings back memories of Mary Whitehouse and 'My Ding-a-Ling', and I wonder how much meaning it still retains. I don't know what other word to use of the arms trade, though, and the emerging scandal over illegal munitions and shackling equipment on sale at the DSEi fair in London. It's not even the first time such stuff has been on offer.

There have been times - Sierra Leone (I declare an interest here; it's where my wife and kids come from), probably Libya, where the UK armed forces have done real good. There have been too many occasions when they've been nothing but a bloody disaster; the only unique aspect of Bloody Sunday was the publicity it gained. Behind it all, though, lies the murky world of arms dealing, in which Britain is an international leader. Again, I have an interest; the civil wars in Sierra Leone and so many other places would never have been possible without Europeans eager to buy smuggled diamonds or whatever, and snaffle up the cash in return for weapons.

It's easy to justify a small arms industry, producing weapons for national self-defence. A multinational juggernaut manufacturing machinery designed wholly and solely for killing human beings in all sorts of ingenious ways, and selling it to all comers with as few questions asked as possible, however, is something else. I wonder how many deaths the British arms industry has been responsible for over the last decade?

Surely there's an answer. Over a decade, say, we could retool the vast majority of those factories, and employ the skilled workers there to produce something useful. British industry has been hollowed out over a generation by turning asset stripping into a national pastime. Who knows; there may be a chance here to rebuild some of it, given sufficient ingenuity. We need a government with the guts to bite the bullet, preferably before it's fired.

Synagogue Visit

2011-09-17T21:11:00.000+01:00

I had an interesting morning with a church group at the Progressive Synagogue down the road, after having gone to the wrong synagogue by mistake. Quite a few of us managed that.

The service was mostly in Hebrew, and very hard to follow, though I did catch the odd word. That being said, it was no harder than the time I visited the Coptic Orthodox Church, where they use a somewhat Hellenised version of the language of the Pharaohs. It was very liturgical, following the book throughout, and the combination of prayers, hymns and readings was familiar. The one element which was new to me was short readings interspersed with commentary from the book, which seemed to replace the sermon. There's nothing surprising here; our church liturgies are descended from the synagogue service, and still follow the same overall pattern. Even some of our traditional prayers are recognisably Jewish, with phrases like 'walk in [God's] way, borrowed from the Hebrew, and doubtless a complete mystery to any non-churchgoing Gentile.

Someone had his bar Mitzvah, which I haven't seen before. The phrase means 'son of the commandment', and it marks the point where the boy is starting to develop into an adult, and is considered able to follow the commandments on his own initiative. Our nearest equivalent would be confirmation, but this is a lot more demanding, as the lad had to read a passage of Torah in Hebrew, which would be more than enough to boggle most Christian minds. The service ended with the congregation pelting him with sweets; I should have asked someone what the significance was, but didn't think of it. We stayed for kiddush, a blessing said over bread and wine on the Sabbath. I don't know whether there's any conection with Christian communion or not, but it's something to look into.

Being Good News to Muslim Neighbours

2011-09-16T22:01:00.000+01:00

Details of what sounds like an interesting day conference here for anyone in the Birmingham area.

Israel and Palestine

2011-09-14T23:30:00.000+01:00

Great post here from Micah's Paradigm Shift. It's good to see something well thought out and sensible on the subject!

In the Beginning...

2011-09-08T19:36:00.000+01:00

The creation accounts (plural) in Genesis have always been of interest to me; I suppose it comes of having a degree in geology. Not long after I became a Christian, a fundamentalist girlfriend pressurised me into reading a couple of creationist books. I checked out everything I read - none of it sounded remotely right - and hit the roof. The books were a mass of halftruths, larded out with plain porkies. Worse, they had to have been written by someone who knew exactly what he was doing. One thing I never could stand is the person who earns money as a religious charlatan.

Despite all the arguing about the first few chapters of Genesis, it's not often they get read for what's really there in the text. People tend to bring their preconcieved ideas - this is a regular problem when it comes to reading the Bible - and of course they find what they expect to find.

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth.

On the face of it, Genesis 1 verse 1 is simple enough. In the beginning - as a first act - God created everything there is. Genesis 1 uses the same word for God - Elohim, which can be used of any divine being, as well as being a name for God - throughout. The word used for the creative act; BARA', is used elsewhere in the passage, in 1:21, 1:27 and 2:3. So it's reasonable to suppose it was all produced at pretty much the same time, by the same group of people. Whoever put the Bookof Genesis together placed it at the beginning; whoever compiled the Hebrew canon - the official list of holy books making up the Hebrew Scriptures - placed it in pole position, right at the start. The placing of the text privileges it, forces us to read it as making an important statement about God and his creation.

However, there are debates about its exact meaning. Should it be translated 'In the beginning God created', or, as the NRSV has it, 'In the beginning when God created...'? Is it part of a continuous narrative, a title, or perhaps an independent creation story? Let's not forget that the Bible has several accounts of creation, and they're all different. Whatever the author's intention, the narrative moves on to God's interaction with things he doesn't appear to have created. The waters, the deep, the darkness; where did they come from? We're used to the idea of creation ex nihilo - out of nothing - but this is a much later idea. As far as I can make out, it's first mentioned by Tertullian, writing at the end of the 2nd Century AD. He rejects it, insisting that God created out of something, namely matter.

In the Ancient Near East, it was assumed that the god, whoever the individual worshipped, had created the world out of a pre-existing, watery, chaos. This was ruled over by a monstrous deity, whom the god defeated in a primal battle. In the Babylonian Enuma Elish, there's a long and elaborate acocunt of how the god Marduk fought against the armies of his mother Tiamat, and killed her after a titanic struggle. Having done so, he then built the world out of her corpse. There's only the faintest generic resemblence to Genesis 1, but we do find the chaos monster and the primal battle elsewhere in the Old Testament.

Psalm 74:10-17:

How long, O God, is the foe to scoff?
Is the enemy to revile your name forever?
Why do you hold back your hand; why do you keep your hand in your bosom?
Yet God my King is from of old, working salvation in the earth.
You divided the sea by your might; you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters.
You crushed the heads of Leviathan; you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness.
You cut openings for springs and torrents; you dried up ever-flowing streams.
Yours is the day, yours also the night; you established the luminaries and the sun.
You have fixed all the bounds of the earth; you made summer and winter.

The sanctary of Zion - or Jerusalem - has been destroyed; Judah's enemies are triumphant, and the psalmist reminds God - or his people - of his mighty power. He rules everything; he destroyed Leviathan; he can deal with Babylon as well. In the midst of it all, we find the primal battle clearly, though briefly, described. God crushed the heads of the dragons (TANIN: sea-monsters) in the waters; he crushed Leviathan's heads and fed him to carrion beasts. Leviathan (LWTN in the original; vowels are a medieval addition to the text) derives from the Canaanite Latan (LTN), a seven-headed water monster who features in a poem found on a clay tablet at Ugarit, in modern Syria. There, Baal slays Sea, dragons (TANIN again), and Latan. Lingustically, Hebrew is a late dialect of Canaanite, so the resemblances aren't surprising.

We find the battle again in Psalm 89, which celebrates god's covenant with the house of David, and sings of his might:

Psalm 89:9-12

You rule the raging of the sea; when its waves rise, you still them.
You crushed Rahab like a carcass; you scattered your enemies with your mighty arm.
The heavens are yours, the earth also is yours; the world and all that is in it-- you have founded them.
The north and the south-- you created them; Tabor and Hermon joyously praise your name.

The name Rahab is sometimes used of Egypt, but the primary reference is to the chaos battle. Perhaps we're justified in hearing an echo of the destruction of Pharaoh as well, since the story of his end in the waters of the Red Sea parallels it so neatly. In Isaiah 27:1, Leviathan and the primal battle appear again, this time as a metaphor for evil:

Isaiah 26:20 - 27:1 Come, my people, enter your chambers, and shut your doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until the wrath is past. For the LORD comes out from his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity; the earth will disclose the blood shed on it, and will no longer cover its slain. On that day the LORD with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea.
Over time, the Israelites' idea evolved. God gets bigger, and the monsters smaller. In Genesis 1, the monster appears in v21, as something created by God. In Psalm 104:26, Leviathan is said to have been created by God, to play in the sea. The monster makes a final appearance in Jonah, in the form of a great fish which turns out to be a more faithful servant of God than his wretched prophet.

The chaos battle, then, has disappeared in Genesis 1, which presents a God who is clearly in control of the creation. Even he, however, doesn't seem to find it easy to get the primal waters under control. On the forst day, he calls light into being, and separates it from dark; on the second, he makes a dome (RIQQUA - something beaten or stamped out, an expanded plate). He doesn't call it into being, he gets his hands dirty, and he uses it to split the waters horizontally, into waters above and below. The expanse is called 'sky'. In the story of the flood, we gain an extra detail; the expanse contains sluices or floodgates - there are various translations to be found, but this is the only one which makes sense in this context - which God opens to let the waters through. The waters above make good sense in a pre-scientific society; large quantities of water regularly fall from the sky, so there must be a great deal of it up there somewhere. God is seen to control the weather thoughout the Old Testament, in, to give one example, the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal, who was another, rival, weather god.

On the third day, once more, God is at work, commanding the waters to be gathered together in the sea. Thus the dry land appears. There's a pattern here; heavens (light and dark) - sea/air - land, which is found repeated in the rest of the six days of creation; with the creation, first, of the heavenly bodies, then of fish and birds, and finally of land animals and human beings.

I think that's enough for one post, but this stuff fascinates me, as you've probably gathered. I'll continue in a couple of days.

Dealing with the sinner

2011-09-05T13:37:00.000+01:00

We were discussing part of yesterday's lectionary reading, Matthew 18:15-17, in the prayer meeting this morning. It's the section about how to deal with another church member who's sinned against you:

If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

I think this is something the church as a whole fails to get right. At one time, a significant number of our ladies had been drummed out of other churches, for getting pregnant and/or being in relationships with men they weren't officially married to. All of them were in committed relationships, some of which had lasted for many years. There has to be something wrong here; our view is that the church should celebrate such relationships, regardless of whether or not the couple have paid for a ceremony and a legal ticket. The problem doesn't lie with such couples, but with a culture which has developed a historically narrow understanding of marriage.

Coming back to Matthew, this is an area where the Methodist Church has a real problem. Some of us were discussing our experiences round the country, and between us we covered quite a number of Districts. In every one, we'd all found the identical problem. Cliques and little tinpot dictators. Nobody wants to start expelling church members, but we go to the opposite extreme of allowing small numbers of people to alienate potential church members, or drive existing members away, in large numbers, for the sake of childish ego games. Anything rather than challenge these people, and sort the problems out. My view is that we should sometimes be willing to vote people out of office, but even this seems to be too difficult. Once someone's elected, an office all too often becomes a lifetime appointment, and if the church has appointed the wrong person, it's in trouble.

I don't pretend to have instant solutions, but a denomination which is in long-term decline can't afford not to tackle its awkward squad.

Luke's Infancy Gospel

2011-09-05T01:44:00.000+01:00

Luke's narrative is considerably longer than Matthew's. He begins with a brief introduction, dedicating the book to 'Theophilus', whoever he was. I don't see much point speculating. He makes it clear that he's not an eyewitness (despite subsequent claims, no gospel author says anything which would clearly indicate that he was present at any of the events described), and that he's using sources. He's not too impressed with them, and writes an 'accurate account'. One of his sources has to be Mark, since a lot of material is transcribed verbatim, and, like Matthew, he re-orders the material, in his own way. I rather think that he also has a copy of Matthew, but if so, he rejects Matthew's infancy gospel, and writes his own.

He begins with Gabriel's appearance to Zechariah, promising the miraculous birth of a son, John the Baptist. Gabriel then goes off and appears to Mary to announce the coming birth of Jesus; she's most upset since she's too young. Unlike Matthew, there's no explicit virgin birth. So here we have two angelic visions, two miraculous births, and Gabriel appears, not to Joseph, but to Mary. The unborn John is made to bear witness to the unborn Jesus, as a way of emphasising that Jesus is superior. All four Gospels take up this theme in their different ways; Jesus seems to have joined John's movement at some time - this is implied by his baptism - and that would imply that John was superior.

The magnificat - Mary's psalm in 1:46-55 - brings in one of Luke's favourite themes; wealth and poverty. The humble shall be raised up, the hungry filled with good things; the proud are scattered, the mighty torn from their thrones and the rich sent empty away. It's traditional OT language, expressing a thoroughly Jewish vision of salvation. Luke's concern for the poor is established as being in line with traditional Jewish expectations. There's an eschatological meaning here; Jesus comes to bring the new age of the Kingdom - not immediately, but within the lifetime of at least some of his hearers (9:27) - and the 'mighty' who are to be torn down aren't specific rulers, but all rulers who stand in opposition to the rule of God. The just society is coming, and the church should embody it in microcosm (Acts 4:34-7), but it's the work of God, despite the church's role in subverting the present order. The remainder of the chapter is concerned with John's birth, and Zechariah's prophecy, which promises that a Davidic saviour (literally a 'horn of salvation') is coming, and that John will be a prophet. We've spiritualised the concept of 'saviour' until we've lost touch with the meaning it held at the time, but it was a royal title, often taken by the founder of a dynasty. One of Alexander's generals, for instance, a man named Ptolemy, seized power in Egypt after Alexander's death, and called himself Ptolemy Soter; Ptolemy the Saviour. The implication was that he had 'saved' the Egyptians from the dreadful rule of the previous dynasty. A horn was a Jewish symbol of military power; we're still in a world where the mighty are liable to be torn from their thrones, and it's clearly the power of God which is behind it. At the same time, obviously, we have a second figure, Jesus, who somehow embodies or possesses that power. We're still in a thoroughly Jewish world, but that is about to change.

Chapter 2 puts us straight into the Roman world. It begins with a reference to a census, allegedly ordered by Augustus, across the entire oikumenon, the inhabited world, or in other words, the Roman empire. We're not yet in the era of the world-empire on which the sun literally never rose, but the attitude is the same. There is, of course, no evidence that Augustus ever ordered any such thing, and it's hard to see why he would wish to go to the trouble and expense of doing so. It's possible that this might be a reference to a general policy of carrying out periodic censuses. A census was a local thing, ordered to determine what sums could be expected in taxation from a specific province. In this case, Judea and Samaria had been ruled for ten years or so by Archelaus, the eldest surviving son of Herod I, the 'King Herod' of Matthew 2. Archelaus was not a success as a ruler, and after a series of complaints from the Jews, Augustus sent him into exile, and imposed direct rule over his domain, while his younger brothers were left in place over the parts of their fathers' kingdom they had inherited.

Quirinius, the Syrian Legate, was the most important Roman official of the day, after the Emperor, with responsibility for the defence of the entire eastern frontier as far as the border of Egypt. The area had been conquered by Pompeius Magnus - the 'Pompey' under whose statue Caesar fell - in the previous century, and the administration had always been extremely lightweight. Wherever possible, it was ruled via native princes like the Herods. Judea was set up as a sort of sub-province, governed by an equestrian - a member of the lower aristocracy - with a small policing force of auxiliaries. His function was to keep order, with the aid of the native elite, which had to be kept in line, and to collect taxes. In the event of serious trouble, the Syrian Legate, a senior Senator, usually an ex-Consul, with major military and political experience, would have to intervene with his legions. This arrangement wasn't unique; the Decapolis was run on a similar basis.

One of the first tasks was to carry out a census, in order to establish the taxation base, which took place in late 6 or early 7 AD. Taxes would be farmed out; rich men would pay the money up front, and then had to collect the money, plus their take. Judging by the number of complaints, the latter was often excessive. Normal practice, understandably, was to assess households in their place of residence. Forcing everyone to return to their place of birth would be disruptive, administratively complex - I wonder how well modern states would cope with it? - and pointless. To make Luke's story yet more implausible, Joseph and his family are apparently living in Nazareth, in Galilee. This was under the jurisdiction of Herod Antipas, Tetrarch (a title given to a minor native prince) of Galilee and Perea, an area on the East Bank of the Jordan. Antipas, of course, raised the taxes there, and then made his own payment to the Romans. So Luke would have us believe that Joseph travelled from one jurisdiction into another, to register for a tax he wasn't liable for. It's not impossible that Herod held a census for his own purposes, and Luke rejigged the story, but if so, we have no record of it. If Joseph was only temporarily absent from Bethlehem, and had a regular home there, it's strange that he should end up sleeping in an inn stable. The answer, of course, is that Luke's writing, not history, but theology.

The point is, of course, that Jesus was known to have been from Nazareth. His followers, however, were convinced, brobably on the basis of Micah 5:2, that the Messiah had to come from Bethlehem, like David. Matthew and Luke deal with the difficulty in quite different ways. Matthew starts the story in Bethlehem; Joseph and Mary appear to be living there. They become refugees in Egypt, and eventually, after the death of Herod, move to Galilee. His son Archelaus is ruling Judea - there's no mention of Antipas, ruler of Galilee - and Bethlehem isn't safe for the family. Luke starts with the family in Nazareth, and concocts the census story to account for a visit to Bethlehem, and at the same time to emphasise that Jesus is born under Roman rule.

Here, of course, we find a major contradiction between the two versions. Matthew, writing for Jews, has Jesus born in a thoroughly Jewish context under Herod I, who died in 4BC. Luke's Jesus is born ten years or so later. He, of course, writes for Gentiles, and wants to convince his audience that Christianity is perfectly compatible with the Roman order. So he places the birth in a Roman context; his Jesus is born in the civilised world, not under some exotic eastern ally of Rome.

Fundamentalists will sometimes claim that 'there is evidence', or some such expression, that Quirinius had been Syrian Legate before, and that the two accounts are therefore not incompatible. The 'evidence', however, consists of a mistranslation of a partial inscription which doesn't contain the name of the governor it refers to. All we know about Quirinius' previous career is that he had held office in the east; the rest of it is ideological wishful thinking.

Luke's date is almost certainly too late. Pilate was Prefect of Judea from 26 to 36 AD. That would make Jesus about thirty when he was dismissed, and in his mid to late twenties at the accepted time of his death. It's rather too young to make him a plausible leader for a religious movement. Matthew's date is more likely, but it's perfectly possible that neither author knew the correct date. It was an agricultural society, with a low literacy rate, and in such cultures, people often don't know own their birth dates.

Luke's Jesus is born in a stable, and his first visitors are shepherds, not Gentiles as in Matthew. Luke's interests are different; he writes for Gentiles, who need no reminder that they need to be included in the church. He's always concerned about the poor, and so his Jesus comes into the world in conditions of poverty, attended only by ordinary people. Gabriel appears, not to Mary of Joseph, but to the shepherds, announcing a saviour, who is Messiah and Lord, of the house of David. Despite the humble circumstances, these are more resonant titles than Matthew uses; he only calls Jesus 'Messiah' in his infancy gospel. A saviour is one who rescues the people from tyranny; a Messiah is an eschatological ruler sent from God, and 'Lord' can mean anything form 'Sir' to the Most High God himself in person. Jesus isn't being identified with God, but he is being set up as his plenipotentiary.

There's an echo of the claims made for Augustus; an inscription from Priene reads: 'Providence … has brought into the world Augustus and filled him with a hero’s soul for the benefit of mankind. A Savior for us and our descendents, he will make wars to cease and order all things well. The epiphany of Caesar has brought to fulfillment past hopes and dreams.' This sort of language isn't unique to Augustus. It's not necessarily a direct reference, but Jesus is being placed on a level with the emperor. The difference is that Jesus is sent from God himself, while Augustus or his flatterers is content with his being the epiphany of his adoptive father, the divine Julius.

Jesus is circumcised, taken to the Temple, and a sacrifice made, as Torah demanded. The turtledoves or pigeons of v24 are from Leviticus 12:8, which specifies them as a poor woman's offering for purification after childbirth. She's considered to be unclean for a period - seven days for a male child, fourteen for a girl - then there's a period of blood purification; thirty-three days for a boy or sixty-six for a girl. At that point, she makes the offering, and is considered clean. After the seven or fourteen days, she's technically clean, but has to stay at home for the further period, and avoid contact with anything holy. It's a long way from anything in modern European culture, but there is a hangover from it still with us; some of the more deeply misogynistic Anglo-Catholics I've come across have worried about the mere possibility of a menstruating woman entering the sanctuary of a church, let alone administering Communion. Luke's point, however, is that Jesus is a Jew, brought up as a Jew, and that his family are devout observers of Torah.

The Angel of the Lord appears to the shepherds, the glory of the Lord shines around, and they react with the fear which Luke considers appropriate to divine manifestations. There are a number of places in the OT where the distinction between God and angel becomes blurred; in Genesis 16:7, the Angel of the Lord appears to Hagar; in v13, she addresses him as God himself; in Exodus 3:2-6, the apparition in the burning bush is both the Angel of the Lord and God. And so on. This is an acceptable way to describe a theophany; the message is to be understood as coming from God. The angel announces the coming of a saviour, who is Messiah and the Lord, and the heavenly host appears around him. Quite a vision, but described in such a way as to be compatible with the idea that it was impossible to see God and survive the experience. This puts Luke around the midpoint on a sliding scale; at one end we have John, who insists that nobody has ever seen God at any time; at the other we have a full-frontal vision of God in Revelation 4 - and, of course, several more in the OT. Luke manages to maintain a degree of ambiguity in the shepherds' vision. What really matters is the overwhelming majesty of the vision, not so much the precise - and necessarily inadequate - theological language used to describe it.

The shepherds rush off to see Jesus - rather than Gentiles being the first, as in Matthew's account, it is now the poor who have priority - and the baby is taken to the Temple for the appointed sacrifice. While there, Simeon and Anna offer messianic prophecies over him. Simeone is an old man who's been promised a sight of the Messiah before he dies, by no less than the Holy Spirit. The Jews thought in terms of 'extensions' of God; God himself was 'out there', and inaccessible, but his Spirit, his Word, his Wisdom, his mighty arm, his angels, all served to mediate his presence within creation. The New Testament adds his Son to the catalogue, but remains essentially within Jewish tradition. Simeon prophesies that Jesus will be a 'sign' for the falling and rising of many in Israel - no mention of the Gentiles, in keeping with Luke's idea of 'the Jews first, then the Gentiles'. He goes on to say that Jesus will be opposed, and that a sword will pierce Mary's heart, an early indication of trouble to come.

Anna is a devout old woman who never leaves the Temple. She tells everyone who is looking for 'the redemption of Jerusalem' about the baby. The phrase parallels the inscriptions on First Revolt coinage; the first rebel government was run by priests, and one of their early acts was to issue shekels - providing the pure silver required for the Temple tax - which bore no image, unlike the shekels of Tyre used earlier, and bore the Hebrew inscription 'Shekel of Israel' on the obverse, with the date 'Year 1', and on the reverse, the inscription 'Jerusalem the Holy'. The following year, a less aristocratic regime brought in small copper coins, with the inscription 'The Freedom of Zion'. By the fourth year of the revolt, the government was run by radicals who freed slaves, redistributed property, and appear to have been attempting to enact the Law of Jubilee in Leviticus 25. (Obscure stuff here, so I'd better give some references. Josephus, War, 4:508; Neil Faulkner, Apocalypse: The Great Jewish Revolt against Rome AD 66-73, Tempus, 2002, p288; Ya'akov Meshorer, A Treasury of Jewish Coins, Amphora, 2001, p115ff).

Luke's intention is to show that Jesus' movement is compatible with Roman rule, while the 'freedom' or 'redemption' of Zion on the coinage is principally freedom from Roman rule. However, nobody picks up a term from the surrounding culture, and instantly uses it in a radically new sense. Meanings and interpretatioins evolve with time, and in some cases - Paul's ideas about the salvation of the Gentiles, for instance - we can watch ideas developing within the NT. When Jesus or his diciples first used messianic language, they must have been thinking about political liberation; these ideas changed later, as the movement developed within a Roman context, and realised that, contrary to what Paul and his people believed, Jesus wasn't going to return to sweep the existing world order away in the next five minutes. The crucifixion has to have begun a process of reassessment; by the time we get to Paul, we've moved beyond the vision of the messiah as an earthly king to something more akin to the angelic Son of Man of Daniel 7; Jesus is raised up, set over all, appointed to be Son of God with power at his resurrection. By the time we get to Luke, writing a generation after Paul, we find a concern to live alongside political structures which is just barely there in Paul, who doesn't really think such things matter. In his view, Jesus is due to return any moment, so it's not even worth marrying, let alone worrying too much about the Romans!

After this, the family return to Nazareth, until Jesus is twelve. At that age, a Jew would have been growing up, but not yet an adult. He goes to Jerusalem whith his family, to celebrate Passover, and stays behind, vastly impressing everyone who heard him. Various figures of the ancient world - Samuel, Cyrus, Epicurus, and so on - were said to have made a great impression at this age, so Jesus falls into a known pattern here. When his parents come looking for him, Jesus tells them that they should have expected to find him in his father's house. The relationship with God is to the fore here, and while we may well be expected to see the divine Wisdom at work in Jesus here, it isn't made explicit at this point. He then goes home with his parents, and obeys them like a good lad, increasing in wisdom, and in divine and human favour, while he gets older. So if he had enough wisdom to impress people at twelve, we should expect something tremendous as he grows up!

Luke's infancy gospel ends at this point, and chapter 3, where the main text begins, looks very much like another beginning to the Gospel. This has taken me far too long to write, and I don't intend to attempt to cover two chapters in a single post again!

Church barbeque

2011-08-28T19:52:00.000+01:00

I had to take a service, rush back to the barbeque, see a sick friend, and then dash down to the allotment. In the process I forgot the camera, so no pics. Never mind. We'd never had a barbeque before, but we decided to have one over tea after a service a few weeks ago. One of our members brought her barbeque, and the Super, who took the service, brought his. Everyone mucked in - that's the important thing at these events - and it was a great success.

I've found before that if you start with the little things - helping at something like this, leading choruses, whatever - then it isn't long before some of them start developing roles in the church. That's the dangerous phase; sometimes people begin to feel threatened, and try to squash whatever's going on. Deal with that, support people in what they're doing, and maybe the church can flourish in other areas as well. Church is a community, and it's only as it learns to function as a healthy community, with everyone finding their role, that it can grow.

C K Barrett

2011-08-27T22:34:00.000+01:00

I've just heard about the passing of C K Barrett, former Professor of Divinity at Durham. I only met him once, but he was a notable preacher as well as a great scholar. Twenty years ago, when I realised I needed to grapple with academic works on the Bible, his commentary on John was the first I bought. I'm still using it, and his work on 1 Corinthians. He'll be sadly missed.

Reworking Jesus

2011-08-18T11:09:00.000+01:00

Jesus Creed has a review of what sounds like an interesting book here: Jesus in our Own Image. It's a sickening story I came across long since, and it's not unique; there have been many other perversions of the Gospel over the centuries. The really worrying thing is that it's only an extreme version of what we all do. We all filter out the stuff we don't like, read stuff into the text which isn't there, and so on. 'German Christianity' and apartheid theology were rejected as heresies, but the dangerous stuff is the nonsense going round right now. Can anyone, for instance, see the connection between the stuff quoted here and Christianity? James Robinson, Wayne Grudem

Coming back to home, what about our own sermons? Was Jesus really as tame, as easy to fit into British culture, as we make him out to be? Where are we sliding off into error?

Matthew's Infancy Narrative

2011-08-15T23:40:00.000+01:00

There's an interesting post about Matthew 2:13-15 here in the Naked Bible: http://michaelsheiser.com/TheNakedBible/2011/08/were-new-testament-writers-hermeneutical-hacks/ . I like a lot of what he says, but I differ on one point; I don't think Matthew got the story from Mary. I think he made it up.

There's a progression in the New Testament writers. Paul thinks that Jesus is 'declared to be son of God with power' at his resurrection (Romans 1:4); he's exalted and given the 'name above all names', ie God's name (Philippians 2:9), and he really isn't interested in the unexalted, unresurrected Jesus who the disciples knew. Mark is, however. He thinks Jesus was adopted as God's son at his baptism (Mark 1:11), and he's not interested in his life before this event. Matthew, however, thought he was God's son from birth. He probably didn't know anything about his early years - he and Luke tell incompatible stories, and manage to come up with dates ten years or so apart for the Nativity - and the story he does tell is essentially theological. It wasn't, of course, a particularly literate society, and peasants have often been vague about exactly when they were born.

Jesus is born miraculously, like Isaac or Samuel, except that this time the birth happens to a young woman, not an old one. Doubtless Mary was known to have been young at the time; we don't know when she died, but her son James ran the Jerusalem church for a generation. The rough outline, at least, would have been known. Jesus' Messiahship is testified to by the star, based on Balaam's star prophecy in Numbers 24.

Matthew is writing for devout Jews, who don't like the Pharisees - his Jesus slags them off a lot more than anyone else's - but seem to have followed their interpretations of the Law. He's keen to emphasise that Gentiles have their place in the Kingdom, and so the first people to honour the infant Messiah are, of course, some rather learned Gentiles. The Jews reject Jesus, and Matthew blames them for his death (27:23; this isn't antisemitic, since it's written by a Jew. It has, of course, been used in an antisemitic way subsequently). So Jesus is on the recieving end of an assassination attempt by a sort-of-Jewish king.

Matthew wants to portray Jesus, among other things, as the prophet like Moses promised in Deuteronomy 18:15-19. This becomes most obvious when he has Jesus stand on a mountain to deliver his interpretation of the Law. Here, he takes the opportunity to place him in Egypt - doubtless he has in mind that Moses was himself a refugee, though it was in Midian not Egypt - and then has God call him back to his own people. No doubt the thought that God's son Israel also came out of Egypt wasn't far from the back of his mind; why confine yourself to one implied reference when you can manage two at once?

What we have here is a narrative which foreshadows the story Matthew is about to tell, and which at the same time lets us know who he believes Jesus to have been.

Gehenna and the State

2011-08-15T13:08:00.000+01:00

Good post here from Andrew Perriman: http://www.postost.net/2011/08/was-gehenna-burning-rubbish-dump-does-it-matter .

And one here from Micheal Bird about Romans 13: http://www.patheos.com/community/euangelion/2011/08/08/church-and-state-reflections-on-rom-131-7/ .

Peace rally

2011-08-14T19:08:00.000+01:00

I've just been at the rally in Summerfield Park - sorry, there are no pics because I dashed there from organising a vegetable show, and by that time I was so shattered I forgot I had the camera. It was good to see people getting together from all the main faiths; that's something we need more of. Maybe we can build on it somehow. Naturally no awkward questions were asked; it wasn't the time for it so soon after three deaths, though I wasn't too comfortable with the Chief Constable making a complacent speech about how wonderful his officers are, when I know too many people locally whose kids get hassled regularly by those same officers. I think we all realise that the police played a role in triggering the trouble off, just as they did back in the 1980's.

We've got a systemic problem in society, and it's not going to be solved by speeches from 'leaders'; it needs work at grassroots level, to start building a better society. If we want Britain to be a place where every kid has a future, and a stake in their community, and everyone can expect to be treated with respect, then we need to do something about it. If people see us making things better in a sustainable way, without depending on leadership from ministers and similar people, who move on after a few years, or on funding which soon runs out, then sooner or later the politicians and the country will have to follow.

PS I've known Dudley Road for many years; I think this article is pretty fair.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/13/uk-riots-death-dudley-road

Original sin?

2011-08-11T15:09:00.000+01:00

We all know the story. Adam and Eve got kicked out of the garden for being disobedient; maybe they'd eat the fruit of the other tree and become immortal, like gods. So either they got punished, or Daddy booted them out for their own good and told them to grow up - maybe a bit of both - and off they went. In the next generation, Cain was sent off after killing his brother, afraid of being killed by the people out there. What people? Then, it appears, he went on to marry a foreigner. What foreigner?

At the very least, we need to see that these stories aren't particularly consistent, and that we therefore shouldn't make a shibboleth out of them. They say that evil is there from the beginning, and attribute it to a breach of God's commandment. We soon find that sin isn't just individual. Adam and Eve sin together, as a couple - as the most basic community - but that's easily overlooked. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is probably the most obvious example of what I mean.

We're told how wicked the people of Sodom are, and God promises to spare them if he can only find ten righteous men there. They attack Lot and his family - it's not about homosexuality, but about the abuse of a guest - and God zaps the lot of them. It's not individual sin, it's systemic sin; they're all guilty. Somehow, though, the church has failed to see how a whole society can be guilty; it's individualised sin; for centuries, original sin was about Adam's guilt being passed from generation to generation in sperm, like eye colour.

Systemic sin is still with us, unfortunately, and one of its results is the riots of the last week. It's a recurring problem, which was with us before the present generation of rioters was born. The police are still making the same mistakes they made in the 1980's; the same deprivation is still with us, the rich are still getting richer, the poor, poorer, and another generation go out on the streets to express their frustration in the same old way. I'm not certain that it's best regarded as a consequence of original sin, but it's the best I can come up with at the moment.

Unfortunately, with our individualised, forensic approach to sin and salvation - about an endless string of individuals being found not guilty at the divine court - we don't currently have the tools to address evils of this sort properly. Perhaps the people who wrote the Bible did, in their own way. I think we've thrown out a great many babies over the centuries, along with the theological bathwater of a multitude of church reforms.

The Flesh

2011-08-10T13:20:00.000+01:00

Richard Beck has a good post on sarx and soma here: http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2011/08/slavery-of-death-part-4-on-sarx-and.html

Can we do better?

2011-08-10T12:21:00.000+01:00

I've been thinking back to the church's response to the riots in the 1980's. A lot happened that was good, but it was superficial. Most of it was minister-led, and the nature of the Methodist system ensures that this can never be the answer. Ministers move on, and nothing they run can ever last too long. That, I think, was the nature of the system back then. We were still living in the days when the slightest breath of criticism of a minister was always met by appalling patronising speeches about how wonderful everything in a dog-collar was, from officials who were, of course, 'nominated' to office by ministers, and probably lived up their backsides. Hopefully, the church has moved on a little.

Most of these ministers were perfectly well-meaning, though there were a few empire-builders involved. None, as far as I know, ever asked serious questions about systemic problems; mostly, they set up 'projects' designed to alleviate the situations they found in the inner city. Theological thinking, such as it was, was superficial, and soon sank without trace. Funding for projects ran out, ministers moved on, and everything came to a halt.

We can certainly build sustainable projects. We have a charity shop at my church which predates the riots. It's survived because we run it ourselves without outside money, paid workers, or significant minsterial involvement. So that's one thing we can do. Set things up which we can run ourselves, long-term. That, however, is still just sticking-plaster on the wound. It doesn't solve the problem.

We need some serious theological thinking. The church is a theological community, whose way of being is intimately involved with its theories about God, the universe, and itself. A hierarchical church will tend to develop a theology which makes hierarchy essential; look at the Roman Catholics. A church which is cosy with the political powers - as much of it has been for most of its history - fails to challenge them as it ought. We've developed a cosy doctrine of salvation which is about repentance from personal sin, and about 'souls', whatever they are, going to heaven after we die. That's obviously simplistic, but I think it sums up the position.

We've tended to emphasise the individual sins of the poor (why do we find it so much easier to condemn a rioter than a greedy banker?) at the expense of those of the rich, and particularly at the expense of the great social sins - poverty, injustice, and so on - which the Bible has rather a lot to say about. We've taken this to the point where it's possible for preachers to invent the 'prosperity gospel', castigate the poor, make the agenda of the greedy rich into the agenda for their churches, and still get away with calling themselves Christian. At best, we've patched up peoples' wounds, and helped alleviate the worst evils of an unjust system without calling its existence into question. We've accepted the increasing inequality in Britain with nothing more than an inaudible squeak.

The root of the problem is often that we fail to question tradition. We make a big noise about the Bible, but at the same time we accept a situation where it's normal to take a snippet here and a snippet there, rearrange them to suit ourselves, and use them uncritically to prop up doctrines and ideas which simply aren't there in the text. The 'prosperity gospel' is an obvious example, but I'm concerned about the stuff we accept without question. It's easy to find passages which condemn, for instance, adultery - plus the odd one which suggests that perhaps we shouldn't condemn it too hard - but how is it that significant sections of the church manage not to notice the stuff about poverty? Sexual behaviour, abortion, birth control, all become central to some sections of the church, while war or discrimination are treated as lesser evils, or even lauded as virtues. Something's rotten in the house of Denmark, and I think it's our understanding of salvation.

According to what records we have, Jesus didn't come telling us to go to heaven. He proclaimed a much worldlier salvation, to do with the coming Rule of God, and this rule was to be established in this world, not the next. The dead may rise to be judged, but there's no radical discontinuity involved. Rather, it's a question of one age - the age of the sinful, man-made world order which creates so much suffering - passing into the next, the age of the Rule of God. Somehow, we manage to ignore the apocalyptic dimension of the New Testament. The fact that the authors concerned were wrong in believing that Jesus' return was imminent doesn't mean they were wrong in everything except the bits we happen to find convenient!

Then again, salvation in the Bible is never individual. In the Old Testament, it's about the salvation of Israel, or at the very least, of the righteous remnant who remain faithful to its vision. Or maybe they're actually developing a new vision, leading it out of paganism towards the worship of one God, but whatever, they're faithful. In the New Testament, it's about the church, the new community which, again, is groping its way towards something, trying to live as though the Rule of God was already established. Perhaps we could describe it as an outpost of the Kingdom (more familiar, but it doesn't get the sense so well), attempting to be obedient to the risen and exalted Christ, rather than to the powers and principalities of this world.

And what of those powers and principalities? The people who wrote the Bible thought in terms of angelic powers lurking behind political structures; once, each people had its own god, now they each had their own angel. The absolute monotheism we're used to didn't exist at the time, boundaries were a lot fuzzier, and angels tend to look rather like lesser gods by any other name. Satan doesn't sit on a red-hot throne nursing his burnt bum and dreaming of cosmic revolution, or murmering sweet nothings into the ears of those he tempts; he appoints the one who rules over all the kingdoms of the earth, and anyone in the ancient Mediterranean world could have told you who did that. The job has to be in his gift, or how can he offer it to Jesus?

So often, Biblical powers and principalities seem to have political and economic dimensions. That's what we need to grapple with; we need to reclaim these areas of the New Testament from the lunatic fringe, grapple with them seriously, and develop something which isn't spiritualied out of sight, and can address the real problems of the real world. I think Marxism could be described as a secular apocalyptic, and it certainly recognised its equivalent of demonic powers. So what would a 21st Century apocalyptic look like? Somehow, we need to rework our whole understanding of the faith, and turn it into something which puts engagement with the world around us at its core, rather than running away, or becomeing the polite end of an unjust system.

Looting aftermath

2011-08-09T22:51:00.000+01:00

This was the view from the flat at 1.30 last night; the family were panicking, wouldn't let me put a light on, and didn't want me to call the fire brigade in case we got targeted. It took ages to get through to them, but they came very fast. It was a car which had been dumped and set on fire.

I went into town this afternoon to do some shopping; a lot of places were closed, only the vegetable end of the markets was open, and shops were closing early. Shop workers I spoke to were really scared. Bad as it was, damage was being fixed at a rate of knots, and it was nothing like the looting I saw in Soho Road in 1993. That time, there was a power cut across Handsworth, and people descended from all over the West Midlands to fill up their cars. Every shop window in the entire road was smashed, every shop emptied - even the shoe shop and the butcher's - and a police car toipped onto its roof and completely wrecked. That, in turn, was nothing like the 1985 riots.

I don't know what happened here; nobody was killed that I'm aware of.

The glaziers must be making a fortune.

Riots

2011-08-08T20:40:00.000+01:00

I spoke to my daughter in Hackney earlier; she's OK, but they're rioting round her way and she couldn't get to her placement. She's horrified by what she's seeing; as she said, the damage will only make things worse. After rioting here in 1985, and looting in 1993, I'm a bit more used to it, but destroying your own community isn't going to solve anything.

It seems to be the old problems all over again; police behaviour towards black people, plus deprivation. There was hope in the air in the late 1980's, with both the government and the church taking an interest in the inner cities. That evaporated, and history is repeating itself. This time, we need to avoid dependence on outside funding - that runs out and whatever you're doing evaporates - and build sustainable projects which can last, and give people real help. Our church shop is one; we run it outrselves and it's been going for about thirty years, and the food bank we're planning may be another. Trouble is, these only put sticking plaster on the wound.

We need to build a society where people are treated properly, have real opportunities, and when things go wrong, redress is available to all, not just to those who can afford legal fees. That's going to take a better response from the church than the superficialities of last time.

Correction: the looting in Handsworth occurred on 2 September 1991, after a fire led to a power cut across the entire area. I'll never forget walking down Soho Road through the middle of it. I never felt threatened, despite the fact that every shop in the entire road was being looted all around me. Another thing I'll never forget is the patronising attitude of one or two ministers who thought it was all right for them to check out what was going on, but not for me to do the same thing!

Worship

2011-07-31T22:16:00.000+01:00

We had a discussion after church today, following on from a conversation some of us had with the Super last week. Basically, we've agreed to do our own preaching plan, which can then be incorporated in the official one. The first step is going to be to get dates from Novette, the minister, as she obviously has to fit in her other churches as well. Then we plan whatever dates we want for our own preachers and worship leaders. We may be only a small church, but we have a tradition of getting people involved in leading worship, so we've no lack of talent available. One Sunday a month will be left for Paul to plan a preacher from the rest of the Circuit, so we're still functioning within it rather than trying to secede or become a law unto ourselves.

That should give us ample scope to develop our own worship style further. I'm preaching at Ladywood in a couple of weeks, and I may well let one of the Worship Leaders organise the service, and just preach the sermon. It's a common enough pattern in other denominations, and many of our people will be familiar with it from having previously been in one or other branch of the Church of God.

We've also agreed to have a barbeque in four weeks' time, on the 28th. That gives us ample time to plan, and we'll just have to hope the weather lasts. Only we don't want it to last without a break here and there, because the stream at the bottom of the allotment has dried up, and we'll be having major problems if it doesn't rain before then!

16 years

2011-07-24T17:23:00.000+01:00

This is us out for a 16th anniversary meal yesterday. People forecasted disaster, tried to sabotage the wedding, claimed Namissa was only marrying me to get her stay here. Our minister at the time wrote and asked me not to go ahead since she's Muslim. Despite it all, we've failed to murder each other, divorce, or do anything else to cause an irreparable breach, and as you see, we're still together. We've never had a single row about religion either. It's the same God, and beside that, what else matters?

A couple of good things

2011-07-20T15:48:00.000+01:00

I'm not sure the first is really so 'good'; there's a local initiative to start a foodbank, and we had a request to use our premises. The fact that we need such a thing is a thoroughly Bad Thing, in fact a Disgraceful Thing, but given that the need is there, it's good that the church should respond. I don't know enough about it yet to answer the questions people in the church are asking (another good thing; they're speaking up and asking rather than sitting there like sacks of potatoes while others do the talking!), but I'm arranging for someone to visit the church to discuss it.

As a result, I found out on Monday about a meeting for local churches last night to find out what sort of community outreach we're all doing. I've heard about a lot of exciting things which I didn't know about, and there was at least one person there who didn't know about our community shop. We're going to keep in touch, and if nothing else, it should throw up some extra sources of the secondhand clothes we're always in need of.

Mariatu

2011-07-14T00:17:00.000+01:00

I thought I'd post this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRU86Jxz8qs . I met Mariatu some years ago, when she was fifteen. She was on the way to Canada, where a family was adopting her, and had stopped in the UK to be fitted with the latest artificial hands. The woman looking after her was an old school friend of my wife's, hence the connection. The hands were purely cosmetic; I remember her struggling to eat a biscuit with them at church. As soon as she got home, she dumped them behind the door with the shoes (no shoes in our house!), put on an elastic wristband, and managed to eat with a fork stuck in it.

The Sierra Leone ivil war was was nothing more than a glorified bandit gang taking over most of a country whose goverment had collapsed under the weight of its own corruption. They never seriously wanted to rule, just to use the country as an extended diamond mine. Killings, rapes and mutilation were a way to drive away the civilian population and leave the diamond fields to themseves and their slaves.

Banned?

2011-06-30T23:16:00.000+01:00

Ostensibly, the Dutch government has just banned kosher and halal slaughter: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2011/06/201162945027320392.html . However, the law is that animals must be stunned before slaughter. Most halal meat in the UK is stunned - see this report, for instance: http://www.themeatsite.com/meatnews/13683/stunning-use-under-halal-kosher-practices-revealed - and most Islamic scholars would agree that the practice is perfectly legitimate for Muslims; see, for instance, this page: http://ehalal.org/Stunning.html . I assume practices in Holland are similar to those in the UK, or if not, they could soon be brought in line.

Kosher slaughter seems to be another story, judging by the Meat Site report. I can't find anything decent online about it, but there may be a problem there. If this is motivated by Islamophobia - I don't know, but the current political climate suggests that it may be - then they seem to have scored an own goal.

Sunday School

2011-06-26T23:55:00.000+01:00

We're making progress getting this organised. We had a discussion after church - it's much better to make decisions in a wider group, rather than having a bunch of stewards deciding everything in a back room - and came up with a lot of ideas. The two ladies running it are keen to organise an open day, and do some leafleting in the area. So we talked about the age group (5-12? Younger wouldn't be too practical unless the parents were in the building), activities, and so forth. I'm trying to get some training organised, on a circuit basis.

The great thing is that it gets a couple of the younger people involved in organising something. We couldn't go on indefinitely with the same group of people trying to run things, but moving on from that has been a major struggle, and we're not out of the woods yet. With one vital person retiring to Jamaica, and two more stuck in London, it's sometimes felt hopeless. It's God's church though, and his resources are more than ours!

Unspeakable Acts

2011-06-22T17:26:00.000+01:00

I had an email this morning inviting me to a concert at my old school, in honour of one its most famous Old Boys, Ivor Novello. Naturally it doesn't mention the fact that he was expelled in 1906, aged 15, for committing unspeakable acts on half the First XV. There's no evidence that any of them were expelled with him, despite their being older, probably bigger, and therefore presumably consenting. It seems that hypocrisy around gay sex is nothing new.

Stoning dogs

2011-06-21T17:41:00.000+01:00

The Heresiarch has a post about a right shaggy dog story here: http://heresycorner.blogspot.com/2011/06/has-bbc-gone-to-dogs.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HeresyCorner+%28Heresy+Corner%29 . I don't know how to make the link come out as 'Heresy Corner' or something in blue type. We're used to this sort of nonsense about Sharia, but it's not so common about Jewish law.

God made these too

2011-06-08T18:56:00.000+01:00

This is a wasps' nest which has established itself in an empty beehive. It's made of paper constructed from fibres chewed from weathered or decaying wood; I believe the patterns in the surface can be used to identify the species. There are several very similar species, and I'd need to take my book down to the allotment to be certain which this is.

Wasp and bee colonies contain thousands of juicy grubs, and as a result, they tend to be extremely good at self-defence. Their weapons are only used in that way, though, at least against us. I can lift the cover off the hive and watch them without the slightest reaction.

Social wasps are major predators; thousands of insects, many of them pests, are brought back daily to feed the grubs, which produce sugary syrup to feed the adults. It's only at the end of the season, when the queen stops laying and there are no more grubs, that they come looking for anything sweet, and come into regular contact with humans. As far as I'm concerned, they more than earn their keep, and they're no problem at all. I've shared my shed with wasps several times, and never been stung yet.

The beehive next to it has been building up steadily, and is now beginning to store a little surplus honey. Most of it will come in during the next month, as the brambles flower. At this time of year, the queen's going full blast, laying somewhere from 1200 to 1500 eggs, more than her body weight, in a day.

A few feet away is another hive with a swarm which moved in a month ago. I get them every year, and use them to restock empty hives. They can be an impressive sight; the queen can't survive alone, and she flies off, driven out of the hive, accompanied by about half the workers in the colony. This is a small one I found hanging in my hedge one afternoon:

The older bees go with the queen, while the younger, which don't fly much, stay behind to maintain the colony, look after the brood, and attend to the new queen which will have been started before the hinve swarmed. In the air, a swarm can be a tight knot of bees ten feet across, or it can be fifty yards across, turn the air black with bees, and sound like a jet aircraft.

A queen is nothing but a sexually mature, overfed worker, and all being well, she soon mates. They'll have raised several queen cells, and many colonies keep more than one for a while, as an insurance against mating failure in our dodgy weather. In the wild, about 75% of swarms will probably fail to store enough honey to see them through their first winter, so I feed them like mad during their first autumn.

These are all part of God's creation, and we've got no need to regard them with the fear which is so common!

A little Good News

2011-06-07T11:07:00.000+01:00

There was some good news at Circuit Meeting last night. Firstly, the pressure to join the local megacircuit is off. It's got financial problems, another big circuit in Coventry had to appoint an assistant to the Superintendant as he couldn't keep up with the job, and the assistant, of course, wasn't getting the Super's allownace for the extra work. So it's now running as two separate circuits, and a halt has been called. Maybe a little sanity will now manifest itself, and we can look at the Super's role, and see what we can do to improve their lot.

Secondly, the Circuit is no longer losing members, at least for the moment. We keep having to dip into our financial reserves, and if that continues, we have two options. One is to cut back, but this isn't necessarily a good idea. All too often, as the history of British industry shows, it leads to further decline. We've done a great deal of cutting back already; over twenty years, we've gone from three circuits with around ten ministers, to one Circuit with three. That's an enormous change, and we can't go on at that rate. What we have is working at the moment, so we need a breathing space before we even think of cutting another minister. I'm not so sure about buildings. Several churches are in large, uneconomic old buildings, when they might be better off getting rid of them, and meeting in something smaller and more manageable.

The other option is to build up our churches, and make them flourish. If you have more people, you can do more, bring in yet more people, and your finances grow with the congregation. We need to go from managing decline to managing growth, and some people are going to find that very threatening. If a church is shrinking, there are few if any new people coming in, the same people stay in control, and the church becomes their little empire. Everything I've seen suggests that this is part of the problem; new people are left to drift away, or are pushed, as they're seen as a threat. Growth brings in new people, new ideas, and it only continues as long as they're given space to thrive.

Things are happening round the Circuit; we're starting a Sunday School; other churches are doing other things. Hopefully, one step may lead to another. If decline really has ceased, then we have to be doing something right, and we need to do more of it!

Comment

2011-06-04T15:09:00.000+01:00

I still can't comment on this or other people's Blogger sites. Infuriating!

I'm very wary of using the word 'can't' of God. It's a sort of hyper-Arminianism I come across quite often; God can't force us into Heaven, and now there's a string of other things he can't do either. He's supposed to be an omnioptent being, though, and in that case there can't be anything he can't do!

Luke speaks of the Holy Spirit's presence repeatedly in his Gospel. Elizabeth and Zechariah are filled with it, it rests on Simeon. Then Jesus is filled with it. It doesn't seem to be the least bit inhibited before the Ascension, so I think there's something else going on. Elizabeth, Zechariah and Simeon all prophecy, paralleling passages in the OT where people are filled with the Spirit, and prophecy. Jesus is filled for the duration of his ministry, then, when it's time for the church to continue his mission, the Spirit fills the disciples. Wherever God is acting, the Spirit, which in Luke is like the active presence of God on Earth, is also present.

Ascension Day

2011-06-03T19:01:00.000+01:00

Yesterday was Ascension Day, and some bloggers have been using this as an opportunity to poke fun at the literalists. Some people are very quick to claim that they 'believe every word of the Bible literally', but I wonder what that means in practice?

Of course Jesus didn't take off like a space shuttle on his way to Planet Heaven. I hope not too many people think he did. Luke's the guy who talks about it it. In his Gospel, Jesus appears to have ascended within a few days of his resurrection. The two disciples meet him on their way to Emmaus; then the scene moves to Jerusalem. He's off shortly afterwards:

Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God. Luke (24:50-53).

I have trouble seeing Spaceship Jesus there.

In Acts, of course, Luke gives us a more elaborate, and not entirely consistent, version of the story. Jesus famoulsy spends forty days with the disciples, so Luke now wants us to know that he was around for a long time; it seems that he had rather more to tell them than the author lets us know in his Gospel. The two things that Luke is keen to pass on to his audience is that the Holy Spirit will be given to 'you' - ostensibly the disciples, put perhaps extending to Luke's audience a couple of generations later. Then, probably in answer to questions as to why there's such a delay, Luke's eager to assure his hearers that it's not for them to know when the kingdom will be restored to Israel (1:7). They will, however, be Jesus' witnesses 'to the ends of the Earth'. Acts is, of course, the story of how the message went as far as Rome.

Once that's out of the way, we get to the Ascension itself:

When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven." (Acts 1:9-11)

No doubt the two 'men' are intended as angels; which turn up in human disguise in the apocalyptic writings. I suppose a blind literalist could see this in terms of Jesus flying off to some heaven beyond the bright blue sky, and no doubt that type of interpretation was once widepread. The intention, however, is to put a full stop (more or less; let's not forget Paul) to Jesus' appearances. He's finished his work on earth, and God is now sending the Spirit to get the church moving; while the Gospel is the story of Jesus' mission, Acts is concerned with the church. The Spirit is never personified; rather; it's a sort of 'divine wind' (RWAH means wind, breath or spirit in Hebrew; Pneuma much the same in Greek) driving the church onwards.

I suspect Luke - or whoever originated the story, as he may have got it from someone else - gained his inspiration at least partly from Paul. Unlike Luke, he's not interested in the incarnate Jesus. To him, Jesus is 'declared to be Son of God with power' by his Resurrection (Romans 1:4). To Paul, Jesus is special from that moment, and he's not too bothered about what went on earlier. He elaborates in Philippians 2; he may be quoting or adapting from elsewhere, but if so, he quotes with approval. He's not clear as to whether Jesus is pre-existent or not. Philippians 2:5-7a: '
Philippians 2:5-7 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.' could mean that Jesus was some heavenly or angelic being which submitted to being born as a human being, but could equally well mean that he was a human being who was satisfied with his humble status, unlike the first Adam, who sinned in his pride, and tried to be equal with God. Either way, his humility and obedience led God to reward him in a sort of heavenly enthronement; he's given a new name which sets him up above all other beings - except, presumably, God himself - and every knee shall bend, every tongue confess, as per Isaiah 45:23, that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God. In romans 14:11, the same is applied directly to God. It's an enthronement which leaves God and Jesus so closely associated that the distinction almost - but never quite - disappears. This exalted heavenly Christ is, of course, the one who really interests Paul!

Luke, however, is very interested indeed in the incarnate Jesus. He disagrees with Paul; rather than becoming special at the Resurrection, he thinks Jesus is Son of God, and special, from birth. His sonship is derived, not by his having been engendered by the Holy Spirit, as per Matthew, but by inheritance from Adam, who is also called Son of God (Luke 3:38). A series of prophecies and angelic visions around the birth make it clear that this is a very special baby indeed; the Gabriel declares to Mary that: 'He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end."' (Luke 1:32-33). There's no sign of pre-existence anywhere in the Gospel, we have to turn to John to find that.

So Luke gets to the end of his tale. He's writing theology in the form of story, presenting the movement Jesus started as something which is, despite its founder's embarassing death, quite compatible with Roman rule. Alone among the New Testament authors, he deals with Jesus' transition to heaven by telling a story about it. That's all it is; a transition,and the church is probably wise not to make too much of a fuss about marking the occasion.

Comments

2011-06-03T13:29:00.001+01:00

For some reason, Blogger hasn't been letting me comment here. There have been a string of complaints recently from other bloggers, so I don't think it's me. All I can think of is to use a new post to reply to comments on my last, and hope they get their act together soon!

All the people involved know our pattern perfectly well, it's just that we get this minority who don't think they should have to go along with it. I agree that it's about control, but underlying that, it's their own convenience as well. The problem with any sort of authoritarian approach.

We can't start earlier; one of two people who wanted an earlier service recently asked everyone, and they made it clear they didn't want to start earlier. We did try starting the choruses earlier, when we had a minister who wanted to finish 'on time' and a Senior Steward who never disagreed with ministers. It didn't work because nobody turned up any earlier. The choruses are part of the service, and everyone's going to have to work with that.

There's a slight political problem in the church, with one vociferous individual who probably agrees with the people who want to finish at twelve. Right now I'm the only one in Church Council who argues with her. I need one vital person to be there, but she's stuck elsewhere due to work at the moment. Hopefully that'll sort itself out before long.

Once we've got something clear through CC, the LP meeting will have to go along with it - even if a few argue, the majority will support us. That should be the end of it, and with an officially longer service, we can then look at the next stage. As I say, it's going to be a question of feeling our way, step by step, and finding a way of having a service which more of our people will be comfortable with. If we can do it without upsetting anyone, so much the better; I'm notorious for arguing with people in meetings, but I don't actually like doing it! We've just got too many people who've been allowed to get away with too much for too long, and it's got to stop.

When it comes to readings, our approach is to encourage as many people as possible to take a turn reading, and provide Bibles so everyone can follow. Some people are good readers, others lousy, but we don't care. What matters to us is participation. In our case, this isn't just a clique; it's a policy which has stood the test of time, and which, as far as I know, is supported by everyone. Once again, some preachers don't like it, but they've more or less accepted that this is what's going to happen.

Escaping the lowest common denominator

2011-05-31T10:02:00.000+01:00

One of the problems with Methodism arises from the way that preachers operate, moving round a Circuit. There are 14 churches in my Circuit, and of course I'm in a different church every time; churches have a different preacher every week. It's not easy to lead worship in a congregation you only know superficially, and see once in several months!
The result is we drift to the lowest common denominator, the one-hour hymn sandwich, and it's extremely hard to break away from it. I vaguely remember the odd attempt by one church to maintain some continuity by giving preachers texts to preach from, but it didn't last long. One church went all charismatic for a while, with masses of choruses, but there were a lot of tensions, and it fizzled out in the end. There's only one church in the Circuit which has tried to maintain its own distinctive style for the entire 24 years I've been in Birmingham, and that's my own.

It started simply enough. We shared a minister with another church with a 9.30 service - I think; it was very early anyway - and it was hard for him to get to my church for eleven. So we started with a few minutes of choruses, led by the stewards. Eventually, we decided it wasn't right that leading worship should be restricted to the few, so we opened it up to everyone. Some of the people who screwed up the courage to take it on went on to become stewards themselves, and bit by bit we reached a situation where most people get involved with leading worship.

At the same time, the makeup of the church was changing. When I arrived in 1987, there were slightly more white people than black. As time passed, the number of black people increased, as did their influence in the church. When a volcano erupted in Montserrat, a lot of the refugees were housed locally, and the church suddently became about 80% black; this has remained roughly the same since. A significant number of Caribbean people are from Pentecostal backgrounds, and we have a fair few Africans. They're used to longer, noisier services, and like the service to be a bit more than a one-hour hymn sandwich. We've also made a practice of stopping for a cup of tea and buscuits after the service, which has made a big difference. A church is a community after all, and if we don't spend time talking to each other, we can't function.

Unfortunately, our slightly longer service sometimes causes conflict. Of the four ministers we've had since I've been here, one didn't want us to have choruses at all when he was taking the service - he once told me he didn't feel it was 'really worship' - and another always wanted us to start before eleven, and only have a very few, so that he could finish at twelve. There have been occasional conflicts with Local Preachers as well. One once wanted to take over the choruses himself, as that it could be 'part of the service', and never mind the person who'd prepared to do it. I was stewarding, and didn't let him; it would have been gross discourtesy, and it's already part of the service anyway! Then there's the odd one or two who think we should finish exactly on the hour; one once stopped for a cup of tea, then started a row with us about it. This is, of course, the problem. There will always be those who want the short, easy service, and will try to impose it on others.

The service is becoming more of an issue as one member's children, now in their 20's, have moved to another church because it has livelier worship. So how do we liven things up more, with all the drawbacks of the Methodist system? Naturally, it's landed on my plate for the moment. We can't start the choruses earlier, since we've asked about an earlier service, and only two people wanted it. The only option I can see is to tell the preachers that while the service starts at eleven, we want them to start at quarter past. Their hour would then end at quarter past twelve, and that would at least give us a slightly longer service without - hopefully - anyone wanting to hurry us up. We could then talk about where to go next.

We're not going to solve this in a day; we're also starting a Sunday School soon, and so one question is how to involve the kids in the service. I know from experience that they can do far more than just take the collection round, despite the efforts of the odd one or two who - inevitably - want to keep them in 'their place'. Bit by bit, if we keep going, I think we'll continue to make progress. It comes back to basic principles. The church is the people, not the minister or the preacher, and the peoples' will must prevail, or the congregation will fade away, and the church end up closing.

Old Habits Die Hard

2011-05-26T22:49:00.000+01:00

Amy-Jill Levine has an interesting paper here, critiquing church statements on Israel: http://www.fodip.org/articles/old_habits.pdf .

She's not, of course, immune to critique herself. For one thing, she wants us to stop using the name 'Palestine'. However, ancient Israel (or Samaria) and Judea only occupied parts of the region, as does modern Israel within its legal borders. The only times it was united were brief periods under David and Solomon, if their empire was historical, and under the Hasmoneans, who may be obscure, but at least enjoy an assured place in history. 'The Holy Land' is horribly sanctimonious, and theologically objectionable, as it suggests that God is more interested in one part of the world than another. 'Palestine', or variants thereof, is attested over an extended period, and is widely understood. There's no other term which can be used for the region without ambiguity and the consequent need for clumsy explanation when used before a lay audience.

More importantly, she fails to distinguish clearly between antisemitism and opposition to the political programme of the Israeli state. There are those who cry 'antisemitism' at any criticism of Israel; it is for them to demonstrate that such criticism is in fact racist rather than political. Levine calls for 'balance' in church statements about Israel, and critiques them for the lack of it. However, she fails herself to recognise the imbalance between a state equipped with modern weaponry, and the ill-equipped guerilla forces of Hamas, or the inevitable imbalance in the resulting casualty figures.

I think there's a comparison here with the Six Counties; the British Army vastly outgunned all the IRA splinter groups put together, but was no more able to defeat them than the Israelis are to defeat Hamas and Hezbollah. The solution involved talking to the IRA withhout any insistence that it first recognise the legitimacy of the British presence - which it obviously wasn't going to do - followed by mutual disarment, and an honest enquiry into Bloody Sunday, without, it should be said, and enquiry into any of the other atrocities carried out by the British Army. Nothing was said about nationalist atrocities like the pub bombings, which appear to have been carried out by an out-of-control Active Service Unit, operating against policy laid down by the Provisional Army Council. Leaked documents suggest a willingness to talk on the part of the Palestinians, in which case the onus is on the Israeli government to respond in a constructive manner, rather than pointing the finger and insisting that the fault is all on their side. Palestinian crimes need to be acknowledged, but it's right that the emphasis should be on those of the more powerful party.

Levine's position needs to be taken seriously, if the churches are to have any influence in Israel, but allegations of antisemitism should never be allowed to hinder a principled critique of the Israeli state.

The Sect of Rome

2011-05-26T10:13:00.000+01:00

I always did feel that, despite the presence of a lot of really good people, the Church of Rome acts like a divisive little sect. What makes them so insecure?

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2011/05/25/archbishop-calls-off-methodist-ordinations/

No longer Jew nor Greek

2011-05-25T20:46:00.000+01:00

Most of the time, we tend to read Paul through a Lutheran lens. Luther, perhaps for his own polemical reasons, interpreted Paul as setting grace (good) against law (bad); the Jews emerge as the bad guys - let's face it, the Gospels do let the Romans off the hook for the Crucifixion and blame the Jews instead - and in Luther's view, Jesus replaces the impossible Law with the glorious light of grace. Unfortunately, this is a serious misreading of Paul.

Paul is, after all, a Jew, with impeccable credentials. He's a Benjaminite , a Pharisee, a Hebrew of the Hebrews (Philippians 3:5; I'm only citing Paul's testimony here, and ignoring Luke's portrayal of Paul in Acts). The Hebrews were the Palestinian, Aramaic-speaking Jews, which might perhaps contradict Luke's testimony that Paul was from Tarsus, but in any case, he comes of Jewish stock, and he's no mere convert. He's been been based at the Antioch church, which was, by all accounts, rather more liberal than the mother church in Jerusalem, but he's been sent by Jerusalem to go to the Gentiles (Galatians 2:9). Both Paul and Luke make it plain that, at this time, Jerusalem was where the decisions were made.

Paul has come to Galatia, whose people were Hellenised Celts, with the message of Jesus. He's established a community of people, now essentially Greeks, though still with the Celtic heritage, who followed a Jewish messiah, under Roman rule. We needn't be surprised that this multicultural mishmash led to a few tensions!

The Jews, of course, were a tolerated minority, granted protection within the Roman empire, and allowed to follow their own religion in peace, to the point where it was legal for a Roman citizen to be a Jew. At this time - Galatians was written sometime between AD 48 and the mid-50's - the Jews had lived peacefully within the Roman empire for generations, since Pompeius Magnus captured Jerusalem in 63 BC, and established a puppet kingdom there. They offered daily sacrifice for he Emperor in Jerusalem, and were not expected to sacrifice to him.

They were however, a minority, and as such may well have felt insecure within the Hellenistic world. In the 160's BC, there had been an attempt to integrate Jerusalem, with the establishment of a syncretistic cult which identified their God with Zeus Olympios. In 41 AD, Caligula, who had been brought up partly in the east, and took divine kingship extremely seriously, ordered that a gilded statue of himself be set up in the Temple, so that the Jews could sacrifice to him. The governor of Judea prevaricated, and Caligula was murdered before the order confirming the erection of the statue could arrive in Jerusalem. Lingering worries emerge in the Gospels, which refer to the Abomination of Desolation (Mark 13:14, Matthew 24:15; the term comes from 1 Maccabees 1:54). Evidently there was a feeling that, sooner or later, someone was going to put an idol in the Temple and make Jews worship it once again.

A diaspora community, in daily contact with their Greek neighbours, would have been doubly insecure. Then Paul came along and started a group of pseudo-Jews; they worshipped the Jewish god - perfectly legally, of course; it's not clear when the first anti-Christian legislation was passed, but it was long after this - but they did none of the things which marked Jews as Jews. They weren't circumcised, didn't keep Sabbath, and their meat probably wasn't kosher. In that case, as secular slaughter didn't exist, it would have been sacrificed at the local temple. They weren't following pagan cults, but they weren't Jews either. So what were they? It must have been a confusing situation.

Someone - either people sent by James, mentioned in Galatians 2:12, or the local synagogue - had a simple solution. They should convert, get themselves circumcised, and become proper Jews. If they did so, everyone would know where they were, any tensions would soon settle down, and in any case, there was an advantage to being a Jew. They'd be full citizens in the Kingdom when it arrived, rather than tolerated strangers and aliens, righteous before God, but, as it were, posessing permanent leave to remain, and nothing more. It was, after all, going to be a Jewish kingdom, under a Jewish God.

No ancient Jewish document claims that Gentiles can't be acceptable to God as Gentiles. It would be a little difficult for anyone to say that, considering the number of righteous Gentles in the Jewish scriptures. Rather, the Mishnah, from the end of the 2nd Century AD, takes the view that God gave seven basic Noahide Commandments to Noah, and through him to all humanity. Any Gentile keeping these would be righteous before God. The commandments of Moses, because these were only given to the Jews, so onlyJews had to keep them. Most likely, this was only a formalisation of an existing conclusion; the New Testament, written earlier, takes a similar view.

In Acts 15, Luke gives us an account of the Jerusalem Conference, where James, the top dog in the church there, has the last word:

"It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials: ²⁹ that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well."

Luke wrote at the end of the First Century AD; Paul, writing earlier, never gave a formal list of requirements, but his advice to Gentile followers of Jesus is comparable. Galatians is his earliest response to the issues, and lacks the carefully thought-out arguments of Romans. Rather, Paul has reacted with a furious rant. At one point, he got so worked up, he wished the circumcisers would castrate themselves (5:12). There's an implied comparison here with the priests of the local Magna Mater cult, who were eunuchs; this could only have been seen as a terrible insult.

In the crucial passage, though, he comes up with something which was, as far as I've been able to discover, new.

In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise. (Galatians 3:26-29)

God is no longer a Jewish God; the Kingdom is no longer a Jewish kingdom. Rather, Jew and Gentile enter on an equal basis, via their defferent routes. Paul continues to develop this idea through his letters, most notably in Romans, and it's this that brings him into conflict with his fellow Jews. The familiar distinctions of the ancient world have been relativised; they can no longer be absolute, since before God, they are meaningless. Each, therefore, should remain as they were. The Jew should obey the commandments of the Law, since they are binding on them, and the Gentile should continue to ignore them, since they were never given to them. Their final status before God, which was Paul's main concern, would be the same.

Today, we often take this for granted. Our culture is far removed from those in which Paul moved; slavery is effectively invisible, though it still exists, and despite the continuing sexism of our culture, women can become Prime Ministers. Many Jews are so well integrated into the wider culture that they are almost invisible. We take it for granted that God makes no distinctions, and assume that this passage refers to social justice.

This isn't entirely wrong. If God, say, treats men and women the same, it would be wise for those who claim to be his worshippers to do likewise, and to do what they can to ensure that others do as well. If we don't, God may have something to say about it. In that case, to borrow one of Matthew's favourite themes, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. However, this is a secondary implication of the text, not what Paul is actually saying.

Obviously, the church didn't invent sexism. It has, hoever, often justified and maintained it, and developed its own version, creating religious barriers to women, who, in some churches, cannot serve as priests or ministers, and sometimes cannot even set foot in the sanctuary. Equally, we didn't invent racism; it grew out of the slave trade. We did allow the church to be used for some centuries, to legitimate it, and thus to allow it to continue its development.

Antisemitism, however, was the invention of the church. Paul tells us that there is now no barrier between Jew and Gentile; our response has been to pick up the way the Gospel authors, for their own political reasons, exonerate the Romans for the Crucifixion, and blame the Jews instead. We developed the nonsense that the Jews crucified Jesus, and in doing so, laid the foundation for the Holocaust, and all the other pogroms the Jews have suffered. We also, for that matter, laid the foundations for apartheid. Instead of demolishing the stupid barriers which divide humanity, we developed new ones.

God, however, only created one human race, and gave us only one world to live in. All the things which divide us, and justify one group of people in trampling on another, whether the victims are black people, Jews, Arabs, women, or whoever, are ultimately incompatible with our Chrisitian profession. If we're all equal before God, then we need to ensure, firstly, that everyone is equal within the church, which represents God on earth, and secondly, that we use whatever influence we have to oppose everything which makes people unequal out there in the world, and which leads to discrimination.
Acts 15:28-29

Another rapturous mess

2011-05-22T21:17:00.000+01:00

James McGrath has some interesting comments here about the relationship between the Rapture - or people who believe in it anyway - and the present unhealthy state of things in Palestine: http://www.patheos.com/community/exploringourmatrix/2011/05/22/cleaning-up-another-apocalyptic-mess-israel-and-the-palestinians/ . It's going to take a lot more sorting out than the aftermath of Camping's nonsense.

Left behind?

2011-05-21T09:06:00.000+01:00

Jason Staples has a good blog post here dealing with one of the passages used by people like Harold Camping to justify their nonsense about the 'Rapture': http://www.jasonstaples.com/blog/2011/two-will-be-taken-one-will-be-left-misinterpreted-bible-passages-8-2478? . He's perfectly correct; the sense of Matthew 24:40 is as though the police raid a building, arrest one person, and leave another. You definitely don't want to be taken! It never ceases to amaze me how the church (meaning the community, led by the nose in this case) sometimes manages to interpret the Bible as meaning the precise opposite of what it says! Of course, the traditional translation here isn't very helpful, but that's often the case, and we need to be aware that we're not reading the original text.

And here's a post from the Beaker Folk summing up what apocalyptic is really about: http://cyber-coenobites.blogspot.com/2011/05/riding-bow-wave-of-rapture.html .

CPD

2011-05-18T09:30:00.000+01:00

We have a constitution in the Methodist Church which is (mostly) fairly reasonable, and which could often be used to our advantage. Trouble is, hardly anyone knows what's in it; it's just a big book which is toted around the place by ministers, and which most of them don't bother to read themselves. Fortunately, it's not hard to get hold of these days. The 2009 version of CPD (it doesn't change much from year to year, and if someone wants to claim it's changed, make them prove it by producing the updated text) can be downloaded from the Methodist Church website.

Vol 1 (Historic Documents) http://www.methodist.org.uk/downloads/CPD-volume-1-0709.pdf .

Vol 2 (The bit that matters, with all the rules) http://www.methodist.org.uk/downloads/CPD-volume-2-2009.pdf .

Ministerial appointments

2011-05-16T22:47:00.000+01:00

Our Superintendent has asked for his initial five-year appointment to be extended for a couple of years. As it happens, I'm all in favour, but I've never been too happy with these situations. Until quite recently, the slightest criticism of any minister, no matter how dire, was always met with the most appalling patronising speeches from those in power about how wonderful and special ministers were. The sun shone from every ordained backside, God was in his heaven, all was right with the world, and if the churches were unhappy that was their problem. If you run a church that way, is it any wonder if members vote with their feet?

The result, of course, was that it was almost impossible to get rid of any minister wanting to stay. I remember one in the late 1980's, who people were seriously unhappy with. He asked for an extra two years, and the vote, by a show of hands, didn't go his way. The Circuit Stewards announced a miscount, asked us to raise our hands again, and a couple of the people who voted neutral changes to a yes vote. They repeated this charade three times, and eventually got the result they wanted. We then decided that future extensions were to be decided by a paper vote, which at least stopped that nonsense.

Then we had the practice of Circuit Stewards going round with a minister coming to look at the circuit, telling us not to ask them questions, and assuring us that if we said no, we'd be left without a minister. In fact, of course, the worst that could happen is that we might be short of a minister for a year, while the existing Circuit ministers covered the extra churches. The result of this approach was that we had a couple of ministers that the churches were extremely unhappy with. That's obviously not in anyone's interest.

We've currently got a situatiuon where there's a shortage of Superintendents. The District Chair thinks the answer to this is for Circuits to amalgamate, so fewer are needed. As far as I can see, that makes even more work for them, and makes the job even less attractive. You don't solve a recruitment problem by working the present incumbents to death! What we need to do, of course, is to look at the role, lighten the burden a bit, and try to make it more attractive.

The result has been that Circuits have come under pressure to amalgamate. A very large Circuit has been formed in Birmingham, next to us, and it has financial problems. Allegedly, some are blaming this on the fact that we, and once other Circuit, refused to join. Our current Super is being very supportive over this, and if he moves, we're likely to come under pressure again.

That's fair enough, but I've just had an argument with one person at the meeting, who claimed that if we didn't grant the extension, we'd be compelled to amalgamate. I felt it was another piece of manipulation, and made it clear that I didn't believe there was any mechanism for compelling us. In the end, the guy half admitted it. I checked Standing Orders as soon as I got home, and sure enough, there doesn't seem to be any such provision. I've got no issues with Paul's extension, but I have very considerable issues with the stuff that goes on; our only chance of avoiding any more dodgy minsters they try to send us is to have an honest discussion, air any concerns, and reach an unmanipulated decision.

Rejoicing at a Death

2011-05-03T11:18:00.000+01:00

I never thought I'd be happy to hear about a death, but that day did come, once. It was a former neighbour, Solomon 'SAJ' Musa.

He had been Vice-President of Sierra Leone after the NPRC coup in 1992. As far as I can make out, there were two contenders for the top job; Musa and Julius Maada Bio. They settled on a compromise candidate, Valentine Strasser. 26 alleged coup plotters were executed not long afterwards, supposedly by Musa driving a lorry over them. All I can say is that the man was capable of such a thing. Before long, Musa and his wife were put on a plane at gunpoint, after a series of rows with Strasser. They surfaced in Birmingham, a few hundred yards from where we lived, with a council house, refugee status, and a UN grant to study at Birmingham University. It wasn't long before Musa picked a ferocious quarrel with us, probably because we're democrats.

At the beginning of May 1997, my wife ran into Tina Musa, who appeared to be rejoicing; they'd done some juju, and 'power was coming to return to them'. Three weeks later, on May 25th, soldiers loyal to Musa seized the parliament building and hung out banners calling for his return as President. Local people tried to dissuade him, warning him that it would lead to his death, but the two of them rushed off in a state of grate enthusiasm, and arrived in Freetown, after being delayed by a temporary arrest in Guinea, to find that someone else, Johnny Paul Koroma, had taken the top job. Musa became Vice-President again, and Minister of Mines.

We had just received clearance to bring the girls, then aged 11 and 5, to the UK, and the result was that the elder was caught up in fighting a week later. They arrived in the end, but she still suffers from nightmares. At one point I phoned a family friend, to find her in a state of terror as a gang of soldiers came down the street, looting and killing; I subsequently spoke to people who saw Musa directing these gangs personally. We were worried that Namissa's family was likely to be targeted because of our quarrel with Musa, who was known to be vindictive, but in the event he spent most of his time in the diamond areas, stealing the gems.

The regime lasted nine months, and collapsed; the leaders escaped from Freetown with their forces intact, and with no civilian casualties. I've never come across any details of what went on behind the scenes, but given that the head of the Nigerian-led peacekeeping force was known locally as 'Mr. Ten Million', since that was his annual take from the rebels to allow them to remain in business, I imagine that there was a fair amount of collusion involved.

Musa then established himself as the de facto leader of one of the rebel groups, based at Kabala (Namissa's home town) in the north of the country. It's subsequently emerged that he was behind most of the fighting in the latter stages of the civil war. He was killed in the early stages of a major rebel assault on the capital over New Year 1999. At the time it appeared that his death was due either to an accident or a booby-trap, but it now seems that he was probably shot by his own lieutenants, on the orders of Charles Taylor, the former Liberian dictator whose trial at the Hague ended recently.

God alone knows how many deaths this man was responsible for, and how many were saved by his death. There's no doubt that as long as he was alive, his attempts to steal the country and its mineral wealth would have continued. I don't consider Osama bin Laden to have been a monster on the same scale. His major crimes took place a decade ago, and he's been a declining influence for some years. It's interesting that he was betrayed just when the Arab revolutions had made him politically irrelevant. Apparently he made no attempt to defend himself, and he could presumably have been taken alive. A trial - preferably outside the United States - would have avoided making a martyr, and would have been far more fitting for a country which likes to portray itself as a leader of civilisation. An extra-judicial killing panders to the worst elements of a nation with an unfortunate tendency to confuse violence with justice.

Divine Grace

2011-04-17T02:13:00.000+01:00

I've always admired John Wesley as a theologian. The upright Fellow of Lincoln 'submitted to beome more vile' as he put it, and went field preaching at the urging of his friend George Whitfield. Whitfield wasn't too much of a thinker, but he'd seen a need, and responded to it.

The 18th Century was a time of upheaval in England. Agricultural enclosure had been going on for a couple of centuries, but inventions such as Jethro Tull's seed drill (1701) needed larger fields to be fully effective. As enclosure proceeded, land was, in modern terminology, privatised, and mostly passed into the possession of the wealthier farmers. Many people were left landless, and either became agricultural labourers, joined the army or navy, or moved to where work could be found in the mines or the factories which were beginning to appear. In the process, a new underclass appeared.

The Anglican Church, organised on the parish system, was too inflexible to cope with population movements. People like the miners of Kingswood, near Bristol, where Wesley preached, were effectively beyond its reach. I used to live on the St Austell Moors in Cornwall, an area where there was almost no population until the china clay pits were opened in the second quarter of the 19th Century. There was no Anglican church until the last century. As new villages developed, the Methodists moved in, and as 19th Century Methodism was so strongly teetotal, there isn't a pub in the whole area.

This created a problem for the Calvinism of people like Whitfield. The western church had taken predestination for granted since Augustine in the 4th Century; grace was irresistible, and if you were saved, it was because God had you on his little list, drawn up before creation. If you weren't, it served you right anyway; you were a sinner. That worked in medieval times, and continued to do so as long as the church could reach the entire population. Wesley and his friends found themselves in a new situation.

People were still Christian; the Bible story - or at any rate the Bible as read by the church - was taken for granted as history. Accounts of people crying out in early Methodist meetings might suggest that some were going in real fear of death and hell. If so, it's not surprising. So crowds flocked to hear preachers when they came. We read accounts of people coming from miles around; in one case, a man was converted while leaning of his gatepost listening to George Whitfield preach a mile away. Representatives of the church were going out to where the people were, presenting the message in a new way, and faith came to life for many of those who heard. It's an inspiring story, but Wesley was more than an evangelist; he was a thinker.

In the previous century, Jacobus Arminius had come up with new ideas, challenging the view that salvation is fully determined by God, with no free contribution by ourselves. On the old Augustinian theory - Calvin and the other reformers we essentially reworking Augustine - salvation was an arbitrary matter of the divine will. Those outside the church, who Wesley now had to deal with, were likely to assume they were excluded from God's elect. Wesley's thought on the matter was eventually summarised in his 'alls', though I believe they were actually written by William Fitzgerald a century ago:

All men (taking men as inclusive of women; you could get away with it back then) need to be saved.

All men can be saved.

All men can know they are saved.

All men can be saved to the uttermost.

Salvation, then, was open to everyone. Wesley accepted the tradition of the Western church, which is extremely pessimistic about human nature, but nobody was so terrible that they were outside the possibility of God's grace. I'm not so keen on the third 'all'. Undoubtedly, many people in those meetings did have tremendous emotional experiences, but the end result has been a tendency in some traditions to believe not only that salvation is a single, forensic, event, in which God forgives us for our sins and redeems us, but that it has to be an emotional experience. I think that goes far too far.

Wesley, however, was surely correct in seeing that salvation is more than this; it's an ongoing process. To him, there was the possibility of 'Christian perfection'. These days, it's not a helpful expression. 'Perfection' has come to refer to something absolute, which can't be bettered. Once, however, it referred simply to maturity; a 'perfect insect' is the mature stage, the adult. Christian perfection was a state in which we don't knowingly commit sin. He encouraged others to claim it, but never did so himself.

However, from the perspective of our very different position today, I think there are problems. As long as everyone's a Christian - let's remember that Wesley's famous conversion was a theological one; he'd been a Christian long before - free choice works. But these days, a child of devout Christians is far more likely to have a meaningful opportunity to accept God's grace than someone born to militant atheists, and the child of devout Muslims, born in a village in Saudi Arabia has virtually none. The offer of salvation has become a lottery, at best.

Then we tend to assume that the birth of a child is down to God's will. So God wills that someone be born into a Muslim environment, then they go to hell for being a Muslim. If we're not careful, we drift into a slightly subtler version of predestination.

Then there's a weakness in traditional Arminianism, which becomes evident in the language some preachers use. God, it's said, 'can't' force us to accept salvation. How can we use language like that of an omnipotent being? If we're not careful, we end up proclaiming a pretty feeble deity.

At the same time, if God either can't or won't force us into heaven, death can, and does, force us into hell. Dying allegedly cuts us off permanently from the offer of salvation. Once again, of course, God had always been assumed to determine the time of our deaths. So, again, we're in danger of sliding into predestination. Even if we manage to avoid this somehow, we've still made death at least as strong as God, if not stronger. We like to claim that 'Christ has conquered death', but the Arminian Christ hasn't done a very good job of it.

Not only do we have problems with a God who, if he hasn't determined the time of our dying, is unable to reach us through it, but we have ethical difficulties as well. Why would a just God prescribe infinite punishment for finite sin? It's almost as bad as the Augustinian God throwing unbaptised babies into hell.

But how do we know that death is the end of hope for those outside the church? It's an assumption, larded out with selected Biblical snippets. But we can just as easily select other texts which point the other way. Jonah, for instance, is quite sure that God heard him from the fish's belly, treated as a metaphor for she'ol, or the grave. I don't like speculating about what happens after death. God knows; we don't. But I can't help wondering whether Origen was closer to the truth than orthodoxy, with his idea that all creation will be saved, with the Devil himself bringing up the rear. If death doesn't cut us off from God after all, then we may be free to reject God, but he has all eternity to work on us. Perhaps there are strange aeons when even death may finally die.

Evangelicalism

2011-04-13T12:15:00.000+01:00

There's a pretty good summary here: http://religionatthemargins.com/2011/04/why-im-a-conservative/ . I abandoned them twenty years ago when I twigged that however much they banged on about the Bible, they were always going to interpret it in line with their theological traditions, whether it supports them or not.

The Bible's Buried Secrets

2011-04-13T11:54:00.000+01:00

I haven't been posting much due to endless headaches, but I thought I'd post a link to this excellent series, for anyone who missed it.

http://documentarystorm.com/religion/bibles-buried-secrets/

Spot the logical flaw

2011-04-10T01:06:00.000+01:00

I just spotted this. http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/death-anxiety-shapes-views-on-evolution-29580/ .

Someone's logic isn't working. OK, so the theory of evolution doesn't give us reassurance about the afterlife, but neither does heliocentrism or any other scientific theory. That's not what it's there for.

Religion does offer such reassurance, but there's no logical connection between 'I believe in God' and 'I don't believe in evolution', any more than there's a link with 'I believe the Earth goes round the sun' or any other piece of gobbledygook. The author needed to look a bit further.

Are you religious?

2011-03-22T08:51:00.000Z

I was trying to write a post on Christology, but five days with non-stop migraine have temporarily put paid to that. Mouse put up an interesting post yesterday, at http://churchmousepublishing.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-poll-from-bha-over-50-are-christian.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheChurchMouse+%28The+Church+Mouse%29 . The original post from the British Humanist Association is here: http://www.humanism.org.uk/news/view/771 . You can tell I don't have Mouse's expertise with links.

It seems to me that the BHA questionnaire was appallingly badly designed. I don't know whether this is cock-up or conspiracy, but for a start, what's anyone supposed to make of a question asking 'Are you religious?' It's not a description many people are keen on these days, and I'd be tempted to answer 'no' myself. We see it in phrases like 'conventionally religious'; it's got a bit of musty, out-of-date feel to it, it often comes with slightly negative connotations. After having asked for a person's religion, I wonder what the motive for the second question was?

Then there's the third question: 'Do you believe that Jesus Christ was a real person who died and came back to life, and was the son of God?' For a start, what does 'died and came back to life' mean? How does it differ from someone being revived in hospital? At best, it's an extremely crude statement. The truth is, the New Testament authors never came up with any consensus at all on what happened. Luke describes Jesus as eating a piece of fish after the resurrection, suggesting that he had a normal body. The same writer, however, makes Paul describe the appearance on the Damascus road as a 'vision', and visions aren't corporeal. However obsessive some sections of the church may have become about defining exactly what took place, I can only thing that Luke didn't care about the details. We don't know whether a body came back to life, or what. What we can say is that some of Jesus' followers became convinced that he'd risen - whatever that means - and that this belief sis still with us today.

Then there's the issue of what we mean by 'son of God', an entirely separate question. I think I'd have to answer with 'don't know'. It's a cock-up of a questionnaire which isn't going to produce any meaningful data.

Ministry

2011-03-17T20:53:00.000Z

Every time I hear terms like 'in ministry' or 'the ministry', I begin to fume. It's a conflation of ministry with ordained ministry, which may be traditional - from the days when everything revolved round the minister - but which can't be justified. As Paul points out, God calls people to different roles - or maybe he just calls them, and they work out the details for themselves. He doesn't seem to call quakers to ordained ministry, or Methodists to the papacy, and I suspect our choice of role, and the type of church community we create for ourselves, has some sort of influence somewhere.

So we have church cleaners, secretaries, treasurers, property stewards, church stewards, communion stewards, book stewards, circuit stewards, worship leaders, local preachers, and so on. Every denomination will have its own list, and we're always inventing new roles. So what are we doing allowing a small group of people - maybe half a percent or so of the total - to hive themselves off with the assumption that their specific form of ministry is somehow special or normative? They may or may not be thinking that, but it's what the language they use implies. We're all called to ministry, in the fullest possible sense of the word, and no role is superior, except, of course, that cleaners are a lot more useful and practical than preachers. All we do is stand up and woffle, yet we, along with the ordained, are the only ones supposed to have a 'call'.

God creates us all, God calls us all, God equips us all. We need to celebrate every ministry, not just one, with all the rest treated as afterthoughts.

Earthquakes

2011-03-12T15:06:00.000Z

I thought I'd post a bit of geology for once, after what's happened in Japan. The earth has evolved a fairly simple structure over the last few thousand million years since it formed; as you might expect the heavier stuff has sunk until it ended up in the middle, and the lighter has floated to the top. The core is made up of heavy metals in a molten state, mainly iron and nickel, with some radioactives. Essentially, it acts as a vast nuclear reactor, producing heat, and, as it's molten and presumably circulating, the Earth's magnetic field. This is vital as it protects us from cosmic rays which would otherwise sterilise the Earth's surface.

Above it is a thick layer of rock, the mantle. It's solid - we know that from the way it transmits earthquake waves - but over geological time, it flows. Convection currents carry heat from the core up to the top. Above it are patches of floating scum, made up of lighter material. We call these continents. Between them is the oceanic crust, essentially a thin layer of frozen mantle, with a lot of water on top of it.

The crust is carried along by the currents flowing in the mantle below it; in one place, material is rising, creating new crust - this is happening along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, for instance, with the ocean getting slightly, but measurably, wider each year - and at other places material is sinking, carrying oceanic crust down with it. Huge areas - plates - of crust grind against each other, producing the jolts we call earthquakes. Japan is at the meeting point of three of these plates, hence the inevitability of earthquakes there. San Francisco is built right on top of the joint between two plates which are moving in opposite directions. There are, as we all realise, plenty of other cities built over major, active, faults.

Original Sin

2011-03-08T18:33:00.001Z

I've already outlined the Western Church's concept of original sin, with its dreadful, and entirely logical, consequences. A newborn baby dying unbaptised goes to hell, and there's no salvation outside the church. So someone born into a Muslim community, however holy, is damned for being born in the wrong part of the world.

I don't come across people who really believe all this stuff, though many people still have an exclusive belief which is happy to damn anyone who believes differently from them, and it's not good enough to say that the church once believed it, or that the great Saint So-and-So wrote it, and therefore it's the proper orthodox belief. The church is the people, and if the people reject an idea, it isn't church doctrine. So what do we do with original sin?

Fortunately, there are different views available in the Fathers, who, of course, wrote at a time when ideas like this were taken Really Seriously. The Traducianists claimed that the guilt of original sin was inherited from Adam via our fathers, in the same way as eye colour or a hereditary disease. It wasn't, of course, inherited from our mothers, since they were believed to incubate the man's seed without adding anything of their own. So Jesus, allegedly born of a virgin, without a human father, was conveniently born without original sin. I don't see what we can do with this apart from consigning it to the theological dustbin.

Then there's creationism. No, not the fundamentalist pseudoscience, but its older namesake. This was the idea that each soul was created free of sin, but that it inevitably becomes polluted by sin. Some of the eastern Fathers; the Gregories, and Chrysostom, taught that newborn babies are without sin. We suffer the effects of Adam's sin, but without inheriting his guilt. Not only do we remain free from the guilt of Adam's sin, but in contrast to the Western Fathers, our will remains free. We can choose not to sin, and if we do so, the guilt is purely ours. It's not completely impossible for someone to remain without sin; Athanasius claimed that Jeremiah and John the Baptist did so. Compared with the Western Fathers, the Eastern are far more optimistic about the human condition. This, I think, is something that can be worked with. No longer are we struggling to reconcile some weird medieval idea with the modern world; rather, we have one that translates rather nicely.

Despite our debates about nature versus nurture, we assume these days that babies are born innocent, and this isn't incompatible with the Eastern Fathers. While we doubtless do have inborn sinful tendencies, nobody that I know of attributes all of them to nurture. There's plenty of evidence, for instance, that dysfunctional families produce dysfunctional children, and that sociopaths have often experienced deprivation or abuse as children. We're all affected to the core of our personalities by the experiences we go through, and we all experience the badness of human beings at a young age. I remember primary school, for instance, as being ruled by the law of the jungle.

It wasn't just the kids either. There was a scheme to put a dual carriageway through a few hundred yards away, and whole streets of houses along the proposed line of the road became empty and unsalable. When the plan was scrapped, they all went on the market togethe, and sole for next to nothing. Overnight, we had a flourishing multi-ethnic community around us. Overnight, the kids started referring to the newcomers as 'wogs'. Nobody ever said it was wrong to do so. Obviously, they got the term from their parents; the teachers didn't use it themselves, or not in public anyway. But their own racism was visible in the fact that they never had a word to say against it. That, not genetic inheritance, is how sin is passed from one generation to the next.

Obviously, modern Christianity is much more in tune with the Eastern than the Western Fathers on this point. We probably have John Wesley to thank for this. We tend to think of him as an evangelist and church builder, but he was much more than this. He taught Greek at Oxford at one time; it was his Lincoln fellowship which entitled him to preach in any parish in England. He was immensely widely read, and was influenced by the Eastern Fathers. Our belief that we have free will, and can thus choose to sin or not, goes back to Wesley's Arminian doctrine.

So we can throw out a good deal of bathwater, and retain the baby. Original sin isn't necessarily nonsense, and babies dying unbaptised (and how many of us accept that magical view of baptism anyway?) aren't necessarily damned. I suppose I'll have to tackle the Atonement next, and that's even more complicated, so it'll probably turn out to be a series of posts.

Extra ecclesiam nulla salus?

2011-03-07T10:15:00.000Z

Sorry about the Latin, but I couldn't resist it. Outside the church there is no salvation? It's traditional, and most traditional Christians, when pressed, would probably quote Johannine texts like John 14:6:

Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

The Fourth Gospel, of course, along with 1 John, is a somewhat sectarian text, and I don't doubt that the author intended this in an exclusive sense. It has been read as saying that anyone coming to God, through whatever faith, comes through Jesus whether they realise it or not. That's acontextual, but then so is most of our Bible usage. Perhaps more seriously, it patronises other faiths. However, I don't believe in approaching the Bible in a wooden, rigid way. Just because the author of the Fourth Gospel thought something, it doesn't make it true. We can't take that approach without suppressing the very real tensions and conflicts between different parts of the Biblical text, and that would be dishonest. There's also the problem that 'the church' has often become 'my church'. This is a doctrine with a history of feeding divisiveness, and that alone should start the alarm bells ringing.

The historical doctrine is intimately bound up with the concept of original sin. Doctrines didn't arise 'because the Bible says'; they formed a perfectly logical mosaic, which often owed little to the Bible. The Western church tradition held that Adam lived in a state of supernatural blessedness, from which he fell owing to pride, which led him to grasp at equality with God. He treated Satan as though he was God, fell into his power, and sin took posession of his flesh. I hardly need to point out that this idea is not to be found in Genesis! It's cobbled together from isolated texts through the Bible, many of them in Paul, and a good deal of imagination.

To get from this to original sin, we add the concept of radical human solidarity with Adam. It's worth quoting Ambrose: 'In Adam I fell, in Adam I was cast out of Paradise, in Adam I died'. Ambrosiaster, using an inaccurate translation of Romans 5:12, went further. 'It is therefore plain that all men sinned in Adam as in a lump. For Adam himself was corrupted by sin, and all whom he begat were born under sin. Thus we are all sinners from him, since we all derive from him.' Corruption is passed on through human generation, from father to son. It was believed that the woman incubated the man's seed, and contributed nothing of her own. She was thus irrelevant to the transmission of the taint. Thus the virgin birth achieves its historical importance; Jesus had no human father, and hence no original sin.

Augustine follows this tradition, and sees the baptismal liturgy, with its exorcisms and solemn renunciation of the devil as evidence of the sinfulness of infants. Baptism, to Augustine, is the sacrament which removes the guilt of original sin, without affecting its actuality; its power over our members. Thus, we continue to sin, but guilt is washed away, and the path to salvation opened to us. However, in our natural state, we have lost our liberty to do good, and without God's grace we can neither avoid evil nor do good.

It's only by baptism that the taint of original sin can be washed away, and baptism is the sacrament of initiation into the church, sometimes compared with the City of God, or the Ark adrift in the Flood. It's only by that initiation that we can hope for God's grace in salvation, hence outside the church there can be no salvation. It's logical enough, but how many modern Christians could actually agree with the above? I suggest very few!

In practice, these days we don't really believe that babies are born burdened with the guilt of Adam's sin, and we really wouldn't agree with Augustine's conclusion that a newborn baby dying unbaptised is infallibly damned. In his book, we're all heretics.

Likewise, whosoever says that those children who depart out of this life without partaking of that sacrament (Baptism) shall be made alive in Christ, certainly contradicts the apostolic declaration, and condemns the universal church, in which it is the practice to loose no time and run in haste to administer baptism to infant children, because it is believed, as an indubitable truth, that otherwise they cannot be made alive, must necessarily remain under the condemnation, of which the apostle says, " by the offence of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation."

Letter 166.7.21, to St. Jerome.

But if we don't inherit Adam's guilt - which isn't to say that I think we can't make any sense out of original sin - then the other assumptions linked with it fall flat. We're no longer in desperate need of baptism to rescue us from damnation, and very few of us would understand it in that sort of magical sense anyway. So there seems to be no reason why God's grace should be confined to those who have been initiated into the church.

My wife is a devout Muslim; it's not a problem to us, though it sometimes is to other people. Usually, they seem to be the dogmatic type, to whom religious rules are more important than human beings. After fifteen year of daily exposure to Islam, it's only too clear that we're in agreement on vast areas of faith, and even follow similar practices at times. We pray in similar ways, with both formal and informal prayers. We worship the same God, and both understand him as a benevolent deity who makes very much the same moral demands on our behaviour. We ive in ways that aren't so very different. Obviously, there are specific areas where we differ.

Muslims believe that Jesus was a very great prophet, the bearer of the Gospel, which, along with the Law and the Psalms, is true scripture. They recognise the same prophets as we do. They tell very similar stories about the Patriarchs, with specific differences. They believe in the resurrection of the dead, and the last judgment. Their understanding of Jesus is obviously different, they don't believe in the Trinity (I wonder how many Christians have ever made a serious attempt to understand it, though!), and they believe that Jesus escaped death on the cross.

I find it impossible to believe in a good God who, when all's said and done, accepts or rejects us according to what doctrines we believe and what rituals we've undergone. I don't see that deity in the Bible either. I can see no reason to suppose that God won't accept a Christian, Muslim, Jew or whatever. If we're going to believe in a loving, compassionate God, let's be consistent about it!

Singing the Faith

2011-03-02T21:53:00.000Z

I've just been at the Local Preachers' Meeting, where we were discussing the new Methodist hymn book which is coming out next year. A small sampler has been distributed, with a full index and a small selection of hymns.

When I first became a Methodist, in 1982, they were still using the Methodist Hymn Book, published in 1933, just after Methodist Union. I always felt it was dreadful; lots of saccharine Victorian sentimentality, and unremitting individualism. Hymns and Psalms, published in 1983, is better. It's got a scattering of more modern hymns, some of which are pleasantly aware that we're part of a wider community, but it's still rather traditional. At my church we supplement it with Mission Praise. This is all right as a collection of hymns, but it's all me and my Jesus, and wouldn't do on its own. Every edition seems to have different numbering as well, which makes things difficult. It's not as bad as the old Pentecostal one, Redemption Hymnal, which is so narrow in its scope that it doesn't have enough hymns for a Christmas service. I gather they have to be extra careful devising an official Methodist hymnbook, since our foundational documents state that the doctrines of Methodism are to be found therein. I'm not exactly sure what those doctrines are, but it's obviously no good having a book which leaves a bunch of them out!

I'm no good with hymns, and I'm finding it hard to assess the new one. I'm told it's more eclectic, with hymns from round the world, both old and new. Given the multicultural nature of my church - with members from three continents - that can't be bad. I'd be very surprised if we don't have a set at my church by the end of next year, so I'll be able to say more then.

Democracy

2011-01-23T13:14:00.001Z

We've got an issue at church about some of the men using a drop-in on Mondays leaving a mess in the toilet. Their response was to put up a notice telling men to use the other toilets on the far side of the building. All very well, but it's the only disabled toilet in the building, and it would be grossly embarassing for any man to use a toilet with a notice asking men to go elsewhere!

I feel there are other solutions, and I think it'll get sorted out before long. But meanwhile, we had a meeting about it after church, and I got shouted at for saying they can't do anything which would effectively ban men from that toilet. That's democracy for you, it's messy and noisy, but everyone does get listened to, and we do get there in the end.

2010-11-02T15:32:00.000Z

I haven't posted for a while, as I've been quite unwell, and it makes it hard to sit down and write anything. The only news is that I've been elected a Circuit Steward, much to the disgust of a few people at the meeting. That gets me involved with running a group of fifteen Methodist churches, none of which, apart from mine, is in anything like a healthy state. Two of them are on the point of collapse, due at least in part to insecure, domineering leadership which refuses to accept new members. What on earth are we doing, tolerating situations where churches wilfully abandon their mission and commit suicide, purely because someone's afraid that new people might upset their little empire? It's horribly common; a couple of churches went that way in my last circuit in Cornwall.

I've got involved in a debate with someone on Facebook who thinks we shouldn't be arguing about religion publicly in front of atheists. My view on this is that any debate is worthwhile; we've always got something we can learn from someone else's point of view. I've no time for the way fundamentalists use the Bible, but I wish liberals would develop the same ability to put their ideas across!

Why do people expect churches to be run to suit themselves?

2010-09-16T12:29:00.000+01:00

We had Church Council the other night. One very persistent member, yet again, came up with her bright idea of having an earlier service; she'd like it to be at ten rather than eleven. She likes getting up in the morning. The only person supporting it is her friend; two elderly white ladies in a mostly black church, with a long record of deafness towards everyone but themselves. Unfortunately, church people don't like saying 'no'; it's not considered acceptable to be awkward or get into conflicts, and most people are extremely passive. They accept whatever the leadership says, vote the way they're told, and leave if they don't like it. In some churches, it's considered morally wrong to oppose the leadership. So the ball's landed in my court; we agreed to have a discussion on Sunday. The only other assertive member we have is in Jamaica, where she's preparing to retire.

Looking round, the overwhelming majority of churches in the West Midlands have an 11 o'clock service. They do so because it's been found to be the most acceptable compromise. There are three churches in our circuit which have an earlier service; all three have been haemorrhaging members for the twenty-odd years I've been in Birmingham. One is on the point of collapse, one is in serious trouble, and the other is just about managing on the back of the fact that it started out with a large membership. We're the great exception; we've got twice the membership we had twenty years ago. We have to be getting something right, yet we're being asked to jeopardise it, when we already have people who struggle to get there for eleven.

Everything I've seen, in Cornwall as well as Birmingham, tells me that this is a common pattern. Persistent individuals find it easy to get into office, since churches, like all voluntary groups, are always short of people to do jobs. Then they use that to get their own way. People may not like what they're doing, but they don't like to be awkward. They start to drift away; other people who might have become members go somewhere else. The church is on the slippery slope, and it's the devil's own job to get off it again.

Yet the church isn't here for the benefit of its leaders; it isn't even here for that of its members. It's a community which is called into being to carry out a mission; to spread the Good News, however we're going to interpret that. As Archbishop Temple said, it's the only organisation which exists for the benefit of those who are not yet its members. I'd put it differently; we're here for the benefit of those who will never be our members, but may yet come to find God in other ways, if they haven't done so already. One of the community groups which uses the premises on a regular basis includes a large proportion of Muslims, but we don't have an issue with that.

So why is it that, so often, the church loses sight of its mission, allows a minority to arrange things for their own benefit, and fades away rather than face up to the fact that it's become dysfunctional?

We had a comparable situation some years ago; a minister with nothing in common with us, and a bad case of glue ear, tried to get us to sell some land we lease to the National Childrens’ Homes. It’s on a 99-year lease, with a stupid clause written into the contract to say the rent can only be re-assessed every 33 years. Unfortunately, that’s where the Methodist Church was in the 1960’s; I’ve heard even worse stories. They’d had it on a peppercorn rent for many years, and the rent was due to be reassessed in 2001. We were on the receiving end of an attempt to pressurise us into selling the lease for a ‘generous’ fourteen thousand, while being denied professional advice. The leadership we had then had a long-standing policy of never saying no to a minister; this is the traditional way of getting power in Methodism. You get in the minister’s clique, and they nominate you to office. Our beloved minister brought this up in every Church council for two years, bringing everything else to a grinding halt, while everyone sat there in embarrassed silence. In the end, nobody could take any more. We got proper advice ourselves, and were told not to touch it with a bargepole. Our minister then tried to get Circuit Meeting to send it back to us again. I stopped it by jumping up and protesting, and gave everyone such a shock (nobody had done such a thing before) that we never heard another word. We’re now getting seven thousand a year for the lease, and until inflation starts up again, we’re one of the very few financially secure Methodist churches around.

We’ve discussed this idea of changing the time of the service twice in Church Council, and both times, everyone except me has sat there in silence. It’s got the same feel to it; it’s obvious nobody wants it, but those to whom the Spirit is speaking have no ears. We’ll have another discussion after the service on Sunday, and hopefully that’ll be the end of it. I suspect they won’t give up; they never do. But we can’t make the mistake of so many churches, start doing things to suit one or two people, and end up fading away like a Cheshire cat.

2010-09-02T00:21:00.000+01:00

There seems to be no end to the problems some people out there want to make for my church. Not only do we have one person who's been coming taking services and refusing to speak to the duty steward, who's responsible for the smooth running of the service, but her husband, a prominent official in the Circuit, does his best to stop paperwork going to the stewards as well, even when it's addressed to us. It always goes to their friend in the congregation. At the Circuit Meeting, material intended for my church is segregated, and rushed to this person as soon as she makes an appearance, in order to stop me getting hold of it.

Last week I had yet another letter addressed to 'the Senior Steward' (we don't appoint one, as it leads to one steward being singled out, and it's not an official office, but it's effectively me) passed on to me by someone else, with a note telling me what to do with it. This time I've made a complaint, and I'm meeting with our minister tomorrow to discuss how to handle the situation. I've been at my church since 1987, and in all that time, none of our stewards have been accorded proper recognition unless they were in a very small, exclusive clique. Our current minister is the first who's really accepted the people we choose to elect.

This goes on everywhere in the Methodist Church, perhaps not quite as blatantly as this, but it's there all the same. Back in the 1980's, there were complaints about black stewards not being recognised, but that was only one aspect of the problem. It's no wonder Methodist membership is declining! You try to run a church democratically and inclusively, and all these people can do is make endless obsessive attempts to undermine you and put themselves in control. The fact that they have no support outside their own little circle has nothing to do with it as far as they're concerned.

How not to be the Church

2010-08-05T13:42:00.001+01:00

I’m suffering from daily headaches at the moment, and it’s making it really hard to write anything. But never mind, this is an issue that’s been worrying me for many years.
I’ve been a member of the Methodist Church for twenty-eight years now, since 1982. I’ve been in two very different churches; one in a village in Cornwall, in a rural circuit where every church was slowly collapsing due to a combination of declining membership and inappropriate buildings, and one in central Birmingham. The first was all white, the second eighty percent black, with members from three continents. My current circuit is urban, multicultural, and some churches, at least, have modern buildings which are more or less appropriate to their needs. Others are being brought to their knees by the cost of maintaining dilapidated Victorian barns. I should know; I’ve been responsible for the property in both the churches where I’ve been a member. You’d have thought the problems in the two circuits would have been very different, but no. They’re almost identical.

Firstly, buildings. I’ll never forget one church I used to preach at in Cornwall. When it was built, at the end of Victoria’s reign, there was, apparently, a village there. The church would seat about 100 comfortably. When I started preaching, in the mid-1980’s, the village had disappeared without trace, the walls were streaked with green mould, and part of the ceiling had collapsed. The congregation was about half a dozen, which came out from St. Austell, a few miles away. Another, in a slightly better state, served a village that had long disappeared under a mountain of china clay waste. One in the town itself had been built for 750 people, and I used to get a congregation of three or four, including the organist.

In my present circuit we have one church which has a huge, cathedral-like building, with an extensive range of rooms which include a large hall in which they now meet. The congregation is about fifteen to twenty. I always feel there’s some life there, but it’s slowly being stifled by a derelict building they don’t seem, finally, to be able to get rid of. Other churches are also struggling with buildings they don’t need. In many cases they could sell, buy a large house nearby, convert the ground floor into a church, and upstairs into flats. The rents would go a long way towards maintaining the church.

Another, associated, problem is poor to suicidal leadership. As long as I’ve been in the Methodist Church, I’ve seen a slow trickle of people leaving because they’re marginalized, ignored, their ideas aren’t wanted. In the worst cases, they go due to outright bullying and rudeness. In some cases the behavior I’ve come across has been truly abominable. Only last year, I had to deal with a case of libelous letters being sent, falsely accusing a builder’s workmen of theft. The firm had been contracted by the Church Council to do work which the writers hadn’t wanted, and this was their way of hitting back. Clearly, the people responsible are no longer running that church. But they make it blindingly obvious that they think they ought to be.

On many occasions, I’ve seen good people elected to office, then not recognized. In the 1980’s, there were complaints about black church stewards being used as tokens, without being allowed to do the job. It goes deeper than that; it happens to white people as well. It happened to me. When I was in Cornwall, the Senior Steward at my church retired, then carried straight on doing the job exactly as before, ignoring their successor. Officially, there’s no such office as Senior Steward, but it’s always been more convenient for ministers to have to talk to one person rather than all the stewards, and for anyone wanting power, this is always the one to go for. Then they can exclude all the other stewards. In my present church, I was a steward for years before anyone asked my opinion of anything. Eventually, once again, the Senior Steward retired.

I was already in a situation where I had taken on responsibility for the property, but someone else, who has never been a Property Steward, and shows no understanding of what’s involved, thought she should be in charge. So I was being undermined and pressurised in the expectation that I’d eventually give in as my predecessor had. Then the woman we’d appointed as the new Senior Steward gave up and left, after a similar experience. She was a perfectly good steward, of many years’ standing, who could be trusted to listen to the rest of us. The trouble was, she wasn’t the strongest character, and she listened to the wrong people.

Fortunately, we had a couple of strong characters in the church who were already stewards, and with support from the minister, we’ve – hopefully – been able to get to a situation where people appointed to do jobs actually get to do them. We still get undermined though, and still have situations like the woman who comes occasionally taking services, and refuses to speak to the duty steward. She’ll only work with her friend the former steward, and we haven’t really tackled that one yet.

This is why the Six Year Rule, which says that stewards, who are officially responsible for ‘providing leadership’, have to step down after six years, doesn’t work. By the time it gets to that point, the person in control has probably been bullying everyone else for years, and anyone who might stand up to them has left. On the rare occasions when a minister insists on applying it, they carry straight on pulling strings, then force their way back in as soon as that minister leaves. Problem people in a church can only be dealt with effectively by laypeople who are there for the long haul, and are prepared to stand up for themselves over many years if necessary.

The root of many of our problems has probably been the ordained ministry. Ministers come and go. The norm at present is that they come for an initial five years, which can be extended. If things don’t work out, they can be moved on, but this is rare and difficult; normally you just have to endure them. Some are brilliant, some appalling, but very few look beyond their few years in that church. The result is that we suffer from short-termism, and systemic problems are rarely even considered. I’ve been in my current circuit since 1987; over that time, we’ve lost a large number of members. In all that time, there has never been any discussion about the problems. In many cases, the same people who were running things when I arrived are still there now. At last, we’ve scheduled an extra Circuit Meeting, where it will be on the agenda, but this came from laypeople not ministers.

Where ministers attempt to provide leadership, and there are still plenty out there trying to operate on a minister-led model, they routinely fail. We had one who wanted to turn us all into charismatics, another who bullied and upset everyone. They arrive, not knowing the people, with little real information about the church, and try to take charge when they’re actually less qualified to do so that anyone else. This can only lead to problems, and sometimes it creates mayhem. One church in the circuit was disastrously split by a minister who openly tried to elbow aside everyone but fundamentalist charismatics, and almost twenty years after he retired, that church still has serious problems. His successor had a similar attitude, surrounded himself with yes-people, and pushed them into office long before they were ready. On one notorious occasion, he nominated someone for a note to preach, the beginning of the training system for lay preachers, a fortnight after he had become a Christian. The better ministers listen, and try to encourage the good things they find going on in a church. But then they move on, and we never know what we’re going to be landed with next. When there are major problems, they can offer little help.

Lacking information, sometimes with their heads full of stereotypes of what they think the church ought to be, they’re vulnerable to manipulation. Power in the Methodist Church has traditionally come via a sort of devil’s bargain between ministers and their yes-people. Anyone eager for position and power would gather round the minister, agreeing to anything they said, in the hope of being ‘nominated’ for office. In return, the minister supported the office-holders, and ensured that they should rule the roost – which is probably the main thing they wanted – unchallenged.

I think the practice of ‘nominating’ people to office is one of the worst aspects of Methodist tradition. Decisions of all sorts are taken by little in-groups, and then rubber-stamped by the meeting. This happens at every level; it has been many years since Conference last voted against the platform, for instance. Appointments are made by putting a ‘name’ to the meeting, which is then traditionally accepted without question or discussion. The result is a network of little power cliques, controlling everything, along with their ministerial allies, and having a veto over the appointment of anyone except themselves and their friends, and managing to ignore everyone else. That’s what leads to the situation I mentioned, where someone comes to my church imagining themselves too good to have to speak to the person responsible for the smooth running of the service. It’s an appallingly corrupt system, and if we want to rebuild the church, it has to go.

Fortunately, some aspects of it are dying by inches. When I was in Cornwall, I was regularly accused of being ‘disrespectful’ to a minister who I addressed, and referred to, as ‘Tom’ not ‘Reverend So-and-so’. I arrived in Birmingham to find that practice was long gone, but the slightest criticism of any minister was instantly met by patronising speeches about how ‘special’ they were. That stopped by the end of the 90’s.

When I came here, there were three Circuits, and six ministers in mine alone; I think there were a total of five in the other two. The three are now amalgamated into a single Circuit, with three ministers. The result is, of course, that a lot more is done by laypeople. I believe we are the first Circuit in the country to have appointed lay ministers, who are not ordained, but who do everything ministers do apart from weddings. There’s no block to their doing that, but they’d have to be officially appointed for a particular church, and it hasn’t happened yet.

It hasn’t really made much difference to my church, as we’ve always done everything ourselves. Originally this was down to weak ministers and a domineering leadership clique, these days it’s because we really do believe in inclusiveness and democracy, and our current minister supports us in this. The only thing we really rely on her for is a bit of support now and then, and decisions are regularly taken over coffee after the service, with everyone participating. We’ve recently given jobs to two ladies on the fringes of the church; a new member has taken responsibility for cleaning the church, while our latest trainee worship leader hasn’t got as far as membership yet. Time will tell whether I’m right in thinking this is a way of bringing new people in. Things can be done differently; it only takes the will!

Luke and Money

2010-07-20T13:10:00.001+01:00

One of the problems I see with the way the church uses the Bible is that it completely submerges the differences between the Biblical authors. Luke says something we want to hear, and maybe John says something roughly similar, but Matthew, let’s say, says something different. Instead of looking seriously at what Matthew says, we ignore him, and claim that ‘the Bible says’ the bit we like.

But let’s forget that, and look at Luke and money. We’ll start with Luke 18:18-27, the story of the Rich Young Ruler. Luke, of course, is adapting and expanding Mark, and follows him closely; the extent of the verbal agreement between the two is evidence that he’s using Mark as a source rather than writing an independent account. He changes Mark’s ‘one’ to ‘a certain ruler’.

Throughout his Gospel he makes a distinction between the people, who are responsive to Jesus, and the rulers, who are opposed. So we need not expect this man to become a disciple.

He’s obviously an observant Jew, who keeps the Law, and seems eager to follow Jesus. The stumbling block, of course, is the requirement that he sell everything he has, and give to the poor. This is radical stuff indeed, and the church doesn’t like it. How often do we hear a sermon telling us to take it at face value?

My interest in this began about twenty years ago, when I studied New Testament under the late Prof. Michael Goulder, who died last January. Lukan radicalism was one of the themes he covered, and there’s a chapter on it in his introduction to the New Testament, ‘A Tale of Two Missions’.

Then I found that John Wesley was another man with radical views in this area. I may do a post on this later, as it’s worth looking at in detail. Basically, his view was that money belonged to God, and if we spent more than the necessary minimum on ourselves, rather than giving it away, we were effectively stealing from God. As a young man he found he could live on twenty-eight pounds a year. There was no inflation at the time, and he continued to live on this throughout his life. Everything else - and by the end of his life he had over a thousand a year, a great deal in those days – went into his ministry. Much of it went on books which he distributed free. At the end of his life, he preached a sermon in which he said that the revival, as we'd call it today, had failed because Methodists had become too 'comfortable', meaning too rich, and weren't giving properly. If only everyone involved in what’s called ‘ministry’ followed his example today!

So we come back to the Rich Young Man. The theme is dealt with not only in his Gospel, but also in Mark and Matthew. Outside the New Testament, Origen records another version from the Gospel of the Nazoreans. Clearly, whatever was meant, the story had wide circulation, and was felt to be important. But here we’re concerned with Luke.

He and Matthew both follow Mark in saying that it’s easier for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye and for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. Here the preacher pricks his ears up, and of course they all go on to say that ‘all things are possible with God’. So, they tell us, if you’re rich, you can keep your money and get in after all. Luke, however, gives us examples of what he really means.

The most obvious is the story of Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10; it’s not found anywhere else). He’s a chief tax collector, and an object of well-deserved loathing. Telones, translated as ‘tax collectors’ we men who purchased the right to collect tax. They would pay them money up front – and therefore had to be seriously rich – and took it back by whatever means they could, along with their profits. It was a system established by the Greeks, and taken over by the Romans.

When the latter took control of the Levant in 57 BC, the general and politician Gabinius set up sanhedrins thoughout Palestine, and made them responsible for tax collection. Julius Caesar abolished this after a few years, and made the Ethnarch (Ruler of the People) Hyrcanus II responsible for tax collection in his territory. He, of course, passed large sums on to Rome, but as long as the money was paid to Jews, it doesn’t seem to have raised the same degree of protest.

Herod I used his own officials for tax collection. Rome eventually imposed direct rule over Judea and Samaria (6 AD), and re-introduced their own tax collectors, while Galilee and Peraea, on the East Bank, were the responsibility of Herod Antipas. Doubtless all these people used very much the same system. So tax collectors weren’t necessarily working for the Romans; it depended on where they were. Zacchaeus, operating in Jericho, was in Judea, and therefore paid his money to Rome. Both the Gospels and the Rabbis testify to just how unpopular tax collectors were.

At the bottom of the tree would have been bully-boys who may well have acted like modern bailiffs, taking whatever was of value, and not being at all scrupulous about how much they took over and above what was owed. They would have passed the money on to their bosses. As a chief tax-collector, Zacchaeus was well up in the pile, and as Luke says, he would have been rich. However, he’s falling over himself to see Jesus, and even risks the wrath of the crowd to do so. He promises to give half his money to the poor, and to repay everyone who’s been ripped off four times over, way beyond what the Law requires. Jesus himself declares that he’s now OK with God, but has he got any money left? I rather doubt it.

Then there are the women who finance Jesus’ mission (Luke 8:1-3) If they’re funding everyone with him, they’re being generous, at least. As soon as the church comes into being, we find that the group holds everything in common, with nobody claiming ownership of anything (Acts 4:33-37). Those who have property sell up, and Barnabas gives a shining example by selling his land; the term is ambiguous, and of much wider meaning than the common translation ‘field’. The result is that there isn’t a needy person to be found among them. Later on in Acts, Paul’s churches contribute enthusiastically to his collection for the mother church in Jerusalem, just as diaspora Jews contributed to the Temple. It sounds suspiciously like a primitive version of the much maligned Communism, but this is the Word of God and all that, so it can’t possibly be wrong, can it?

Luke, of course, gives us the other side of the picture as well. The rich young ruler goes away sad, because he’s extremely wealthy, and he doesn’t want to give it all up. The fellow in the story of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19-31; again, the story isn’t found anywhere else) doesn’t want to give any of it up either. Lazarus is lying at his gate with the dogs licking his sores, and this Scrooge does nothing to help, but dresses up in his finery, and eats like a glutton. Neither character actually does anything, yet Lazarus, who has suffered in this life ends up in the bosom of Father Abraham, while the rich man, having had his pleasure, goes somewhere nasty. His five brothers, who we may presume are also rich, are headed for the same place, and even someone rising from the dead (ie Jesus himself) would be unable to do anything about it.

Then there’s the awful example of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-11). They lie to the church, and thus to the Holy Spirit, hang on to some of their money, and are struck dead on the spot. All in all, Luke doesn’t have a single good word to say about anyone who keeps their money, and gives plenty of examples of people who give it away. The church can duck and dive all it wants, and as Goulder says, a preacher who tells his congregation to give it all away this week may not have one next week. However, it seems it was not always thus. Luke must have had an audience, or his writings would never have come to regarded as holy writ.

2010-07-19T20:58:00.000+01:00

I’ve decided to start this blog out of frustration about two things. Firstly, over many years, I’ve been watching the Methodist Church here in the UK declining. I’ve heard several simplistic pseudo-explanations of this; we’re not evangelical enough, not charismatic enough, etc. I don’t happen to believe in a God who only accepts people who worship in a specific, ‘spirit-filled’ style, or people who believe a specific list of doctrines. For that matter, I don’t read about any such deity in the Bible. Meanwhile, Methodist leadership at every level persists in producing no answers. If we’re not careful, we’re going to fade away like the Cheshire cat, without its talent for reappearing.

Meanwhile, over twenty-odd years, I’ve seen a trickle of people leaving for an obvious, identifiable reason. Poor leadership combined with cliquishness. I’ve been in that situation myself; I joined a church, and found the leadership, such as it was, to be exclusive and patronizing. Nobody else’s ideas were wanted; nobody else was capable of doing anything. Everyone else was marginalized and put down, in the interests of their pathetic little smidgeon of petty power.

I’ve seen exactly the same thing happening in two circuits, in two Districts, in Cornwall and Birmingham. I don’t believe it’s down to individuals, I think it’s endemic; there’s something in our Methodist structures which fosters bad leadership, and opens the way for those who want to use God’s church for their wretched ego trips. Not all leadership is like that, of course, but too much is. More than enough to do massive damage over time.

Taken to extremes, we have the case of the church which no longer accepts new members. I saw two churches close because of this in Cornwall, and there are a couple in my current circuit. In Cornwall, I was able to find out exactly how it happened. In both cases, some little so-and-so had been Senior Steward for twenty-odd years. In theory, we have a thing called the ‘six-year rule’ which stops you being a Church Steward for more than six years; in addition, the common position of Senior Steward has no official existence. However, the rules are unworkable. I’ll explain why in a future post.

Both these characters, men I got to know a little as I went round the circuit preaching, were deeply insecure. The church gave them the only status they had, and at bottom, they were afraid. New members might upset their power trips, and so, out of insecurity, they destroyed those churches. Anyone who might stand up to them was bullied until they left, and the remaining members just gave in. Ministers did nothing, despite our suicidal tradition of looking to ministerial leadership. They come to a station for a limited period, initially five years, and very few of them look beyond those five years. If we want to build the church, we need leaders who look to the long term, and are concerned with the good of the church community, not their own needs. That can only come from the laypeople, and we have to devise structures which will encourage the right people to come forward, not the wrong ones.

My other frustration is easier to explain. The internet is full of conservative Christianity, as are religious bookshops. Liberal scholarship is there, but there are very few liberals making any serious attempt to put their views across at a popular level. Why not? Where, for instance, are the popular liberal commentaries we need to counter the fundamentalists?

Sometimes you hear triumphalist conservatives proclaiming that it’s impossible to preach liberal ideas. I’ve been doing it for twenty years, and I decline to believe them. It can be preached perfectly well, but it’s harder work, as you can’t just follow the thousands who’ve preached on the same thing before you. You have to plough your own furrow, and inevitably, you make mistakes. I know I do.

Back in the 1980’s, David Jenkins, a man I greatly admire, had a go when he was Bishop of Durham. He was consigned to what’s euphemistically called ‘a lost eternity’ in God’s imagined torture chamber, and pilloried in the popular press as an ‘unbelieving’ radical bishop, the sort who were supposedly destroying the church. In fact, he was far more conservative than me, and he never said anything that hadn’t been common currency in theological colleges since the middle of the 19th Century. So how come it wasn’t familiar to ordinary Christians? There’s no excuse, and perhaps I can make some sort of progress with this blog. Doubtless there are others out there doing the same thing, and I hope to find them!