Worship Wars

There's some real wisdom here from Michael Spencer, with a follow-up here. The thing that jumps out at me is just how similar, and yet dissimilar, this is to the situation I'm familiar with. In British Methodism, the challenge is to include younger people; to find ways of making the church attractive to those who aren't living in a former age, like the perplexed octogenarian who once asked me why something which worked when she was in Sunday School wouldn't work now. Like Michael, I'm convinced that a healthy church makes room for all ages, in worship and elsewhere.

I've also been told that if I didn't like the way a church did things, or I didn't agree with the leadership, I should go elsewhere. I've even been told that in a Methodist church, and we're suposed to be broad-minded. I couldn't disagree more strongly with that approach, and I can't see it as being remotely consistent with what we read in the Gospels about the first being last, etc. Leaders who think everyone has to agree with them are unfit to lead. Far too many people fall for this nonsense; often, the most valuable people in a church are the ones who see things are going wrong, and stick it out until they can put things right.

God continued

The problem of talking about an infinite being in terms comprehensible to finite beings like myself remains. We're very good at imposing our own categories on God, seeing himself as a projection of something in ourselves, and I've long found it impossible to avoid the impression that all these people who seem so sure about what God is are doing exactly that.

There was a time, some centuries ago, when people must have felt completely powerless. Life was poor, nasty, brutish and short. God decided when and where we were going to be born, to die, and all the bits in between. Most people were subsistence farmers, living from hand to mouth; there were regular famines and outbreaks of disease; now and then God might get a bit upset and zap the sinners (and everyone else for miles) with plague or whirlwinds or something equally nasty. Even when we died, God would be sitting there with his little lists. Made before creation, one named those who were predestined to heaven, the other those predestined to hell. But if your name was on the second, it wasn't anything to do with God. Don't blame him; it was your own fault for sinning.

It's not an attractive picture of God, but in an age before bacteria or viruses were invented, when eating during the early spring depended on a good harvest the year before, something of the sort was probably inevitable. There had to be some explanation of it all - European culture has a bit of an obsession with lining everything up, making it all consistent, and explaining it -  and an arbitrary, all-powerful deity supplied it.

Slowly, things moved on. The 18th Century saw the introduction of new agricultural techniques which increased the food supply; by the following century, better ships and the growth of empire enabled the import of large quantities of grain. People driven off the land fed the army, navy and the factories; wealth flowed in from slavery and colonial exploitation. As the cities grew, the introduction of piped drinking water and sewers slashed the child mortality rate, and the population exploded. People began to feel more powerful, more in control of their environment, and this impacted their understanding of God.

At the same time, the old Calvinism was crumbling. Wesley's Methodism popularised Arminianism, the idea that God gives us free choice in salvation, if not much else. In the same period when Samuel Wedgewood issued his anti-slavery medallion with the inscription 'Am I not a man and a brother?', moving on from seeing black people as the descendents of Ham, predestined to servitude, the Methodists proclaimed that anyone could be saved, not just those on the right little list. In the face of increasing exploitation and social dislocation, and the beginnings of 'scientific racism', which declared that black people were little better than the great apes, some people, at least, began to value our humanity a little higher than before.

At the same time, God shrank a little. Salvation still depended on his grace, but it was our choice to accept it or reject it. The language of omnipotence was retained, with little thought given to the fact that there was now a hole in that divine potency; something had been ceded to mere humanity. It worked, for that society, at that time, when everybody was familiar with the Christian story, and virtually everyone believed it. The problem wasn't lack of belief, but theologies which no longer worked, combined with an enormous social upheaval, and a church which was failing to adapt to the changes. When John Wesley and his friends went out to preach to the Kingswood miners, they weren't preaching to atheists or pagans. The audience was made up of Christians who found themselves cut off from the church.

Since then, of course, the world has changed again, and, if declining church attendance is anything to go by, our discourse about God is failing to strike much of a chord in our potential audience. The big problem I see is that the world has got bigger. In Wesley's day, the idea that we all had the freedom within God's grace to respond - or not - to the Gospel was a reasonable one, since it could safely be assumed that everyone would come into contact with the message. That no longer holds true.

To take an extreme case, an illiterate villager in some remote part of Saudi Arabia - where over 20% of the population is illiterate - is extremely unlikely ever to come into contact with Christianity. So what chance do they have to 'choose' salvation? Similarly,  what of a child growing up in Britain, in a family with no contact with the church? We can no longer pretend that everyone has the opportunity to accept the Gospel, so what we have, in effect, is predestination by the back door. If God gives a child to a devout Christian family, then, in a classic Arminian theology, they have every hope of heaven. If he gives that child to a devout Muslim family in an Arabian backwater, then it's almost inevitable that they're 'going to hell'. That God is no more just than the Calvinist deity with his little lists. We need to rethink.

What about God?

Tony Jones has issued a challenge to progressive bloggers to do a post about God. He thinks, perhaps rightly, that progressives/liberals/call them what you will don't talk about him much compared to evangelicals.

I'm sure he's right, but the trouble is, some conservatives know - or think they know - altogether too much about God. He wants this, he rejects that - usually some people the conservatives don't approve of, like publicans and sinners in ancient Judea - he can't do this and he can't do that. The latter really worries me. How can you use the word 'can't' of omnipotence? Surely the word implies that God can do anything he likes, even turn lead into gold or tell the tide to go back out when it's only halfway in. If he doesn't do things like that, maybe we be should be asking some awkward questions, which won't be settled by your favourite prooftext. I've even heard a preacher say that God 'always' wants to heal, and if he doesn't it's probably your fault for not having enough faith. I'll hold my nose and pass by that one as fast as I can before I write a naughty word. Not many of them manage to plumb such depths.

What we 'know' about God is mostly what tradition tells us, and we think we read out of the Bible. That's one of the big problems with a conservative approach to the text; you can make the Bible say anything, if you just find the right prooftext. It never seems to say anything they don't want to hear. We all 'know' God is immanent, which is a big word meaning he's with us. In our hearts, in a favourite conservative term. He's also transcendent, an equally big word meaning he's out there. Somehow, we have to square the circle and make him both at once, since that's what tradition says, and sure enough, there are well-known prooftexts for both. At one and the same time, he's sitting on his throne somewhere up in the third heaven, and he's also in our hearts. Tradition, of course, also says he's omnipresent, which is a nice way out of that one. He's everywhere, all at once.

He's clearly not one of us, whatever he is. Allegedly, he's both one and three at the same time, which we clearly aren't. I'm not going to get into that one; last week I was accused of heresy for (supposedly) denying the Trinity, and once a month is enough for that sort of thing. And he's the Creator, which means he's not a created being. In some way, he has to be utterly different from us.

We however, subsist within creation; we can't imagine anything outside it. That implies that whatever we think about God, it's likely to be wrong. Language is a created thing; it can't describe God any more than the finite can comprehend the infinite. Maybe that's why liberals (I prefer the term to 'progessive'; people think they know what it means) don't write so much about God. We're not so confident about our prescriptions; it's more a case of 'O let us never, never doubt, what nobody is sure about'. That's Hilaire Belloc, by the way. A great writer of doggerel, even if he was a fascist. The one thing we can say for definite about God is that he's like nothing we can possibly imagine. That's a lot less comfortable than anything you hear from conservatives!

Reading Genesis literally?

Jim McGrath brings up a point I hadn't thought of. In Genesis, Adam and Eve are literally 'one flesh'. They're one individual who's been cut in two to make a sort of prototypical human community. In Mark 10, Jesus is made to say that a man will leave his parents, be united to the wife, and they will become 'one flesh'. The passage has to be metaphorical, since Adam and Eve start as one, and become two, while any other couple start as two and (hopefully!) become one. So the use of the story in Mark is rather more sophisticated than you normally get from the sort of fundamentalist preacher who I remember banging on about 'leaving and cleaving'.

Stories of Salvation

It's about time I stopped neglecting this blog! I've added a pretty picture showing one of many reconstructions of Solomon's temple, which I freely admit to having nicked. It's meaningless, but conventional.

When the New Testament sets out to tell us about salvation, it doesn't give us a nice neat doctrinal package with all the ribbons nicely tied, or even tell us to go through a ceremony, like going to the front at the end of a service and saying a ritual 'sinner's prayer'. It tells us a story. Behind that, however, lurk other stories, half seen, like the fossilised remains of our simian ancestors.

The one we all know about is, of course, Paul's comparison of Jesus with Adam. Adam was the first man, and he messed up. He sinned and, to borrow a Pauline phrase, fell short of the glory of God. Humanity was kicked out of the garden, and somehow (Paul doesn't explain how, though the church later devoted many gallons of ink, and, no doubt, cubic kilometres of hot air, to trying to explain it), we all managed to sin in Adam. So we're all polluted. Then Jesus came along, the Second Adam, and did a rather better job. He didn't sin. For his fidelity, God raised him up and exalted him, making him, as it were, his viceroy over creation, set above all created things.

Of course, we don't hear much about the latter bit. It isn't exactly the Doctrine of the Trinity as set out in the Nicene Creed, modified by the Council of Chalcedon, and modified again by the Western Church a few centuries later. You can't expect the poor guy to proclaim doctrines invented long after his death.

But I don't think this was the original story. Nobody before Paul seems to have seen the Fall in Genesis 3, and I think he invented it for a reason. Jesus was a Jew; he proclaimed his message to Jews, and there was a familiar story of sin and redemption available to him, and to his church.

That, of course, is the story of the Exile and the return. Pre-exilic Israel was clearly as polytheistic as any other nation, worshipping Yahweh, Ba'al, Asherah, Molech (if he was indeed a separate god), the sun and moon, and the heavenly host. Some, of course, believed that they should worship Yahweh alone, and it was this faction which eventually won out. They believed that the Exile was a punishment for polytheism, or idolatry as they saw it. The exile resulted from sin, but it wasn't the end of the story. God hadn't finished with his people after all, and the return, by a small group of people who were sponsored  by the Persians to put Jerusalem back on its feet. Persian policy was to encourage the religions of its subject peoples, and so the Temple was rebuilt. This was later spun into a glorious Return, with which all those who came to be known as Jews identified.

We can see this story being re-used in John. First, we find the story of the cleansing of the Temple (2:13-21). The author has moved this from shortly before Jesus' arrest, where we find it in the Synoptics, to near the beginning, and clearly he must have had a purpose in doing so. The Temple has been turned into a marketplace, and Jesus drives out the merchants so that it can function as 'a house of prayer for all nations'. The language is softer that that used in the Synoptics, without the accusation that it has become a 'den of robbers'. The comment about the nations, also found in Mark, could be a reference to the market having been established in the Court of the Gentiles, but most likely it's intended to make the point that Gentiles are included. The Temple is to be replaced by the risen Jesus, who becomes the new temple.

The next story concerns Nicodemus, a leading Pharisee, who meets Jesus at night. Physical darkness is, of course, sometimes used as a metaphor for spiritual darkness. The Jews have sinned, the Temple, the centre of the cultus, isn't what it ought to be, and God has rejected them. Nicodemus is told (3:1-10) that he must be 'born again' of water and the Spirit. God himself is involved in the process - the Jews tended to think of God as transcendent, 'out there', but divine extensions; his Word, his Wisdon, his Spirit, etc; were thought of as being present with us. Water is explained a little later; in the next story (3:22-36), we find Jesus and his disciples baptising. This developed out of Jewish ritual washings, to remove impurity.

So we find the pattern of exile and return repeated. The Jews have sinned; the Temple isn't acceptable to Jesus, and by extension, to God. Nicodemus, who seems to function as a representative Jew here, is in darkness. Through the action of God, and the purifying effect of baptism, a renewed Israel is brought into being. It's not a case of Israel being 'superseded' by a Gentile church; the author is a Jew, writing for a Jewish community. He's reworking a traditional story to explain how Israel can be renewed through Jesus.

Paul, of course, worked in a totally different context, with Gentiles. The Exile story would have meant nothing to them; they'd never identified themselves with the people who were taken into captivity, or with those who eventually came home to Jerusalem.  So he had to use a different story, and over the course of time, we've lost sight of what John is saying here.

Moltmann on open communion

There's a good post here from Richard Beck. I think Moltmann's on the right lines; I particularly loathe the idea that eating together has some connection with chuch discipline, or that access to it should be restricted. That strikes me as even worse than the situation Paul critiqued in Corinth, where some (presumably those organising the meal) were stuffing their faces, while others got there late and went hungry.

I'd suggest though, that in practical terms, a cup of coffee and a biscuit together after the service, or a bring and share meal, is probably more meaningful to many people than a ritual 'meal' in the service. Beck's hit the nail on the head with his last paragraph. Years ago, I was at a communion service organised around a picnic, with communion taken during the meal. We should do things like that more often.

Charles Taylor

So one of the monsters has been convicted, of a lesser offence. There's been no attempt to prosecute anyone for the atrocities committed in Liberia during the civil war there. None of the other major rebel leaders involved in Sierra Leone's war can be prosecuted as they're all dead, some of them at Taylor's hands.

And, of course, there have been no prosecutions of the people behind the war. It could never have happened without the European diamond dealers who were only too happy to buy smuggled diamonds, or the arms dealers who supplied the weapons. Then we might mention the banks which took deposits form those who made themselves rich on stolen diamonds, without asking where the money came from.

But it's a bit of closure. Taylor funded his bid for the Presidency of Liberia with stolen diamonds, and caused untold suffering in the process. It's a vast relief that he, at least, won't be on the loose again for many years. If ever.

Creation Take 2 Part 1

Genesis 2:4-7 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up-- for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground-- then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.

In the first creation account (Genesis 1:1-2:4a), which I wrote about here: Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 , the emphasis is on God as the sole creator. At least part of the intent is polemical; the God of Israel is the one who creates, and powerful deities like the sun and the moon, which were worshipped in the Jerusalem Temple before the exile (2 Kings 23:5) are robbed of their names and reduced to mere lights in the sky. Human beings are created - male and female, with each sharing the same importance - and appointed to exercise dominion; to be God's viceroys on earth. They're told to multiply and populate the earth in this context; obviously, they can't carry out their appointed role without doing so.

In the second creation account (Genesis 2:4b-25), the emphasis is different, on the creation of humanity, and there are enough points of difference to justify treating this as an independent creation account, which has been placed beside the first by subsequent editors.

The name used for God is different. In Genesis 1, God is 'Elohim'. It's a word with a broad range of meanings; it can mean God, a god, the gods; it can refer to lesser divine beings such as angels, and it's even used of Samuel's ghost in 2 Kings 28:13. 'God' is probably as good a translation as we'll get in this context, since it's so obviously used of Israel's god. In the second account, God is 'Yahweh Elohim', conventionally translated as 'LORD God'. Yahweh is his personal name, which is revealed to Moses rather later in the story, so it means something like 'Yahweh the god' or 'the divine Yahweh. The repetition looks like a way to emphasise the godness of God, if you like.

Genesis 1 begins with an unformed chaos; Genesis 2 with the land. The physical universe is assumed to be there already, but there's no life; that comes into being in 'the day', singular, in which creation takes place. Again, we have a contrast with the six days of Genesis 1. Some more conservative interpreters will want to slot this account into the framework on Genesis 1, but too much is created in one day, and it doesn't fit. Two things are lacking for life; there is no water on the earth, and there's nobody to work the land. The seas aren't mentioned, but no rain has fallen. The land is seen to be dependent on the presence of a farmer. Two types of plants are mentioned, shrubs and herbs. Shadeh, 'Field', carries a wider meaning than just agricultural land. Most likely what's meant is both fields and pasture, where many shrubs and trees might be expected, and arable crops. Herbs, on the other hand, would be agricultural crops. Fields, of course, can't exist without a farmer to till them, and in many cases, a similar situation exists with pasture. I can't answer this one with reference to the ancient Near East, but in a British context, abandoned pasture will soon revert to woodland. The author is thinking of an artficial landscape, brought into exitence by human effort.

It's worth looking at this comparison table, which I stole from here:

Obviously, the two have a great deal in common. In both, creation is the work of a single deity, the Israelite God. However, there are distinct differences, and whoever put the two texts together probably didn't feel any need to harmonise them in the way traditionalist Christians do today. Our concern with consistency is a product of our culture, not theirs.

The Nicene Creed

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

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.