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.
Sunday, 13 November 2011
Friday, 11 November 2011
The Wearing of the Red 2
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.
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.
Saturday, 5 November 2011
Reading the Bible
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?
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
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.
Thursday, 3 November 2011
Revival
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.
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.
Monday, 31 October 2011
In the Beginning 2
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.
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.
Wednesday, 19 October 2011
Ola the Poet
This is my daughter's latest video; she's getting more professional every time.
http://digitallydisturbed.tumblr.com/post/11617647723/video-ola-the-poet
http://digitallydisturbed.tumblr.com/post/11617647723/video-ola-the-poet
Tuesday, 18 October 2011
Who's the king of the castle?
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.
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.
Monday, 17 October 2011
God's will and ours
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.
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.
Saturday, 15 October 2011
The Height of Goliath
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.
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.
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