Exploring Ecumenism

Hope in God's Future

It is easy to get frustrated at the churches' lack of urgency about climate change.  I have raised the issue a few times in ecumenical meetings and the sense I get is that many do not see the relevance of climate change to ecumenism or indeed church life in general.

It is most encouraging to find the Joint Public Issues Team of the Methodist, Baptist and United Reformed Churches have produced a report Hope in God’s Future: Christian Discipleship in the Context of Climate Change.

A Question of Christian Ethical Priorities

We're straining at gnats and swallowing camels.  As I've explored ethics over recent posts, it seems as if the churches will focus time and energy on any ethical issue so long as it is not about the use of wealth to exploit other people and the environment.  (The Eleventh Earl of Mar's photo says it all.)  Indeed, the appetite amongst some Christians for these peripheral ethics is to the extent that it sometimes feels as if issues are being invented as further distractions.  Whilst a few verses in the Bible about sexuality are blown up into a major issue that threatens the integrity of the churches, exploitation, an issue present on almost every page, can go unacknowledged in a month of sermons.

Hard Issues 6: Climate Change

Of course, this issue is well known and so I will not go into a lot of detail about the science.  In three posts I will attempt first to scope the issue, then reflect upon its theology and finally to look at what the churches might do to address it.  Many organisations and websites provide more detail; this is as always broad brush strokes.

This issue is born entirely out of affluence.  This affluence has been a great achievement.  For the first time in human history, millions of people can live in a degree of wealth undreamed of in the past.

Hard Issues 5: Racism

I have a suspicion that the churches have been compromised by racism, more than any other issue.  For centuries the dissenting Christian traditions were movements of the people and politically situated towards what we might nowadays call the left.

The change probably started in the American south where after the abolition of the slave trade, many churches continued to segregate black congregations, well into the twentieth century.  Where churches in the north developed critical stances on social issues, the southern churches were compromised.  They took refuge in pietism and a fundamentalist approach to scripture, claiming their defensive interpretation was not just their own reading but the only true reading.

Debt in the Gospels

In the story at the beginning of Mark chapter 2 a paralysed man is carried to Jesus but his four friends cannot negotiate the crowds.  He is taken onto the roof and lowered through it.  The picture, from sacred destinations, shows a golden mosaic of the healing of the paralytic in the Basilica di San Marco, Venice.   

Then things become a bit strange.  Seeing the faith of the friends, Jesus does not heal the paralysed man but forgives his sins.  This causes some of the scribes to question how Jesus has taken upon himself the authority to forgive sins.  To prove he has the authority, Jesus heals the man.

Hard Issues 4: Debt

The Gillray cartoon speaks to our times, showing the wealthy (George III and William Pitt) raking in the cash.  So far, so obvious.

Margaret Thatcher was an ideologue, her faith was monetarism and against all reason she deregulated the markets during the 1980s.  I have never bought the idea that markets mysteriously regulate themselves.  Whatever Adam Smith meant by his invisible hand I am certain he didn't mean what we have seen over the last couple of decades.

On the Nature of Hard Issues

I thought I would pause after covering three hard issues and reflect on what distinguishes them from the next three.  It does seem that many Christians have identified sexuality, abortion and ordination of women as their flagship ethical issues.

These are all about sex and to some degree are issues generated by the attitudes of the churches themselves.  There is a significant consensus about them, covering a range of traditions some of which don't even recognise each other.  Instead of speaking in a prophetic voice about economic and political issues, where there will be less consensus between Christians, the voice of the churches is uncertain and derided as its ethical attitudes are seen as outdated and unjust.

Hard Issues 3: Ordination of Women

A couple of days ago, I mentioned The Marriage of Figaro.  Beaumarchais' play, upon which Mozart's opera was based, was banned in Austria at the time because it mocked the aristocracy.  The driver of the plot is that although the Count has publicly renounced his right to the servant women on his estate, he is (as it were) prepared to make an exception in the case of Suzanne, Figaro's intended.  However, he has not reckoned on Figaro's cunning and neither he nor Figaro have reckoned on Suzanna and the Countess, who join forces to stop the Count.

My point was that this is a small illustration of the power play around women's sexuality and how marriage is potentially a means to enable women and men to make their own choices publicly.

Hard Issues 2: Abortion

Let's start with the temperance movement.  At the Deed of Union in 1932, the new Methodist Church in Great Britain supported very different ethical issues to the ones it supports today.  One of these was temperance.  Temperance was something of a misnomer because the temperate were anything but temperate.  Their rejection of alcohol was absolute.  I once shared a flat with someone who had signed the pledge.  He was not even permitted vinegar on his chips.  Vinegar is brewed.  Some people might remember non-brewed condiment, an alternative to vinegar.  Thanks to epredator for his helpful picture.

Hard issues 1: Sexuality

My aim in touching on these hard issues is not to prove a particular case.  Usually, it will be fairly obvious where my sympathies lie but what I want to do is simply show that there is more than one interpretation of scripture with respect to these issues.

I want to start with St John Chrysostom, the Golden Mouthed, so called because of his popular preaching.  (In the picture he (on the left) is handing a copy of his sermons to the Byzantine Emporer).  I'm afraid I've lost track of my references for this but if memory serves, during his time in Antioch John Chrysostom preached a very radical approach to abstinence from sex. It seems this was highly influential and has been traced to some of the more extreme positions against sex in general, through the history of the church.