This is part of a series of posts based on the Churches Together in England publication one light: one world. If you click on the link you will find the biblical texts. This post of the same name covers the purpose of this series.
John 3:16
Whenever I see the word 'perish', I think of a state somewhere between life and death; a sort of undead state. Remember where Jesus warns his disciples, those who live by the sword will perish by the sword? Perish here means the act of using the sword erodes the moral person; we become driven by something which is not of God and so might as well be dead. To perish is to give up on life.
To long for God's Kingdom is to choose life. It is to choose to enter into dialogue with God, to respond to God's questions, to embrace the pain of being alive. It is ultimately, the most difficult thing of all, to learn to love.
God's example to us is in God's love for the world. The God we saw challenging the world in Isaiah is the God we find loving the world and suffering for the world.
Somehow the churches are called to join in on this enterprise of love. This means to share in God's pain as well as God's love. We learn to do this and experience unity through our divisions; the ways in which we are challenged to love one another despite our differences.
This is part of a series of posts based on the Churches Together in England publication one light: one world. If you click on the link you will find the biblical texts. This post of the same name covers the purpose of this series.
Romans 8:19-23
Why evolution? Why not create everything by design? An answer is in this text. We can see a purpose for evolution in this text. All creation, living and non-living, strains towards God and is in some pain as it does so.
Once again we are with the Oikoumene. It is as if creation knows there has to be more than its immediate experience.
Our experience of modern cosmology is one of ultimate futility. All things will come to an end. Eventually, not only our own sun but all stars will burn out. Creation will return to a soup of energy free chaotic matter.
But there is hope this creation is somehow a stepping stone to something else, it is as if the whole of creation is moving towards not death but new life.
We sometimes hear of the second coming, the belief that Jesus will return and put an end to all things. This is sometimes known as eschatology. Some people say the unity of the church is something we will discover at the end time; unity is eschatological.
But the thing that distinguishes life from death is its dynamic, life changes into more and more complex forms. To give birth is to bring about new life. Perhaps the eschaton is not so much unity as a new and reconciled life, increasingly diverse?
This is part of a series of posts based on the Churches Together in England publication one light: one world. If you click on the link you will find the biblical texts. This post of the same name covers the purpose of this series.
Matthew 24: 14
In my last post I wrote of things evolving in order to respond to God's call. In what sense are we asked to respond to God's call? It is not merely recognising God's role in creation; to recognise God's role is to submit to God's rule.
Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of God. Once again we need to see this as an opportunity to respond to God's challenge rather than submit to control. We need to be highly suspicious of those who argue the Kingdom is like an earthly Kingdom, only bigger with scarier punishments. This sort of argument merely masks their own lust for power.
It is obvious as we read the Gospels, Jesus is ironic in his use of the word Kingdom. This Kingdom is one where the powerful serve the powerless. We are invited to compare it with the Kingdoms we experience on earth. There would be little point in doing so if God's Kingdom is essentially business as usual for despots.
This is why the Kingdom is good news and needs to be proclaimed across the whole world. It would not be good news if this were a proclamation of business as usual.
Matthew is of course aware of how unlikely radical obedience to God will be. Once it has been proclaimed to all nations, the end will come. The end appears to have been indefinitely postponed!
This is part of a series of posts based on the Churches Together in England publication one light: one world. If you click on the link you will find the biblical texts. This post of the same name covers the purpose of this series.
Psalm 24: 1-2
It is interesting to compare the first line in the NRSV version with the paraphrase in Churches' Together in England's title (above). 'The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it'. The word 'belongs' implies ownership, as if the world is God's property. To say the earth is the Lord's implies it is the Lord's in the sense that a work of art is the artist's. If I buy a Picasso it is mine but the painting is still his.
One point I have made many times is, ecumenism is a part of the wider Oikoumene, which stands for the reconciliation of all things to God. The world is God's and God calls to all created things. Evolution is their response to God's call.
In what sense is this world God's? There's not a lot to go on in this particular text. The focus is not on God designing animals and plants but in setting the parameters of seas and rivers. Perhaps the image is of God the theatre owner, who maintains the theatre in order that others might put on plays? There might be a tendency to forget the theatre owner's work at the final curtain.
This is part of a series of posts based on the Churches Together in England publication one light: one world. If you click on the link you will find the biblical texts. This post of the same name covers the purpose of this series.
Isaiah 40: 21-26
This is about God's power and yet it is interesting to look at how it is exercised.
Before I do that, it is important to remember the writers of this text had a different cosmology to the Newtonian one most of us cling to despite the massive changes that have taken place in physics over the last century, sometimes referred to as quantum mechanics.
These changes in cosmology are not necessarily a problem. They have happened before during the history of Christianity and do not invalidate the main points of the Jewish and Christian faiths.
At first glance, in this passage we have an all powerful God who exercises power over creation. But look closer, there is nothing about design - God sits above, stretches the heavens, makes rulers as nothing, brings out the host, numbers them. Just about anything but design.
This powerful God certainly interacts with creation, sometimes in ways which might not be welcomed. But this is not a God who is in control.
God lays the foundations; creates the environment in which creation evolves. God asks questions of God's creation. They are rhetorical questions, that draw attention to God. God is saying, don't lose yourself in creation, can't you see there is more to it than your immediate environment?
It is a call to transcend where we are and seek something else entirely. Is this the same call heard by atoms and molecules as they form the first life? The same call as that heard by single cells as they become multi-cellular?
The call is to know God. Things evolve, according to our modern cosmology, in order to discover God.
Similar questions are asked of human beings and various faith traditions have evolved to help those who will listen encounter God.
This is part of a series of posts based on the Churches Together in England publication one light: one world. If you click on the link you will find the biblical texts. This post of the same name covers the purpose of this series.
Genesis 1:26-31
I have written a great deal in this blog about evolution and there is more to come! If we understand conversation to be a primary act, then we need to see it in all things; the conversations between churches are but one example.
The views of creationists and neo-Darwinians focus on the idea of design. I find this a static and unhelpful understanding of evolution. Design implies the sort of effort a human being puts into making a watch. It has a purpose and designs for watches (or bicycles or cars or computers) are largely convergent, we soon learn what works and so continue to design along similar lines. When we look at the design of a watch we see geometrical shapes, which we cannot see anywhere in a kitten, for example.
I prefer to think in terms of a conversation. Evolution is an ongoing conversation at many levels between living organisms and their environment. The theist might wish to add to that conversations between God and the material world. I've no time to explore this further but will return to it in the future I am sure.
Verse 31, seems to be evidence of this. God speaks earlier in the narrative and now God sees the effects of his words; how has creation responded? If God were the all-powerful designer, as neo-Darwinists seem to imagine, why would God need to look? Creation would be perfect because it had been designed by a perfect designer. These words 'it was very good' seem to be God's judgement on a creation that is not essentially predictable because it has freedom to grow and develop in its own way.
We are in danger of thinking God has a design for the church. But if the liberation of the Holy Spirit is real there cannot be a design; we are free to develop our relationships as we see fit. The spirit calls us to base relationships on love and they grow out of love not some heavenly prescribed design
Some time ago I promised to comment upon the texts in the Churches Together in England publication, one light: one world. This link will take you to a free download of the volume. I hope as a Lent discipline to complete the task. There are actually more texts than there are days in Lent, so I will plod on until I complete the task.
Last time I completed three texts and they can be found as follows:
The aim of this series will be to test some of the ideas I have written about in this blog against scripture. This is not an exercise in proof texting but an attempt to dialogue with scripture. These texts have been selected to illustrate what scripture says about unity. My question is whether they are incompatible with an emphasis on diversity and the primary act of conversation. The three initial posts above all observe the oneness of God need not necessarily imply the churches need be one, especially if by being one we mean structural unity.
My hope is of course that by entering into dialogue with scripture I won't prove anything so much as be challenged to develop my ideas about the importance of conversation further.
I will aim to post one a day if I can. March in particular is a manic month and so excuse me if there are a few gaps!
I will not normally copy out the texts as they can be found in the download or any Bible. The version used by Churches Together in England is the New RSV.
We cannot predict what we do not already know about. We ignore the unknown unknowns (a concept that existed long before Donald Rumsfeld turned it into a comedy act).
Let me put it in another way. We have no vision of the future church and cannot have one until it happens. Why? Because if we knew what it was going to be, we would already be there. Taleb describes this in his book. If I know that tomorrow I'll know my partner is cheating on me, I actually know it today. I can no longer go on living as I did when I believed my partner to be faithful.
If we all knew where God was calling the church to go we would be there! The problem is we have no idea and so everyone's ideas are as good as anyone else's. Who knows whether someone has the right vision for the future? We cannot know, without knowing what that future is going to be.
Furthermore, we have no way of knowing whether God will build a future church out of our misunderstandings of what the future church will be.
We base our ideas for the future, on how the church has been in the past but we have no way of knowing whether or not it will be that way in the future.
The one thing we can learn from this is humility. Just as my ideas might be helpful, a building block for the future, so might anyone else's.
What about prophecy? It is a reading of the signs of the times, it is insight beyond the superficial insights of reasonable theologians, and acknowledgement that the future church will be born from the actions of millions of Christians today, and not from academic theological papers, read only by those who can afford to purchase expensive books.
I've been reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and this sequence of posts (see below, beginning here, and there's one more after this) are inspired by this book. Taleb show us the limits to reason. The predictive power of reason is poorer than those who loudly promote reason claim.
This is no reason to abandon reason. The paradox is reason can show us its own limitations. Some theologians have of course known this all along.
So, what can't we know? We can't know the future. This is the nature of chaos theory, small incidents have big consequences. It's not that we can't observe the small causes; we don't know which ones are important. I see a butterfly flap its wings. I know this movement could in theory cause a hurricane on the other side of the world, but how can I prove it was this particular butterfly at that particular time? And what if the cause is the interaction between many butterflies?
We ignore non-linearities. This bothered me for years as a scientist. We use logarithms to turn non-linearities into linearities and so end up with a graph with a straight line. Nothing wrong with this, except we easily forget it isn't linear.
Ecumenical conversations are subject to the same issues. How can we be sure the rational debates of the theologians are taking us any closer to unity? How can we know the significant is not to be found amongst certain local churches, for example, rather than in the conversations between church leaders. Some local partnerships might have a massive impact on the future of the churches, but which ones?
Formal conversations can overlook the consequences of success. If the Church of England moves closer to the Roman Catholic Church, for example, what are the implications for its relationships with the Methodist and Reformed traditions? And of the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox, for that matter?
Christian unity is multi-factorial (just like everything else) and so cannot be approached in an entirely ordered way. The consequences of initiatives are always unpredictable. This is not to deny the positive achievements of formal conversations, they have established massive theological common ground.
It's the small things that keep tripping up the churches. The barriers to unity are not theological, they are about human beings and their organisations.
I suppose I approach ecumenism not so much from the perspective of an academic theologian, as that of a community development worker. One insight I developed over many frustrating years is, 'Most things don't work'. This is equally true of ecumenism.
The history of ecumenism is littered with initiatives that haven't worked. Usually, they are voted down by the council of one church or another and many more never get off the drawing board.
I suspect this insight occurred to me because before community development, I was a research scientist in the field of biology. I discovered most experiments don't work but failure is fundamental to evolution. Evolution is based on the principle of most things not working.
Of course, a few things do work. But it is a fallacy to believe it is the best things that survive. I suspect many scientists have difficulty remembering this, it is easy to assume the best has been selected. This is because Western philosophy is strongly influenced by Plato and his idea of the (platonic) ideal.
Theologians are influenced by the same ideals and the last gasp struggle of the proponents of 'intelligent design' demonstrate Plato's ideal is far from dead. We need to understand, in evolution as much as the church, the Spirit works through diversity and chaos.
The problem is, as humanity has become self-aware, we tend to undermine the harmony in creation in our search for order, design and perfection. The place to seek God is not in the illusion of order and perfection but in what appears to be random.
It is an interesting question - what is random? How do we know something is random? One extreme would be to argue randomness is lack of knowledge; beneath the sequence of apparently random numbers there are causes. For example, take pseudo-random numbers. There is no way of distinguishing a good sequence of pseudo random numbers from genuine random numbers.
Now this might be a source of rejoicing for creationists except for one minor problem. Nature doesn't use numbers. Reality might be nudged by God but how it responds to any nudge must be unpredictable.
The history of religion has always been the struggle between those who seek to impose order on God's creation, and those who value freedom to respond to God spontaneously. If we insist on imposing order on our churches, then splits are inevitable. We can choose to make our ideals absolute and split the church. Or we can agree splits are inevitable. This means we all have freedom to be heretics, as all spirit led people are, alongside the apparently ordered life the churches.
There is nothing to fear from heresy because most things don't work! There is everything to fear from orthodoxy (whatever type) because it uses force to impose order that does not exist.
Consultancy for Mission and Ministry This should take you to details of the Consultancy for Mission and Ministry course at the York Insititute. See my post about non-directive consuultancy around 9 September 2009.
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