So What?

Lent 19: Sydney Carter

Sing John Ball, and tell it to us all,

Tell of the day that is dawning,

I'll crow like a cock and I'll carol like a lark

For the light that is coming in the morning.

(From: Gentle Angry People, 10)

Sydney Carter was a Quaker and his best known hymn is probably Lord of the Dance.  We used to sing this one, Eve is a Queen and Adam is a King, in the Sheffield Liberation Congregation, about 20 years ago.  It had its origins in the 1981 500 years commemoration of the Peasants Revolt.  John Ball was a priest who is best known for the saying: 'when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?'  Gentle Angry People was published by the late lamented Alliance of Radical Methodists in 1987.

'All shall be ruled by the love of one another' has been the cry of radical Christians down the ages.  Reflect upon how readily Christians sacrifice the rule of love for the rule of law.

Lent 18: Ebenezer Elliott

Shall crime bring crime forever,

Strength aiding still the strong?

Is it thy will, O Father,

That man shall toil for wrong?

No! say Thy mountains: No! Thy skies;

Man's clouded sun shall brightly rise.

And songs be heard instead of sighs:

God save the people!

(From: Methodist Hymn Book, 909, verse 2)

Some of us discovered this hymn in 1982, when I lived above Grimesthorpe Methodist Centre in Sheffield.  Elliott was known as the corn law rhymer and his statue is in Weston Park in Sheffield.  The house where he lived is marked with a blue plaque in Upperthorpe, Sheffield.  The members of the Grimesthorpe Methodist Centre, who were in their late eighties, told us they were not allowed to sing this when they were young because it's telling God off!  More likely it was frowned upon because it was written in the nineteenth century soon after the National Anthem.  When wilt thou save the people? enjoyed a renaissance in the musical Godspell in 1970.  It is usually sung to Commonwealth.

I still believe this hymn should be sung more often.  It is a miracle it found its way into the hymn book in the first place and it is significant it is not in the current one.  The lyrics might be seen as sexist but I hope this can be excused this one time.  We should ask ourselves why Christians are so reluctant to sing revolutionary songs these days.  We seem to have given up on anything other than anodyne worship songs about nothing real.

Lent 17: Stuart Kauffman

Whether or not I am right that life started with collective autocatalysis, the mere fact that such systems are possible should make us question the dogma of a central directing agency.  The central directing agency is not necessary to life.  Life has, I think, an inalienable wholeness.  And always has.  (From: At home in the universe , page 275)

Kauffman challenges doctrinaire neo-Darwinism by arguing life is inevitable in our universe.  We're not here by chance and against the odds.  His views are not incompatible with natural selection but go much further to explain how selection might work.  I have argued elsewhere  there is no design to which nature adheres but that life develops naturally according to its own rules.  (This book was recommended to me after I'd written this series of posts about evolution.)

God is known through experience.  There is no proof of God in the universe, the universe itself is all the proof we need.  Kauffman does not answer the question: why is there anything at all?  Instead, he deepens the question by showing, in a highly technical way, how creative the universe is.  Such a universe in conversation with God, needs no design.

Lent 16: John Dominic Crossan

We put on our front cover an artist's creative restoration of that frescoed point-counterpoint from the Cave of St Thecla and St Paul.  Paul is in the centre under full spotlight, just as the church's post-Pauline tradition has always placed him.  Thecla is of equal height, with open eyes intact and up-raised hand untouched, but she is on the very edge of the cover.  She is half on and half off.  But here are our questions.  Is Thecla still departing or now returning?  Does a search for Paul push female leadership, authority, and apostolicity off to the side and finally off that cover, or does a search for Paul bring Thecla, women, and equality back steadily and inevitably into the light until female and male stand together side by side in the full light of the centre?  (In Search of Paul , page xiv)

The original frescoes are to be found in the Grotto of St Paul at Ephesus.  Thecla's eyes and raised hand have been obliterated, deliberately.  Crossan and Reed argue that the seven books all scholars agree were written by Paul, reveal to us a radical Paul in contrast to the other, conservative and reactionary, Pauls in the New Testament.  I first read this in 2005 and have over the last five years preached on each chapter in turn.  This book and another featured later have opened up Paul's theology for me. 

Ironically, the church has obliterated Paul almost as effectively as it has obliterated Thecla.  We need to hear what radical Paul was saying and so undo not only centuries of marginalisation of women but also centuries of violent distortion of the Christian faith.  As always we should pray to be able to read Paul with fresh eyes and understand what he was saying.

 

Lent 15: Walter Wink

The idea that God has appointed an angel or god over each of the pagan nations finds its most notable development in Daniel 10.  According to the book of Daniel, in the third year of Cyrus, king of Persia, an angel appears to Daniel, delayed for twenty-one days because "the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me."  But Michael, "one of the chief princes (archonton)," came to the angel's aid.  "So I left him there with the prince (archon) of the kingdom of Persia and came. ..."  Hastily he finishes the message, then: "But now I will return to fight (polemesai) against the prince (archontos) of Persia; and when I am through with him, lo, the prince (archon) of Greece will come. ...  There is none who contends by my side against these except Michael, your prince (archon)" (Dan 10:13, 20, 21).  (Naming the Powers: The language of power in the New Testament , page 27)

In this, the first of his three volumes about the Powers , Wink explains what he means by the angels of the nations.  His aim is to map the first century Palestinian understanding of cosmology.  The conflicts between nations on earth are played out in heaven by the angels of the nations.  What are the angels of the nations?  They represent the interests of the people of their own nation.  Wink attempts to demonstrate the powers are the contemporary equivalent of our own sociological analysis.  This gripped me when I first read it during the nineties and it seems to make sense of much that is in the New Testament.  The main difficulty I have had is to find a short passage which conveys something of Wink's analysis to the reader.

Our lives are still controlled by the powers, even though we don't think of them as angels.  The spirit of our nations, our churches or our political organisations still dominate us.  Too often we think of ourselves as free agents, when in fact we are enslaved by forces deep seated in our own imagination.  We need to pray to be delivered from these illusions which can destroy our lives and the lives of others.

Lent 14: Theodore Runyon

When we focus on divine perfect love and make it genuinely available in today's world, we tap into the energy which, according to the Fathers, renews creation.  It was this energy which found undeniable expression in new lives in the Wesleyan movement.  Indeed, the greatest strength of the Wesleyan doctrine of perfection may lie in its ability to mobilise believers to seek a more perfect future that surpasses the present.  It turns the Christian life into a project consistently open to new possibilities.  As we have seen, it is not blind to negative forces.  However, it does not take them as the inevitable and unavoidable consequences of original sin, but precisely as that which can be overcome.  It was this goal-orientation which Wesley did not want to give up to the critics of entire sanctification.  If the conditions of life are fixed and sin is permanent, the future is robbed of the kind of hope Wesley is convinced is found in the New Testament.  (From: The New Creation , page 227)

This book was recommended to me by a lay Methodist theologian a few years ago.  It is in his view one of the best books about John Wesley .  I don't disagree with him.  Runyon is a member of the United Methodist Church in the United States and takes a radical view of Wesley's life.  I have written at some length on Wesley's doctrine of sanctification , as explained in this book.  (The link will take you to the first in the sequence.)

Wesley was future orientated and contrasted his approach to that of the Calvinists who were past orientated.  They believe in predestination.  God created everything perfect and predetermined who will be saved and lost.  Wesley's view was that God is still at work in creation and therefore, there are new things to come and so no-one is predestined to anything.  This opens up the future to the unexpected and creative change.

 

Lent 13: James Joyce

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.  He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes.  Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.  (From Ulysses , part 2, section 4.)

So, Joyce introduces his main character.  And isn't it glorious?  As a vegetarian, it is not the aroma of bacon sandwiches which calls me back to the life of a carnivore, but this passage.  Who can resist the fine tang of faintly scented urine? 

Joyce writes not of the wealthy or the extraordinary.  He writes of a common man who by degrees becomes anything but common.  The world moves around him as he moves around Dublin.  He is stranded on one day in the early twentieth century but also here and now.

Lent 12: Bill Bryson

Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano.  It sits on top of an enormous hot spot, a reservoir of molten rock which begins at least 200 kilometres down in the Earth and rises to near the surface, forming what is known as a superplume.  The heat from the hot spot is what powers all of Yellowstone's vents, geysers, hot springs and popping mud pots.  Beneath the surface is a magma chamber that is about 72 kilometres across - roughly the same dimensions as the park - and about 13 kilometres thick at its thickest point.  Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of an English county and reaching 13 kilometres into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of.  The pressure that such a pool of exerts on the crust above has lifted Yellowstone and its surrounding territory about half a kilometre higher than they would otherwise be.  If it blew, the cataclysm is pretty well beyond imagining.  According to Professor Bill McGuire of University College London, 'you wouldn't be able to get within a thousand kilometres of it' while it was erupting.  The consequences that followed would be even worse.  (From A Short History of Nearly Everything , page 199)

I read this just after it came out, in 2003.  I had read Bryson's travel books before and enjoyed his sense of humour.  This book appealed to my interest in science and my belief that theologians who do not understand basic science, have no calling to be doing theology in todays world.  There is no excuse when there are books like this one readily available.  I suppose there's little chance of any significant change when so many Christians are scared of a proof that their treasured beliefs about God are wrong.

The section about Yellowstone is thrilling.  The whole story, as Bryson tells it, of cosmology and geology, puts us firmly in our place.  We may be at home in the universe but we are extremely lucky to be here.  We are led to reflect that our existence is conditional.  This is why I prefer to think of God as artist rather than designer.

Lent 11: John J Vincent

What can be meant by calling this a "secular" Gospel?  From our summary even so far, we see that Mark's purpose has been plainly to show that the life and ministry of Jesus on earth contained more than appeared on the surface - naturally, for Mark writes for those who, thirty years after, had never known Jesus "after the flesh"!  Consequently, what we might call the nonsecular references are already beginning to be heightened.  But the whole story is not about God, or heaven, or eternity, or ideas, or goodness, or providence, or anything else not available to ordinary man using his ordinary senses.  His whole story is about Jesus, walking, talking, getting into boats, doing controversial things, healing, getting into arguments, evading opponents, securing friends, explaining himself, explaining his teaching.  His whole story is about a secular event, an event within this world, which presupposes the limitations and opportunities of living in this world.  (From Secular Christ (1968), page 78)

John Vincent chose to live this story in Pitsmoor, Sheffield and has had a teaching ministry there ever since the late sixties, soon after this book was published.  For me, it is always John's teaching that springs to mind as I preach and exercise my own ministry.  I am one of what must amount to many thousands who have been influenced by him down the years.  I would certainly say his teaching has been more influential than his writing and indeed, I suspect his earlier writing has more significance than his later publications.  This in no way detracts from his, often controversial teachings, although it raises the question how influential he will be in 50 or 100 years time.  John has been responsible for several initiatives in Pitsmoor, the photo is of his latest, developed since his retirement.

Like Winstanley , John sees the Gospels from the point of view of the ordinary people who passed on the stories of Jesus.  John started as an academic and has remained an academic in the place he found himself, inner city Pitsmoor.  Perhaps his most profound teaching is that putting down roots in a particular time and place makes sense of the Gospel.  Perhaps we all need to reflect upon how engagement with what is real is central to our own faith. 

Lent 10: Diarmaid MacCulloch

I hope that this book will help readers stand back from Christianity, whether they love it or hate it, or are simply curious about it, and see it in the round.  The book is self-evidently not a work of primary-source research; rather, it tries to synthesise the current state of historical scholarship across the world.  It also seeks to be a reflection on it, a way of interpreting that scholarship for a large audience which is often bewildered by what is happening to Christianity and misunderstands how present structures and beliefs have evolved.  It can be no more than a series of suggestions to give shape to the past, but the suggestions are not random.  At some points in it, I have developed further the text of my previous book, Reformation, which was an attempt to tell part of this wider story, but which led me on to this attempt to put shapes on the greater picture.  My aim is to tell as clearly as possible an immensely complicated and varied tale, in ways which others will enjoy and find plausible.  Furthermore, I am not ashamed to affirm that although modern historians have no special capacity to be arbiters of the truth or otherwise of religion, they still have a moral task.  They should seek to promote sanity and to curb the rhetoric that promotes fanaticism.  There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified.  (A History of Christianity , page 12)

This is possibly the most recent book to feature in this series, indeed I am still reading it.  There is little wonder; I received it from Amazon on 30 November and have been reading it ever since.  It stands at 1016 pages and I have read as far as the counter-Reformation.  MacCulloch is a brilliant writer.  This history is never dull and always readable.  I'm still struggling with the exact nature of non-Chalcedon Christians but then, I suspect, so are most people.  I bought the book as a result of watching his BBC television series, based upon the book.  I have commented on this book in several posts on my ecumenical blog .

I think MacCulloch is right about fanaticism and the contribution made by oversimplified history.  Why do so many Christians seem terrified of being found wrong?  When we read this history, so much is placed in context, and helps us understand where our treasured beliefs originated.  Does this imply they are not reliable?  Or does it imply, God loves humanity in its errors and not just those who get it right (if any such exist).