So What?

Lent 41: Timothy Ashworth

'Keeping aligned' is a concept that captures well the sense that this prophetic word does provide guidance but without any coercive force.  Actions flow naturally from it.  As we have seen, Paul does not say, if you live by the Spirit these are the things that you ought to do, these are the ways that you ought to behave, but rather, live by the Spirit and these are the ways that you definitely will behave.  Life in the Spirit leads to such behaviours as naturally as trees bear fruit.  For Paul, being guided, - 'keeping aligned' - by faith, by the spirit, by the cross is to experience a life of freedom, without needing to follow any external direction.  Living by the law is, in contrast, a form of enslavement.  (From: Paul's Necessary Sin  : The Experience of Liberation, page 56)

This book was a present from a friend who, a few years ago, attended a conference led by Timothy Ashworth, at Woodbrooke, the Quaker College in Birmingham, where Ashworth lectures.  Ashworth, with other authors such as Crossan , seeks to return to the 6 authentic letters of Paul and re-examine his writings in the light of modern scholarship.  This is a technical book but full of exciting insights.

We need to take time to understand what Ashworth is saying.  Usually, we think we have two options: license, to which the churches provide an alternative, morality.  These are not opposites; license and morality come from the same source.  They are both used by imperialists to control people.  Our consumer society is an example of the former.  The most familiar Christian morality has its origins, according to Crossan, in imperial Rome.  Christianity offers an alternative, although you wouldn't know it to hear the claptrap about Christian values.

Lent 34: Miroslav Volf

Is the scandal of the cross good enough reason to give up on it?  Let me respond by noting that there is no genuinely Christian way around the scandal.  In the final analysis, the only available options are either to reject the cross and with it the core of the Christian faith or to take up one's cross, follow the crucified - and be scandalised ever anew by the challenge.  As the Gospel of Mark reports, the first disciples followed, and were scandalised (14:26ff).  Yet they continued to tell the story of the cross, including the account of how they abandoned the Crucified.  Why?  Because precisely in the scandal, they have discovered a promise.  In serving and giving themselves for others (Mark 10:45), in lamenting and protesting before the dark face of God (15:34), they found themselves in the company of the Crucified.  In his empty tomb they saw the proof that the cry of desperation will turn into a song of joy and that the face of God will eventually "shine" upon a redeemed world.  (From: Exclusion and Embrace , page 26)

Volf, a Croatian, writes out of his experience of war in the former Yugoslavia.  His theme is peace and ecumenism.  I have not as yet written about this book on my other blog  but I'm sure I will.  The relationship between peace and ecumenism is an intriguing one.

The reference to the dark face of God reminds me of Dark Holy Ground; the experiences in Cleveland I referred to earlier.  Volf questions how we respond to the scandal of the world's response to self-emptying love.  The sense of abandonment of Jesus on the cross is more devastating than his suffering.  How can we trust God in the light of this story?

Lent 25: Marcus Borg

I encounter this in my university students.  Every term one or more of them says to me after class, "This is all very interesting, but I have a problem every time you use the word 'God', because, you see" - here there's usually a pause and a deep breath - "I really don't believe in God."  I always respond in the same way: "Tell me about the God you don't believe in."  Invariably, it is the God of supernatural theism.  I then tell them that I don't believe in that God either.  They are surprised, for they know that I believe in God.  They're simply not aware that there is an option other than supernatural theism.  (From: The Heart of Christianity , page 68)

If you want to know what the other option is, you will have to read the book!  As a preacher I spend a lot of time correcting false images of God.  Both Christians and atheists believe in the same unbelievable supernatural God.  I include Borg in this series because he is a well-known radical theologian who does not make the common liberal mistake, where having rubbished the supernatural God, we are left suspended with half a faith and no way of moving anywhere else.

We need to ask ourselves who we are fooling.  Why do we find it so difficult to pass the Christian faith on?  Our educators, preachers, theologians and ministers conspire to set up barriers to God through their insistence in belief or doubt about a God who does not exist and is not believed in by people of faith.

Lent 24: Robert Linthicum

The primary purpose of a community organisation is to create a community - to create out of a victimised, marginalised, destructive conglomerate of people a community whose quality of life is such that people find fulfilment and joy in living there.  It is to enable the people to build their society around their common articulated, intentionally pursued values.  If such a community is not created, then all that we have accomplished through community organising is the replacement of one oppressor by another in the tyranny of the now powerful poor.  The power of the oppressor must be replaced by a quality of corporate life that is of such superiority to either the formerly oppressed or their oppressors that it brings purpose, direction, joy, and fulfillment to all who experience it.  That is the true objective of community organisation.  (From: Building a People of Power , page 243)

Linthicum, with others, picked up Allinski's  organising and made Citizens' Organising the powerful movement it is today in the United States.  It is worth putting Linthicum's approach alongside Lovell's (see yesterday's post).  What they have in common is the commitment to allowing others the space to make their own community or their own ministry.

We see, in the tendency for the oppressed to turn oppressor, the need to understand this flaw in all human relationships.  Traditionally, Christians call this sin.  The struggle to maintain community, in the inner city as much as in religious communities, is a call to live life on the knife edge.  This is why John Wesley  said, there is no holiness apart from social holiness.

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 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 4: Jonathan Sacks

Just as the human situation would be impoverished and unsustainable if we were to eliminate all life forms except our own, so it would be reduced and fatally compromised if we were to eliminate all cultures and traditions except our own.  The idea that we fulfil God's will by waging war against the infidel, or forcing our specific practices on others, so that all humanity shares the same religion is an idea that - as I have tried to argue - owes much to the concept of empire and little to the heritage of Abraham, which Jews, Christians and Muslims claim as their own.  It was not until the Abrahamic faith came into contact with Greek and Roman imperialism that it developed into an aspiration to conquer or convert the world, and we must abandon it if we are to save ourselves from mutual destruction.  To repeat my formulation in an earlier chapter: fundamentalism, like imperialism, is the attempt to impose a single way of life on a plural world.  It is the Tower of Babel of our time.  (The Dignity of Difference  (2002), page 201)

Purchased on 4 January 2005 at the Cliff College Bookshop.  Perhaps some will think this is an unlikely venue but Sacks is arguably one of our greatest modern theologians.  He is pointing the way for Christian ecumenism, although we are still waiting for a theologian to translate his work for the specifics of our Christian churches.  (If you know of someone who has, do let me know who it is!)

It can be hard to live with the idea there are many truths, when our own seem so compelling.  But how can we test our own truths unless there are people with different truths to test them against?  It is not our beliefs that save us but our compassion.

Idolatry 22: Does Father Christmas Matter?

In this post I want to return to the figure of Father Christmas and to ask whether our idolatry matters. 

Who believes in Father Christmas?

Father Christmas is the god of consumerism.  This god is deeply rooted in Christian and pagan imagery.  Although it cut loose a long time ago, it still retains those associations, especially in the image of Santa Claus.

Not all people who believe in consumerism are obvious worshipers of this god.  People from non-Christian religious traditions, who don't celebrate Christmas, are probably not influenced so much.  Consumerism is an ideology which presumably influences a far wider group of people than Western Americans and Europeans.  However, this is the culture that has generated both consumerism and the image of Father Christmas and at some level image and practice reinforce each other.

My guess is the United States and UK are the most excessive users of the Father Christmas cult.  Other countries in Europe seem to be less excessive in their observance perhaps because in some countries traditional observances have withstood the consumerist onslaught better than Britain and America.

It is perhaps not too surprising that the last two states to be world powers, now in decline, feel the strongest need to have an annual season of excess. 

What drives the cult?

I have already pointed out it is the market.  A bad Christmas (by which they mean the weeks leading up to Christmas) can be very damaging for retailers and the economy.  When did we last have a bad Christmas? 

Very early on, we are told prospects are gloomy. Then, as Christmas approaches, at some point everything turns around.  At some point the magic of Father Christmas kicks in and everyone realises that (a) we might as well go into debt to have a good Christmas, and (b) if we don't get out there soon everything will be gone from the shops.

So, the economy gets an annual jump start and people are encouraged to continue spending whether or not they have money to spend for another year.

Does any of this matter?

As I write, the Copenhagen climate change talks are happening.  Where is the leadership?  I have never known any time when there has been a political will to reduce sales.  The idea we might have to reduce our consumption and make do with less is unthinkable. 

It is a disaster that this summit took place during the Christmas season.  There is no way the interests in consumerism are likely to loosen their grip on the world's resources at the best of times.  To choose the time of year when their spirituality is celebrated and strongest is a bad omen.

It seems we have created a world for ourselves we cannot escape from.  It is impossible to imagine a world with shortages.  (With the exception of course of much of the past and most of what we call the developing world.)

The waste, the pollution, the exploitation of the planet are all consequences of our inability to stop consuming.  We bolster this with whimsical stories and false bonhomie.  The problem is we do not know how to stop.

Idolatry 21: On the Advantages of Not Being Organised

In my last post , I suggested a materialist approach to the Christian faith; how we need to learn to read scripture and the world together, so that we can see the ways in which institutions dominate our consciousness through our uncritical acceptance of images or idols.

The problem atheists seem to have with religion is the wars it has fought and the evil it has done.  I can't help thinking that if atheists were organised they could show us how to run things properly.  I am quite sure the atheist no-church would never go to war, never torture, maim, unjustly imprison or dominate people who don't agree with them.

However, atheists are not organised and so we are invited to compare the atrocities and excesses of organised religion with the gentle benevolence of armchair critics. 

Let us remember times and places where atheists have been in charge.  The French Revolution, based upon the writings of Voltaire and others, shocked by the evils they saw God perpetrate through the Lisbon earthquake, led to the Reign of Terror.  Can we forget the excesses of the Soviet Gulag, China in Tibet or Pol Pot in Cambodia?  It seems being led by atheists is not always an entirely positive experience for those who disagree with them.

The point is all human institutions are potentially violent; it is institutions which cause the problem, whether or not they are religious.  This is why all religions can be accused of violence alongside atheist states.  So, why the sniping at religion?  There isn't shred of evidence that religions lead to more violence than non-religious organisations. 

I've never been sure whether Hitler was atheist or some sort of religious sectarian.  Let's assume his regime was atheist.  Now we have to face up to the collusion of the Protestant Churches in Germany and the Vatican.  This is well attested.  So, is the witness of the Confessing Church in Germany . 

Christian collusion with the Nazis was shameful and still is where Christians continue to pursue racism and oppress others.  But we need to ask ourselves what is the alternative?  If there is one thing we have learned from this survey of idolatry, I hope it is that people will believe almost everything.  Belief is something spiritual and almost always corrosive.

The mainstream churches all have disciplinary procedures for their ordained and lay members.  These provide a degree of accountability for their members, which would be missing if Christians simply believed and were not organised.  Discipline is a never ending task for the churches and doesn't always work; witness what has come to light about the Catholic Church in ireland recently.

But are we really saying that no accountability whatsoever is better than some accountability?  Of course, political authorities could send the police round but how soon before that seeped into totalitarianism? 

Atheists might be intelligent but in spreading their views they don't seem to think particularly strategically.  We all have to share our world with people who seem to us to act like idiots.  But most traditions have the means to restrain the worst excesses and should be encouraged to do so fairly.

So, my message to atheists is back off and credit religious people with some intelligence.  We're not all idiots just because you disagree with us.