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THE CORACLE          

1  February 2006  Robust but respectful

Methodists used to sing a hymn by Charles Wesley, that great Methodist Anglican, as both he and his brother would have called themselves, which contains the lines,

‘Even now we think and speak the same, and cordially agree;

Concentred all, through Jesu’s name, in perfect harmony’.

I’m not sorry we don’t sing it any more.  For one thing it’s a step in the direction of honesty, for I know of no period in Methodist history when those words were true of us as a denomination, nor of any Methodist chapel where they were true either.  But more important, I’m not sorry because the ideas it conveys were, and are, dangerous.

It is pretty clear that these words are not entirely applicable to Anglicanism either.  2006 promises to be a very tough year for the worldwide Anglican communion, with huge and almost certainly unresolvable tensions between Nigeria and Sydney on the one hand and the USA on the other on the question of gay bishops.  That issue will confront us in England too, though hopefully we will use less venomous language.  Then there is the question of women bishops.  And all this will be on top of the ongoing and inevitable tensions on issues moral, liturgical, theological and practical between clergy and laity, catholic and evangelical, old and young, tradition and change, liberals and conservatives, and women and men.  Add to that those frictions between ‘them’ (at Church House Westminster) and ‘they’ (at Diocesan House) and ‘us’ (at St Faith’s at the Grassroots) and the result is a huge risk of fragmentation.  That risk comes across in the recent book FRA  G MENT ED FAITH? – the results of a Church Times survey in 2001 – published by Paternoster and edited by Lesley Francis, a bit of a disappointing, over-hyped book, incidentally

But it’s because the church is as it is that Wesley’s words are dangerous – naïve possibly, simplistic certainly, but without doubt dangerous.  Why?  Because they suggest that things can and should be different from what they are.  They suggest that for proper Christians in proper churches all is sweetness and light and agreement.  And that, I suggest, is a dangerous delusion.  If we look in the New Testament for the pure ‘faith once delivered to the saints’ and for churches unified by sharing the same beliefs, worshipping in the same way, and organised on a common pattern – we will not find it.  For there never was such a church.  The first Christians and the first churches were united in saying ‘Jesus is Lord’, but after that there was diversity, difference and no small amount of tension.  How to live together when polarised views are held with conviction is not a new problem.

However, institutions like to be tidy and down the centuries they tried to sort it.  One method was to compel everyone into uniformity, as in the Inquisition; another was to split away and create your own perfect church, as in many examples today.  But neither method works.  Nor are they true to the New Testament.  If there is a lesson to be learned from Church History it is not to go either of those ways.  The Anglican middle way seems to have been to live and let live, or to think and let think, as the other Wesley brother put it.  This way has been much despised, but it was the advice given by Paul to the church in Rome when it was bitterly divided on one of the big issues of the day.  To be robust in one’s own position and yet also respectful of those who hold opposite views is no easy option.  It demands humility, charity and, not least, ingenuity.  I hope you are up to it.

2  May 2006  Change and Charity

When I was at theological college in the 1960s students divided into two groups.  One rejoiced that ‘Change equals improvement’.  The other bemoaned that ‘Change equals catastrophe’.  Although we can find both attitudes in the church and the diocese today, I think the majority feeling is that we are caught up in change after change and most of us do not like it very much.  Then the ‘blame-culture’ kicks in and we start looking round for someone to name and blame for it all.  Naming and blaming doesn’t help much, of course, but it makes us feel better.  No prizes for guessing the usual victims.

The truth is that it is impossible to say who is to blame for the wave after wave of changes which keep hitting us these days with the regularity of Atlantic lows hitting our coast.  Few of these changes are of our own making or choosing.  New building regulations and listings weren’t our idea.  We didn’t think up new rules for Church Treasurers, or for safeguarding children, young people or vulnerable adults.  It wasn’t General Synod which discovered Health and Safety, or food hygiene or that most public buildings make life tough for people with disabilities.  In these and in many other respects, the Church is subject to social and economic forces over which it has no control.  If we do want to look more closely at ourselves and start pointing fingers at those responsible for empty pews and ageing congregations and the absence of younger people and acute cash shortages and so on and so on, then it becomes an interesting question as to who should throw the first stone, doesn’t it?

Whether we like it or not, and most of us don’t, we are caught up in all kinds of change; and blaming people for it doesn’t get us very far.  Another thing is clear too, that there is no going back to the 1950s.  We have no choice, for example, but to reduce the number of stipendiary clergy.  The knock-on effects of this are that patterns and timings of services must change, and new people be involved in leading them, and that patterns of pastoral ministry must change, and new people be involved in doing it.  Some will find these things exciting and want to be part of the new possibilities, others will find them worrying and may not want to be part of anything at all any more.

And this brings me back to where I ended last time, with the need for humility, charity and ingenuity.  Some correspondents have asked me to unpack that a bit.  By ‘humility’ I mean recognising that I (or my group) haven’t got all the answers, deciding that I am not going to insist on it being done my way, and committing myself to putting other people’s needs before my own.  By ‘charity’ I mean being thoughtful, considerate and kind – in thought, word and deed - to everyone, both to those with whom I (or my group) find it easy and to those with whom I don’t, to those with whom I agree and to those with whom I disagree.  By ‘ingenuity’ I mean being prepared to think laterally, to look at old problems from new angles, to ‘think outside the box’ (horrible modern cliché) and so find different ways of doing what needs to be done, ways which might differ radically in different places.  I wonder how St Paul, caught up in change as he was, would have completed the saying he nearly wrote, that ‘Three things abide: humility, charity and ingenuity; and the greatest of these is ….?’

3  August 2006  Assisted Dying

Recently both the House of Lords and the BMA have opposed attempts to introduce assisted dying.  The papers had pictures of packed rows of bishops in the House of Lords for the occasion and headlines about the Church being at the forefront of opposition to the bill.  According to them the Church was automatically and totally opposed to this bill.  I am not and I do not want to be counted in this opposition.

I find it sad that ‘the Church’ can speak out so powerfully on this issue when no such passion was evident before the Iraq war.  You might say that this is a different issue, but the arguments used against the assisted dying bill were those of the sanctity of human life; and far more human life has already been lost in that war than would be lost in decades of any assisted dying in the UK.  I find it appalling that human life is expendable in the interest of political causes but not in the interest of compassion for individuals with dreadful and terminal illness.  I find it odd that the Church is comfortable about our pets being put down when life becomes intolerable for them, but is unhappy to take the responsibility of extending that care and love to God’s human creatures.

I am aware, of course I am, that this whole issue needs rigorous and real safeguards.  As Christians we are fully aware of humankind’s considerable ability to twist and manipulate things to suit our own, not always good, intentions.  And we have all seen the gross misuse of the 1968 Abortion Act, where safeguards have proved completely inadequate and ineffective.  In any assisted dying proposals there must be clear conditions and fully enforceable safeguards.

According to the press, the core of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech against the bill was that assisted dying ‘would signal that certain kinds of life are not worth living’.  For me, assisted dying is a good thing precisely because certain kinds of life are not worth living!  If we were able to prevent the lives of terminally ill people getting to the unendurable stage, there would be little demand for assisted dying at all.  But the fact is that we are not, and that some terminally ill people in some places (probably ‘many’ rather than ‘some’) suffer terribly, both mentally and physically.  From my own observation I would say that certain kinds of life are indeed not worth living – that sometimes life reaches a point where existence is cruel, inhuman and utterly degrading.  So in my view, before that stage is reached the humane, compassionate and responsible thing is to offer a way out; and at that point, ‘fine words (eg about the sanctity of human life) butter no parsnips’, as my gran used to say.

No doubt someone will say that we cannot play God.  I disagree and next time I will argue that ‘playing God’ is exactly what Genesis 1.26-28 says we are supposed to do.  But in the meantime here is some history.  In the old days people were often assisted to die, for example by letting pneumonia – ‘the old man’s friend’ - take its course, or more actively by being given a larger than necessary dose of morphine to kill the pain and ease the passing like the king’s physician, Lord Dawson of Penn, did to the dying George V on January 20^th 1936.  Assisted dying, done responsibly with proper safeguards, is in my view an act of compassion to those whose life has become unendurable and an expression of human responsibility authorised by God. 

4  November 2006  ‘Playing God’

Thank you for the responses to my piece on Assisted Dying in the August Chronicle, and especially to John Williams for his in the October Chronicle.  So far, supportive comments outnumber the others by 5 to 1, which is interesting.  I promised to explain the Biblical and theological basis of my viewpoint in terms of the phrase ‘playing God’ and Genesis 1.26-28.  So here goes.

It is almost inevitable that the phrase ‘playing God’ gets used in discussions of the dilemmas and possibilities created by modern developments in medicine.  The way it’s used, to ‘play God’ is a bad thing – it suggests overstepping the mark, transgressing proper boundaries and usurping God’s authority.  It is not right, the users of the expression insist, for us to ‘play God’.  I want to challenge that, and say that as far as the Bible is concerned, playing God is precisely and exactly what human beings were created to do.

On the 6^th day of creation, so the parable in Genesis 1 goes, God involves the heavenly ‘us’ in the creation of humanity ‘in our image, according to our likeness’.

In v26 God's states his intention to do this so that humanity can ‘have dominion’.  In v27 God carries out this intention, creating us in his own image and likeness and creating us male and female; and v28 gives God's reaction to the result.  He blesses humanity and commands us to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it and have dominion over its creatures.  From this it is clear that to be made in the image of God is to be given a share in his creativity and a responsibility for shaping and moulding the ongoing life of the creation.  It means that we are created to be God’s agents or stewards, taking responsibility for the future of creation.  Our human vocation is to ‘play God’, or better, to be truly ‘God-like’.

Obviously God is taking a huge risk.  Bible stories of human failure, disappointment and mess-making far outnumber those of human success, achievement and creativity.  Very soon after humanity has been created, so the story goes, we begin our long history of fouling things up, of marring rather than making and of spoiling rather than enhancing.  So Bible readers are fully aware of the dangers in the message of Genesis 1, and so were those who produced the Bibles we have.  They were under no illusion about what humanity can do to undo God’s work: but they still insisted on introducing the human story this way.  For them, humanity’s greatness and potential must not be submerged by the multitude of stories which show humanity as so often it really is.

So, despite the risk, to ‘play God’ or to be ‘God-like’ is exactly what we are created to be and to do.  It’s what being made in ‘the image of God’ is about.  And if this is so we must not shrink from taking the hard decisions which come with medical, scientific and technological developments.  Accepting that we are created to ‘play-God’ does not mean that we will applaud every new development or do every new thing just because it has become do-able, but it does mean that taking the decision, making the choice, is open to us whereas ‘leaving nature to take its course’ or refusing to engage with change is not.  The one argument, therefore, which is not permitted to Christians is to say that ‘we must not play God’, for it is to play God – with all the terrifying responsibility which this entails – that Genesis 1 calls and commissions us.

5  February 2007  A Christmas ‘poem’

I used the 'poem' called 'Lurking' for this edition of the Coracle - you can see it on the oddments page of this website.  I introduced it as follows:  'I always think that Christmas is not a very good time for thinking about Christmas because we are so busy doing all the Christmas things.  So here is a Christmas reflection to ponder before we get caught up in the Lent and Easter things'.

6  May 2007  ‘With God we can’

I have been asked to spell out something I wrote in Bishop Bill’s new book, ‘With God We Can’.  I said,

‘It seems to me that perhaps the biggest change that has taken place in the relationship between the Church in England and the society in which we live in the last five years is that religion is constantly in the news now and that it is constantly getting a bad press.  In the old days religion was hardly ever in the news, for who was interested in that harmless and eccentric hobby of those inadequate enough to be bothered with it?  Clerical misdemeanours merited an occasional cartoon, and the Archbishop of Canterbury was always good to fill an odd column inch now and again, but that was it.  The C of E was a bit of a figure of fun, usually treated with affection, sometimes not.  That has gone.  Religion is now portrayed as dangerous, a threat to our English and civilised values: seen most clearly in the way that religion caused the London bombings!  And it is not just Islam which is getting caught up in this kind of demonising backlash, because as some forms of English Christianity stand up and speak out (defending ‘Christmas’ or the right of the Evangelical Christian Union at Exeter university to be recognised as a university society or on medical ethics issues) they are lumped together and seen as another manifestation of that ‘fundamentalism’ which is a threat to civilisation as we know it.  Religion is back on the agenda, but very dangerously’.

Some of this is, of course, the result of nothing more than ignorance.  Society as a whole is now as ignorant of Christianity, of what we believe and what we do, as it is of other religions like Hinduism or Islam.  Watching any television quiz show soon shows that.  And some who ought to know better, don’t.

Much more serious is the way that religions and religious people are increasingly demonised.  This is not new, but it has grown alarmingly in recent years.  At the heart of it, I suspect, is the fact that human beings are innately suspicious of strangers.  The Old Testament, for example, at times advocates ethnic cleansing and the removal of all strangers; but then at other times commands the Israelites to care for the ‘strangers’ in their midst because obviously this is what they weren’t doing.  The stranger represents the unknown and the unknown is to be feared.  Strangers are also easily identifiable, and so can be scapegoated, and scapegoating always makes us feel safer.  Nowadays all religions and all religious people are getting the backlash of this xenophobia and scapegoating.  We are becoming strangers in our own places.

But there is another side to this.  Some of what goes on in the name of religion is dangerous.  Some religious people do do hideous things.  There are cranks and fanatics.  There are sinister interests at work.  Some religions can be manipulated to some very nasty ends – as Christianity is used in some circles in the USA to justify American policies in the Middle East.  Society is right, some religion and some religions are dangerous and need to be exposed and condemned as such.  The problem is that everything gets tarred with the same brush.

Here we need some rigorously honest and clear thinking, both about our religion and about all religions.  Religion should make us sane and humane, and any sort that does that deserves credit, while those which make its adherents the opposite need to be properly held to account.

7  August 2007  Science and Religion

The old, and fairly pointless, Science versus Religion debate has begun again.  Personally I’ve never thought that there was anything much to debate, apart of course from the ethical issues arising out of advances in medical science.  That debate goes on and will go on, quite rightly.  No, the old and hoary Science versus Religion debate has surfaced again from two quite different places – from Richard Dawkins on the one hand and from the Creationists on the other.  As a scientist, Dawkins takes issue with Religion, and the Creationists take issue with Evolution.  Those of us who are neither fundamentalist atheists nor fundamentalist Christians don’t see either problem, but the debate has certainly begun again.

Let’s start with Richard Dawkins.  He used to be an excellent scientist, a biologist who wrote with passion and clarity about his specialised subject in a way that ordinary mortals like me could both understand and think about.  Recently, however, he has become something else.  To the embarrassment of his scientist and atheist friends, he has become a ranter against religion.  His latest best-seller - ‘The God Delusion’ - is written at the top of his voice.  In it he gives examples of bad religion to demonstrate that all religion is bad – bad for the individuals who practice it, and for the wellbeing of societies and communities.  There is, of course, some bad religion about - I said so in this column last time – and those of us who know the Church from the inside could give Dawkins some better examples than the rather tired old ones he uses.  But Dawkins doesn’t stop to listen, he belts out his case against God and religion with gusto, and many will hear it and agree with it.  Fortunately he has been answered in a very good little book written by someone who is both a competent scientist and a competent theologian, Alister McGrath.  His book – ‘The Dawkins Delusion’ - isn’t a rant, but a careful reply which shows that Dawkins has got carried away by his own rhetoric and that this has distorted his science as well as his views on religion.  Both are books to be read, and if you’ve got friends who’ve read Dawkins, then you should get them to read McGrath as well.

Then there’s the arrival on these shores of American fundamentalist Creationism, which is now trying to rebranding itself as ‘Intelligent Design’.  ‘Intelligent Design’ insists that the Biblical science of creation must at the very least be given equal place as a scientific theory to that given to Evolution, which it sees as a seriously flawed theory.  Make no bones about it, this is a powerful movement being backed by lots of American cash – religious bookstalls and websites are full of it.  The fact that its science is full of holes, my scientist friends tell me, is not stopping it making progress.  I don’t know about its bad science, I’m not competent to comment, but I do know that it is very bad Bible!  For a start, there are four quite distinct creation ‘pictures’ in the Old Testament, two of which Creationists tend to ignore while conflating the other two.  Look up Genesis 1-3 for yourself and see how there are two quite distinct pictures there – fundamentalists generally run them together and explain away the bits that don’t fit.  ‘Intelligent Design’ majors on the ‘Six Days of Creation’ picture, and reads that ancient parable as science.

Dawkins and the Creationists are reliving and reviving the pointless and misguided debates of the nineteenth century.  We live in the twenty-first. 

8  November 2007  Shopping is a theological act

I’ve been conducting Harvest Festivals recently, as well as picking blackberries, putting the lining back inside my biking jacket and wishing it was time to put the heating on in my study.  So it’s autumn.  Except in Tesco’s where you can find all the seasons at once, or where the very idea of ‘seasons’ is now meaningless.

As I sat huddled in our caravan in the far north-west of Scotland with the heater full on and the rain driving against the windows, this being our August holiday, I was pleased to read that children in Cornwall and East Anglia came out top in a recent survey about knowing that milk comes from cows, chips from potatoes which grow in fields and bread from wheat which does the same.  Down here at least we still have some connection with the land, farming and agriculture.

Then I came home and went across the road into my local supermarket.  Usually we shop for as much as possible in the Farmer's Market on our draughty piazza in Truro where we get super local meat, the ham and sausages are especially good, delicious bread, dirty fresh eggs, seasonal no-sprays vegetables, and lovely strawberries with old-fashioned taste.  Anyway, as it was late on a Thursday night I was sent to the supermarket instead.  Among other things I wanted some tomatoes.  I was looking for ordinary, local tomatoes but every tomato I saw was Polish.  Eventually I found a pack (and why do we have tomatoes in packs these days?  It’s only more rubbish to dispose of) of English tomatoes ‘on the vine’ (and where did that pretentious idea come from – no doubt a bit of Delia or suchlike on the television and then everybody’s at it?  And they don’t taste any better), so I bought them and went on grumpily to look for spring onions.  I found some.  From Mexico.  Yes, I didn’t believe it at first myself either.  From Mexico!   Fortunately there were some English ones on another shelf.  Now I've nothing against Poles or Mexicans, and I'm a firm believer in Fair Trade, but in the case of tomatoes and spring onions Fair Trade surely means local produce with as few delivery miles as possible.  And I'll willingly pay a bit more for it.  Like we have all summer for those fantastic strawberries from down west.

This column is not, of course, about advertising the excellent Truro Farmers Market on Wednesdays and Saturdays: but it is about theology.  And theology is about doing as well as about talking.  It is about acting as well as about thinking.  Theology – the ‘ology’ of God, as Maureen Lipman might have said in one of those old adverts - is not just ‘God-talk’ but ‘God-business’ too.  So shopping is a theological activity, shopping is ‘doing theology’.

The danger with some Christianity is that it can miss those things out and be a bit too religious, giving the impression that what really matters is being the church, saying our prayers, deepening our spirituality and so on.  And all that does matter.  Of course it does.  But the Bible reminds us that all the other things matter too, that God created the world and not just the Church, that we are human beings as well as Christians, and that no part of life or living is beyond God’s concern.  That’s why the Old Testament includes rules about the kitchen as well as the altar, tells us what the prophets said about politics and economics, and has a book of proverbs for daily life.

Shopping is indeed a theological act.

9  February 2008  Psalm 23

I thought a look at the 23^rd Psalm might be good for the depths of winter because it pictures God as the Good Shepherd who leads his sheep to green pastures and good water, and the Good Host who lays on a rich banquet for his guests.

The picture of God as a Shepherd and the people of Israel as his flock is common in the psalms (eg 95.7 and 100.3).  The first four verses of Ps 23 describe how God the Shepherd provides for every sheep in the flock so that none goes without.  He knows where to find green pastures, rare in a land where much was arid and dry.  He knows where there is good water, neither brackish nor running dangerously fast.  He knows the safe routes to travel between them.  When dangerous places can’t be avoided, he can be trusted to defend his sheep from attack and harm.  When he gets the flock to the good places, he gives them time to recover from the hard travel in between.  This Good Shepherd has the best interests of the flock at heart. 

The picture of God as a Host and the people of Israel as guests at a banquet is rare in the Old Testament, but there is one important reference which the Church has taken up.  Isaiah 25.6 speaks of the great banquet to be celebrated when God finally rights all the wrongs currently experienced by his suffering people, the picture of the ‘heavenly banquet prepared for all people’ used in some of our Communion Services.  It looks as if this picture meant a lot to Jesus, because he made a big point of ‘eating and drinking’ with all kinds of people – quite against the usual rules of hospitality – as a sign that God’s new ways were beginning and that all and sundry were invited to the Feast.  In Ps 23 this is a lavish banquet.  Each guest is given the special honour of being anointed with oil in welcome.  There is plenty to drink.  And everyone is safe, even if they are surrounded by enemies outside the banqueting hall, because this generous Host is never going to turn them out.  This great feast is going to last a lifetime!

It is easy to dismiss this psalm as too cosy or rosy by half.  To say that life is not like this.  That people don’t live happily ever after.  That for most of us at some time, and even for some of us all of the time, life is hard, painful and deadly without any relief at all.  That we cry out to God and he doesn’t seem to be there.  That he neither cares nor provides.  And many psalms shout complaints like these directly at God, something we never do in Christian worship, but which perhaps at times we should?  But Ps 23 knows about the shadow side, that life is a journey through some hard places, that life takes its toll and can sometimes destroy our very being.  It knows about dark valleys, evil and enemies; that these things are real enough.  It knows that ‘stuff happens’, as they say.  But the anonymous author of Ps 23 knows something else too, that these things do not have the last word.  And so his psalm testifies that the last word lies not with death but with life, not with darkness but with light, and not with evil but with good.  Thanks be to God for this ancient psalm from someone who has been there that nothing can separate us from God’s love, ever.

10  June 2008  Trinity Sunday

One drawback of being Canon Theologian is that people ask you about the Trinity, so as May 17^th is Trinity Sunday I’d like to ask you to use your imagination.

Imagine you are an old man writing about your long journey with God.  You’re writing what would be chosen as the Fourth Gospel, your testimony to Jesus, your meditations on what he had said and done, and your reflections on the meaning he had given to your life.

Church and Synagogue had long since parted company, but you have held on to that old truth that God is Father; the Father of creation, the Father of His People, ‘our Father who art in Heaven’.  The night sky moves you with awe at this mighty God’s power.  Looking at the failings of creation you are moved that he remains merciful and gracious.  Seeing your own frailty you are moved by his generous and forgiving kindness.  It is a privilege and blessing to know this great God as ‘Father’.

Jesus had confirmed all of that for you as he spoke and acted in the name of that God of eternal, fatherly love and authority.  Like everyone else you struggled to make sense of him.  Was he a teacher?  Of course, but more than that.  A healer?  Yes, and more.  A prophet?  Undoubtedly.  The Messiah?  Yes, and more than messiah.  Whatever you called him, he had an amazing presence.  You had come to see that he was the awesome holiness of God personified; God’s glory made visible; the love of God in action.  His death and ‘resurrection’ stretched your mind and your words to breaking point, but you had to call him ‘Lord and God’.  So you had dared to say he was ‘God incarnate’ in your introduction to your meditations.  It was as if when you looked at Jesus you saw right into the heart of God, or as if he was the human face of God.  In the end, that was the only way you could think of him, as ‘Son of God’, as ‘God with us’.

Jesus was not with you like that any more, but there was no denying his real presence when you gathered in worship: in the silences, the preaching, the study of the scriptures, the singing, the prayers, the joy of forgiveness and, many said, especially in the breaking of the bread.  And it was as if he was with you when you were apart too, in the solitary moments, a companion, a voice; an inner calm and a peace which passed all understanding, or a stirring, challenging, uncomfortable presence which drove you on.  As you wrote you had struggled for the words for this, and you still weren’t quite sure that ‘the Spirit of Truth,’ the ‘Holy Spirit’ and ‘the Comforter’ said what you really meant.

So here you are, John, struggling after a lifetime to talk about God.  You know that there is only one God and that God is one: but you want to find proper words to speak of how you experience him and so invite others to experience him too.  The One, Eternal, God, encountered and experienced as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that is the good news you want to share.  You don’t use the ‘Trinity’ word but you want people to have a trinity experience.

What I mean is that the doctrine of the Trinity is a blueprint for our Christian experience and not a diagram of the inner workings of the Deity, even though that’s what it sometimes looks like.

11  August 2008  GAFCON

I write this the day after the GAFCON (= Global Anglican Future CONference’) bishops’ meeting issued the Jerusalem Declaration and ahead of the Lambeth Conference of bishops.  I observe, as a friendly outsider, that big things are at stake here for the Anglican Communion worldwide, and that the ripples might even cause a splash or two in our diocese.  The headline issues are human sexuality and the question of Other Faiths.  The GAFCON people think that those Anglicans who support the appointment of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire or who say that Other Faiths may lead to God are compromising the Gospel.  They want reform, a return to traditional Biblical teaching and new structures to protect traditional Anglicans from this ‘false gospel’ and from those who promote it.  They would no doubt include some past Bishops of this diocese and the current Canon Theologian among their list of such people.

I will look at the question of Other Faiths another time.  It is, I believe, the biggest and most potentially divisive issue facing Christians this century.  The GAFCON position on it is an important point of view and one to be respected: but it is not the only one, nor the only ‘Biblical’ one.

Here I want to comment on the claim which underlies the whole of the Jerusalem Statement - that the GAFCON position is the only one which takes the Bible seriously and that anyone who thinks differently is not truly ‘Biblical’.  People often say that about ‘liberal Christianity’ and it’s simply not fair or true.  That’s why I wrote my best-selling Why Bible-believing Methodists shouldn’t eat Black Pudding back in 1993 when the Methodist Church was having this same debate.  It’s still worth reading!  (That’s why it’s on this website, of course)  My point then, and now, is just this: that it’s not as simple as that!

Point 2 of the 14 points of the Jerusalem Declaration says,

We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God written and to contain all things necessary for salvation.  The Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading’.

Well, so do I.  And so do most ‘liberal Christians’ I know, though I might not put it quite like that.  The problem comes in what happens next.  What is ‘the plain and canonical sense’ of this or that verse?  What is the ‘church’s historic and consensual reading’ of this or that verse?  And what does it mean to ‘respect’ it?  Take two examples.  First, there are texts that forbid women to speak in church and to have authority over men; there are others which support a different view.  How do we decide between them?  Second, the Gospel texts on divorce are complicated and contradictory.  How do we decide which ones to follow?  Just saying ‘The Bible says’ and quoting a verse is not enough, because someone else will say ‘that verse doesn’t mean that’ or quote another Bible verse which says something else.

The Bible has to be interpreted, and that’s where the hard work and the differences of opinion come in when equally sincere and faithful readers, who take the Bible equally seriously, come to different conclusions.  The GAFCON people are claiming the Biblical high-ground for their interpretation of Scripture.  But they are not the only Anglicans who hold the Bible in the highest regard.  Nor is their interpretation the only possible ‘Biblical’ one.

12  October 2008  John 14:6 and Other Faiths

I promised last time that I would at some stage look at the question of Other Faiths.  I also said that I believed this question to be the biggest and most potentially divisive issue facing Christians this century.  So this time I’ll look at the Bible verse which is the most quoted one on this issue, especially by those Christians who believe that all Other Faiths are wrong and that Christianity is the only true religion.  That verse is John chapter 14 and verse 6.  Jesus replies to a question from Thomas with these famous words,

‘I am the way, and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me’.

Those who make the exclusive claim that Christianity is the only true religion say that this saying of Jesus is both clear and conclusive because in it Jesus says that no one comes to God except through him.

For now I’ll leave on one side the question many scholars raise about why John’s Gospel is so different from the other three, and whether Jesus actually said these words or the other famous ‘I am’ sayings in the Fourth Gospel.  You deserve that information and I’ll give it in another column.  Here I don’t want to be controversial at all and my question about this verse is simple.  Does it say that no one comes to God except through Jesus?  The answer, surely, is No.  It doesn’t say that.  What it actually says is that ‘No one comes to the Father except through Jesus’.  And that, I submit, is not the same thing at all.

If John had meant to say that no one comes to God except through Jesus he would presumably have said so – but he doesn’t.  And here is a good example of what I said last time about reading the Bible needing care, attention and sometimes downright hard work.  At the beginning of chapter 14 Jesus tells the disciples to ‘Believe in God’ and to believe in Jesus himself.  In the next verse he talks about there being ‘many mansions’ in his Father’s house.  Then we get the reference to ‘Father’ in this verse.  After that ‘Father’ is mentioned twenty-one times in the rest of the chapter and ‘God’ not once.  This chapter is about the difference that believing in Jesus makes and indeed about the distinctiveness of Jesus’ teaching and ministry.  It is boldly claiming that believing in Jesus leads to us knowing God to be our Father from whom we receive blessing, love and peace.  And here the Fourth Gospel is at one with the other Three who insist that what was distinctive about the teaching and life of Jesus was that he called God ‘Father’ (‘Abba’) and invited the disciples to do the same.

So bold claims are indeed being made here.  But not the claim that Jesus is the only way to God.  What is being claimed is that Jesus is the way to experience and love God as Father, and in reverse to know ourselves loved as his children.  And that is distinctive.  No Other Faith offers that understanding of God or that relationship with Him.  Instead they offer other understandings and other relationships.  If we take John 14:6 seriously our distinctive claim is not that Christianity is the only way to God, but that in Christianity we can know and experience God as our Father.

So I wish those who quote this verse so readily would actually read it more carefully!  Obviously there’s more to say about Other Faiths at another time.

13  December 2008  More on Other Faiths

Given that ‘religion’ is so often in the news these days, that it usually gets a bad press, and that the religion most demonised at the moment is Islam, I thought I’d do my follow-up piece on Other Faiths now rather than later.  Secular fundamentalists like Richard Dawkins keep saying that ‘Religion is bad’ and they would ban it if they could: but whether they like it or not, religion is here to stay.  As Christians, we need to recognise that Other Faiths are here to stay too.  The question is, what should Christians think about them and how should they engage with them?

There is a very simple answer to that.  Christians should take Other Faiths seriously, and treat them with respect.  Just as we expect them to take Christianity seriously and treat us with respect.  This is, of course, not easy.  As I write, Christians are being persecuted by Hindus in Orissa, there are bloody encounters between Christians and Muslims in northern Nigeria and many Muslims regard Iraq and Afghanistan as Christian crusades against them.  Leaders of the great world Faiths almost unanimously deplore such persecution, but it goes on.  And we know even here in Cornwall that people will do some awful things in the name of religion to those who don’t share their particular faith.  Religions, including Christianity, can get nasty.  That’s why the simple answer matters.

The Church of England is committed to dialogue with Other Faiths, and three different positions have emerged.

One is the ‘Exclusive’ one.  This says that Christianity is the only true religion and the sole and exclusive way to God.  Other Faiths are not real Faiths.  There is only One Way to God, and that way is exclusively through Jesus and the Church.  Many claim that John 14.6 says this, but as you know from last time, I don’t agree: but Acts 4.12 does - ‘there is no other name by which we can be saved’.  This view takes Other Faiths seriously and treats them with respect, but believes that they are ultimately wrong and that members of Other Faiths need to be converted.

The second is the ‘Inclusive’ one.  This view recognises that there are good and spiritual people in Other Faiths who are in tune with God and have a genuine religious experience.  Other Faiths nurture a relationship with God and produce real spirituality, holiness and integrity because the Spirit of Christ is present in those Faiths, unacknowledged and unrecognised, but there none the less.  John 1.9 is often quoted here, that Christ is ‘the true light which enlightens everyone’.  Whatever is good in Other Faiths is the result of God’s Spirit at work in them, and good Muslims or good Hindus are really ‘anonymous Christians’.

The third is the ‘Pluralist’ one.  This believes that all religions have something of God in them.  God has made himself known in a variety of cultures in many different ways.  Each Faith helps people to journey nearer God and offers resources for that journey.  Different Faiths may do it differently, and some may do it better than others, but each Faith witnesses to the God who is beyond all our names for him and all our belief systems, but who is encountered in prayer, faith and worship in every Faith.  Religion is like climbing a mountain, each path takes a different route, and each route gives different views, but all are going up the same mountain.

Each of these positions has its strengths and weaknesses.  Each will appeal to some and seem totally wrong to others.  The debate is important.

14  March 2009  The ‘Death of Christendom’

I first came across the phrase ‘the end of Christendom’ about twenty years ago.  I wasn’t impressed.  I thought the article I read it in was scaremongering.  Then I began to hear people talking about ‘Kingdom this’ and ‘Kingdom that’ and I wasn’t at all sure what they were talking about.  Then somebody explained it to me.  She explained that, at long last, the ‘Age of Christendom’ or the ‘Age of the Church’ was coming to an end, and so Christianity was about to be set free from its corrupting ties with ‘state religion’ to preach and live and serve the ‘Kingdom of God’ as Jesus had done.  I still wasn’t impressed.  I could see what my enthusiastic friend was getting enthusiastic about, but I could also see a downside.

That was about twenty years ago.  Much has happened since then.  Many of the experts, in this case the sociologists of religion and modern church historians, are now saying that ‘Christendom’ is indeed coming to an end.  What do they mean?

I think the best way into this is to go back to 312 AD and the conversion of the Emperor Constantine.  His decision to make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire marked the beginning of ‘Christendom’.  Since then, in so much of Europe, Christianity has been the ‘state religion’ in many countries, with close and powerful ties between the Church and the Government, and with the Church being very much involved in the life of the state at every level.  So ‘Christendom’ is what emerged when the Church was given secular ‘power’ and ‘authority’.  ‘Christendom’ stands for the Church and the State in an official, mutually-supporting partnership, a partnership which over the centuries gave the Church considerable power and standing.  And here I mean all the churches and not just the ‘established’ ones.  It was something we all took for granted.  It was not just that the Archbishop of Canterbury crowned the Queen; it was that there chaplains in hospitals, unquestioned tax breaks for churches and that Christianity was part of the fabric.

The experts say that what is happening now, in ways that have never happened before, is that that Church/State tie (which we easily forget is in fact only found in Europe) is now being widely dismantled.  Churches may still be ‘established’ and ‘official’, like the Church of England is in England, but, they say, the reality is going out of that status.  The Church can no longer assume a right to speak and be heard, or to influence legislation or to exercise any form of control.  The Church is losing, or being stripped of, its secular ‘power’ and ‘authority’.  It is no longer ‘part of the fabric’.  It follows that churches must stand or fall on their own feet, that Christianity will have no privileged position in the public sphere, that churches must pay for the rainwater off their roofs like everyone else.

This is what is meant by ‘the end of Christendom’.  Many deplore this huge change in attitude and status.  Others welcome it and see it as ‘freeing the Church to be the Church’.  Many say that ‘Christendom’ has been a good thing, and deplore its passing.  Others say that Constantine’s decision deformed and corrupted Christianity and the Church has been compromised ever since.  What cannot be denied is that we are not talking ‘theory’ here; things really are changing, even if we haven’t come across the sociologists’ and historians’ name for it.

Putting a name on it helps, I think.  And I’ll say more next time.

15  June 2009  More on ‘The Death of Christendom’

I promised I would say more about the idea that one of the big changes which is taking place in Europe is that the ‘age of Christendom’ is ending, and that the partnership between Church and State which goes back to the conversion of the Emperor Constantine is as good as over.  So here is something on two aspects of this.

‘Establishment’.  Back in the 1990s when I was Chair of the Methodist District I used to write an occasional column in the Coracle for Bishop Michael.  I surprised some Anglicans and offended some Methodists in one by saying that I firmly believed in the establishment of the C of E.  I wrote that I had said at a meeting of the Diocesan Bishops and the Methodist Chairs at Ampleforth Abbey that the Bishops should think twice before exchanging their Anglican Establishment birthright for a mess of Free Church pottage.  I still believe that.  But back then the pressure for disestablishment was coming from inside the Church.  Now it is coming from outside.

House of Lords reform is one example.  It is on the back burner now, but it will be back.  There is growing feeling that the Church has no right to influence legislation like it did when the Bishops voted unanimously against the Assisted Dying bill two years ago.  Attitudes are hardening and the Church will have to produce exceptionally good arguments to get any purple onto those red benches in the future.

So the question has changed.  It is no longer a question of whether the Church of England should be disestablished, but of when and how.

Parish Churches.  Last month Prof. Grace Davie from Exeter University came to our Open to Question? group when we were discussing the future of the Church.  She is a sociologist of religion of international standing as well as a good Anglican and an advisor to the Archbishop.  One of her points really struck home.  She said that our society has moved from a culture of ‘obligation’ to one of ‘consumption’, and that this affects church-going like it affects everything else.  Now, like many of you, I am still one of those people who do things because we think we ought to.  If I’m honest, one of the reasons I go to church on Sunday is that I think I ought to.  Grace said that most people are not like that any more.  They do things because they want to do them rather than because they think they ought to do them.

Parish Churches are Christendom built in granite.  Inside them, though, congregations are tiny because people no longer feel they have to go to church.  But, Grace said, people do use them when they need them!  And think of the outcry if we try to close a church.  It’s like the Post Office, the school and the dentist: people expect them to be there when and if they need them.  It’s their right as consumers.  That annoys me: but after listening to Grace I began to think that it was perhaps me who needs to have a rethink.  What if I started to think about what I and my local church actually offer these potential consumers of Christianity?  Or what the Bible and the Faith say we have to offer?  Or what our product is?  Or how best we can promote it?  I don’t like thinking in this consumerist way, but I have a nagging suspicion that this is how our forebears thought before ‘Christendom’ arrived.  So might we need to think this way now that it is going?

16  October 2009  The Learning Church

I must confess to having a large waste paper basket in my study where I file quite a few of the bright ideas which come down from London.  The more urgent they are labelled the more urgently they usually get filed.  A friend says that Bright Ideas from the Top are like wine, they need to be left to stand for several years before they’re usable.  Be that as it may there is a Bright Idea from your Anglican Top which has now been round for a year or two and which I really do think is worth thinking about.  It’s the idea that the Church should be a Learning Church.

There’s nothing new in this, of course.  The Early Church was a ‘Learning Church’ where they met together to study the Scriptures as well as to worship and pray.  In my youth churches had ‘guilds’ or ‘house groups’ or ‘Bible studies’, though the take-up was never that great.  But there is little of that around these days (‘Blessed are you if your parish does that kind of thing, and blessed is your minister for promoting it’).  And this is especially worrying at a time when ignorance of basic Christian things outside the Church is at an all-time high.  So the Bright Idea is to promote ‘learning’ in the Church and it’s got a number of slogans, ‘Education for Discipleship’ being one of the most common.

The Formation Group in the Diocese has been thinking and praying about this and has come up with the idea of a set of short courses on Christian basics which can be run in parishes or deaneries.  We’ve called it ‘Windows into …’ and when they are all done there will be six short courses: Windows into the Bible – the Old Testament; Windows into the Bible – the New Testament; Windows into Church History; Windows into Christian Ethics; Windows into Christian Doctrine and Windows into Spirituality and Worship.  Each course will last for 6 weeks and will be based around a Powerpoint presentation which will be fronted by a local Tutor and a local Facilitator.  The two Bible units will be up and running this autumn ready for trialling around the Diocese through the year, and we’ve already got some offers of places to run the trials.  Some are parishes, one is a deanery and I’ll be doing one in the Cathedral.  Some will be 6 weeks on the trot, some fortnightly or whatever suits the local situation best.  There should be a trial somewhere near you, so if you want to know a bit more about the Old Testament and the New then here’s your chance to find out.  Another pair of courses will come on stream for autumn 2010 if the trials go well.

At a more advanced level the University of Exeter has run Certificate level courses in Truro on the Bible and Christian Doctrine for many years now, started by Canon Peter Boyd and taught by him for much of the time.  Sadly, the University is pulling out of part-time public-access Theology courses for financial reasons.  Happily, there are plans afoot for the South West Ministry Training Course to take over the programme and revamp, revitalise and refresh it to start again in September 2010 and continue the work Canon Peter began.  So if you like the tasters offered by ‘Windows into …’ there will be somewhere to go next.  After all, Jesus did say, ‘Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me …’

17  December 2009  New Ways and Fresh Expressions

There are two other sets of Bright Ideas doing the rounds now which have also avoided my large waste paper basket.  One is the set labelled ‘New Ways of Being Church’ or ‘Fresh Expressions of Church’, and the other is the set labelled ‘Evangelism’.  If I’m honest I’m a bit surprised that they haven’t gone into the bin, because I’m not very comfortable with either of them.  I’ve nothing against ‘New Ways’ or ‘Fresh Expressions’ in principle (after all, my own Methodist Church started out as a New Way and a Fresh Expression back in the 1740s) but in practice I often don’t like what I see happening under those banners today.  It’s the same with ‘Evangelism’.  It’s a good, big and important New Testament word – Christianity has ‘Good News’ (the English translation of the Greek word evangellion) to share!  In practice, though, I don’t like much so-called ‘evangelism’ and I’m often turned off both by its messages and its methods.  But, however reluctantly, I have to recognise that the Grumpy Old Man syndrome, which dismisses stuff out of hand just because I don’t like it, just will not do.  And that’s why these two Bright Ideas haven’t gone in the bin.

At the heart of both of these Big Ideas is an important pair of facts.  Fact 1 is that the institutional Church is in serious decline.  I don’t think I need to spell this out because the signs are obvious in church every Sunday.  The people are just not there, are they?  We rejoice in those who are there, but there’s not many of us and in most places we are getting older and fewer.  Whatever we are doing in church on Sundays is not connecting with the people in the parishes or communities around our churches.  Fact 2 is that something needs to be done about it.  Or at least, something needs to be done about it if the Church is to survive as an institution.  I know that there are those who see the demise of the institutional Church as a good thing, a sort of clearing of the ground for God to do something new and better.  I also know that these serious declines have happened in the past and God has then done something about it.  But when I look closely I see that what he did usually involved both ‘New Ways’ or ‘Fresh Expressions’ and ‘Evangelism’ of one sort or another, whether that was Methodism in the late 18^th century or the Oxford Movement in the late 19^th, and that it involved the Church of the day thinking new thoughts and doing new things.  The days of thinking that all is ok and it will all somehow work out are over.  So are the days of simply praying and waiting for something to happen.  So are the days of saying that ‘bums on seats’ is not the main thing.  The absence of bums on seats is precisely the problem!  And getting more bums on seats is precisely the solution!

Any chance of achieving that, it seems to me, requires two changes.  One is a change in our strategic thinking and planning, in how we make decisions, order our priorities, deploy our resources and do what we do in our worship and mission.  The second change is personal, involving each of us growing in our understanding of our Faith, as in those ‘Windows into …’ short courses the diocese is promoting, and in learning to share our faith better with our families, friends, neighbours and contacts.  I’ll say more on this next time.

18  March 2010  Evangelism is everybody’s business

This is the second of the two Bright Ideas doing the rounds at the moment, and which have  avoided my large waste paper basket.  This is the bright idea labelled ‘Evangelism’.  I ended last time by saying that the time had come when we all needed to learn to share our faith better with our families, friends, neighbours and contacts.  Why?  Because, as Bishop Tim puts it, we need to ‘grow the Church’.

I think there are two things in particular which make many vicars and ordinary churchgoers think that ‘evangelism’ is not for them.  One is that the Church has tended to leave evangelism to the Evangelicals.  The other is that ordinary Christians have tended to leave evangelism to ‘evangelists’.  These two statements are, of course, generalisations: but I think they are accurate ones.  The result of leaving evangelism to the Evangelicals is that ‘evangelism’ is defined in a very particular way, associated with particular styles of worship, particular ideas, a particular theology and particular methods.  Those who do not like those kinds of things therefore back away from ‘evangelism’ and so a vicious circle develops.  The result of leaving evangelism to ‘evangelists’ is that evangelism gets professionalised.  In the eyes of ordinary Christians, evangelism is what special people do, people who are trained for it and have professional qualifications: people like Billy Graham or J. John, not people like you and me.  So another vicious circle forms.

So what can we do?

First, if we are to ‘grow the Church’ these two vicious circles need to be broken.  That starts by naming them and identifying them for what they are, and I hope this column might have started to do that.  We can begin to break these two particular vicious circles by recognising that evangelism is the business of the whole Church and of all of us, no matter how nervous or uncomfortable or inadequate saying that might make us feel.

Second, we need to know ourselves and be ourselves.  I get a bit sceptical about Myers-Briggs, Enneagrams and ‘personality-types’ and all that kind of thing, but I do know that I have real strengths and weaknesses.  Some things I do easily and well.  Some things I do only with great effort and badly.  Evangelism trainers (I know, I’ve just come back from a weekend listening to several of them) recognise how important it is that each of us does evangelism in the ways that suit our personality-type.  Trying to do it in ways that don’t, they say, is awful for you and usually not much help for those with whom you are trying to share your faith.

Third, we need ‘missionary training’.  I put it as starkly as that deliberately.  Before we went to work for the Church in Ghana, Margaret and I were sent for ‘missionary training’ because it was recognised that anyone going onto ‘the mission field’ needed training.  Today, the commentators observe, Cornwall, England and the UK is ‘the mission field’.  We do not live in a place without God, but we do live in a place ignorant of Christ, the Church and the Good News.  And to work in a ‘mission field’ we need ‘missionary training’.  That’s very new and very scary: but it’s where we’re now at.

Evangelism is not a new idea.  The new Bright Idea is that it’s the business of all of us, and that it’s urgent business.

19  June 2010  The Bible 

Let’s face it, the Bible is a problem.  We all know it is important, and it’s still a best-seller: but surveys show that most Bibles are rarely opened.  By and large, with the exception of Revelation, the New Testament still gets a relatively good press.  And Jesus is still ok, as we see in the title of Philip Pullman’s new book (though the topic and title is old hat) – The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.  But the Old Testament hasn’t got a good name at all.  People talk about ‘the God of the Old Testament’ or ‘Old Testament religion’ when they want to point to a nasty and vengeful God and genocidal, repressive and negative types of religion.

There’s nothing new in being rude about the Old Testament.  Marcion was a second-century missionary and church leader in Rome with strong views about the Old Testament and its god.  He didn’t think the Old Testament should be Christian Scripture at all; nor that the god of the Old Testament was the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  He saw the Old Testament as an outdated and barbaric book, and believed that the god of the Old Testament was a cruel and thoroughly unpleasant god, greatly inferior to the God of Love made known by Jesus.  Although Marcion was excommunicated as a heretic in 144 AD, his views were very popular in the churches of his day and his legacy remains with us.  He lives on as a shadowy presence in the Church, whispering insidiously about the Nasty God of the Old Testament and the Nice One of the New, with the result that that way of thinking about the Old Testament and its god is widely, even if unofficially, held today.

I must admit that Marcion had a point.  The Old Testament is a very large anthology of ancient religious literature, some of which is pretty unreadable and some of which is unquestionably offensive, although both of these can be said of parts of the New Testament too.  But I can’t leave it there.  I have to go on to say that although the Old Testament is an ancient library from a strange culture, and despite the fact that it is long, complicated and at times both utterly tedious and downright repugnant, it is nevertheless worth staying with if we want to think about ‘God’ and ‘the meaning of life, the universe and everything’.  Marcion had a point, but so did the church leaders who decided that he was wrong, and a very good place to see just how wrong Marcion is about the God of the Old Testament, and why the Old Testament as a whole really is worth staying with, is Psalm 103, my ‘desert-island psalm’.  This ancient hymn is an excellent summary of everything that is best in the whole Bible, not just the Old Testament.

It’s because the Bible is not an easy book that the first two of the short ‘Windows into’ courses which the Diocese is producing are about the Bible: Windows into the Old Testament and Windows into the New Testament.  These 6-week powerpoint courses, with everything you need on one disk, are starter packs on reading the Bible seriously and intelligently.  There’s probably one planned in your deanery somewhere, and if not, there could be!  Ask your priest about it, look on the diocese website, or get in touch with Marilyn at Diocesan House.  It matters, because the Bible is too important to keep closed and the Old Testament, especially, is too easy to get wrong.

20  September 2010  Why?

There is one question which is absolutely unavoidable for Christians.  It crop ups when there is a devastating natural disaster, like the Haiti earthquake; when there is a terrible human tragedy, like the west Cumbria shootings; or when fatal accident, serious illness or untimely death strike much closer to home.  It is the question, ‘Why?’

I was in the kitchen of the Methodist chapel in Buddleigh Salterton last month, and was intrigued to read this plaque in memory of the Revd Lewis Lewis, a former minister of the church,

As a missionary in the West Indies and as a minister at home, he served God in his day and generation with much fidelity and usefulness, and was then called to his eternal rest, by a mysterious providence, in the midst of life, 24^th June 1848, in the 35^th year of his age.

I liked that bit about serving God ‘with much fidelity and usefulness’ and thought it was very appropriate that his memorial ended up in the kitchen when they renovated the building; but it was that ‘mysterious providence’ bit that took my eye.  A good minister dies relatively young and his congregation sees it as the will of God which is beyond them to fathom and beyond them to question.  It’s a Victorian version of Job’s saying that ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’, before the writer of that theological case study turns his leading character into a much more argumentative sort of chap.

I know that that ‘Why?’ question is often a cry for help and rarely a request for a theological discussion.  I know too that some people say that there’s no answer to it anyway, and others disagree over what the possible answers are.  But the question of ‘Why bad things happen to good people?’ is an ancient one which can’t be shirked; and it deserves discussion in our churches.  All I want to say here is that although the question is hard and answers are harder still, there are some definitely wrong answers to it which need to be challenged when they are heard.  One of them is Job’s answer itself.  Could you say that to the children whose mum was shot in Egremont, or to the grandmother who has seen her family wiped out in Haiti?  That sentence was rightly dropped from the Methodist funeral service in our 1976 Worship Book and has never reappeared.

Then there’s these common responses to tragedy, and after each of them I offer what I usually reply as simply and gently as possible:

‘These things are sent to try us’.  ‘No they aren’t.  It doesn’t work like that.’

 

‘What have I done to deserve this?’  ‘Nothing, it doesn’t work like that’ (except, of course, if it’s someone with lung cancer who has smoked fifty a day for 40 years …)

 

‘God must have done this for a purpose’.  ‘No.  He doesn’t work like that’ Or ‘If God really has done this for a purpose (eg the death of a 25-year old mother of two little ones from an undetected deep vein thrombosis) – then he’s not a God I could worship’.

 

‘There must be a reason for this and one day we’ll know what it is’.  ‘I don’t think so.  Some stuff just happens’.

The times we hear these things are not the times to say very much, but it seems to me that when they are said, they deserve a response.

21  January 2011  The 400^th Anniversary of the Authorised Version

Christmas is nearly here and it won’t be long before churches are putting on those Services of Nine Lessons and Carols.  I committed the unforgiveable sin once of changing the carols at one of those.  I can’t remember which two or three I wanted to drop or what I wanted to put in their place, but organist and choir were having none of it.  I lost.

The old and familiar are important to us, and change is not always welcome, which is why the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were so unsettling.  They started in England with church like it had always been and ended with something quite different, and those who lived through those turbulent years of the English Reformation didn’t enjoy them very much, whichever side they were on.  The issues were many and varied, the conflicts fierce, and the casualties high.

One of the battles was over the Bible.  Early on the ‘Latin versus English’ battle was won by those who advocated the right of ordinary people to hear and read the Bible in their own language.  Next came skirmishes between different English translations, because different groups produced different translations and, just like today, translation is an art and not a science and translators and especially publishers usually have some sort of axe to grind.  So, when you add in the 16^th and 17^th century fear of diversity and its insistence on law, order and authority there is something inevitable about 1611.

And so in the new year, we shall be celebrating the 400^th Anniversary of the publication of ‘The Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments, translated out of the original tongues and with the former translations diligently compared and revised by His Majesty’s special command: appointed to be read in churches’.  The publication of the Authorised Version (or the ‘King James Version’ as the Americans tend to call it) was not universally welcomed.  The half dozen English translations which had appeared in the previous century had their supporters.  It was fifty years before this new Bible was established as the English Bible and then it reigned supreme until the 1950s, easily shrugging off an attempt to revise it in the 1880s, and then only giving way reluctantly to the Revised Standard Version and a flood of fresh translations.  There is even an attempt to resurrect it in the New King James Version.  Its story is a fascinating example of how that which at first was unwanted, radical, new, different and which had to be imposed from the top became something that people fought to keep at all costs because it was old, traditional, familiar and true.  Which is why many of the Bible readings used in our Carol Services this year will still be from that old AV; and if anyone has the temerity to use the Good News Bible or The Message you can guarantee there will be grumbles.

Much will be said in 2011 about the contribution of the Authorised Version to the development of the English language and the richness of English literature.  Its contribution to worship, liturgy and spirituality will also feature.  I hope the discussion will also include stuff on what the Bible is, how it came to us, manuscripts and translation issues and things like that.  Above all, I hope that the 400^th Anniversary Year of the Authorised Version will result in a renewed awareness of the legacy of the Bible in English culture and English Christianity and in more Christians actually reading it, though, I must say, preferably not in the AV translation itself.

I was emailed a question the other day by a student who I’d never met and didn’t know.  From the question I assumed that the student was not a Christian or a churchgoer.  It was a very good question on an important current issue.  The editor of the Coracle thought I ought to share my reply with you all.

The question was about the Bible and Science.  The student wanted to know what the Church thought about scientific attempts to discover how the earth was created.  The way the question was put made it clear that the student assumed that these scientific experiments and any results they might obtain would contradict the Bible’s views on creation.  So there was also an unspoken assumption that the Bible and the Church were wrong on this important issue.

This is what I replied.

‘The idea that the Bible account of Creation and that of Science are mutually contradictory is both widespread and misguided.  It is currently being widely perpetuated by Richard Dawkins and others from their Atheist position and by Christian Fundamentalists from theirs, and from the way you have framed your question it looks as if you have bought into this popular misconception.

As far as the Bible is concerned, it has a number of different ways of speaking about Creation (seven in the Old Testament alone according to one recent book) and it is simply wrong to speak as if there is only one 'creation account' in the Bible.

Also, when reading any kind of literature, a vital question to ask is the question of genre - what kind of literature is this, and so what reading method do I use to understand it?  You wouldn't, for example, go to your local travel agents to book a ticket for the train to Hogwarts or a flight to the next World Quidditch Championship, would you?  So taking the genre of the Bible's creation pictures seriously, professional Bible scholars will point out that the Bible treatments of creation are not 'scientific' in our modern sense of the word at all, and are not answering 'how the universe was made' kinds of questions.

The questions they deal with are the 'Why is there a universe?' sort of question, and the 'How are we going to live in it wisely and well?' sort of question.  So, given that Science and the Bible are working with different genres of material, and exploring different types of questions, orthodox and traditional Christianity sees no conflict between Science and the Bible over Creation.  John Calvin, the great leader of the Continental Reformation in the 16th century, put it beautifully when he said that if he wanted an answer to the question about the age of the earth he wouldn't dream of looking in the Bible, he'd find the nearest geologist.

So traditional and orthodox Churches, like the Church of England, are happy to join in the scientific search for the origins of the universe, and to read the Bible for its perspectives on how to make the most of life on the planet we are on; and we see no contradiction between Science and the Bible here at all’

23 June 2011 By their fruits you will know them

At the beginning of Holy Week I listened to Start the Week on Radio 4.  It featured Sam Harris (the American militant-atheist equivalent of our own Richard Dawkins) talking about morality with Canon Lucy Wincket of St James’ Piccadilly.  His argument was that science was the only solid basis for morality, because it was obvious to all right-thinking people that religion leads to some very nasty ideas about morality, some very unpleasant attitudes and values and some very bad actions.  Canon Lucy agreed, quite rightly, that bad religion can be very nasty.

Sam Harris countered that by going off on a familiar tack.  Religion is simply bad for your health, he insisted, and for the health of society, the world and the planet.  To support this sweeping generalisation he pointed out that according to surveys 40% of Americans believe that the End of the World, the Second Coming of Christ and the subsequent throwing of most of the world’s population into the Hell of Fire is coming soon, or at least within the next 50 years.

I hoped that Canon Lucy would respond to that strange logic, but the presenter asked her something else instead.  If she had been able to respond I hope she would have said that you can’t blame Christianity for the strange views of some American Christians.  After all, 40% of Americans vote Republican, but that doesn’t mean that we should stop believing in democracy.  And the fact that 40% of them are obese doesn’t mean that we should stop enjoying our food.  Canon Lucy was right that it’s bad religion which is dangerous and Sam Harris was wrong to tar us all with the same brush.

At the same time, I think we do have to recognise that there is some truth in what these atheists say on this one because there is a lot of embarrassingly bad religion around.  That’s one of the things my mate Revd Ian Haile and I often talk about on our walks round the footpaths of Cornwall (our last was round the Goss Moor Trail, much to be recommended, just miss out the half which runs down the side of the old A30).  We know that there are many arguments against the existence of God, or against the existence of a God of Love, or against Christianity or against Faith of any kind.  Some of these are arguments from science or philosophy, some come from the realities of suffering and evil, and others come from the failure of God to answer our prayers or to be around when most needed.  These can be strong arguments.  But for me the biggest argument against faith in God (in whatever religion that faith is expressed and by whatever name God is known) is the way that those who have faith behave.  Church History is full of Christian examples; the news provides contemporary ones.

There is nothing new in this, of course.  The Old Testament prophets spent most of their time castigating their contemporaries because their behaviour didn’t square with their beliefs.  Jesus did that too, though less aggressively.  When asked what it was all about, he repeated what he had learned as a boy: love God and love your neighbour.  There might be a bit more to it than that, the Gospels and the New Testament make that clear, but that is the bottom line; and ‘By their fruits you will know them’ remains for me one of Jesus’ sharpest sayings.  Unfortunately, iffy fruit plays right into the hands of the Sam Harrises of this world.

24 September 2011 Have you heard the one about ...?

Summer is traditionally the silly season for news, so I thought I’d tell you two old jokes in this issue of the Coracle which I am writing just before going on holiday.  The only hiccup in my logic, though, is that some jokes are not silly.  Funny, yes.  Silly, no.  Rabbi Lionel Blue’s jokes are usually funny, but never silly, because he comes from a long line of Jewish theologians who use jokes to make serious points.  The writer of that comic Biblical tale – the Book of Jonah – was one too.  Jesus was another.

My reason for telling these two jokes is that I’ve been reading up some Church History recently so that I can edit the material that our guest writers are producing for the new Windows into Church History course, which will be available from Diocesan House in late September.  So thinking about the Church in the last 100 years I looked up some statistics.  I was very encouraged to learn that worldwide the Church has almost doubled in size in the last 40 years.  I found that very encouraging, a happy antidote to the decline in Church numbers in Cornwall, the rest of the UK and western Europe in that same period.  I was less encouraged to learn that there are 77 million Anglicans and 75 million Methodists in the world.  I thought it was the other way round, and so as a Methodist I was a bit disappointed.  Then I read that there are 38000 Christian denominations in the world.  Yes, that’s right, 38 thousand denominations.  The biggest is the Roman Catholic Church with just over a billion members, and the smallest is Ebenezer Church of the Holy Seraphim which meets in a front room in Birmingham.  Okay, I made that one up, but only just.  But 38,000?  That’s worrying.  So here are the jokes, and for obvious reasons I’ve used my own denomination …

Two walkers met on a bridge over a deep ravine in the middle of nowhere and stopped to chat.  They discovered they were both Christians.  ‘Praise the Lord!’ they said.  Then they found that they were both Methodists.  ‘Praise the Lord!’ they said.  Then they discovered that they were both Wesleyan Methodists.  ‘Praise the Lord!’ they said.  Then they found that they were both United Wesleyan Methodists.  ‘Praise the Lord!’ they said.   Then they discovered that they were both Reformed United Wesleyan Methodists.  ‘Praise the Lord!’ they said.  Then there was a scream as one pushed the other off the bridge.  ‘Die, heretic!’ he shouted, having learned that the other was a Traditional Reformed United Wesleyan Methodist, while he was a New Covenant Reformed United Wesleyan Methodist.

One day a group of Anglicans gathered at the Pearly Gates.  As he usually did, St Peter took the new arrivals on a walk round to show them the sights.  They passed the part where the Buddhists were, and the new arrivals admired the saffron robes.  They passed the charismatic Christian area where they had just put their hands down for coffee.  They shared the Peace with the Orthodox, though some found the long beards a bit tickly.  Then St Peter put his fingers to his lips and asked them to tiptoe past the next place which had high walls around it.  When they got past one of them asked St Peter what that was all about.  ‘O that’, replied St Peter, ‘that’s where the Methodists are.  They think they’re the only ones here’. 

As Jesus said at the end of some of his jokes, ‘If you have ears to hear, then hear’.      

25 December 2011 Love Wins

Twenty years ago we would have called it a storm in a teacup.  Not any more as the ‘teacup’ in question is the Evangelical community.  In those days Evangelicals were a small, though important, minority in the Church of England and a small but important minority in the Church Catholic.  Today things have changed and Evangelicals, though split into factions, are a powerful and major player in the Church of England, and the largest single group in the World Church.  Definitely not a teacup.   

The ‘storm’ in question is a bitter dispute over a man and his book.  The man is Rob Bell, Founding Pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  The Chicago Sun-Times even call him ‘The next Billy Graham’.  The book is Love Wins (Collins, 2011, £14.99 - cheaper on Amazon).  It reads more like a lively and stimulating meditation than a book and it’s a very easy read with lots of short sentences, even single-word ones, and no jargon or footnotes.  I found it inspired and inspiring: but it has caused a real storm.

Love Wins is about God.  What is God like?  In it Rob Bell focusses on Heaven and Hell.  He thinks that God is not like the so-called god of those Christians who believe that he provides the joy of Heaven for some and eternal punishment in Hell for the rest.  He believes that the picture of eternal punishment in Hell is not actually found in the Bible and that those Evangelicals whose message is that people must ‘Turn or Burn’ are utterly mistaken.  A god who behaves like that is unworthy of the name – no human parent would behave like that towards their children and God is better than we are!  

You can see why he has caused a storm.  Not least as in 2000 the Evangelical Alliance produced a report on Hell which firmly stated, among other things, that ‘as well as separation from God, hell involves severe punishment.  Scripture depicts this punishment in various ways, using both psychological and physical terminology.  Although this terminology is often metaphorical and although we should be wary of inferring more detail about hell than Scripture itself affords, hell is a conscious experience of rejection and torment’ (The Understanding of Hell, point 7).  Rob Bell looks at the kind of references the report uses and shows that they don’t mean that at all.  I’d buy the book just for his marvellous exposition of the Parable of Dives and Lazarus.

None of this is new or strange.  My minister told us much the same thing as Rob Bell has written in our Confirmation class in the 60s.  Back in 1929 the hymn-writer and editor Percy Dearmer wrote that ‘The legend of Hell is … a powerful enemy of the Christian religion, as it has for generations been the most general cause of the widespread repudiation of the Churches which marks the modern era’.  The popular theologian Walter Wink put it succinctly in 2002 that ‘Belief in a place of eternal torments is unworthy of the highest forms of Christian faith’.  And the great Eastern Orthodox Bible scholar Origen of Alexandria said much the same in the third century. 

Rob Bell doesn’t want to throw the concept of Hell away – emphatically not – but he does want to get back to what it and Heaven actually mean in the teaching of Jesus and in the reality of our daily here-and-now lives.  This is a book to buy, read and share.  It would make an excellent textbook for a Lent course.

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