'Doing' theology today

Nicholas Lash has an excellent account of what doing theology means today in his series of lecture  Holiness, Speech and Silence: Reflections on the Question of God.

... continuing to hold the Gospel's truth makes much more serious and dangerous demands than mere lip-service paid to undigested information. Unless we make the truth our own through prayer, thought and argument - through prayer and study and an unflinching quest for understanding - it will be chipped away, reshaped, eroded by the power of an imagining fed by other springs, tuned to quite different stories. And this unceasing, strenuous, vulnerable attempt to make sone Christian sense of things, not just in what we say, but in the ways in which we 'see' the world, is what is known as doing theology. (4)

For a helpful unpacking of some of the themes in this fine piece of theology, see Simon Barrow's paper What Difference does God make today?

Occupy, St Paul's and why the church needs a radical reformation

Responding to the contortions of the Church of England, and the dominant media narrative that Occupy LSX is a "disaster" for the Church as a result of the troubles at St Paul's Cathedral, my good friend Simon Barrow, co-director of the Christian think-tank Ekklesia, has drawn attention to the theological and ecclesiological issues at stake. Simon observed that:

Actually, Occupy LSX has also presented an unprecedented (some would say God-given) opportunity for the established Church radically to reconsider its mission and message in a plural society. The church needs to seize the chance to move from failing attempts at top-down control based on historic patronage, towards dynamic engagement with those at the grassroots and on the margins of an unequal and uneasy social order.

The core Christian message is that, in Jesus Christ, God pitched a tent among human beings for the purposes of bringing about radical personal and social change based on love and justice. The 'vertical church' of Christendom, emblemized by the remote, patronising and hierarchical response of the St Paul's management to a flowering of creative protest, is no longer 'fit for purpose' in a post-Christendom situation.

By contrast, Occupy, with its energy and imagination, is modelling a different possibility for the church. The institutions of Christianity need to be remade from the edges inwards. They need to be turned inside out.

Which Religion? Whose Spirituality?

Browsing through a questionnaire on social attitudes at the start of my long march through a PhD, I was brought up short by some questions that invited me to assess my religiousness and/or spirituality.

The problem is that I don't consider myself very religious, or very spiritual for that matter.

The difficulty is that both terms are used generically, without clear definition,as though we all knew what the essence of religion and spirituality respectively are. Unfortunately, for anyone wanting to use the terms this way, there is no such thing as a "religion" and no such thing as a "spirituality" without further qualification.

The question we need to ask, with appropriate apologies to Alasdair McIntyre, is "Which religion? Whose spirituality?"

As the question implies, both religion and spirituality at the very least, need some form of qualification before I could even begin to think about, contemplating giving any sort of an answer to the above question.

The issue of specifying which gods we are worshipping is important, because as Rowan Williams pointed out in his address Analysing Atheism, Unbelief and the World of Faiths, the early Christians were in a very significant and life-threatening sense not religious.

... to understand what atheism means, we need to know which gods are being rejected and why. Thus an early Christian was an atheist because he or she refused to be part of a complex system in which political and religious loyalties were inseparably bound up. 'Atheism' was a decision to place certain loyalties above those owed to the sacralised power of the state.

Simon Barrow in What difference Does God Make, makes clear, drawing on the work of Nicholas Lash, why "individual religiousness" is not really the point.

Before modernity, the term ‘gods’ was understood, correctly, as a relational one, designating whatever it was people worshipped – gave ultimate worth to. It resided in occurrences, activities and patterns of behaviour – not concepts. Explains Lash: “The word ‘god’ worked rather like the word ‘treasure’ still does. A treasure is what someone... highly values. And I can only find out what you value by asking you and by observing your behaviour… There is no class of object known as ‘treasures’… valuing is a relationship.”

However, with the dominance of instrumental reason, ‘gods’ became, correspondingly, things (objects, entities, individuals) of a certain kind, a ‘divine’ one. Analogously, the ‘home territory’ of God-understanding shifted from worship (the assignment of worth-ship) to description (the assignment of properties). It became a metaphysical enterprise rather than a matter of appropriate relationship. The difference is that the former has to make claims about essence or ‘being’ (of a person, a thing, or ‘god’) in order to find it meaningful. The latter does not, though it needs a good idea of what it speaks.

This double shift of meaning and affection fundamentally corrupted and disabled the modern comprehension of ‘God’ – because God is, logically and necessarily, beyond definition (delimiting) and categorisation. God is most definitely not a ‘thing’ belonging to a class of things called ‘gods’.[10] “Christians, Jews, Muslims and atheists all have this, at least, in common: that none of them believe in gods”, says Lash. Therefore religions are best considered ‘schools’ in which people learn properly to relate to God precisely by not worshipping any thing – not the world nor any part, person, dream, event or memory of it.

Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, nationalism and even atheism offer specific, and in varying ways overlapping and competing schools, in what it is to be and live humanly in the world in which we find ourselves. Spirituality, like religion is never generic. And in the account of religion that I am arguing for the substantive difference between "religion" and "spirituality" begins to disappear, in so far as spirituality is expressed in differing, and non-generic ways of learning to live in relationship to the world.

The key difference is that "spirituality" is seen as differing from "religion" in being less tied to institutional structures and intellectual formulations. This outcome is what we might expect if the move in public identification from "religion" to "spirituality" is the result of the deconstruction of Christendom. This process has generally fallen under the label of secularization, a process which is notably been played out in the geographical areas of the world shaped by Christendom.

In the light of this development the sociology of religion needs to be reconsidered and perhaps de-constructed as being powerfully shaped imaginatively and historically by its relationship to Christendom and its underlying assumptions. Such an exercise might have the helpful result of relativising its explanatory usefulness for Christians thinking about mission and church growth strategies. The analysis offered by this discipline with its focus on the "decline of religion" and the "rise of spirituality" if used without appropriate caution could simply result in importing the problematics of Christendom back into our ecclesiology and practice of mission.

Note: an edited and slightly extended version of this is now available on Ethos: EA Centre for Christianity and Society blog.

Wedded to a Right Royal Theological Confusion - theological reflections provoked by the royal wedding

I am frequently deeply in debt to the musings theological and otherwise of my friend Simon Barrow, co-director of Ekklesia. On this occasion I want to reproduce in full his theological comments on the situation of the Christian church as highlighted by the wedding of William and Kate. It's great. I wish I had said most of it myself.  Read, be provoked and become a regular reader of the Ekklesia site.

Wedded to a Right Royal Theological Confusion

Reading the church media over the past week, and probably for the succeeding one, would leave many people with the impression that the boundary between church and monarchy is virtually indecipherable. I find this elision of faith in God with a longing for worldly pomp and circumstance deeply disturbing.

Though Anglican by tradition and somewhat Catholic in my spirituality, I am increasingly a Mennonite-shaped Anabaptist in my core theological convictions - and ecclesiologically formed by the difficult but fruitful conversation between these three.

However, at a time when flags are waved, national anthems sung, royalty celebrated, the state ritualised, and all 'proper' persons presumed to be monarchists, it is my nonconformist and Anabaptist side that I feel coming to the fore more than ever. 

Next to a willingness by Christians to sanction or excuse war, there is for me no greater evidence of the theological vacuity, privatisation of belief and civic absorption of the church (all of which lie at the heart of the crisis in modern institutional Christianity) than clerical eagerness to fawn over earthly monarchs and be their courtiers.

I write this without an ounce of ill-will towards any individuals within Britain's royal family, and without in any way wishing to be churlish about anybody's wedding - whether they are famous or not.
But for me, the idea and reality of monarchism is deeply offensive. It rests on nothing more nor less than absolute eugenic privilege and the reservation of power, wealth and status for the very few - in whatever attenuated 'constitutional' form. This is deeply unChristian. Yet most Christians, socialised into deference and mistaking the upside-down kingdom of God for earthly kingdoms, appear not to notice it. Even when it is pointed out. We have a massive amount of unlearning and relearning to do in the transition to post-Christendom. 

That means, among other things, re-visiting our theological roots. In this sense, while remaining implacably at odds with the constraining (modernist) ideology of fundamentalism, I am not a 'theological liberal' either. It is the deep structure of the narratives, language, events, experiences, grammar ('doctrine') and communal inheritances of the tradition of Jesus and the dynamics of his movement in the world which I wish to be constitutive of my political orientation - not passing fads in culture or secular theory.

But for that structure to become usable - and resistant to the powers that be - we need a hermeneutic of new community (ekklesia), a recognition of the tension between monarchical / establishment and prophetic / dissenting religion (much more significant than the modern 'conservative' versus 'liberal' typology Christians have become captive to), and an ethic of demonstrative Gospel virtues - economic sharing, forgiveness, peacemaking, hospitality and more. 

Otherwise we Christians - whatever our denominational or other labels - will go on 'getting it wrong' by interpreting the kingdom of God in terms of the kingdoms of this world, rather than the other way round. Which is where the confusion about monarchy (something established against the warning and will of God in the historical biblical tradition) comes in. 

Who or what are we really wedded to in terms of social practice and spiritual formation? Those are important and challenging questions for Christians to ponder on 29 April 2011, and beyond.
Meanwhile, I wish William and Kate well. But I am not their loyal subject, and never can be, given my defining allegiance to Jesus the subversive.
----------
© Simon Barrow is co-director of Ekklesia.
Also on Ekklesia
* Simon Barrow, 'The mytho-poetics of royalty' - http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/14663
* Symon Hill, 'The subversive feast of Christ the King' - http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/13613
* Chris Rowland, 'A kingdom, but not as we know it' - http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/8020
* Tom Hurcombe, 'Disestablishing the kingdom' - http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/8138
* Jill Segger, 'Crown or parliament? Time for reflection' - http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/14635
* Phil Wood, 'Beyond 29 April: Equity after monarchy' - http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/14660

Feast of Christ the King - subverting our ideas about Kingship

Simon Barrow in his column The subversive feast of Christ the King comments that:

After days of wall-to-wall media coverage about royalty, churches across Britain have today celebrated Jesus Christ as the true king. This is a truly subversive claim.

A carpenter's son executed as a political troublemaker by an oppressive regime does not conform to our understandings of monarchy; even less so when he teaches that the first will be last and the last first. The man who announced his engagement last week appears to be a far more suitable candidate for the position. 

The claim that Christ is king not only subverts common expectations about the nature of power. It is also a reminder that no-one can serve two kings. If Christ is king, then no other person or institution can demand our total loyalty – whether William Windsor, the British state, the free market or even the Church. 

Many early Christians attracted extra persecution by refusing to declare that “Caesar is Lord”. If Christ is Lord, they reasoned, then Caesar cannot be. After the coming of Christendom – when the Church became allied with the forces of power and wealth – this claim was softened. In order to get round the problem, earthly monarchs were presented as representatives of Christ. 

But if we no longer accept the notion that monarchs are anointed by God, why are we prepared to acknowledge anyone other than Christ as our king? It may well be argued that the British monarch has no real power. This claim is an exaggeration, but there is a lot of truth in it. However, the very use of words such as “king”, “queen” and “lord” reinforces the values of hierarchy and privilege whose emptiness is exposed by Jesus' radical message of the Kingdom of God.

Curiously enough there is support for the subversion of commonly accepted cultural ideas of kingship extends back beyond the New Testament accounts of Jesus that go back deep into the history of Israel. One of the more unexpected of these surfaces in the Old Testament reading for the Feast of Christ the King, in of all places the book of Deuteronomy. The account of kingship offered in Deuteronomy 17 attaches some requirements that qualify the support for the people of Israel having a king so drastically as to redefine the nature of kingship.

The king is not to:

• have "too many horses" particularly from Egypt - limiting his military power severely
• have too many wives - limiting the options for building alliances 
• try to get huge amounts of silver and gold - again limiting the basis for dynastic power
• not think of himself as better than anyone else - that is he is not to consider himself superior to his fellow Israelites - like them he is under God

The king must: 

•  write out a copy of God's laws under the supervision of the priests
• must read and obey these laws
• learn to worship the Lord with fear and trembling

Given that the kings of the ancient near east saw themselves as having unquestioned and unlimited power and authority the limits placed on kingship in Deuteronomy fundamentally redefine the role of kingship. The authors of Deuteronomy are contributing to an ongoing argument in Israel about the desirability of kingship and its character and provide an account which cuts against the grain of their time and place.

27-28 October - some significant dates in war, peace and religion

30 October Remembering Marcellus Good blog entry by Tobias Winright on Saint Marcellus

Simon Barrow on the Ekklesia website has drawn attention to some significant events associated with 27-28 October, contrasting Imperial versus non-imperial Christianity.

... 27 & 28 October, are key dates in Christian history. Constantine's 'vision of the Cross' in 312, and his attribution of military victory at the Battle of Milvian Bridge the next day to God, was the beginning of Christendom in Europe - an era which mixed civilisation with bloodshed, saints with militarism, and faith with often brutal sacralised-secular power.

With the defeat of Maxentius, Constantine became the sole Roman Emperor. The subsequent decree of religious toleration, which established Christianity alongside others in the Imperial pantheon, spared Christians persecution - but embroiled them in power politics in a way which bypassed or reversed key aspects of the Gospel message. The Jesus who refused violence and favoured the poor, women and the despised became an embarassment. He was replaced with an imperial version of Christ, degrading both his humanity and divinity.

The disease involved in all this was widespread. On 27 October in 1553 Michael Servetus burned as a heretic just outside Geneva. On the same day in 1659, two Quakers who came to America from England, to escape religious persecution, were executed in Massachusetts Bay Colony for their beliefs.

Yet embedded in this disturbing history (not least in its victims) there is another, liberating story. The Anabaptists, the Quakers and other non-conformists refused state religion and violence. In the nineteenth and twentieth century Christians campaigned for social justice and helped form peace movements which had a worldwide impact.

On 27 October 1967 Catholic priest, theologian and activist Philip Berrigan and three others (the 'Baltimore Four') protestested against the Vietnam War by pouring their own blood on Selective Service records - a very different understanding of the meaning of the Cross to the one Constantine perpetuated.

Then on 27 October 1968, 120,000 marched against war in London, urged on by campaigning Anglican priest Canon John Collins, one of a range of clerical heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle.

Here we see the two sides of Christianity: not so much 'liberal' versus 'conservative', but an imperial version of the faith captive to earthly power, contrasting with a non- or post-imperial (and now post-Christendom) understanding of the Gospel, recovering the dynamic of the originating Jesus movement.

Christmas as revolution

A reminder as I move into this new year from a christmas sermon by Simon Barrow:

... the Christ who is born quietly, humbly, almost insignificantly on this Holy Night speaks first to ordinary people – like you and me. He begins his revolution by disturbing our certainty, giving us hearts of flesh rather than stone. Then he invites us to join a small company of friends who will go into the world’s darkest places, not with weapons of war and large corporations (as we have seen in the region of Jesus’ birth in recent years), but with something much more costly.

I am talking about simple but life-changing actions like forgiveness, hospitality, reconciliation, the sharing of goods, and human solidarity – what the Bible calls love of neighbour: treating the stranger and even the enemy as you yourself would wish to be treated. This is the way of the Prince of Peace whose coming we celebrate.

What is true of Christ’s challenge to the way we live, the way we relate to each other and the way we see things is also true of the way we understand faith and the way we perceive God. In an often bruised and hurting world, in the midst of the doubt and confusion we all feel, where is God to be found? Not in opulent palaces, not in remote splendour, not in complicated formulas – and not (if you read the gospels) with those who go around boasting about how ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’ they are, either. That is some comfort to those of us who count ourselves neither especially smart nor notably righteous!

Instead, according to the topsy-turvy Good News announced to those shepherds, the ordinary working people of the time, God is to be found in the most unlikely of places: in a stable, off the beaten track, and in the vulnerable flesh of a baby born on the edge of empire, miles away from the rich and powerful. It is this Jesus, now lying in a cradle, soon mixing with the crowd, and eventually confronting one of the murderous crosses we have built in the world – it is his life which truthfully embodies who God is, what God is like, and what God’s agenda is about.Cradling a Revolution

Learning to Remember - gathering for the Eucharist

Simon Barrow in his discussion of remembrance and Remembrance Day has some really useful things to day in his account of the rich connections between this theme and the practices at the heart of Christian discipleship.

At the heart of the Christian community’s faith, constitution and action is the painful paradox of a violent death remembered. When the church gathers around the communion table, whatever other disagreements it may have about this act, it remains the case that the memory of Jesus, his living and dying, is central.

The Christian belief in resurrection, the conviction that this death is woven substantially into a greater pattern of life wrought by God, does not remove or excise this memory of death. Indeed in certain respects it makes it more poignant.

In the New Testament accounts of the encounter between the early Christian disciples and the Jesus who they came to believe had not been contained or defined by death, there is a powerfully transformative image. The Risen Christ retains the marks and scars of crucifixion. He does not ‘lose’ them.

For Christians, the life-beyond-life to which Christ points, embodies and expresses is not an evasion. It does not abolish death and suffering, it transfigures it, placing it into a new context. Every tear may be wiped away in God’s future, but that which causes tears of unutterable grief has happened and, in this sense, remains potently with us. The critical issue is, what gives or shapes that particular sense? Which is the ultimate context, death or life? Believers and non-believers are bound to have a different estimate of this question.

In human experience it is death which has the last word, because we have no capacity to experience anything beyond its boundary. If we are to remain open to the possibility of divine life, of love which is finally accountable neither to our death dealing nor even to our gloriously garish attempts at living, this openness will occur not as a hypothesis but as an action in which what has been broken is gathered and re-offered for the life of the world.

This is what Eucharistic remembrance and thanksgiving is all about. Its essence is not a ritual or a doctrine but a communal invitation to a new way of living in the face of death. It is a meal of hope, of the sharing and multiplication of life. It heals our memories. But it only makes sense if the wounds we remember – in order not to avoid them, but to understand their real depth – belong to the Living One, and to the Body (the community of human suffering and joy) to which we are united in baptism (the granting of a new identity), prayer (the petition of the sovereignty of love) and action for justice and peace (the sacrament, the genuine foretaste, of a new world coming).

All of this is involved in specifically Christian remembering. And it is of absolutely crucial importance for acting Christianly in the arena of war and peace – where justifying and joining in with war can be the chief expression that, when all is said and done, what we believe in most is the sovereignty of death.

Likewise, peace (wrongly conceived) may be yet another means of avoiding the confrontation with deathly fear which comes from being simply ‘anti-war’, rather than being incorporated into any genuine alternative to the society that goes on remembering and (therefore) reacting in a warlike way.

So the issue is not, in the first instance, whether you are an advocate of pacifism or ‘just war’ thinking, it is about remembering death in the context of the search for life and the gift of life. This is what Christians are called upon to do, not out of 'political correctness' (as some are suggesting), but in recognition of the central facts of their faith in Christ crucified and risen.

Not to make space for the agonistic and the conflictual in our public, as well as private, remembrance, is bad for our health. It also falls dangerously short of what is involved in Eucharistic memory. All too often it is emotion, not reason; vested interests, not truthfulness, which are most powerfully at play in the ritual and symbolism of official remembering – a point which Christians should never forget, given how the image of the Cross has been used to buttress conquest and crusading in our own, deeply flawed history ...

 ... the churches need to re-think their own approach to Remembrance. What they have sanctioned in civic ceremonies and within their own walls has often failed to reflect the dynamic of the Gospel towards peace, love of enemies, forgiveness, and the disavowal of violence.

War may produce favourable results in some circumstances, but history shows that it is not a solution, it is a tragedy, and often a sheer waste. The best way to honour those who have died as a result of war (as we must do) - is to recognise its horror not in order to 'run away', but in order to have the true courage to seek alternatives and to engage in costly peacebuilding - to re-member a dis-membered world. (Transforming Remembrance into Hope)

Echoes of Christendom or a call to a new world?

The impending "Back to Church" Sunday scheduled for this weekend shows how deeply engrained the Christendom mindset is in Christian churches in Australia.

It shows up in a couple of ways.

One is in the assumption that people have strayed from the church when the empirical reality is that for those aged under forty probably a majority have never engaged with the church whether as a community or institution in any significant way. How can they come back if they never have been there in the first place?

The other is the tacit assumption that is a close, not to be questioned link between being Christian and being an Australian and that the church is a central element in maintaining social order.

What are we calling them back to? Notice the work "back" - it carries the undercurrent of reference to returning to a past institution, a retreat from the world, rather than calling them to an adventure, a movement towards a future that is subversive of the world of violence and injustice.

Simon Barrow in his latest column on the Ekklesia website A Different Way of Seeing the World expresses the sense of excitement that Christians should be about when he speaks of a ... vision of shalom presented by Isaiah and by the Psalmist reveals the opposite of what now is, in the form of a promise. A world of oppression, injustice and suffering is neither inevitable nor necessary. To defy the order of death and to envision a realm of peace based on the restoring of right relationships among people, with the natural world and with God is – despite all appearances to the contrary – to go with the final grain of the universe as sheer gift.

If only we could recognise it, say the biblical writers, there is a divine reversal going on. When mercy is shown, when the stranger is welcomed, when right is done, when abusive power is resisted, when the hungry are offered food, the prisoners release and the homeless shelter – in those moments of faithfulness to God’s underlying purposes, despite the suffering and brutality around us, a new world beckons. http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/10162

This is about a movement not an institution - a movement like Micah Challenge with its Voices for Justice.http://www.micahchallenge.org.au/voices-justice

Christianity versus the "Church of Power"

Simon Barrow in his latest editorial on the Ekklesia website "Christianity versus the "church of Power" speaks for me when he says that the... approach we are seeking to develop, in other words, is neither a Christian gloss on a non-theologically derived secularism nor an attempt to revive ‘established religion’, but something quite distinct and different from both – namely, a recovery of the non- and anti-imperial heart of the Christian message in the midst of a plural world, in a way which emphasises and exemplifies its socially subversive, just and peaceful expression.

Much of the anxiety apparent in discussions on human rights by some of the churches betrays a hankering for a return to the privileged mode of the Christendom model of church society relationships. The record of the institutional church in terms of living out the gospel within the institutions that we have been running, in terms of protecting the vulnerable is not so good that we have got solid grounds for claiming a privileged position.

Gratitude

Gratitude is something that has been an important part of my approach to life - but Simon Barrow has captured this virtue beautifully in the following comments.

Gratitude he says is about ... recognising that the life we share is beyond possession. To see the world and everything in it as God’s creation ... is not to propose a particular theory of origins (certainly not one in unnecessary conflict with the gifts of scientific endeavour and knowledge). It is, rather, to receive the world as sheer gift – specifically, the gift of a God who, having absolutely no need to get caught up in our quarrelling and jockeying for status and influence, is able to love without condition, manipulation and limit.

In this sense, the invitation at the heart of the Christian message is to let go and give thanks. Simple, but incredibly difficult without good teachers, encouragers and exemplars. So, apart from shelter, health and sustenance, what we need most of all in life is people and relationships founded on the recognition that love is not about gaining control, it is about setting free; and that gratefulness is not about being glad we got our own way, it is about being glad that often we do not.

For those of us who are Christian, this is what being joined to the Body of Christ is (or ought to be) all about. Others may discover the same spirit of liberating gratitude is different ways and places. But the light of recognition in our eyes tells us that though our labels may be different, the truth – God’s truth, some of us would say – remains the same.

With gratitude to Simon Barrow "Cultivating Tough Gratitude" June 29, 2009 Ekklesia
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/9755

William Stringfellow

Some useful articles on William Stringfellow, the radical Episcopalian lawyer and theologian on Faith and Theology - a blog by Ben Myers.

Stringfellow articles at:
http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/search/label/William%20Stringfellow

I've just added a link to his blog. thanks to Simon Barrow of Ekklesia and FaithinSociety- links also on this blog.

What does courage really look like in a time of violence?

The rhetoric in situations of conflict is always about taking the hard decisions, of being tough and courageous. But what would a display of courage look like in a time of violence?

What is courageous about the use of high technology weapons to kill with no real certainty that the victims will not be civilians? What is courageous about political leaders giving the orders that launch military operations in situations where they have little risk of having to deal up close with the impact of their decision in human terms - the trauma of children in the sort term, frequent bed-wetting, nightmares, and a heartbreaking loss of hope – with he long-term trauma that will devastate for years to come and the trauma of serviceman with increasing prevalence of post traumatic stress disorder and the impact on the lives of their families?

Clarity of moral vision seems to be lacking in the way all actors in the interlocking series of crimes against humanity that is the war in Gaza. No one can "see" a way out or even see clearly enough to truthfully name what is happening.

Gaza is not an "eye for an eye' - though that prescription in its time was intended to be a limitation on the spiral of violence and revenge. Taking only one eye left another so tht a person still had vision. As Simon Barrow points out:

... the modern popular usage of 'an eye for an eye' is entirely misconceived.

... its original intention was not to amplify revenge, but rather to limit it. It is the law of proportionality that it seeks to instantiate - not advocacy of hatred and pre-emptive killing.

In an ancient setting where the tendency was for people to respond to an act of violence by exacting retribution on a grand scale, 'an eye for an eye' was a powerful counter-proposal – a way of saying that you should not go beyond equivalence. It was intended to halt indiscriminate or disproportionate slaughter.

Equally ignored in Christians circles is Christ's broadening and radicalisation of this legal limitation of violence: "You have heard it said, 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth'... but now I say to you: love your enemies ... do good to those that curse you... bless those that persecute you." Repay hatred with love, in other words.

Whereas the lex talionis is about limiting violence, the Gospel takes the next step and seeks its abolition. Not, of course, that the churches have found this convenient, especially in cosying up to principalities and powers - where something more 'realistic' was deemed necessary. Thus the development of 'just war' thinking.

As we survey the terrible woundings of the world around us, however, the more radical demands of the rebellious rabbi Jesus surely begin to look more like the deep-healing medicine we so badly need. Amelioration of the sickness of violent hatred is not enough. It must be challenged and replaced.

For as Martin Luther King Jr pointed out, an ethic of proportionate violent response can never be enough to sustain life. Or as he bluntly put it: in the end "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth will leave us all eyeless and toothless." Gandhi said something similar. So have non-religious peacemakers.

Putting the life-affirming ethics of confronting enemies by refusing to use the tools of hatred and war is, of course, exceptionally difficult in a world where the ideology of violence has seeped deep into our institutional and personal life.

But at the very least, it surely ought to be the commitment of those who claim to follow Christ? This is why converting the church to active, interventionist non-violence and conflict transformation remains a vital priority for those who would take the Gospel seriously.
Eyeless in Gaza

Ekklesia on Christmas

Delayed reference to a couple of columns on Christmas from Ekklesia. Links to the full columns. Always worth a read.

Simon Barrow on "Rescuing God from our attempts at Belief"
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/8223
The God who is portrayed in the Gospel stories about the birth of Jesus is indeed a stranger to dominant ideas about divinity ...

When human beings go about making gods to worship, they are able to do so only as projections of their own image. This is particularly true of the infantilising cosmic tyrant who haunts the imagination of those who would use faith as a self-asserting weapon, and those (like Richard Dawkins) who see this kind of false deity as the be-all and end-all of God-talk.

The god of human imagining is, as someone once put it in my hearing, “a person like us, only much bigger and able to do anything at all.” In contrast to such fantasy, the God whose nature and purpose is disclosed in the flesh of Jesus is neither a metaphysical proposition, nor a cosmic being nor an unassailable entity. God is, rather, unconditioned and unconditional love – a reality beyond definition, description and specification, but revealed in the truth of self-giving.

As recent tragic events in Britain have confirmed, a small child is dependent and defenceless. The story of Jesus is of a birth into obscurity at the edge of Empire in debatable circumstances and of dubious parentage.

Moreover, this child grows up to become someone who defies the attempts of religious and political authorities to capture God for their own purposes. For them, unbounded grace and healing for the ‘impure’ is too much to bear. He is subjected to a criminal’s death and his vindication is not by might but by the gift of life beyond captivity.

There is no way that this picture of God can ever ‘fit’ in with our conventional expectations, religious or otherwise. The god of human construction operates through inviolable fiats, inerrant texts, incomprehensible commands and unquestionable ....

We are faced with a ...God beyond all our concepts of ‘god-ness’, being found not as an alien intruder, a competitor or a member of a class of things called ‘gods’, but as unfathomable life encountered in and through our vulnerability – not over and against it.

When we get to the heart of the Christmas story we find ourselves challenged to become more, not less human. We are asked to stop treating each other, and God, as ‘objects’ to be contemplated, traded, argued about and disposed… but instead as “mysteries to be loved”...


Jonathan Bartley "Christmas means compassion not crusading"
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/8233

... attempts to put Christ back into Christmas through conquest sit uneasily with the political message that lies at the heart of the Christmas story, which challenges those who would seek to dominate and control. According to St Luke's account of the nativity, it's a sentiment that Jesus' mother recognised particularly well.

There is a tendency to think of Mary as a victim – a slightly passive but worthy virgin, chosen to bear the god-child because she has wouldn't hurt a first-century fly. But Mary's response is not one of benign resignation. She celebrates. She bursts into song. And the song she sings is about an end to tyranny and oppression. She anticipates that the powerful will be brought down, the hungry fed, and the rich sent away with nothing. The world will be turned upside down by the baby growing inside her.

The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), as it came to be known, is a profoundly political song of subversion. But it is also entirely in keeping with the tone of the Christmas story. Oppressive Romans are seeking to extend their control and tax the Jewish population through a census. A despotic ruler sees Jesus as a potential threat, and commits a terrible atrocity in his desire to eliminate the risk. Jesus' family become asylum seekers and flee to Egypt. The baby has clearly come to cause trouble – and he subsequently does so for both the religious and political authorities of his day.

It's all a long way from the "Little Lord Jesus", so gentle, meek and mild, he doesn't cry in his manger bed. But Christmas was rebranded long before the existence of "politically correct" councils. In fact there isn't any record of Christians in the first few centuries after Christ celebrating Christmas at all. Following the fourth century conversion of Constantine, Jesus was embarrassing for a church now in bed with the same empire that had put him to death. It has suited both church and state, in assorted alignments for the next 1700 years, to have a romanticised and sentimentalised story, not a subversive one. Even the Magi (wise men) were made into "kings", rewriting history to create a close association with power, rather than a challenge to it.

Mary's song has far more in common with The Red Flag than We Three Kings. But if it makes uncomfortable reading for the Church keen to attract people with a warm, fuzzy message at the one time of year when church attendance seems to actually increase, it is equally challenging for governments.

Advent and the Church

Who is it we are waiting for at Advent? Who is this Jesus who we talk about being born in our hearts and in the world? How shall we respond?

Simon Barrow has some suggestions ins sermon for Advent entitled "Which Jesus are we expecting?" (full sermon is up on the Ekklesia site.)

If the Jesus we are expecting this Advent is truly the Christ of the Gospels, the comforter of the disturbed and the disturber of the comfortable, then the most important task for us as a church right now is to be the church – by which I mean to be the kind of people who are found regularly in the company of Jesus, in the midst of whatever else it is they are given to do.

Many people get easily confused about what ‘church’ is. They think it’s a building, or a religious institution, or a club for people who “enjoy that kind of thing”. It may indeed need structure, organisation and devotees. But it isn’t about them. ‘Church’, rather, is the name of a public space for risky, experimental living – for doing crazy stuff like forgiving others, offering hospitality to oddballs, sharing what we have in common and with others, learning how to live justly, and re-telling key stories of redemption and change. I’m paraphrasing some key elements from the gospels here. The word ekklesia refers to this kind of ‘zone of action’.

‘Church’ is also a place where people are specifically equipped to undertake these difficult activities by being taken deep into the waters of death and then raised through them with Christ, so that they know in their hearts how God’s love can embrace everything that could ever be thrown at us and still not be exhausted. That is, we are equipped for what lies ahead by being baptised “in the Holy Spirit”, in the life God gives beyond our limited capacities. This is vital because keeping Jesus’ company often amounts to being asked to “share God’s sufferings in the world” (to use Bonhoeffer’s poignant expression), and this is not something we can do in our own strength.

Further thoughts on Obama

There is a space for rejoicing with those who rejoice - particularly those who have struggled hard and carry the memories and the actual scars of that struggle - Congressman John Lewis for one whose invocation of Martin Luther King Jr as he celebrated the election of Barack Obama was one that we should be glad to join with.

My friend Simon Barrow has found words that express the balance of engagement and naming of our resonsibility for action when we move beyond that shared moment of celebration to an assessment that should brace the ongoing Christian response in his column in Ekklesia.

The election of Barack Obama in the US is a significant change, but it is a much smaller change than many people want to believe.

So the real issue is how we, "ordinary people", can use the tiny but vital bit of space opened up for justice and peace. It's no good expecting Obama to be a singular hero. I think he has humane instincts, but he is (of course) deeply wrapped up in the system he would like to redirect. I don't expect him to save us, and I shall not hate him when he doesn't.

If there is salvation to be had (and I fully respect those who doubt it, though I think any lesser hope is likely to be inadequate to the real challenges we face) it is going to be, in the words of the Hebrew prophet, "not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit, says the Holy One": that is, a massive refiguration of everything that is at stake, politically, economically, spiritually, interpersonally - starting not with overarching theory or messianic politics/religion, but with specific interventions and the cultivation of alternative ways of being.

This is what church as ekklesia and as part of the civic arena should be about. Not pipe dreams, but lived possibilities and concrete actions. There is a larger hope, but it starts in small places; it engages rather than overwhelms; and it is birthed by absorbing, sharing and transforming pain, not inflicting it by force of arms. It is Christlike. And it is rooted in metanoia, turning around and heading in a new direction.

Christians in Australia will want to consider the possibilities for pushing the Australian government harder on climate change and financial commitment on the Millenium Development Goals now that we have a US President who has committed to joning global action on these pressing issues.

Obama - the limits and possibilities of change

Simon Barrow at Ekklesia captures something of a Christian realism about the limits and possibilities of change arising from Barack Obama's election. Some of the real changes in the USA are as likely to come from the grass roots empowering that he has set off as from his actual election.

Though I remain less convinced than many that a win for Obama will bring the sweeping change many hope for, it will certainly revamp the general 'mood music' of American and global politics, and open up positive vistas and pressure points which have not existed in recent years. At one level this can only be good, though the reaction of others can never be predicted. Nevertheless, we shouldn't kid ourselves. In a modern, money-driven, corporate-led, technocratic age, there is a sense in which the old anarchist slogan remains true: "It doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in." The former premise is not validated by the latter, however. It matters. If it provides an inch for people to live in when they might otherwise perish, it matters. Only those who have the luxury of retreating to their armchair are privileged to think otherwise and adopt a feigned neutrality or a hip cynicism. Go, Barack. And go those who at the grassroots who will be there to hold him to at least some of his practical ideals.

What is important about being a Christian community?

In reflecting on the events over the schism, or coup in the international Anglican community in the past week (can Anglicans have schisms? I must seek guidance from my Anglican friends as to whether this is ecclesiologically possible), I found the following observations at the close of a sermon by my friend Simon Barrow of Ekklesia bracing in providing a helpful perspective:


Jesus, remember, was clear that the Spirit of the Lord was calling him to proclaim good news to the poor, not the self-satisfied; the sick and the subjugated, not the well and the worthy. In following this Jesus, we will take risks and make mistakes. But that is not the worst thing. The worst thing is to think that it is our rules, structures and institutions, rather than God’s capacity to remake lives, forgive sins and free us from bondage, that really counts. (Whose Mission is it Anyway? a Sermon on the Feast of St Peter and St Paul)

Living the Trinity

The sermon on Trinity Sunday this morning reminded me of how difficult it is to preach about an abstract doctrine which is what "the doctrine of the Trinity" has become.

Trinity as it emerged as a doctrine, comes across as an attempt to set fences around the embers of the explosion, the excitement, the wonder, the awe that lay behind the socially and politically subversive and transformative Jesus movement, lest the flames begin burning again and upset the emerging applecart of Christendom and the accompanying use of the church for the purposes of stabilising the empire.

The Trinity, like the Creeds emerged in a particular situation, as an attempt to achieve an understanding that could inform teaching and evangelism and respond to the questions that were being asked in the intellectual, political and religious context of the time. It is not a timeless abstraction, but you would never guess that from most of the preaching tht I have heard.

Simon Barrow in s sermon from last year's Trinity Sunday, see the link below, is a little more generous than I was inclined to be in responding to the preaching this morning and helpfully reminded me that Trinity can be understood not as belief in an abstract sense as giving assent to a rational formula but arises from the dangerous experiment of living as a Christian in a community shaped by the remembering of Jesus life death and resurrection.

http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/5312
God, in other words, is now and forever the transcendent mystery of the world, the 'Word' (or reason) of God expressed through flesh, and the energy of God continually inviting us into the ritual of life and equipping us to dance. ... what we are talking about here is three irreducible and mutually interdependent ways of believing in one God – belief, in this case, residing not in a proposition, but in experimental living. How do we touch God’s creativity? By developing and celebrating each others’ creativity. How do we touch God’s love for humanity? By refusing all that imprisons human beings in themselves. And how do we touch God’s spiritedness? By nurturing the everyday gifts of the Spirit – not abstract or 'religious' virtues, but love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5.22). This happens personally and corporately.

... 'Trinitarian language' is about several very important things. First, holding together elements of God’s life which superficially appear in contradiction (transcendence and embodiment, say) and which we would otherwise be tempted to separate, to turn into a hierarchy or to ignore. Second, discovering the nature of God by learning to re-order our lives according to the promise of God’s endlessly hidden appearances beyond, in and between us. Third, constantly repeating (in speech, sacrament, song, deed and thought) the figurative grammar which goes on linking us to the modes of God’s life and God’s modes of living to us. In this way we "become Christians".

The chief difficulty we have with all of this, I suspect, apart from the fact that it demands our lives not merely our assent, is that the components that make up this all-embracing 'traditional' Christian speech about God have come to us in abstract Greek metaphysical categories - ones which address questions and formulate responses that seem remote from our habits of thinking. Our task, then, is to so inhabit what our predecessors were trying to say that, discovering its fruitfulness, we can say "if they put it like that then, how would we put it in our language today?" ....

How would we put it in our language today? What are the questions that trouble us as we try to speak of God and live out our discipleship?

Simon rightly draws attention to the fact that the technical language used at the time the doctrine was formulated, "persons" and "substance" for example, meant something quite different then to what they mean in contemporary usage.

For example, I once heard a well-known theologian wrily observe that grasping Trinitarian language is not too difficult... once you realize that ‘one’ and ‘three’ aren’t numbers in a sequence (but rather ways of speaking of a singularity embracing beyond the merely numerical); that ‘persons’ in the Trinity are not human persons (the Greek means something like dramaturgical ‘masks’ or ‘appearances’, and was deliberately chosen to avoid what we now denote by ‘personalness’); and that ‘substance’ applied to God doesn’t mean ‘stuff’ (but true essence beyond our knowledge of ‘thingness’)!

In other words, Trinitarian doctrine is not trying to describe God as you would a person or an object. But nor is it simply a mirror held up to our nice ideas about God. Instead it refers to what we can know by participation, rather than 'forensic examination' or speculation, about the life and affection of God encountered through the excess of the world, the unrestrained humanity of Jesus, the limitless donation of the Spirit, and the outstretched community of the church. It is therefore about image and relation, not some silly empirical claim to see into the very core of God when, frankly, most of us couldn’t claim to have much of a clue about what makes our spouse or neighbour’s cat tick – let alone the giver of the universe!

Further comment
On the Ekklesia Project blog on Trinity Sunday some comments by Debra Dean Murphy that makes a similar point:

http://ekklesiaproject.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

The doctrine of the Trinity is foundational for Christian discipleship and for the ongoing shaping of Christian community. And yet our grasp of this doctrine is not merely a mental operation by which we give intellectual assent to the historic claim that God exists as one ousia and three hypostases. The truth of this doctrine is not available to us outside of our own participation in forms of life that bear witness to God as triune.

Earlier this week I attended a seminar on immigration sponsored by the North Carolina Council of Churches. The title of this event was “From Hostility to Hospitality: Immigration and People of Faith.” In listening to several presentations, I thought about hospitality in relation to immigrants in relation to the Trinity.

In Rublev’s famous icon we are invited to “see through” the art itself (something every icon asks us to do) and to recognize that the divine life is one of eternal communion in which we are invited to dwell.

Hospitality is the nature of God’s triunity and is the call of the Church in the world.

Indeed, it is the work of God as Trinity to make icons of us—to conform us to the image of the crucified and risen Jesus (image= eikon).

It is Jesus the Son, our hospitable host, who, through the will of the Father and the power of the Spirit, meets us at the table and transforms us into icons of Trinitarian hospitality in and for the world. When we offer such welcome to others—to immigrants, beggars, strangers of all kinds, we “entertain angels unaware” and we practice the Holy Trinity.

So no clover this year, please.

Escaping Fundamentalism, Evading Liberalism

Recent comments from Simon Barrow capture nicely the difficulty of pinning down what it means to be "biblical". It is as he rightly says being part of a community involved in an on-going, necessarily non-violent argument, about how we should respond to the humanity and freedom we meet in Jesus.

Such an argument might well include people who do not regard themselves as conventionally religious or affiliated with the church as an institution. Great - just so long as we can all get beyond the assumption that if you are not a "liberal" you are a "fundamentalist" and that if you are not a "fundamentalist" you must be a "liberal".

Christian faith is inescapably rooted in biblical tradition. But the Bible isn't a series of knock-down propositions. It is a set of living, dynamic, troubling, inspiring and disturbing accounts of the ways of God among wayward people across the centuries. For Christians its interpretative core is the Gospels. They are, by their nature, diverse rather than singular. They speak of a God of unutterable grace who, in Jesus, turns upside-down every expectation of the conventionally religious. In Christ nothing we thought we knew about God, the world or ourselves remains untransformed. But, as the New Testament records demonstrate, and as the communities that have been formed from it show, Christians have continued to disagree about the precise nature and impact of what God has declared in Christ. To be 'biblical people' involves recognising ourselves as part of this vital argument. It also requires us to engage vigorously (as the prophets did) with God in the contemporary world. In all this we are gloriously free. But we are also constrained by the Jesus whose concern was the last, the least and the lost; not the powerful, the sufficient and the self-righteous. For we are, finally, the people of a person, not a book. That is the living irony of 'being biblical'. To come to terms with it requires openness and generosity, but also the discipline to be formed into a people focussed on what might be involved in being Christ-like.

http://www.simonbarrow.net/article56


All this has implications for ecclesiology - an open ongoing argument embodied in our everyday life would end up with something that represented a disorganised religion, much less amenable to top down control and tight models of structure. Much more experimental - like the Jesus movement recorded in the book of Acts. That might be taking things a bit far though - they ended up spending lots of time in gaol.