Daily Telegraph (England), July 31, 2002
By Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent (Filed: 31/07/2002)
Few bishops would now share the views of the former Bishop of Durham, the Rt Rev David Jenkins, who caused a scandal in the 1980s when he contrasted the Resurrection with a "conjuring trick with bones."
WRIGHT: We don't have a proposal for a "church within a church." That's one of the possible unfortunate results that might happen if the proposals that are on the table don't work.
The proposal is for an Anglican covenant. The bizarre thing is that we're in covenant with the Methodists, and we're in ecumenical covenant with all sorts of people, but we should be able to be in covenant with ourselves. The point is this: What happened three years ago with the election and consecration of Gene Robinson, to everyone's surprise in America but to no one's surprise in the rest of the world, tore the fabric of communion at the deepest level. The Anglican primates said that in a meeting in October of 2003. The result of this was that we had a very expensive, long, drawn-out year in 2004 when the Lambeth Commission met and produced the Windsor Report. That cost a lot of money to get 20 theologians together from around the world three times to discuss everything. It ate up the budget for several other things that should have been going on. But we couldn't not do it because we had to have some way of addressing the issue.
But we can't afford to do that again every two or three years whenever something like this happens. So we have to have some way of setting up ground rules of how we can live together as a communion. The covenant is a minimalist proposal for ground rules to enable us to explore, to push the boundaries if we want to, but to do so without throwing all the china off the table — as has happened.
The question of how you know which issues are "china-off-the-table" issues and which ones aren't is the critical thing. In other words, the real issue is: How do you tell which issues make a difference and which issues don't make a difference? The example I've often used is: If someone says, "We have flowers on the altar at our church and you don't." Well, come on. Get used to it. Grow up. This is not a communion-breaking issue. It's a local option.
If someone says, "You read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in your services and we always read the gospel of Thomas, the gospel of Judas and the gospel of Mary." Well then you say, "Not sure we're talking about the same religion here. Are we really in fellowship with you guys or not?" In other words, that would be a communion-breaking issue.
The question is: On that scale, where do you locate the other issues that are in front of us? Lay presidency of the Eucharist being an obvious one. Some want to do it; most say you shouldn't. Ordaining practicing homosexuals as priests and bishops. It's happened in some quarters; it would be unthinkable in other quarters.
So the question is: How do you tell? The covenant is not a way of saying, "Let's have a church within a church." The covenant is a way of saying, "We want to be a church where we can have these discussions without the china getting tossed off the table."
If in the process someone says, "We know that, covenant or no covenant, we're going to have to push ahead and do this, because we're going to be prophetic and we know we're right," then the rest of the communion might say, "That's horrible because you are actually thereby breaking the covenant that the rest of us think we have with each other." And if that then creates a church within a church, or a church outside the church, that is tragic. It's not the aim.
We haven't got there yet, and I pray God we won't.
In classic Christian teaching God's free offer of forgiveness always stands, but to accept forgiveness means, well, accepting forgiveness. It doesn't mean hearing the word of forgiveness and saying, in effect, 'well, that's OK, because actually there wasn't anything to forgive'. You can't pretend to accept forgiveness and turn forgiveness, as you do so, into 'tolerance' or 'well, it didn't matter that much.'
Forgiveness means that it did matter, that it was wrong, and that it won't be held against you. To accept that is to agree with the fact that it was wrong and that you need forgiving; which is to say sorry. Not to say sorry is not to accept forgiveness, almost analytically.
Part of the difficulty in the recent cult of apology is the people go about apologizing for things they didn't do and wouldn't have done, but apologizing on behalf of their predecessors. This has all kinds of oddities about it.
It may well do some good in terms of reassuring people whose communities have suffered under a long burden of unresolved anger and resentment that the point has been taken; but it ought to issue, if it is really genuine, in a searching after wisdom to see where similar mistakes are being made today.
And there is then a danger that the 'apology' is simply a way of saying 'I agree with the current politically correct version of what happened many years ago', which may, but may not, necessarily help anything forward.
Dawkins on Bush, some gems! Did he really mean to say that George Bush was "stupid" or did he really mean "ignorant"? A fine piece of invective, by the master himself!
The population of the US is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the US leads the world by miles. You would think that a country with such resources, and such a field of talent, would be able to elect a leader of the highest quality. Yet, what has happened? At the end of all the primaries and party caucuses, the speeches and the televised debates, after a year or more of non-stop electioneering bustle, who, out of that entire population of 300 million, emerges at the top of the heap? George Bush.
When a company seeks a new chief executive officer, or a university a new vice-chancellor, enormous trouble is taken to find the best person. Professional headhunting firms are engaged, written references are taken up, exhaustive rounds of interviews are conducted, psychological aptitude tests are administered, confidential positive vetting undertaken. Mistakes are still made, but it is not for want of strenuous efforts to avoid them. Maybe such methods would be undemocratic for choosing the most powerful person on earth, but just think about it. Would you do business with a company that devoted an entire year to little else than the process of choosing its new CEO, from the strongest field in the world, and ended up with Bush?
Saddam Hussein has been a catastrophe for Iraq, but he never posed a threat outside his immediate neighbourhood. George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden.
(the full article is at http://eagle.la.asu.edu/hester/dawkins_war.html)
In the end, the ultimate enemy of enlightenment isn't belief in a particular thing, but dogma and self-righteousness -- qualities that are amply demonstrated both by people of faith and by people of science.
Quite a few people manage to hold on to their religious convictions -- belief in God, in non-arbitrary morality, etc. -- while accepting that natural selection is real, the earth billions of years old, and so on. It's these sort of people that evolution's defenders need to produce.
Krauss seems to get this, but the boorishness of people like Dawkins doesn't help anyone, except maybe people who think scientists hate God. Is there some way of making him switch teams? At this point, the best thing that could happen to the public acceptance of evolution would be Richard Dawkins' full-fledged conversion to Christianity, whereupon his alienating intellectual tendencies would show moderate, generally sensible fence-sitters the stupidity of fundamentalism.
| By Neil Bowdler BBC science reporter |
The fossilised remains of the animal, which lived some 36 million years ago, were found in what is today Peru.
At 1.5m (5ft) tall, the penguin looked quite different from its modern-day cousins, a report in PNAS journal says.
It had a long protracted skull and what its discoverers are describing as a grossly elongated beak that was spear-like in appearance.
The Icadyptes salasi penguin would dwarf all the penguins who walk the planet today.
It would have stood head and shoulders over the emperor and the king penguins of the southern seas.
Its well-preserved skeleton was discovered in the Department of Ica on the southern coast of Peru along with the remains of as many as four other previously undiscovered penguin species, all of which appear to have preferred the tropics for colder climes.
Indeed, the Icadyptes appears to have lived happily at such warmer latitudes at a time when world temperatures were much hotter than they are today - and long before anyone thought penguins had reached such low latitudes.
Of course, not all modern-day penguins are adapted for life in cold temperatures.
The African or Galapagos penguins, for example, as their names suggest, also prefer warmer waters to the better-known penguins of the southern seas and Antarctica; but they are comparative newcomers, say the researchers, compared with the giant whose discovery they are now announcing.
"That was sort of a dominant hypothesis - that in fact penguins had only reached low latitude regions comparatively recently and after two major periods of cooling in Earth's history," said Dr Julia Clarke, of North Carolina State University, US, and a member of the research team.
"One was around the Eocene-Oligocene about 34 million years ago; and more recently, post 15 million years ago - but in fact we find penguins there now in much warmer periods and much, much earlier."
Full details are reported in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) of the United States of America.
BEAKS AHEAD Icadyptes salasi had a spear-like beak (top). Scale bar = 1cm It was much longer and more pointed than the skull of the modern-day Peruvian (Humboldt) penguin Spheniscus humboldti (below) |
What is the moral difference between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music. My guess it is the same as the moral difference between breeding soldiers and drafting volunteers - that is to say - it violates the free will of the individual to have these types of choices made for them by other men. If you are bred for soldiering - you will die a soldier. If drafted, at least you have the option of fixing airplanes.
I prefer the following philosophy:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Was Jesus divine, or a human being with a powerful message?
And there you have it, a simplistic question that I certainly could not
answer. I'd prefer to say, how did Jesus see himself, and what does that
tell us about redifining our idea of God. In this context, "divinity" means
something like "Superman", i.e., Jesus as Clarke Kent, concealing under his
Galilean garments the all powerful superhero. The early church called that
"docetism" and rejected that idea. Why give such a simplistic either/or
style of question? If it was broken down, I would answer as follows:
Was Jesus divine? No
Was Jesus a human being with a powerful message? No
There is also a link to a bookship on :"The Jesus Dynasty: Stunning New
Evidence About the Hidden History of Jesus by James D Tabor"; This asks:
"Was Jesus far more human than the Church has led us to believe?"
As the gospels present us with a Jesus who could be tired and weary, sweat,
be hungry, exasperated and angry, and despairing and doubtful, I really
wonder what this "far more human" can mean, expect that he had a
relationship, a child etc etc, and all the stuff about "secret evidence"
which really exists about as much as the Atlantis myth, Von Daniken's
ancient astronauts and the usual conspiracy stuff.
Why can't they link to something by Ed Sanders ("The Historical Figure of
Jesus"), or if they want something more critical of the gospels, at least
Dominic Crossan engages with the evidence; even the Jesus Seminar wouldn't
propogate tripe like this.
Elizabethan Catholics
WW: What would it be like to live as a recusant in late Elizabethan England?
RH: The most common modern analogy for being an Elizabethan Catholic is being a Communist in 1950s America, but being a Communist in 1950s America was a holiday camp compared with being a Catholic recusant under Elizabeth.
Just like in the modern example, you couldn't actually get a job, you were cast out of society, you were suspected of being the local fifth column for a menacing foreign power that stood for everything that your country didn't.
But being an Elizabethan Catholic is actually much worse. You are in danger of having your property searched by armed men without warning at any hour of the day or night. You are fined regularly for the simple act of not turning up to your local parish church. So that's coshing your income at regular intervals.
And, above all, if you actually do what a Catholic is supposed to do, which is to hear the Word of God according to your Church, you need a priest. If you harbour a priest, you're in serious trouble, because this is technically treading on treason, and treason means going against the whole government of the land, to an extent that you risk your life.
WW: Why this fear of Catholicism?
RH: Protestants hated Catholics, because Catholics were the horrible, rotting skeleton in their family cupboard, where everybody had been about two generations before. That's when they were all being conned by the Devil who had perverted the Christian Church into Catholicism to remove everybody's chance of getting to Heaven and condemn everybody to Hell.
So having seen the light, having cottoned on to the real Word of God and got reformed, Protestants saw the Catholics as, collectively, the Devil's hit person – they were the storm troopers of Satan. They were the people who were left in the realm to ensure that the Devil had a real chance of winning back England to eternal fire.
Furthermore, in more straightforward terms, they were the agents of the pope and the pope was linked with the powers of France and Spain, particularly Spain, the strongest, most menacing power in western Europe. So what you're seeing is a Satanic superpower and an evil empire on your doorstep, and the Catholics lodging like a virus inside your body, waiting to kill you off.
Catholics are by definition the people who give loyalty to the pope. And the pope claims the power to depose kings and princes and queens who don't toe his line.
Now if you're an English Protestant around 1560, what you do is look in all directions. To your west is Ireland, stuffed with Catholics; to the north is Scotland, just ceasing to be Catholic, with the Highlands full of menacing Catholics armed to the teeth. Look across to the east and the south and you have the French and the Spanish, who are the super-Catholics, with all the power of a fully armed state system behind them.
So you are cornered, you're surrounded, and you have English Catholics still all among you, everywhere, just waiting for the button to be pushed, to implode your country from the inside, as their adherents crowd in from every point of the compass.
The NCH said it found the prevalence of emotional problems and conduct disorders had doubled since the 1990s, citing studies of 8,000 children.
But some experts cast doubt on the NCH's interpretation of the findings and its definition of a "disorder".
The final findings of the studies are due to be published later this year, when the NCH launches a major campaign.
Chicken or egg
The NCH defined an "emotionally well" child as one who demonstrates empathy, self-awareness, an ability to manage feelings, motivation and good social skills.
It based its conclusions that this wellbeing was deteriorating on three studies carried out in recent years.
The charity also carried out a survey "to test and compare our research findings with the experiences and views of the general public".
It found that the public believes emotional wellbeing is more important than family income, physical health, and IQ.
Clare Tickell, chief executive of the NCH, said: "The lack of emotional wellbeing amongst our children and young people is undermining the foundations of any social policy to combat social exclusion, deprivation or lack of social mobility."
But Professor Sue Bailey, Chair of the Child and Adolescent Faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said all these issues were intertwined.
Poverty and exclusion, she said, were inextricably linked with the state of a child's wellbeing.
She added that she was familiar with the one in ten figure for mental health disorders, adding that this "was not new", but said it covered a range of problems - from the very minor to the very serious.
She backed a statement by the Children's Minister Beverley Hughes, who said that the available figures do not back up NCH claims that incidences of childhood depression are rising.
"In fact, they show that the prevalence of mental disorders among five to 16-year-olds in 2004 have remained broadly unchanged from the previous survey in 1999."
The full text of the letter to Bishop James Jones described in the article is as follows:
Dear James,
The three most recent former Principals of Wycliffe, Geoffrey Shaw, Dick France and Alister McGrath, met today in view of the publicity given to the crisis in the Hall. Were it simply a matter of media speculation and sensationalism we would not have written to you. Our enquiries from a variety of sources have convinced us of the seriousness of the situation and filled us with deep foreboding.
The resignation of so many competent and dedicated teaching and admin staff all together in such a small community cannot be written off simply as a new broom sweeping away out of date and out of touch lumber. Nor as a supporter of Richard Turnbull has written "a few ruffled feathers reacting with sourness and extreme bad grace"! These are men and women who have given outstanding service to the Hall and its students and it is due to them that Wycliffe has gained a worldwide recognition for its excellence in biblical scholarship, study, exposition, personal devotion and praxis. Yet they have been made to feel stumbling blocks to a new regime by a man who despite the qualities many attribute to him has had no experience of academic and spiritual formation leadership in a college context.
The repercussions of all this are deeply disturbing. Already voices are being raised in the University as to the suitability of Wycliffe as a PPH. Bishops and DDOs may decide to give the Hall a wide berth. Staff with suitable qualifications may not apply for vacancies. Students from the broad range of evangelicalism which has traditionally characterised the Hall are unlikely to apply and the resultant limited focus on one strand of evangelicalism is unlikely to commend the Hall to the wider church. The Hall is running on borrowed capital and we fear for its future. If this sounds melodramatic it is realistic and is prompted by our love and concern for the Hall.
With very great sadness we must in all seriousness ask you to recognise before it is too late that there is a widespread lack of confidence in the present Principal, both in his managerial style and his myopic vision. We find it hard to envisage the Hall maintaining its erstwhile acknowledged reputation under its present leadership.
Not personally signed but authorised by
Geoffrey Shaw Principal 1979 – 1988
Dick France Principal 1989 – 1995
Alister McGrath Principal 1995 – 2004
Every time I am given this unexpected awareness towards some other creature and feel this current of communication between us, I am touched and activated by something that comes from the fiery heart of the divine love, the eternal gaze of the Father towards the Son, of the Son towards the Father.
John V. Taylor, The Go-Between God
'Being saved' and 'doing good works' sounds like a low-grade version of the classic Reformation stand-off between Luther and the other reformers on the one hand and the Roman Catholicism of the late mediaeval period on the other -- and, of course, Luther and his followers saw this stand-off as the re-run of the battles Paul had with his opponents, particularly the so-called 'Judaizers' in Galatians
This important set of arguments has become fairly thoroughly confused in the last hundred or two hundred years because it's got muddled up with various others, including (a) the Romantic notion that genuine religion is all about inwardness rather than externals ('How I feel deep down' vs 'What I do outwardly') and (b) the existentialist notion that 'authenticity' consists in being true to what one finds within oneself rather than conforming to outward regulations etc. Unfortunately, these four things (Paul's battles, Luther's battles, Romanticism and existentialism) are simply not the same as one another, though it would take a long article, perhaps a book, to spell all this out (I have tried elsewhere: see e.g. my commentary on Romans in the New Interpreters Bible (Abingdon Press) vol. 10).
Part of the difficulty today is that most people who speak about 'being saved' in a 'religious' or 'faith' sense mean by it, quite simply, 'going to heaven when you die'. Heaven is important, and our immediate destiny after death is important (I write from a Christian point of view, of course), but it is not the final destination, since in the New Testament the final destination is the 'new heavens and new earth' we are promised in Revelation 21, the renewed, redeemed creation we are promised in Romans 8, the 'summing up of all things in heaven and earth' we are promised in Ephesians 1.10. For this we will need, not disembodied immortal souls, though that's one way we can talk about what happens to us immediately after death, but re-embodied, resurrected whole selves; and that, of course, is what both Judaism and Christianity promise, or rather what is promised by the creator God of whom both Jews and Christians speak.
And -- and this is the point -- this final destination, not the intermediate 'heavenly' state, is 'salvation'; because the creation is good and God-given, so that to imagine that 'salvation' means being rescued FROM the world is to deny the most fundamental article of the creed. If 'salvation' means simply 'leaving behind the world of space, time and matter', then this is not really 'salvation' from the ultimate enemy, death itself, which destroys God's good creation, but colluding with it. Rather, 'salvation' in the New Testament -- though of course our culture has done its best to distort this -- is all about God rescuing humans AND CREATION AS WELL from death -- in other words, the redemption and renewal of creation, and of human beings within that, into a newly embodied world of which the present world is simply the foretaste.
If that is 'being saved', what about 'good works'? From Ephesians 1.10 to Ephesians 2.10: we are saved by grace through faith FOR GOOD WORKS WHICH GOD PREPARED BEFOREHAND for us to walk in. Separating the two is like saying 'which is more important, breathing or eating?' Obviously if you stop breathing you won't do much eating, but equally if you never eat you will find your breathing eventually in trouble. Not a perfect analogy, but the 'salvation' which is 'by grace through faith' is precisely the rescue of our humanness from all that corrupts it, including ultimately death, and sin which anticipates death -- so if we are indeed rescued from sin and death then it makes no sense whatever to say 'well, I'm saved, so I won't bother about good works'. We aren't saved BY good works but we are saved FOR good works -- for the rich, wise, mature human life which reflects God's glory into the world.
Much more to say but this is a start!
When Guru Teg Bahadhur, our 9th Guru, gave his life defending the right to freedom of worship of another community, the Hindus, in the face of persecution by the Mughal rulers, he poignantly reminded us of the need to stand up for the rights of others. It takes courage, but for true community cohesion, we need to look well beyond mute tolerance, and bring this higher vision of respect for difference to the fore in schools, the workplace and in all we do.
Over the years Sikhs have developed a highly sophisticated system of checks and balances to ensure that their response to threat or attack was always just and proportionate. Force should only be used as a last resort, and that it should be the minimum required to redress injustice. There is also the requirement that force should never be used for personal or political gain, and that non-combatants, particularly women, should always be treated with dignity and respect.
In the Sikh marriage service, a married couple are required to see themselves, not so much as individuals, but as a team of equals in mutual support, and in joint care and commitment, not only to the family, but also to wider society.
When we remove the distorting overlay of culture from religion, we see our different religions as they really are, overlapping circles of belief with much in common. Taking culture out of the equation will also help us see areas of religious difference in a fuller perspective and develop strategies to promote integration, based on genuine understanding and respect.
In keeping with Guru Arjan 's teaching of compassion and concern for others, Sikhs mark the anniversary of his martyrdom in an unusual way. There is no show of bitterness, Instead Sikhs set up stalls outside their gurdwaras and homes to serve cool refreshing drinks to passers-by. In this way we remember the thirst and suffering of Guru Arjan by looking to the needs of others, whatever their race, colour or creed.
While the Sikh Gurus supported the institution of marriage, and themselves lived married lives, they never criticised those that chose alternative lifestyles. Sikhs do not see such relationships as a sin. They are simply a matter of personal choice, which should be respected.
Guru Arjan Dev, the main compiler of the Sikh holy Granth, included in it not only teachings of the Sikh Gurus, but also verses of Hindu and Muslim saints to show that no one religion has a monopoly of truth. Earlier, the Guru showed his respect for Islam, by asking a Muslim saint Mia Mir, to lay the foundation stone of the famous Golden Temple, which has doors on four sides to emphasise a welcome to people from different spiritual and geographic directions.
Clifford Longley
Gordon Brown and David Cameron have both been emphasising the need to establish a clearer sense of national identity, to counter the tendency for a multi-cultural society to pull itself apart. Neither mentions religion, probably because it is seen as part of the problem and not part of the solution. But what about the national character?
That's slightly different from identity, and you can't so easily dismiss religion from the equation. The Anglo-Saxon personality owes a lot to our turbulent religious history, in particular the fault- line that has emerged time and again between two principles or ideas which, going back to the English civil war, we could label Roundhead and Cavalier.
If we're looking for where the dividing line runs today, we shouldn't ignore the party wall between No 10 and No 11 Downing Street. There is something of the Roundhead about Presbyterian Gordon Brown and something of the Cavalier about Tony Blair, who leans, as we know, towards Catholicism. The Cavalier and the Roundhead have two views of God, even a God they don't believe in like my utterly atheist father who was distinctly Puritan in his values. The Puritan God is hard to please; we must keep to his rules or he will be angry with us. Those who follow him are zealous strivers who work hard to get where their duty drives them. The Cavaliers' God is more relaxed and forgiving, who wants us to enjoy life. Cavaliers, natural aristocrats, rise effortlessly to the top as if it was their God- given right.
The Roundhead-Cavalier divide will be the key to understanding the relationship between Gordon Brown and David Cameron, who is manifestly on the Cavalier side of the line. We can even boil this down to a rhyming couplet: Cavaliers have more fun, Roundheads get more done. Needless to say they don't entirely understand or like each other. But they will co-operate and compromise when they have to.
But what about multi-culturalism? These two ideas of God, the judgemental versus the merciful, turn up in other religions too. We can see definite Roundhead characteristics in parts of the Muslim community most influenced by Wahhabist fundamentalism. Whereas Sufis, like most Hindus and indeed Sikhs, are on the Cavalier side of the line. What keep this division alive is the fact that neither Cavalier nor Roundhead is completely wrong, even if their views of God, or of how to live the good life, are out of harmony.
Understanding this fault-line, and how it influences the way we think and feel, is the key to that one British characteristic both Mr Cameron and Mr Brown agree on: tolerance. It is fundamental that we realise there can be no final victory between Cavalier and Roundhead. They will be locked together inside us as a nation until the end of history. They just have to get along.
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