On A Mission to Nowhere

I wandered into the Christian bookshop mission in the Central Market, and had a glance around the books on offer. Whenever I do this, I tend to get depressed, and this time was no exception. A few observations...

Despite continual popularity, and the new film out, there are no copies of the Narnia books for sale that i could see; only lots of very evangelical preachy children's fiction. In fact, as far as C.S. Lewis goes, I could only spot "Mere Christianity" in the main section. I'd have throught "A Grief Observed" would make it into the section on bereavement, but evidently not. It seems that the bookshop is starting to view C.S. Lewis with suspicion. No sign of his space trilogy ("Out of the Silent Planet" etc) either, although the appalling Left Behind series (which is a kind of science fiction wish-fulfilment fantasy) is still on the shelves. Clearly C.S. Lewis is being viewed with more suspicion than - for example - ten years ago - when there were most of his books in print on the shelves (and they are still in print, just not on these shelves)

Only N.T. Wright's most recent book "Surprised by Hope" on the shelves; no sign of "Simply Christian", or in fact of any of his popular New Testament "for everyone" series of books. But then they never wanted to stock William Barclay either. Only the Tyndale commentaries, which have a definite theological slant, and while they are good at explaining some of the meaning, lack the gift of homely illustration so prevalent in Wright and Barclay - and dare I say it, the parables of Jesus!

One Rowan Williams "Writing in the Dust", but in the sale books. I got it as a spare copy to take on holiday, at only 50 pence. They did once have his book on the Resurrection, about 5 years ago.

A good sign was the "Left Behind Kids" books, of which there must have been about 30 in the sale area. Obviously kids are wiser than we think!

Lots of very preachy DVDs, with only Amazing Grace managing to creep in from the wider world. Some gospel filmed versions, but not the well-known ones, with a very Anglo-Saxon Jesus. I wonder if they'll have the Passion DVD when it comes out?

Occasionally in the past, the odd gem has slipped by. some of Tom Wright's Everyone series, the book in which he engages with Marcus Borg, a book on lifestyle choices and problems by Windy Dryden, and an excellent new translation of part of the Carmina by Kathleen Jones.

On the whole, it is like browsing the New Age stuff. You know what it is likely to say even before you open a book. Not much element of surprise or challenge to existing preconceptions (or even my preconceptions!) but just the usual formulaic evangelical party line.



On the whole though, it is pretty despressing.

Tom Wright on the Anglican Church

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.

Forgiveness Means You Were Wrong

Reading Tom Wright on forgiveness, he is spot on. Reminds me of a couple of the Chesterton Father Brown stories (the Chief Mourner of Marne, the Arrow of Heaven, in which Father Brown comments on the difference between Christian forgiveness, and the mere excusing of something (as a means of social acceptability).

Forgiveness Means You Were Wrong by Tom Wright

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.

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/nicholas_t_wright/2007/04/forgiveness_means_you_were_wro.html#more

Being Saved

Good reply by Tom Wright!

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/nicholas_t_wright/2007/06/start_by_understanding_salvati.html

Start by Understanding Salvation

'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!

Quote of the day

Let's be quite clear: In the first century, if your leader gets executed by the authorities, you either give up the movement, or you find yourself another leader. Going around saying he's been raised from the dead is not an option. They were far too hardheaded for that.

- Tom Wright

Voyeurism and TV

Came across this snippet today, which I think touches on the Big Brother news syndrome, and the repeated ad nauseum TV images of the Challenger Disaster, of the Two Towers, and now - on Channel 4 - video footage of Diana's death.

There is a peculiar aspect to contemporary war because of broadcasting and so on; people can become voyeurs, captivated by scenes of suffering and devastation while they sit in comfortable homes drinking coffee or beer in front of the TV. Like all voyeurism, this can deaden genuine human reactions and give a quite unhealthy sense of false involvement which then breeds the wrong sort of detachment as its reverse. Enough to find out basically what's going on, pray about it, and get on with your real work and the rest of your life.

- Tom Wright

Neognosticism

Another great comment by Tom Wright (see below my notes)

I have been always struck by how close to neo-gnosticism some of conservative evangelical Christianity is. The focus on the centrality of the "personal relationship" with Jesus, the "let Jesus into your heart" always seem to contrast with the Jesus of the New Testament, who doesn't say "come and have a personal relationship with me", but "come, follow me". Of course, when one does the latter, the former is also there, but I am unconvinced it plays out in reverse. Christianity is not I think mainly about about "me, my faith", but about proclaiming "Jesus is Lord".

---

http://www.spu.edu/depts/uc/response/summer2k5/features/davincicode.asp

Neo-Gnosticism is the philosophy that invites you to search deep inside yourself and discover some exciting things by which you must then live. It is the philosophy which declares that the only real moral imperative is that you should then be true to what you find when you engage in that deep inward search. But this is not a religion of redemption. It is not at all a Jewish vision of the covenant God who sets free the helpless slaves. It appeals, on the contrary, to the pride that says "I'm really quite an exciting person, deep down, whatever I may look like outwardly" — the theme of half the cheap movies and novels in today's world. It appeals to the stimulus of that ever-deeper navel-gazing ("finding out who I really am") which is the subject of a million self-help books, and the home-made validation of a thousand ethical confusions. It corresponds, in other words, to what a great many people in our world want to believe and want to do, rather than to the hard and bracing challenge of the very Jewish gospel of Jesus. It appears to legitimate precisely that sort of religion which a large swathe of America and a fair chunk of Europe yearns for: a free-for-all, do-it-yourself spirituality, with a strong though ineffective agenda of social protest against the powers that be, and an I'm-OK-you're-OK attitude on all matters religious and ethical. At least, with one exception: You can have any sort of spirituality you like (Zen, labyrinths, Tai Chi) as long as it isn't orthodox Christianity.

By contrast, the challenge of Jesus, in the 21st century as in the first, is that we should look away from ourselves and get on board with the project the one true God launched at creation and re-launched with Jesus himself. The authentic Christian gospel, which is good news about something that has happened as a result of which the world is a different place — this gospel demands that we submit to Jesus as Lord and allow all other allegiances, loves and self-discoveries to be realigned in that light. God's project, and God's gospel, are rooted in solid history as opposed to Gnostic fantasy and its modern equivalents. Genuine Christianity is to be expressed in self-giving love and radical holiness, not self-cosseting self-discovery. And it lives by, and looks for the completion of, the new world in which God will put all things to rights and wipe away all tears from all eyes; in which all knees will bow at the name of Jesus, not because he had a secret love-child, not because he was a teacher of recondite wisdom, not because he showed us how we could get in touch with the hidden feminine, but because he died as the fulfillment of the Scriptural story of God's people and rose as the fulfillment of the world-redeeming purposes of the same creator God; and because, in that death and resurrection, we discover him to be the one at whose name every knee shall indeed bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, confessing Jesus Christ as Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Follow your star or Jesus?

Who cares about speaking the truth to power if the real task is to escape? Why bother feeding the hungry and housing the homeless, why worry about global debt or global warming or the madness of global warfare, if the main thing to do is to follow your own star and discover your true spiritual identity? Why bother following the real Jesus and standing defenceless before the powers of the world if you can invent a fake Jesus who panders to your inner desires? Let's be quite clear: despite the sneers of so many who say that the New Testament was written, edited and then chosen out of a much larger collection of books in order to sustain the church's political power and prestige, the truth is that in the second and third century, long before anyone thought of the Constantinian settlement, it was the people who were reading Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Acts, Romans and the rest who were being thrown to the lions, burned at the stake, beaten and bullied and beheaded. Why would Caesar worry about 'Thomas', 'Judas' and the other pseudo-gospels? The rulers of this world are not bothered when yet another little group invents a new form of private spirituality. What makes Caesar shiver in his shoes is if people start to believe that whereas the Gentile rulers do it one way, God does it a different way, that there is a different way of power, a different form of rulership, and that Jesus has inaugurated and modelled it in his servanthood and suffering, and that the community that hails him as the only true Lord is going out into the world to live that way, and to celebrate it, as we do today, in sacrament and vocation and healing.

- Tom Wright

The evangelical tradition

I think this is brilliant!

"When I began theology, I assumed that all writers not published by the . . Press, or perhaps the . . of . . Trust, were suspect. If I read the right books I would find the 'answers'. Fortunately, after two years of soaking myself in the Bible itself, I was so gripped with the excitement of exegesis, and the new horizons it opened up that I didn't worry so much about 'sound' answers. I continue to respect the Reformers, and men like Charles Simeon, of 200 years ago, John Stott, Jim Packer and Michael Green, at whose feet I was privileged to sit, and whose work in a variety of ways created space for me to do things differently. Where I disagree with them it is because I have done what they told me to: to read Scripture and emerge with a more biblical theology. The evangelical tradition at its best encourages critique from within. It sends us back to the Scripture which stands over against all traditions, our own included."

Tom Wright
http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_My_Pilgrimage.htm

Fulcrum

I've only just really got into this site. Evangelical in a new way. For
those of us who have only come across the rather narrow face of conservative
evangelicalism, this is brilliant! I've always thought the Grove books were
excellent and spread across quite a range (for an example, look at Praying
to God as Mother), and very positive, and Tom Wright's method of genuine
dialogue with Crossan or Borg seemed miles away from the "rubbish it" school
of books which were so ruthlessly dissected by James Barr (Fundamentalism),
so it is good to know there is a whole site out there saying "Behold, I make
all things new".

Some good Fulcrum articles:

Canal, River and Rapids: Contemporary Evangelicalism in the Church of
England
http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/news/2003/20030930watercourses.cfm?doc=2

Homophobia
http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/news/2006/20060524goddard.cfm?doc=108#abc

The Founding of Fulcrum
http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/news/2006/newsletter09.cfm?doc=137#a2

Future Directions in Systematic Theology
http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/news/2005/20051213knight.cfm?doc=69

The Cross and the Caricatures
http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/news/2007/20070423wright.cfm?doc=205

Discovering a Positive Model for Responding to Unorthodox Theology
http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/news/2006/20060208kuhrt.cfm?doc=85

Women Bishops:A Response to Cardinal Kasper
http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/pageinfo.cfm?author=Tom%20Wright
(and one might add, Simon Vibert!)

Women's Service in the Church: The Biblical Basis
http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/news/2004/20040904wright.cfm?doc=164

Here is a new way of being religious and you might enjoy it?

N.T. Wright on Paul; brilliant stuff! Heard this as an MP3.

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Look at what Paul actually says when he talks about how people become Christians. Look for instance at 1 Thessalonians where he says quite a lot about it without ever using the word justify or any of its cognates. He talks about the gospel coming to you in the power of the Spirit. You accepted that word not as the word of man but as what it really is, the word of God that is at work in you believers. It's quite clear what Paul is talking about, that he comes into town announcing that Jesus is Lord, as a royal herald. He is saying that the crucified Jesus is the Lord of the world. And this is not, "Here is a way of salvation. You might like to apply it to yourself." It's not, "Here is a new way of being religious and you might enjoy it." This is really an imperial summons: "On your knees!" Nobody ever went into a Romantown and said, " Caesar is lord and you might like to have this experience of acknowledging him as lord if that suits you." They said, "Caesar is Lord, get on your knees and we want the tax right now."

And when that message is announced, some men and women find to their astonishment that they believe it. I say to their astonishment because it's stupid. Paul says that it's stupid. He knows it. You can just imagine it. It's like someone telling a joke in a foreign language and not knowing why people laugh. Paul was going around the Roman world saying that this crucified Jesus is the lord of the world. He must have felt many times this is the craziest thing imaginable yet when I say it, lives are changed, the community emerges, people love each other. That is grace. And it is all of grace.

Give someone a fish ....

"You know that old saying, Give someone a fish and you feed them for a day; teach someone to fish and you feed them for life. Paul's whole motto seems to be that if you merely give someone a dogma, you may keep them on the straight and narrow for a day, but if you teach someone to think Christianly, they'll be able to be sustained, even when you're not around writing letters to them. And so a lot of Paul's letters are really helping people to grow up and think Christianly for themselves, because Paul knows there'll be many, many more issues that they have to face, that he won't have time to write letters to them about. But if they will actually learn to think Christian, if they can do it for themselves." (Tom Wright)

http://www.abc.net.au/cgi-bin/common/printfriendly.pl?http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/spirit/stories/s1604323.htm

Coffee

"The amazing thing about St Paul is not that he said and did all these things,
it's that he said and did them without coffee. "

-- N.T. Wright, on the New Testament

Damnation

We find throughout Scripture that humans are invited to worship the God in whose image they are made. By worshipping this God (which involves repentance and faith; the faith involves learning to recognize this God in the crucified and risen Jesus), they are restored as image-bearers.

When people continually and consistently refuse to worship this God, they progressively reflect this image less and less. Instead, they reflect the images of what they are worshipping. Since all else other than the true creator God is heading for death, this means that they buy into a system of death, [which] leads, by one's own choice, to an eventual erasing of that which makes us truly human.

– NT Wright, in answer to a request for a definition of what "damnation" means