[191.1] INTERPRETING GOD'S LAUGHTER

The news that a retired school headmaster has reduced the Bible into a booklet which can be read in around a hundred minutes may be an abridgement too far, according to James Sturcke, summarising blog reaction for the new 'Berliner'-style Guardian. Maggi Dawn has the issues sensibly and briefly weighed up. Even more of a storm greeted As Good as New: A Radical Re-telling of the Scriptures, because of its controversial interpretative stance towards passages concerning sex - always something guaranteed to, er, get Christians' knickers in a twist. Meanwhile the Graun (as it is lovingly known by sub-editors the world over) is encouraging bloggers to summarise other 'great books' in just 100 words.

I don't imagine that we'll be seeing a 100 minute version of the Qur'an too soon, not unless someone really wants to stir the pot. But Giles Fraser, undoubtedly the best theologically-equipped columnist in any UK paper at the moment, has some very sensible things to say about the debate on the reformation of Islam galvanised by Salman Rushdie and others. In Rushdie should swap his crusading for novel writing (a crude headline, which he didn't write and doesn't do justice to the piece) Fraser follows his earlier article on The idolatry of Holy Books by reflecting on the role of fiction in helping narrative traditions to meet, exchange and find a better way of engaging both themselves and 'the enemy' - whatever and whoever that is perceived to be.

He says: In these pages I had a go at Rushdie's appeal to the Reformation as simplistic, arguing that reforming zeal often leads to the sort of bad religion of which he rightly complains. Taking the point, he has now changed tack: "Not so much a reformation, as several people said in response to my first piece, as an Enlightenment. Very well then: let there be light." But this won't do either. Certainly Enlightenment thought offers a challenge to the moral poison that often oozes from superstition. Even so, secular rationality is no fail-safe prophylactic against murderous ideology. The 20th century offered up enough genocidal "isms" to make that point. Hatred has the capacity to nestle within the most enlightened breast. So far, so obvious. But what's apparently not so obvious to Rushdie is that the most effective answer to bad religion is under his very nose: the novel itself...

Picking up an old Jewish proverb, "Man thinks, God laughs", [Milan] Kundera proposes that the novel was born out of the laughter of God. What's God laughing at? At the hubris of human attempts to deliver a single knockdown answer to the problems of the world. The novel can never be a cheerleader for Islam or Christianity or Modernist or Enlightenment. Those who believe that the exclusive truth of any of these is obvious and self-evident can never have heard the laughter of God. [My emphases]

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[190.1] THE TRAGIC, NEEDLESS DEATH OF MANUEL BRAVO

Britain's asylum and refugee policies are shameful. Policy debate is trapped by the scare-mongering, selective information and xenophobia peddled by the tabloid press and reinforced by the likes of 'Asylum Watch' (so effectively taken on in a recent Westminster Forum debate). But the real scandal of the situation is highlighted by the tragic story of Manuel Bravo, 35, who hanged himself last Thursday after he and his 13-year-old son, Antonio, were arrested at their home in Leeds and taken to Yarl's Wood detention centre in Bedford. They were due to be sent back to war-torn Angola. Mr Bravo's wife Lydia and their other son Mellyu returned to the country earlier this year. The International Red Cross later informed him that she had been arrested on their arrival and that both had disappeared. It seems that Mr Bravo hanged himself so that the government could not deport Antonio, as it is illegal to send back an unaccompanied minor.

The Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, John Packer, the vicar of Mr Bravo's local church, MP John Battle and local campaigners of all faiths and none are calling for an enquiry into the death - and into the arrest, which was probably illegal. Quite right, too. This is one policy area where churches are united against injustice, I'm delighted to say. The National Coalition of Anti-Seportation Campaigns, Bail for Immigration Detainees, the Churches' Commission for Racial Justice and the Bail Circle are among those who you can contact for action ideas and opportunities. See also the sanctuary intitiative.

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[189.1] LINKING POWER AND RECONCILIATION

More on the Church of England House of Bishops' report on power, violence and democracy post 9/11 (yesterday). The official Church House press release is here. Interesting to compare how they set it out (I almost said 'spun it'!) alongside the major newspaper reports - which basically picked up on the initial BBC trail. (See: the Daily Telegraph's Jonathan Petre, Bishops suggest apologising to Muslim leaders for Iraq war; The Guardian's Stephen Bates, C of E bishops criticise US over foreign policy and war on terror; and The Times' Ruth Gledhill, Bishops want to apologise for Iraq war.)

Bishop Richard Harries' Observer article, How the Church can tackle terrorism is worth checking out, too. He rightly says: "Religion has too often been used to justify illegitimate violence; there is a seed of violence within all religions, including Christianity. There is no way that we in the church can contribute to the public debate without taking this fully into account. At the same time, the churches do have a special mandate from their founder for the work of reconciliation." He goes on to reference the work of Canon Andrew White in the Middle East, and the TRC model.

However, over on Thinking Anglicans, which does a fine job of covering the news bases, Andrew Conway comments: "I am not convinced of the need for a South-Africa-style Truth & Reconciliation Commission in Iraq (and I wish Anglicans would be a little more critical in their attitude to the TRC, instead of treating it as a universally applicable model for conflict resolution), but I am rather taken with the idea that the Western democracies should apologise for their role in supporting and arming Saddam's monstrous regime." [emphasis added]

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[188.1] BISHOPS, BOMBS AND POLITICAL BALLAST

What are we to make of the newly issued 100-page advisory report from the Church of England’s synodical house of bishops, Countering Terrorism: Power, Violence and Democracy Post 9/11 [available as a *.PDF file here]?

As I was attempting to summarise it for Ekklesia, I found myself experiencing mixed emotions: gratitude for a serious, substantial and carefully-crafted piece of work, certainly; irritation that the general media has instantly reduced it to a rather feeble-sounding ‘apology' to Muslims; and concern that even good people atop an Established church inevitably end up side-stepping the difficult peace of Christ in a dubious attempt to establish their credentials as ‘political realists’.

[This is the beginning of a longer comment piece in my Ekklesia column, due up within the next 24 hours.]

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[187.1] A USEFUL REMINDER FROM A NEIGHBOUR

I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. (Mahatma Gandhi)

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[186.1] BEHOLD THE WOMAN

It's curious to witness the minor storm of approval and disapproval provoked by the latest statue to be situated on the famous 'fourth plinth' in London's Trafalgar Square. On 15 September 2005, the striking 3.6m marble sculpture "Alison Lapper Pregnant", by Marc Quinn, was unveiled. Lapper [below, left] is an artist who was born with no arms and with shortened legs due to the chromosomal condition Phocomelia. The statue is a nude representation which intriguingly combines weakness and strength, loss and hope.

For me it has distinct echoes of Mark Wallinger's remarkable "Ecce Homo" [see picture, left], installed in Trafalgar square July 1999 - February 2000, which is now located in the Anthony Reynolds Gallery (68 Great Marlborough Street, W1). Made of marbleised resin, gold leaf and barbed wire, the unassuming life-size representation of Jesus embodies the vulnerable "man for others" (Bonhoeffer), a definite antithesis of triumphant maleness, postmodern celebrity, modern military heroism, and the unattainable Nietzschean 'superman'.

Marginal to the symbols of power that surrounded it for eight months, "Ecce Homo", like the new Lapper statue, attracts attention to an alternate set of values in proximity to the public square. Wallinger's own philosophy is agnostic, but to my eyes he has created a genuinely faithful representation of what it means to receive Christ as God's person, the one in whom our prevailing corruptions of deity are radically reformulated as solidarity with the victim.

I doubt that this impression would cut much ice with Stephen Green of the inappropriately-named Christian Voice - an extreme website which seems to have captivated a confused media through its Jerry Springer antics. Green was implausibly asked by The Independent (thanks to MediaWatchWatch for the tip-off) what he thought of "Alison Lapper Pregnant". After damning the venture with faint praise and lamenting the demise of militarism, Green dubbed the sculpture "indecent", childishly observing that "she has her breasts and other bits hanging out."

How sad and revealing that he finds the naked female form threatening and repulsive, rather than seeing in it the goodness of a world gifted by God, the pathos of human disfigurement, and the empowerment of unclothed truthfulness. Like Wallinger's "Ecce Homo", Quinn's tender representation seems infinitely closer the redemptive impact of Christ than the bullying bravado of Christian Voice.

Quinn says: "I'm not physically disabled myself, but from working with disabled sitters I realised how hidden different bodies are in public life and media. [Lapper's] pregnancy also makes this a monument to the possibilities of the future."

"Alison Lapper Pregnant" will be replaced by the "Hotel for the Birds" sculpture by Thomas Schutte in April 2007.

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[185.1] LEARNING TO BE WOUNDED HEALERS

"How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others... But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness."

(M. Scott Peck in A Different Drum - the link is to a piece about Bonhoeffer's extraordinary Life Together)

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[184.1] BECKHAM TIE-DYES FOR OUR SINS?

[Excerpted from the full story on Ekklesia today] An academic conference on celebrity culture, taking place in Scotland this week, has confirmed soccer icon David Beckham as a ‘new messiah’ for a post-Christian generation. “Beckham … is all about salvation, redemption, even resurrection,” Dr Carlton Brick, a lecturer at the University of Paisley, near Glasgow, tells the relaunched Guardian newspaper today. Explains the academic, who teaches politics and sociology: “It is not me that is saying Beckham is a pseudo Christ-like figure, but it is how he is often portrayed, and it is how he portrays himself.”

Commented Simon Barrow from the UK Christian think tank Ekklesia: “I’m sure the tabloids will have a field day mocking academics for spinning long words around celebrity culture and setting up David Beckham as some kind of modern deity. But there is a serious point in all this...
Religious meaning has indeed morphed into popular culture, and that is both good news and bad news for church leaders. It shows that Christian language and iconography has staying power even in a strongly plural and secular culture. But it also demonstrates how Christian meaning can easily be absorbed into a consumer culture and robbed of its subversive, life-changing impact.”

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[183.1] REDEEMING CYNICISM

A few days ago I raised the question about how one could distinguish between faith and credulity, reason and cynicism. There is, of course, another (more important) definitional take on 'the cynic', referring to the Socratic disdain of the illusions of the world, rather than the corrosive acidity of the modern person who refuses all attempts at truth as politicking.

Pete Rollins on Emerging Church exaggerates, but has a point -- not least a theological one: "Be cynical. The original cynics where a dusty group of people who questioned ethics not because they hated ethics but because they loved ethics so much. They questioned God and religion not because they where sceptical but because they where obsessed with God and religion. Questioning God is not questioning God, but only questioning 'God' - in other words our understanding of God. [D]econstruction (which is very cynical) will help revolutionise Western Christianity." (Image: Kandinsky's Deconstruction)

As Tony Kelly CSsR comments: "[T]he demand for a complete self-dispossession pervades the New Testament. Only by losing one's life ... can one truly save it (Matthew 16:24-25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24; John 12:25). The moral and spiritual implications of this radical demand have, rightly enough, been the focus of commentators throughout Christian tradition. But there are also implications of a more intellectual character, as faith-inspired thinking seeks to go beyond the conceptual and theoretical systems which, incapable of allowing for ‘God's foolishness', tend to become idolatrous. It is especially here that deconstruction is a bracing reminder ... to take seriously the 'negative theology' of the New Testament."

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[182.1] WAKING UP TO A NEW WORLD

Well, not exactly. But I'm waking up to the new, full-colour, all-singing, all-dancing 'Berliner' format Guardian, anyway -- since the much-hyped relaunch 24 hours ago. This is a subject close to my heart (as I've been reading the Graun for 30 years, and crave good print design too), so I couldn't resist waxing about it in an Ekklesia news/commentary piece yesterday on religion and the newspaper doyen of the liberal intellegentsia. Even those who don't know much about twentieth century theological giant Karl Barth may be aware of his famous comment that Christians should face the world with both scripture and sentinel. As Ronald Goetz commented in The Christian Century during the centenary of his birth, in 1986: "The only aspect of Barth’s thinking that changed little during his lifetime was his politics. Despite the often-repeated charge that his theology led to political quietism, Barth himself was not quiet. He always insisted that theology had to be done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. He was a lifelong socialist and political maverick whose political views elicited much hostility -- first in Nazi Germany, later in anticommunist America, and chronically in his own neutral Switzerland. As he once observed, in politics the radical is probably wrong but has a chance of being right; the conservative is [invariably] wrong [emphasis added]." Which is why, I reckon, the Guardian is usually more usefully wrong than the Telegraph, as well as more frequently right.

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[181.1] HOW THE ONE WAS WEST

The inimitable Cornel West, professor of African American Studies and Religion at Princeton University, pulls few punches in his post-Katrina interview with Joanna Walters in the Observer newspaper ('Exiles from a city and from a nation'). My introduction to his work was the classic Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, penned in his 20s. He's also the only theologian I know who's recorded a hip-hop album. There are downloads on his home page. In today's piece, he declares:

"If I had been of Martin Luther King's generation I would never have gone to Harvard or Princeton. They shot brother Martin dead like a dog in 1968 when the mobilisation of the black poor was just getting started. At least one of his surviving legacies was the quadrupling in the size of the black middle class. But Oprah [Winfrey] the billionaire and the black judges and chief executives and movie stars do not mean equality, or even equality of opportunity yet. Black faces in high places does not mean racism is over. Condoleezza Rice has sold her soul. Now the black bourgeoisie have an even heavier obligation to fight for the 33 per cent of black children living in poverty - and to alleviate the spiritual crisis of hopelessness among young black men.

"[President George W. ] Bush talks about God, but he has forgotten the point of prophetic Christianity is compassion and justice for those who have least. Hip-hop has the anger that comes out of post-industrial, free-market America, but it lacks the progressiveness that produces organisations that will threaten the status quo. There has not been a giant since King, someone prepared to ... create an insurgency where many are prepared to die to upset the corporate elite. The Democrats are spineless."

I caught Cornel West in action myself at a public meeting in Brixton (Railton Road Methodist Church, where I had an office in the late '80s) a few years ago. Stirring and sharp, he was, in an oddly predictable way, every inch a black Pentecostal preacher - but one who effortlessly dropped in words like 'hegemony' and 'hermeneutics' in between street anecodes, biblical quotations and impassioned pleas for justice... all to loud choruses of 'amen!' and 'hallellujah!' It was quite an evening.

Then there are those cameo appearances in The Matrix and The Matrix unloaded. Really. Of course West has attracted much criticism for grandstanding, not all of it illegitimate. But he integrates critical faith and progressive politics in a unique, infuriating and inspiring way.

Clarence Shole Johnson explores his conceptions of pragmatism, existentialism, post-Marxism, prophetic Christianity, black-Jewish relations, affirmative action, and the role of black intellectuals in Cornel West and Philosophy (Africana Thought), published by Routledge in 2002. See also the PBS programme, This Far by Faith.

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[180.1] INVOKING A MYSTERY

I should have mentioned some time ago that Richard Skinner (a writer, poet, performer, comedian and counsellor - who also happens to attend my church in Exeter, St Stephen's) has recently produced a fine new collection of verse. Invocations: Calling on the God in All (ISBN 1901557936, £5.99) is published by Wild Goose, the associate publishers of the Iona Community in Scotland.

In the tradition of liturgical chants such as the ‘Advent Antiphons’, Richard Skinner has created invocations inspired by creatures, conditions and objects in the world around us which reflect and are a metaphor for aspects of God or the Divine. Although the author comes from a Christian background and is most at home with the iconography and language of Christianity, these invocations, which incorporate symbolism from creation, science, technology and human psychology, and point to the God in all things, will resonate with individuals and groups of any or no particular religious or spiritual allegiance.

An excerpt from the book is viewable in *.PDF format here.

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[179.1] YOUNGER ASIAN VOICES AIM TO MIX IT IN THE MEDIA

I'm honoured that Sunny Hundal (left), founder of Asians in Media, has linked FaithInSociety on his important new webzine venture, Pickled Politics - which aims to give a range of young, progressive British Asians a stronger voice in the public debate about politics, culture and religion. A background story is here on Ekklesia.

In a piece on Ziauddin Sardar's recent primetime BBC2 documentary Battle for Islam, Hundal wrote: Conservative Asians have a habit of believing that changing religious practice is a bad thing because it is deviating away from the religion. What they don’t realise is that Islam, Sikhism and Hinduism have long traditions of theological debate that encourages re-interpretation of the religious scriptures. This needs to change.

Similar lack of awareness inhabits Christianity, of course, when tradition and scripture are taken to be fixed, restrictive, closed, determined by the past, and prescriptive - rather than dynamic, creative, open, future-oriented, and generative.

Naturally I've added Pickled Politics and AIM to my own blogroll, under newsLinks. They're both essential reading for a different take on life in Britain and beyond.

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[178.1] GOD IS NOT A CONVENIENT COMMODITY

John D. Caputo, in his stimulating book On Religion, and elsewhere, has done much to reinstate to contemporary attention Augustine's central question, "What do we love when we love our God?"

A famous Christian mystic put the issue like this: Some people want to see God with their eyes as they see a cow and to love [God] as they love their cow - they love their cow for the milk and cheese and profit it makes them. This is how it is with people who love God for the sake of outward wealth or inward comfort. They do not rightly love God when they love for their own advantage. Indeed, I tell you the truth, any object you have on your mind, however good, will be a barrier between you and the inmost truth. (Meister Eckhart)

I was sorry to miss hearing John Caputo in Belfast recently. He appeared on BBC Sunday Sequence (listen here), and his talk at Swarthmore was on "The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event." It is good that emergent-emerging church people are getting interested in what he says, which, among many other things, is that the postmodern returns to religion by positing a "reality" beyond the real (the world of objects and our descriptive reliance on the analogy of being).

See also Vincent Geoghehan's opening up of the debate [in *.PDF format] about post-secularism and religious narrative, specifically the Bible.

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[177.1] ON TRAGEDY BEYOND EXPLANATION

This astute comment is from Nick Adams' passionate theological manifesto on his home page at New College, University of Edinburgh. (I've had the pleasure of working with Nick, both on the editorial board of the currently suspended Christian magazine, and on the Mission Theological Advisory Group.)

"Increasing numbers of the world's population do not know what to hope for, and find that, for whatever reason, they cannot pray. There are probably complicated reasons for this. There may also be some simple ones. I can think of two. First, our lives are marked by tragedy; second, we are powerless to prevent or explain it. Those who believe that theology should explain tragedy turn away in disappointment. Those who believe that technology or economics should prevent it give up in despair. I think they are right about technology but wrong about theology. Theology is not for explaining tragedy: it's for renewing hope and prayer, and finding deeper and better ways of articulating them. Of course, it's about many other things too. But in a world where [many] people find hoping and praying almost impossible, theologians are going to be busy enough."

As the late Charles E. Winquist argued in his complex and evocative Desiring Theology, the vocation of theology is a work against "the disappointment of thinking" - though ultimately I much prefer Merold Westphal and Robert Scharlemann's take on he challenge than his. (See Westphal's 'Divine Excess: The God Who Comes After' in John D. Caputo, The Religious).

In a different but complementary vein, also in the face of the tragic, Rowan Williams writes: "The childish religious mind… tends to conceive the freedom bestowed on us by God as something provisional and temporary, undergirded by a safety net in the assurance that 'Paternal Love' still reserves the power to bring about its will by force. But what if the divine renunciation of violence is completely serious? In that case, there is no point in wondering whether it is in anger or pity that God stands back from the world or reacts to what the world does; [God] has elected powerlessness in terms of the world."

Williams was reflecting on poetry and the legacy of Bonhoeffer, for whom the God who comes to us is the God who is "edged out of the world onto the cross". There is more to say about this, but not a 'more' that evades that love which chooses to establish itself in and through the terrifying freedom (contigency) of creation. [Quoted in my Is God a disaster area?, which I hope is a tentative account, not "an explanation".]

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[176.1] EYELESS IN ALABAMA

Good piece on OpenDemocracy by Geoff Hodgson on the aftermath of the storm and the challenge to democratic politics. Meanwhile the progressive inter-religious coalition FaithfulAmerica (note the penchant for conjoining words in titles!) has raised US$40,000 online for Church World Service's relief efforts.

A friend living in the proximity of the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina wrote to me yesterday: "The enormity and proximity of the disaster are having a profound effecton everybody. This time it is going to take much more than money... Huntsville, Alabama, is now home to hundreds of evacuees and I assume that number will grow."

"We had high winds from the storm but little rain. A big tree fell down in my back yard and I was without power for two days, plus I had to pay for the electrical repairs myself and get the tree moved but all that is inconsequential. My neighbours have been wonderfully helpful.

"The lack of preparedness and sluggish response in the face of one of the big three predicted events defies belief and will be to this country'sundying shame. There will be repercussions ranging from the price of gas and bananas to a review of the health care system and environmental management. But I don't have high hopes of any real reform."

See also this good comment from The New Yorker, In the ruins.

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[175.1] REKINDLING THE CRITICAL URBAN SPIRIT

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has just returned from holiday with an interesting piece on Urbanisation, the Christian Church and the Human Project in this week's Church of England Newspaper. Unfortunately it cuts off the last sentence (unless they have corrected it by the time you read this). Among the issues he raises is the question of spirituality in the urban environment.

"[T]he education of the spirit is inseparably bound to highly practical challenges. We still treat separate zoning as unquestionable; we still design residential areas without visible points of focus, as if they were just an assembly of individual residences; we still struggle to get spiritual health onto the agenda of groups planning and discussing regeneration. We have some way to go.

"We need to rescue ‘spirituality’ from some of the ways in which it has been domesticated, even trivialised, in recent years. A popular and a vague word, it demands – especially for the Christian – an anchorage in some specific convictions about human beings and their possibilities. Without this, it becomes only a code for techniques of making people feel a bit better about themselves; whereas the life of the spirit ought also to make people uncomfortable about themselves and their environment, critical and creative, open to things being different. [my emphasis and links added]

"The image of the City of God makes some sense. To the extent that urban life represents, in the history of human culture, a move beyond the sheer struggle for self-sufficiency, a move towards diversified community and a sharpened sense of the variety of goods (material, intellectual, imaginative) that people can exchange with each other, it is an appropriate metaphor for Christian community."

This is good stuff. But confronted with the squalor and division that has recently been unmasked in New Orleans, it still looks like a rather polite 'progressive establishment' take on things. For a gritty, complementary exposition of the challenges arising from the conflictual side of city life, a crucial issue for any spirituality that takes the disturbance of Jesus seriously, see also Kenneth Leech's talk on Ministry, Marginality and Mammon. For those who may not know, UNLEASH is a churches' homeless action network operating across London.

[The skyline depicted is New York's, from where Rowan Williams began to sift ideas for his superb meditation, Writing in the Dust, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. He was a block or two away when the planes struck.]

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[174.1] BLAME RACISM AND NEGLECT, NOT GOD

The national president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded by Dr Martin Luther King, has spoken out strongly on BBC Radio 4's Sunday Programme, calling for a renewed civil rights drive across the USA in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The radio excerpt is here. Black church and community leaders, including Jesse Jackson, have pointed out that poverty, inequality and racism are clearly implicated in the failure of the federal goverment to deal adequately with the widely-predicted disaster. Journalist Matt Wells has also written a pointed and passionate viewpoint on this and related concerns, 'New Orleans crisis shames US'.

Responding to questions about how God could have allowed such terrible suffering, characterised by fundamentalists as divine punishment, and callously pounced on by some evangelists, SCLC's Charles Steel (left) said: “God has given us everything we need, and we cannot cop out by putting the blame on God.” Indeed. Injustice doesn't drop from heaven, it is very much forged on earth.

I have previously written about the theological issues raised by natural disasters. This is a question which needs much more serious attention by the churches, who rather easily resort to sentiment or cliche in such circumstances. One natural response among those speaking on behalf on the Christian community is to stress divine engagement with suffering, which is surely right. A good, compassionate example is Katherine Torrance's sermon. But it could also be interpreted as a convenient evasion to appear to be attributing the positive to God while sidestepping the negative (though I'm certainly not suggesting that this is what Katherine is intending in her appropriately pastoral approach.)

Meanwhile, in terms of practical response, the US-wide ecumenical relief body Church World Service has also been playing a major role in coordinating aid efforts by faith communities, as have smaller bodies like Mennonite Disaster Service. [Dollar contributions to the SCLC Hurricane Katrina Relief Fund may also be sent to: SCLC National Headquarters, PO Box 89128, 591-A Edgewood Avenue, Atlanta, GA 30312, USA.]

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[173.1] THE AGONY OF HOPE

"[W]hen we take human existence upon ourselves in its starkest and most humiliating misery—a misery in which nothing, really nothing, has meaning—[then] we can win through to the only possible way to live. The first step is to grasp human destiny in its deepest contradiction… A genuine feeling for life will show a person the deepest contrast between extreme happiness and extreme pain. It is only when we taste the lot of all, when we become involved deeply in world suffering, one in heart with the need of [humanity], that we can win through to that vocation which is the calling of [human beings], and which, therefore, [is true] joy… Only when the conscience becomes active, only when love is born out of suffering, only when hardship leads to liberating action, is victory near." (Eberhard Arnold, from a lecture held in Berlin, 7 April, 1919. )

Picture: coutesy of Mennonite Disaster Service. The main canal leading into the town of Bayou La Batre, Alabama, where three-quarters of the town was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters. Donate to MDS here.

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[172.1] TRUMPING THE SUBLIME WITH THE RIDICULOUS

People sometimes ask me why I don't write about headliners like the Da Vinci Code (Doubleday, 2003), the Bible Code and so on. Heaven knows why, but they do. I obviously don't strike them as having anything better to do! But seriously... In post-Christian and radically plural societies, the amount of pulp from (or about) religion seems never-ending, and it strikes me as a time-consuming miscalculation to think that people eager for this stuff are likely to be swayed by earnest attempts to trump the ridiculous with the sublime.

Regarding Michael Drosnin, the best retort is surely satire: see, for instance, Pete Aitken's 'playing with the Bible or playing with ourselves'. As far as Dan Brown is concerned, a friend recently told me he found one of the multi-millionaire's books idly abandoned in an airport arrivals lounge, and after only ten minutes could scarcely credit how badly written and tedious it was. "Thank goodness", he sighed. "It could have been far worse. I could have paid for it."

Meanwhile, Robert M. Price has a volume coming out soon called The Da Vinci Fraud, which I imagine will be a good a hachet job. He says: "There exists a surprisingly large public for books that claim to 'blow the lid off Christianity' by means of new discoveries, real or imagined. Many such readers are what one might call sophomoric skeptics. They have learned proper suspicion toward their inherited Christian faith, but they seem to be completely uncritical about the assertions of those who would substitute some other hypothesis, often equally wild ... The Da Vinci Code [...] is a fictional narrative, but its author claims it is based on fact. That, too, alas, is part of the fiction."

Price himself started out as a Bible-belt fundamentalist, and has gradually morphed into a born-again nonbeliever who dismisses Christianity (with comparable nineteenth century rationalist fervour) as a "wild" Hellenistic mystery cult, though he still appreciates its rituals. So while he's an entertaining writer, and given the right target can score a high number of palpable hits, his approach is overdetermined by an exaggerated counter-image of what he opposes.

From an equally passionate contending viewpoint, this time Catholic, journalist Sandra Miesel (who co-authored The Da Vinci Hoax with Carl E. Olson) offers a deconstruction of the bestseller in that odd mix which is Crisis magazine ("politics, culture and church"). As she says: "In the end, Dan Brown has penned a poorly written, atrociously researched mess."

True. And that, frankly, ought to suffice to encourage us to focus on something else. For example the question about what distinguishes proper skepticism and trust (we surely need both to sustain a healthy life?) and improper versions of these (otherwise known as cynicism and credulity) which turn out to be seriously disabling.

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[171.1] CHANGING THE CLIMATE ON ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION

[Updated 03.09.05] The scenes and reports from Louisiana and Mississippi on the TV a few hours ago were appalling. In New Orleans, thousands of poor (mainly black) people were unable to evacuate the city as instructed because they did not have the requisite money or transport. They also have little or no medical or property insurance. So prospects beyond the immediate mess are bleak, too. Though Hurricane Katrina is classed as a natural disaster (by all but some malign fundamentalists), its differential impact poignantly illustrates the ongoing pain of 'the other America' - the one that has neither the resources nor the inclination to go to war, but which faces a daily struggle for survival. Federal support of US$10.5 billion has now been pledged. But how, when, in what form (and for whom) it will turn up is a different question. It has taken five days even for basic food and provisions to arrive.

The fact that New Orleans is the conduit for half the country's oil and gas supplies will certainly make a difference to a goverment otherwise reluctant to spend public money. Oil price hikes and a possible US$100 billion economic hole will see to that. But Katrina also raises deep questions about the environmental implications of coastal reclamation developments of this kind. And, of course, it highlights the urgency of tackling climate change, which the Bush administration still refuses to face up to.

By a positive piece of synchronicity (since it was planned weeks ago), representatives of Christian Aid, CAFOD (the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development) and Tearfund took part in the dramatic launch of a new climate change campaign – Stop Climate Chaos – in central London yesterday.

Around 500 campaigners lay down in front of the oil company Shell’s UK headquarters, near the south bank of the Thames, to form the swirling shape of the ‘Stop Climate Chaos’ logo (see graphic).

"It's curious to be asked to lie in the park during a morning at work, but there’s little campaigners won’t do to draw attention to their cause," declared Paul Valentin, Christian Aid’s international director, whose body formed part of the logo. [Full story on Ekklesia]

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[170.1] DANCING ON THE GRAVE OF LOUISIANA'S TRAGEDY

As if things weren't bad enough for the many people killed, injured or made destitute by Hurricane Katrina in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, they also have to endure aggressive religious conservatives claiming it as a divine handiwork. The religious right in the US and elsewhere does irreparable damage to Christianity by fostering the idea in the public imagination that the capricious deity they bow to is somehow connected with the God of Jesus Christ - who, far from employing crucifying vengeance, actually absorbs, negates and transforms it.

The spin that people like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and 'Repent America' put on public tragedy is therefore not spiritual but ideological, and in any meaningful sense (bound up with the struggle of life against death) is profoundly anti-theological. For while it often adopts a correspondingly trenchant anti-Muslim rhetoric, its central convictions are just as brutal and hate-filled as the distortions of extreme Islamism.

In its own way, it is also bound up with the murderous myth of redemptive violence, which subsumes biblical categories into an active belief in annihilation as cleansing ritual. Of course it can find plenty of textual legitimation for this, but only by eschewing the hermeneutical counter-story and lived reality of Jesus -- a redeeming narrative about humanity released from the ideological power of death in face of a God who is quite unlike our dominant ideas of 'godness'. (See 'Does Christianity kill or cure?')

Meanwhile, some are describing these events as 'America's tsunami'. This is inappropriate for a host of reasons. Awful though it is, there was warning, and an immeasurably wealthier society has the capacity to recover much more effectively in the long-run. That said, it is predictable and notable that those worst effected in both cases are the poorest.

And in both instances, the deeper question arises for many people of faith: is God a disaster area?

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[169.1] FOLLOWING CHRIST IN A VIOLENT WORLD

While media attention undestandably focusses on the fallout from televangelist Pat Robertson's recent hateful comments, it is worth reminding ourselves that responsible US Christian leaders (including people from key seminaries and academic institutions) earlier signed a powerful statement, Confessing Christ in A World of Violence, which gives a very different response to the use of force. Its signatories, up until February 2005, included ecumenicals, evangelicals and Catholics.

They write: Faithfully confessing Christ is the church's task, and never more so than when its confession is co-opted by militarism and nationalism.
* A "theology of war," emanating from the highest circles of American government, is seeping into our churches as well.
* The language of "righteous empire" is employed with growing frequency.
* The roles of God, church, and nation are confused by talk of an American "mission" and "divine appointment" to "rid the world of evil."
The security issues before our nation allow no easy solutions. No one has a monopoly on the truth. But a policy that rejects the wisdom of international consultation should not be baptized by religiosity. The danger today is political idolatry exacerbated by the politics of fear.

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[168.1] THE BBC AND BRITISH MUSLIMS: BRIDGES & WALLS

One of the most reliable sources of comment and perspective on religious issues in the news comes from Bartholemew's Notes on Religion. The latest entry (permalink here) concerns John Ware's BBC documentary on the Muslim Council of Britain and reactions to it, most notably Madeleine Bunting's in The Guardian, which I commented on earlier. Overall, and upon further reflection, I think Bartholemew has this right. However, if "McCarthyite" means, in general terms, hectoring and accusatory, I don't believe Bunting was "unbalanced" to raise it in the context of other things she says. Indeed, part of that context, I would argue, has to be awareness of the unprecedented levels of media attention the MCB and Sir Iqbal Sacranie have been subject to.

This isn't to excuse particular views (like those on suicide bombings in Israel and the Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie, with which I profoundly disagree). But it is to require realism about what it must be like for a tiny and previously little-known organisation suddenly to find its every breath attended to. This is something media professionals and commentators find it hard to come to terms with from the other side of the probing camera/microphone.

Moreover, as Bunting said (and as even some of the stauncher MCB critics admit), while the virtue of a broad umbrella group like MCB is that it is able to relate something of the breadth of opinion among different sections of its constituency, the corresponding disadvantage is that it can only really do this by being a ring-holder rather than an arbiter.

Having worked for Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, I have some experience in this delicate area. And from that vantage point, I also had occasional opportunity to see that the MCB (coming from a particular background, and without any equivalent of the lengthy history of Christian ecumenism) was genuinely trying to do discharge the resulting tension honourably. That doesn't mean, as Bunting pointed out, that it hasn't or won't make mistakes. Or that we are obliged to agree with it.

It is, of course, necessary and desirable in a plural society that religiously constructed opinions, especially those which turn out to be a matter of life and death for people they affect, should be open to careful scrutiny in media both internal and external to the community/tradition from which they arise. In that sense Panorama was quite justified in its enquiries. But I still believe that a greater degree of care, respect and circumspection should have been demonstrated - not least because building bridges rather than walls between Muslims and non-Muslims is especially important right now.... and because good journalism is compromised by media hype.

Meanwhile, here are some Bartholemew favourites. Wry, angular and informative. After all, being properly worthy doesn't mean being inexcusably dull.

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[167.1] LEARNING TO FOLLOW MY LEADER?

I have been wondering for some time about what it might mean for there to be a correlative to ‘leadership’ called ‘followership’, and if so how the former might be rescued from the unwanted imposition of individuated power and the latter from the mere self-encoding of patterns of domination.

This is a matter of importance to me for two reasons. First, because most of the time in life we are, whether we reflexively know it or not, followers; but sometimes we become leaders. And in both instances we are ill-equipped by the dominant discourses of our age to discharge these functions in ways which could be genuinely described as hopeful and liberative. Second, because, as a Christian, I am caught up in the multiple meanings of Jesus’ “follow me”, since I have discovered in the Way of Jesus a subversive authenticity which makes the path of discipleship (well realised by someone like Bonhoeffer, poorly realised by someone like me) a necessity for re-understanding and re-engaging the world in which I find myself. (Questions surrounding Pope Benedict XVI and the assumptions of Christendom are not irrelevant here, either.)

To put it differently, in seeking ways of following Jesus as Christ today, what I experience is not capitulation to ‘foreign occupation’ or the reduction of myself to some sheep-like docility, but rather a re-awakening, a disturbance and an (often painful) opening. But why is this so? And what could it mean for (say) the re-consideration of ‘religion’, the re-description of ‘secularity’, the re-expression of church and the re-doing of institutional life in a complex, urban culture?

For these and many other reasons, I have on my ‘must read’ list Robert P. Scharlemann’s The Reason of Following: Christology and the ecstatic I (University of Chicago, 1991), of which there is a small preview here. I have recently been reading the same author’s Inscriptions and Reflections: Essays in Philosophical Theology (University Press of Virginia, 1989), which I picked up at Unsworths Bookshop earlier in the summer during a sojourn in London. It’s fantastic. Scharlemann opens up new possibilities for understanding Christian formulae in the contemporary by re-understanding theology as what he calls an “afterthinking” (metanoiesis) based on the inversion of traditional ontology.

Anyway, in The Reason of Following, Scharlemann suggests that Christology represents a form of reason and an understanding of selfhood. To quote the blurb, he traces “the connections between the ‘I am’ of the God who spoke to Moses, the ‘I am’ of Christ, and the ‘I am’ of autonomous self-identification. How, he asks, can the self that spontaneously responds to Jesus’ ‘Follow me!’ be compared with the everyday, autonomous self? What is the nature of ‘following’ on the part of those who answer the summons of one whose name is ‘I am’?

“Pursuing these questions, Scharlemann develops a Christological phenomenology of the self – an account in which following means not the expression of the self in action or reflection but rather self-discovery in another person [emphasis added].”

“With a deep sense of both culture and philosophy, Scharlemann [also] distinguishes the forms of reason involved in ‘following’ from those in ethics, aesthetics, and other modes of religious philosophic thought. His … readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German theological and philosophical traditions provide an introduction to lesser-known thinkers such as Hermann and Picht as well as a profound critique of major figures such as Descartes, Heidegger, Fichte, and Kant.”

“Finally Robert Scharlemann outlines a program for a more systematic and rounded presentation of what Christian doctrine might mean in the contemporary world.”

Sounds fascinating, and an important preparation for immersion in management speak, organisational theory, leadership studies, change agency, and all the other disciplines that presuppose those patterns which theology properly seeks to unpick and re-weave – theology being, as Charles E. Winquist once put it, a “nomad discipline” which is a work against “the disappointment of thinking.”

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[166.1] BEING RE-ORIENTED BY THE PAIN OF GOD

The other day I chanced upon an interview with the Catholic theologian and sociologist Gregory Baum on the online journal Philosophy and Scripture, which examines the multiple relationships between the disciplines of critical reflection and communally authoritative textual traditions. What particularly attracted me was Baum's comment about the tension between esse and agape at the end of the excerpt below (see italicised section).

Here is more than a routine rehearsal of the theodicy conundrum. Baum points, whether consciously or not, to the genuine contradiction between the god of onto-theology and metaphysics, rightly critiqued by Heidegger, and the biblical God's character as pain-bearing love, affirmed by Bonhoeffer from his prison cell. To embrace the latter is necessarily to deconstruct the former, and to begin to speak of God 'beyond being'.

This takes us further along the road opened up by Kazoh Kitamori in his Theology of the Pain of God (John Knox Press, 1965) and subsequently by Douglas John Hall Hall -- a step beyond both the modified Hegelianism (though see Gillian Rose) and the separation of ethics and theoria to which Surjit Singh points.

[Incidentally, I note that Radical Philosophy didn't think that Rose's death-bed baptism was worth mentioning in its obituary; whereas arguably, and certainly for her, it was a singular event that made sense of her life's work. Agapic love is both the source and resource for our existence and for our capacities to give.]

OK, here's Baum:

"The mystics claim that in the process of opening themselves to God, there comes a time—sometimes a long time—when they are so much aware of the obstacles to God in their heart, so much aware of their inner fragmentation and outer superficiality, that God seems to disappeared altogether for them, so much so that they wondered if they had become atheists. They called this the dark night of the soul. But they also say that you have to wait patiently in the night, for it will end through the opening of a new and surprising window. Today, I have the impression, many Christians pass through a different dark night of the soul. They are deeply disturbed by the suffering in the world, the cruelly unjust maldistribution of wealth and power, and the indifference of the official churches to this scandalous situation that they find it increasingly difficult to believe in divine providence. They feel that they are becoming atheists. Some Christians—friends of mine among them—have never left the dark night. They became non-believers because they were inconsolable. They became agnostics for theological reasons—for which God will reward them. Yet other Christians pass through this night and eventually come out of it. They learn that God is in solidarity with the victims of history. A Jewish rabbi once wrote that the Holocaust has brought the end of “untroubled theism.” The more we believe that God is love, the more difficult it is to believe that God exists. We don’t want a faith that does not raise uncomfortable questions. We long for a faith that is both serene and troubled."

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[165.1] SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE

A comment from the late philosopher Paul Ricoeur: "We are overwhelmed by a flood of words, by polemics, by the assault of the virtual, which today create a kind of opaque zone. But goodness is deeper than the deepest evil. We have to liberate that certainty, give it a language. And the language given here in Taize is not the language of philosophy, not even of theology, but the language of the liturgy. And for me, the liturgy is not simply action; it is a form of thought. There is a hidden, discreet theology in the liturgy that can be summed up in the idea that 'the law of prayer is the law of faith'."

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[164.1] MAKING MURDER MUNDANE

In a manner that can only be described as reluctant, US right-wing televangelist Pat Robertson has been forced to apologise for comments that he made on Monday calling for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. This isn't the first time that Robertson has advocated the use of political violence while exercising his ministry as a Christian preacher, either. And two days after the 9/11 attacks in New York, he concurred with Jerry Falwell that the American Civil Liberties Union, abortionists, feminists, gays, pagans and the liberal pressure group People For the American Way should "share blame" for the terrorist outrage, because they had "caused God to lift the veil of protection which has allowed no one to attack America on our soil since 1812." This too elicited what turned out to be a partial retraction.

Though the religious right is brimming with denunciations of "evil" and "violent" Muslims at the moment (making few if any distinctions between different strains of Islam), it seems that its chief spokespeople have a permanent beam in their own eye concerning what can only be called "redemptive murder". What is really shocking about this is how casual, ill-thought-out and immune to criticism it is. Tragically, some who use the name of Christ do so primarily as a cipher for their own nationalistic prejudices, co-opting misconstruals of Christian doctrine into a Manichean worldview that legitimates all kinds of abuse in the name of faith.

It is surely the duty of Christian leaders to speak and teach against the demonising theology and the religious roots of violence, every bit as much as it is the responsibility of those in Muslim communities to confront the legitimation of violent extremism among those who make dangerous use of Islam. The whole question of Christian Zionism is among the specific concerns involved in this.

A good source of general information on the US situation is TheocracyWatch, a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy (CRESP) at Cornell University.

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[163.1] THE TRICKY ART OF DISPOSSESSION

From Nicholas Lash's Three Ways of Believing in One God, SCM 1992/2002 (which I'm re-reading at the moment)...

"All prayer, all worship, all life lived in the discipline of discipleship, is, at heart and centre, dispossessive. We need continual and exacting schooling because, at every level of behaviour, language and imagination - from politics to private life, from business to religion - we seek some safety, some security through ownership and power. And yet, however much we kick against the pricks, we do not own the words we say, the things we do, ourselves, our friends, our circumstances (and, when we try to do so, there are always forces outside our control which mock all such Promethean ambition). In liturgy and attentive contemplation, praise and prayer, we may learn to give back our language and our understanding, and ourselves; [to] learn patience, the surrender of security, sometimes in darkness not unlike Gethsemane."

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[162.3] REFLECTING ON 'GOD'S ROTTWEILER?'

For those more familiar with Vatican politics, Channel 4’s hour-long documentary last night about the new pope, ‘God’s Rottweiler?’, (3BM TV, produced by David Wilson and Grace Chapman) contained precious little by way of fresh insight into what kind of leader Benedict XVI is set to become. But it echoed a host of questions which continue to resonate in the struggle for authentic, outward-looking church in the twenty-first century.
Accompanied by a melodramatic orchestral backbeat and a somewhat incriminating, tabloid-style commentary, the programme charted the profound impact of both Nazism and the upheaval of 1968’s revolutionary stirrings on Josef Ratzinger, turning him from a relative moderate at the Vatican II Council to a convinced conservative on the Throne of St Peter.

I have written a longer, more discursive review / appraisal based on the programme, called After absolutism: the world, the church and the papacy. It has extensive internal weblinks and also looks critically at Philip Blond and Adrian Pabst's International Herald Tribune piece (19 August 2005), entitled 'Pope Benedict's Challenge to the Status Quo'. See also the earlier FinS piece, Why the Pope's Christendom Alternative Will Not Do.

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[162.2] SEARCHING FOR ALTERNATIVES IN IRAQ

The tragedy of post-invasion Iraq is highlighted once again by a truly harrowing covert report from Haditha which "exposes the limitations of the Iraqi state and US power on the day when the political process is supposed to make a great leap -- a draft constitution finalised and approved by midnight tonight."

It ill-behoves those of us who always thought the war was a wrong-headed way of wrestling democracy from dictatorship to engage in any kind of "told you so" over such terrible events. Likewise, the importance of the current constitutional bartering, supremely difficult though it is, should not be dismissed. We must continue to hope and pray that politics can triumph over terror. But it is nevertheless grossly irresponsible for the Western coalition to go on pretending that it is "business as usual" in "the new, democratic Iraq".

Barring a miraculous result this evening, a radical re-think is needed about international involvement in the change process. And it has to go much further than simply following occupation with abandonment. The advocacy delegation report (*.PDF file) on Iraq from Mennonite Central Commitee is frank and concise. However, what is being discussed in alternative forums at present is, it has to be said, still piecemeal.

Meanwhile, Paul Rogers' weekly OpenDemocracy columns on 'the war on terror' remain among the best summaries of what is at stake globally. He is now an international security correspondent, having formerly been Chair of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford -- where Philip Lewis (a vital commentator on Islam in Britain) is also based. In addition, see the Oxford Research Group and the Global Policy Forum's Iraq crisis page.

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[162.1] THROWING MUD AT MUSLIMS DOESN'T HELP

Media pundits and politicians are putting British Muslims under intense scrutiny in the wake of the London bombings in July. Every move they make seems only a breath away from the approbation of a commentator whose knowledge of Islam in Britain was probably next-to-nothing a few weeks ago. In a well-balanced article in today's Guardian, the paper's former religious affairs correspondent Madeleine Bunting examine's last night's BBC Panorama programme ('A Question Of Leadership') criticising the Muslim Council of Britain, which has been accompanied by some strongly-worded articles in The Observer.

The problem with this stuff is that in a drive to "uncover the truth" it falls prey to the kind of cartoon-style analysis which we ought to expect the BBC and broadsheet newspapers to resist. It is also counter-productive, perversely encouraging those who have an interest in portraying British society as "anti-Muslim", and disempowering followers of Islam who are genuinely trying to come to terms with the challenge in their midst and to develop effective responses from within their own tradition. In this context, the problem is not criticism per se, but ill-formed or sensationalist criticism. Panorama's centrepiece technique of "guilt by association" has unfortunate parallels with those used to discredit Professor Tariq Ramadan. As Bunting writes:

The tiny, volunteer-run MCB doesn't have the power to police the views of its disparate membership. [Sir Iqbal] Sacranie and the MCB have a tightrope to walk. On the one hand, the government and non-Muslim Britain are piling on the pressure that they deliver a law-abiding, loyal ethnic minority. On the other, an increasingly restless younger generation of Muslims criticise the MCB as far too moderate, a sell-out establishment stooge cosying up to Tony Blair.

There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to make of the MCB and Sacranie - and [Panorama presenter John] Ware details some of them - such as Sacranie's reprehensible refusal to attend the Holocaust memorial service last January and his decision to attend a memorial service for the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Yassin. The MCB bears all the characteristics of a diverse migrant community's struggle to develop a common voice - and it makes plenty of mistakes. But Ware has thrown so much mud around in the course of his programme that much more of it will stick than is deserved.

What is deeply troubling is how exacting British society is becoming of its Muslims. A new set of 'cricket tests' are being imposed on British Muslims - they are expected to sign up enthusiastically to every aspect of western secular society and to jettison any part of their intellectual heritage that is critical of the west. They are expected to keep their faith entirely out of politics (yet faith plays a crucial role in US politics). Set the bar high enough and all will fail - the consequences of that on the streets of Luton and Bradford will be disastrous, and not just for Britain's 1.6 million Muslims.

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[161.1] CROSSING OUT SACRIFICIAL SYSTEMS

Having just co-edited a book, Consuming Passion, which explores different aspects of the meaning of the death of Christ in a violent world, I'm struck by the anger with which critiques of 'penal substitution' doctrine are met in some church circles. The reductive power of this imagery, incomprehensible to many in a post-Christendom and secular context, is such that it makes reading biblical texts in a different way almost impossible for some Christians. This is because, I think, it rests on endemic but elusive necrophilia within human culture -- something that is particularly vulnerable to 'religious' construals of the kind that legitimate the capital punishment to which Jesus was subjected.

The outstanding Catholic theologian James Alison (who has a chapter in Consuming Passion on 'the intelligence of the victim') provides a useful counterpoint to all this in his Thoughts on Atonement, derived from a talk in Brisbane, Australia, this time last year. Here he defends the thesis "that Christianity is a priestly religion which understands that it is God’s overcoming of our violence by substituting [Godself] for the victim of our typical sacrifices that opens up our being able to enjoy the fullness of creation as if death were not." The whole piece is well worth scanning, especially for those who have been raised to think of Christ's killing as the ultimate endorsement of a vengeful God who demands blood for honour.

Alison retorts: "All sacrificial systems are substitutionary; but what we have with Jesus is an exact inversion of the sacrificial system: him going backwards and occupying the space so as to make it clear that this is simply murder. And it needn’t be. That is what we begin to get in St John’s Gospel: a realisation that what Jesus was doing was actually revealing the mendacious principle of the world. The way human structure is kept going is by us killing each other, convincing ourselves of our right to do it, and therefore building ourselves us up over and against our victims. What Jesus understands himself as doing in St John’s Gospel is revealing the way that mechanism works. And by revealing it, depriving it of all power by seeing it as a lie."

Incidentally, I'm chuffed to see that Consuming Passion is in the Church Times Top 10 this week (well, it is August...) and that it has its first Amazon review in the US.

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[160.1] CIVIL PARTNERSHIPS ARE A BLESSING

At last a senior figure in the Church of England has had the courage to speak out affirmatively on the matter of civil partnerships, and to criticize the mean-spirited and fearful response of the House of Bishops on the UK legislation, which comes into effect in December 2005. The person prepared to stick his head over the parapet (not for the first time) is Peter Selby, the Anglican Bishop of Worcester, with whom I had the pleasure of working in Southwark Diocese in 1991-2. His full statement can be seen on the Worcester Diocese site.

Back in 1999 I wrote a small booklet called Towards Communion: Recovering Human Sexuality as an Ecumenical Concern (Coleman Press) which offered a reframing of some of the core theological issues, and included reference to ways that Peter has also courageously sought to do that over the years. He is often characterized by the media as "a liberal", but for anyone familiar with his work, that is a vast oversimplification. His liberality arises from a deep intellectual and spiritual engagement with the Christian tradition and the demands of biblical interpretation -- in much the same way as Rowan Williams in The Body's Grace (slightly curiously reproduced by iConservatives!) and elsewhere. Its concern is not cultural accommodation, but the radical nature of the Gospel.

Incidentally, in addition to his Guardian column which I referenced earlier on FinS, Giles Fraser wrote a very good Church Times piece on civil partnerships, called "Why you need love and more". Thanks to David Wood for reminding me about it. The excellent Thinking Anglicans website has also been following the saga bit-by-bit, for those who want the whole scoop.

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[159.1] DIFFERENT WAYS OF MOVING THE CENTRE TO THE EDGES?

Several obituaries for Brother Roger Schutz have pointed out, inter alia, that as well as being forward-looking in many respects, leading (male) members of the Taize community have also been generally uncritical towards inherited church structures - not least the Roman magisterium - on controversial issues like gender and sexuality. This is true, and indicates just how unadaptive our dominant labels are for handling the inevitable contradictions of actual religious life. Is Taize 'liberal' or 'conservative'? Well, yes and no and both...

When Taize began, it broke many of the accepted rules and was greeted with suspicion by both Protestants and Catholics. However, over the years it grew considerably in recognition and 'respectability', occupying a creative-but-loyal position on the shifting edges of the Church. This is a different location and role to that of prophetic counter-testimony or campaigning, to be sure. But both can be aspects of the movement needed to enable the tradition to recognise its vocation to be open and faithful.

As I suggested yesterday, in the ecumenical arena and in terms of prayer and peacemaking Taize has sponsored some giant steps forward. This should be celebrated. But of course it has its limits, and it is those that make InclusiveChurch, Catholic Womens Ordination, the Anabaptist Network and other more 'subversive' initiatives equally vital. It's not a zero-sum game.

Back in 1984, during a visit to base ecclesial communities in Italy (all of them living in the shadow of the Vatican), I remember somone from our British visitors' group asking a community member whether they saw themselves as being 'inside' or 'outside' the Church. The reply has stayed with me ever since, and went something like this: "We see ourselves as an element of the church, but oriented to the margins, like Jesus. As such, the institution needs us, whether it knows it or not. Without prophecy it will ossify and turn in on itself even more. On the other hand, our community needs the institution too, otherwise we risk losing our biblical and liturgical roots. And it's also important that we don't allow those who run the structures to substitute power for charism without noticing it."

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[158.1] TAIZE MOURNS THE LOSS OF BROTHER ROGER


It was only in the early hours of this morning, in the middle of a sleepless night, that I heard the appalling news on the radio of the murder of Brother Roger Schutz at the Taize community on Tuesday. I have never visited the community myself, but like millions of people across the world, I am familiar with its music, its liturgy, its place in ecumenical Christian hope, and its example of peacemaking in an era of continuing violence and revenge.

At a stage in history when religion is again in the news for most of the wrong reasons, many of those associated with Taize model the possibility of a Christian conviction which is at one-and-the-same-time rooted in the tradition, contemporary, thoroughly outward looking, and focussed on the alternative way of Christ for a troubled world.

As far as I can recall, my first contact with the work of the communitywas through a Good Friday liturgy about twenty years ago, as we sung the invocation of the crucified rebel, "Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom." No doubt that will be the prayer of many for Brother Roger right now.

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