[00.12 GMT] SCM joins calls for mediation not legal action in Christian Union student row (Ekklesia).

[386.1] KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY?

I haven't read it yet, but this book looks right up my street. Very topical, too, given the arguments currently raging in the churches on both sides of the Atlantic. It's written by a family friend with whom I've just reconnected - indeed, connected for the first time, as far as my adulthood goes. Deirdre Good is Professor of New Testament at The General Theological Seminary (Episcopal Church) in New York City. A widely published author and lecturer, she is also a programme consultant to television on religious history. Her most recent book is Mariam, the Magdalen, and the Mother, a collection of essays on the Mary figures of the Bible.

"Many people claim to know what Jesus would say or do in the kinds of ethical dilemmas we face today, but applying "traditional" Christian values out of context actually sells Jesus' teaching short. What are Christian family values, Deirdre Good asks in Jesus' Family Values, why are there so many interpretations of what Jesus actually taught and said, and which of these biblical values should guide our lives?

"She begins by setting this conversation in the context of the Greek, Roman, Jewish, and first-century sectarian world, and criticises the attempts to use biblical texts literally in advocating for marriage and the family. Other chapters take up the meaning of house and home, marriage and divorce, and biological ties vs. extended families and communities.

"Through careful attention to the words and stories of Matthew, Luke, Mark, John, and the letters of Paul, Good provides an ideal method for studying the Bible to find out what it actually says to our communities and households today. " (From the publisher's blurb)

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[02.01 GMT] SORs UPDATES: Anti-gay rights activists do not represent most religious opinion, say critics; Parliamentary challenge to UK equalities regulation fails. See also the ongoing coverage on Thinking Anglicans.

[385.1] A GENTLE BLOW FOR EQUALITY

Given the extraordinarily negative and depressing reaction of many Christian groups to the UK government's incoming Sexual Orientation Regulations (SORs) on goods, services and facilities, it is heartening that at least one significant service agency (and an evangelical one, to boot) has called time on this nonsense in no uncertain terms. I don't agree with FaithWorks on everything, but this is a bold and necessary statement. Good on them. In other respects, the churches are sadly gaining a reputation not for a liberating Gospel, but for a message which requires fear, prejudice and discrimination to sanction it. More strong but temperate voices to the contrary are needed. Incidentally, the legislation that outlaws discrimination in the public realm against lesbian and gay peope does the same for members of religious, ethnic and other groups. See also: Faith groups are misrepresenting sexual equality rules, say critics 09/01/07, and my colleague Jonathan Bartley's probing of the emerging 'persecution complex' among some Christian groups at the end of Christendom. Christian Today, who otherwise have given solid backing to the nay-sayers, have (happily) reproduced Malcolm Duncan's excellent 'open letter', which is to be found in its orginal form here.

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[384.1] GLIMPSES OF LIGHT

An epiphany of love in a suffering world? January 8, 2007. Simon Barrow reasons with the mystery of incarnation (Ekklesia).

"[T]he One who we meet in Christ this Epiphany is not a God whose coming-in-the-flesh begins and ends with the history of Jesus. It is, says the tradition, an eternal condition of the divine to be given within the limits of our humanity – rather than in some esoteric knowledge or proposition. This is actually what the strange language in St John's Prologue seeks to convey by picturing for us the ‘pre-existence’ of the Logos (divine reason), and later by proclaiming that the one who was crucified is now ‘risen’ – in other words, that the tortured love we meet in the person of Jesus is finally recovered in the hidden and un-containable life of God. This claim, experienced through forgiveness and restoration-in-community, is what Christian hope is all about." More.

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[383.1] LONGING NOT POSSESSION

"The community of faith is a community of longing, not possession. It is for those who have glimpsed something of the divine, as well as for those who have not, but long to. It is for those who have achieved some level of discipline and control in their lives and for those who have not, but long to. St Augustine once described the Church as a school for sinners, not a museum for saints. It should be as wide as humanity; it should include all who wish to be attached to it; it should welcome their desire to explore the mystery that besets us."

From Dancing On The Edge by Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus in the Scottish Episcopal Church

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[382.1] 2007? JUST SAY NO!










Only kidding (wonderful story, though)... a very happy New Year to you!

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[15.37 GMT] Reshaping our democratic debate Jan 1, 2007 Simon Barrow looks at how to put people before political posturing.

[381.1] THE SHOCK OF THE NEW

"Christian hope is not based on which political party is in power. Nor is based on being purpose-driven, as some have written, or cajoling ourselves toward happiness, as some have preached. Our Christian hope is based on an Easter reading of the world. In the resurrection of Jesus Christ God overturns the world. God does a whole new thing. Easter is not the result of gradual progress. It does not signify a military victory. It is not the destruction of all that is evil. Rather, it is a breaking through to a whole new future. It is a letting go of what has been in order to grasp what is given in Jesus Christ." (Phil Edwards)

[Artwork: Penelope Aitken]

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[00.32 GMT] Iraqi exiles are concerned about post-execution backlash; WCC seeks peace and justice in Iraq after dictator's demise; Killing goes on as Saddam Hussein is executed and churches pray (Ekklesia)

[10.25 GMT] New UK opinion poll shows continuing collapse of 'Christendom' - Ekklesia

[380.1] HOPE FOR THE WORLD













Nativity mural at Batahola Norte Catholic Church in Managua, Nicaragua - a centre of liberating theology in a region of the world still blighted by poverty and injustice.

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[379.1] DISCOVERING A GIFT ECONOMY

Part of the annual squabble about the extent to which a Christian festival should be marked in the public life of a plural nation like Britain has been a rather thin running commentary on the biblical stories concerning the birth of Christ. What is striking about the response of both ardent secularists and religious fundamentalists is that they read texts in such a narrow, unimaginative way. One side pronounces with great solemnity its non-acceptance of these ‘made up stories’, while the other insists that every detail is some forensic description of an ancient event. The rest of us, I guess, can only wonder at the naiveté of treating evocative narratives in such a stultifying way.

The Gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus act as a powerful reminder that in this wonderful and perilously fragile world we have been gifted, you can’t have glory without muck – and vice versa. The search for unalloyed purity is as dangerous as the abandonment of a vision which elevates the mundane. The nativity is also, about a radical reordering of the way we perceive the world and shape our relationship with God. The eisegetical wisdom of the Magi, based reading the interests of the powerful back into the heavens, is supplanted by an event which claims that the essence of divine favour is to be found, instead, in honouring the vulnerability of flesh. Their gifts – gold, frankincense and myrrh, representing imperial splendour, religious rule and suasion over death – prove instructively redundant. Jesus grows up to refuse them all, and instead to initiate a gift economy based on Beatitude sharing rather than the blandishments of earthly power. This is the deep truth which those who squabble over their control of ‘the facts’ are in danger of missing altogether. [Picture: A scene from the log-running ‘Black nativity’, Boston, USA]

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[378.1] WHY CHRISTIANS MUST CHANGE

New UK opinion poll shows continuing collapse of 'Christendom', Ekklesia. The latest ICM opinion poll confirms the continuing drift away from organised religion in Britain, and the tendency to regard both it and religiosity in its various form (as distinct from 'spirituality') as problematic or worse. Of course there are many sociological and psychological complexities bound up in this. But in the season of Christ's nativity the call towards a dying-to-self in our inherited institutions, and the emergence of a global hope in radically unexpected, vulnerable form, indicates precisely why this poll (and the mounting evidence to confirm it) should not be received negatively, or with defensiveness. Christendom is in probably terminal decay. But the faith of Jesus is of a different order and scale. The full Guardian report is here. The paper’s leader response is here. Also on Ekklesia: Redeeming Religion in the Public Square - beginning to chart a new approach to faith, politics and civil society; Faith and Politics After Christendom - Jonathan Bartley's overview of how and why the church-state settlement is unravelling, and the wayforward for transformative Christianity.

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[377.2] REASON AND COMPASSION

Amazon inform me that people who have expressed interest in The God Who May Be: The Hermeneutics of Religion (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion) by Richard Kearney - a book I have found very stimulating - have also ordered Faith, Reason and Compassion: A Philosophy of the Christian Faith by James A. Gilman. For once I'm inclined to take their advice. (Last time they told me that people who read Rowan Williams enjoyed watching Shrek. Hmnnn...). A few years ago, Gilman wrote a very good book called Fidelity of Heart: An Ethic of Christian Virtue, which I consumed as part of a growing interest in the whole 'virtue ethics' discussion. It was more than enough to convince me to buy his latest, which was published last week, along with David J. Bartholemew's Uncertain Belief: Is It Rational To Be A Christian. (The answer is 'yes', but a good deal of unhealthy certainty-mongering masquerading as fidelity is rightly dispatched on the way.) The synopsis for Faith, Reason and Compassion: A Philosophy of the Christian Faith: "What is the relationship between faith and reason? How should faith and reason situate themselves in relation to each other? These are the chief questions that James Gilman seeks to address in this new title. An innovative new book in philosophy of religion, it treats the problems typical of the discipline in an untypical way, with a methodology that presupposes a particular religious tradition, in this case Christianity, and that re-enfranchises emotions (e.g., compassion) as crucial to shaping solutions to philosophical problems."

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[377.1] WISE MEN... AND, MORE OFTEN, WOMEN

“To understand reality is not the same as to know about outward events. It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed [person] is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of knowledge [s/he] will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depth of life. And so the wise [person] will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge."
~ Dietrich Bonoeffer.

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[11.33 GMT] Festive foolishness. Simon Barrow Dec 21 06, 11:49am: The Guardian: Comment-Is-Free. August has always been journalism's 'silly season' but this year December has put in a bid for the daftest media month. Here's the coda, unpacking more of the theological issues (or see the post immediately below).

I should add that Sunny Hundal from the highly worthwhile Pickled Politics (who is up for blogger of the year on C-I-F) has kindly given a mention to FaithInSociety in his latest, which is well worth reading: Religion is not the problem, people are. And thanks to Maggi Dawn, too, while I'm being seasonally warm.

[376.1] BIRTHING AN ALTERNATIVE WORLD

More on the kind of world called into being by the nativity of Christ. Back in 2004, biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan (whose energy and general trajectory I like very much, though I go further than he is prepared to on a number of issues - as I shall elaborate below) co-authored with Jonathan L. Reed the book In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom. BeliefNet's Deborah Caldwell interviewed him about this at the time, specifically in relation to the meaning of the nativity story. Here's an excerpt, where he describes what was going on in the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus' birth (the first couple of sentences are alarmingly contemporary in geopolitical terms) and then situates this in relation to the Gospel's alternative.

At the time, the prevailing belief was that in order to achieve peaceful civilization, you first secured victory. You capture a country, put it back on its feet, you build the economy, you build the roads, you build the whole infrastructure. As long as it doesn't rebel and it pays its taxes, you support it. So for example, if there's a major earthquake at Ephesus - there were earthquakes along that fault line all the time - you send a letter saying, "Dear Caesar, Saviour of the World, We Need Help." And if you're Caesar, you've got to furnish it. This is a very reciprocal game. So the opening word of Virgil's Aenead, which is the New Testament of Roman Imperial Theology, is "Arma (arms, weapons)." Off Actium, which is where this battle on the 2 September 31 B.C.E. took place, there's a huge inscription saying, "Having established victory in this place, I secured peace on land and sea," and it's signed, as it were, "Caesar, Son of God."

So the Romans would not ask if there's another way. But Paul is saying that there is another alternative. First, you establish justice, then you live in peace. It's an alternative programme based on the claim that God is just, that God is not violent, that God was revealed in Jesus, who was not violent. And there is an alternative lifestyle to this programme. It's taught and practiced by small groups from the bottom up, not from the top down like Roman Imperial Theology. Paul's programme advocates and announces a new theory of global justice.

And that's what Jesus also taught. Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God stands against Empire Rule. And not because Romans are particularly cruel, nasty, and brutish, but because they represent normal civilization. Jesus believes in a just God who will stand against that civilization. "Kingdom of God" is Jesus' language: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth. Paul puts it in different language - he talks about the lordship of Christ, which speaks better to pagan Greeks. It's different language, but the point is that both ideas establish a counter to what was then considered "normal" civilization.

This quite succinctly explains why what we now call Christmas is about regime change at a very fundamental level, and why it calls forth a Beatitude communiy. To name Jesus "Son of God" and "Lord" was to challenge Caesar's mandate, just as to name him "King of the Jews" (which happens at his birth and mockingly at his death) is to challenge both the sovereignty of Herod - who had been given that title - and the violent narratives of messiahship which formed a decisive part of the inherited expectation. The latter inscription has also come back to haunt Christendom for its crimes against the Jews.

Where Crossan's account is weak is in his marginalisation of incarnation and resurrection, which he pretty much disposes of as variants of primitive redeemer myths. This seriously (fatally) weakens the resources made available in the Gospel. As I've indicated elsewhere, to believe that God-is-in-Christ reconciling the world is to look without flinching at the unreserved humanity of Jesus and to come to see and experience it as the unlimited commitment of God to the flesh. This is how God comes through to us, rather than in some totalising ideology or via metaphysical speculation. It is central rather than incidental to the message.

The problem for modern thinkers about the Word-made-flesh goes roughly as follows: we assume we know what a human being is (with some justification) and we assume that we know what God is (with no justification at all, actually), and we therefore think we know that 'what flesh is' and 'what divinity is' must be two different orders of things lacking any intrinsic compatibility - like a circle and a square, to cite John Hick's analogy in The Metaphor of God Incarnate. That tends to propel us in two directions: either positing a God who improbably squares circles to benefit 'religious people' (while apparently ignoring more pressing worldly dilemmas for everybody else), or the assignation of Christ to the role of an encouraging but ultimately confounded anti-hero. But the premise of the choice is faulty. We do not know what God is in some essential or specifiable way. God remains utter mystery ("I shall be what I shall be"), and we therefore have no means of stepping outside the circle of investigation to adjudicate the relation of divinity and humanity - as a certain kind of 'liberal' and a certain kind of 'conservative' interpreter wish us to do.

Actually, the fabric of the Christian claim about Jesus' filial relation to God works in the opposite direction to the usual metaphysical way of reasoning. Instead, it says something like this: "Everything you think you know about God is based on the assumption that God is like an eternal Emperor. Actually God is like this nobody, born into obscurity and murdered by an alliance of religious and political expediency. So don't look for gods in temples, in arcane theories, in esoteric practices, or via barrier-forming rules twisted towards the interests of clerical elites. Meet the God-beyond-your-imagining in the vulnerability of the flesh; risk personal and social transformation; join yourself to the continuance of Jesus' body in the world. Then you will begin to discover that what appears to be most conditioned and limited about earthly life actually shows us something unconditioned, unmanipulatable, utterly wonderful - life as gift, which is the energy of God in the world."

This, in turn, is the message embodied in the resurrection narrative - which is not some zombie ideology, not a piece of magic with bones, but a way of saying that the God who is found unconditionally in the material (and, as Nicholas Lash adds in unpacking the surprising conclusion of orthodox Christianity, nowhere else) is in no way constrained by that, as we are, but goes on giving life in, though and beyond the flesh. This is how I tried to put it (badly, of course) in a sermon I gave in 2001:

[W]hen Christians announce, with Paul, that "God raised Jesus", what we are claiming is not that a part of Jesus survived death or that his atoms were reassembled in some magical way, but rather that the very power, presence and personality of the earthly Jesus was assumed and transformed within the endless creativity of the transcendent God – and then made available as a living reality to those who were already being transformed by him. In other words, the resurrection speaks of a new creation, a new order of being [beyond forensic description] which incorporates all that we have seen and discovered of love in this world, but much more beside. It is continuous with the best of what we have seen so far, but it is discontinuous in the sense that it is the work not of us, but of a God who goes on loving and creating beyond the death which we inevitably face. If we have been touched by God’s love, we will begin to know that it has no boundaries. It is either the most important thing in the universe, or it is nothing. As Paul says, with startling honesty: "If Christ is not raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins" – that is, to put it another way, you are still captive to that which imitates and embodies death rather than life.

So Crossan is surely spot-on in positing Jesus' birth as an unwelcome irruption of peace in a world reassuringly at war, and in situating the Gospel in stark opposition to Empire rule in all its guises. But for this to find shape and meaning (other than as yet another piece of human hubris) we also need Dietrich Bonhoeffer's words, just over a year before his execution: “It is not from avoiding death but from the resurrection of Christ that a new, purifying breeze can blow into the present world …. If even a few people were really to believe this, much would change. To live from the perspective of the resurrection: this is Easter.” (Tegel Prison, March 1944). It is also, in an odd, way, Christmas - where killable flesh proves capable of introducing us to uncontrollable life-giving. Bonhoeffer cotinues on 30 April 1944, in words I have often found myself quoting: "The belief in resurrection is not the 'solution' to the problem of death. The 'beyond' of God is not the 'beyond' of our cognitive capacity. Epistemological transcendence has nothing to do with God's transcendence. God is 'beyond' our lives. The church is found not where human capacity fails, at the limits, but rather in the middle of the village." Or nowhere worth being at all. That’s the challenge of the Christ-child to the organizations that purport to speak for him.

[After penning this, I decided to adapt it slightly as my final Ekklesia column before Christmas - Giving birth to a new world Dec 21, 2006. The other columns are listed here]

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[20.51 GMT] Americans not sure where Bethlehem is, survey shows (Ekklesia / Independent Catholic News / Open Bethlehem Project)

[375.2] TURNING AROUND, NOT TURNING AWAY

Many thanks to Daniel Liechty for this pearl, in the midst of an intra-Mennonite conversation about the disciplines of non-exclusion and spiritual transformation. It very well illustrates the meaning of a polity which holds a centre through the active example of a living community, rather than policing the boundaries with fences and brickbats:

It is said that a soldier came to George Fox and asked if he, a soldier, could also be a Quaker. Fox said: "Of course, if the Spirit so moves you." To which the soldier replied, "Is it not forbidden that I carry the sword?" To which Fox replied, "Come, be among us, and carry your sword as long as you will to do so!"

What's also noticeable in this story is how natural it is for Fox to conceive of the community created by Christ as a zone free of threat and combat. That this is quite alien to many of our modern churches, which prefer to copy the 'realism' of the world's armed security, indicates just how strange the company of Jesus is for those of us who exalt his name - but secretly fear his company.

[Dan has pointed out to me that this is a reconstruction of what Fox said from his memory, so it would be worth checking the sources]

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