When your heart's not open

For Christmas this year I received "The Ballad of John Clare" by Hugh Lupton. It is without doubt the best novel I've read since 1981 (When I read "To Kill a Mockingbird"). It is a fictionalised biography covering a year in the life of the poet John Clare. It is set in 1811, at the time when in the countryside between Peterborough and Northampton where Clare was born, the land was being enclosed, following earlier legislation. At the heart of the story is the enormous feeling of injustice felt by the poor ands the smallholders when their rights to graze stock or grow crops on common fields were taken away. Lupton quotes the 16th century verse that arose from the first protests against enclosure:

"The law locks up the man or woman,


Who steals the goose from off the common.

But leaves the greater villain loose,

Who steals the common from off the goose."

So this year marks 200 years since that part of countryside (along with a lot of the rest of it) was effectively privatised, having previouslyy been either held in common or at least in the hands of a greater number of individual owners and tenant farmers. Those whose livelihoods were removed fell into dire poverty. As the industrial revolution got underway, many moved north to the city to try to find work in mills and factories, leaving their families and their roots behind.  It was a turning point for England.

There has been a lot of talk in the media and the blogosphere this week about another anniversary, the 400th birthday of the King James Bible (KJV) first published in 1611. This date was also a turning point, but for very different reasons.

I'm going to stick my neck out and say I think that 1811 is the more significant anniversary. Much has been made of the importance of the KJV in terms of its contribution to the English language - we all use phrases in our written and spoken language today that arose from the text of the KJV, there's no getting away from that. 1611 also marked a pause in the very turbulent place that was the English religious landscape of the 16th and 17th centuries. The KJV was for centuries a unifying text, to which the Christian Anglophone world looked. The British Empire took it with them in missionary endeavour, and even today the likes of Bono and Melvin Bragg wax lyrical about the beauty of its language.

Which is where the problem starts for me. The Bible wasn't written to sound nice, it wasn't meant to be a preserver of language or culture; it was meant to tell a story, the story of God, and to introduce us to a person - Jesus Christ. Now, no one Bible  translation is perfect, indeed the modern science of translation has a lot to say about the impossibility of actually properly translating anything. The KJV, I feel, was a good tool for its day, but like the ancient farming tools that were overtaken by the seed drill and the subsequent mechanisation of farming, it has been superseded by better, more accurate, more scholarly and more comprehensible Bible translations, and we need to let it go. It may have been a thing of beauty, but the KJV also contains (to our ears) myriad words and expressions that are not only meaningless but also in some cases do not do justice to the original text. Just google "kjv inaccuracies" to get a flavour of this.

Now, I realise 1811 is a bit of a non-specific anniversary, but I still feel that 200 years since the end of widespread smallholder and common land farming is a more important anniversary to mark. The injustice of it  led in some cases to open conflict between the landed gentry and the peasantry - a real live class war. For today's protester this intense and bitter disappointment and feeling of being crushed has come to the surface again. Our class structure and social and economic landscape was formed by the consequences of  enclosure. It contributed at least as much as the Industrial revolution to the breakdown of family ties and rural roots. Never forget, the nuclear family didn't exist in the pre-industrial, unenclosed age. People lived much closer to their relatives in multi-generational groups.

1611 and 1811 do have something in common though. They have both caused us as a nation to idealise - the Bible and the countryside respectively. After enclosure, the corporate mindset of the rural population always looked back fondly upon the pre-industrialised farming villages. This formed the "chocolate box" image of thatched cottages and winding lanes that we still operate on today as an archetypal rural scene. It wasn't really like that though (or at least not for long), even if people have been trying to recreate rural life in that image ever since.( I'm often tempted to suggest middens and no running water should be included in planning permission in villages where the planners want to preserve the chocolate box!)

After its publication the KJV froze in time the religious language of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and froze alongside it a set of religious assumptions (behind the translated text, from the minds of the translators) many of which have long disappeared, especially with regard to gender, to race and to the created order. We haven't changed our theology of these things by abandoning biblical (read: KJV) truth, but by studying the original texts (i.e. Hebrew and Greek) and discovering (sometimes also though science) that ther are other ways of understanding. To look back at the KJV is to idealise language in the face of a snowballing development of newer words and forms of language (innit?) I hesitate to suggest, but I believe it to be true, that those who also look back to the KJV for an idealised "traditional" faith, are holding back the church in mission, strangling us like a dog on a choke chain. It wasn't ever really like that, and can never be again.

The landscape of rural England is changing again in this age. Eco-town, anyone? Maybe not, but something has to give in the quest for more and better housing (but that's another story). Chocolate box villages are only on chocolate boxes; everywhere else has Range Rovers and Sky dishes and youth crime just like anywhere else.

The landscape of religious England is also changing in this age. I don't know how its going to turn out, but it is by trusting a person (Jesus) rather than a book (the KJV) that I intend to ride the storm.

Languages are meant to evolve, not to stay the same. English will still be English even when the KJV is long forgotten (that's "when" not "if") . I'm not sure 'evolve' is the right term for Christianity, but I do believe our faith is meant to adapt to each new culture in which it finds itself. You wouldn't take the KJV to an undiscovered tribe in the Amazon now, so why make the descendants of the disenfranchised farmers of 1811 read it here?

Not properly researched, I know, but there you go!

happiness more or less

Recently, in a discussion on the Psalms, a friend used the expression "all human life is here". I had usually associated that with the News of the World, but it does work for the variety of emotions you find there - cries of joy, of anguish, of depair, of praise, of love and of revenge adorn the hebrew Bible's hymnbook. We concluded by saying it would be good if our worship gave enough space for such a breadth of emotion. It doesn't really though, does it?
I also concluded that it was about time I stopped suppressing my emotions when I am deployed pastorally. You know like when you are at a funeral you probabaly don't expect the minister to be overly emotional because (and cringe, I have used this phrase of myself0 they are paid to keep a straight face. It is quite hard to shock me, but now I am unafraid to weep at a funeral I am taking, if only because (like the psalmists, I feel) I would want everyone there to feel comfortable expressing emotion.
Then again, I watched Marley and Me tonight and blubbed like a girl ...

What do you think?
(btw since I am fasting from Fb this week please reply here)

Bible Books meme

I have been tagged by Sam. This is how it works





Rules:


1. Name the five books (or scholars) that had the most immediate and lasting influence on how you read the Bible. Note that these need not be your five favourite books, or even the five with which you most strongly agree. Instead, I want to know what five books have permanently changed the way you think.


2. Tag five others.





My five are not necessarily books specifically about Scripture, but all of them have deeply impacted how I read the Bible, and some go further, having influenced the whole of my life and faith. Significantly they are all books I read during my ordination training, but I wouldn't want you to think I haven't read anything since then.








1. "Truth is Stranger than it used to be"; J Richard Middleton and Brian J Walsh SPCK 1995.


At the time in training when everything was up in the air, this book was one that helped me catch things as they came back down to earth; things like "What is reality and how do I perceive it", as well as introducing me to words like "meta-narrative". The cover carries a quote from Tom Wright; "All thinking Christians should read this book". Of all the books I read at college this was the one I didn't actually mind reading all of, even though I didn't have to! I re-read it every couple of years, though it's getting a bit dated.





2. "The Post Evangelical"; Dave Tomlinson SPCK Triangle 1995. He wrote this when he was pastoring "Holy Joes", a church that met in a pub. My brother was going to it at the time, indeed DT spoke at my brother's wedding. I don't think I am a Post evangelical (if there ever was such a thing outside London), but I remain influenced by Tomlinson's take on atonement theories, and I particularly warm to his IKEA flat-pack vs Meccano metaphor. Now that he's an Anglican minister, I expect he'd describe himself as an Affirming evangelical, but some would just say he's a liberal.





3. "God's Empowering Presence; the Holy Spirit in the letters of Paul"; Gordon Fee 3rd Edition 1995. This is the only one that is purely and specifically about the text, being a systematic and comprehensive treatment of Paul's references to the Spirit. In that sense, it's not really a book you read from cover to cover; it lives next to my copy of Brueggemann's Theology of the Old Testament, and so is classified really as a reference book or Bible dictionary type thing. Sounds a bit dry, but its impact was that it was the first book from a charismatic perspective that I found that told me there are other authentic, faithful ways of reading Paul on gender roles than what Grudem says.








4. "The Prophetic Imagination"; Walter Brueggemann Fortress 1978. I could have put "Texts under negotiation" or "Biblical perspectives on Evangelism". All had a big impact on the way I studied Scripture academically while also going through big changes in my own life and faith. Best thing about these - they're short!





5."God's Home Page"; Mike Riddell BRF 1998. Less academic, more fun and more relevant to where I found myself the year it came out - about to start in ministry. Next week is the 10th anniversary of my priesthood, so I probably ought to read it again, along with Pete Ward's "Mass Culture."



A lot of influence on how I read the Bible actually came from people and places, not just books. For example the single greatest influence was a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; another huge thing was doing a course based around the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola. Naturally also the greatest influence on how I read and interpret Scripture is the place in which I am reading and preaching it. That doesn't mean I am simply recontextualising Biblical Truth, it just means as I seek to understand the Bible here, here is unavoidably a huge influence on how (but not always what) I understand.



So I tag Michael W, Kurt, Malcolm, AnneDroid and Howard.

Enjoy!

But it wouldn't be nothing, nothing .....

Hi again Jody,

Well (cards on the table) I have now read the whole article properly several times and realised the identity of the writer and his context. I see this as a bloke writing for men, from the context of a church with a significant ministry to and outreach among men. It's a church not far from here, and I get on well with Steve's boss, and have even had one of his colleagues to preach here. That church also has on its staff one of the very few women priests who regularly speak at NW. So I guess my words are a bit guarded, but don't let that make you think I have moved on from the previous post - which I guess was really about your older post about women in leadership.

Now I am the kind of guy who reads his wife's Cosmo Eve or She, mostly because I can't stomach GQ and feel too old for Q and the NME, not fit enough for men's health and not nerdy enough for PC gamer (or whatever).

So the only magazine I read that is specifically for men is the one published by Christian Vision for Men, whom our Men's Group (known as BoB) subscribe to. It contains the kind of thing that Steve wrote, which, if you can look at it for the perspective of a ministry to men, in a culture where, as the book says (and I haven't finished reading it yet) "Men Hate Going to Church", is (for the most part) helpful - to men.

But my opening analogy doesn't work the other way round. My wife doesn't read men's magazines, and if she did she would probably find a lot of the content difficult to accept if not downright alien to her point of view. I do not think however, that it is wrong for there to be "niche" magazines in this sense, whether they are Christian (and therefore frankly likely to be cheesy) or secular (and therefore likely to be principally concerned with sex and physical appearance - but that doesn't always put me off reading them!)

And so I recognise Steve's article in NW mag as being appropriate for the context of a Christian magazine for men. If there was editorial error therefore on the part of NW, it was to assume that the readership of the NW mag and CVM mag are the same, or at least have a significant overlap. This I doubt. My reasoning is that there is always a page or article for women in the NW mag, but rarely a specific article for blokes - most of the readers, I deduce therefore, are women.

Most of the people in all of the churches I have ever been involved in (15 at the last count over the last 22 years) have been women. There is a problem with the church, that not enough men are part of it. I do not repeat do not think that the ordination of women has caused this. Its causes are much more long term and too complex to cover in just one post. I even understand that the bloke who wrote "Why men hate going to church" has now written another book in which the women of the church are challenged to bring the blokes in. This seems a refreshing approach, as even the Ugley Vicar has had enough of macho men's rallies.
The sentiment behind Steve's article, therefore, I pretty much agree with. We have a small men's group here which is aimed at the blokes on the fringe of church, and we do have a problem with a lack of blokes at the heart of the fellowship.

So, to the article itself. There was only one bit I thought was completely unacceptable - the paragraph you highlighted about people seeing the divine in men, as Pilate saw the divine in Jesus. This is indeed to elevate the status of the male above the female within redeemed humanity and therefore I don't think it is theologically acceptable - Christians are all called to reflect the glory of God in our lives, not just the blokes, even if you are writing for blokes (which I think Steve is).

Steve does say "for better or for worse, men still hold privileged positions of decision making authority ..." I read that as meaning he does not think that the status quo is what God wants, he is just saying that's how it is. So I guess we differ in that you have read him as meaning it is an acceptable status quo.

Some of the other quotations - such as the one from Marcus Tullius Cicero, or Proverbs 27 might be better applied to both men and women, in a TNIV or NRSV style, taking the old (say 1950's) "men" to mean both men and women. Today that usage is not usually editorially acceptable, but Steve is (appears to be) writing for men so I guess chose not to inclusivise his quotations.

Jane Morris's article on p48 of the same mag is about Esther - a woman leader writing about a woman hero. I've never edited a magazine like this but I wonder whether they figured Jane's article might provide a balance to Steve's.

So what do we do next? I am not one for stirring up trouble, but I might be prepared to email John Coles and Steve Clarke to ask for clarification. Until we have that, most of this discussion is just speculation.

You may not have liked a lot of this, but I do want to re-iterate that I support your call for a higher profile for Women in holy orders in NW leadership. I agree that a small part of Steve's article is out of order, but I urge you to consider his context when finalising your opinion of what he wrote. After all, even in an all age church like ours, if I put on an event or write a sermon that is aimed at old people or teenagers, those church members who are not part of the target audience do not feel insulted because they know from experience that there is something for them also on the agenda.

In 1981 as I walked across the quad at Harvard (age 15 on holiday), I heard two passing students talking. One said to the other, "If only Reagan or the Ayatollah had been a woman".

Go on now go, walk out the door ... (?)

Aha, there it is, staring me in the face from Sunday's gospel reading, Matthew 18, 15-20.



We looked at it again at home group this afternoon, and had some considerable discussion - this is after all a passage with at least three major things in it that cause a stir



- if your brother sins against you, go show him his fault - when's the last time you did that?



Or again, if two on earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done by my Father in heaven (my friend H**** had some choice words on that having prayed very hard for her late husband in his illness.)



And again, if he refuses to listen, tell it to the church ... that'd liven up 1662 communion!



But the thing we got stuck into (and perhaps it's fair to say, stuck on) was the meaning of "treat him as you would a tax collector or a pagan" (verse 17 TNIV)



I preached on this passage Sunday using some notes from Rootsonthe web by David Goodbourn, in which he makes the comment,



"There is an irony in letting the outcast be to you 'as a Gentile and a tax collector', given that there were now many Gentile Christians, and elsewhere in the Gospel tax collectors are welcomed into the kingdom of heaven."

Some in our homegroup felt that this implies that the sinner is in fact not excluded (as perhaps Jewish culture of the time would expect - hence the irony) but nurtured and supported and included, as the tax collectors and gentiles (NRSV so much better here) from the Matthean church were. This approach gains some strength from the fact that the rest of chapter 18 is all about inclusion, so on verse on exclusion seems rather out of place. The old "What would Jesus do?" question also lent weight to this idea.



On the other hand, some others in this light hearted and inquisitive discussion felt that the more immediately obvious meaning that, as tax collectors and Gentiles were outsiders to the Jewish community, so the unrepentant sinner should be shunned by the church. I guess this is where you got the practice of 'the ban' or shunning, in certain non-conformist churches and communities.



So it's about either keeping them in and looking after them, or kicking them out and thereby remaining "pure".



On the way home (or rather on the way to teach the Primary School Eoghan Heaslip's "Holy is the Lord") it suddenly struck me that these two potential interpretations would split pretty accurately the two sides of the Communion/ECUSA/sexuality/gafcon/fulcrum maggoty mess (to steal a phrase from Jody Stowell)

You either want to be shot of the revisionists/gay inclusivists (Ephraim Radner's words, not mine), because they "will not listen to the church", so you'd take the second interpretation, or you want to keep the door open, while being clear on what you feel is the ideal, therefore going for option 1.

Blimey, 3 nil in Zagreb and still 15 minutes to go!

Women Bishops - bring it on!

I am in favour of women bishops; I am in favour of women priests and do not subscribe to Reform style "headship theology", (go here to read my take on all that) so it follows naturally that I support the consecration of women as bishops. Bishops are still priests (and deacons) - you do not surrender your letters of orders when you are consecrated (do you?)

I am not a liberal though. I have a high view of Scripture as the Word of God, don't have much time for a lot of of critical scholarship and function spiritually in a Charismatic Evangelical worldview. I'll happily admit to catholic tendencies, but not liberal, no siree!

I really hope that if nothing else, this summer's General Synod vote and Lambeth conference will be able to put to rest the idea that if you are in favour of women as priests and bishops you must also be in favour of the affirmation of homosexual physical relationships as biblically acceptable, and the ordination of active homosexuals.

There is a big difference. Being a woman is not a moral issue, but a matter of creation. No matter what you think about homosexuality, it is a question of morality - you either accept it as morally right or wrong. Someone's gender is not generally open to public discussion like that.

People who are more conservative than me and more liberal than me both say however that to support women's ordination will lead to a support for gay ordination (to be acceptable, instead of just done on the quiet.)


But I just don't think it follows. The conservatives will say, Oh well it's a slippery slope once you've let go of the authority of the Bible. I would say the liberals have let go of the authority of the Bible, even though you don't have to do that to arrive at a conclusion that women can be leaders.

The thing is, the person who invented the term "slippery slope" (Francis Schaeffer, for whom I otherwise have the greatest regard) lived up a mountain and saw things therefore from a mountain top perspective. I live in flat Essex, where things don't slip down, theologically or physically. That colours my approach, but what defines it is a marvellous book that was recommended by Bishop Graham Cray to the 2005 New Wine Leaders' Conference. It is Grove Booklet B16 "A Slippery Slope? the ordination of Women and Homosexual Practice - a case study in Biblical Interpretation" by RT France. Go here to order online.

The moment of it's recommendation sticks in my mind, as Charles Raven had just addressed the conference calling for support for Reform's campaigning against the church's (perceived) direction on these issues, treating them as a single matter. Bishop Graham stood up and said "it doesn't have to be like that". He also spoke favourably of Rowan Williams' orthodoxy. The conference were stunned, but in a good way.

I'll let you read the book (and check out Rosy Ashley's chapter in "the Call for Women Bishops") but basically the thing is that the interpretive processes that we use to come to a conclusion about women's ministry (and France leaves room for decisions either way on that) are not the same as those that are used in attempts to justify the inclusion of sexually active homosexuals in church leadership.

For me it is possible to conclude that women in leadership is a biblical thing; I can't say the same for homosexuals if they are in physical relationships, any more than I think it is alright for a straight priest to co-habit with a sexual partner if they are not married.