From "I will not believe" to "My Lord and my God"

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Andrew's Wickford this morning:

Thomas’ statement to the other disciples that, “Unless I see the scars of the nails in his hands and put my fingers on those scars and my hand in his side, I will not believe” is essentially one which is repeated regularly by atheists around the world. Here is a typical comment made in the discussion section of Richard Dawkins’ website, “I have never witnessed a scrap of evidence pointing to god's existence, which leads me to a total lack of belief in it.” Dawkins himself has said, "Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence."

How can we, as Christians, answer such assertions; because it is not enough simply to say that we believe and leave it at that?

First, we need to be clear that those who say there is no evidence for the existence of God seek to disallow the very evidence which has helped convince us otherwise by saying that the only acceptable evidence is scientifically measurable evidence. This is the argument that science and its methods provide the only way of knowing that gives us true knowledge of the world around us.

Yet, if that were to be the case then, for example, weddings would make no real sense. Instead of being about the mutual celebration of love and affection which we see between the couple themselves and also between them, their families and friends, on the basis of measurable scientific knowledge what occurs at a wedding simply becomes about the survival of the fittest through the passing on of selfish genes in procreation. Our experiences of love and faith cannot be adequately captured through the language of scientific measurement. Instead, we need the languages of belief and imagination to give voice to what we truly experience of love and faith. As Richard Chartres once noted in a wedding sermon, "Faith and committed relationships offer a door into the mystery of spiritual life.”

Second, we need to understand that faith is fundamental to all true knowledge and that applies to scientific knowing as much as to any other form of knowing. Philip Sherrard has given forceful expression to this view:

“Every thought, every observation, every judgement, every description whether of the modern scientist or of anyone else is soaked in a priori preconceived built-in value-judgements, assumptions and dogmas at least as rigid, if not more rigid (because they are so often unconsciously embraced) than those of any explicitly religious system. The very nature of human thought is such that it cannot operate independently of value-judgements, assumptions and dogmas. Even the assertion that it can constitutes a value-judgement and implies a whole philosophy, whether we are aware of it or not.”

Scientists like Michael Polanyi have come to understand that faith is fundamental in the whole enterprise of understanding because all knowledge of reality rests upon faith commitments which cannot be demonstrated. As a result, scientists and philosophers of science are now rediscovering the vital role that the imagination has to play in their endeavours.

When there is an acceptance that other forms of knowing and other forms of evidence have validity, then two further arguments can be made. The first of these is that belief in God makes sense of our experiences of life and love in ways that give full weight to our experience of these things without contradicting the findings of science. On this basis, Christianity offers, as Lesslie Newbigin has argued, “the widest rationality, the greatest capacity to give meaning to the whole of experience.”

Second, the arguments for the resurrection made in the New Testament and also subsequently come into play. Many historians, lawyers and sceptics have testified to the convincing nature of this evidence when objectively considered. Many would, for example, agree with E. M. Blaiklock, Professor of Classics at Auckland University, who said, “the evidence for the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ is better authenticated than most of the facts of ancient history . . .”

One of the earliest records of Christ's appearing after the resurrection is by Paul. The apostle appealed to his audience's knowledge of the fact that Christ had been seen by more than 500 people at one time. Paul reminded them that the majority of those people were still alive and could be questioned. Dr. Edwin M. Yamauchi, associate professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, emphasizes: "What gives a special authority to the list (of witnesses) as historical evidence is the reference to most of the five hundred brethren being still alive. St. Paul says in effect, 'If you do not believe me, you can ask them.' Such a statement in an admittedly genuine letter written within thirty years of the event is almost as strong evidence as one could hope to get for something that happened nearly two thousand years ago." These New Testament accounts of the resurrection were being circulated within the lifetimes of men and women alive at the time of the resurrection; people who could certainly have confirmed or denied the accuracy of such accounts.

Another interesting example of evidence for the truth of Christianity and, in particular, the resurrection of Jesus, is the testimony of former skeptics, many of whom attempted to disprove Christian faith. Thomas is merely the first in a long line of such people which in more recent years have included Frank Morison, C. S. Lewis, Dr Gary Habermas, Alister McGrath, and Lee Strobel.

So, there is evidence for the existence of God and evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Such evidence helps us in holding our faith and may, as was the case for those I have just listed, be helpful in bringing people to faith. However, we should never think that such evidences prove either the existence of God or the resurrection of Jesus. Ultimately, if we believe in both it is because of faith, not proof; just as atheists cannot disprove the existence of God and, therefore, also hold their beliefs on the basis of faith. Neither positions can be proved conclusively, so can only be held by faith.

That is what Jesus emphasizes to Thomas after confronting him with the physical and tangible evidence of the resurrection that he demanded. Jesus said, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”:

Unless I see
the scars
of the nails
in his hands
and put my finger
on those scars
and my hand
in his side,
unless I can touch,
unless he is tangible,
unless I have proof,
I will not believe.

If you see
the scars
of the nails
in my hands
and put your finger
on those scars
and your hand
in my side,
if you can touch,
if I am tangible,
if you have proof,
you will not have belief.

Blessed are those
who cannot see
the scars
of the nails
in my hands
and put their fingers
on those scars
and their hands
in my side,
blessed are those who
cannot touch,
who are without
tangible proof,
for they truly believe.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Good Charlotte - We Believe.

The Kingdom of God as a mustard seed

Here's the sermon I shared this morning at St Catherine's and St Andrew's:

The Kingdom of God, Jesus says, begins as something small, unregarded, and insignificant.

We see this lived out in Jesus’ own life. In human terms his life was small and insignificant, like the mustard seed (Mark 4: 26-34). His birthplace was described as being least among the clans of Judea. His home town was a place from which no good was known to come. In appearance he was without beauty or majesty, undesired. In his life he was despised and rejected, unrecognised and unesteemed. In his death he was made nothing. An insignificant man who died in a insignificant part of the world.

That ought to have been the end of it but instead it was only the beginning. From that small beginning, Christ’s body – the Church, the gathering of all those who believe in him – has grown so that for many centuries Christianity has been the largest religion in the world; and that remains the case despite secularisation in parts of the Western world.

The Early Church reveals the same pattern to us. Paul wrote to the Christians at Corinth (1 Corinthians 1.26-31) and said, “think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.” He said in this letter that, in the eyes of the world, Christians are foolish and the message of the cross is foolish.

The same words could actually be applied to us: none of us are major intellectuals or academics; none of us have major influence or power in terms of work or politics; none of us, so far as I know, were born into the aristocracy. The reality is that wonderful as each of us are, we are not major players on the world stage and that makes us, in human terms, one among millions of other human beings around the world. When we think of ourselves in those terms it easy to see ourselves and what we do as being small and insignificant.

We may not like to think of ourselves as being foolish, as well as insignificant, but that is how Paul describes the Corinthian Christians from the perspective of those considered wise in their culture. It is no different today, Richard Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion that God is a “psychotic delinquent” invented by mad, deluded people and our faith in God is a “process of non-thinking,” “blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.”

BUT what Jesus demonstrates through his life, death and resurrection and what Paul states in his letter to the Corinthians is that “the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.” The Message, a contemporary paraphrase of the Bible, puts it like this:

“Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these "nobodies" to expose the hollow pretensions of the "somebodies"? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ.”

What Jesus has done for us, in giving us a clean slate and a fresh start – points forward in history to a time when the whole world will be given a clean slate and a fresh start. In Revelation 21 we are given a wonderful future vision of God making everything new; of God moving into the neighbourhood permanently, joining earth and heaven together, and making his home with us. Wiping every tear from our eyes as death, tears, crying and pain are all gone for good.

Now we don’t have to understand how this happens. Jesus told the story that we heard this morning of the man who scattered seed in his field without knowing how the seed grew. Farmers in Jesus’ day didn’t understand the science of how plants grew but they knew that the process of sowing seeds into soil worked and produced corn. It is not necessary to understand in detail the processes of germination and growth in order for the harvest to come.

Jesus is saying something similar to us. Just as we could not have anticipated that an insignificant rabbi for Israel who was killed after only three years of teaching would become the greatest figure in the history of humanity, so we cannot expect to understand in detail God’s plans for the future of the world; how the Kingdom of God will finally and fully come, how the vision of Revelation 21 is to be achieved.

What we do know though is what Jesus has shown us of the Kingdom of God coming through his life, death, resurrection, and through the change that he has made in our lives and those of others that we know. He introduces the Kingdom of God into the world and into our lives. He is the first fruits, the first sign of that coming Kingdom and, because we can trust him, we can trust that the Kingdom will come both more fully in our lives and completely in the new heaven and new earth.

This is not blind faith because, like the farmer, although we do not understand the detail of how the process or plan works, we know that it does work from the evidence of Jesus and from the evidence of his Spirit in the lives of countless Christians throughout history including ourselves.

And because we know that the process or pattern or plan of the small, the insignificant, the foolish being used by God to achieve great change, we can trust that our lives also have meaning and significance as we put our faith into practice in small acts of compassion here and little words of witness there; at home, at home, in church and in the community. We don’t know what God will cause to grow from these actions and words but we trust that they will take root and grow because that is the pattern that we, and Christians throughout Church history, have observed in practice.

So: “Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don't see many of "the brightest and the best" among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these "nobodies" to expose the hollow pretensions of the "somebodies"? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ.”

unregarded

Birthplace,
least among the clans of Judea.
Home town,
a place from which no good was known to come.
In appearance,
without beauty or majesty, undesired.
In life,
despised and rejected, unrecognised and unesteemed.
In death,
made nothing.
His followers,
not wise, not influential, not noble – fools!

The light of the knowledge of the glory of God
in the bodies and form of human beings.
Light shining
through the gaps and cracks of clay pots.
Light shining
in the unexpected places, despised faces, hidden spaces.
Light shining
in the poor, the mourners, the meek, the hungry.
Light shining
in the merciful, the pure, the peacemakers.
Light shining
in the persecuted, the insulted, the falsely accused.
Light shining
in the lowly, the despised, the nonentities.
Light shining
in weakness and fear and trembling.
Light shining
in the foolish followers of the King of Fools.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Delirious? - King Of FoolsKing Of Fools.

How to live in wartime?

Here is the sermon that I preached at St Vedast-alias-Foster this morning:

How to live in wartime? That is essentially the guidance that Jesus gives his disciples in the teachings recorded for us in Mark 13. In the light of the horrific events in Paris on Friday, it is particularly pertinent to us today.

Jesus was talking about a very specific conflict that would affect his disciples in the near future and which occurred in AD70 when the Roman army attacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple there. When this happened, as Jesus prophesied, “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

The result of this conflict was twofold; the Jewish faith refocused its community life, teaching and worship around the synagogue (a pattern of faithful living which continues to this day); and Christianity, forced to abandon its early focus on the authority of the church in Jerusalem, stepped up its missionary encounter with the wider world to become a world religion. Both results are relevant to Jesus’ teaching here because the essence of his teaching comes in verse 13 when he says “the good news must … be proclaimed to all nations.”

The conflict he describes and prophesies will, he says, be an opportunity for his disciples to tell the Good News, if they stand firm: “nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines … As for yourselves, beware; for they will hand you over to councils; and you will be beaten in synagogues; and you will stand before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them.” (Mark 13. 8 & 9)

That is what Jesus looks for from his followers in wartime and he promises his support and enabling in doing so: “When they bring you to trial and hand you over, do not worry beforehand about what you are to say; but say whatever is given you at that time, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit.” The situations in which we are called to do this change throughout history but what is unchanging is the call to tell the Good News, as here, in situations of military defeat, but also in times of victory, while the outcome is uncertain, and in times of peace.

In the past week of Remembrance we will have recalled particular examples of telling the Good News in and through the wartime experiences which are within our cultural memory, most notably soldiers who fought and died in order to win peace within Europe such as Harry Patch, who was the last surviving British soldier to have fought in the trenches of the First World War. Patch, in the moment when he came face to face with a German soldier, recalled the story of Moses descending from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, including "Thou shalt not kill", and could not bring himself to kill the German shooting him in the shoulder, above the knee, and in the ankle. Patch said, "I had about five seconds to make the decision. I brought him down, but I didn't kill him." We can also think of: civilians living through the Blitz and caring for neighbours while accepting the simple lifestyle imposed by rationing; Archbishop William Temple setting out an Anglican social theology and a vision for what would come to constitute a just post-war society in ‘Christianity and the Social Order’; and Bishop George Bell assisting refugees, arguing against the blanket-bombing of German cities and encouraging the role of the Church in the reconstruction of Europe after the war.

The German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who took part in the plot to assassinate Hitler, was one of those who saw most clearly what was actually at stake in World War II, when he wrote at the beginning of the war: “Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilisation may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilisation.”

Our situation is different again, meaning that the ways in which we are called to stand firm and tell the Good News are also different. In our time, the battle is one of ideas, a battle which is explained well by the French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy: “1968 led to a process of transformation that amounted to adapting society to something that was leaving it behind: a new techno-political-economic world. This adaptation has had many negative effects. It unleashed the spirit of consumerism and ... completed the destruction of the frameworks, or references, of religious and emancipatory politics ... The resulting society has fewer foundations that it did before 1968. But society today is beginning to understand that a world and a civilization are disappearing and it has entered a change of the same magnitude as the shift from antiquity to the middle ages.”

In this changed and changing world, where, in the West, we are no longer part of a civilization which seeks to be built primarily on Christian principles, many people want to mount rear guard actions to retain as much of what they perceive to be the past as possible. So, for example, some seek to fight for a mythic mono-cultural white Britain which never actually existed while others seek to maintain the privileges that Christians have enjoyed in this country in the past instead of accepting the justice of the equality of faiths which is now enshrined in the law of the land.

The situation in which we find ourselves now equates to that of the Jews and Jewish Christians after the destruction of the Temple in AD70. Then there was no going back and Jesus sought to prepare his disciples for that reality. Instead of calling for rear guard actions to preserve as much of what had been as possible, Jesus sought to prepare and enable his disciples to go out into their changed and changing world and tell the Good News by standing firm in their faith. This remains the call of God on our lives and it is a task which requires the same bravery and courage as was shown by the Early Church in its missionary activity and as continues to be shown by serving men and women in conflict situations around the world today.

Jesus gives us the same marching orders that he gave to his first disciples: “When they bring you to trial and hand you over, do not worry beforehand about what you are to say; but say whatever is given you at that time, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit.” We are to trust that Jesus, through his Spirit, will inspire and enable what we are to do and say in this changed and changing world (as happened for Harry Patch).

We can also trust that he will give us surprising allies to stand alongside us as we speak. For example, at the very same time that Christianity has come under severe attack from the New Atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, we find Radical Atheists such as Simon Critchley arguing that “to jettison [religious] traditions in the name of some kind of scientific rationality is simply philistine and counter-productive” and Slavoj Žižek stating that as a radical leftist he thinks “Christianity is too precious a thing to leave to conservative fundamentalists.”

The crucifixion, the resurrection and the Holy Spirit, Žižek argues, should be read as God trusting us by leaving his mission in the hands of a community which can be free of both liberal egotism and Christian fundamentalism; an argument which has clear synergies with what we have seen Jesus saying to his disciples in this passage.

Nancy argues that we should respond to our new techno-political-economic world: “not with politics or economics but with thinking, with imagination, with what I call worship: a relationship to the infinite. We must stop believing that economic measures or political models can respond to what is happening. What is happening ... is the spirit of the world being transformed.”

The Early Church saw the spirit of the world transformed by God as they stood firm in their faith and told the Good News. That is how we are called live in wartime - in the battle of ideas or clash of civilizations which we now face - to stand firm in our faith and tell the good news. The challenge of this passage is whether we can do and see that within our changed and changing world.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Talking Heads - Life During Wartime.

Society has largely lost the ability to talk about religion and belief in public discourse

There is an excellent article in today's Observer from Stephen Pritchard on levels of faith literacy in the media:

'“The media’s coverage of religion is a bit like covering football from the point of view of hooliganism and never really watching the game,” said Michael Wakelin, former head of religion and ethics at the BBC, at a fascinating, though occasionally depressing day of discussion held in London recently on Islam and its treatment in British broadcasting and newspapers. After years of conflict in Afghanistan and the Middle East, Muslims in Britain feel that they are too often associated with the crimes of extremists while too little attention is paid to the positive contribution they make to civic life or to the peaceful aims of their faith.

Understanding that faith – and indeed all faiths – is an urgent priority, said Wakelin, quoting Professor Adam Dinham of Goldsmiths University of London: “Billions of people around the world remain religious, despite the assumptions of secularity. Millions are in Britain, Europe and the west. After decades in which we have barely talked about religion and belief in public discourse, society has largely lost the ability to do so. Diversity, global trade and extremism make it pressing to do so now.”

Wakelin maintained that a generation of neglect, with education failing the religious curriculum, the major religions failing to engage with the wider public – and the media not understanding religion and therefore keeping it at arms’ length – had resulted in a society that lacked the confidence to deal with religious subjects and religious people.

Inspired by the success of the Science Media Centre in transforming the way science is reported, he is now involved in setting up a religion media centre. “We do not want to promote religion or even say that it is a good thing, but we are wanting to have a recognition that it matters and therefore it needs to be reported, discussed and examined with knowledge, fairness and respect.'

Earlier in the week Jonathan Freedland addressed this same issue in relation to society in general:

'Whatever else the seers of the past, the Aldous Huxleys, Jules Vernes and HG Wellses, imagined for the 21st century, it wasn’t ... that in 2015 we would still be in thrall to the stories we’d told one another for two millennia. And yet here we are ... a recurring theme of our era is the persistence of the ancient faiths.

It was not just the sci-fi writers who assumed we’d be over this by now. Most believers in science and progress took it as read that we would put aside such fairytales as we reached a higher stage of evolution. There would be no room in the space age for the sand and dust of the biblical past. What’s more, true progressives would want to hasten the banishment of religion from the public sphere, taking its superstitions, its fear-fuelled strictures about sex and its out-dated patriarchal attitudes with it.

But this has proved a double mistake. It’s failed as both description and prescription. On the former, its prediction of the future proved wrong: faith is still here, apparently stronger than ever. For that reason alone, for the role it plays in shaping our world, religion has to be taken seriously – more seriously than Dawkins-ite atheists, who dismiss it with talk of “fairies at the bottom of the garden” or “sky-pixies” will allow.'

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Arvo Pärt - Credo.

Dealing with faith and with secularism is difficult but necessary now

Interesting to note that Michael Symmons Roberts' Drysalter which has just won the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection is being praised by the Forward judges for its powerful spirituality.

“We need to be able to talk of matters of faith and the soul, and how the soul intersects with the heart. What Symmons Roberts does is difficult but necessary now – it addresses a fissure in the human psyche: how we deal with faith and with secularism, how we find a life .. It is an outstanding winner,” said Jeanette Winterson, chairman of the 2013 Forward judges. She praised Symmons Roberts, an atheist who converted to Catholicism at university, for challenging the “fundamentalism” of militant atheists like Richard Dawkins.

The press release from the Forward Arts Foundation specifically notes that Symmons Roberts was a thorough-going atheist as a teenager, who chose to study Theology and Philosophy at Oxford University in order to “talk believers out of their faith”. The ploy backfired. "As university went on I got deeply into philosophy — and the philosophy completely undermined my atheism, by making me realize that there was no overarching objectivity, no Dawkinsian bedrock of common sense if you strip everything away.”

Symmons Roberts has publicly asked the question of whether it is possible to write religious poetry that communicates widely in an increasingly secular language, noting that "T. S. Eliot warned against a religious poetry that “leaves out what men and women consider their major passions, and thereby confesses to an ignorance of them”, but argued instead for “the whole subject of poetry” to be treated in “a religious spirit”. Symmons Roberts pointed then to the work of John Berryman as being one affirmative answer to that question. The response of the Forward judges to Drysalter indicates that his own work also genuinely answers that same question in the affirmative.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Michael Symmons Roberts - The Vows.

Jesus is having a moment in literary fiction

The Guardian's ShortCutsBlog finds Jesus as a trending topic in literary fiction:

"Jesus is having a moment in literary fiction. Novelists can't get enough of him. In September 2012, Naomi Alderman's The Liars' Gospel was published – a month before Tóibín's book. The year before that came Richard Beard's Lazarus is Dead, and before that Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. More allegorically, JM Coetzee's Childhood of Jesus appeared earlier this year.

"There have definitely been more novels about Jesus recently," says Stuart Kelly, who is on the judging panel for this year's Booker. He thinks they might be a reaction to the current situation in the Middle East, or "the gauche and strident atheism of the likes of [Richard] Dawkins. People can argue what they like about the new atheism, but what it doesn't do is explain why this story has had such a hold over the human imagination for 2,000 years."

The conclusion of the piece makes a strikingly valid point based on the polyphony found in the Gospels and beyond:

"Perhaps the story of Jesus's life bears novelistic reiteration partly because it has always been told by multiple voices – not only Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but many more whose versions were not included in the Bible.

That duplication and overlapping of narratives must create holes and folds in which novelists can work, to narrativise the contradictions and build new worlds in the gaps."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bruce Cockburn - Cry Of A Tiny Babe.

Christendom is on the way out

Responding to the Ipsos-Mori survey of 'census Christians' commissioned by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science UK, Simon Barrow, co-director of the Christian think-tank Ekklesia, has made what is in my view a very accurate and sensible response:

"This opinion survey makes interesting reading as part of a whole web of research on the changing shape and location of Christianity in Britain over the past thirty or more years.

"It shows that 'civic' and 'cultural' Christian self-identification is a very different thing to the deeply-rooted faith held by a much smaller number of people whose believing, belonging and behaving is strongly shaped by regular participation in active Christian communities.

"While we can argue over details, the broad outline of what this survey reveals should not come as any shock or threat to church leaders who have been paying attention to what has been happening in recent decades.

"Top-down and institutional religion is in decline. Trying to restore or maintain the cultural and political dominance of Established religious institutions in what is now a mixed-belief 'spiritual and secular' society is a backward-looking approach.

"Churches have a creative opportunity here. It is to rediscover a different, ground-up vision of Christianity based on practices like economic sharing, peacemaking, hospitality and restorative justice. These were among the distinguishing marks of the earliest followers of Jesus. They have always been part of the 'nonconformist' tradition shared in different ways by Anabaptists, Quakers, radical Catholics, Free Churches and faithful dissenters in all streams of Christian life.

"The mutually reinforcing pact between big religion and top-down authority that we call 'Christendom' is on the way out.

"The kind of conservative religious aggression that claims 'anti-Christian discrimination' every time Christians are asked to treat others fairly and equally in the public square is a threatened response to the loss of top-down religion's social power. So is overbearing 'Christian nation' rhetoric, and the 'culture wars' that some hardline believers and non-believers sometimes seek to launch and win against each other.

"A positive, post-Christendom perspective suggests that Christianity can and should flourish beyond the demise of 'big religion', and that a level-playing field in public life can and should involve both religious and non-religious participants.
"Likewise, while Richard Dawkins may not be a subtle, unbiased or persuasive analyst of religion overall, it would be entirely unhelpful for believers to dismiss this survey because they disagree with its commissioner in other respects. Its content evidently needs further and deeper analysis, alongside other data, than the initial response to it has allowed."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Al Green - Belle.

It's time to embrace uncertainty

It's time to embrace uncertainty Susanne Moore argues in today's Guardian:
"The world is full of people proclaiming about stuff they don't know much about. My trade depends on it. Pundits, politicians and economists, too, all depend on some kind of bladder-busting meta-analysis to keep us quiet. In fact, they are just winging it ...

What is valued is certainty. What is devalued in such a world is uncertainty. Those who aren't sure are weak. Poor. Faithless. Uncertainty is often worrying and feminised. Real men know real things ...

How weighed down is public life with its emphasis on certainty. How dumbed down is belief. The big divides are not between different beliefs, but the differing degree of certitude in which those beliefs are held.

No one knows. No one has the answers. Uncertainty is where we are. It is to be embraced."

I agree with Moore's basic thesis and recently highlighted another comment piece in the Guardian in which Jenni Russell made similar points and concluded: "We should be more willing to admit that the complexity of the world means those leading us will make mistakes."

However, in this post I want to question the assumptions made here about belief. Moore wrote that "those who most understand the value of uncertainty are scientists," highlighting the comment piece in the Guardian by "the delightful" Jon Butterworth on Tuesday. Butterworth set up a contrast between science and belief: "We should all know that science is a betting system, not a belief system. Near-certainty arises from a morass of uncertainty, it does not drop from heaven gift-wrapped."

Like Richard Dawkins, Butterworth argues that science is superior to belief but they use opposite arguments to reach the same conclusion. Dawkins argues that science is evidence based while belief is not and therefore is uncertain, Butterworth argues that belief is about given certainties while science honestly accepts and values uncertainty. Belief is therefore damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.

The reality is that science works with both - uncertainty and evidence - as also does belief. It is the unnecessary opposing of science and belief in both Dawkins and Butterworth that provides a note of certainty (and therefore falsity) in what they write. Their certitude comes from their belief that scientific knowledge is better than the knowledge which comes through religious belief. This certitude is a belief because it cannot be proved. Therefore, Moore's comment that, "The big divides are not between different beliefs, but the differing degree of certitude in which those beliefs are held," which seems aimed at those holding religious beliefs would also seem applicable to Dawkins and Butterworth. A fuller embrace of uncertainty would seem to understand that, as Polanyi argued, all knowing is ultimately faith-based.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sam Phillips - Gimme Some Truth.

Resurrection: evidence and belief

Thomas’ statement to the other disciples that, “Unless I see the scars of the nails in his hands and put my fingers on those scars and my hand in his side, I will not believe” is essentially one which is repeated regularly by atheists around the world. Here is a typical comment made in the discussion section of Richard Dawkins’ website, “I have never witnessed a scrap of evidence pointing to god's existence, which leads me to a total lack of belief in it.” Dawkins himself has said, "Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence."

How can we, as Christians, answer such assertions; because it is not enough simply to say that we believe and leave it at that?

First, we need to be clear that those who say there is no evidence for the existence of God seek to disallow the very evidence which has helped convince us otherwise by saying that the only acceptable evidence is scientifically measurable evidence. This is the argument that science and its methods provide the only way of knowing that gives us true knowledge of the world around us.

Yet, if that were to be the case then, for example, Friday’s Royal Wedding makes no real sense. Instead of being about the mutual celebrations of love and affection which we saw between the couple themselves and also between the people of this country and the royal family, on the basis of measurable scientific knowledge what occurred Friday simply becomes about the survival of the fittest through the passing on of selfish genes in procreation. Our experiences of love and faith cannot be adequately captured through the language of scientific measurement. Instead, we need the languages of belief and imagination to give voice to what we truly experience of love and faith. As the Bishop of London said in his sermon, "Faith and committed relationships offer a door into the mystery of spiritual life.”

Second, we need to understand that faith is fundamental to all true knowledge and that applies to scientific knowing as much as to any other form of knowing. Philip Sherrard has given forceful expression to this view:

“Every thought, every observation, every judgement, every description whether of the modern scientist or of anyone else is soaked in a priori preconceived built-in value-judgements, assumptions and dogmas at least as rigid, if not more rigid (because they are so often unconsciously embraced) than those of any explicitly religious system. The very nature of human thought is such that it cannot operate independently of value-judgements, assumptions and dogmas. Even the assertion that it can constitutes a value-judgement and implies a whole philosophy, whether we are aware of it or not.”

Scientists like Michael Polanyi have come to understand that faith is fundamental in the whole enterprise of understanding because all knowledge of reality rests upon faith commitments which cannot be demonstrated. As a result, scientists and philosophers of science are now rediscovering the vital role that the imagination has to play in their endeavours.

When there is an acceptance that other forms of knowing and other forms of evidence have validity, then two further arguments can be made. The first of these is that belief in God makes sense of our experiences of life and love in ways that give full weight to our experience of these things without contradicting the findings of science. On this basis, Christianity offers, as Lesslie Newbigin has argued, “the widest rationality, the greatest capacity to give meaning to the whole of experience.”

Second, the arguments for the resurrection made in the New Testament and also subsequently come into play. Many historians, lawyers and sceptics have testified to the convincing nature of this evidence when objectively considered. Many would, for example, agree with E. M. Blaiklock, Professor of Classics at Auckland University, who said, “the evidence for the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ is better authenticated than most of the facts of ancient history . . .”

One of the earliest records of Christ's appearing after the resurrection is by Paul. The apostle appealed to his audience's knowledge of the fact that Christ had been seen by more than 500 people at one time. Paul reminded them that the majority of those people were still alive and could be questioned. Dr. Edwin M. Yamauchi, associate professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, emphasizes: "What gives a special authority to the list (of witnesses) as historical evidence is the reference to most of the five hundred brethren being still alive. St. Paul says in effect, 'If you do not believe me, you can ask them.' Such a statement in an admittedly genuine letter written within thirty years of the event is almost as strong evidence as one could hope to get for something that happened nearly two thousand years ago." These New Testament accounts of the resurrection were being circulated within the lifetimes of men and women alive at the time of the resurrection; people who could certainly have confirmed or denied the accuracy of such accounts.

Another interesting example of evidence for the truth of Christianity and, in particular, the resurrection of Jesus, is the testimony of former skeptics, many of whom attempted to disprove Christian faith. Thomas is merely the first in a long line of such people which in more recent years have included Frank Morison, C. S. Lewis, Dr Gary Habermas, Alister McGrath, and Lee Strobel.

So, there is evidence for the existence of God and evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Such evidence helps us in holding our faith and may, as was the case for those I have just listed, be helpful in bringing people to faith. However, we should never think that such evidences prove either the existence of God or the resurrection of Jesus. Ultimately, if we believe in both it is because of faith, not proof; just as atheists cannot disprove the existence of God and, therefore, also hold their beliefs on the basis of faith. Neither positions can be proved conclusively, so can only be held by faith.
That is what Jesus emphasizes to Thomas after confronting him with the physical and tangible evidence of the resurrection that he demanded. Jesus said, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”:

Unless I see
the scars
of the nails
in his hands
and put my finger
on those scars
and my hand
in his side,
unless I can touch,
unless he is tangible,
unless I have proof,
I will not believe.

If you see
the scars
of the nails
in my hands
and put your finger
on those scars
and your hand
in my side,
if you can touch,
if I am tangible,
if you have proof,
you will not have belief.

Blessed are those
who cannot see
the scars
of the nails
in my hands
and put their fingers
on those scars
and their hands
in my side,
blessed are those who
cannot touch,
who are without
tangible proof,
for they truly believe.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Script - Science And Faith.

The New Dark Ages (1)

This is the first part of a short story which I have recently written with the 400th Anniversary of the 1611 version of the King James Bible in mind, although the story concerns all human culture and has a strong multifaith element to its plot.

The New Dark Ages

"I'm bringing back to the forefront principles that are gradually fading away from our modern societies." Mohammed Ali (aka AerosolArabic)


"You can't appreciate English literature unless you are steeped to some extent in the King James Bible ... not to know the King James Bible, is to be in some small way, barbarian." Richard Dawkins


I


It was in a private meeting called by Prime Minister David Clegg at 10 Downing Street itself that the full implications of the crisis were finally articulated.

The published reports were of an increasing series of thefts; systematic thefts of artefacts from museum displays throughout the country and with no sign of forced entry. Security had been immediately increased, access had been restricted to significant sections of most museum collections and free entry to all but the most localised of museums suspended.

Yet the full extent of the crisis was being actively suppressed with the media being fed only the bare bones of the true story which in its fullness constituted a cultural crisis and had led to the Directors of all the national collections being summoned to meet with the Prime Minister.

"There have been no thefts," explained Neil Dixon, the Director of the British Museum.

"No thefts!" exclaimed Clegg. "Then what in God’s name are we doing here and why the massive expense of the measures you have all demanded from me and my Government!"

"That is correct," Dixon stated. "No actual thefts, but to all intents and purposes theft is what appears to have occurred."

"All who visit our institutions see absence where certain artefacts should be displayed," cut in Dr. Michael Penny, the Director of the Natural History Museum.

"The artefacts remain in their place of display." Dixon resumed his account. "Our curators can touch and feel them and can confirm that they have not been stolen, yet these artefacts are enveloped in an impenetrable darkness which means that they cannot be seen."

"In the circumstances," Penny cut in once again, "it seemed more understandable to talk to the media of thefts than to persuade them and the public of the true nature of the crisis."

"A crisis," shouted Clegg, his voice rising in sync with his flushed colour, "which I still fail to fully grasp, beyond what now appears to be wholly unnecessary expenditure on increased security for objects which have not in fact been stolen, nor are under any threat of being so."

"To be frank, Prime Minister," interjected Sir Nicholas Jones, the Director of the Tate Galleries, "that is the least of our worries. The darkness which is enveloping these cultural artefacts – and it is artefacts of human creation which are affected - is doing so systematically and period by period, epoch by epoch."

The bearded, bespectacled face of the Director of the Natural History Museum once more jutted forward with an interruption. "The darkness began at the beginning with the first objects known to have been human creations and is progressing systematically forward from that point."

"In addition," continued Jones, his face beginning to glisten from heat and sweat - the effect of the import of the news he sought to convey combined with his concentration in doing so and the stuffiness of the room in which they met – "not only are the artefacts themselves being blanked from sight but so too are all references to them in the artistic and literary artefacts which follow them in history."

"Our contacts tell us," added Dixon, "that this is a global phenomenon."

"What periods of history are currently affected?" asked the Prime Minister.

"We are currently in the Mesolithic Period," stated Penny, pleased to finally take the lead and supply hard facts. "The forward movement of the darkness appears to be weekly and we have no indications as to what its cause might be or how to counteract its progress."

Dr. Martine Serota, the Director of the V&A, made her first contribution, "Prime Minister, you must understand that we remain at present in a period of crafted objects rather than written words. As a result, the current impact of the darkness is much less than it will become if its progress continues as to date."

"Even so," stated Jones, "I have paintings, photographs, sketches and notes which cannot be displayed because they contained images of artefacts which the darkness has covered and these images have also been covered by darkness at the same time."

"The Lascaux caves now look like the redacted documents issued by the US after the first WikiLeaks publications," blurted out Dr. Christophe Newby, the Director of the Science Museum, almost in tears.

Serota continued her analysis. "What will happen, Prime Minister, when the darkness reaches crafted objects which are in the landscape, rather than our museums, and are national icons? Stonehenge being just one significant example!"

"Constable’s mezzotint, Gropius’ photos, the arrest of Tess ..." Jones muttered.

"What too will happen once we reach the periods of the written and then the printed word? Take the King James Bible as example! What will happen when that is enveloped by this darkness? Will all the phrases which it gifted to our culture and which are peppered throughout our language also be enveloped? Will the phrase ‘salt of the earth’ no longer be seen in our literature? Will that phrase still form itself on our lips? We do not know the answers to these questions but we fear the consequences for our culture and future."

"Without a solution," exclaimed Clegg with a sharp intake of breath, "we will be entering the new Dark Ages!"

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Mark Heard - Well-Worn Pages.

Good News in the battle of ideas

March past following the Civic Remembrance Service at the Ilford War Memorial

How to live in wartime? That is essentially the guidance that Jesus gives his disciples in the teachings recorded for us in Luke 21. 5-19.

He was talking about a very specific conflict that would affect his disciples in the near future and which occurred in AD70 when the Roman army attacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple there. When this happened, as Jesus prophesied, “not a single stone here will be left in its place; every one will be thrown down.”

The result of this conflict was twofold; the Jewish faith refocused its community life, teaching and worship around the synagogue (a pattern of faithful living which continues to this day); and Christianity, forced to abandon its early focus on the authority of the church in Jerusalem, stepped up its missionary encounter with the wider world to become a world religion. Both results are relevant to Jesus’ teaching here because the essence of his teaching comes in verse 19 when he says to “stand firm” in your faith.

The conflict he describes and prophesies will, he says, be an opportunity for his disciples to tell the Good News, if they stand firm:

“Countries will fight each other; kingdoms will attack one another. There will be terrible earthquakes, famines, and plagues everywhere; there will be strange and terrifying things coming from the sky. Before all these things take place, however, you will be arrested and persecuted; you will be handed over to be tried in synagogues and be put in prison; you will be brought before kings and rulers for my sake. This will be your chance to tell the Good News.” (Luke 21. 10-13)

That is what Jesus looks for from his followers in wartime and he promises his support and enabling in doing so: “Make up your minds beforehand not to worry about how you will defend yourselves, because I will give you such words and wisdom that none of your enemies will be able to refute or contradict what you say.”

The situations in which we are called to do this change throughout history but what is unchanging is the call to tell the Good News, as here, in situations of military defeat, but also in times of victory, while the outcome is uncertain, and in times of peace.

On Remembrance Sunday we remember particular examples of telling the Good News in and through the wartime experiences which are within our cultural memory most notably soldiers who fought and died in order to win peace within Europe such as Harry Patch, the last surviving British soldier to have fought in the trenches of the First World War. Patch, in the moment when he came face to face with a German soldier, recalled the story of Moses descending from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, including "Thou shalt not kill", and could not bring himself to kill the German shooting him in the shoulder, above the knee, and in the ankle. Patch said, "I had about five seconds to make the decision. I brought him down, but I didn't kill him." We can also think of: civilians living through the Blitz and caring for neighbours while accepting the simple lifestyle imposed by rationing; Archbishop William Temple setting out an Anglican social theology and a vision for what would come to constitute a just post-war society in ‘Christianity and the Social Order’; and Bishop George Bell assisting refugees, arguing against the blanket-bombing of German cities and encouraging the role of the Church in the reconstruction of Europe after the war.

The German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who took part in the plot to assassinate Hitler, was one of those who saw most clearly what was actually at stake in World War II, when he wrote at the beginning of the war:

“Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilisation may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilisation.”

Our situation is different again, meaning that the ways in which we are called to stand firm and tell the Good News are also different. In our time, the battle is one of ideas, a battle which is explained well by the French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy:

“1968 led to a process of transformation that amounted to adapting society to something that was leaving it behind: a new techno-political-economic world. This adaptation has had many negative effects. It unleashed the spirit of consumerism and ... completed the destruction of the frameworks, or references, of religious and emancipatory politics ... The resulting society has fewer foundations that it did before 1968. But society today is beginning to understand that a world and a civilization are disappearing and it has entered a change of the same magnitude as the shift from antiquity to the middle ages.”

In this changed and changing world, where, in the West, we are no longer part of a civilization which seeks to be built primarily on Christian principles, many people want to mount rear guard actions to retain as much of what they perceive to be the past as possible. So, for example, some seek to fight for a mythic mono-cultural white Britain which never actually existed while others seek to maintain the privileges that Christians have enjoyed in this country in the past instead of accepting the justice of the equality of faiths which is now enshrined in the law of the land.

The situation in which we find ourselves now equates to that of the Jews and Jewish Christians after the destruction of the Temple in AD70. Then there was no going back and Jesus sought to prepare his disciples for that reality. Instead of calling for rear guard actions to preserve as much of what had been as possible, Jesus sought to prepare and enable his disciples to go out into their changed and changing world and tell the Good News by standing firm in their faith. This remains the call of God on our lives and it is a task which requires the same bravery and courage as was shown by the Early Church in its missionary activity and as continues to be shown by serving men and women in conflict situations around the world today.

Jesus gives us the same marching orders that he gave to his first disciples: “Make up your minds beforehand not to worry about how you will defend yourselves, because I will give you such words and wisdom that none of your enemies will be able to refute or contradict what you say.” We are to trust that Jesus, through his Spirit, will inspire and enable what we are to do and say in this changed and changing world (as happened for Harry Patch).

We can also trust that he will give us surprising allies to stand alongside us as we speak. For example, at the very same time that Christianity has come under severe attack from the New Atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, we find Radical Atheists such as Simon Critchley arguing that “to jettison [religious] traditions in the name of some kind of scientific rationality is simply philistine and counter-productive” and Slavoj Žižek stating that as a radical leftist he thinks “Christianity is too precious a thing to leave to conservative fundamentalists.”

The crucifixion, the resurrection and the Holy Spirit, Žižek argues, should be read as God trusting us by leaving his mission in the hands of a community which can be free of both liberal egotism and Christian fundamentalism; an argument which has clear synergies with what we have seen Jesus saying to his disciples in this passage.

Nancy argues that we should respond to our new techno-political-economic world:

“not with politics or economics but with thinking, with imagination, with what I call worship: a relationship to the infinite. We must stop believing that economic measures or political models can respond to what is happening. What is happening ... is the spirit of the world being transformed.”

The Early Church saw the spirit of the world transformed by God as they stood firm in their faith and told the Good News. That is how we are called live in wartime - in the battle of ideas or clash of civilizations which we now face - to stand firm in our faith and tell the good news. The challenge of this passage is whether we can do and see that within our changed and changing world.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 

Talking Heads - Life During Wartime.

The persistence of faith

FaithAction have today summarised the speech made yesterday by Conservative Party Chairman Baroness Warsi about the importance of faith to life in Britain:

"Baroness Warsi opened her speech, to Anglican bishops in Oxford, by stating that Britain has ‘a big problem in the way we think about faith in our society as a whole’.

Baroness Warsi referred to media reports which said how 'Faith charities have been put off from applying for public funding by a barrage of bureaucracy’. There is an imbalance in the relationship between the state, faith and society, which is shown by a suspicion of faith by the ‘political elite’.

Baroness Warsi said that the Government needed to put this right and presented three approaches:

1. Understanding the current state of faith in Britain
2. Having a richer recognition of the Anglican and wider faith-based contribution to society
3. Draw the right conclusions for policy

Understanding the current state of faith in Britain

Know that the proportion of people in the world who adhere to the four biggest religions has actually increased in the past century with increased turnouts at religious ceremonies.

‘The fact is that our world is more religious than ever. Faith is here to stay!’

‘Deny it and you deny the ability of a high part of society to articulate where they have come from, what they are working for, and who they are.’

Understanding the Faith based contribution

There are almost 30,000 faith based charities in the UK

‘We have come to a deeper understanding about the contribution of these faith communities to our society. In other words, why they do the good things they do. Unless we understand what drives people of faith to contribute to society, we cannot hope to help them on their way’.

‘Very often, faith communities offer us innovations which the whole of society can learn from’.

Faith and the Big Society

‘Just imagine if the whole nation could give to charity at the same levels as people of faith already do. The question is how can government help to bring that about?’"

Over the summer I read The Persistence of Faith by Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, and wrote a poem in response with the same title which echoes aspects of Baronness Warsi's speech:

The persistence of faith


“I remain convinced that, in many conflict zones throughout the world, if religion does not become part of the solution, it will be part of the problem. We have not yet learned what it is for religion to be a force for peace in our hyper-connected age.” Jonathan Sacks

On Dover beach Matthew Arnold heard
the melancholy, long withdrawing roar
of the retreating Sea of Faith.
A dead sea evaporated
by a lunar cycle of utopian visions and disastrous wars
revealing a place of disenchantment,
a dried-up Waste Land
devoid of meaning and cohesion
in which private piety was a song
played on a mental i-pod to while away
the idle hours at the end of history.

The returning flood-tide of religion –
a tsunami-like wave of fundamentalism –
overwhelmed sceptic and believer alike.
Driven full speed down the one-way street of secularism,
came the 4x4’s of the US Moral Majority,
the Iranian Islamic Revolution, the fall of Communism,
and the rise of tactical terror as weapon of choice
in religiously-defined cosmic struggles.
On the beach where Arnold mourned,
Richard Dawkins fulminated.
Where Europe doubted, the Majority World believed.

The timeless and timebound intersect
at a crossroads where the one-way streets
of secularism and fundamentalism do not meet.
The literalism inherent in the love of self or God
for self’s and God’s sake cannot interpret the signs
of past ideals in terms of present possibilities.
The voice of transcendent revelation calls
for love of others for the wholly other’s sake.
The fight for human flourishing is now within religion
calling forth a wave of compassion, not condemnation.
How long to hear this song? How soon is now? If not now, then when?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
U2 - 40.

Post-Christendom Church

Visitors from the East came looking for Jesus in a palace but found him in a manger. They looked for him at the heart of privileges won through personal power but found him in a place of poverty and dispossession. The visitors from the East looked for a King according to their understanding of kingship but only found Jesus when they left that understanding of political power and rule behind to encounter a King whose every breath is service of his subjects.

The slogan of the Early Church was that Christ is Lord. This was a direct political challenge to the Roman Emperor, to the Caesars who were worshipped as gods and whose personal and political power extended across the known world. However, by saying that Christ was Lord, the Early Church was not seeking to set up Christ as an alternative Emperor instead they were seeking to say that there is a different conception of power, of kingship and of rule, exemplified in the loving service and sacrifice of Christ and standing in stark contrast to the selfish exercise of personal power exemplified in human rulers and empires. By living out the statement that Christ is Lord they were living in the truth of Jesus’ words when he stood in front of Pilate and said that his kingdom is not the kingdom of top-down power and control that Pilate exemplified.

Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, puts it like this:

“… the whole point of the Gospels is that the coming of God's kingdom on earth as in heaven is precisely not the imposition of an alien and dehumanizing tyranny, but rather the confrontation of alien and dehumanizing tyrannies with the news of a God — the God recognized in Jesus — who is radically different from them all, and whose inbreaking justice aims at rescuing and restoring genuine humanness.”

This is an understanding of politics, power and kingship that was lost, in part, for a large period of the history of the Church beginning with the adoption, by the Emperor Constantine, of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire. There were long periods of the history of the Church where Patriarchs and Popes held political power over large parts of the then known world and periods where alliances between Church and State gave Christianity huge power and influence within society. These periods of Church history are known as Christendom and we now live in a period after Christendom while often still remembering the final days of Christendom through which many of us have lived. Days when legislation was generally rooted in the Christian scriptures, the Church was the dominant and determining voice within our society, the nation was generally considered a “Christian” country, and levels of churchgoing were higher than now.

These changes have had increasingly significant implications for churches in this Deanery and more widely as we struggle with changing patterns of churchgoing, multi-faith parishes, less people with free time for volunteering, and the financial demands of maintaining large, old building through the generous giving of local congregations. These are all issues that we have grappled with at St John’s Seven Kings over the past few years; with the past year seeing us making significant changes to the way that we respond to these challenges.

Initially these changes were driven by a secular agenda which sought to drive Christianity to the margins of public life by arguing that religion was entirely a matter of private faith, but that drive has been counter-balanced by recognition of the diversity of faiths that now exist within the UK. We still see the secularising agenda in the militant atheism of people like Richard Dawkins and Polly Toynbee but what has been enshrined in law is an equality of religions and beliefs, not the eradication of religion for which the militant atheists have argued. So, in the Post-Christendom world, Christianity is losing most of the privileges that it previously possessed in order that it receives equal treatment from the State to that of other religions and beliefs.

Many still yearn for the Christendom period to return but the reality of today is that we are in a Post-Christendom period and we have to deal with the reality of where we are, not yearn for the supposed ‘Golden Age’ of the past. The reality of being in a Post-Christendom period also means that we are actually much closer to the situation of the Early Church than was the case when the Church had political power and influence.

Our text for 2010 - “Be alert, stand firm in the faith, be brave, be strong. Do all your work in love” is taken from 1 Corinthians 16. 13 & 14 and is how St Paul ends his first letter to the church in Corinth. Our pew bibles tell us that, “Corinth was a great cosmopolitan Greek city, the capital of the Roman province of Achaia. It was noted for its thriving commerce, proud culture, widespread immorality, and variety of religions.” Not so different from our own culture and city then!

Being church in that kind of city and culture was no easy task and so Paul’s letter shows how the Good News speaks to the questions and issues faced by that church. By doing so, Paul was declaring the lordship of Christ over those issues and the culture and city in which the Corinthians lived. Once he had addressed those issues that were contemporary for the Corinthian church, he ended with the exhortation which is our text for 2010, “Be alert, stand firm in the faith, be brave, be strong. Do all your work in love.”

This is why, I believe, these verses to be a relevant message for us at St John’s, and also for Christians more widely, in 2010. At our Annual Parochial Church Meeting in 2009 we spoke about the challenges of the changing culture around us and over the course of 2009 we have faced up to financial pressures, made key changes to our use of the Parish Centre, and have discussed ways of dealing with disagreements. Not only that but we have increased our involvement in our local community – something which has always been strong at St John’s through our involvements in Redbridge Voluntary Care and the Redbridge Night Shelter, among others – through involvement in community campaigns to improve facilities in the area.

Tom Wright writes of the Church “doing to the rulers of the world what Jesus did to Pilate ... confronting him with the news of the kingdom and of truth, deeply unwelcome and indeed incomprehensible though both of them were.” Part of the way, he writes, “in which the church will do this is by getting on with, and setting forward, those works of justice and mercy, of beauty and relationship, that the rulers know ought to be flourishing but which they seem powerless to bring about.”

When we argue publicly for improved community facilities in the parish and provide through our Parish Centre a place within which our local community can come together then, we are doing what Jesus did when he stood before Pilate demonstrating a different kind of kingship and what the Early Church did when they declared Jesus Christ to be Lord rather than Caesar. By “doing God in public” we declare the Lordship of Christ over our community and create signs of the kingdom of Christ that we know in part but which is still to come in full.

Again, Tom Wright puts it well when he writes:

“… it is vital that the church learn to critique the present workings of democracy itself … we should take seriously the fact that our present glorification of democracy emerged precisely from Enlightenment dualism — the banishing of God from the public square and the elevation of vox populi [‘voice of the people’] to fill the vacuum, which we have seen to be profoundly inadequate when faced with the publicness of the kingdom of God.”

None of this is easy but these verses from 1 Corinthians exhort us to stand firm. Dealing with the challenges faced by the 21st Century Church in a Post-Christendom period requires the alertness, bravery and strength about which Paul writes. As we take forward in 2010 the decisions and changes we have made in 2009, we will need the same alertness, bravery and strength.

Alertness involves being aware of the real issues that we face, bravery is needed to face them fully, and strength is needed to persevere with the direction we have taken.

We can be encouraged with new members, increased giving, increased hall income, an increased community profile, new stewardship responses, and funding for our community garden project. These, and other aspects of St John’s, are positive signs which indicate that, although we haven’t resolved all of the issues we face, we are on the right lines and need to take St Paul’s words to heart in 2010.

Most of all, we need to continue living out St Paul’s final exhortation to do all our work in love. It is love that needs to underpin all we do and which will continue to hold us together. Love for each other needs to characterise every action, interaction and decision. Love needs to be at the forefront of our vision, our relationships and our mission. Love is how we stand firm in our faith. Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians that love is the best of God’s gifts to his people. God is love and when we live in love we live in God.

So, as we move forward in 2010, let us be alert, stand firm in the faith, be brave, be strong, and do all our work in love.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

M. Ward - Vincent O'Brien.

Greenbelt diary (3)

Alistair McGrath

Pete Rollins

I queued to hear Rob Bell first thing and didn't get in but did see Sam Norton who was also in the queue. From there I went to hear Chris Dingle speak on music and faith. He argued that all music is inherently sacred and provides a glimpse of eternity as we lose our sense of time while listening to exist for a time in the eternal now. Clearly this depends on the extent to which we lose ourselves in the music but I've certainly had that experience and once read an interesting interview with Van Morrison who, at that time, viewed his music and concerts as inducing that experience and taking the listener into the heart of silence.

The next item on my schedule was the Simone Weil celebration with Grahame Davies and Michael Symmons Roberts. This rapidly became less of a celebration and more of a critique as, while the contributors were challenged by Weil's attempts to eliminate the gap between how she lived and what she believed, they were also disturbed her martyr complex, jewish self-hate, and egotistical impersonality. She had a brilliant mind and it is fascinating to see someone so intellectually rigorous come to faith in Christ. She also wrote beautifully and this is perhaps the clue to the loss of celebration from the debate as, while we heard about Weil from the two contributors and from their writings about her, we never actually heard from Weil herself. Her writings were not read or quoted at any length, so we never heard her beautiful writing or the reasoning of her brilliant mind and, therefore, it was possible for us to focus on the issues that we have with her death at the expense of celebrating her work.

I hadn't intended to hear Alistair McGrath but, on arriving at the wrong venue, decided to stick around and appreciated his debunking of Richard Dawkins (although much of it I had already read in The Dawkins Delusion). A very structured speaker, he neatly summed up his argument in this talk as being that the New Atheism represents a sense of anger that religion is very much still here when, by the reckoning of secularists, it should have died out years ago. The arguments of Dawkins et al have actually made it easier to talk about God now than was the case ten years ago and we should have confidence to engage in the debate because of our understanding that Christianity was gifted to us by God and of the interest that there is i our culture to talk about God.

Mark Vernon would have been unlikely to agree with McGrath's sense of confidence. He is both a former priest and former atheist who as an agnostic is a tutor at 'The School of Life', a new organisation offering short courses on life, love, work, play, and politics. Vernon argued that agnosticism has always been a part of Christianity and offered seven tips for being a religious agnostic; the practices of questioning, love, knowledge, writing, negation, suspension, and wonder. However, if we accept that these practices (which acknowledge the existence of doubt in faith and of limits to our human knowing) have consistently been a part of Christianity, where is the need to practice them outside of Christianity itself. It seemed to me that in this session Vernon was essentially describing his return to a nuanced faith as opposed to any sort of journey away from it.

Vernon's session was followed by a fairly uproarious panel session on the theme of art, propaganda and evangelism. Uproarious, primarily because Billy Childish was playing the lovable anarchist to the hilt ably assisted by Angie Fadel. One felt for Adrienne Chaplin and Rita Brock gamely trying to make their serious academicly rigorous contributions in the face of Childish's faux 'I no nothing' stance coupled with occasional shafts of wit and profundity. There are times when the dryness of logic, reason and catagorisation are revealed and this seemed like it might be one of those occasions. A concensus of sorts was cobbled together around the notion that communicating a pre-conceived message or idea through art doesn't do justice to art and that, currently, conceptual artists are those most inclined to deliberately and cheerfully throw themselves into this faultline.

There was more iconclasm to be had as Pete Rollins took to the stage to argue that identification with Christ is dereliction, as we identify with one who, at the cross, is stripped of identity and meaning. 'Religionless Christianity' sees Christ resurrected in the community which bears his name as our identification with him enables us to escape the system that defines us and take responsibility for the dreaming of new possibilities. Rollins uses Slavoj Žižek and 'Death of God' theology to flesh out what Dietrich Bonhoeffer may have meant by 'religionless Christianity'. In doing so, he argued for a closing of the gap between how we live and what we believe that was at least as radical as that of Simone Weil.

Rollins argues that we often treat Church as a sop to the lack of radicality in our lives i.e. that hearing about the need for loving sacrifice becomes a subsitute for actually living sacrifical and loving lives. It is, of course, entirely possible that, for those of us present, listening to Rollins is a part of the same game giving us the frisson of radicality without the need to follow through but the challenge was to the real transformation of rebirth.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sex Pistols - Anarchy In The UK.

Insignificant beginnings

The Kingdom of God, Jesus says, begins as something small, unregarded, and insignificant (Mark 4. 26-34).

We see this lived out in Jesus’ own life. In human terms his life was small and insignificant, like the mustard seed. His birthplace was described as being least among the clans of Judea. His home town was a place from which no good was known to come. In appearance he was without beauty or majesty, undesired. In his life he was despised and rejected, unrecognised and unesteemed. In his death he was made nothing. An insignificant man who died in a insignificant part of the world.

That ought to have been the end of it but instead it was only the beginning. From that small beginning, Christ’s body – the Church, the gathering of all those who believe in him – has grown so that for many centuries Christianity has been the largest religion in the world; and that remains the case despite secularisation in parts of the Western world.

The Early Church reveals the same pattern to us. Paul wrote to the Christians at Corinth and says, “think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.” He says in this letter that, in the eyes of the world, Christians are foolish and the message of the cross is foolish.

The same words could actually be applied to us: none of us are major intellectuals or academics; none of us have major influence or power in terms of work or politics; none of us, so far as I know, were born into the aristocracy. The reality is that wonderful as each of us are, we are not major players on the world stage and that makes us, in human terms, one among millions of other human beings around the world. When we think of ourselves in those terms it easy to see ourselves and what we do as being small and insignificant.

We may not like to think of ourselves as being foolish, as well as insignificant, but that is how Paul describes the Corinthian Christians from the perspective of those considered wise in their culture. It is no different today, Richard Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion that God is a “psychotic delinquent” invented by mad, deluded people and our faith in God is a “process of non-thinking,” “blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.”

BUT what Jesus demonstrates through his life, death and resurrection and what Paul states in his letter to the Corinthians is that “the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.” The Message, a contemporary paraphrase of the Bible, puts it like this:

“Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these "nobodies" to expose the hollow pretensions of the "somebodies"? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ.”

What Jesus has done for us, in giving us a clean slate and a fresh start – points forward in history to a time when the whole world will be given a clean slate and a fresh start. In Revelation 21 we are given a wonderful future vision of God making everything new; of God moving into the neighbourhood permanently, joining earth and heaven together, and making his home with us. Wiping every tear from our eyes as death, tears, crying and pain are all gone for good.

Now we don’t have to understand how this happens. Jesus told the story of the man who scattered seed in his field without knowing how the seed grew. Farmers in Jesus’ day didn’t understand the science of how plants grew but they knew that the process of sowing seeds into soil worked and produced corn. It is not necessary to understand in detail the processes of germination and growth in order for the harvest to come.

Jesus is saying something similar to us. Just as we could not have anticipated that an insignificant rabbi for Israel who was killed after only three years of teaching would become the greatest figure in the history of humanity, so we cannot expect to understand in detail God’s plans for the future of the world; how the Kingdom of God will finally and fully come, how the vision of Revelation 21 is to be achieved.

What we do know though is what Jesus has shown us of the Kingdom of God coming through his life, death, resurrection, and through the change that he has made in our lives and those of others that we know. He introduces the Kingdom of God into the world and into our lives. He is the first fruits, the first sign of that coming Kingdom and, because we can trust him, we can trust that the Kingdom will come both more fully in our lives and completely in the new heaven and new earth.

This is not blind faith because, like the farmer, although we do not understand the detail of how the process or plan works, we know that it does work from the evidence of Jesus and from the evidence of his Spirit in the lives of countless Christians throughout history including ourselves.

And because we know that the process or pattern or plan of the small, the insignificant, the foolish being used by God to achieve great change, we can trust that our lives also have meaning and significance as we put our faith into practice in small acts of compassion here and little words of witness there; at home, at home, in church and in the community. We don’t know what God will cause to grow from these actions and words but we trust that they will take root and grow because that is the pattern that we, and Christians throughout Church history, have observed in practice.

So: “Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don't see many of "the brightest and the best" among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these "nobodies" to expose the hollow pretensions of the "somebodies"? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ.”

unregarded

Birthplace,
least among the clans of Judea.
Home town,
a place from which no good was known to come.
In appearance,
without beauty or majesty, undesired.
In life,
despised and rejected, unrecognised and unesteemed.
In death,
made nothing.
His followers,
not wise, not influential, not noble – fools!

The light of the knowledge of the glory of God
in the bodies and form of human beings.
Light shining
through the gaps and cracks of clay pots.
Light shining
in the unexpected places, despised faces, hidden spaces.
Light shining
in the poor, the mourners, the meek, the hungry.
Light shining
in the merciful, the pure, the peacemakers.
Light shining
in the persecuted, the insulted, the falsely accused.
Light shining
in the lowly, the despised, the nonentities.
Light shining
in weakness and fear and trembling.
Light shining
in the foolish followers of the King of Fools.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

MOYA BRENNAN - No Scenes of Stately Majesty.