Europe’s openness about religious images has grown out of the Christian tradition

'Europeans may believe that in defending free speech – including contentious religious cartoons – we are standing up for human rights won since the French Revolution, but this is not strictly true.'

Jonathan Jones, writing about Art Below's Stations of the Cross exhibition at St Marylebone Parish Church (an exhibition which features work by commission4mission's Christopher Clack), notes that: 'Europe’s modern openness about religious images has grown naturally out of the Christian tradition itself.'

As a result, 'Europeans should recognise, when we rightly defend the right to offend, that for inheritors of the sensational tradition of Christian art, it is actually quite easy to say that artists have the right to do what they want to religion. Even the church agrees on that, as it always has.'

While this is a valid and important corrective, Jones will also be well aware of the propensity within certain streams of Christianity to protest against the right to offend. In his article he mentions Andre Serrano's Piss Christ, a cibachrome print of a crucifix submerged in urine, which 'became a hate object for cultural and religious conservatives in 1980s America.'

Yet, as he rightly suggests, Christians are as 'likely to embrace the outrageous image as they would a lamb strayed from the flock. 'Jesus,' he quips, 'how can you offend these people?' In his excellent talk on faith and contemporary art entitled 'Icons or Eyesores?' Alan Stewart does precisely that in relation to Serrano's Piss Christ:

'For me the real power of the piece is that it encapsulates a Christ who comes into the filth and refuse of the world, who himself is rejected, expelled like a body fluid. God in the refuse of life; dignifying it; sitting with us in solidarity. Allowing himself to become contaminated with the fall-out of life.'

Some years ago Philip Ritchie, Paul Trathen and myself led several courses entitled The Big Picture exploring faith and popular culture. In one session we considered the pros and cons of Christian protest or engagement in relation to controversial portrayals of Christ. In the 1970’s and 80’s films like Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ resulted in thousands of Christians demonstrating outside cinema’s while Christian organisation’s like the National Viewer’s and Listener’s Association headed by Mary Whitehouse lobbied for these films to be banned. However, the release of The Da Vinci Code in 2006, although it dealt with similarly controversial material for Christians, did not result in mass protests. Instead, through seeker events, bible studies, websites and booklets Churches encouraged discussion of the issues raised by the film while clearly contesting the claims made about Christ and the Church.

We noted that the protests often did not tally with the content of the films and displayed a lack of understanding of the films, their stories and meaning. As Richard Burridge, Dean of King’s College London, has said 'those who called for the satire to be banned after its release in 1979 were “embarrassingly” ill-informed and missed a major opportunity to promote the Christian message.' Life of Brian portrayed the followers of religions as unthinking and gullible and the response of Christians to that film reinforced this stereotype. The Church had to relearn that the way to counter criticism is not to try to ban or censor it but to engage with it, understand it and accurately counter it. The Da Vinci Code events, bible studies, websites etc. that the Church used to counter the claims made in The Da Vinci Code featured reasoned arguments based on a real understanding of the issues raised which made use of genuine historical findings and opinion to counter those claims.

This brings us back to Jones' comments that, following the Iconoclastic controversy, 'When it comes to portraying God and Jesus, there never were many restrictions in Europe ... Artists were not only permitted but encouraged by the Church to depict Jesus in the most shocking ways they could.' This approach has helped to develop 'Europe’s modern openness about religious images' but has grown naturally out of the Christian emphasis on 'the humanity and suffering of a god brought down to Earth' or, as Stewart puts it: 'a Christ who comes into the filth and refuse of the world, who himself is rejected, expelled like a body fluid. God in the refuse of life; dignifying it; sitting with us in solidarity. Allowing himself to become contaminated with the fall-out of life.'

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Kanye West - Jesus Walks.

New Book: The Secret Chord (2)

My jointly authored book The Secret Chord, an impassioned study of the role of music in cultural life written through the prism of Christian belief, is now available in paperback as well as Kindle. The paperback is being sold directly from Lulu - click here for the link. 

If you're a Kindle user, then the bumper bargain Kindle version at just £1.95 is available by clicking here. If you're not a Kindle user but would like the online version then click here to download free software to run the Kindle version. 

The website for The Secret Chord is also up and running with news, bios, additional links, and room for your comments and views. Click here to access the website and start a conversation about issues raised in The Secret Chord. 

Click here for initial comments on The Secret Chord and here for a mention of The Secret Chord on the Ritter Records blog. For more news of my fellow author Peter Banks' band, After The Fire, click here.

Special thanks to Sam Norton, Philip Ritchie, Heather Rowe, John Russell, Sean Stillman and Paul Trathen for spreading the word about The Secret Chord.

Rev Dr Hugh Rayment-Pickard, author and co-founder of IntoUniversity says "Secret Chord is well written, full of wisdom, great quotes and illustrations. It's great to read something about art and Christianity that embraces such diverse material."

Carol Biss, Managing Director of Book Guild Publishing, says “Secret Chord is an interesting and impassioned study of the role of music in cultural life, written through the prism of Christian belief. Covering a huge range of musical styles and influences, from gospel music to X Factor, Secret Chord conveys a great enthusiasm for music and its transformative powers, which readers are sure to find engaging.”

While a significant number of books have been published exploring the relationships between music, art, popular culture and theology - many of which Peter and I have enjoyed and from which we have benefited - such books tend either to academic analysis or semi biography about artistes whose output the writers' enjoy. By contrast, The Secret Chord is an accessible exploration of artistic dilemmas from a range of different perspectives which seeks to draw the reader into a place of appreciation for what makes a moment in a 'performance' timeless and special.

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After The Fire - I Don't Understand Your Love.

Living the Story (3)

Philip Ritchie has posted on the Living the Story session which I led on Friday and which made use of poems by Carol Ann Duffy, George Herbert and John Berryman.

In this Lent series for the Chelmsford Diocese we have been comparing and contrasting artworks which can be said to be living the Christian story with others that seem to view that same story from the perspective of a non-participant. This is not in order to suggest that one is better than the other but simply to see and explore the different types of insights and understandings which come when your perspective is inside or outside the story.  

It was interesting to note that the course participants had most to say about the two poems - Duffy's Prayer and Berryman's Dream Song 201 - which seemed to have been written from the perspectives of characters without a Christian faith. In the first, they identified with its evocations of moments of particular attention or epiphany which come with a sense of gift or realisation or revelation. In the second, with its sense of the meaningless mundanity of a faithless existence.

It is a source of interest that, as we have sought to explore in this series, so many artists (like those we have looked at in this series, Nick Cave, Mike Nelson, Denys Arcand, Carol Ann Duffy, Philip Pullman) remain fascinated by the stories, beliefs and impact of Christianity at a time when the secularist narrative remains that of the decline of faith. Why this should be can in some measure be gleaned from the works we have explored in the series e.g. the intertwined nature of passion and violence to which Cave responds, the strength for survival in the face of marginalisation that Nelson sees as stemming from belief systems, or the existence of moments of gift or illumination in life that Duffy evokes.

These may not be the principal reasons why those who seek to live the story of Christianity do so but they are undoubtedly among the reasons why Christianity retains an inspirational and provocative place within contemporary culture. Those who seek to live the story have much to learn from the responses to that story of those who don't, both in the significance for our faith of those aspects of Christianity to which others respond and in understanding connections and context for mission.  

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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Brompton Oratory.   

Living the Story (2)

Living the Story got off to an excellent start this morning with an engaged group and fascinating parallels and contrasts found by Philip Ritchie in the engagement with the Bible's narrative of Nick Cave and Bono. My introduction to the course, which preceded the main content of the session, was as follows:

Consider yourself and your family, or your circle of friends:

• What are some of the stories you might tell together which give you a sense of who you are?
• What are the types of events they focus on?
• Do stories in the Bible work in the same way for you?

From earliest times human beings have told stories. The stories we have been discussing initially are personal or family tales (we could call these micronarratives) but they will often, as with many tales, have been stories which say something about or identity; who we understand ourselves to be, either individually or within our family. As human beings we also commonly tell stories which, either explicitly or implicitly, seek to answer questions such as, “How did we get here?”, “Where are we going?”, and “What is the meaning of our existence?” We call these overarching stories metanarratives or worldviews and we live within the meanings which they provide.

So, for example, a humanist may tell a story of a universe which comes into being by chance leaving human beings free to create their own meanings for life and society. By contrast, Stanley Hauerwas has argued that Christians are “a people who have been formed by a story that provides them with the skills for negotiating the danger of this existence, trusting in God’s promise of redemption.” In other words, the church is founded on the premise that the creator God decisively calls and forms a people to serve him through the history of Israel and through the work of Jesus Christ to bring about the redemption of the creation.

We must constantly remember that we are a story formed community and that story is what defines our existence. To quote Stanley Hauerwas again: “The story of modernity is the story that you should have no story except the story you chose when you had no story. We call that freedom. But as Christians we believe that we are creatures born into a story that we haven’t chosen.” Our story derives from the Bible and Tom Wright has provided us with a simple means of describing the Bible’s metanarrative and the way in which we are to be shaped by this story. Wright has described the Bible as being like a five act play containing the first four acts in full (i.e. 1. Creation, 2. Fall, 3. Israel, 4. Jesus). He continues:

"The writing of the New Testament ... would then form the first scene in the fifth act, and would simultaneously give hints (Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end ... The church would then live under the 'authority' of the extant story, being required to offer an improvisatory performance of the final act as it leads up to and anticipates the intended conclusion ... the task of Act 5 ... is to reflect on, draw out, and implement the significance of the first four Acts, more specifically, of Act 4 in the light of Acts 1-3 ... Faithful improvisation in the present time requires patient and careful puzzling over what has gone before, including the attempt to understand what the nature of the claims made in, and for, the fourth Act really amount to."

Wright concludes that he is proposing "a notion of "authority" which is ... vested ... in the creator god himself, and this god's story with the world, seen as focused on the story of Israel and thence on the story of Jesus, as told and retold in the Old and New Testaments, and as still requiring completion."

Living the Story in this way is something that artists and writers have done throughout Church history and continue to do today. For example, the curator and art historian Daniel A. Siedell has noted that:

“the Bible … is a dynamic and powerful cultural artefact, a library of powerful stories, within which we in the western tradition have lived and breathed and have had our being. And for centuries it has been the engine that drove art and literature ...

to recognize and acknowledge such biblical resonances and influences for western culture risks opening up a pandora's box that secularists have long tried to keep shut: that modernity emerged from and has lived off the creative capital of the Judeo-Christian tradition, including its theology, as it was embodied in the Renaissance humanism and the Reformation.”

In the course we will examine a selection of mainly contemporary uses of the Bible and the Christian story in popular culture (film, music, novels, poetry and visual arts) and consider whether or not they can be said to be 'living the story’.

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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - The Mercy Seat.

The DNA of the western imagination

Daniel A. Siedell's latest post gives clues as to some of the directions Philip Ritchie, Paul Trathen and I are planning to go in with the Living the Story course we are currently planning. Siedell's post is based on a biblical reading of the work of artist Enrique Martínez Celaya:

"First, it argues that the Bible's influence does not have to be embodied in a self-conscious way, as a form of meditation or reflection on particular biblical themes. If the Bible is the DNA of the western imagination, as such critics as George Steiner, Northrop Frye, and Andrew Delbanco suggest,then it should be present in some way in the work of an artist such Martínez Celaya, who is deeply formed by the western literary tradition, not only as a reader but as a writer of poetry and prose ... Second, the exhibition argues that the Bible can function as a provocative and enriching critical tool, which can expand rather than limit the experience of art ...

The Bible is a rich resource for critical practice. But for use in this context, it needs to be liberated from the believers, who fear that its authority or infallability as God's word is undermined if it approached as literature. For them, art, literature, music, film, and theatre should function as Bible studies and devotional exercise in paint, sound, word, and image. Far from protecting it, this literalistic approach to "Biblical art" weakens its power, restricting its use to quoting chapter and verse in support of dogma and theology. This makes the Bible boring and obscures the fact that it is a dynamic and powerful cultural artifact, a library of powerful stories, within which we in the western tradition have lived and breathed and have had our being. And for centuries it has been the engine that drove art and literature ...

to recognize and acknowledge such biblical resonances and influences for western culture risks opening up a pandora's box that secularists have long tried to keep shut: that modernity emerged from and has lived off the  creative capital of the Judeo-Christian tradition, including its theology, as it was embodied in the Renaissance humanism and the Reformation. Recent books by scholars Michael Allen Gillespie (The Theological Origins of Modernity) and Bruce Hoslinger (The Premodern Condition) have revealed this more clearly. The paucity and shallowness of contemporary art criticism, which oscillates between journalism, marketing, and obscure pseudo-theory, might be ameliorated through a rediscovery of the literary treasures of the Bible, treasures that have seduced the greatest minds and artists throughout modernity (and postmodernity)."

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Willard Grant Conspiracy - Fare Thee Well.

Living the Story / Writing on the Wall

I spent part of yesterday planning Living the Story, the Lent course I'm running as part of the Diocesan Lent and Eastertide programme together with Philip Ritchie and Paul Trathen.

We've taken as our starting point Tom Wright's description of the Bible as being like a five act play containing the first four acts in full (i.e. 1. Creation, 2. Fall, 3. Israel, 4. Jesus) and the writing of the New Testament as forming the first scene in the fifth act which also giving hints of how the play is supposed to end. We are then called to live in this story improvising our part in the play on the basis of what we know of the story so far and the hints we have of how it will end.

Living the Story in this way is something that Christian artists and writers have tried to do throughout Church history and continue to do today. So in this course we will be examining a selection of contemporary uses of the Bible and the Christian story in popular culture and considering whether or not they can be said to be 'living the story’. We plan to cover film, music, novels, poetry and visual arts.

Also included in the Lent and Eastertide programme and covering similar ground are two sessions by Maggi Dawn based on her book The Writing on the Wall.

2011 is the 400th anniversary of the publication of The King James Version of the Bible. But just how well do we understand the Bible, and its relationship to our culture? Maggi Dawn, author of The Writing on the Wall, will show how art, music, poetry, sculpture and film have been influenced by the Bible far more than we usually realize. But the arts do more than merely illustrate bible stories and characters: they also open up possibilities for interpretation.

This day will open up some of the theological and devotional adventures that become possible when the riches of the Bible are recognized within the world of the arts, and offer all kinds of inspiration, for teaching, preaching and personal spiritual growth.

The Writing on the Wall is on Saturday March 26th at Chelmsford Cathedral Centre and Saturday May 7th at St Margaret’s Church, Barking. Both are from 10am – 4pm.

For details about dates, times and venues of courses go to Lent Schools 2011 and Eastertide Schools 2011 for the full programme. Contact details for booking at Lent and Easter schools 2011.

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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Brompton Oratory.

First fifteen music meme

I was tagged for this meme by Philip Ritchie:

1) Turn on your MP3 player or music player on your computer.

2) Go to SHUFFLE songs mode.

3) Write down the first 15 songs that come up–song title and artist – NO editing/cheating, please.

 
‘New Home’ - Eric Bibb (Booker’s Guitar)

‘Building Up’ - Al Green (Gospel Collection)

‘Thank You For The Cross’- Various Artists (Songs of Fellowship Vol. 5)

‘Primitives’ - T Bone Burnett (Twenty Twenty)

‘Brown’ – P.O.D. (Brown)

‘Quechua Song’ – Jan Gabarek/Hilliard Ensemble (Mnemosyne)

‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’ - T Bone Burnett (Twenty Twenty)

‘Rock, Salt and Nails’ – Buddy Miller (The Best of the Hightone Years)

‘My Immortal’ – Evanescence (Fallen)

‘This Time’ – P.O.D. (Testify)

‘Stop’ – Spice Girls (Greatest Hits)

‘Mr Tambourine Man’ – Bob Dylan (The Bootleg Series Vol. 5)

‘All My Trust I Place In You’ – McIntosh Ross (The Great Lakes)

‘On The Grind’ – P.O.D. (Testify)

‘Ubi Caritas’ – David Fitzgerald (God is Love)

Make of that what you will! Here is something different again ...
 
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Bill Mallonee - River Of Love.

Food, Song and Vocations

Revd. Canon Philip Ritchie & I before our Vocations Service

Jack & June with their sumptuous buffet

 Chapel End Savoy Players

We have had a busy but valuable weekend at St John's Seven Kings. Yesterday we had an excellent fundraising event featuring the Chapel End Savoy Singers performing a programme of songs from musicals and Gilbert & Sullivan and a sumptuous buffet prepared by church members Jack and June Weedon, both of which were greatly enjoyed by all who came. The event was ably organised once again by our Social & Fundraising committee.

Using our gifts and talents in the service of God and the mission of the church was our focus today in a Vocations Service organised as part of Stewardship Month at St Johns. Philip Ritchie, Lay Ministry Education Co-ordinator in the Diocese of Chelmsford, was our preacher and spoke about the sense of inadequacy that characterises those whom God often calls, using the final episode of Rev as an example having seen Tom Hollander at Greenbelt. Philip encouraged all of us to say yes to God's call in our lives despite our personal sense of inadequacy. We then gave our congregation the opportunity to explore ministry and volunteering opportunities in the Church and community with representatives of children's, lay, ordained and youth ministries in the Diocese, Christian Education Project, Downshall Pre-School Playgroup Trustees, Gideon's International, Redbridge Night Shelter, Redbridge Street Pastors, Redbridge Voluntary Care, SKNPRA, TASK, various workplace ministries, and various ministries at St Johns.

We prayed together: Lord, my God and my loving Father, You have made me to know You, to love You, to serve You, and thereby to find and to fulfil myself. I know that You are in all things, and that every path can lead me to You. But of them all, there is one especially by which You want me to come to You. Since I will do what You want of me, I pray You, send your Holy Spirit to me: into my mind, to show me what You want of me; into my heart, to give me the determination to do it, and to do it with all my love, with all my mind, and with all my strength right to the end. Amen.

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Larry Norman - I Am A Servant.

7 links challenge

Philip Ritchie tagged me with the 7 links challenge:

1. Your first post – Glory Days was a meditation on the song of the same name by Just Jack.

2. A post you enjoyed writing the most – I've most enjoyed doing the Windows on the World series because I've enjoyed taking the photos and having a focus for my photography. Here is the 100th Windows on the World post.

3. A post which had a great discussion – The series of posts which generated the most interesting and continuing discussion was The Bible - Open or Closed? where Philip Ritchie and I had an ongoing discussion about the nature of scripture. The first post in the series is here. The single post that generated the most discussion was my second post about the Holy Spirit in the World Today conference.

4. A post on someone else's blog that you wish you'd written – This is hard as there is so much that is interesting which is being written. Posts that have been influential have included Sam Norton on Peak Oil and Peter Banks on music but the one post that I want to highlight is Some thoughts about the shape of the church to come... by Paul Trathen, simply because I agree with all that he writes in it.

5. A post with a title that you are proud of – The value of pointlessness which highlighted a quote from Armando Iannuci about spirituality.

6. A post that you wish more people had read – My short story A Disappearance, which I rate both as a story and in terms of its conceit; that fast living literally wears out your body. The four posts are here, here, here and here.

7. Your most visited post ever – New Church Art Trail has had the most visits. Encouraging that a recent post has been getting the most attention.

Here's an addition to the list:

8. Your most serendipitous post - Annie & Bernard Walke - I posted about this artist & priest couple at the same point that Paul Trathen was reading Bernard Walke's autobiography and posting about it on facebook.

I tag Tim Goodbody and Paul Trathen.

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Bob Dylan - Saved.

The Holy Spirit in the world today

Graham Tomlin, Jurgen Moltman, Ken Costa and Rowan Williams

Q & A with Moltmann, Costa & Williams

Miroslav Volf

I've spent today with friends and colleagues from the Diocese at the conference on 'The Holy Spirit in the world today' organised by St Mellitus College and held at Holy Trinity Brompton.

It has been a lengthy (made longer by a station evacuation at Holborn) but very fruitful day hearing from some of the most interesting and stimulating contemporary theologians including David Ford, Jurgen Moltmann, Miroslav Volf and Rowan Williams.

The day got off to the best possible start with a wonderful homily from Rowan Williams in which he spoke of the Holy Spirit as desire or longing to become the new humanity for which we have been created by God. Quoting St Symeon - "Come, you who have become yourself desire in me, who have made me desire you, the absolutely inaccessible one!" - and Mother Maria Skobtsova - "either Christianity is fire or there is no such thing" - he argued that the Holy Spirit is the desire in us to be where Christ is - God's child - and to become Christ-like - self-emptying. True freedom, he said, is freedom for a full humanity. Full humanity is Christ-shaped. Freedom is kenotic - for self emptying - humanity overwhelmed by the energy of gift.

By contrast Ken Costa seemed to me to provide only a lightweight comic turn between the heavyweights with a contribution which had plenty of jokes but was light on illustrations of his theme that the Holy Spirit was active in the world of work and economics. Philip Ritchie and Graham Hamborg however assured me that that message was a necessary one for those who tend to view the Spirit as primarily working through the Church and, to be fair to Costa in the later Q&A with Moltmann and Williams he did provide examples to back up his argument.

Moltmann, like Williams, was simply wonderful. A brief initial interview by Costa revealed the humanity which informs his theology and then he spoke on 'The Church in the power of the Spirit'. His perspective is a European theological voice not commonly heard in Church debates within the UK which is informed by the destruction of state Christianity that occured in Europe following the First World War but which is only slowly occuring in the UK. As a result, he is comfortable seeing the Spirit's initiative in and the need for the Church to ally itself with human rights organisations and Greenpeace, alliances over which much of the UK Church still agonises or resists. He emphasised the extent to which his theology had been a response to world events - The Theology of Hope was a response to Germany after the War and The Crucified Christ a response to the assassination of Martin Luther King - and an attempt to resource the Church for ministering in the light of those events.

'Think globally, act locally' is a lesson that the Church can inhabit and so he began with stories of the Church in Germany and his own church of St Jacob's Tübingen. This is a church which has moved from being a church for the people (religious caretaking) to become an inviting, participatory community church of the people where the gifts of all are trusted. The opposite of poverty and property, he argued, is community because in community we discover our true wealth the spirit of solidarity through which all our needs can be met. Such spirit-filled communities are seen in the fulfilling of Joel's prophecy at Pentecost and the descriptions of the Jerusalem Church in Acts. Such spirit-filled communities are bridgeheads to new life on earth where righteousness will dwell.

He posited three paradigms of Church - the hierarchical, the hierarchical community and the charismatic community - which equated to the Father above us, Christ with us, and the Spirit within us. The Church is come of age, he suggested, so we are no longer just God's servants or his children but, his friends. Peace with God, however, makes us restless in the world and a revolutionary Christiaity will both call the world evil and seek to change it, ultimately by reconciling the cosmos. The Spirit of God is no respector of social distinctions which divide us and awakens democratic energies for a new humanity.

Graham Cray drew on John V. Taylor's The Go-Between God to identify criteria for discerning the work of the Spirit in leading God's mission and the part that the Church plays within it. Discernment involves learning of what God is doing and learning to do it with him. This means understanding the shape of the Spirit's ministry. The Spirit is essentially relational and arranges the meaningless pieces of reality until they suddenly fall into shape. The Spirit anticipates in the present, things which are still to come. The Church is, therefore, to live in each culture as an anticipation of the future. Christ-likeness is the ultimate test of the Spirit's presence and where the Spirit is making Jesus more real neither caution nor convention or reputation ought to make us resist his possession of us. The Spirit is manifest in the translation of Christ in all times and cultures, so that he is multiply incarnate.

Cray's specific criteria for discernment were: charism, character, content, characteristics, community, cultivation, and experience. However, each of these is open to interpretation as was illustrated by his response to a question regarding the Episcopal Church which he thought to have departed from scripture. The actions of the Episcopal Church in relation to the LGBT community could be understood within Cray's criteria as a discerning of a move of the Spirit in a direction that subverts previous understandings of scripture, as in his biblical example from Acts of Peter's re-evaluation of his understanding of God's mission in response to the Spirit's work in Cornelius.

Paul Westin helpfully summarised Lesslie Newbigin's understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit in mission. Newbigin blazed a trinitarian trail in thinking about mission as he responded to the changing thinking seen at the major mission conferences of the twentieth century. For Newbigin pneumatology is mission, as the gifts of the Spirit are always for mission. It is the Spirit which takes the initiative bringing the Church after, in contrast to the Church-centric focus of the 1938 mission conference in India. The Spirit brings new forms of Church into being and by doing so works towards unity which is the deepest expression of the Gospel.

Miroslav Volf posed the key question in a globalised world of whether and how religious exclusivists can live comfortably with each other i.e. is monotheism by its very nature exclusivist? He answered this question by arguing that Christian monotheism contains democratising and universalist aspects which justify political pluralism, including the Spirit of justice and of many languages/cultures, so that a consistent religious exclusivist ought to be a political pluralist.

Having set his question up in an interfaith context I felt that Volf should have explored an interfaith answer and was disappointed that he unpacked only a Christian answer. Others thought that this decision was appropriate to the nature of and audience at this conference. As a side issue he also suggested that the example of religious conflict in India indicates that the pluralism of Hinduism is no more effective at warding off exclusivism than is monotheism. This would have had my friend, the Hindu educationalist, Jay Lakhani fuming at the suggestion that his faith should be defined by its worst and therefore least representative practices (an approach that we rightly resist when used by Richard Dawkins' to stereotype Christianity), particularly when he views the pluralism of Hinduism as the solution to religious exclusivity (a position which has an imperial aspect as it requires other faiths to reframe themselves in Hindu terms). All this in my view indicates a need to examine this issue within the worldview of each of the monotheistic faiths, although this too might involve remaining within, as opposed to challenging, the exclusivist mindset.

David Ford summed up a part of what the conference has covered to date with the following questions: What is real humanity in the Spirit? How do we relate the world and the Spirit? How do we shape the Church globally in the Spirit?

Ford also gave these key elements in wise and creative theology inspiered by the Spirit:

• retrieval of the past and of scripture;
• engagement with God, the Church and the world;
• mastering the disciplines of thought;
• wrestling with mediums to come to and to commuicate new understanding.

In his experience intensive conversations had led to the greatest breakthroughs. Conversation and dialogue is therefore a key location for the movement of the Spirit in the world.

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Hillsong United and Tim Hughes - Consuming Fire.

Old Ideas, New Meme, 1,2,3

Sam tagged me with this:

1. Name one idea that used to be seen as a key Christian theme, but is nowadays regarded as either irrelevant or outdated, although you think it still has a lot to offer.

2. In two sentences say something about why you selected this, and why it should be recovered or renewed.

3. Tag three people.

I thought Sam's response was great and is well worth repeating:

1. Spiritual warfare (ie the spiritual reality of the demonic); and

2. I like what CS Lewis said about the devil, that there are two equal and opposite errors, of taking it too seriously, and not taking it seriously enough. I believe the impact of Modernist rationality has, in large part, meant that the church generally, and the CofE in particular, has fallen into the latter error, and that this has had serious consequences.

For my answer I would like to promote:

1. The conviction of Daniel Siedell (as developed in God in the Gallery) "that Christian thought and practice as it is embodied in the seven ecumenical councils can nourish a deeper and more expansive understanding of contemporary artistic practice."

2. An excellent Amazon.com review of the book summarises Siedell's thinking well: "The most lucid distinction Siedell states near the end of the book is particularly helpful in considering art: "the ultimate distinction, then, is not between Christian art and autonomous modern art but between art that in its union of form and content can bring forth or testify to an embodied transcendence, revealing our `amphibious existence' [C.S. Lewis], and art that denies such transcendence" ... It is a matter of seeing and being incarnationally in the world ... The engagement of the church with contemporary art practices, then, is to expand the vision of the incarnational reign of Christ; it is to deepen the ability for contemplation, for communion with God; it is to live in such a way that embodies the kingdom "not of this world;" it is to affirm that another world is, in fact, possible, and to participate in that reconciliation."

3. I tag Philip, Paul, and Peter.

On the subject of the Art & Christianity meme that I started a while back, I'm now getting around to following up some of the recommendations made by those who responded to the meme. So, I've got copies now of Magnolia (recommended by Sam) and Babette's Feast (recommended by Philip) either of which I had seen previously (clearly a major gap in my cultural education!). I've still got to watch Babette's Feast but found Magnolia very moving. Like Abel Ferrar's Bad Lieutenant, the film involves a sustained immersion in, as Sam put it, a "warts'n'all portrayal of modern life" before reaching a memorable and spiritual dénouement consistent with the characters and narratives depicted.

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Paramore - We Are Broken.

The Arts & Faith Top 100 Films

This comes from Image Update:

"Just in time for this years Oscar awards ceremony, Image has released its 2010 Arts & Faith Top 100 Films list.

Showcasing top films and directors from around the world and spanning cinematic history from a 1927 silent film to films currently in theaters (the Coen Brothers Oscar-nominated A Serious Man), the list is the culmination of years of discussion and debate among the ArtsandFaith.com online community.

Last published in 2008, previous incarnations of the Arts & Faith Top 100 List have been featured in the LA Times, VH1, Christianity Today, and on Jeffrey Wells Hollywood Elsewhere blog. The list has been called an incomparable resource for anyone interested in exploring transcendent themes in the movies.

In his blog post accompanying the Arts & Faith Top 100 Films list, film critic Jeffrey Overstreet (Through a Screen Darkly) defines the list as being characterized both by artistic excellence and a serious wrestling with questions that at the root might be called religious or spiritual.

Overstreet notes that this list will come as a surprise to those who think they know what a religious community might select. Films like The Ten Commandments and The Passion of the Christ did not even make the list, while a host of foreign-language films with subtitles were selected.

Many Christians, Overstreet explains, have become so concerned about the usefulness of art as a tool of ministry and evangelism, theyve forgottenor never known in the first placewhat art really is, and how it works. We hope this list will remind you of the powerful and multifarious ways that film can convey matters of faith, and suspect you may find a new personal favorite among the 100 final selections.

Click here to view the list, here to visit or join the Arts & Faith community, and here to read Jeffrey Overstreets Good Letters blog on the significance of this list."

Which films would be in your Top 10? See Philip Ritchie's Reel Issues post for some other useful film-related resources from the Bible Society.

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Soggy Bottom Boys - I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow.

Subversion of scapegoating

I've been tagged by Philip Ritchie for the following meme:

Summarise the Bible in five statements, the first one word long, the second two, the third three, the fourth four and the last five words long. Or possibly you could do this in descending order. Tag five people.

My version is a Girardian attempt:

Murder
of scapegoats
subverted by the
act of God becoming
the ultimate sacrifice for all.

Sam and Banksy have also come up with some great responses to this one. I tag Paul Trathen, Elwin Cockett and Tim Goodbody.

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The Staple Singers - When Will We Be Paid.

Five deeply de-Christian doctrines

Philip Ritchie tagged me with this meme on which topic lots of fellow bloggers have already posted (see here and here, for example). The problem with memes is responding quickly enough partly because if you're slow, like me, at doing so all the people you would tag have already been tagged and partly because others have then said all that you would want to say. Anyway, here's my response to this one:

List five doctrines that are taught within the Christian church that you believe to be deeply de-Christian.

1. The prosperity gospel - all those church adverts claiming to transform us from losers into into prosperous, healthy overcomers are simply buying into the spirit of capitalism not the Spirit of Christ. Jesus told us to take up our cross not our cheque books in order to follow him and to become servants not superstars.

2. Faith causes healing - this doctrine arrogantly locates the source of any healing that does occur in the faith of human beings rather than the grace of God and condemns all those who are not healed as lacking in faith.

3. "This world is not my home, I'm just a'passing through, my treasure's all laid up somewhere beyond the blue" or "Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace" - Oh no they won't, the things of earth will grow more precious and more significant in the light of his glory and grace that's why he taught us to pray, 'Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven'. This doctrine is brilliantly demolished in Tom Wright's Surprised by Hope; read it and create signs of the coming kingdom (heaven on earth) in the here and now.

4. Systematic theologies - God has not chosen to communicate with us systematically instead his communication is diverse and diffuse - creation, incarnation, scripture etc. To try to tidy up God's revelation into harmonious, systematic categories is to say that we know better than God and distorts the diverse revelation which he has gifted to us. To live in God we need to live with the creative tensions of his revelation instead of resolving it all to our liking.

5. The lingual trumps the visual - the idea that words are more important than images in Christianity which underpins arguments such as that scripture is the Word of God (not Christ), that evangelism is more important than social action, and that art to be Christian must have a message. But the Word become flesh and lived among us, faith without works is dead, and the greatest artistic creation ever - the universe itself - did not come emblazoned with a message from its sponsor.

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Extreme - Peacemaker Die.

c4m webpage update (27)

This week posts on the commission4mission webpage have been to do with our showcase exhibition and Study Day at Chelmsford Cathedral. One post has images from the exhibition while another is the first in a series summarising the various presentations given at the Study Day by the Bishop of Barking, the Dean of Chelmsford Cathedral and the Chair of the DAC for Chelmsford. The series begins with the introductory presentation that I gave at the Study Day.

Philip Ritchie has also posted about our exhibition with subsequent discussion of the exhibition following in the comments to his original post.

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Paolo Nutini - Coming Up Easy.

Canon's installation

Philip Ritchie

A collection of clergy at the after-service reception - Paul Trathen, Brigid Main, Graham Hamborg & Gordon Tarry

Today I was at Chelmsford Cathedral for a service at which Philip Ritchie was installed as a Non-Residentiary Canon of the Cathedral.

Philip is responsible for the provision of adult education and training resources in the Diocese of Chelmsford including the Course in Christian Studies, Lent and Eastertide Schools and Reader Training. He is also on the staff of the North Thames Ministerial Training Course (now part of St Mellitus College).

A Canon is an honour given to distinguished people who have made a significant contribution to the life of the Church across the Diocese and beyond. Philip fully deserves this honour for the work he has done in developing training within the Diocese. I have greatly enjoyed working with him on The Big Picture courses that we have run together with Paul Trathen for several years as part of the Lent and Eastertide Schools and in the development of the Christians in the Workplace resource pack.

Bishop Laurie wrote in tonight's Order of Service that "On an occasion like this, when our priests or deacons are made Canons, clergy who have served the Diocese in particular ways and from every quarter can be honoured by us all as we give thanks to God for their ministry. They represent so much that is splendid in the Christian Church as it goes diligently about its business of worshipping Almighty God and proclaiming the Gospel of Christ in word and deed."

Another example of of a priest doing just that was given as a result of meeting up with Paul Trathen, who was also at the service and who gave me a whole pack of materials that he has recently collected about the ministry of Bernard Walke.

At about the same time that I came across Annie & Bernard Walke through seeing some of Annie's work in an exhibition catalogue while in Cornwall, Paul had bought a copy of Bernard's autobiography Twenty Years at St. Hilary in secondhand bookshop in St Davids Pembrokeshire.

A few days after seeing my post on the Walke's and commenting on the synchronicity of our both discovering this couple's work and ministry simultaneously, Paul was in Cornwall himself, a short distance from St Hilary's, and able to visit and collect the materials that he gave me tonight.

As a result, I now have postcards of some of the artworks commissioned by Bernard for St Hilary's, a biography of Bernard by Donald Allchin, Bernard's autobiography to borrow, and a CD of the 1934 recording of Bernard's radio play Bethlehem as performed by members of the congregation of St Hilary's.

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The Innocence Mission - I Never Knew You From The Sun.

Bible books meme

I've been tagged by Philip on this:

"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."

I enjoyed Philip's autobiographical approach to this meme and will try to do something similar.

1. A Way Through the Wilderness by Jamie Buckingham - This is the book that I think most influenced my late teens and early twenties after recommitting my life to God. I read Risky Living and Where Eagles Soar before this one but this was the one that grounded Buckingham's talk of being led by the Spirit most firmly in scripture as he created parallels between his experiences and the people of Israel's wilderness wanderings. I didn't know it at the time but what I was responding to was Buckingham's paradigmatic reading of the wilderness wanderings. It was reading Christopher Wright's Living As The People of God later that set out the value of this way of understanding scripture. What has stayed with me particularly from A Way Through the Wilderness is the background that Buckingham gives to Deuteronomy 32. 10-12. The image of the mother eagle pushing her chick out of the nest, catching it in the small of her back and then tipping the chick off until it learns to fly is a wonderful image for the way in which God is always seeking to disturb our complacency and move us "farther up and farther in" as C.S. Lewis puts it in The Last Battle.

2. The Book of God by Gabriel Josipovici - This book helped confirm in my mind a hunch about the Bible that I had developed out of thinking about the use made of fragments of materials and images in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the poetry and paintings of David Jones, and the paintings of Marc Chagall. Each of these combines and holds together a series of fragments in such a way that a relation is established between the fragments and, often, a non-linear story told. Eliot is explicit about this at the end of The Waste Land when he writes: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." The diversity of texts, genres, and voices in the Bible seemed to me to be similarly fragmented but held together by the narrative developed by means of the canon. Three books that I read around the same time - The Collage of God by Mark Oakley, God's Home Page by Mike Riddell, and Josipovici's The Book of God - seemed to understanding the form of the Bible in a similar fashion. Josipovici was the most significant as he unpacks both the fragmented form of scripture and the implications for interpretation of scripture being fashioned in this form. As a result, in order to be serious about scripture I think we have to take account of the form as well as the content of scripture and recognise that the fragmented nature of scripture militates against approaches to scripture, such as harmonisation, which view scripture as being essentially linear and consistent when that is not actually the case.

3. Old Testament Theology: Essays on Structure, Theme and Text by Walter Brueggemann - The first of Brueggemann's books that I read and it remains my favourite for its exploration of the dialectic of the Old Testament between its core/majority/structure legitimating testimony and counter/minority/pain embracing testimony. Brueggemann's insights revealed the extent to which the diversity of materials in the Bible enable a conversation to develop between these two testimonies. His conclusion, like that of Josipovic, is that in the Old Testament this dialectic is essentially unresolved and open. This understanding of dialogue within and between the texts made sense of the fragmentary form of scripture and developed a sense that, rather than being an instruction manual, reading scripture is actually more like participating in a debate or going on a journey of exploration.

4. The New Testament and the People of God by N.T. Wright. This book helped me to understand Jesus as 'a one-man Temple/Land/Torah-replacement movement' i.e. what Israel had been waiting for! The implication of all this is that God, through Jesus, is in dialogue with scripture reinterpreting and re-enacting the story of Israel through his life, death, and resurrection. Wright also provides a means for understanding the authority of scripture when scripture is understood in the more dynamic and open sense that I have been writing about. He describes scripture as being like a five act play containing the first four acts in full (i.e. 1. Creation, 2. Fall, 3. Israel, 4. Jesus). "The writing of the New Testament ... would then form the first scene in the fifth act, and would simultaneously give hints (Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end ... The church would then live under the 'authority' of the extant story, being required to offer an improvisatory performance of the final act as it leads up to and anticipates the intended conclusion ... the task of Act 5 ... is to reflect on, draw out, and implement the significance of the first four Acts, more specifically, of Act 4 in the light of Acts 1-3 ... Faithful improvisation in the present time requires patient and careful puzzling over what has gone before, including the attempt to understand what the nature of the claims made in, and for, the fourth Act really amount to." Going back to my first book (and confusing metaphors), this is a description of us, as eaglets, learning to flap its wings in order to fly up to ride the thermals of the Spirit in order that our improvisations are Spirit-led. As Wright concludes, he proposes "a notion of "authority" which is ... vested ... in the creator god himself, and this god's story with the world, seen as focused on the story of Israel and thence on the story of Jesus, as told and retold in the Old and New Testaments, and as still requiring completion."

I see Satan fall like lightning by René Girard - "Girard brings our attention to three facts without which we will never make sense of our lives, our world or our faith, namely: the role violence has played in cultural life, the role mimesis plays in psychological and social life, and the role the Bible plays in revealing both of these things and showing us how to deal with them." Girard also reveals how the developing dialogue and narrative of scripture can critique, deconstruct and expose societal norms such as the scapegoat mechanism. Girard's thesis then gives us both an understanding of the way in which the fragmented, dialectical narrative of scripture can speak to our world (not just the interpretive community, for whom it is normative) and a basis/focus for our improvisations in Act 5 of the play.

Should anyone want to think more about these ideas of and approaches to scripture, I posted a series last year called 'The Bible - Open or Closed?' exploring them in more detail in dialogue with Philip and they can be found by clicking here.

I tag Interim Mutterings, one of the St John's housegroups, for this meme.

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Igor Stravinsky - Symphony of Psalms I.

C4M webpage update (7)

This week on the commission4mission webpage, I have updated the profile of Colin Joseph Burns with a link to his new website, added images of a chalice and drawing to Mark Lewis' profile, created a profile for David Hawkins and included information on my guest post about commission4mission at Philip's Treehouse.

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Moby - Lift Me Up.

Blogs & papers

Here's a link to the Church Times piece about the Palm Sunday service and procession that St John's shared with St Paul's Goodmayes. In a piece about the service and procession in the Ilford Recorder, Fr. Ben Rutt-Field said it reminded him of of festival processions that he had seen while on sabbatical in Japan.

I commented recently on Nick Baines' blog about the value of these kinds of stories in the local press saying:

"My experience, in a short spell of ordained ministry, is that if you give the local press stories regularly they will be used and won’t be significantly changed in the telling.

This means, at a local level, that it is possible to tell good news stories about Christianity that therefore challenge the more negative impressions that people pick up more generally from the national media.

Taking the time to do this (and it doesn’t involve a great deal of time) is, I think, something that Christian leaders should be encouraged and trained to do. This is, of course, dependent on an issue that you raised in an earlier blog; the extent to which local newspapers can survive the recession."

Philip Ritchie's blog got a mention this week in the Church of England Newspaper with a factual listing of his most frequent topics each beginning with the letter 'f'.

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Neal Morse - Lifeline.

Scripture: a meganarrative?

Last year, when Philip Ritchie and I were debating the extent to which there is a metanarrative in the Bible, I wrote a post saying it may be that a new descriptor is needed for the kind of narrative we find in scripture.

I was hesitant about calling the narrative of scripture a meta-narrative because it is threaded through the fragments which form the whole canon of scripture rather than over-arching them. At the same time it is clearly not a micro-narrative because its full telling is not contained by any one of the books forming the whole canon of scripture.

A recent post by Peter Rollins seems to give me the phrase I was searching for. A meganarrative, he suggests, being that term which refers to the story that one lives while a metanarrative refers to the story that intellectually justifies and makes sense of our existence.

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Tom Waits - Down in the Hole.