A Big Christianity - beyond Cameron and Chaos

It’s taken me a while, but I’ve been thinking a bit about David Cameron’s recent foray into religion. It received a bit of a mixed reaction from all sides, including the usual rants from the atheists, but also perhaps a surprisingly lukewarm response from Christian voices. Some liked his reminder of our Christian heritage, some thought it was unrealistic given the levels of secularism we now have, some felt his vision of Christianity was too moralistic.


I also read a piece by George Monbiot recently in the Guardian about what he called “The great political conflict of our age – between neocons and the millionaires and corporations they support on one side, and social justice campaigners and environmentalists on the other. ” and a lightbulb went on in my mind connecting the two pieces.

David Cameron’s version of Christian faith is one of standards, morality, maintaining order and uprightnesss. It is typical of a more right-of-centre appreciation of religion for bringing order and peace to a chaotic world. The problem is it can lack sympathy for those for whom life is a struggle and can too easily glide over underlying injustices that keep them struggling. This is the aspect of religion that ‘neocons and the millionaires and corporations they support’ tend to like. On the good side, it maintains order and restrains the chaos. At the same time it can reinforce existing patterns of power, privilege and stigmatise those who fail as deserving of little grace.

Occupy London also asks ‘what would Jesus do’? It's a good question, and once asked, it's hard to see him doing anything other than siding with the poor, the meek, the persecuted, the mourning. The aspect of religion that ‘social justice campaigners and environmentalists’ perfer is the idea of religion as salvation. God rescues the sinking, opposes the unfeeling rich, saves the sinner, heals the sick, lifts up the broken-hearted and oppressed. This is good news for the poor, hope for the hopeless and homeless.

David Cameron had it half right. Occupy London have it half right. Christianity is bigger than both. It combines salvation and ethics, a message that God rescues and that he restores, Christian faith has a vision of rescue; it also has a vision of life as it was meant to be lived -a vision that has a distinct shape. At its heart, Christianity is about salvation – it is about God entering his good but broken world in the story of Israel and the person of Jesus Christ to redeem it, restore it and to overcome the great enemies of life and humankind – sin, evil and death. It is about good news for the sinner, the struggler, the addict, the victim. At the same time, it also gives a reassurance that there is a moral order and structure to the world that if transgressed, tends to unravel things and leads to destruction and death, the very things from which we need rescuing.

These two exist in a dialectical relationship – each need the other. When Christianity is held to be one and not the other, or at least one is championed while the other ignored, (as to be honest, David Cameron did, but perhaps also Occupy London does too), it betrays itself. A moralistic Christianity that has no sense of salvation may uphold a sense of moral order, but has no good news for the strugglers, the victims, the silent sufferers. A Christianity of salvation with no sense of moral order is a band-aid, providing quick-fix solutions with no longer-term rebuilding of lives and communities.

Our culture needs a vision that overcomes the conflict that George Monbiot identifies. It doesn’t need a privatised faith of moral rectitude. Nor does it need a vaguely religious version of secular cries for social justice. It needs a big vision of Christian faith that once held western Europe together and that embraces both salvation and order. How the two fit together is a significant intellectual, moral and spiritual question, but one well worth working at if the Christian faith is to rediscover its social function, and provide a way beyond the tired debates of our current cultural discourse.

Sepp Blatter and the Judgment of God

Sepp Blatter has done it again. Switzerland's most famous buffoon has managed to alienate most of the human race with his comments about racial abuse in football.

According to our beloved head of FIFA, you can get abused for the colour of your skin all game and are then you're meant to shake hands and forget it as if it really doesn't matter. But it does. And we know it does and it isn't good enough to pretend that it doesn't and can just be let go. The public outrage shows our sense of injustice and the desire for judgement - that when something has been done that is fundamentally wrong, it needs to be dealt with properly, not brushed under the carpet.

One charge often made against Christian faith is that the doctrine of divine judgement is exclusive and violent. The idea that God should judge is deemed harsh and unacceptable. Instead, the idea of 'indiscriminate hospitality' is supposed to be more worthy of God, who should accept everyone, with no questions asked. The idea of a God of judgment is a prehistoric remnant of ancient religion. Yet a God who refuses to judge, who refuses to discriminate between good and evil is a God who demands that that the victim of injustice, the abused child, the exploited slave, the beaten wife have to sit down at table in the heavenly banquet with their abusers and attackers. And shake hands as if it is all a bit of healthy banter. Do we really want that? Give me a God who judges, who vindicates the victims and condemns evil any day. I don't want a God like Sepp Blatter.

Prayer alone conquers God

If you ever wonder whether it is worthwhile praying, and whether it makes any difference, here is a bit of early Christian theology that might help. Tertullian was a Latin-speaking theologian of the C2nd with an ear for a good phrase and a great delight in shocking people. How about this:

 "Prayer alone conquers God. But Christ has no desire that it should do any evil deed; he has conferred upon it every power of doing good. Therefore it knows only how to call back the souls of the departed from the journey of death itself, to strengthen the weak, to restore the sick, to cleanse the possessed, to open the doors of prison, to loosen the chains for the innocent. The same prayer absolves sins, repels temptations, puts down persecutions, strengthens the weak-hearted, delights the high-minded, leads wanderers home, soothes the waves, confounds robbers, feeds the poor, governs the rich, lifts up the fallen, supports the unsteady, holds firm those who stand. Prayer is the buttress of faith, our armour and weaponry against the enemy that watches us from every side. So let us never set out unarmed. Let us remember the station (times of fasting) by day and the vigil by night. Let us guard the standard of our emperor armed with prayer, awaiting the trumpet of the angel while we pray. Indeed, every angel prays, every creature. The herds and the wild beasts pray and bend their knees, coming forth from byres and dens looking to heaven, giving movement to the spirit after their fashion with animated mouths. And even now the birds arise, lifting themselves to heaven, spreading out their wings like a cross whilst uttering what appears to be a prayer. What more can be said on the duty of prayer? Even the Lord himself prayed, and to him be honour and might for ever and ever."

I don't know many theologians who would dare the phrase 'Prayer alone conquers God'. It is striking how these early Christians believed that the way in which God's will works out in the world might be changed by our prayers, that he chooses to unite his work in the world to the prayers of his people, that he recreates the world at least in part through the prayers of the church. I can usually see how my work for God might contribute to his purposes in the world. I see less clearly how my prayers do exactly the same. I would be ashamed if I didn't turn up to work for the wider purposes of God's kingdom, but am I similarly ashamed if I don't perform the other part allotted to me - to pray, along with the whole creation, that God would "strengthen the weak, to restore the sick, to cleanse the possessed, to open the doors of prison, to loosen the chains for the innocent?"

St Paul's, Occupy London and the need for Repentance

The Christian church has always insisted on the necessity, every now and again, of repentance. Week after week in churches around the world, people are invited to admit their failings and sins out loud before everyone else in words of confession. It is remarkable when you think of it and not a little counter-cultural, to publicly express the fact that you are sorry for what you have done. After all in a culture always eager to find someone to accuse, who wants to stick their head above the parapet and invite the accusing finger of blame? So usually the default position of most of us (not just politicians) is to find someone else whose fault it is, and whatever you do, don’t admit liability.

Thinking about the strange saga of St Paul’s, it seems to me that the whole thing demands some real repentance as the key to moving on, and that in two ways.

I must admit on first sight, I shared some of the misgivings of the St Paul’s Clergy Chapter. If I were the Dean of St Paul’s, would I want a scruffy shanty town on my doorstep every day, spoiling that nice clean plaza outside the cathedral? If the encampment outside the Houses of Parliament is anything to go by, it would be unlikely to leave for years. For any group with unspecific and unrealisable demands, leaving always feels like defeat. I think I would probably also have subtly tried to move them on without too much embarrassment and just hope that life quickly gets back to normal.

That’s the strategy St Paul’s took, and it was disastrous. It made the Church of England look like what (let’s be honest) it often is – an old-fashioned, out of touch organisation, worried about its own life and survival, more concerned with petty Health & Safety rules and the loss of £20,000 of daily tourist income than issues of economic justice and poverty, or connecting with issues that matter to people outside the bubble of church life.

So I repent. I repent of my scornful attitude towards the protesters. I repent of not hearing God’s Word through them. Yes they lack cohesion and have a whole of host of contradictory concerns and unfocused grievances, but it seems to me more and more now they didn’t turn up by accident, but that underneath they are expressing something deeply felt by many, many people. Maybe they even were sent by God to show us, the Church of England for what we so often are – out of touch, deaf to real people’s anxieties and passions, insensitive to God’s voice, especially when he speaks to us through a rough rabble of face-painted peaceniks and anarchists. It is good that the Church seems to be beginning to get its act together with the Bishop of London taking a lead, refusing to take legal action against the camp, and setting up an initiative in ethical finance under Ken Costa, but it has been a chastening experience and one which needs a good dose of proper ecclesiastical repentance.

Yet it is not just the Church of England that needs to repent. Underneath the various agendas of the protesters lies a deep sense, felt I suspect by many people, that what has happened to the economy over the past few years is scandalous. It’s not so much that people hate bankers, or want to do away with the entire market economy. After all the creation of wealth is a vital aspect of a growing society – it has to be created before it can be distributed. It’s more the way in which a whole fantasy financial system was allowed to grow like an over-inflated balloon, with speculative deals involving the re-packaging of debts as assets to be traded when the money did not even exist, all because it made huge profits for certain individuals regardless of the social cost and longer term risks – that’s what went wrong. But even more it is the lack of repentance that gets out goat. A few bankers were named and shamed (Fred Goodwin for one), but how many have come out with a good hearty mea culpa? Where is the public repentance of the City? Where are the voices prepared to admit that they messed up, they goofed, they speculated with our hard-earned cash (or even with cash we never had?) and now it is gone?

Over the next few years we are likely to enter a period of real austerity, even tougher if the double-dip recession hits. Not as tough as Greece, perhaps, but it will not be pretty, with unemployment and inflation set to rise. What has happened has happened. We need to deal with it and there is no magic wand that makes it right overnight. Sending a few bankers to prison might make some people feel better, but wouldn’t change anything, especially if they fight it tooth and nail. What might change the mood is some genuine repentance. The protesters have high hopes for a new world order. But that can only begin with repentance, and sadly I see little sign of that from the financial sector.

Some kind of public act of repentance from those at the heart of the financial world would at least go some way towards getting us on the right track. I’ve no idea what that would look like (isn’t it strange that we have so few models of public acts of repentance?) but it certainly isn’t rising bonuses in the financial industry, Directors’ pay and perks. That doesn’t look like repentance to me. It looks more like hubris. Change always starts with repentance, because repentance makes possible forgiveness, forgiveness makes possible new relationships, and a new start with real hope that things might be different. Repentance in Christian faith is actually a joyful thing, because it is the moment of honesty, clarity and it always opens out a new beginning. Might that be the place where a new approach to ethical finance starts?

Leisure: what we are here for

On holiday in France a couple of weeks ago, we wandered into an old, but still functioning monastery. In the gift shop I saw a book by the German Catholic philosopher, Josef Pieper, called 'Le Loisir: La Fondation de la Culture'. I had read one or two of his works before, and this looked to be a promising title for a holiday, so I quickly ordered the English translation (Leisure: the Basis of Culture), and have been reading it for the past couple of days.

A lot of us think of holidays as a necessary break to re-charge our batteries, so we can shed our jaded end-of-year weariness and return to work refreshed and ready to go again. The problem with this view of things is that it assumes that 'work' is what we are here for, and leisure is secondary, something which only prepares us for more work. Holidays are there to stop us having breakdowns, and are good because they help make us better workers. We are really here to work, to labour and to produce.

What if it is the other way round? What if work is there to enable us to have time for leisure? What if we are here to holiday, and work is preparatory for leisure? The key question, of course, is what leisure means. For Pieper it doesn't just mean endless games of golf, watching TV, getting up late and eating lots more food than you really should. Nor is it a process of active, rational thinking, as if we are all to become professional philosophers, pondering the nature of being while we sit on the beach. It is something much richer than all that. Leisure is the ability to step outside normal life to reflect on it and everything else, and to celebrate it. It is to step outside the normal, regular world of work, and to see things you wouldn't otherwise see: bees, waves, rock formations, blades of grass, people's faces. Is is what Gregory the Great called: "the grace to see life whole." as Pieper puts it: "In leisure, man too celebrates the end of his work by allowing his inner eye to dwell for a while upon the reality of the Creation. He looks and he affirms: it is good." (forgive the gender-specific language - it was written in 1947).

Leisure in a sense, therefore, is what we are here for. It is not just 'time off' however. Leisure gives the opportunity for 'contemplation', a more passive and receptive mode of being than 'thinking'. It gives an opportunity for wonder at the nature of things, a realisation again of the miracle that there is anything here at all, and that what is here, despite riots, economic crises and tyrants struggling to hold onto power, is good. It also gives opportunity for 'celebration': the reminder and enjoyment of life as something not earned by our work and productivity, but freely given. So, if eating too much isn't the point, long, leisurely, relaxed meals with friends or family is.

Yet Pieper also has another valuable insight - that leisure depends on worship. Work is productive, focussed on results, ends, and If it is to be more than 'time off', preparing us to dive back into work again, resulting quite often, let's be honest, in a boredom that wants to be back at work again to fill the absence, leisure needs to begin with a sense that there is something more than work, chores, busyness, 'stuff'. When worship is missing, when we can no longer bow down before a God who is bigger, more mysterious and wonderful than we are, when we (or even the physical creation we can see) are the sum and pinnacle of all that there is, dullness results: "The vacancy left by absence of worship is filled by mere killing of time and by boredom, which is directly related to inability to enjoy leisure; for one can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost." Worship is in a sense pointless. It is not a means to an end, it does not produce anything: "the act of worship sets up an area where calculation is thrown to the winds and goods are deliberately squandered, where usefulness is forgotten and generosity reigns". Worship lifts us out of our ordinary lives and makes leisure possible, and vice versa: In worship we are "transported out of the weariness of daily labour into an unending holiday, carried away out of the straitness of the workaday world into the heart of the universe." Worship and leisure belong together. That is why we have Sabbath. Only worship makes leisure possible and leisure makes art, learning, education and culture possible.

So if you are on holiday, make are you don't manically run around doing too much. Don't forget to say your prayers. And make sure there is time for proper contemplation, seeing things you miss the rest of the time. And if you are not, then make sure there is some time today, this week (that's what Sabbath is for) for true leisure. For without it, we are missing something vital in being human.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Love and Death

This weekend, I went to two weddings and one funeral. A real mix of emotions and a chance to contemplate significant moments in the lives of several different people. The funeral came first, a farewell to Gerald Hegarty, a former fellow-staff member at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford, and a wonderfully gentle, humble, wise, incisive and warm man. Two weddings came next, of Lincoln Harvey, one of my colleagues at St Mellitus, marrying Tereza, and my godson Barney Morgan, marrying Josie Cooley. Both of them full of genuine fun, solemnity and happiness.

It got me thinking about the extremes of joy and grief, happiness and sadness right next to each other. What struck me was the setting of all three events - in Christian worship. In all three we said the Lord's Prayer, offered thanksgiving, sung to God and each other, remembered the gospel promises.

The big moments of our lives - birth, love, death, need a kind of 'frame' to give them shape and structure. Christian faith was the frame for all three, and it struck me how well it did just that. Each event, a death, and two celebrations of love and commitment as a result became part of a wider and bigger story, part of a bigger picture. Gerald's death was no longer a sad event leaving a grief-filled space, his funeral a brave but hopeless celebration of a life now snuffed out. Instead, his life was re-stated as part of the building of God's kingdom, and his death merely a transition into the presence of Christ, waiting for the renewal of all things. This was a real parting, with tears and genuine sadness, but with the hope of reunion and resurrection life still to come. The two weddings likewise became part of the great story of God's love for his creation and for us. The love and commitment of these two couples were an echo of the theme that plays at the heart of all things - God's heart of love that beats at the centre of the universe. They were not just an excuse for a party and for getting hammered, a brief celebration that these two people had happened to find each other, but a window into the nature of reality - the love and commitment that God has for his church and his world, and for the entire creation. They were snatches of the same tune that sounds in the heart of God, the music of the past the present and the future.

Without that framing, that fitting of each event into a bigger story, each one would have been important, significant for the families, but containing meaning only in themselves. Being framed by Christian faith, they became full of bigger significance, full of hope, even the funeral. When a life, or even a marriage or a death is placed in the bigger story of God's purposes since the beginning of time, running through until its end, then they take on a meaning, a weight they could never have on their own. They become what they were always intended to be - intimations of eternity, signs of life and hope and truth.

Alpha - the most effective ecumenical movement in the world today?

I have been involved this week in speaking the Alpha International Week at HTB. It has been a remarkable week in all kinds of ways, people finding their vision for church and evangelism renewed, making new contacts and friendships, and hearing all kinds of fascinating stories from all over the world. Everyone feels they know about Alpha, but one of the most remarkable aspects of it for me, is a factor often unnoticed from the outside - the extent to which it brings together an unlikely, but astonishing mix of different types of Christians. I remember the first time I spoke at one of these events around 5 years ago, pausing half way through my talk, while the reality of what was happening dawned on me. I was speaking to a group of around 70-80 people in a seminar, and I realised that in the corner were a group of Russian Orthodox, gathered around a bearded black-robed priest; in another corner were a group of Nicaraguan Roman Catholic nuns, elsewhere were scattered groups of Northern Irish Presbyterians, American Methodists, Finnish Lutherans, English Anglicans - you name it, they were there. Most of the time when I teach, I speak to (mainly) Anglicans with a few scattered Baptists, independents etc. But never had I spoken to such a group representing the worldwide church like this.

This past week, I spoke to a group of over 100 bishops and archbishops from a bewildering range of churches. There were Roman Catholic bishops from Colombia, Peru and Brazil, Anglican bishops from  Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Ghana, a Presbyterian Moderator from Belarus, Orthodox bishops with square-topped hats from Bulgaria and Romania. And those were only the ones I could idenitify - heaven knows where all the others came from. I went with them to Lambeth Palace on Tuesday for Morning Prayer with the Archbishop. It was a bit chaotic, with most of them completely ignoring the careful instructions as to how to say the Psalms and canticles, but the sound of the Lord's Prayer being said simultaneously in countless different languages will linger in the mind for a long time.

Having spoken at these things for a number of years now, I tend to take it all for granted, but once again this week, I found myself wondering where else in the world would you get this range of people in one room? Where else is there anything of comparable ecumenical power?

One the one hand it says something about the power of mission to unite. It is often conceded that the ecumenical movement of the C20th died a death of a thousand conferences, consultations, minutes, resulutions, agreement and disagreements. Apart from some notable succeses such as the churches of North and South India, there are precious few evidences of real organic and structural unity brought about by official ecumenism, and where there are, little evidence that the resulting amalgamated denominations arrested decline in any significant way. Focus on unity and you will never unite. Focus on mission, and you might have a chance. It is not accidental that the gathering I found myself in this week focussed around the Alpha Course, which is at the end of the day, an attempt to do something about evangelism in a difficult cultural context - an attempt to facilitate a conversation about faith in which people can discover Jesus for themselves. Only when we focus on something outside ourselves and our own concerns do we find some real unity happening. Ironcially, Alpha is ecumenically effective precisely because it does not focus on ecumenism.

On the other hand, it taught me about the sheer size and power of the Christian church when it comes together. Despite differences of language, culture, dress, liturgy, ethics, even doctrine, there was throughout the week a strong sense of how much we have in common. Trinity, Incarnation, Atonement, Church, Holy Spirit, the Future Hope - we might all understand these things slightly differently (and yes, being a student of the Reformation, I do know how different), yet the richness of classic Christian faith, the sheer weight of history, prayer, thinking, experience and suffering that binds this unlikely group together was almost palpable. Ultimately there is one church, not many, the church birthed by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, existing in many forms and shapes, with the person of Jesus at the centre.

Alpha is sometimes dismissed as simplistic or too corporate - we all know the criticisms. But it has managed to keep its focus on the key task of sharing the faith, holding it out to a hungry world, and as a result, slowly, but surely this 'collateral blessing' (as the Bishop-designate of Durham called it) has emerged, bringing Christians together in a way few other things in the world can do. I think Jesus might have liked it.