Here goes...

A Big Christianity - beyond Cameron and Chaos

2011-12-23T12:15:00.000Z

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

2011-11-20T20:27:00.001Z

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

2011-11-04T13:41:00.000Z

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

2011-11-02T12:08:00.000Z

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

2011-08-18T08:00:00.003+01:00

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.

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Love and Death

2011-07-03T20:21:00.001+01:00

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?

2011-06-10T14:41:00.002+01:00

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.

Williams and Cameron

2011-06-10T06:51:00.001+01:00

Two things strike me about the Rowan Williams media frenzy of the last couple of days. One is not so much what he says, but the level of interest in what he says. The New Statesman article is characteristically intelligent, thoughtful, perhaps even a little opaque at times, but if it had been written by any other person (except perhaps Prince Philip) would it have gained anything like the same coverage? On the surface it is a critique of current political debate similar to what you find every day in the broadsheets, but when the ABC says it, it has a lot more power. Christians sometimes moan that no-one listens to the church any more, or that our leaders don't speak out: but this shows the opposite. There is an intense interest when a Christian leader, as the voice of the nation's conscience, speaks to government, as Rowan has done.

The other thing is the level of misreporting. The piece seems to me a model of how to speak to government. It takes no sides, but has some uncomfortable questions for both government and opposition. The Government needs to explain its big idea more clearly. The Opposition needs to find one. Otherwise we are stuck:

"Government badly needs to hear just how much plain fear there is around such questions at present. It isn't enough to respond with what sounds like a mixture of, "This is the last government's legacy," and, "We'd like to do more, but just wait until the economy recovers a bit." To acknowledge the reality of fear is not necessarily to collude with it. But not to recognise how pervasive it is risks making it worse. Equally, the task of opposition is not to collude in it, either, but to define some achievable alternatives. And, for that to happen, we need sharp-edged statements of where the disagreements lie."

Does that sound to you like the one-sided rant the Telegraph reported, or David Cameron responded to? The PM seems to have read the Telegraph, but not the original article, which just illustrates exactly the point about the poverty of political debate that RW is making.

At the end, the Archbishop starts to lay out a Christian communal vision, an idea of a society which is about "the mutual creation of capacity, building the ability of the other person or group to become, in turn, a giver of life and responsibility". It perhaps needs a snappier title, but to my mind that is a more promising and attractive 'big idea' than either left or right have at the moment.

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Champions League Final - The best of the best

2011-05-27T16:59:00.000+01:00

I'm just beginning to get excited and nervous about going to the Champions' League Final tomorrow. It will be fantastic and I fully intend to savour every moment. This is a meeting of undoubtedly the two biggest clubs in world football. Here in the UK, we get use to thinking that Barcelona and Man United are just two out of many clubs in the Champions' League, alongside Chelsea, Arsenal, Inter, AC Milan, Real Madrid etc. I don't think so. Go outside these shores and I reckon there is more fascination with these two than any other clubs. Two vignettes to make my point.

I spoke a couple of years ago at the Yoida Full Gospel Church in Seoul, South Korea. There were around 10,000 Koreans there, and as a bit of a warm-up for my talk, I told them I was a theologian, but I also liked football. Sensing a bit of approval, I warmed to my theme, and decided to find out who they supported. I asked how may Chelsea fans there were. About 200 hands went up. I asked for Liverpool fans - about 400. Arsenal? around 300. Finally I asked how many Man United fans were there. Around 9,000 hands instantly went into the air. South Korea? No contest. Park Ji Sung has done his job well.

I was in Prague recently, and spent a day wandering around the streets. There were various shops selling football memorabilia, with a few scarves from Real Madrid, Liverpool and other English clubs. But one stood out: Barcelona. They were way out ahead in badges, hats, shirts, the lot. They even had Barcelona marionettes - puppets of all the Barcelona players, so you could (presumably) re-enact the moves that led to the 5-0 thrashing of Real earlier this season in your living room, with your very own Messi, Alves, Xavi, Iniesta and Puyol dolls.

Tomorrow is the meeting of the two best teams in the world. Club football is now far superior to the international game, and these two have the best support, managers, some of the best players in the world between them, and probably the best team spirit. I went to the final in Rome two years ago and was hugely disappointed United didn't win, but strangely was not distraught, as I had just seen a fantastic team win fair and square without any shadow of doubt that they deserved it. Fair play, and far better than losing to a dodgy refereeing decision, or a bit of bad luck. I'm just hoping tomorrow is a more even game, and this time the reds are ready.

The Queen's Visit and the Power of Weakness

2011-05-21T07:32:00.001+01:00

It feels as though something very good and healing has taken place during the Queen's visit to Ireland this week.

The Irish and the English are neighbours whose history is for better or worse tied up with each other. The bad blood between them doesn't need rehearsing, whether felt as '800 years of oppression' or outrage at IRA violence, but it has festered away for years, and left behind all kinds of tragedy and pain on both sides. And it is always tragic when neighbours don't get on.

I am, I suppose, an illustration of the relationship. As the son of an Irish mother and an English father, who grew up in England but spent most childhood holidays feeling at home with family in Ireland, I have always felt a bit of both. I have both an Irish and a British passport. I happily support England at cricket, Ireland in rugby and both at football. My friends are mostly English, my wider family mostly Irish. And I know many others like me. Being such a mixture, I instinctively feel that trying to separate Ireland and England, like Irish nationalism tries to do, expecting everyone to speak Irish, propagating the myth of Celtic origins that made the Irish fundamentally different from the English was crazy (that it is a myth and that we are close cousins genetically and racially was there for all to see in Fergal Keane's excellent history of Ireland showing on BBC on Mondays).

I remember being at school in the 1970s during the IRA bombing campaign and getting abuse and graffiti on my school locker for being Irish, then spending holidays in Ireland and being teased for being English. Such is the fate of the half-breed. But the Queen's visit this week has healed something. No trace of the frequent English superciliousness towards the Irish. No trace of the usual Irish chip on the shoulder towards the English. A good deal of humility on both sides, a touch of repentance and warmth.

It was not insignificant it seems to me that it came through a frail 85 year-old. If David Cameron had gone, with his Etonian confidence and air of superiority, he would have evoked all the classic Irish feelings of resentment and inferiority. As it was, this sense of harmony and healing came through a weak, unthreatening, quiet, polite and humble old lady. A sign again that the deepest healing and true strength comes not through power and force but through weakness, humility and grace.

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Location:Foskett Rd,Hammersmith,United Kingdom

Feeling hard done by?

2011-05-04T12:43:00.000+01:00

At the moment, I'm working on the 'Philippians and Colossians' volume in the forthcoming "Reformation Commentary on Scripture" series, and came across this vintage bit of Calvin, commenting on Philippians 2.21: "For they all seek their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ." If there are any ministers, priests, clergy out there feeling a little hard done by, badly paid, unappreciated, wishing they were somewhere else, hear what Calvin had to say. Typically forthright - he calls a spade a spade, as usual - but there is perhaps some wisdom here:

"It may seem at first sight as if it were no great fault to seek one’s own, but how insufferable it is in the servants of Christ, appears from the fact that it renders those whom it possesses utterly useless. For it is impossible that he who is devoted to self should spend himself for the Church... For it must necessarily be, that one or other of two dispositions rules in us: either that, overlooking ourselves, we are devoted to Christ and the things that are Christ’s, or that, too intent on our own advantage, we serve Christ perfunctorily.

From this it appears how great a hindrance it is to the ministers of the Church to seek their own interests. Nor is there any force in these excuses: “I do harm to no-one”; “I must also have regard to my own affairs”; “I am not so hard as not to be prompted by a regard to my own advantage.” For you must give up your own right if you would discharge your duty: a regard for yourself must not be preferred to Christ’s glory, or even put on a level with it. Whithersoever Christ calls you, you must go promptly, leaving all other things. Your calling ought to be regarded by you in such a way that you shall turn away all your senses from everything that would divert you. It might be in your power to be richer elsewhere, but God has bound you to a Church which afford you only a moderate sustenance. You might elsewhere have more honour, but God has assigned you a place in which you live humbly. You might elsewhere have a better climate, or more pleasant scenery, but it here that your station is appointed. You might wish to have to do with more cultured people; their ingratitude, or barbarity, or pride offends you; in short, you have no sympathy with the dispositions or customs of the nation in which you are, but you must struggle with yourself, and do violence in a manner, to opposing inclinations, that you may cherish the Sparta where you find yourself. For you are not free, or at your own disposal. In short, forget yourself if you would serve God."

Commentary on Philippians 2:21

This is one conference you don't want to miss...

2011-04-27T14:42:00.002+01:00

This is one conference you don't want to miss...

If the church in Europe is to rise from its lethargy, it desperately needs the power of the Spirit to bring it to life. If the world is to find healing from the ravages of climate change and environmental destruction, it will need the life of the Spirit to flow through it. If you and I are to fulfill our true potential as human beings, we will need to be filled with the Spirit so that we can be brought to the full stature of Christ-like people. For those reasons, I can't think of many more important things for the church to think about right now than how the Holy Spirit is at work in the world (and the church) today, and thus to long and cry out for the Spirit's coming with conviction and passion.

On Friday June 3rd, we are holding our next 'Holy Spirit in the World Today' conference. Last year's was a special event, with some fantastic speakers including Jurgen Moltmann and the Archbishop of Canterbury. This year's will take the discussion to another level, focussing on some key biblical texts about the Spirit, with some brilliant speakers.

Professor David Ford from Cambridge University has been working on a commentary on John's gospel for a long time, and he'll be offering the fruit of all those years of reflection on John 14-16 and what it says about the Holy Spirit and life.

Dr Wonsuk Ma is a Pentecostal theologian, missionary and Biblical specialist who will be speaking about the Spirit in the Old Testament, especially Isaiah, and providing an important perspective from a Pentecostal background - Pentecostals do tend to know a thing or two about the Spirit!

Professor Tom Greggs, soon to be Professor of Theology at Aberdeen, is the youngest theology professor in the UK, and one of the up-and-coming stars in the world of theological studies. He's going to be speaking on what it means to do theology 'in the Spirit' - how theology can avoid being dry and faith-sapping, and instead full of life and spiritual wisdom.

Dr Jane Williams, known to many of us, will be taking another key passage on the Spirit and exploring it in her own inimitable style.

Ken Costa, City banker, recently Chairman of Lazards Invstment Bank, will be sharing his thoughts on what he sees as a global awakening to the Spirit, shown in all kinds of unlikely places.

Along with those, there will be all kinds of seminars on subjects like the Holy Spirit and the Church, Culture, Ethics, Mission, Experience, all introduced by people working in the theology of these areas, people like Julie Canlis (author of a recent excellent book on Calvin),
Mark Knight
David Hilborn (who's just been doing some really important work on Anglican-Pentocostal relations)
Lincoln Harvey
Chris Tilling
Stephen Backhouse
Simeon Zahl (also author of an excellent recent book on Charismatic and Lutheran theology),
Sara Snyder
(and me!).

As well as all this, there will be fantastic worship led by the HTB worship band, and opportunity for engagement with the Spirit through prayer ministry and conversation. There will also be the launch of "The Holy Spirit in the World Today" - the book that came out of last year's conference - and a chance to buy signed copies of my new book on the Prodigal Spirit (a signature should decrease the value on EBay.....)

Basically, it will be a rich and fantastic day, an oppportunity to catch up with old friends, make some new ones, and be stimulated for whatever ministry you're involved with.

Don't miss it! To book, click HERE.

The Holy Spirit and the Purpose of Life

2011-04-26T09:09:00.001+01:00

Another excerpt from my recent book - The Prodigal Spirit - The Spirit and human vocation- Buy here

The Spirit unites us with Christ, so that we can know the love of the Father for the Son, as a love into which we are drawn. This also means that we find ourselves called into the mission of the Son towards the world. Bring ‘in Christ’ by the Spirit means becoming caught up in his work to prepare for the new creation. Our new identity leads to a new vocation, to join with God in his work of ‘bringing all things together under Christ’, ‘looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth’.

The Spirit does not do his work in creation directly. Alongside the Spirit, humanity plays a distinct role in the creation stories in the development and maturing of creation. As human beings are created at the climax of creation, they are called to ‘work it, and take care of it’ (Gen. 2.15). Humanity is deeply involved in God’s work to bring creation to its fulfillment, though activities such as work, art, technology and the scientific enterprise of understanding, naming and harnessing the powers of the world. The Spirit of God is free to work without human agency (after all, flowers grow, birds sing and forests breathe without the help of people), yet to bring creation to its true fulfillment, the Spirit works through human agency. Humanity always had a purpose. It was to work with the Holy Spirit in caring for the created order, and enabling it to fulfill the latent potential in it. Parents cannot make a child mature. They can however help to shape the child as he grows, forming his mind, interests, values and future career. Gardeners cannot make plants grow. They can however tend the plant, pruning it and fertilizing the soil to make sure it grows straight and free from parasites. In the same way, humanity cannot bring or give life to the creation – only God the Holy Spirit does that. Yet we can, and are called to shape that creation as it develops, giving it form, order and structure.

However when we remember the work of the Spirit within a damaged, broken world, we see a further role for humanity. Our calling is not only to help creation grow to maturity, but also to be involved in its healing. Of course, humanity itself is affected by that brokenness. We were intended to be involved in the evolving growth of creation into maturity, yet we have become part of the problem, damaging and destroying the very creation we were meant to tend and care for. Every harsh word, broken relationship or polluted river is evidence that we are complicit in the destruction of creation, joining in the impulse to return creation to the chaos from which it came, co-operating with forces of death, not the Spirit who brings Life.

The work of redemption requires forgiveness, cleansing, and a new creation, so that we can again take our place, working with, rather than against the Spirit in his work of bringing life and vitality to the world. The sending of the incarnate Son restores the image of God into humanity, and atones for the sins of the world. Paul puts it like this: “In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself.” (2 Corinthians 5.19). God’s work of restoring the broken creation is focused in the coming of the divine Son into the world in the person of Jesus the Christ. If the Spirit is to work with us and through us to enable creation to reach its full potential, that means that humans will not only need to be ransomed and forgiven, they will also need to be filled with that same Spirit, so they can be agents of God’s work in the world. The Incarnation suggests that God’s normal way of working is not to use people like instruments, like a workman using a screwdriver or a gardener a spade. Jesus has his own will, which he chooses to bend to the Father’s will, as happens most tellingly in Gethsemane. God transforms from within, gradually changing desire and will, so that people choose to do his will, rather than being forced to. So, for us to be agents of the Spirit’s work of completing creation, we need to be filled with that same Spirit, not just mechanically used by him. We are filled with the Spirit so that he can work through us to complete his work in the world.

There is a sobering side to this too. A sense of the power of the Spirit, the overpowering sense of the love of God can end up with a one-sided triumphalism. However, being united with Christ does not just mean knowing the love of the Father, it also means being united with him ‘in his death’ (Romans 6.5). Romans 8, that seminal New Testamenr passage on the Spirit, contains that solemn note of suffering hidden within its theology of the Spirit:

The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory. (Romans 8.15-17)

If we are united with Christ through the Spirit, so that we experience for ourselves the intimate love of the Father for his Son, enabling us to call him ‘Abba’ as Jesus did, then this text reminds us that we are united with the crucified Son. Our fellowship with Christ is a fellowship of his sufferings (Philippians 3.10).

When the world hung together

2011-04-20T07:42:00.002+01:00

I spent an afternoon in the National Gallery yesterday, in the C16th section. The painting that caught my eye was 'The Ambassadors' by Hans Holbein, a 1533 depiction of two French diplomats. Holbein gives an indication of both of their ages (25 and 29 - pretty young for official envoys by our standards). The one on the left is Jean de Dinteville, the French ambassador, the one on the right Georges de Selve, a young French bishop. Between them lie an assortment of items, a lute, some astronomical instruments, some books, and the strange shape of the foot of the painting is a distorted skull, only visible in proportion when viewed from the right hand side of the canvas.

What struck me about the painting was its sense of harmony and honesty. It is a scene of youth, health and vigour, two men at the top of their game, confident, strong and at ease with the world. One is a politician, one a churchman, in a world where religion and politics can live alongside one another as equally important aspects of life. The scientific instruments lying next to a Christian hymnbook, lute and pipes point a world where science, music and prayer are not mutually exclusive and suspicious of each other, but live quite comfortably side by side. It is also a world where it is possible to celebrate youth and energy, fine clothes and colour, while at the same time include reminders of death and mortality. The broken string on the lute and the cryptic death's head skull (even if you have to look closely and obliquely to see them) are both signs of a culture that could quite happily embrace the realities of both life and death without trying to erase one or the other.

It is beautifully composed, all in balance and proportion, luxuriously painted, and gives you a nostalgic sense of a world where things hung together - science, art, theology, politics - and a world where death and life, youth and age were not hidden from each other. The sixteenth century was of course far from a harmonious age, yet underneath the disputes of the Reformation (and these two men are of course Catholic diplomats in a court fast breaking away from the papacy in 1533) this pre-modern world had an underlying harmony and unity based around its Christian view of the world that our fragmented and pluralistic world can only wistfully imagine.

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A warning from history - how evil creeps up on you

2011-04-14T22:05:00.001+01:00

Michael Burleigh's book, 'Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda' is a long read, at times depressing and inspiring, but always impresssively erudite. One of the most interesting sections is on the Nazis extermination policies in the 1930s.

It started with the gradual acceptance of the idea (shamefully agreed to in 1930 by the 'Inner Mission' one of the main Protestant welfare agencies), that sterilization was 'morally legitimate', even perhaps an act of duty towards future generations, a necessary means of social progress. The next step was the decriminalization of voluntary eugenic sterilization in 1932. That again seemed a fairly harmless step. After all, no-one was forcing it on anyone, it was only for those who chose to have themselves sterilized on racial grounds, opening up the possibility that someone might choose to stop themselves bearing children in the future, and thus perpetuating their own race. The next stage was the possibility of sterilization at the consent of a guardian, for those whose own behaviour indicated that their children could end up being 'anti-social'. Once the earlier rubicon had been crossed, this didn't seem too bad either. After all, if the principle of the benefits of sterilization had been established, then a legal guardian worried about a teenager's behaviour might choose to save society the trouble and cost of future aggro by preventing any possibility that promiscuous delinquent youths might give birth to other promiscuous delinquent youths. It wasn't a huge step then towards the legalisation of compulsory sterilization at the decision of the local Party, who decreed that certain elements of society should be nipped in the bud and no longer allowed to replicate themselves.

From there it became feasible to imagine not only the enforced sterilization of undesirables but their extermination. After all, if you are stopping a particular kind of person from reproducing, why not go a stage further back and stop them living?

The point is that Nazi Germany did not suddenly go from a 'normal' society to one that could tolerate mass state murder of its own citizens overnight. It happened gradually, incrementally, step by step, almost while no-one, even 'good' people, noticed. It is to my mind one of the arguments that should make us pause before legalising euthanasia, however desirable it may seem to stop someone's pain. You never know where it will lead once you step out on that path.

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A Prague Goose and the Freedom of God

2011-04-03T08:30:00.001+01:00

I've just spent a weekend doing some teaching to a group of very focussed and impressive church leaders in Prague. The Czech Republic is one of the most secular countries in the world today. At the same time, the wonderful Tomas Dittrich who showed me around and the others I met had a deep sense of the Christian history of the country and its role in forming European Christianity. I loved a visit to the Bethlehem Chapel, the place that holds the pulpit where Jan Hus preached in the early C15th. For those who don't know, Hus was a radical preacher who mounted a rigorous critique of the church of his day, demanded reform and ended up getting burnt for his pains at the Council of Constance in 1415, despite having been guaranteed safe conduct to the Council. Hus in Czech means 'goose', and during his trial, he had reportedly said “Today you are burning a goose, but out of my ashes will be born a swan whom you will not burn". As you might imagine, Luther quite liked that line. I have often mentioned Hus while lecturing on Luther - it was when Luther realized in 1519 that Hus the heretic had been burnt for preaching views similar to the ones he was himself develop, that Luther began to realize he was on a different track to the papal church that was trying to bring him to book. Nearly six centuries later in 1999, Pope John Paul II expressed "deep regret for the cruel death inflicted" on Hus.

Hus identified six problems with the church of his day. They were these:

Priests who boasted of making the body of Jesus Christ in the mass, and of being the creator of their Creator.

The confession exacted of the members of the Church — 'I believe in the pope and the saints' — in opposition to which, Huss taught that men are to believe in God only.

The priestly claim to remit the guilt and punishment of sin. Only God does that.

The implicit obedience exacted by ecclesiastical superiors to all their commands.

Making no distinction between a valid excommunication and one that was not so.

Simony - the idea that positions in the church can be bought and sold for cash.

In essence all of them are a re-assertion of the radical freedom of God. the church does not possess or control God, much less dispense him to others. God is our creator, we are not his. And yet God gives himself to us in Christ. Holding that tension saves us from many theological and spiritual mistakes. It saves us from domesticating God, making him familiar and safe. At the same time it keeps us from making him so distant and mysterious that we can say nothing about him, or rendering him cool and unconcerned with our struggles and pains. Hus's blow struck for the freedom of God at the price of his own life is something for which we have to thank the Czech nation and it's fine spiritual heritage.

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Location:Prague

Translating the Bible can cost you your life

2011-03-26T21:57:00.001Z

In January 1530 a priest named Thomas Hitton was making his way to Dover to catch a ship to Antwerp. Walking through fields near Gravesend, a posse of men looking for a thief who had stolen some clothes from a hedge, stopped him & searched him. They found none of the stolen clothes on him, but they did find letters written to certain ‘evangelicals’ on the continent. Aware of a recent change of policy on ‘heretics’, he was handed over to the officers of Archbishop of Canterbury for interrogation.

Hitton had recently visited William Tyndale and others in the Low Countries, and had returned to arrange distribution of forbidden books, including Tyndale’s new translation of the Pentateuch and the Psalter. Hitton was quickly interrogated, condemned, and burned alive at Maidstone on February 23rd 1530.

Hitton was the first martyr of the English English Reformation, first of many to lose their lives on both sides of the debate over the

future of the English church and nation, over the coming decades. In all our enthusiasm for the literary beauty and grandeur of the King James Bible, published 400 years ago this year, Hitton's story, as is Tyndale's, is a reminder that the appearance of the English Bible was not a gentle, affair sorted out by committees, but was won with blood and fire.

Bible translation was a dangerous business then. It could cost you your life. It still can. This week, Mary Gardner, another Bible translator lost her life because she had gone to Jerusalem to improve her Hebrew so she could better translate the Bible into the language of the people of Togo In west Africa. She caught in a blast that tore apart a bus, part of the ongoing tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No-one had heard of Mary Gardner before. She is a true heroine of the faith, joining the ranks of Hitton, Tyndale and numerous others who paid an ultimate price to allow others to read the subversive and life-giving message of the Bible.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-12856418

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The Prodigal Spirit

2011-03-23T09:54:00.001Z

My new book "The Prodigal Spirit: The Trinity, the Church and the Future of the World" has recently come out. I thought I'd offer a few snippets of the book on the blog. This is a section from chapter 1, looking at one of the main themes of the book, a contemplation of Charlie Mackesy's sculpture of the Prodigal Son, which imagine the image not just as a picture of the Prodigal Son being embraced by his Father, but also as a window into the Trinity.

If we let our imagination run with this way of looking at the sculpture, it depicts God the Father embracing God the Son. In particular it suggests the Father’s embrace of the Son who is on the borderline between life and death. In this sense, the sculpture is a kind of Pietà, though not with Mary his mother cradling the dead Jesus in her arms, but the Father embracing the Son after his sacrifice on the cross. Bringing back the picture to its setting in the Prodigal Son story, the words of the Father: “for this son of mine was dead and is alive again” (Luke 15.24) makes the further connection with the resurrection. The image captures the embrace in which the Father catches up and brings to life the son who was dead and is alive again.

Now of course there are only two persons in the picture – the Father and the Son, which leaves the question: where is the Holy Spirit? There is no visible depiction of the Spirit in the sculpture, but the way in which the image affects the observer hints at the role of the Spirit within it. That second level, the way in which many people have found themselves drawn into the image and begin to identify with the son, held and embraced by the father, is a sign of the place and work of the Spirit. If it were just a picture of a father and son embracing, it would simply be an interesting portrait of what might even be a self-enclosed exclusive love. Yet it is not. We are invited, welcomed into the picture – even into the very embrace between the Father and the Son, so that we begin to experience that same loving welcome, the same life-giving embrace of the Father for the Son. The Spirit is this invisible dimension of the sculpture – the invitation to become part of the embrace between the Father and the Son, to know and experience the love that pulses between the Son and the Father.

Irenaeus spoke of the Son and the Spirit as the ‘two hands of God’ and how the Father does his work in the world through both the Son and the Spirit. It is a crucial reminder to us never to separate Christology from Pneumatology. It also suggests that if we can speak of Jesus Christ as the ‘Prodigal Son’ in the story, perhaps we should also imagine the Spirit as the 'Prodigal Spirit’. Just as the Son of God is sent from the side of the Father into the far country of a rebellious and hurting world, so the Spirit is sent from the heart of God into that same far country to draw creation back into the embrace of the Father and the Son. There is however a sequence about this. In the gospels, the Spirit is sent upon the disciples only after the Son has offered his life as atonement, risen again and ascended to the Father. Once the Son has been reconciled to the Father, the Spirit is sent into the world to draw it back into the heart of God which is the embrace between the Father and the Son. Pentecost follows after Good Friday, Easter and Ascension. The Spirit can only be sent after the restoration of the Son to the right hand of the Father (John 16.6). This is because the Spirit is related intimately to both Father and Son, and proceeds from the Father through the Son, from the very heart of the relationship between them, when the Son has returned to the intimacy of the Father’s right hand. In the terms of the Prodigal Son picture, the Spirit is sent to draw us into the embrace between the Father and the Son.

To read more - buy the book - here!

Bethlehem and Babel

2011-02-28T21:38:00.002Z

On the hill opposite Bethlehem stands this rather ominous looking Israeli settlement. It lies of course in the West Bank, and is remarkable not just for its location but also its size. It bristles like a well-armed fortress, square and aggressive, a metaphor for Israel's Goliath opposite the David of the Palestinian Bethlehem (appropriate,

I suppose as David is said to have been born there, even if the nationalities are reversed). It is perched on a hill, a monument to Israel's desire for security and determination to keep the Palestinians firmly in their place behind the security wall that has turned Bethlehem and its surrounding villages into what is effectively an open prison.

It reminded me of something, and when I got home I remembered what it was - Pieter Brueghel the Elder's painting of the Tower of Babel. It is both a pictorial and symbolic likeness. Babel was a human attempt to establish security, presence and a future without God. The settlements are attempts to establish security, presence and a future without justice. Israel needs security and has a right to it. Yet however solid the settlements look and feel, they will only ever be as substantial as Babel if they are built on land that not rightfully owned or foundations of fear.

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The most important water in the world?

2011-02-23T15:16:00.001Z

As I write this I am in Israel, leading a group of friends around the Holy Land with my (now) good friend, Dahoud, our Egyptian Coptic Christian guide.

The other day, on a visit to the City of David, the site of the small Jebusite fortress that David captured around 1000 BC, we stopped by the Gihon Spring, the water source that fed the fortress and subsequently the city that David built. Presumably one day, some prehistoric farmer drank from the well, and thought it would be a good idea to build a settlement on the hill above it, as it both had accessible water and was easily defendable with three steep valleys around it.

It got me thinking about the significance of this small stream of water emerging from deep underground. It seems so small, so insignificant. Yet without this spring, there would have been no fortress, without the fortress, David would not have tried to capture it. Without David's raid, there would have been no Jerusalem. Without Jerusalem, no Solomon's temple. Without Solomon's temple, no Herod's temple. Without the Temple, Jesus would not have set his face for Jerusalem, hence no cross, no resurrection. Also, no Western Wall, no Dome of the Rock, no Crusades, no State of Israel, no Palestinian question, no Middle Eastern crisis... the list goes on and on.

And it all stems back to that tiny stream of water gushing out from the rock in an obscure valley in the Judean hills. Can there be a more significant and influential spring anywhere in the world? So watch carefully when you drink from a spring and think it might be a good place to build a city.

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Lenten Generosity

2011-02-17T15:56:00.000Z

It may be a little in the distance, but Lent is not too far away. I am beginning to think about what I might do this year. I heard recently of a campaign run by an organisation called Stewardship, which is called “40 Acts, Give Out – Not Up”. The idea is that rather than giving up something for Lent, you do something positive instead, and in particular do something generous on a regular basis. The idea is that on each of the 40 days of Lent you do something out of the ordinary, something generous - giving something away to others, whether it is time, money, gifts etc. It struck me that this was a good idea for a number of reasons.

First, the great tradition of building character through virtue rooted in Aristotle and given strong Christian colouring by Aquinas and in recent times Stanley Hauerwas and others, suggests with reason that good character is built up by regularly practising certain acts. So for example, becoming a generous person requires repeated acts of generosity, so that it becomes a habit. This way it becomes something which is easier to do than not to do. The goal of Christian behaviour is not to perform the occasional heroic generous act, which is difficult and out of the ordinary, but to become the kind of person who naturally, almost without thinking about it, does generous things. This is the impression you get of Jesus. He doesn’t look like he is making some mental calculation all the time to give his time, energy and life for those who need it. These are natural acts that come out the person that he is. For us, generosity is nurtured by a blend of meditation on the generosity of God and creation and in Christ, and the experience of the overflowing love of God poured out through the Holy Spirit, and then repeated acts of generosity in response to this, which embed the practice as a habit or virtue in our lives.

This also struck me as a good idea because generosity is perhaps one of the major qualities which speaks of the nature of God in contemporary life. We live in a deeply acquisitive culture. In other words, we are told again and again that life is about acquiring things, buying objects, getting as many gadgets and toys as we can to fill our homes, lives and time and earning enough money to satisfy every whim or desire. Generosity as a virtue runs counter to all of that because it tells us that true life is about giving things away, rather than about acquiring them. To that extent, it mirrors the very nature of God the great Giver, who gives us the gift of Christ, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and our daily bread day by day. So perhaps this is one of the most counter-cultural Christian virtues of them of all and something which we need to learn more of. For that reason I think it is a pretty good plan. I still might give up something, but I will at least have a go at generosity this year.

Why England lose at Football and win at Cricket

2010-12-31T11:37:00.001Z

2010 has seen very different fortunes for our sports teams. The England cricket team is on the up, having retained (and surely about to win) the Ashes, the best competition in world cricket. The football team on the other hand had a dreadful World Cup, and if the recent home game against France is anything to go by, have not improved since then. There was a moment at the end of the recent test against Aussies that illustrated the difference between the teams and their approach. Having won the test and retained the Ashes, the entire England team performed the 'Sprinkler' dance in front of the barmy army. The question is: can you imagine the England football team doing that in front of England football fans? Basically, no. And I think there are a number of reasons for that, that perhaps go to the heart of why one team is successful and the other isn't - the cricketers realize that at the end of the day, sport is ultimately a matter of fun.

The barmy army are very different from England football fans. The cricket fans (a bit like Irish or Scottish football fans) will have a good time and support the team whether they win or not. There is an anarchic sense of fun about them that the football fans lack. I always find going to England football games rather depressing - there are too many wealthy bankers who are only there because they can afford it, or snarling racists whose only reaction to an England goal is not joy but anger and gloating. A glance at the barmy army song website - http://www.barmyarmy.com/funandgames/index.php?m=songs - tells you what you need to know - this is a combination of complete commitment and utter fun.

The England football team also has a joyless streak about it as well. I don't know if that's down to Capello, or the strength of the club system that makes it hard for the players to gel as a team, or what. But it's all very corporate, manicured and moneyed. You get little sense of a team working together, because it all feels so serious and intense. Swanny's video diary breathes a whole different world. Deadly serious about winning, yet having a lark at the same time.

Fundamentally, The cricket set-up, both player and fans have realized something very deep and important about sport that the footballers haven't. That sport is a celebration of the fact that we are not to be taken as seriously as we often take ourselves. God created us not because he had to, or because he wanted to use us for some purpose, but, so to speak, for the sheer fun of it. Out of simple delight. To out it more theologically or philosophically, we are contingent and not necessary. Life is ultimately about delight, joy and wonder, and sport at it's best reflects that. Of course there is a serious side to life when all that is denied, goes wrong and needs to be put right, but that mustn't cloud the deepest sense of sheer joy that life is meant to bring, and that sport in it greatest moments brings about. The cricketers have realized that a sense of fun can go alongside an intensity about winning that brings success, a sense of camaraderie that somehow the national football set-up lacks and needs to find. So for the time being well-done to Straussy and the lads. And keep up the Sprinkler.

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Location:Foskett Rd,Hammersmith,United Kingdom

Advent Sermon

2010-12-21T07:23:00.001Z

Preached a sermon on waiting in Advent, and why the second coming is hard to imagine recently at HTB - audio and video files are here - http://www.htb.org.uk/media/media/graham-tomlin/all/all/all

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Loving not Thinking

2010-11-01T07:21:00.001Z

I've been reading James Smith's 'Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation'. Very insightful. He takes what I have long thought the right approach that sees our desires as more fundamental than our thoughts. In other words we are driven more by our loves than our ideas, our hearts rather than our heads, our feelings rather than our principles. It is of course Augustine's anthropology reproduced in Pascal and others. At the end of the day we do what we want to do, because that is the way we are made. We are loving, desiring animals before we are thinking beings, and our ideas are shaped more by our loves and desires than we care to admit. So the key to Christian life and growth is not suppressing our desires but changing them. It is no use trying to get people to change by feeding them information, or just by 'teaching' them truth (even biblical truth!). First they have to learn to love truth. Smith puts it well - we are primarily lovers before we are thinkers or actors. Our desires define us, shape us and are more fundamental than anything else in us. Thinking is in fact our reflection on our desires and ordering them rightly, assessing which ones are healthy and which aren't.

Smith focusses on worship and 'liturgy' understood in the broadest sense as shaping our desires and loves. The practices we perform regularly educate and train us to desire what they point to. For example, going into a shopping mall draws us into a story that makes us desire to be part of it. It tells us that to what we really want is sleek hair, so we need l'Oreal shampoo, or we want carefree driving on empty roads, so we need to buy a Mercedes, or we want sex, so we need we need to buy Lynx deodorant. In other words they sell us a desire, a vision of what it will take for us to flourish, and tell us how to satisfy it. More generally Smith says it is vital to watch habits and practices we do regularly, so that we are educated to love the right things, to long for what is good and healthy, not what is destructive and damaging. He shows how 'secular liturgies' - the assumptions and practices that we engage in in malls, universities and sports events train us to desire a certain way of life or 'vision of human flourishing'. Therefore central to Christian formation is liturgy - regular practices that train us in desiring the Kingdom of God.

I have two minor critiques: one is that he focusses on the need to desire the Kingdom, whereas I would have thought the primary Christian desire to be cultivated is a desire for God - a subtle distinction but an important one. Certainly that's what Augustine would have said, and focussing on the Kingdom rather than God himself seems to me a little little like focussing on God's gifts rather than God himself. Worship has to cultivate a desire for God first and his Kingdom second. The second is that he overestimates the power of 'liturgies', however broadly understood, and underestimates the power of community to shape us. It seems to me we are shaped in our desires as much by the people we choose to spend time with as the practices we engage in. Choosing your friends wisely seems a vital decision is deciding what you will end up loving, and therefore what you will turn out to be.

Anyway a good read and well worth the effort.

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Location:St Albans,United Kingdom

I have seen the future

2010-10-23T14:44:00.002+01:00

Tonight I watched something quite amazing. I am in Hong Kong for a few days, staying on the Kowloon side, and in a rare spare few hours wandered out towards the water. I stumbled on something called the symphony of lights, a light show unlike anything I have ever seen. It involved all the buildings on the Hong Kong island side lighting up in all kinds of synchronised patterns in time with music drifting across the channel. If you know the Hong Kong skyline, you'll know how impressive it is anyway at night. But this was something else. Lasers, whole skyscrapers changing colour, flashing lights ups and down the office blocks, all perfectly choreographed along the shoreline. It was a stunning piece of technology, far beyond anything I've seen anywhere else, all the more impressive because it was just a bit of fun for the tourists.

If ever there was evidence that China and Asia are the future this was it. I felt like I came from a tired old continent, trying to shore itself up after a financial meltdown that means we are cutting back all over the place, while China marches on. Looks like Asia is the future.

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Location:Kowloon Park Dr,,Hong Kong

Life has to mean something

2010-10-19T23:52:00.002+01:00

Watched 'About Schmidt', on a flight to Hong Kong yesterday, the 2002 Jack Nicholson film about a man who retires from his career as an Actuary. Soon his wife from a rather unfulfilling marriage dies, his daughter is getting married to a loser, he has nothing to do. He discovers his wife had an affair with his best friend that he never knew about, he visits his old firm and his old school, but they have moved on seamlessly without him. He tries to stop his daughter's wedding with no success. He travels across America in a Winnebago, visiting tacky places and making drab observations on them.
It is the story of a life lived without depth or significance. It is the story of a dawning realisation of the need for significance and meaning beyond survival and routine. At the end he says: 'We are all pretty small in the big scheme of things and I suppose the most you can hope for is to make some kind of difference. But what difference have I made? What in the world is better because of me? I am weak and a failure. There's just no getting around it. Relatively soon I will die. Once I am dead and those who knew me are dead it will be as though I never really existed. What difference will my life have made? None that I can think of. None at all.' It is the saddest confession, the saddest story I have heard in a long time. Yet there is something strangely heroic about it. It takes courage to realise it, stare it in the face and say it. Not everyone can do that. That is repentance – the clarity of mind that sees our own emptiness and unimportance on our own. We cannot live without significance, without life meaning something. Warren Schmidt is Everyman, Mr Smith. Many are like him. Few get to the realisation he makes of the superficiality, the emptiness of lives lived without a broader purpose, without being part of a bigger story, a story in which they amount to something 'in the big scheme of things', God's scheme of things. To realise that is the beginning of wisdom. To do something about it is even better.

God Owes us Nothing

2010-09-24T10:25:00.003+01:00

This is the title of a book I read a while ago by the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. The book is actually about Blaise Pascal and the way the Catholic church rejected the Jansenist frame of mind in the C17th, but that's by the by. What has got me thinking again is the title: God Owes us Nothing. It's a powerful thought, maybe on first sight depressing, but the more I have thought about it, the key to a whole lot of wisdom.

Kolakowski's point is that this is essentially the insight at the heart of the Augustinian tradition in Christianity, something common to much mediaeval thought, to Luther, to Calvin and to Pascal. The book chronicles how it was firmly shown the door by the RC church in the Jansenist/Jesuit/Molinist controversies of the C17th. Although initially forbidding, I am increasingly convinced this insight is the way to a truly liberating way of life. If God owes me something – happiness, wealth, health or whatever, I will naturally feel short-changed if I don't get it. You regularly hear stories of people who believed in God, until a friend got ill, or died, or they saw some tragedy, or heard about the tsunami, or encountered real suffering and 'lost their faith'. I suspect this happens because deep down we think that God owes us something, and if God doesn't give it, then the problem is with God – either that he is unkind, or simply doesn't exist. If God owes me something and he doesn't provide it, I lose faith in God. To begin however from the perspective that God owes us nothing – that we have no rights over him, no claim on him, means that everything we do get comes as a gift – as a sheer delight, something to be deeply grateful for. Every breath, friendship, act of kindness, chocolate, football, strawberries – they are all gifts not rights. It suddenly turns everything about my life from something I feel I have right to, and moan mercilessly about if I lose it, to something that is a true surprise. Our natural cry 'it's not fair' when something bad happens to us reflects this same basic idea – that we somehow deserve fairness or justice.

To that extent the Dawkins brigade are perhaps right – we should not think the universe is made for us, that we are any more than specks of life on a distant planet, and we should give up our delusions of deserving divine intervention when things go a bit wrong. The essence of Christian faith is the faith that although this is precisely what we should expect, the surprise is that we do receive so much from the hand of God. Despite our insignificance, we have been privileged by God to play a key role on this planet of reflecting his image to the rest of creation. We do sometimes enjoy gifts of health, laughter, sport, music, shelter etc., and these are neither random accidents of a faceless universe, nor things we have a right to expect because of our inherent deserving, but gratuitous, free gifts from the heart that beats behind it all.

It is so much better to view everything as unexpected and gratuitous gift than as right. 'Rights' make us grasping, holding onto things and insisting on them – it centres life around me and what I deserve. 'Gift' makes us grateful, always delighted with the new things that come, and a bit more philosophical about stuff we lose. In the Christian life, if I think God owes me something, then grace and mercy will not seem a miracle to me at all – after all, it's only what I deserve. If God owes us nothing, his grace, the gift of Jesus, the Holy Spirit his provision of my needs are all miracles, things I don't deserve and thus to be given thanks for with a constant sense of wonder and amazement. This insight is perhaps the key to a truly thankful and (relatively) carefree life. It is perhaps the key to happiness.

The God debate – why does it leave me cold?

2010-09-18T08:21:00.001+01:00

There's something about the God debate that troubles me. The atheists demand evidence for God, and trumpet their confident assertions that he doesn't exist. The Christians (why aren't Muslims and Jews involved in this debate more?) argue back, fighting the battle on God's behalf. It basically boils down to the atheist argument that it is possible to explain the emergence of the world in its own terms, whether through physics (Hawking) or biology (Dawkins), with the religious coming back with the argument that even so, how can something emerge out of nothing? However the laws of evolution or gravity might provide a complete mechanism for launching the world and developing life, it is still hard to conceive of something appearing out of nothing at all, the basic problem the atheist argument has yet to answer properly, in my view at least.

Nonetheless, all this does slightly leave me cold and misses something essential about the nature of Christian faith and theology. Even if it were established by proper argumentation that God existed, if Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and friends suddenly announced that after all they were convinced and that God did exist after all, what difference would it make? Arriving at the conclusion that God exists is a long way from Christian faith. And of course it could never really happen that way anyway Jesus says: "If anyone chooses to do God's will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own." (John 7.17). In other words, it is only when I begin to act on the words of Jesus, to live as if it might be true that God is there, loves me, you and the world, that I will begin to know for sure whether Jesus and all those who say there is a God are right or not.

Christian belief is the kind of thing that only comes into its own, only becomes real when activated by practice, not just by assent. Until then, the arguments seem rather sterile. It is why when Christina faith becomes inactive and discipleship ceases, before long people often stop even believing in God in any substantial way. As George Bernanos once put it: "Faith is not a thing one loses. We merely cease to shape our lives by it." Jesus also says repeatedly '"Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it." (Lk 11.28). It is only when hearing translates into doing that we begin to understand. Christian theology cannot be separated from Christian practice, and for that reason, arguments over the existence of God that lack that dimension, that fail to emphasise that you only begin to know God when you obey him, will always ultimately miss the point.

Calvin. Luther and Barth

2010-09-12T09:01:00.002+01:00

Just started reading Barth's lectures on Calvin from 1922. He comes up with the surprising statement that 'nothing really new came into history with the Reformation'. He has an interesting contract between the enthusiast Caspar Schwenkfeld who thought the Reformation was the dawn of a new age, with Luther's conviction that it was nothing new, but the re-discovery or reintroduction of something old, the Word of God, meeting history as it did in the 1^st century, the 5th and every other time when the Word has made itself heard. "The world now faces God's Word exactly as it did two thousand years ago. God's Word always comes down on the same time". It is a broader, grander philosophy of history that sees the connections of history not the disconnections. It warns us against the kind of historical excitement that is always seeing a 'new generation arising' or 'a new day dawning', but a proper humility about history and a sense of the eternity of God and his revelation in contrast to our fleeting whims and self-important delusions of our own historical significance.

Praying in the dark

2010-08-09T09:01:00.001+01:00

I am not the kind of person who prays for people and they instantly glow or fall over. In fact most of the time after I have prayed for people, they smile politely, say thank you and nothing much seems to happen. I guess I hope it's been vaguely helpful and leave it at that.

The other day I met someone I prayed for about three years ago. He told me that after that prayer he had been healed of a depression that he had endured for about 40 years. Now this doesn't happen very often. It certainly doesn't happen to my prayers very often. I dimly remember praying for him, and it seemed like most of the other times I've prayed for people – pleasant but a trifle disappointing. It was just an ordinary prayer, prayed because someone asked me to, with just a modicum of faith that he and I could muster - a very small modicum of faith on my part. Sore knees and headaches are one thing, but I'm not sure I really think God can heal clinical depression. But he did. And in some way, my small prayer was part of that. Jesus said you only needed faith as small as a mustard seed for something pretty remarkable to happen. It shouldn't be, but it is surprising when you see that happen in front of your very eyes, because my faith was definitely in mustard seed territory, barely visible. I'm sure my prayer was not the key factor, and was just one of many. But it somehow blended with all kinds of other requests, tears and longings that were heard in the courts of heaven and resulted in this man's life being changed, the dark cloud of gloom lifting and happiness returning. If we can play a part in that, then surely it is worth keeping praying even if nothing much seems to happen. It is always worth praying, even when you can't quite bring yourself to believe it will make much difference.

Rev - a triumph?

2010-08-03T21:32:00.000+01:00

I thought this TV review from the Evening Standard tonight was telling and hopeful...

...while young men feed the beast in Edinburgh, a comic miracle is taking place on our television screens. Last night was the final episode of Rev, BBC's against-all-the-odds hit about an inner- London vicar. The comedy flowed from the kindly but flawed Rev, played by Tom Hollander. It was like Richard Curtis but with melancholy shadows.

London's curious coalition of C of E congregations — parents trying to get their children into church schools, black gospel, alpha, and the homeless and oddball — forms a tableau of humanity. I'm sure the Bishop of London recognises it, although I am certain he would not compare himself to the worldly and menacing Archdeacon Robert, played by Simon McBurney.

The struggle to be virtuous is the deepest human conflict and Rev is a painfully funny study of ambition, envy and loneliness as well as fellow feeling.

Great novelists from Trollope onwards have found literary inspiration in the church. I've been reading Adam Sisman's biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper, whose popularity rested on his Hitler studies but whose interest was in the drama and contradictions of religion.

Yet in recent years we have abandoned Christianity as worthy of study. Its richness has been reduced to comic one-liners or obscene satire. Secularists have been able to divorce the C of E from the rest of existence. Rev is a lesson that public taste and sensibility has a different centre of gravity to that of opinion formers. The joy of Rev was not just the unexpected size and breadth of its television audience. It was that, at its peak, it beat Big Brother in audience ratings. Television is Risen!

The Holy Spirit: Theology for the Twenty-First Century

2010-05-22T22:25:00.000+01:00

Well, our conference on the Theology of the Holy Spirit has come and gone. Quite a remarkable time in all kinds of ways. I’ll reflect more on it in time when the dust has settled. Meanwhile here is an article I wrote recently and which was published in the Church Times a few weeks ago.

What kind of theology is needed in the twenty-first century? Perhaps more than most, it is a theology of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit used regularly to be called the ‘forgotten member of the Trinity’. No longer. The last forty years has seen a whole host of theological work on Pneumatology from Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Pentecostal theologians, at the same time as what many would call an outpouring of the Spirit on all kinds of churches around the world. Karl Barth, towards the end of his life, famously dreamed of a theology which would start with Pneumatology rather than Christology, but which he, like Moses, was only allowed to see from afar. Now is a time to imagine what such a theology might be like, not just because of the crises faced by the church, but also the world.

Contemporary societies desperately need cohesion and a deep sense of common life and purpose. The fragmentation of the former eastern bloc in the 1990s, the religious conflicts that have shaken global confidence since the rise of militant Islam, the continued growth in the gap between rich and poor, all make us painfully aware of division and disharmony. The search is not just for a common set of values (probably impossible to find in an irreversibly pluralist society like ours), but a deeper common spirit, a sense of kindness, peace, patience, gentleness towards one another. These of course are the classic Christian gifts of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is for Christians the source of all community and cohesion. At almost every church service Christians invoke the ‘fellowship of the Holy Spirit’ along with the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God. The New Testament emphases the Spirit’s work in drawing what would otherwise be dissonant chaos into varied unity. The unity of the Spirit is not uniformity but harmony in difference – precisely what a divided world and church needs.

Then there is the ecological crisis. David Attenborough recently said: “I’m no longer sceptical. I don’t have any doubt at all. I think climate change is the major challenge facing the world today.” One of the central themes in biblical Pneumatology is that the Spirit ‘broods over the creation’ (Gen 1.2) and ‘renews the face of the earth.’ (Ps 104.30). The experience of the Spirit is a foretaste, deposit or firstfruits here and now of the new creation, the world that one day will come. The bold Christian claim is that the Holy Spirit is the hope for the future of the earth – that we are not alone in our attempts to save the planet. We are working with the Spirit of God who gives life and power to renew a damaged earth.

At the same time, the church, at least in western Europe, is also is dire need of a new start. Faced by scandals, moral and theological quarrels and numerical decline, if the church in this continent is to stand any chance of revival and renewal, it will need a fresh wave of the Spirit, yet one that breaks out of the narrow confines of the charismatic to infuse all traditions of the church. As Rowan Williams recently said: “It is the work of the Spirit that heals the Body of Christ, not the plans or the statements of any group, or any person, or any instrument of communion.” The church sorely needs a fresh breath of the Spirit who makes all things new.

Theology also needs the Spirit. Everyone knows how theological study can become arid, divisive and dull. Theology in the Spirit, as the Greek Fathers, for example, always envisaged it, is different. Rather than an object of theological enquiry, the Spirit makes engaged, worshipful theological enquiry possible, by bringing us into relationship with the Father and the Son – the God into whom we enquire with our minds. In other words, if we are to take the theology of the Spirit with full seriousness, it engages us immediately in the realm of encounter – the intimate closeness of being brought into the life and love at the heart of the Trinity, not just in theory but in practice and experience - so that our theology gets done within that experience, not outside of it. A theology of the Spirit will be a matter of the heart as well as the mind.

Pneumatology is not a rival to Christology. It merely offers us a new way into it, inviting us to know Christ through the Spirit, rather than just study him by unaided reason. Jürgen Moltmann once wrote: “The relation of the church to the Holy Spirit is the relation of epiklesis, continual invocation of the Spirit and unconditional opening for the experiences of the Spirit who confers fellowship and who makes life truly worth living." This sounds exactly what the church and the world needs today. In May of this year, Professor Moltmann, along with Miroslav Volf, David Ford and Rowan Williams all spoke at a conference on ‘the Holy Spirit in the World Today’ hosted by St Mellitus College, St Paul’s Theological Centre and Holy Trinity Brompton. It is a sign of the future. It is an example of the growing convergence of dynamic church life and theological work, a renewed exploration of Pneumatology in the context of worship and experience of the Spirit. This kind of serious reflection both on the rich Christian heritage of theology of the Spirit and on the experience of the Spirit in the church and the world has the potential to re-imagine a more holistic and dynamic Christian approach to the contemporary world. Pneumatology is theology for the twenty-first century.

2010-05-12T10:46:00.000+01:00

The new Robin Hood movie is out soon. The story has such power that it gets re-told in every generation - Errol Flynn, Kevin Costner and now Russell Crowe.

Maybe the story has such power because it appeals to something deep within - a desire for things to be different. The legend is well known – Robin Hood steals from the rich to give to the poor, lives in Sherwood Forest with the merry men and Maid Marian, and regularly manages to annoy the Sheriff of Nottingham. What relationship the story bears to historical reality is hard to tell. However, the context in which the story is usually set is significant. In the twelfth century England’s rightful king, Richard, had left the country to fight in the Crusades. In his absence, his brother Prince John had set himself up as king in his place. Not content with this, John had also inflicted heavy taxation on and curtailed the hunting rights of the peasants, who were already kept firmly in their place by a strict feudal system.

Robin Hood was the leader of a kind of resistance movement that refused to accept the rule of ‘King’ John,
and kept alive the hope of the return of the true king, Richard. When news began to filter through to England that King Richard was on his way home, and had in fact landed, Robin Hood and his followers began to whisper the news around to their fellow countrymen, who had by now given up hope, that the true king had not forgotten them, and that things were one day going to be different. For a while they still had to live under uncertainty and even oppression until ‘King’ John was finally defeated, but the news was out, and nothing could keep them quiet.

Robin Hood’s band of resistance fighters is a surprising, but not a bad image for the Church in the world today. They live under an oppressive regime, but have a sense of joy and lightness because they know that the present system is not the last word. They know that the true king is coming, and that things will one day be different. From time to time, they still remind the false powers that their rule is temporary and bogus, by acts of rebellion that recall the true king. They also whisper around the good news that things don’t have to be like this. The king is coming, in fact he has already landed, and we can happily defy the current powers and live instead under the laws and rule of the true proper king. It sometimes means they are out of step with others who haven't heard and think the current regime is all there is, but it's a much lighter, more positive way to live - looking forward to the day when all will be different and the usurper will be de-throned.

Political change can make a temporary and minor difference, but ultimately only divine action can bring in an entirely new realm. Christians are those who have heard news that there is another king, another kingdom, under whose rule things are very different. And this is the big story – the kingdom has come, in Jesus Christ. The king has arrived and if you look hard enough, you can see signs around that things are becoming different.

The Holy Spirit in the World Today

2010-04-20T21:52:00.000+01:00

On May 20th & 21st this year, we're organising a conference at Holy Trinity Brompton on 'the Holy Spirit in the World Today.' It's hosted by St Paul's Theological Centre and St Mellitus College along with HTB, and we have a pretty stellar line-up of speakers. Jurgen Moltmann is coming over from Tubingen, Miroslav Volf from Yale, David Ford from Cambridge, and Rowan Williams from down the road in Lambeth. Add to that Tom Smail as the grand old man of Pneumatology, Tom Greggs from Chester and a host of others doing seminars, and it promises to be a fantastic time.

I'm convinced Pneumatology is theology for the twenty-first century. The Spirit connects us into God, transforms division into unity, renews the face of the earth and revives the church. Those all sound to me like things we need rather badly in our world, let alone the church, so looking at the theology of the Spirit is just what the doctor ordered right now. To book in, go to http://www.htb.org.uk/conferences/holy-spirit-world-today - It's filling up fast, so book your place now!

Worship and Sacrifice

2010-04-12T21:00:00.000+01:00

In our church we were recently debating the needs of different worshippers. Do we remove the chairs, leaving a more relaxed atmosphere, with space to move around, lie on the floor, or keep them in, respecting the needs of older people (like me) who need a chair to rest their creaking limbs?

It got me thinking about the relationship between worship and sacrifice. Old Testament sacrifices were not only made to atone for sin - they were often acts and offerings of worship. Pagan worship in New Testament times also took the form of sacrifice to the gods. And although Christian worship assumes the prior once-only sacrifice of Christ, it still involves sacrifice, if Romans 12 is anything to go by. Worship does benefit us - it inspires us to devotion, restores perspective etc. but perhaps that is only a secondary function of worship. Perhaps the primary aspect of worship is sacrifice - the giving up of my own energy, time, desires, preferences, to offer something to God that costs me something because it is worth something. So perhaps the main act of worship I offer when I come to gather with my fellow Christians is when I engage with a form of worship that actually I find hard, or when I give up a level of comfort that I would prefer for the sake of my fellow Christian brothers and sisters, or even those on the fringes of the church, who love to worship that way - to enable them to gain some of the benefit that worship can bring.

If I am honest, although often I love it, at other times I struggle with loud contemporary music at every service and long for a little quiet Book of Common Prayer, or classical orchestral music (not the organ, please!). Yet I'm also aware mine is a minority and perhaps antiquated taste in contemporary culture. Perhaps my main act of worship is precisely NOT to insist on my preferred style and instead be willing to enter into a worship style that others find helpful and meaningful. Of course there are limits to this - we need to keep the balance between the elements of benefit (beneficium) and sacrifice (sacrificium) in worship. But if worship is an offering of something valuable, something we do ultimately for God's sake not for our own, then what we give up in worship may be more significant than what we gain.

Christian Freedom

2010-03-31T17:41:00.005+01:00

Freedom to choose is one the ‘rights’ we all think we have.Yet global culture today seems poised between visions of freedom that look more like destructive license, and ways of life that restrict the liberty of huge sections of society such as women, ethnic or religious minorities, or the poor who have little access to the wealth that brings opportunity. In the gospel, Christ offers us freedom, but what does that mean? What kind of freedom does he offer?

In 1520 Martin Luther wrote a short work called ‘The Freedom of a Christian’. In it he celebrated the freedom all Christians possess: “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.” In faith, a Christian is freed from the demands of law, of external human requirements that override personal conscience or liberties. The Christian enjoys what St Paul called the ‘glorious liberty of the children of God.’ Yet this is only half of the picture of Christian freedom in Luther’s mind. The other half he summarizes in the statement: “The Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” In other words, the Christian, having received her freedom from Christ then freely surrenders that very freedom to become the servant of others.

It seems at first sight an odd argument. What might make a sane person seemingly turn their back on the delicious freedom from obligation, freedom to choose, freedom to act as they wish, only to become a slave again? The most straightforward answer is in the simple insight that for the Christian, freedom is a gift not a right.

FREEDOM AS GIFT

In the Enlightenment, freedom was very much a right. It was ‘self-evident’ to Thomas Jefferson that ‘Liberty’ was one of the ‘inalienable rights’ of human beings as defined in the American Declaration of Independence. Yet ‘Freedom’ in the New Testament has a metaphorical power that it does not possess for us today – it is a metaphor of freedom from slavery. For a Christian, freedom is not an ‘inalienable right’. It is something forfeited by sin, and restored by the grace of Christ. It might not have been this way.

Because of this, Christian freedom comes with a sense of obligation and indebtedness. It is still true gift, yet it carries with it a sense that you are in the debt of the giver, not in a binding way, but out of sheer gratitude and wonder. It elicits the desire to do something, anything to honour the giver. St Paul, as usual, puts it succinctly: “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love, become slaves to one another.”

FREEDOM AS LIBERATION

There is in Christian theology another answer to the question of why followers of Christ are called to surrender their ‘freedom’ to become a slave all over again. A Christian anthropology does not see humankind as neutral agents, perfectly balanced between good and evil, quite capable of choosing one or the other. That was precisely the Pelagian heresy opposed by St Augustine and many others since. We experience instead a bias in our nature, an instinct to choose our own interests above those of others, to be jealous of those who succeed, to be angry with those who cross us, to ignore those who need our help. Christian redemption on the other hand offers freedom from such destructive habits. It offers freedom from a guilty conscience, and the power of the Holy Spirit in the discipline and fellowship of the church, to learn new patterns of behaviour and new instincts.

A Christian vision of freedom, is paradoxically, freedom NOT to do what I want. It means freedom from the compulsion to follow the slavish and often destructive desires of sinful human will – the very desires which as we saw earlier so often destroy relationships, lives and communities. It means the ability to say ‘no’ to actions and impulses which fail to express God’s will for humankind as revealed to us in Christ, the Scriptures and the Christian tradition. Christian freedom does not give me carte blanche to act as I choose, to indulge whatever desires may rise out of my heart, but there is a higher order of freedom, freedom to be who we were created to be, creatures capable of and naturally inclined to self-sacrificial love, freedom to say no to myself and yes to the good of my neighbour, wife, children, friend or even enemy.

We are experiencing what some commentators have called ‘the crisis of freedom’. The challenge faced by many contemporary societies is whether they can retain the important liberties gained through technology and political emancipation, yet at the same time, not allow such freedom to become destructive of the very things which bind people and communities together. This vision of freedom as the sheer gracious gift of God, which carries a deep sense of indebtedness and which evokes the desire to please the giver, offers a radical alternative to heteronomous repressive demand. At the same time, the notion of freedom as liberation from destructive and selfish desire, becoming capable of the very self-sacrificial love which God in Christ displays at Calvary, builds community and relationship.

The result is a vision of a community not (as in many ancient societies) where some are masters and some are slaves, nor (as in many modern ones) where everyone is a master, and none are slaves, but one in which all are free, yet are called to choose the path of being slaves of one another - only this time it is freely chosen service, not unwilling conformity. Such a vision of common life whether applied to a nation, a business, a university or a neighbourhood holds the promise of harmony which comes only through the willing, freely-chosen surrender of freedom. Yet it is the church, which first and foremost is called to live such a common life. Today, in our current crisis of freedom, that is perhaps its greatest task.

One the best days ever...

2010-03-21T16:18:00.000Z

Yesterday I took and preached at the wedding of Sam, our wonderful and only son, to the lovely Jenni. It was just a fantastic day all round. Jenni came in to Coldplay, they both walked out to U2, and in between, a really excellent band led some very fine worship with a great brass section. I preached on 1 John 4, with some help from Martin Luther. Sam and Jenni were on top of the world, loads of family and good friends were there.

As it was a Salvation Army church, the wedding was dry - not a drop of alcohol in sight. But you know it didn't make any difference. The evening ended with with everyone dancing to Aretha Franklin numbers with as much energy as any other dance I've ever been at. No-one got drunk, no-one fell out, no-one had to worry about gettting breathalysed on the way home - you wonder what the fuss is all about.

God is good. A great day - one of the best.

Three Cups of Tea

2010-03-05T18:15:00.001Z

I don't often use the word 'inspiring' for a book but I've just finished a pretty inspiring one. It's called 'Three Cups of Tea' by a chap called Greg Mortenson (and David Relin - a co-writer). Apparently it, and he, are quite well known in the USA, but I had never heard of him before my wife bought me the book for Christmas as it was about climbing and Pakistan, and she knows I have an interest in both.

Greg Mortenson was a child of missionary parents, and a climber who made an unsuccessful attempt on K2 in the Karakoram in 1993 After a fairly harrowing time, he survived and stumbled into a small Balti village where he experienced real kindness and grace. In response he offered to help, and it turned out they were most in need of a school - so he promised to help them build one. To cut a long story short, starting with no resources or contacts, he gradually finds the funds and the network to build this school, however this turns out to be the start of something big. The Central Asia Institute he founded (it sounds more grand than it is) has built 55 schools in villages across Pakistan and Afghanistan in the past 15 years or so. The book gets really interesting however in 2001 after 9/11. Suddenly the eyes of the world and America are focussed on exactly this region of the world as the source of the sudden homeland security crisis and the focus of the 'war on terror' The book gets fascinating at this point because it offers an alternative strategy to undermining violent Islamic militancy than trying to bomb it out of existence - Education. The source of much of the extreme Islamic tendency was the madrassas of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. If the people of these regions could be given a basic non-extremist education that steered them away from such centres and towards a more socially constructive way of looking at the world, that might do a lot more to build these societies, and promote a sense that the west is on their side than raining heat-seeking missiles on them, or failing to keep promises of aid and post-war re-building. He has a particular focus on training girls as they are so often the key to how childen are brought up and therefore often shape the future more than men.

Education as the alternative to war is a fascinating idea. So is the power of kindness and mercy to generate more acts of kindness and mercy. It is a parable of how both evil (9/11) and goodness (this story) are self-replicating and multiply. They tend to give birth to more of their own. The small choices we make each day for one or the other might have big consequences longer term.

United: The Religion

2010-02-28T21:28:00.000Z

Went to the Carling Cup Final at Wembley today. United were the deserved winners, even though Vidic was a tad lucky not to be sent off early on. Rooney is sheer class - even with a bad knee and a stomach bug he was still the best player on the pitch. He is the complete player - scores goals, a great passer of the ball, reads the game so well. Carrick and Fletcher were in control in midfield and Valencia was always a threat.

This came after leading a good Communion Service at college this morning (not good because I led it, but it had a great sermon from Simon Downham and some good prayer ministry too). It's not often these two big bits of my life - God and football - come together quite so adjacent to each other. I feel like I ought to come up with some deep thought to connect the two, but I'm not sure I can. Both make me feel more alive. Faith does so in deeper ways, with less danger of aggression and resentment. but football does still stir deep things. I'm just grateful the world contains such a thing (though I'm not sure you'd quite feel that way if you're a Villa fan tonight...)

2010-02-20T23:06:00.000Z

Tom Wright was at our School of Theology this morning. He did his usual 'New Creation' thing, but then spoke about his new book, 'Virtue Reborn'. Its interesting that a focus on eschatology leads to thinking about virtue. Once you start thinking about our future and the future of the planet, you have to think about the kind of people we are and will be. Its a link that was very much in my mind when writing my Spiritual Fitness, which also looked at virtue. The language of virtue is a fairly universal one and connects to both religious and secular contexts today. You don't have to be a Christian to realise you need to learn patience, courage and generosity. It's also language the NT uses quite a bit too, with the lists of virtues that comes towards the end of virtually ever NT letter. Virtue is the language that speaks most powerfully about discipleship today, adn Tom's book will do a great job at highlighting it.

American Beauty

2010-02-19T18:52:00.000Z

Just spent a very good week in the USA. I love being in America and Americans, but they do perplex me sometimes. Browsing through the bookshop in Charleston airport this week, I found all the Christian books (Rick Warren, Joel Osteen etc.) under the ‘Self-Help’ section. No trace of irony of course. It’s telling though: American Christianity has a fair amount of the ‘self-help’ variety: ‘Seven keys to improving your life every day”, ‘Six steps to build a healthy marriage’ and so on.
I guess a lot of it can be explained by American origins – a land where everyone came to seek fortune and prosperity. The ancestors were the ones with the initiative to get up and leave their home countries to look for a better life (unless, that is, they were slaves and didn’t have much choice). Built into the American psyche therefore is a self-made, you-can-do-it attitude, which explains why it has been such a phenomenally successful nation. It also explains the quick-fix make-it-simple approach: if you don’t help yourself, no one else will, so you need to take responsibility, get there as soon as you can.
That sense of needing to do it yourself is maybe why they are so reluctant to accept universal healthcare, which we Brits just take for granted. Even the more politically conservative British think the NHS is a good thing, and we just can’t understand why the Americans don’t want it.
Funnily enough, however, Americans also value character (witness Tiger Woods’ words this afternoon), and yet character takes time to build. It takes a sense of surrender – it starts with the recognition that we lack goodness, with the humility that recognises true Christian character as the work of the Holy Spirit not human effort. Its only when we know we need God’s help not self-help. It can only come through the work of God is us as we submit to the disciplines of the Christian life. Character doesn’t come in six easy steps. That is the dilemma: D-I-Y religion or the slow steady growth of faith-based virtue and Christian character – which one will win the day?

Airports

2010-02-16T01:31:00.003Z

I'm writing this in Washington Dulles Airport, waiting for a delayed
plane to Charleston (already 2 and 1/2 hours late), surrounded by lots
of frustrated passengers. It's snowing outside, which, added to the 3
feet of snow they've already had, is the problem. In airports life
seems suspended for a while. Everyone is waiting, in transit, nothing
is permanent. No-one wants to stay. It's a preparation for something
else to come. Relationships and conversations are temporary. It has a
superficial attraction to begin with - the delights of independence,
but after a while it just gets very boring. We need to know we are
rooted, we belong, that this world is not just a waiting room for
something else.

The End of the Pew?

2010-02-07T10:24:00.006Z

What is the biggest obstacle to the growth of the church in Britain today? Creeping secularisation? Richard Dawkins? Infighting over women bishops or gay clergy? Let me make another suggestion: how about the continued existence of pews?

For the first 1500 years of the church’s life, pews were extremely rare. In most medieval churches people stood or sat on the floor, with only a narrow bench around the edge of the building for seating. Eastern Orthodox churches never got around to having pews – still today in Russia and Greece, worshippers stand.

When they did gradually get introduced, pews were a mixed blessing. They were intimately connected with social division and hierarchy, with pews ranked according to social standing. The rich would have large grand stalls at the front and woe betide anyone who sat in the wrong one. They were exclusive then, and they are exclusive now. Pews today effectively exclude the 90% of people who are not regular attenders of services.

The problem is that pews render the space in churches virtually unusable for anything other than around two hour-long events a week. The building becomes a curiosity, hardly visited midweek except for a few ecclesiastical tourists who want to drop by, and the cleaners. A recent survey sent unchurched visitors to slip into churches up and down the country. 90% of them found the experience uplifting, finding a real sense of community. Three quarters said they would go back. Over 50% felt comfortable and welcomed. It suggests that half of the battle is actually getting people into a church in the first place. There is also evidence to suggest that one of the main helps in getting people to feel more inclined to visit their local church is if they are familiar with the building. Imagine for a moment we could wave a magic wand and all fixed pews could be removed from churches up and down the country. Churches could then develop into open, attractive space that could become a resource for their local community. This has a number of key benefits.

At the most basic level, it could become a source of income for the church that would help it fund extra staff, such as a youth worker, administrator or community pastor. Football clubs faced this same issue in the 1970s. Clubs began to realise they were sitting on stadia that were only used on Saturday afternoons and occasionally for night matches. So they began to excavate space under the stands and build on the car parks to provide conference facilities, cinemas, bars, anything that would increase revenue for the club, realising that it was a criminal waste of resources to sit on a building that was used so seldom.

Removing pews would also make churches more welcoming. With the best will in the world, whoever designed pews did not have comfort uppermost in their minds. Many clergy during a dull sermon have at least had the reassurance of knowing that pews are very hard to fall asleep in. When people are used to visiting pubs, cinemas and theatres the least they get is a padded comfortable seat. If they are expected to sit for over an hour in church, pews can come as a bit of a shock.

More importantly for the church itself, opening the building for local community use makes it friendly, rather than foreign, territory. Local groups - further education sessions, fitness classes, after-school clubs and the like - could begin using the building regularly. Increasing numbers of churches are taking out the pews and not looking back. They are now imaginatively reordered, well decorated and lit and provide flexible, attractive meeting space for all kinds of local uses. If local people are used to visiting the church for all kinds of other activities, as they did in the Middle Ages and before, the idea of entering the building for Christian worship rather than just the gardening club becomes a little less scary.

It also makes the space much easier to use for the church itself. Any church wanting to run its own prayer groups, meditative worship, after school club, Alpha course, fund-raising dinners, marriage preparation sessions, suddenly has flexible, pleasant space in which to do. Our church in London – St Paul’s Onslow Square - removed the pews so that at various times it operates as a drop-in homeless centre, a venue for marriage preparation courses, conferences, theology classes, and on Sunday of course for worship that attracts many in their 20s and 30s attracted at least partly by warm, open, attractive space.

Is this yet another example of the church forsaking its rich heritage for something trendy and fleeting? Nothing of the sort. How many cathedrals have pews? Precisely. Pews were a modern invention that served the mission of the church at one time, but arguably no longer do so today. As Sir Roy Strong, former Director of the V&A says: “until the twentieth century, the country church could be altered and adapted in response to the religious changes that affected the Church of England. Now the church is all too often frozen in time.” This is an argument for the return to proper old traditions of the church, with churches as genuine community spaces, for the service of the whole community and the mission of the church.

Such a change need not sacrifice a sense of the sacred. Sanctuaries and side chapels can be kept apart, almost as a reminder of the origins and true nature of the building for those who use it – a gentle nudge that this is not just another functional building, but a place where prayer has been offered for centuries, a reminder that even in the middle of an exercise class, we are in the presence of God. Art exhibitions, sensitive use of decoration, even noticeboards can all serve as semi-permanent witnesses to the faith for those who use the building. If we are serious about the survival and future of the church, we need to thank the pews for their sterling service, but tell them politely that their day is over.

A thing of beauty

2010-01-31T21:14:00.001Z

There was a moment of sheer football beauty last week. It was in the 70th minute of the Man Utd v Man City game. The ball came out to Wayne Rooney on the half way line, just to the left of the centre circle. Within about a second, he turned with perfect balance, looked up, and swung a delicate right foot, a sublime pass, lifted just high enough to drift over the head of the frantically back-pedalling defender, low enough to keep the right speed on the ball to keep the momentum of the attack, direction spot on, to land right at the feet of the advancing Ryan Giggs about 40 yards ahead. Giggs didn't score -Carrick did a few moments later. But it was the pass itself that was the thing of delight. It's rare to see something so difficult performed at speed with such ease and perfection. You'd hardly call Rooney himself a thing of beauty, but when you see something like that, it fills you with wonder and sheer admiration, just for the pure delicate joy of it.

God and the Haiti Earthquake - 3

2010-01-31T17:07:00.002Z

Three weeks on, the Haiti earthquake has begun to drop out of the news. the UN is beginning to get its act together and aid is starting to get through. A litle distance also gives the opportunity to think further with a bit of perspective.

The first thing is to put the event into some kind of context. Despite the tragedy, this is no unique event unheard of before, but just one of many natural disasters which occur with some regularity.
The earthquake that led to the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami killed 230,000 people. The earthquake in northeastern China in 1976 took 240,000 lives and left 164,000 injured. This is not the worst earthquake in recent history either. A quake in Chile in 1960 measured 9.5 on the Richter scale, whereas this one reached only 7.

Although such a disaster makes us feel vulnerable, under threat and at the mercy of forces beyond our control, a wider perspective like the one we’ve just noticed is significant. When devastating events like this happen, we are shocked, because into our quiet, secure, relatively controlled lives comes this invasion of deadly havoc. It seems as if things are out of control, chaotic and random. And yet even though it may sound harsh, while nearly 200,000 died, 10 million Haitians didn’t. The earth shook a few millimetres on its axis, but it didn’t crumble into space. 240,000 died in China in 1976, but the other 5 billion did not. Now this isn’t an exercise in compensatory theological maths, nor (heaven forbid) an attempt to justify the disaster, but it is simply to point out that from a theological perspective, while there is a measure of instability to nature, there are also limits on it. The stories of survivors are not just heartening – they are theologically very significant.

We find this theme in the book of Genesis. The flood (as it does in other ancient myths) wipes out most of the known world, but not entirely – Noah, his family and their animal crew represent those who survive and God’s refusal to give up on his creation. Moreover, God promises never to allow such a drastic flood again. Despite ongoing natural disasters, the rainbow becomes a sign of the ultimate stability of nature (Gen. 9.13-16). Although nature threatens to destroy us, it is held back, held in check by an even more powerful God.

A world with no moving tectonic plates means no mountains, no variety of landscape and no continents on which to live and plan a future. A world with predictable weather means a world without the majestic beauty of an Atlantic storm, the imposing power of glaciers or the vastness of deserts. The balance of climate and conditions needed to sustain life and variety on a planet such as this is very, very fine indeed. A little colder and we descend into an ice age. A little hotter and the planet burns up. Disasters like this alert us to the awesome power of nature. They also remind us of how in the grand scale of things the world is a remarkably stable and finely tuned place in which to live. Even though it can sometimes seem so, nature is not ultimately out of control. God remains faithful to his world and the people in it, by not allowing the earth to be destroyed and his creation undone.

But although earthquakes don’t make the earth break into a million meteorites, they do still cause death and heart-wrenching destruction to some on our planet. Nature is not out of control; neither is it completely benign. The question nags at us again: why?

In the world of the Bible, nature is not a part of God, an extension of his being and so worshipped as divine, as most ancient near eastern religions suggested. Instead it exists independently of God, simply because God chose to create something different from himself. Nature is not God and while we respect it, we certainly do not worship it. Moreover, it begins as something ‘formless, empty and dark’ (2.1) and the process of creation is described as God shaping, moulding and bringing something good & beautiful and life-giving from that empty darkness. The world exists against a background of nothingness – of destruction - which always threatens to undo what God has made, and return it to the chaos from which it came. The author of Genesis doesn’t try to explain the nature or origin of chaos, he just assumes it. And he presents God as the one who brings order out of disorder, something out of nothing.

Disasters like this remind us of the chaos. The destructive power of the earthquake took communities, lives, businesses and families and reduced them to nothing. It was destructive, not creative. It reminds us of the nothingness from which God has created life and beauty and order. It reminds us paradoxically of the miracle of life and existence, the very goodness of being here at all.

When Jesus was asked a question, he often replied with a question. And the Christian answer to the question of ‘why does God allow suffering’ is another series of questions. Why is there anything here at all? Why does the planet and the life upon it survive? Why is life so precious to us? Why is the world in fact a remarkable stable and finely balanced place to live? And why is God apparently still so concerned with it despite its pain, he sends his only Son that we might have the life he intended for us?

God and the Haiti Earthquake 2

2010-01-24T19:52:00.002Z

Events like the Haiti earthquake raise another question - if God can intervene to perform miracles sometimes, why doesn't he do it more often? If he can answer specific prayers, why can't he intervene to stop disasters like this? This is more than an academic question - it can be heartbreaking to pray for something for ages and it doesn't happen, or to to watch someone suffer while you pray desperately for healing that doesn't come, while God seems to happily find parking spaces for other people or answer seemingly trivial prayers. As always on here, only time for a brief answer, but here goes...

One attractive, logically possible option is to conclude that God does not intervene at all. He lets the world roll on its tracks, and refuses to step in. It is the Deist approach that God created but refuses from then on to intervene in the world. Yet a God who refused to intervene at all is a God who looks uncaring on the suffering of the world. This would be a God who refused to answer any of the heartfelt prayers of his people on principle. The Deist God looks on Haiti with a distant and impassive gaze. This is the God of the Greeks, not the Christians.

The opposite view is that God intervenes all the time. This would seem to convey God's love for the world more than the Deist option. Yet does it really? In 'Hey Nostradamus', one of Douglas Coupland's novels, the narrator comments on an enthusiastic Christian group: "They're always asking for miracles, and finding them everywhere. Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God - I think that he created an order for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding Him with requests for miracles, we're also asking that He unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon, not a world." It's a good take on the issue. The order of the world is necessary if we are to feel safe in it. A world with order, that follows certain reasonably predictable paths, where events happen with regularity is a world that can be trusted and relied on. For God to preserve that order means that by definition, miracles, if they happen, must be relatively rare. For us to feel safe in the world requires that miracles don't happen every time we sneeze.

One solution denies the goodness and reliability of God. The other denies the goodness and reliability of creation. Only one option preserves both - the idea that miracles do happen, but rarely. Out of love and compassion for his creation, God does intervene on occasion, to remind us that he is there, he loves us and will one day heal the whole of creation in the same way as he heals bits of it here and now. Yet he cannot and will not destroy the basic order of the cosmos. He will not "unravel the fabric of the world.", yet he also will not leave us without tangible assurances, concrete reminders that he is love and that he is ultimately in control.

Luther on Prayer

2010-01-23T14:08:00.001Z

Some of those who came to the HTB / SPTC 'School of Prayer' today (or anyone else who wants to learn how to pray, for that matter), might want to read the work of Luther on Prayer that I spoke about. It's called 'A Simple Way to Pray', was written in 1535 and contains some simple yet brilliant insights into prayer and how Luther himself prayed. You can find it here - A Simple Way to Pray.

If you want to be part of HTB's growing prayer movement, you might try looking at the Prayerforce site.

God and the Haiti Earthquake

2010-01-20T21:04:00.001Z

The Haiti earthquke is a tragedy on any account. Natural disaster meets human disorganisation. As always on these occasions, the question soon appears on the horizon of where God is in it all. Various things have been given by good church leaders, but a couple of people have said to me over the last weeek that they've all been a bit unsatisfactory. So I thought I'd have a go.

The world God made in the beginning was good, but not complete. It was ‘perfect’ in the sense that we say a baby is ‘perfect’. It was just as it was meant to be. However it has to grow, to be shaped, controlled, learning obedience, just as a child does as she grows into maturity. Even more so since the fall, when it seems even the earth itself shares in the brokenness of sin – the earth no longer co-operates with humanity, making work and survival toilsome and hard. (Gen 3.17-19). Genesis tells us that humans were placed in the world with the primary purpose of ‘filling’ and ‘subduing’ (1.28) the earth, not to exploit it, but to bring it order and shape & enable it to become what it was meant to be (2.15, 19).

As the story proceeds, it says that humankind typically refuses to play that role and we refuse our God-given role as stewards and tenants of creation under God’s rule, setting ourselves up as the rightful owners and rulers of the world and our lives, as Genesis 3 tells us. As a result humanity is now part of the problem as well as part of the solution. In fact, if there is a threat to the survival of the planet it comes more from human weaponry and the desire for power – the numbers killed by the Haiti earthquake pale in comparison to the 8 million who died under Hitler, the 20 million deaths under Stalin, or even the 4 million who died in the civil war in the Congo in recent years.

So, not only does the creation have to be controlled and subdued as it grows, but also humans themselves have to grow back into that maturity of character God intended for them. And that is what is made possible for us in Christ.

Jesus Christ is the clearest picture we are given of what it means to be fully and perfectly human. And what does he do? He stills the storm, calms the waves, heals the sick and raises the dead, bringing order and control to the world. He is given power because he will not use it for himself. And it is by becoming like him that we can be entrusted again with the power to rule over and subdue the earth without exploiting and abusing it and each other. Power without goodness is a dangerous thing. (Incidentally, all this makes sense of a whole number of things – evolution as God’s intended means of the development of creation, the movement of tectonic plates to gradually create land and sea over time, the important role of science and technology as a God-intended means of bringing order to the world, and the central need for individual spiritual growth into maturity in Christ.)

Earthquakes happen frequently off the Pacific coast of the USA. Yet they rarely cause this scale of disaster. The difference is that early warning systems, careful building and a communication infrastructure ensure they cause little damage. The fact that they were not in place in Haiti may be due to false priorities among those governments, or the miserliness of richer countries in being stingy with aid before the tragedy. But the development of such technology is from a Christian perspective, exactly part of God’s providential care for his world through his human stewards and agents.

God's chosen means for continuing to bringing order and maturity to this world out of the chaos from which it came, is humankind – his image, intended to reflect his nature. And so he also calls us to grow in the qualities which will make us truly share his image – love, compassion, self-sacrifice, generosity, kindness, wisdom – qualities which will enable us to care for, bring order to and control his world wisely. And these we can most fully learn in relationship to God himself in Christ.

Ultimately the Bible does not try to offer us a neat easy answer to the question of suffering. We could speculate – such events teach us courage and compassion; they warn us not to worship nature but to worship God; they keep us in our places by humbling us and stopping us get too grand ideas about ourselves. But at the end of the day, although they can give some sense and comfort, maybe none of these fully satisfy. What we are given in the Bible is an assurance that God is good and can be trusted as much as we can trust that the sun will rise tomorrow as it has done today. But the final reason we can trust him is because of the very thing we celebrated the weeks before the Haitian earthquake – his gift of Christ to us – his coming to us in human flesh as a pledge of his compassion, power and love right in the middle of a world like this.

More to follow on this one....

Why we should get rid of 'Faith Groups'

2010-01-15T14:18:00.001Z

In our multi-cultural and multi-ethnic society, a new phrase has entered our vocabulary: Faith Groups. Its way of describing religious groupings, those who apparently have a ‘faith’ that influences the way they view the world and motivates what they do – it includes Christians (like me), Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists (kind of), Sikhs etc. Sometimes they are called ‘faith communities’ but the idea is the same, and it is common government-speak including the report on “Faith Groups in the Community - Working Together: Co-operation between Government and Faith Communities” in February 2004.

You might think this was good news for religions – belated recognition for their important role in society, and encouraging them to make a greater contribution. It has to be said, much of the language about faith groups does verge on the patronising, but that’s not what raises big questions about this designation. The question is, what counts as a faith group? And what are all the others? What about secular humanists, atheists, socialists, communists, conservatives? What are they? They also are united by certain core beliefs about human life and its purpose, are motivated for action in society, and attempt to build a better one by those beliefs. So what are they, if they are not Faith Groups? Reason groups? Truth groups? The problem with ‘Faith Groups’ is that is boxes religions into a special category, as if religious people alone have a ‘faith’ (something which we assume to be a lesser form of knowledge than ‘proof’ or ‘reason’) and the others are based on something other than faith. Now of course atheists, conservatives, socialists and secular humanists have faith. All of them adopt certain contentious beliefs about the world that go beyond the available evidence such as that we are alone in the universe without any superior being (atheism), that minimal government is the best way for society to function (conservatism), or that some kind of state intervention to force equality is necessary for social justice (socialism). All of these are contested notions, adopted by faith, and none the worse for that. This is not to belittle these positions or to argue that they are false, but simply to call them what they are: positions adopted through faith.

So if the designation ‘faith groups’ is of little use to us, how then should we speak? A better way would be to think of the different ‘narratives’ or ‘stories’ we tell about the world that determine how we behave within it. For example, Christians are not people who somehow adopt a ‘faith’ while secular humanists don’t. They just live by a different story. Both Christians and secular humanists have a story, and, if they have any integrity, seek to live by them. The Christian story tells us that we are made by a good God who created the world, that evil subsequently spoiled the goodness of creation, that God is working to redeem and bring it to completion, and through Christ we can be saved from our sins and become involved in that work of redemption. Again this isn’t to prove the truth of this story over against others. It’s simply to say this is the story that Christians live by. Everyone lives by a story. Everyone has a faith. So let’s stop pretending that only some do.

A new blog site

2010-01-12T20:38:00.000Z

I've moved to this new site - gives a few more options. I have still resisted facebook, twitter and everything else (OK I do have a facebook page but hardly ever use it). I don't think the world really needs to know when I'm hungry or bored. Don't thinkI want to know when I'm hungry or bored. So this will try to remain reasonably untrivial (apart from the occasional reference to Bristol City - not that thst is at all trivial, you understand...)

A Pagan Christmas?

2010-01-10T20:39:00.004Z

There were a few stories going around before Christmas about the revival of paganism, the winter solstice, with druids dancing around Stonehenge and uttering long-lost pagan oaths. It brought up the old stories of Christmas being a pale Christian version of good old pagan revelry in the depths and darkness of winter. Yet there was a good reason why Europeans gave up on paganism.
I spent part of Christmas reading G.K. Chesterton's Life of Francis of Assisi, quotable and pithy as GKC always is. He had a very interesting theory about the 'Dark Ages' - the period after the end of the Roman empire when nothing much seemed to happen in European culture, before it began to flower in the C12th and C13th. Perhaps, he argued, these were a kind of purging of paganism from European life and mind, before the heights of a Christian culture could begin to emerge?
Paganism is at its heart, the worship of nature, the worship of things as they are, or at least seem to be. The great problem with the worship of nature though, is that nature is often pretty unpleasant and cruel. Forest fires, tsunamis and earthquakes don't teach us much about forgiveness and grace. They are indiscriminate and deadly. No point in praying to them for mercy. Even our own nature is a dubious thing - as much full of jealousy and malice as goodness and love. The Christian argument against paganism was always that nature is flawed and for that reason it is at best pointless, at worst dangerous to worship it. Because if you worship something cruel and hreatless, you become cruel and heartless. You only have to wander around the Colisseum at Rome and realise the grisly delight in pain and death for which that building was built, to realise that paganism's entertainment industry was unpleasant to say the least. A culture that enjoyed watching slaves die, that made condemned criminals play the parts of characters to be murdered in plays so the audience could watch a real death on stage was only relflecting the nature of the gods it worshipped.
We had to learn to view nature with a bit of healthy scepticism, realising that it is not evil (God after all made it) but it is flawed. We needed to worship something better, someone better, who is at heart love, mercy and grace, not twisted and unjust. Chesterton's point was it took us almost a millenium to unlearn that destructive worship of nature. Only then could Europeans return to nature, as Francis did, to learn to respect it and enjoy its beauty as a creature not a god, without the temptation to worship it again. By his time, the average European had "stripped his soul of the the last rag of nature worship, and could return to nature." A bit strange then that we are tempted to look back at the pagan past with rosy-tinted fondness. It was always a culture of darkness that celebrated blind and pitiless fate, rather than the one that gradually replaced it, began to learn to glory in the world as the gift of a good, gracious and merciful God.

A warning from history - how evil creeps up on you

2001-01-01T00:00:00.000Z