MetaCatholic

I continue to be amazed at some of the search terms that land people somewhere on this blog. I’d be fascinated to know what other weird terms my fellow-bloggers have found. I thought, before vanishing from cyberspace for a few days to run a training weekend, that I’d reflect on a few of them.

Unlike my previous round-up of searches, this time I seem to be going through a bout of sex-related terms, including:

• gay slaves
• sex positions
• sex pics
• hermione sex
• harry and ginny having sex

Now I really, really do not want to think of the mentality that leads to the last two of that group, but what really baffles me here, is that given the huge amount of porn and sex related stuff on the web, how come they’re even finding me with these terms. Are they clicking through to the 9,999th link Google returns, or what? And how sad is that?

Then there are terms where I honestly don’t know what people thought they were looking for:

• bafflement headword
  (well, that one has me baffled)
• reinstall google
  (er, does the mean Google desktop? Or what)
• Venn diagram of babylonia and assyria
  (sorry, I don’t quite see how a Venn diagram would help you here)
• English idiomatic bread
  (nope, no idea)
• May 13th 2007
  (What do you want, every blog posted on this date?)
• evolution of women
  (in what sense, are they another species?)

And finally two that seem to concern my fellow bloggers:

• jim needs
  (He certainly does)
• anglican michael bird
  (Yes, even Baptists can be saved)

written by doug

I know it’s got its faults as a translation, but I’ve always (as one or two previous posts indicate) had a great fondness for the Jerusalem Bible. I suspect that one reason for it is that as Catholics just set free by Vatican II, its translators weren’t constrained by centuries of Bible English. More successfully than the NEB (perhaps because less contrived) it finds a natural English style, often appropriately colloquial, but at the same time draws on a wider English vocabulary, and more literary range of expression than most dynamic equivalence Bibles There are some particularly good examples in the story of Paul in Athens (Acts 17:16 ff) After each example I quote what seem to me the better among several other translations.

Verse 18 a
Some said: “Does this parrot know what he’s talking about?” (JB)
Some said, “What is this pseudo-intellectual trying to say?” (HCSB)
Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” (NIV)

Verse 18 b
“He sounds like a propagandist for some outlandish gods” (JB)
“He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” (NIV)

Verse 21
The one amusement the Athenians and the foreigners living there seem to have, apart from discussing the latest ideas, is listening to lectures about them.” (JB)
All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas. (NIV)

Now in all of these, I freely admit the JB tends to paraphrase, and tips outright into it in the last of these examples, while catching Luke’s scorn to perfection. But they are all examples of how often the text sounds fresh, English and natural. This is a translation that is too easily overlooked in Protestant circles, and while I’m glad that the New Jerusalem Bible has toned down some of the JB’s flights of fancy, and textual adventurousness, I still regret that it has lost some of these touches of genius that could make reading the text a verbal delight.

written by doug

Once or twice lately I’ve endured acts of worship where everything was projected on screen – often with bad typography and clashing visuals. But the main thing that made these experiences bad, in my view, was a complete sense of disempowerment. This was not “our” worship: it was simply us responding like Pavlov’s dogs to whatever the projector flashed up in front of us, with no sense of direction, structure or familiarity to enable ownership of the liturgy.

Something can and should be done about this, and a very simple way of giving people some sense of where they are and where things are going is this:

A line across the top of the slide (and every slide) setting out the main structure of the liturgy, with the current section highlighted, helps people locate themselves, and so participate not just in the moment but in the movement.

Having said that, this is still not my preference for something that follows a regular and pattern. People should, I think, be encouraged to learn and own common and frequently used texts, and inhabit the structure, so that worship flows freely, and can handle interruptions, or even common extemporarily offered prayer and praise. Visitors, and those learning their way around, can have simple cards or booklets, but these should be treated more as a pair of stabilizing wheels on a child’s bicycle, a learning device to enable participation. (In fact, everyone should have them, so visitors and learners don’t feel marked out, but people should not be encouraged to depend on them, but use them as learning aids / comfort blankets.)

The projector should be used primarily:

• For people’s texts, when the occasion is not a regular liturgy
• For people’s texts, when they are supplemental to the normal repertoire
• For musical texts, when one wants to encourage freedom of bodily expression
• For visuals, when wants to enhance what is going on
• For specific uses such as visual aids to prayer, or meditations in pictures

But, in my experience, and in my prejudice, constant use of the projector for everything is simply a technological return to an old-fashioned one-man band, where everyone does what the leader tells them. Am I just being grumpy?

written by doug

Dan Wallace, on Parchment and Pen has an interesting post on Pauline Scatology, in which he can’t quite bring himself to say “shit”, even though he thinks it’s the best translation of σκύβαλα (refuse, dung, garbage – Phil 3:8). I’m personally not entirely convinced (see Sirach 27:4) though it’s quite possible. But I do think his subsidiary point is well taken, that there is more abusive language in the Bible than we think. (His main point is how to reconcile the texts that tell us not to be abusive in our speech with the texts that clearly are)

Another example he gives is Galatians 5:12, where the NRSV gets it about right

I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves! (NRSV).
As for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves! (TNIV – a little coy)

Actually, my favourite, because it sounds so English (and humourous – Lingamish please note) is the original Jerusalem Bible:

Tell those who are disturbing you I would like to see the knife slip

I have a recollection that the earliest printings of the UK Good News Bible (unfortunately I can’t find mine) went a step too far for churches, and they changed it in subsequent editions, but they rendered 1 Samuel 20:30 as Saul saying to Jonathan “You bastard!” Others may still have such a copy to check my recollection. Others again (are you there John Hobbins?) can tell me whether that’s a fair translation. All except the partially colloquial  New Jerusalem Bible (”Son of a rebellious slut”) seem to have toned it down considerably to something no English speaker would actually say.

We do seem surprised when insults (especially rude ones) appear in the Bible. I don’t know why, and I don’t really have Dan Wallace’s difficulty with reconciling them with the verses that tell us not to abuse one another. Hey, it’s human. I still recall myself baffled by one argument I heard for the North Galatian hypothesis. “Paul,” said the lecturer seriously, “would never have called people living in the south of the Roman province ‘Galatians’ it would have been very rude.” I found myself asking what exactly he thought Paul was being when he said “Foolish Galatians” if not being rude.

Naughty language and ride words in the Holy Bible? Some may find it shocking, but personally, I find it a great comfort.

written by doug

(This post is part of a series on the 39 articles of the Church of England)

In my previous post in this series, I suggested that Cranmer mired himself and succeeding Anglican generations in all kinds of difficulties by appearing to define the Church in terms only of a visible church, tied to city localities or congregations. This view scarcely coheres with his actual practice, which was to regard the visible church as the national organisation, as implicitly reflected in the twentieth article, read alongside the actual provision of rites and ceremonies to be imposed uniformly as a nation.

XX. Of the Authority of the Church
The Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority  in Controversies of Faith: And yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another. Wherefore, although the Church be a witness and a keeper of Holy Writ, as it ought not to decree any thing against the same, so besides the same ought it not to enforce any thing to be believed for necessity of Salvation.

This continues to multiply confusion, by placing the cart before the horse. Cranmer would have done much better (in his own terms) to start where the article ends, in exploring the Church’s authority as “a witness and a keeper of Holy Writ” and then move on to more specifics about the exercise of that authority. That would at least have given the article some coherence.

In fact, even this doesn’t really go far enough back. Thinking about the church’s authority really needs to reach back into the gospel narratives, and the fact that the church exercised authority before and during the collection of “Holy Writ.” The church has authority to proclaim the good news, to go to every nation, to baptize and teach, to heal and reconcile, and to share the life of the Spirit. That active authority to carry out the mission of God precedes organizational authority, the settling of controversies, and the adjudication of what makes for right worship, all of which are fundamentally subservient to the church’s nature as a sacrament of the kingdom of God, a visible sign of the mission of God, and an embodiment of the gospel.

That is, in a sense, what is also problematic about the idea of particular beliefs being of “necessity for salvation.” Right doctrine and practice is necessary for the church to be the vehicle of God’s offer of salvation in Christ. The church needs to work at reflecting, embodying and teaching truth in order to carry out its Christ-given mandate But the idea that particular doctrines are necessary for salvation regarding individual belief is too easily misstated. Yes, right belief should help someone live the kind of life to which God calls us. But no-one is saved by right doctrine, but by the God right doctrine should help us encounter.

The decreeing of rites and ceremonies points in fact to the role of tradition as an authority, and Cranmer’s liturgies, in any area where a major Reformation controversy is not in play, actually point to an attentiveness to the authority of the past’s worshipping tradition, where, for Cranmer, it does not come into conflict with Scripture. Likewise, in settling controversies, the responses of the Fathers, especially Augustine, also come into play for him as for other Reformers. The way in which the article simply starts with the Church (which is the king and bishops, here - and most certainly not the individual congregation of the previous article) makes it sound almost arbitrary, rather than a sifting of the past in the light of present readings of scripture. Again, what Cranmer says is not actually what Cranmer does. The binding of the BCP and Ordinal together with the articles demonstrates this, and the concomitant danger of reading the articles in isolation.

Again, although I’m aware I’m not at this point offering a coherent alternative of my own, it does seem to me that the lack of cohesiveness between these articles on the church, and the lack of rigour in setting out an all too brief reaction against particular controversies of the day, is a serious problem. The failure to address it in less polemical times is part of the backdrop of present Anglican difficulties.

written by doug

The more I look at translations of Romans 3:25, the more I feel that you would need a fairly full understanding of Reformation teaching to make much sense of the English. (I’m only focusing on the initial part of the verse.) But consider first the very literal (not optimal) HCSB:

God presented Him as a propitiation through faith in His blood

This is echoed by others:

[Jesus] whom God set forth as an expiation, through faith, by his blood (NAB)
God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.(NIV)

I submit that this doesn’t make sense as English: grammatically faith here can either refer back to God or to Jesus (hold on to that thought), yet the translators of these versions would be clear it was the faith of those who believed in Jesus. Some translations decide to spell it out a little further.

[Jesus] whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. (ESV)
[Jesus] whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. (NRSV)
God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith (TNIV)

These are slightly clearer in English, but have achieved that at the cost of loading a single preposition – διὰ (dia) – with a theological theory. I say slightly clearer, but ESV could unfortunately be easily read out of context as us, recognising what God has done, receiving his propitiation of us! I’m also not at all sure of the NRSV implication that God’s work only becomes “effective” through faith, though supporters of limited atonement will no doubt rejoice that this liberal translation is so Calvinist.

With all these difficulties the NET plumps for one particular theory and some very specific translation choices, and paraphrases completely:

God publicly displayed him at his death as the mercy seat accessible through faith

This (and it has several footnotes) has the merit of being clear English. It does depend on buying in to a particular theory of the meaning of ἱλαστήριον (hilasterion), which while it has arguments in its favour, is by no means assured of full acceptance.

I would note, however, that this is one of those places where (at least if you don’t buy the NET theories, and even to some extent if you do) there is a fairly clear argument  for going with the idea that here we are actually talking about Christ’s faithfulness rather than human faith. Then, instead of all these contortions with English we have a relatively clear meaning:

ὃν προέθετο ὁ θεὸς ἱλαστήριον διὰ [τῆς] πίστεως ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι
[Jesus] whom God put forward as a means of atonement on account of his being faithful to death.

The thought is not a million miles away from that embedded in Philippians 2:6-11.

written by doug

A few posts that have caught my eye this last week

• Mayfly (aka Kyle Colvett) introduced me to omphalism. I’d never come across this term before, but it sounds suitable silly for people who believe the earth was created with the appearance of great age. It’s a good critical post about an exceptionally bad idea. How mad can creationists get?
• Continuing the creationist theme, Michael Pahl has a good post (although I’d express it more radically) on the popular myths of evangelicals: “creation” = “creationism” I hope he continues this as “popular myths” series. On the same topic see Chris Heard’s thoughtful reflection, and very worrying story.
• Matt Robison, a blogger new to me, has a tongue-very-firmly-in-cheek post about how to read the Bible the right way: “God wrote the Bible so you, as a Christian living in the 21st century, could get to heaven. So it’s appropriate to assume that every single thing in it was meant specifically for you”
• Duane Smith proposes the inverse bookshelf length law. I hadn’t noticed this before, but the man has a point.
• Jason at Ancient Mediterranean Musings points us to the significance of contemporary source criticism in Winnie the Pooh scholarship.

I wouldn’t normally comment in a round-up on one of my own posts, but I learnt a useful lesson this week. You never know who’s going to read what you write when you blog. I made some comments on Chilton’s and Neusner’s newish book on the Pharisees. Despite largely consisting of very good and stimulating individual essays in it (only a couple of disappointments), the book was in my humble view rather less than the sum of its parts. I was very surprised when Bruce Chilton popped up to react to the criticism with his own brusque and fairly derogatory comment. While I might have worded some things more carefully if I’d known one of its editors would read the review (and while I wished I’d made it longer), I don’t think I’d have changed the substance of what I said. But it was a salutary reminder that even when it feels like it, my blog ramblings aren’t private!

written by doug

There’s a story in today’s Observer about a headteacher who wanted to turn his school into a secular school. On the one hand, it serves as a useful illustration of how confused the UK is as a country, not just over education but over having an established Church. On the other hand, it’s a but baffling that the headteacher thought he could try this:

Head: Dear Government, I’d like my school to be exempt from the law.
Gov: Sorry, everyone has to obey the law.

Universal education in the UK was effectively the result of a church initiative to provide education for those who couldn’t afford it. As a result, virtually every non-fee-paying school was set up by, and run by the Church of England. Then universal education was provided by statute, and over a period of time, and with successive revisions, these church run schools became state schools, and new state schools were set up. The church schools continued, as part of the deal, to retain something of their foundational character and ethos. In addition, and as part of the intertwining of church and state, all schools were expected to provide acts of worship that reflected the formal status of Christianity in the (unwritten) constitution, what was probably a general view that the country was Christian, and its historical roots.

None of that history has prepared either legislation, education or constitution for dealing with the very different kind of society which the UK now is. Things have been further complicated by the change in language from “church schools” which were nearly always desired and desirable community schools, to “faith schools.” The former were defined in part by the church’s relationship to the entire community, the latter are potentially more identified by what sets them apart from the wider community.

The situation in the Church of England was complicated under George Carey’s leadership when increasing the number of church schools became seen as a good example of holistic mission. This ignored the fact that there are comparatively few Christian teachers who are willing to work in them, so that Christianity becomes a rather vague ethos instead of a life-defining faith, and worship is led by many who are not themselves regular worshippers. It also ignores the fact that many parents who are not themselves interested in living as members of the church, choose the school either for its results, or for a vague sense that it will give their children guidance they themselves might struggle with. Finally, it ignores the fact that such schools have not only being wonderfully unsuccessful in creating Christians, but have even managed to put them off for life. It all smacks of the “We must do something. This is something. Let’s do it” approach to life.

There are still some good church schools, just as there are some good schools belonging to other faith communities. The best have staff and an atmosphere that models and enables participation in an overarching view of life through the eyes of their faith, while teaching a common nationally mandated curriculum, in which prayer and worship are a genuine and not an artificially imposed part of the framework. There is no reason why such schools can’t continue, and continue with state funding, provided they deliver the curriculum properly. And in this context that means, for example, that evolution is taught in science classes as the only viable theory going. And if you;re going to have “faith” schools in that sense, I see no reason why “humanist” schools can’t be allowed under that umbrella.

But just as I think establishment has pretty much had its day, and only falters on because no-one’s got the energy to unpick so much convoluted history and legislation, so I think this idea of a watered down religious patina smeared gently over the whole of education has also had its day. If the church could put its educational energy into overtly Christian after-school clubs, that made no pretence to be other than pastoral, educational and evangelistic work with children, for those parents that chose them, supported them, and helped fund them, then it would be doing a far better job with its limited resources than this pretence to be a necessary and historic part of the system.

written by doug

Lingamish wants us all to be miserable buggers, and seems to think it’s what God wants to. I’m not entirely sure where his tongue is in relation to his cheek in some of what he says:

It might be disturbing for you to find that a good belly laugh is unbiblical. But that’s just tough. I would like to recommend that we all start practicing the habit of not laughing

Perhaps David should go and join the monks of The Name of the Rose, who sought to destroy a missing book of Aristotle’s Poetics because it discusses laughter.

Suzanne McCarthy digs up some additional biblical quotations to say something more positive about laughter, balancing “Woe to you who are laughing now” (Luke 6:25) with “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh” (Luke 6:21).

But while David ponders whether he should visit sites like Ship of Fools and The Onion perhaps he ought to take a good look at the humour of the Bible, sometimes wryly sympathetic as in the comedy of Jonah, and sometimes seriously black as in the comedy of the Exodus:

God turns the river into blood.
“You’ve ruined our water supply” say the magicians, “but that’s nothing special, we can ruin it more”
And they do.
God brings a plague of frogs.
“There are so many frogs that we can’t move for squelching them” say the magicians, “but that proves nothing, we can make even more”
And they do. (Exodus 7:17 – 8:7, drastically summarised)

Perhaps doing a serious word-study of the word “laughter” is not the best way to enjoy a comedy.

written by doug

(This post is part of a series on the 39 articles of the Church of England)

When he was archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, addressing a conference of evangelical Anglicans (NEAC 1987) challenged them to review and renew their ecclesiology. While he certainly had grounds for doing so, he might equally have challenged himself and other Anglicans. If evangelical Anglican ecclesiology has sometimes looked non-existent, then liberal and catholic Anglican ecclesiology has tended to be promiscuous in its borrowings from the patristic period and contemporary Roman Catholicism. Much of the problem can be traced back to Cranmer and the hopelessly inadequate nineteenth article introducing the section on the Church.

XIX. Of the Church
The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.
    As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, have erred; so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.

The following two articles will contextualise this somewhat. There is clearly a visible entity that can be referred to as the Church which is a lot more than “a congregation of faithful men.” Unfortunately it is not visible here. Taken at face value, there is no visible church here when it is not gathered for worship. There is no sense of how one congregation might be related to another. There is no body except this local congregation that can know, recognise or declare that what they are engaged in is either the pure word of God, or the due administration of the sacraments, and no-one except themselves to declare that they are “faithful.” 

Even worse is the extraordinary geographical definition of separate churches. The church of God in a particular place is potentially quite different from the church of God of a particular place. Where Paul uses “of” it is either in the plural as in Galatia in his very perfunctory greeting, or “of the Thessalonians”: the fuller phrase is “the church of God in Corinth”. But theologically, ideas like being a colony of heaven point to the importance of that “in.” Again, if there are simply all these geographical churches who exactly is to state that they have erred? The only possible implication is that there are lots of different churches, all able to say that the other has erred, and none taking seriously the idea of the Spirit leading the church into all truth. Is it any wonder that this ends up in modern times with the half-baked idea of “provincial autonomy” and a complete ecclesiological mess?

Moreover, how exactly is a specific congregation, or a specific church in one place, related to the “holy catholic Church” of the Apostles’ Creed, or (in its extraordinary Cranmerian version) the “one catholic and apostolic Church” of the Nicene Creed? (I have never understood why the BCP omits “holy” from that article of the creed: was it just a 16th century typo enshrined accidentally for perpetual use?) This is not just a matter of the invisible church, though that omission is bafflingly strange, but of how any particular instantiation of the church is conceived in terms of the global, historic and eschatological church.

The church has one historical foundation in the ministry of Jesus gathering his disciples, and in the constituent events of the cross and resurrection. At this point, its unity is visible, and any body that claims to be the church must trace its identity to this foundational group. That does not simply point to some form of the episcopate alone, but to a continuity of sacramental and missionary practice, of teaching and transmission of the scriptures within an ongoing tradition of reading and reflecting on them. How such things are to be made visible, either historically, or in the present should be a real and pressing question, unless one simply accepts the answer of Rome.

The church has one eschatological destiny in the shared communion of God the Holy Trinity, which is experienced through the animating and guiding work of the Holy Spirit, who is the foretaste of what is to come, and who enables the church to know and respond to the living presence of Christ as her Lord. That presses the question of unity in a different way. As Peter notes in his experience of evangelising Cornelius, as Luke narrates it, “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” (Acts 11:17 NRSV) The church is not just a human society organizing its life in fidelity to its historical constitution; it is a divine society which God is constantly leading and remaking, and for whom God, not itself, chooses its membership. A church that was simply transmitting tradition faithfully could not easily have welcomed the Gentiles in response to a new and unprecedented action by God. The unity of the church is pressed hard upon us as accepting God’s definition of membership.

It is not enough, however, to take refuge in this eschatological definition, and declare a unity of Christians in the Spirit. The historical institution of the church and the question of how its one foundational unity in the incarnate Christ is expressed in the present needs to be taken seriously as a witness to that fleshly incarnation and bodily resurrection, and the truth that God does not rescue souls, he transforms people, and is renewing all creation. In addition, it is as witness to the identity of Christ as the historical Jesus of Nazareth that the church exists. There needs to be a visible historical connection, which is the thrust of Irenaeus’ answer to the Gnostics, and the development of a theology of episcopacy as a guarantee of succession of teaching.

Finding a way forward through this is not and never has been easy. At the risk of generalization and over-simplification, the Catholic and Orthodox Churches have tended to stress the historical pole in this tension, and the Protestant Churches the eschatological one. One of the great disappointments of this article is that it does neither, and so bequeaths an uncertain air to Anglican ecclesiology, leaving successive generations, and different groupings within them, to lurch uneasily from one to the other. No wonder we’re in such a mess.

written by doug