MetaCatholic

Oh, dear, I’ve lost count of the number of times Peter Kirk has posted on Todd Bentley, far less of the number of times he’s commented on other people’s posts. This is largely a conversation I’ve dropped out of, but today Peter tries to move things on to a broader canvas of discernment.

Now, I am broadly with him that one element of faith and discernment is relational and grows out of our experience of God as we have known him. I would also say that another element is habitual, and those practices which we associate with the experience of God for us are more likely to receive favourable discernment.

But I simply do not accept that without the reception of our communal readings of scripture and the accumulated wisdom of the past, and without the careful application of our God -given reasoning, our experience is enough.

Peter needs to give an account of why his relationship with God allows him to recognise the Holy Spirit working in Todd Bentley, when a great many other people’s do not. It would help if that account doesn’t simply dismiss his critics as either liberal materialists (apparently what I am) or Enlightenment-trapped fundamentalists (unspecified in this post). He also needs to give an account of how his experience of God allows him not to be bothered by:

• kneeing people in the stomach
• having associations with what seems dubious angelic gnosticism
• having people spend all their time talking about Todd Bentley rather than God

Has the recognition of Todd Bentley actually become the acid test of having a real relationship with God?

Michael expresses his surprise at a Sydney Morning Herald article on Christian Sex Guides. I’m not quite sure why, since evangelical Christians (the only sort who would buy a separate “Christian” guide) seem to me to have bought fully into a late modern Western hedonistic relational pleasure-giving-and-receiving understanding of sex as a necessary means of human fulfilment – only adding the proviso that it really ought to happen only in marriage (straight of course!) whether it’s your first, second, third or more.

If the SMH article surprised Michael, he should take a look at this site, where you will find advice on the proper place of anal sex, oral sex, rimming, spanking and more. In case you were wondering, the proper place is marriage. While they think divorce ought to be avoided, their argument, if I have them right is that refusing to have sex with your spouse is “porneia” and so included in the Matthean exception as a reason for divorce.

The site says above the menu: “Got Jesus? Please donate.” It does rather make him sound like a disease looking for a research cure.

The “flying bishop” of Ebbsfleet, Andrew Burnham, has decided to write an article for the Catholic Herald suggesting that many Anglo-Catholics may and perhaps should leave for Rome, after the vote in favour of women as bishops, and the vote against creating a perpetual enclave of those who won’t accept them.

I would describe myself as a Catholic within the Anglican tradition, and I don’t for a minute share the assumption that to be catholic is to fit this pattern.

I would like to note, however, that Andrew Burnham has said openly, at a meeting I’ve been at, that he normally uses the (Roman Catholic) breviary for his daily prayer, and that many (most?) of the churches for which he is charged with “alternative” (read “no women”) oversight use the Roman Mass.

In what sense, we might genuinely ask, are they Anglican at all, if they don’t think the official Anglican forms of prayer are good enough for them? Well, like Bishop Burnham, many of them have wives (a slight snag in Roman terms), and not a few of those that don’t have boyfriends (another snag, at least in theory).

The current definition of a “traditionalist Anglo-Catholic” it seems to me, is someone who can joyfully and exuberantly disobey their bishop in the name of the Pope, but has absolutely no desire to start obeying the Pope instead of their bishop. Their dilemma is that they regularly pray the Eucharistic prayer of a Church that believes they are unable (because not real priests) to pray that prayer, while they refuse to pray the common Eucharistic prayer of the Church that has ordained them precisely so that they may gather people to pray it.

That way madness lies.

According to Ruth Gledhill, in the General Synod debate on women bishops, Canon Chris Sugden said:

We should have the big tent approach, a generosity of spirit

This from the man who has spent much (most?) of his time over the last several years arguing and campaigning that even arguing that gay people could share a faithful relationship was a sin that should have you thrown out.

I think the biggest scoop in the Gafcon reporting is Ruth Geldhill’s sighting of wealthy and controversial delegate Howard Ahmanson. According to Wikipedia:¹

He is reported to have “never supported his mentor’s calls for the death penalty for homosexuals”; rather, as the Orange County Register reported in 2004, “he stops just short of condemning the idea”, saying that he “no longer consider[s] [it] essential” to stone people who are deemed to have committed certain immoral acts. Ahmanson also told the Register, “It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral, to stone people for these things. But I don’t think it’s at all a necessity.”

The presence of such a multi-millionaire with a record of funding right-wing and fundamentalist campaigns may be seen by some as offering an alternative and more plausible explanation for the funding of this very expensive conference than the remarkable providence of God.

1. accessed 25 June 2008 [↩]

One of the latest stories out of the anti-gay jamboree that calls itself orthodox Anglicanism is the call of one Nigerian bishop for Rowan Williams to resign. Emmanuel Chukwuma was the idiot who tried to exorcise Richard Kirker’s demon of homosexuality at the 1998 Lambeth Conference.

Chukwuma did additional study at St John’s College Nottingham in the 1980s before being consecrated a bishop. My abiding memory of him was his changing sides during the 1986 FA Cup Final so that he could be sure of supporting the winning side.

My sources tell me that he occasioned very serious discussion in the staff room over whether they could allow him to finish his course with anything remotely approaching a pass grade. He got it, I would judge, for political reasons only, since he would have made two short planks look like Einstein. (I wonder if Lambeth 1998 made any of them regret it?) Indeed it would be hard to say whether his ignorance or his arrogance were his dominant characteristic. (See this page for the way he styles himself “Lord Bishop Venerable Dr. Emmanuel Chukwuma”)

This is the man whose call for Rowan Williams’ resignation is being propagated round the world by the BBC.

What we are seeing here is some massive posturing, however informed by principle it might seem to be, including posturing from some like Chukwuma who are underwhelmingly qualified to understand what the theological questions raised in Western interpretation actually are.

I don’t doubt that here are some serious issues to be asked about scriptural interpretation, and genuine questions to be asked about the ready identification by opposite camps of their own cultural preferences with Christian values. Nor do I doubt that there are some at GAFCON ready and able to explore them. However, I don’t seen an interest in exploring them. I see, instead, a power struggle disguised by apparently orthodox rhetoric.

We have seen, and are seeing, just how much a mix of an anti-colonial mindset, combined with a fervent anti-gay and above all anti-Western rhetoric, has been used to justify the evil that is Mugabe’s Zanu PF dictatorship. It seems to me that not only is it dangerous to allow the same rhetoric to dominate in the church, but that GAFCON’s ready adoption of it is going hand in hand with ignoring some rather more seriously life-or-death sins going on under many of their noses.

Justin Anthony Knapp sent me an email today inviting comments on a story where a Christian student has claimed to be discriminated against on the basis of her faith, a claim that is contested (with some serious apparent evidence) in the blog post. (I have no independent idea of the details.) He also sent me an interesting op-ed from an old NYT. (Justin, mate, you seriously need to get your own blog instead of pleading with us to blog on what interests you!)

Coincidentally, yesterday Jim West posted a link to a report suggesting that gays are taking over the world. (Jim does seem easily persuaded to think the worst of gay people) I have no idea of the full stories behind any of the snippets reported there, and they provide no links to test them further.

I don’t doubt that in some cases we can and will discover politicly correct bullying done in the name of gay rights and other issues. God knows we have had centuries of religiously correct bullying done in the name of truth and orthodoxy. It was a mantra, for example, of pre-Vatican II Catholicism that “error has no rights” which excused all sorts of abuse of those who erred. In the end, people are stupid, and some (many?) are prone to do each other down. One does not excuse the other, and booth need to be opposed and challenged.

However, I have reached the stage where I suspect all stories of this kind. Christians have developed a story template for proving “persecution by political correctness”. (Atheists, gay people and indeed everyone else likes playing the victim game too!) I now assume, reading something like the report Jim refers to that all of these stories will prove more complex than the summaries suggest. I even find myself wondering whether there will turn out to be any truth in them whatsoever.

Very few people bring out the cynic in me nowadays as much as campaigns involving conservative Christians, where misrepresentation often seem to be the game all round. However, I can’t resist the impression, or refute the argument, that by and large conservative Christians are even better at misrepresenting things than their opponents, as much, I suspect, out of an overwhelming sense of having right on their side: a condition that has often been used, historically, to excuse the commission of many wrongs.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s observation that rather a lot of bishops think their clergy aren’t up to snuff comes a different story. This time yet another bishop gives everyone pause to wonder at his monumental crassness.

At one level, there is a certain commonplace nature (particularly within some theological traditions) underlying his observation, namely that since all have sinned, all deserve God’s judgement, however humans rate the sinfulness involved. But in fact, the bishop seems to wish his comparison with Josef Fritzl to highlight the heinousness of environmental sins, so this isn’t much of a get out clause for him..

It would be remarkably easy to think that rather a lot of bishops have two modes of verbal operation: the anodyne and the daft. Almost certainly unfair, but remarkably easy. It’s probably true of anyone who regularly has to speak in public and doesn’t have an army of PR people watching their back. Yet even in professional politics a remarkable number of gaffes get through.

No doubt it’s as much a media problem of ignoring all but the most outrageous things said, unless they come from a particularly vacuous celebrity source. Not being celebrities, bishops (and other clerics) compete for attention in a marketplace of noise, and send their sentences over the top in the hope of reaching the trenches between their audiences’ ears. Unfortunately, as in this instance, they end up dropping their verbal grenades on their own positions, leaving their holes well and truly foxed.

It is no doubt unfair to have a real go at the Bishop of Stafford for doing what many a cleric has managed (whether episcopal or more lowly). However, in the aftermath of being told that many bishops think large swathes of us clergy aren’t fit for purpose, it’s irresistible, even if I shall leave you to read the insult into this post’s title.

I’m saying mass and preaching out in the sticks tomorrow, where they only have the Old Testament and Gospel reading from the day’s provision. Looking at these – Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18 and Matthew 5:38-48 – I’ve been struck by how many potential prejudices people have about the Bible actually relate to these passages.

• The idea of Leviticus just seems to spark the idea of nitpicking irrelevant legalities to do with ritual and religion. Yet here are some forceful and practical ethics with a particular regard for the poor.
• “Everyone knows” that the Old Testament God is a bit of a stroppy and judgemental git, and hat Jesus transformed Judaism by teaching the love command. Yet here is one of those two commands Jesus quoted, not original after all.
• One of the downers about Christianity is its milksop teaching epitomised by “turn the other cheek.” Yet this command of Jesus seems (I think) to belong in the repertoire of passive resistance, and the refusal to be humiliated while not returning aggression.
• Over and over again, one of Jesus’ sayings in this gospel is partially quoted (because it fits people’s ethical wish-fulfillment) and therefore misquoted. I have often heard people say “God makes his sun shine on the good” but what Jesus says, is of course: “he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous”.

That’s quite a bundle of issues that offer some interesting opportunities to reflect how much we shape what Scripture says according to our preconceptions, and how much we let Scripture shape our thinking.

I am surprised that Peter Kirk is impressed with this. It’s not just that I’m sceptical, I’m positively repelled. Being a fool for Christ is one thing, being a complete idiot is another. When I read stuff like this:

Many on the platform are ON THEIR BACKS ON THE FLOOR!!! 
It appears that no one can take the mic.

================================================
Todd starts having visions of healings happening right now
================================================

We are in a GLOBAL atmosphere of CREATIVE MIRACLES… 

TOUCH YOUR COMPUTER RIGHT NOW!!!

A man had donated a kidney to a friend…   he has been asking God for a new kidney…  when Todd called out a new kidney…  he felt the power of God go through his body!!!

My first reaction is to wonder if it’s a spoof. My second is to think there’s more preying than praying going on. My third is to remember that people in Florida were too stupid to vote in 2000, so why should I be surprised.

Perhaps Jon Birch should have the last word.