MetaCatholic

I’ve been meaning to comment this week on a slightly odd story reported in the Sunday Telegraph. As reported:

A police community support officer ordered two Christian preachers to stop handing out gospel leaflets in a predominantly Muslim area of Birmingham.

The evangelists say they were threatened with arrest for committing a “hate crime” and were told they risked being beaten up if they returned. The incident will fuel fears that “no-go areas” for Christians are emerging in British towns and cities, as the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, claimed in The Sunday Telegraph this year.

Arthur Cunningham, 48, and Joseph Abraham, 65, both full-time evangelical ministers, have launched legal action against West Midlands Police, claiming the officer infringed their right to profess their religion.

…

West Midlands Police, who refused to apologise, said the incident had been “fully investigated” and the officer would be given training in understanding hate crime and communication.

For those who aren’t familiar with the UK scene, a “police community support officer” is sort of equivalent to a teaching assistant in a classroom. 

I want to offer a few observations:

This story seems to have sunk from view like a stone. That makes me think there may be rather more to it than reported, and that journalists investigating further decided it was less news-worthy than they thought. The “evangelists” concerned seem to be seriously fundamentalist. Of the Bible they believe that “Every Word of the original manuscript [sic] is inspired”, but they are also keen to state:

What We are Not
We are not ecumenical, Charismatic, Arminians, Calvinists or denominational.

That doesn’t seem to leave a lot of room for manoeuvre.

A large part of this story’s power comes from the bigger immigration narrative. Without wanting to downplay any of the issues involved, I want to highlight what I see as the biggest danger for the way some people want to enlist Christians to their aid on immigration. The implicit subtext is that Christians are white and native, and if you’re foreign and black you must be Muslim or some other religion. (Something similar seems to have happened in the US in the way some people regard Obama as Muslim.) This is not only politically dangerous, but, from a Christian viewpoint, profoundly heretical.

Churches that don’t evangelise ought to be seen as a contradiction in terms. Mission more generally is of the essence of the church. There are, however, good and bad ways to do it, and (as far as I can tell) what these particular preachers were doing is such a bad way of doing it it’s doubtful that it can be seen as evangelism at all. It looks rather more like an aggressive act of religious and racial hostility, than a generous sharing of the love of God. The preachers’ readiness to pose for a photo and take their story to the paper to tell a story of Muslim no-go areas for Christians encourages me in that suspicion.

It is interesting that nowadays the cases that may most test “freedom of speech” are religious ones. Christians probably need to remember that historically, they have approved of this no more than many Muslims today would, and that effectively it evolved more to protect those outside or against the churches from Christian totalitarianism. Its transformation into a basic Western value that Christians now appeal to both against the secular state and in favour of the freedom to evangelise, is deeply ironic.

I think we will see more and more of this sort of story, and we will need to be very careful about how we read them. They raise quite complex questions of civic polity as well as inter-faith relationships, dialogue and mission. They also suggest that there’s room for far more theological reflection on methods of evangelism that are appropriate to gospel and culture in the early 21st century West. How much power does the method used have to stop it being good news at all?

I seem to have been tagged by Peter Kirk with a non-trivial meme, started by Sam Norton. I am, however, thankful that Peter says he only wants some initial thoughts. I don’t really “do” philosophy. Here’s the meme.

if the nature of god is omnipotent, benevolent, and anthropomorphic (that god is a person, who sees suffering as wrong, and can change all of it), why does god not act to relieve all suffering, or at least the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest amount of people the greatest amount of time?

if you were god, and you were omnipotent and benevolent, how would you respond to suffering?

if this is not the nature of god, what is the nature of god, that allows suffering in the world?

if these are the wrong questions to ask, what are the right ones?

It looks to me a bit like that old journalist’s trick of asking the same question in several different ways, in the hope that the interviewee will trip themselves up on one version, even if they get through the others unscathed.

I fear that my “answers” (a term I use unadvisedly since good theodicy essentially poses unanswerable questions) are going to be rather like the old interviewee’s trick of saying: “That’s a very interesting question” before going on to talk about something else, or else fall back on the strategy of attacking the question:  “god – now that’s a very interesting concept to explore. What do you mean by god?”

I simply don’t feel these are the right questions, and, interestingly, in the real world of suffering people, I rarely hear those questions asked. In my experience people are more likely to ask “Why am I (is he/she) suffering like this?” (with the clear implication that pain is related in some way to goodness or merit). The other question that seems to emerge is harder to express simply, but revolves around a search for meaning or purpose: “If the world’s like this, what’s the point of it all?”

My shortest answer is one I don’t normally articulate, which is “Shit happens”. (You can see why I don’t normally put it in these terms!) I tend to resist rather strongly the notion of a planned purposeful meaning for the many random events of our lives. I don’t believe God has a plan for us. I do think he has dreams and aspirations for us. (Yes, I know that’s hopelessly anthropomorphic.)

But it seems to me that the randomness of existence is the guarantor of human freedom. It is not that the events of our lives simply have meaning, but that we give our lives meaning. Believing in God is about believing both in the worthwhile nature of that meaning-giving activity, and in co-operating with the giver of meaning, so that the meaning we give within our lives finds its horizon against the meaning God is giving to creation. God has, if you like, created a space where he has benevolently chosen not to be omnipotent, so that others can share his meaning creating power, and learn what it is freely to relate in love. I assume (and to my philosophically untrained mind this assumption seems sound) that that kind of freedom is only possible through allowing randomness a significant role.

By and large, however, that kind of musing is not the most immediately useful. Finding ways to appropriately help people engage the story of Christ seems to me to work better. In the end, I continue to find it strange that those for whom the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection is the key to creating meaning in our lives, should ever let others get away with framing the question of theodicy in such abstract and deist terms.

The New English Bible was often one of the more daring translations in many ways, from heavy conjectural emendations in the Old Testament, through startling (and not always successful) turns of phrase everywhere. As I was reflecting on John 6 on this feast of Corpus Christi, I tracked down a vague memory that the NEB had gone for a punning translation. Sure enough, it’s in John 6:60. Here it is in NRSV, Greek and then NEB. The teaching referred to is the whole bread of life discourse.

When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”

Πολλοὶ οὖν ἀκούσαντες ἐκ τῶν μαθητῶν αὐτοῦ εἶπαν· σκληρός ἐστιν ὁ λόγος οὗτος· τίς δύναται αὐτοῦ ἀκούειν;

Many of his disciples on hearing it exclaimed, “This is more than we can stomach! Why listen to such talk?”

The pun reflects the extraordinary ambivalence John shows between very literal language of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of Man, and appearing to switch this to an equivalence of accepting his words and teaching. There’s no way you can really get it out of the Greek, but there’s a sense in which the English idiom improves on the text. Its use fits the context, and the play on words fits John’s style. It’s an example of creative translation that is hard to defend on any technical theory, since it is neither formally nor dynamically equivalent. It does, however, seem to me to verge on the inspired.

Mike Higton has an excellent five point questionnaire on God and creation. Do have a read. And in case your interested, I answered:

1. Yes
2. Yes, sort of.
3. No.
4. No.
5. No.

In the OS wars, the question of which is more “intuitive” gets asked a lot. Mac users claim that OS X is clearly more “intuitive” than Windows. My early experience would suggest that “intuitive” is a matter of what you’re used to. Windows seemed quite intuitive to me, and I’m sure that in a couple of weeks OS X will too.

Let me give a couple of examples. And the beauty of this is that eve if I’m wrong, and there is a better and easier way to do what I wanted, it proves my point about intuitiveness.

I wanted to add a graphic of my real signature to my email signature in Mail. I looked everywhere I could think of for an “insert picture” command, and failed miserably. OK, Mac is supposed to be famous for drag and drop, so I tried that and it worked. Different methods, and what you’re used to will be more intuitive. I don’t think either is quicker or easier than the other.

The signature graphic was a different size to what I wanted. How then did I resize it, short of zooming over to Windows and opening it in Photoshop. (NB When I say resize, I mean resize and resample the actual file, not make it look larger or smaller in the document.) The obvious answer, I thought, would be the famed iPhoto. Nope, there may be a way, but of so, I couldn’t find it. Almost by accident, while looking for something else, however, I discovered the option to resize and resample an image in Preview. (Incidentally, Preview is a real gem, and at the heart of some of the “must have” easy working features of the Mac.) Now call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think it’s remotely intuitive to be unable to resize files in a photo editor, but dead easy in an application intended for previewing them.

I have no idea how you could objectively measure “intuitiveness”. Everyone comes with their own habits, experience and preconceptions. The OS wars: when you take the passionate believers out, there’s still no neutral objectivity. Now where I have I heard that before?

… any better than anyone else. (And worse than liberal catholics!)

I’m not sure how I missed news of this news conference, but I don’t recall seeing it discussed. Apologies if I’m going over old ground. This is the most interesting summary:

Fundamentalists, or those who take a literal view of Scripture, do not know more about the Bible than anyone else. In fact, researchers said, it’s readers whose attitudes they described as “critical,” meaning that they see the Bible as the word of God but in need of interpretation, who are over-represented at the highest levels of Biblical literacy. In other words, fundamentalists actually score lower on basic Biblical awareness.

But this observation runs it a close second:

There is no apparent correlation between reading the Bible and any particular political orientation. In other words, it’s not the case that the more someone reads the Bible, the more likely they are to be a political conservative or liberal.

I’d love to see the questions that were actually asked and the methodology employed. If true, however, it may suggest very controversially that not only does “believing the Bible” function as a shibboleth rather than anything else, but that the scriptures may exercise very little power over the biblically literate and illiterate alike. If Bible reading and knowledge has no correlation with political affiliation, that would seem to be suggested.

I note that in a fairly interesting interview (HT Peter Kirk who quotes with approval, and Jim West who quotes it with disapproval) Ben Witherington says this:

my view is that everything has to be sifted by the word of God and so theology is a second order task. You don’t start with your theology and then do exegesis, you start with exegesis and you construct or deconstruct a theology as necessary

He is not alone in asserting that this is the right order of things, and by implication that this is what he does.

However it seems to me that “everything has to be sifted by the word of God” is a theological statement governing his use of scripture. Both the statement itself, and the application of the term “word of God” to a specific list of 66 books cannot be reached by exegesis alone. This is THE great evangelical inconsistency, that “scripture before theology” cannot be derived from scripture without doing theology.

Since as an Anglican, I’m more used to splitting churches over sex — see how these men love one another. I can’t help but find a certain fascination (to say nothing of Schadenfreude) with the divisive power of inerrancy, currently convulsing Westminster Theological Seminary over the suspension of Peter Enns.

The deep running sense of irony in all this continues. WTS is in Philadelphia, a name easier to live in than live out. But above all, they are defending the Westminster Confession of Faith, and using it to judge whether Enns view of scripture should allow him to teach there. The said confession, used as the yardstick for acceptable interpretation of scripture, says this, of course.

The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself (1.9)

Hmm …

Michael Bird has drawn attention to an interesting series of posts on Darrell Pursiful’s blog, which I’d not come across before, but shall be adding to my feedreader. He discusses the separation of Eucharist and Agape, and has a lot of useful comment on the topic. He is quite right to state that:

It is universally agreed that the earliest forms of Christian worship were integrally related to the congregation’s communal meal or agape.

I do find myself wondering, however, whether that universal agreement is one that imposes a clearer shape on the evidence than it really admits, even while it seems the most likely overall pattern. I enter the following observations:

• The clearest NT evidence comes from 1 Corinthians. The problem is that in many respects this seems to have been a very atypical church, both in Paul’s day, and at the end of the first century when we encounter it via Clement. Given that the social mores of eating seem to have been a significant problem, how much should we assume about Eucharistic patterns elsewhere?
• The evidence of Jesus’ meals as sacramental of inclusion, forgiveness and the bonds of fictive kinship should not be overlooked as giving some force to the importance of a communal meal. There is no clarity, however, on how these relate to the Last Supper, nor on what seems to have led, quite early on, to a Sunday observance of Jesus’ actions with the bread and wine, taken out of the annual Passover context in which they originated.
• The Didache seems to talk about a eucharistic gathering which comes at the beginning of a meal (Did 9, 10), although exactly what it is describing is not as clear as we would like. But there is another eucharistic reference in Didache 14, which seems not to relate to a meal, but be a more cultic observance (and the first mention of Malachi’s pure sacrifice in relation to the Eucharist).
• I find the evidence of Pliny useful but not unambiguous. While it is most reasonable to assume that the Eucharist was part of their evening meal, it is not impossible that the ritual remembrance of Jesus with bread and wine was connected to the morning oath, and that may be why the evening meal is referred to as food “but ordinary and innocent food”. It is, after all, this latter evening meal that they appear to have given up on Pliny’s direction.

The way Darrell read the evidence, is that the separation of Eucharist and Agape begins to happen sometime between Pliny and Justin. This would be the near universal consensus. But he wants to give far more stress to the continuing pattern of conjoined Eucharist and Agape running alongside the increasingly widespread separation.

What I would suggest may be worth further consideration, however, is the possibility that the pattern of separate Eucharists and Agapes was pretty much always there — perhaps as a function of numbers, perhaps of persecution. At first it was unusual, but later it became more common, before finally displacing the conjoined celebration.

Antonio Lombatti asked me if I had the time to take a look at tonight’s BBC documentary on The Turin Shroud. (This iPlayer link will work for the next six days for those who can get the service.) He was particularly interested in what Professor Christopher Ramsey of the C14 testing laboratory in Oxford had to say in the documentary. (Ramsey was part of the team that did the 1988 dating of the shroud to the early 14th century.)

I’ll answer that question first, and briefly, but then say a little more. All Ramsey had to say was, effectively, “We’re always open to considering likely and realistic theories of contamination that might help us refine our work. At the moment there’s no evidence that bears them out.” The particular view under consideration was being put forward by the Turin Shroud Center of Colorado. In brief, they argue that there was some unusual reactions between atmospheric carbon monoxide and the linen of the shroud, which led to a misdating. Ramsey accepts that their theory conjecture offers a possible explanation of how relatively minor contamination could produce a major displacement in the dating. So far, however, there’s no evidence to suggest that such a reaction between linen and carbon monoxide could occur. The team at the Colorado centre are working on finding a way in which they can get similar linen to react to carbon monoxide.

This latter point raises the main difficulty I had with the BBC programme. It essentially consisted of Rageh Omar interviewing a range of people who believe the shroud is genuine and that they have supporting evidence for it. The Colorado team were the dominant participants. Ramsey was, as far as I could tell, the only non-believer in the shroud’s authenticity. The quality of the evidence offered varied considerably: from reasonable point to what looked a little bit like wishful thinking. Most of it was less original than the programme suggested. In this respect the official position of the Vatican is worth noting. The Shroud of Turin is an important devotional object to focus the believer’s attention on the crucifixion, whatever its history and origin turns out to be.

In my view there are two significant arguments against the medieval date, neither of which are conclusive. The first is that no-one has, as far as I know (and indeed as far as this programme told me) worked out how the image might have been created. The second is that (shades of arguments over the BBC Passion) the Shroud almost certainly shows nail marks in the wrists, and possible through the sides of the heels. This would make it unique among medieval (and most contemporary) art. It is an extremely odd thing for a forger to do. Against these arguments, however, stands the carbon dating.

I confess to rarely giving the Shroud much thought. Even if it does prove to be genuine, what does it add, except a rather romantic historicism, and the settlement of Mark Goodacre’s argument with the Telegraph. And for those who want or need to believe then surely it is not inconceivable that the resurrection produced its own surge of inexplicable cosmic energy that forever rendered scientific method unreliable in this, as in all matters pertaining to his resurrection. That would, of course, be deeply ironic, since those who are most passionate about the shroud seem to believe that it somehow provides scientifically testable evidence for the resurrection.