The offence and challenge to Christian's of a simple life-style.

 Last Christmas, I read a biography, Basic Christian: The Inside Story of John Stott, by Roger Steer. I found it helpful, encouraging and challenging. Stott was someone who loved Jesus, loved the Bible, was a humble leader of integrity, and had a particular concern for the Majority World.

One small piece that stood out is the paragraph below concerning the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelisation. The meeting issued a Covenant, which was largely written by John Stott. An excellent exposition of the Covenant is in a book by Stott, and subsequently updated by Chris Wright, Christian Mission in the Modern World.

The Covenant covers 15 topics with a paragraph on each. There is much that the 2,300 leaders from 150 countries could have disagreed about. However, the most contentious sentence was the following.

Those of us who live in affluent circumstances accept our duty to develop a simple life-style in order to contribute more generously to both relief and evangelism.

This led to a consultation in 1980 which produced a detailed paper, some of which is here.

How do we read these Old Testament stories?

 Lately, in my daily Bible reading, I have been using The Message, a translation of the Bible in contemporary language by Eugene Peterson. I like it because it sometimes expresses familiar passages in new ways that make me think.

One bonus in the "Readers Edition" that I have, kindly given to me by my wonderful wife, is that at the beginning of each Bible book there is a short introduction by Peterson. Here is some of his Introduction to 1 & 2 Samuel.

Four lives dominate the two-volume narrative ... Hannah, Samuel, Saul, and David. ... These four lives become seminal for us at the moment we realize that our ego-bound experience is too small a context in which to understand and experience what it means to believe in God and follow his ways. For these are large lives—large because they live in the largeness of God. Not one of them can be accounted for in terms of cultural conditions or psychological dynamics; God is the country in which they live. 

Most of us need to be reminded that these stories are not exemplary in the sense that we stand back and admire them, like statues in a gallery, knowing all the while that we will never be able to live either that gloriously or tragically ourselves. Rather they are immersions into the actual business of living itself: this is what it means to be human. Reading and praying our way through these pages, we get it; gradually but most emphatically we recognize that what it means to be a woman, a man, mostly has to do with God. These four stories do not show us how we should live but how in fact we do live, authenticating the reality of our daily experience as the stuff that God uses to work out his purposes of salvation in us and in the world. 

One of many welcome consequences in learning to “read” our lives in the lives of Hannah, Samuel, Saul, and David is a sense of affirmation and freedom: we don’t have to fit into prefabricated moral or mental or religious boxes before we are admitted into the company of God—we are taken seriously just as we are and given a place in his story, for it is, after all, his story; none of us is the leading character in the story of our life. 

 For the biblical way is not so much to present us with a moral code and tell us “Live up to this”; nor is it to set out a system of doctrine and say, “Think like this and you will live well.” The biblical way is to tell a story and invite us, “Live into this. This is what it looks like to be human; this is what is involved in entering and maturing as human beings.” We do violence to the biblical revelation when we “use” it for what we can get out of it or what we think will provide color and spice to our otherwise bland lives. That results in a kind of “boutique spirituality”—God as decoration, God as enhancement. The Samuel narrative will not allow that. In the reading, as we submit our lives to what we read, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but to see our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.

[The complete text of this introduction is here.]

Where to from here? How should the West respond to its Christian heritage?

 Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland is an amazing read. In just over 500 (!) pages he presents a compelling story of the interplay of Christian theology, church history, and the intellectual and political history of the Western world. 

This month in the theology reading group, we are discussing the third and final section, Modernitas, which covers 1645 to the present. The scope is amazing. The cast of characters includes Oliver Cromwell, Baruch Spinoza, Benjamin Lay, Voltaire, Marquis de Sade, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Karl Marx, Andrew Carnegie, Friedrich Nietzsche, J.R.R. Tolkien, the Beatles, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., ... The issues and topics discussed include the abolition of slavery, evolution, human rights, capitalism, communism, democracy, war, sexual morality, secularism, homosexuality, and the #MeToo movement.

A helpful summary of the main point of the book is at the end.

 If secular humanism derives not from reason or from science, but from the distinctive course of Christianity’s evolution – a course that, in the opinion of growing numbers in Europe and America, has left God dead—then how are its values anything more than the shadow of a corpse? What are the foundations of its morality, if not a myth? 

A myth, though, is not a lie. At its most profound—as Tolkien, that devout Catholic, always argued—a myth can be true. To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it – the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe—that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilisation to which it gave birth. 

Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.

(p.524-5, Abacus 2020 paperback edition).

A specific example of the type of argument Holland makes (and his beautiful prose) is the following. Even Marxism is deeply indebted to Christian theology.

 Marx’s interpretation of the world appeared fuelled by certainties that had no obvious source in his model of economics. They rose instead from profounder depths. Again and again, the magma flow of his indignation would force itself through the crust of his scientific-sounding prose. For a self-professed materialist, he was oddly prone to seeing the world as the Church Fathers had once done: as a battleground between cosmic forces of good and evil. 

Communism was a ‘spectre’: a thing of awful and potent spirit. Just as demons had once haunted Origen, so the workings of capitalism haunted Marx. ‘Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ This was hardly the language of a man emancipated from epiphenomena. The very words used by Marx to construct his model of class struggle—‘exploitation’, ‘enslavement’, ‘avarice’—owed to the chill formulations of economists than to something far older: the claims to divine inspiration of the biblical prophets. If, as he insisted, he offered his followers a liberation from Christianity, then it was one that seemed eerily like a recalibration of it. (pp. 441).

So what? What might be appropriate responses to this book? It is receiving considerable attention from those with a wide range of perspectives, both Christian and not. There seems little argument about whether the book is historically accurate. The debate is more about the implications for life today. Here is a caricature of two responses, briefly alluded to by Ross Douthat in a column in the New York Times a year ago.

An atheist who identifies with the secular political left may concede the Christian origins of many issues that are central to their vision for society: economic justice, human rights, equality,... However, they may say that we can take these good things and we can dispense with all the theology and Christian institutions. They are outdated, unscientific, superstitious, have served their usefulness, and on balance have been instruments of oppression.

A Christian who identifies with the political right will be proud of this heritage and argue that unless Western society returns to these origins, and institutionalises them in terms of law and education we are doomed to societal chaos.

I find both problematic and actually dangerous. Both seem to assume that all you need to do is legislate and institutionalise morality and values. Both may have a strain of self-righteousness. It is just different sins that they focus on.

As much as I love the book, Tom Holland presents a "secular" history of the human dimension to Christianity, which is almost one-dimensional. On one level this is fair enough as it is where his expertise lays and is the ground rules for public intellectual discourse.

There are some more fundamental questions that need to be addressed.

Holland highlights some aspects of the Western world that are distinctly "Christian" But, what about the many aspects that are not, such as individualism, consumerism, neoliberalism, ...?

Is there a role for the divine? Is there something amazing and powerful and transcendent also going on in all this history? Who was Jesus? Was he more than a profound teacher who died a brutal death? Did he actually rise from the dead? Jesus' death on the cross was certainly a powerful, counter-cultural, and inspiring symbol of suffering. But did it actually bring into being a new spiritual reality and achieve a real reconciliation with God (i.e. atonement)? Were Christians who changed their worlds able to do that just because they were inspired by radical ideas (power through weakness, the last will be first, the dignity of all humans, ...), or were they actually tapping into a powerful spiritual force that not just transformed them but also those they interacted with? Is the positive influence of Christian ideas and values on Western society an example of common grace?

In different words, what actually is authentic Christianity? Is it true? Is it real?

Has the modern church lost the radical and counter-cultural edge of the teachings of Jesus and Paul?

The book highlights the necessity of the western world to grapple with such questions in a humble, honest, and open manner. If Christianity shaped our past and present, how should it shape our future?

Emergence in science, theology, and mission

Emergence is one of the most important concepts in the sciences, both natural and social. I have also found it to be fruitful in engaging with questions relating to theology and mission. 

Tonight I am giving a talk on the subject for a session of the Write conference of The Simeon Network. It was canceled earlier this year and is now being held online. 

Here is the current version of the slides.

A gentle introduction is in a short article I wrote for Test of Faith.

A longer academic article is Emergence, reductionism and the stratification of reality in science and theology.

Last year I wrote a blog post about Emergence of Sin by Matthew Croasmun. A helpful review is at Marginalia: LA Review of Books.

Update. A complete video of the talk is below. The introduction is by Professor Peter Gill.

Christendom was not very Christian

Tom Holland presents a fascinating story of how in the past two thousand years Christianity shaped Western society in his recent book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. This month in the theology reading group, we are discussing the second section, Christendom, which covers 754 to 1420 AD.

The first section, Antiquity, traces how Christ's death on the cross, full of suffering and humiliation, shaped what Christians believed and how they lived. This was radical and counter-cultural, and paradoxically increased the power and influence of the church. 

However, reviewing the rise of Christendom there is no room for Christians to feel pride or triumphalism. Rather, we should feel shame and embarrassment at the failure of church leaders and members, particularly in relation to power, wealth, violence, division, pride, and self-righteousness. Church leaders were quick to align themselves with rich and powerful rulers and support violence, often from unruly mobs, as a means to expand their territorial influence and to deal with perceived heresy.

These areas are intertwined and represent clear violations of the teachings of Jesus and Paul. It is worth considering each of these in turn. I quote a few representative texts but claim that these are central themes of the whole New Testament.

Power 

In Matthew 20:25-28, Jesus warns the disciples.

Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Henry Nouwen comments

One of the greatest ironies of the history of Christianity is that its leaders constantly gave in to the temptation of power—political power, military power, economic power, or moral and spiritual power—even though they continued to speak in the name of Jesus, who did not cling to his divine power but emptied himself and became as we are [Philippians 2:5-11]. 

Wealth 

You cannot serve God and money (Matthew 6:24). Caring for the poor and needy is the same as caring for Jesus (Matthew 25). Paul warns Timothy about false teachers (1 Timothy 6:3-10).

Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

Violence

Genesis 6 describes how God was grieved that the earth was full of violence. In Matthew 6 Jesus says "turn the other cheek" and

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."

Do not respond to evil with evil (Romans 12:17-21).

Division

Jesus' followers are to aim to live in peace with one another. Their unity is to be a sign that Jesus is from God.

Pride and self-righteousness

Followers of Jesus are not to be the "first to cast the stone" or to look at the speck of sawdust in their brother's eye when there is a plank in their own. Surely, this does not just relate to lifestyle but also to hairsplitting about doctrine.

On that note, it is easy to pass judgement on these past leaders and church members who joined violent mobs. Why didn't they read their Bibles? Well, it was not quite so simple. Many were illiterate. Even if they were there was no mass publication. There was no Bible in their own language. The church liturgy was in Latin.

An intriguing example of the moral complexities church leaders faced was the relationship between the priest Alcuin and Charlemagne, the King of the Franks who became the Roman emperor. The example of King David was used by Charlemagne when in 782 he ordered the beheading of 4500 prisoners in a single day. He became a sponsor, friend, and student of Alcuin, who was able to convince the warrior king to stop his practice of forcing pagans to convert at sword point. Alcuin pointed out "faith rises from the will not an act of compulsion.''.

This period of church history was not all bad. There were rays of hope. Alcuin laid foundations for literacy and education, that fully blossomed into the first universities, Bologna and Paris. The notion of equality of all humans before God led to that of human rights and equality before the law. There was also the seeds of modern science being sown in universities.

Although in the Western world today church leaders are rarely involved in physical violence, that does not mean that there is not verbal and relational violence, both at the individual and corporate level. Furthermore, the allure of power, money, pride, and self-righteousness seems rampant. May we repent and sit at Jesus' feet and be challenged to live as he wishes us to live.

A spirituality of strengths

Humans are incredibly diverse. We are all very different. There is a diversity of personalities and backgrounds. No two people on the planet look exactly alike. No two people have exactly the same DNA. This concept of uniqueness and diversity plays a central role in the theology of the church. Different people have different gifts and different callings. Yet, all are to work together for the good of the church and for the glory of God.

As part of a team working for IFES, I recently took a test called the Gallup strengths finder. The aim is to identify your particular strengths particularly ones that are relevant to working on projects. These strengths are not just what you are good at doing, but also what sorts of activities energise you rather than drain you. There are 34 different strengths. My top five are Learner, Intellection, Input, Strategic, and Responsibility. It is almost embarrassing to read the description of each of these strengths because they so clearly capture who I am.

So what might be a Christian perspective on an exercise such as this? 

A good place to start may be in Romans chapter 12,

3 For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you. 4 For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, 5 so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. 6 We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. 

This leads me to several questions. 

How should I think about myself?

I should be humble and thankful. I should humbly accept who God made me. Psalm 139 tells me that I am fearfully and wonderfully made. I should not wish that I had different strengths. I should not wish that I was someone else. Unfortunately, I have spent too much of my life doing this, at least on a subconscious level. I should also be humble about any achievement, as it will flow out of my strengths; they were given to me at birth.

How should I act?

Name it. Claim it. Aim it.

I should develop and use my strengths. Again, too much of my life I have spent trying to imitate others who have very different strengths from me.

I should particularly use them for the good of others. Their ultimate purpose is not to increase my social status, my wealth, or my power. As I enjoy using my strengths and gain energy from their use I should not be self-indulgent. For example, my top strength is Learner, which means just learning is a joy and can be an end in itself. However, this can get carried away and I may do it just for the benefit of myself and not for the benefit of others. Things I may learn in researching background for a project may not be of interest or value to others.

I need to be willing to take on tasks that involve my weaknesses. God's power is made perfect through weakness. (2 Corinthians 12:9). Just because I don't have certain strengths doesn't mean that God can't use my weaknesses. I may be asked to or required to do things that I'm not good at and that drain me. (But, I also need to be realistic; if that is all I'm doing may not be sustainable).

How do I relate to others? Particularly if we are working together on a common project.

I should be patient with others. I should learn about other people's strengths and encourage them to develop them. I need to realise and accept that specific tasks may seem easy and fulfilling for me, but these tasks may be difficult and frustrating for others (and vice versa). What may seem obvious to me may not be for other people (and vice versa). The best teamwork will be where there is synergy and energy because we are each working with our strengths and appreciating those of others. Ideally, job descriptions should be designed around strengths.

 I would say that this exercise can be and should be a deeply spiritual exercise. It requires humility before God and before others, a servant heart, listening well, and the fruits of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, gentleness, and self control)! 
 

Science is wonder-ful

 Many books have been written about science and Christianity. Many of them I don't like, find helpful or recommend. I do like some because they present a good understanding of both science and Christianity, and engage in a constructive dialogue between the two. Even then, many books rehash the same old topics and same old arguments about creation, evolution, big bang cosmology, free will, reliability of the Bible, ...

The introductory book that I recommend is A User's Guide to Science and Christian Belief, by Michael Poole. Unfortunately, it is now out of print.

Writing a new book that brings a fresh perspective to the subject is necessary but also daunting. I am very happy that David Hutchings and Tom McLeish have done this with Let There Be Science: Why God Loves Science, and Science Needs God. The book is at the basic/popular/introductory level and is very accessible, so some non-scientist friends tell me. This accessibility may have been aided by the experience of Hutchings as a high school physics teacher. I am not surprised that McLeish would be involved in producing such a wonderful book given that I loved his Faith and Wisdom in Science, which is at the advanced academic level.

The book has many strengths. It is clear, engaging, interesting, creative, original, invitational, and balanced. The authors succeed because they believe that science is a human endeavour. Indeed, science is wonderful because `doing science is a fundamental part of what it means to be human'. Hence it is natural to use stories.

Stories get us thinking about people – their motivations, hopes, or pain; their moments of inspiration or moments of disaster. Stories are how we best understand ourselves and our beliefs. Stories, as we shall see, can be key in the search for a bigger picture.  

Some of the main ideas that are developed are the following. 

Science is a way of thinking. 

 ... we will count something as true science if – and only if – we can show it meets three distinct criteria. First, there must be observation of something in nature. Second, there must be a discussion of a possible physical cause. Third, there should be some form of analysis or testing involved. This last requirement might be through planned experiment, physical interaction, or by further observation. 

Although the term "scientist" did not exist until the nineteenth century, "science" has been around for a long time. Isaac Newton did natural philosophy, which might be defined as "Loving wisdom about nature".  (Chapter 2)

It is remarkable that humans can do science at all. The universe is rational and we do have the capacity to understand it. Furthermore, this rationality is seen in our ability to make connections between phenomena that may appear to have no connection to one another. (Chapter 3)

There are parallels in the manner that people change their minds about scientific theories, about God, and about how they should live their life.  (Chapter 4)

Science does not always go smoothly. It can be a source of personal pain for the scientist. Nevertheless, they persevere because they have scientific hope. (Chapter 5)

 “Order consistently emerges from apparent chaos, even at the very deepest levels of our current understanding.’’ (Chapter 6)

 In both science and theology it is important to ask the right questions. (Chapter 7)

 Love is even more important! (Chapter 8)

 our science stories will intermingle with faith stories – the two are bound together far more tightly than some modern commentators might have us believe. The big pictures painted by the history, the people and the findings of science look very much like those that emerge from the pages of the Bible – and we will go on to find, in Chapters 9 and 10, that this connection might just be of universal significance. 

The stories are captivating and the authors beautifully weave together sets of apparently disparate stories into single stories with a profound point. For example, chapter 3 covers silk, the philosophical question of the existence of numbers, the axioms of Euclidean geometry, weaving looms, the shape of pomegranates, Charles Babbage and the first computer, error correction in computers, and the book of Job. What is the point of all this?

The Bible’s answer to the mathematical debate we began this journey with is simple but profound: the reason that we can know about numbers, despite their lack of physicality, is because God has put wisdom in our minds. Far from being opposed to reason, Christianity gives us the basis for believing two things that are absolutely crucial if good science is ever to be carried out: that we are reasonable beings, and that the world is a reasonable place.

How did the Cross of Christ shape the Western mind?

 In the Western world today, certain values are dominant, even if largely implicit: human rights, equality, democracy, helping the weak, the rule of law, justice, ..

Where did these values come from? ancient Greek philosophy, the Enlightenment, cultural evolution, Judaism, Christianity? These are the questions that the popular historian Tom Holland grapples with in his recent book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. In the theology reading group we are discussing it over the next three months. In more than five hundred pages he offers a breath-taking and engaging ride through more than two thousand years of history. 

The main argument of the book is that "a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire came to exercise .. a transformational and enduring influence on the world.."

Last night we discussed the first one-third of the book, Antiquity, covering from 497 BC in Athens to 632 AD in Carthage. Here are some of the main ideas that stood out to me.

Image: Issenheim Altarpiece by Gruenwald

1. It all begins with The Cross of Christ. It leads to an intellectual, theological, cultural, social, and political revolution. Victory is found in defeat. God identifies with the weak, marginalised, poor, suffering, ...

2. Equality. All humans are made in the image of God. Hence, they are all of equal value and should be treated with respect and dignity. Followers of Jesus have only one identity: Christian, that transcends gender, nationality, citizenship, ethnicity, wealth, position, social class, ...

3. Followers of Jesus live to embody the Cross. They live sacrificially to serve the poor, share wealth and possessions, heal the sick (including in plagues), comfort the dying, rescue abandoned babies, liberate slaves,...

4. Although, the thinking and actions described above may seem admirable and heroic today, at the time they were completely counter-cultural: it went against Greek philosophy, Roman rule, and how people lived. Crucifixion was a brutal means to exercise political control: it involved not just incredible physical suffering but also public humiliation. The heroes were the strong. The most powerful became gods. Violence was good: a means for social control and stability. There was a "brute truth" that most in Rome "took for granted: the potency of a Roman penis. Sex was nothing if not an exercise in power" (p. 81). 

Holland illustrates how context matters. We need to understand the context in which the New Testament was written and how the development of different church doctrines and institutions, were influenced by their cultural and political context.

5. History shows that the church has an ambivalent relationship with wealth and power. The New Testament and the lives of exemplary Christians are incredibly radical and counter-cultural. Wealth and power are intertwined and have a pernicious ability to corrupt mind and spirit, even among the well-intentioned who seek to use wealth and power for the good of others. Church history is a continual cycle of radical service and renewal, institutionalisation, and corruption.

6. The church seems to have had the greatest influence when it was radical and on the margins and when it had an integrated approach combining head, heart, and hands. Or in different words, study, contemplation, and action.

If you want a brief introduction to the book see

A review in The Guardian by Terry Eagleton, a Marxist and distinguished literary critic.

An interview with Tom Holland at the Centre for Public Christianity and another on ABC Radio.

A related book, with a shorter historical scope, is by the sociologist Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity.

In another post, I will consider some missing dimensions to Holland's perspective on the Cross of Christ.

What is Religion? What is Science? How might they be related?

Peter Harrison has beautifully demonstrated that answers to these questions have changed significantly over the past few hundred years in the Western world, with reference to Christianity and the natural sciences. Harrison’s book, The Territories of Science and Religion, based on his Gifford lectures, has generated considerable interest. 

 

Similar issues of ambiguity and Western bias become even greater in South Asian contexts. This is nicely summarised below by Darren Duerksen and William Dyrness in a recent book, 

Seeking Church: Emerging Witnesses to the Kingdom, which builds on field research by Duerksen, and engages concepts of emergence from the social sciences, that I will also discuss below. The quote is long but I include it because it highlights such a fundamental issue.

 

Defining religion is similar to the proverbial problem of defining time—it seems self-evident until one actually tries to put words to it. But for all the various definitions of religion—and there are many—there are at least two things upon which contemporary scholars agree. The first, as scholars such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Clifford Geertz, and J. Z. Smith have suggested, is the idea that religion was, and to some degree continues to be, a concept that comes from outside of religions themselves and does not adequately describe various religious traditions. As Richard King has noted, early Greco-Roman uses of the concept referred to ritual practices and paying homage to the gods. With the rise of Christianity, however, it was redefined as “a matter of adherence to particular doctrines or beliefs rather than allegiance to ancient ritual practices.” This model tends to emphasize a theistic belief and a “fundamental dualism between the human world and the transcendent world.” Such conceptions reflected particular ways of understanding the Christian religion in the West but did not and do not always adequately describe the religions of other contexts.

The second area of agreement is that the idea of “world religions” is also largely a Western concept born out of the Enlightenment and responds to the need to make sense of a changing world. As Tomoko Masuzawa demonstrates in her influential book The Invention of World Religions, until the mid-nineteenth century Europeans and North Americans typically described the world as made up of Christians, Jews, Muhammadans (Muslims), and the rest. Western affinities for taxonomy began to be more specific about “the rest” in subsequent decades, …

What this required, however, was to somehow define and order in Western and Christian terms that which often defied categorization. An important example is the “religion” of Hinduism. As H. L. Richard and others have shown, historically the non-Muslims of the Indian continent did not understand themselves as sharing a common set of beliefs and practices known as Hinduism, much less call themselves Hindus. In the eighteenth century onward, however, and particularly through interaction with British Christian colonialists and missionaries, Britons and then Indians started to categorize the widely ranging traditions of the subcontinent as an identifiable religion.

This signals an important point that we intend to explore in this book— that from a social science perspective the category of religion itself is an elastic concept and is not as self-evident as is often assumed.

An integrated reading of Paul

I have now finished reading Participating in Christ: Explorations in Paul's Theology and Spirituality by Michael J. Gorman

It is certainly one of the best and most influential theology books I have read over the past year. My theology reading group is an eclectic bunch and I think this may be the only book that every person in the group has liked!

A signature of Gorman's approach and thinking is that it is integrated and multi-faceted. He is not reductionist, into either/or categorization, and avoids false dichotomies. For example, the following paragraph may be representative.

For Paul the inseparability of justification and justice is critical,... The community of the justified is the community of the just, which is the community of those being transformed and glorified and recreated all in Christ. 

These are not different, competing soteriologies even quasi-independent slices of one soteriological pie. Rather they are intimately interconnected dimensions of one soteriological reality, such that one aspect to not be fully or adequately articulated without reference to the others. 

A comprehensive term or phrase is needed, or at least helpful, to keep these dimensions integrated... "corporate, cruciform, resurrectional, missional theosis,"... 

(italics are his, page 233-4).

The above occurs at the end of chapter 9, in which Gorman connects three passages from 2 Corinthians, to argue that the concept of theosis is central to Paul's theology and spirituality. Gorman considers the central verses for each of the passages are the following.

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. (3:18) 

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness [justice] of God.(5:21) 

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.(8:9)

The last verse is in the context of Paul's appeal to the Corinthian church to contribute to the financial collection for the poor in the Jerusalem church. 

"5:21 is a bridge from the heavenly glory of 3:18 to its practical, even mundane, embodiment in 8:9.'' It is "Theosis on the Ground: Cruciform Economic Justice."

I think such an integrated perspective is needed to avoid getting trapped in rigid dichotomies such as individual/community, faith/works, life/doctrine, predestination/free will, faith/reason, spirituality/mission, ....

Redemption from words

My wife and I enjoyed watching the movie The Professor and The Madman. It is based on the fascinating story of the origins of the Oxford English Dictionary, focusing on the contributions of and the relationship between the editor James Murray and William Chester Minor. Minor is in a prison for the "criminally insane" as a result of a murder he committed.

I found it quite striking and beautiful is how the issue of forgiveness and redemption thread through the story. How can a murderer find redemption? Can his victim's family forgive him?

How the cross shapes the Christian life

For the next three monthly meetings of the theology reading group we will be discussing Participating in Christ: Explorations in Paul's Theology and Spirituality by Michael J. Gorman

In the first chapter, Gorman introduces the book by making the case for 13 propositions. Here I list the ones that I found particularly interesting and helpful.

        The Cross

3. The cross is not only the definitive revelation of Christ and of God (i.e., it is both Christophany and theophany) but also the definitive revelation of what humans and the church are to be.

         Cruciformity

4. The cross is not only the source but also the shape of our salvation, and cross-shaped living (cruciformity) means that all Christian virtues and practices are cruciform: faith/faithfulness, love, power, hope, justice, and so forth.

6. Cruciformity/Theoformity is a matter not of imitation but of transformative participation: being in the Messiah/Spirit and having the Messiah/Spirit within (mutual indwelling).   

 Dying and rising with Christ  

10. Paradoxically, cruciform (cross-shaped) existence is also resurrectional (resurrection-suffused) cruciform ministry because the death of the messiah means life for all who share in that death.   

Mission  

11. The church is called not merely to believe the gospel but also to become the gospel and thereby to advance the gospel, the church is a living exegesis of the gospel.  

12.  Becoming the gospel means embodying the missional practices of love, peacemaking, reconciliation, restorative justice, forgiveness, non-violence, and so on that correspond to what God has done in the Messiah. 

13.  To be in the Messiah is to be in community, to be in mission, and to be in trouble (persecuted) - simultaneously.

What do we learn from the history of epidemics?

An epidemic provides a mirror on society: its values, its strengths, and its weaknesses. This idea is emphasized by Frank Snowden, a historian at Yale University. Last year he published “Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present,” and there is an insightful interview with him in The New Yorker, ``How Epidemics Change History''.

Epidemics are a category of disease that seem to hold up the mirror to human beings as to who we really are. That is to say, they obviously have everything to do with our relationship to our mortality, to death, to our lives. They also reflect our relationships with the environment—the built environment that we create and the natural environment that responds. They show the moral relationships that we have toward each other as people, and we’re seeing that today.

[an epidemic]  raises really deep philosophical, religious, and moral issues. And I think epidemics have shaped history in part because they’ve led human beings inevitably to think about those big questions. The outbreak of the plague, for example, raised the whole question of man’s relationship to God. How could it be that an event of this kind could occur with a wise, all-knowing and omniscient divinity? Who would allow children to be tortured, in anguish, in vast numbers? It had an enormous effect on the economy. Bubonic plague killed half the population of full continents and, therefore, had a tremendous effect on the coming of the industrial revolution, on slavery and serfdom.

David Brooks in the New York Times also picked up on this idea of the mirror, reflecting on the impact of the 1918 flu epidemic in the USA.

In Philadelphia, the head of emergency aid pleaded for help in taking care of sick children. Nobody answered. The organization’s director turned scornful: “Hundreds of women … had delightful dreams of themselves in the roles of angels of mercy. … Nothing seems to rouse them now. … There are families in which every member is ill, in which the children are actually starving because there is no one to give them food. The death rate is so high, and they still hold back.” 

This explains one of the puzzling features of the 1918 pandemic. When it was over, people didn’t talk about it. There were very few books or plays written about it. Roughly 675,000 Americans lost their lives to the flu, compared with 53,000 in battle in World War I, and yet it left almost no conscious cultural mark. Perhaps it’s because people didn’t like who they had become.

There is a fascinating chapter, ``Epidemics, Networks, and Conversions,'' in The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries, by Rodney Stark.  Pagans fled Rome during epidemics. Christians stayed and cared for the sick, including pagans abandoned by their families.
Here is the Wikipedia summary.

In a time of two epidemics (165 and 251) which killed up to a third of the whole population of the Roman Empire each time, the Christian message of redemption through sacrifice offered a more satisfactory explanation of why bad things happen to innocent people. Further, the tighter social cohesion and mutual help made them able to better cope with the disasters, leaving them with fewer casualties than the general population. This would also be attractive to outsiders, who would want to convert. Lastly, the epidemics left many non-Christians with a reduced number of interpersonal bonds, making the forming of new ones both necessary and easier.

N.T. Wright on the coronavirus

Time magazine published a nice article by N.T. Wright,
Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus. It's Not Supposed To.

Some of his main points are expanded upon in this video interview.

What Big Questions might we ask?

Last week I watched a fascinating Virtual Veritas Forum, Coronavirus and Quarantine: What Big Questions can we be asking?



It brings together a range of perspectives. My only concern is that it is very USA-centric.

Springboarding off that discussion, here are some questions I hope will receive attention in the coming years.
A fascinating and challenging aspect of these questions is that they need to be addressed with multi-faceted and multi-disciplinary approaches. The crisis brings together issues that span microbiology, public health, mathematical modeling, psychology, sociology, economics, politics, ethics, philosophy, and theology.
Many of the questions need to be asked and discussed at multiple scales; e.g., by individuals, institutions, cities, nations, and globally.

Some of the questions have been grappled with by many smart people and societies for decades or even millennia. But, broader modern society often does not discuss them.

I list the questions in random order.

How do epidemics start, spread, and end?

How do we manage risk, balancing near certainties and ignorance?

How do governments balance the ``common good'' with protecting individual freedoms?

How do you balance medical, financial, economic, and social considerations in allocating resources to patients?

When is the ``medicine'' worse than the ``disease''?

How do you balance the future needs of the young with the current needs of the elderly?

Will the current chaos and uncertainty in the Western world make us more empathetic and willing to learn from those in the Majority World who live with such calamities on a regular basis?

What do such events reveal about human nature: values, morality, mortality, rationality, relationality?

How do you balance fear, despair, lament, hope, optimism?

Why does God allow suffering?

In what sense are calamities such as this a reflection of God's judgement? or of God's mercy?

What are appropriate responses (from the theological to the practical) of Christians to events such as this?

Why are we so afraid of death?

I welcome your own questions.

The Presence of the Kingdom by Jacques Ellul

Due to the coronavirus, we postponed this month's theology reading group. Many of us are over 60 and some have health conditions and so it is wise we do not meet in person. Nevertheless, we will try and have our first virtual meeting and discuss, The Presence of the Kingdom by Jacques Ellul.

Here I will just aim to provide a summary of what I think are some of the main ideas, largely for my own benefit. A better summary has been given by Tom Grosh.
Some excellent quotes from the book are here.

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.  (Romans 12:2).

Chapter 1. The Christian in the World
Christians are called to be ``salt and light'' and influence the world in which they live. However, if they need to avoid abstractions but have a concrete engagement. But, the world has a ``will to death'' [i.e. it is intrinsically self-destructive].

Chapter 2. Revolutionary Christianity
``In order to preserve the world, it is actually necessary that a genuine revolution should take place.''
The world is hankering for revolution, whether from the political left or right. However, these proposed revolutions will be ineffective because they are largely about ``action'', contested ``facts'' [conceptions of reality?] and one group gaining power over another group which is ``evil.''
Christianity is truly revolutionary. Central to this is the ``style of life''.
Christians live in two cities [cf. Augustine], the city of man and the city of God. Everything has to viewed in light of the eschaton: the return of Jesus, the final judgment and establishment of the Kingdom of God.

Chapter 3. Ends and Means
In the world, people no longer debate whether the ends justify the means. Rather they are solely preoccupied with the means. An example is the world's obsession with `technique' (i.e. efficiency) and `progress'. For a Christian, the end is the Kingdom of God (Matthew 6:33).

Perhaps, Ellul would say that politics is not about working towards a particular vision of society, but rather solely about getting and keeping power. The modern economy is not about creating prosperity for the benefit of many, but rather just about making money (and more money) and getting possessions for the sake of it. In a communist society, it is all about the workers controlling the ``means of production'' and producing things.

Chapter 4. Problem of Communication
This concerns the role of the Christian intellectual. They need to engage with the lives of regular people in order to understand what is actually happening in the world (what is the reality?) and to communicate with them. Evaluation and understanding of the current `epoch' is central to the calling of the Christian intellectual.

Some general comments. I am really glad I read the book. However, it is at times heavy going and rambling. The first half of the book I read in the middle of the night a few times when I woke up and wanted to go back to sleep... I had to go back and reread a lot of the book. At times I felt it was rather abstract. Meanwhile, he ranted against abstractions, resisted being pinned down as to what ``action'' we should take and providing ``how to'' lists. At times, I felt he was a bit ``dogmatic'' and asserting that certain things were ``obvious''. Although, I agreed with his point of view I do not think this helps convince those who differ. In fairness, some of these concerns may be moderated by the difficulty of translation and of what was ``normal'' in French intellectual circles in the 1960s.

A Christian response to the coronavirus

I thought this short talk from Krish Kandiah was particularly helpful, engaging, challenging, and stimulating.

Reflections on the coronavirus crisis. I

I am a wealthy Westerner who has a comfortable and orderly life. But now I am experiencing minor inconveniences, such as limited travel, canceled events (will Liverpool still get to win the Premier League?), working from home, and a drop in the current value of my financial assets.

Like most people, I have been surprised, anxious, confused, and stressed by what is happening to the world. Here are a few preliminary thoughts on the things I am learning. Many are interrelated.

Perhaps I should not be surprised at this unexpected event.

 Let's take a historical perspective. Consider the twentieth century in the Western world. We made amazing scientific, medical, and technological advances.
However, there were also two World Wars, the Spanish flu epidemic (which killed more people than World War I), multiple stock market crashes, the great depression, natural disasters, terrorism, AIDS epidemic, the cold war, ..
Now, consider the first two millennia. It is even worse: an endless story of wars, earthquakes, famines, epidemics, ...
And then there is life in the Majority World today: chaos, instability, scarcity, disease, corruption, civil wars, epidemics, poverty, starvation, violence, ...
My predictable stable life of the affluent Westerner is not normal. It is a historic and geographic anomaly.

We are not in control as much as we think we are and wish we were.

Normally we have the luxury of making plans and setting goals: social events, travel, holidays, work, retirement, a medical check-up, shopping, ...

We are more interconnected than we may realise.

In the modern Western world, we pride ourselves on individual identity and individual freedom. I am the master of my destiny. I am defined by my achievements. If I succeed that is because I worked hard and used my extraordinary abilities. I deserve to enjoy the fruits of my success, and not others. I should be able to do what I want. I can choose my friends, my family, my work, my hobbies... It is all about me!
The coronavirus pandemic brings home just how interconnected the globalised economy has become; from international air travel (rapidly spreading the virus) to industrial supply chains.
There are merits to individual freedom, meritocracies, and individual initiative. However, the coronavirus is a rude interruption that things are not quite that simple. We do depend on others, for better and for worse, far more than we may like to admit. Our health depends on the health of others. Our economic well being does too. I am not the master of my destiny.

One response: selfishness
Many of us have responses to the crisis such as the following. Will I get sick? Well, even if I do I am young and healthy so it will be just like the flu. Will I lose my job? Will I still graduate from college this year? How much money have I lost on the stock market? Can I get a refund on my travel bookings? Is the government going to save my company? What about my social life?
In Australia we have people hoarding toilet paper, even fighting other customers. We have people with minor colds abusing hospital staff who will not test them for the virus because of limited resources. Political and business leaders are doing cold calculations of how certain actions they take may hurt or benefit them personally. Adversity can bring out the worst in us. It reveals a dark side to our nature.

Another response: fear
This is scary. On many levels. The future is uncertain. Will things get worse? How much worse? This can lead to panic and over-reacting. This reflects itself in hoarding toilet paper, panic selling of shares, believing rumours, ...

Another response: denial 
It isn't really that bad. We can handle it. We have the best medical system in the world. It is no worse than regular flu. Things will soon blow over. Let's wait and see what happens and not take drastic measures.

Another response: love, concern, and sacrificial service
Adversity can also bring out the best in us. Thinking beyond ourselves. Caring for others. Doctors and nurses who work to exhaustion. Some get sick. Some die. All in order to save the lives of others.

The desires of our hearts are revealed
We often hide from others (and ourselves) our inner self; what we really value, want, and think. Calamities can reveal our priorities and values. What are we most upset or worried about? Is it health, the economy, individual freedoms, our stock portfolio, ..?

Who will suffer the most?
Wealthy Western countries are ill-equipped with the medical resources to deal with this epidemic. Majority World countries will particularly struggle due to their extremely limited medical resources. As usual, the poor, the marginalised, the sick, the weak, and the elderly, will suffer the most, both in the short term and the long term.

There are invisible realities.
It is pretty amazing. We cannot see the virus. We don't know if we have it or someone else does or if it is on a doorknob. [I know that you can see it with an electron microscope and that there are medical tests for it]. However, in everyday life the virus is invisible. But it is a reality; one that has serious implications for everything, not just our health, but even for our close relationships, for the global economy, and for politics.
In spite of all that scientists do know about viruses (which is pretty amazing!) we currently know little about key properties of this virus and the associated epidemic: exactly how it spreads, which individuals are more likely to carry it, incubation periods, who is most at risk, .... We do not have a vaccine.

All this ignorance should humble us and make us open to the possibility that there are many things we do not understand in our lives now. Further, we should be open to other realities that we may be oblivious to, poorly understand, or have important implications for our lives. The Bible claims that there are spiritual realities; we cannot see them directly. Nevertheless, the spiritual realm does exist and has important implications for every part of our lives.

A time for re-evaluation
Our worlds are being turned upside down. What will we learn from this experience, both individually and collectively? Will we change? Or will we go back to ``normal''?

In some future posts, I hope to look at how Jesus engages with some of these issues.

Embracing contradictions

This month for the theology reading group we are looking at The Presence of the Kingdom by Jacques Ellul.
I was keen to read an Ellul book because of interest stimulated by a devotional book, that springboards off Ellul, that had a big influence on me. [The book is written by Charles Ringma who hosts the theology reading group.].

Many, including Ellul himself, consider this is the first Ellul book that people should read.
The second edition has a very helpful introduction by Daniel Clendenin.
He states ``Perhaps the single most important factor for Ellul interpretation is an understanding of his passionate adherence to dialectic".
Ellul states ``dialectic is a procedure that does not exclude contraries, but includes them.''
Here Ellul's approach has similarities to that of two large influences on his thinking: Karl Marx in sociology and Karl Barth in theology.
Ellul states that in the Bible, ``we constantly see two contradictory, apparently irreconcilable things affirmed, and we are told that they always meet to wind up in a new situation.'' Concrete and important examples include the following:

• God is beyond time and history. But he enters both through the incarnation of Jesus.
• We live in the ``Now but Not Yet'' of the Kingdom.
• Salvation is by grace alone but cannot be divorced from works.

There are also many others in the teachings of Jesus, such as ``the first will be last; the last will be first.''

Ellul presents a dialectic of social reality, where tension exists in five ways:

• ideology versus reality
• action and consequences
• the whole and the parts    [cf. emergence!]
• social and spiritual
• radical ambivalence of action

Sociology and theology present a critical counterpoint (dialogue partner) for one another.
Here there are certain parallels to John Stott's concept of  ``double listening.''

The fascinating world of John Milton

Recently at Theology on Tap, Ben Myers gave a fascinating talk, Poetry and Truth: What John Milton means to me, focusing on Milton's classic poem, Paradise Lost. One measure of the success of a talk such as this is that it inspires the audience to go and read the original work. Ben certainly did this.

     The illustration is The Temptation and Fall of Eve by William Blake.

I did not know that Milton worked closely with Oliver Cromwell, who I find to be a scary figure. Milton wrote Paradise Lost towards the end of his life when he was blind, under house arrest, and after a tragic personal life where his first two wives died in childbirth. The dreams he had for an English government that was not shackled to the crown, and the church was not shackled to the state were dashed.
He knew that something was wrong with the world.
He took the story of Genesis 1-3 and creatively filled in the gaps to create an epic poem, now considered to be one of the greatest pieces of English literature ever.
Each of the 12 books begins with a summary. The summary for book 9 illustrates the creativity of Milton.

The only contemporary of Milton that is mentioned in the poem, is Galileo, who Milton did meet in person. The meeting is depicted in the painting above.

Satan's shield is compared to the moon seen through the telescope of the ``Tuscan artist.''

He scarce had ceas’t when the superior FiendWas moving toward the shore; his ponderous shieldBehind him cast; the broad circumferenceHung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose OrbThrough Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist viewsAt Ev’ning from the top of Fesole,Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands,Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe.

An interesting blog post, Milton and Galileo: Affinities between art and science, by Brigitte Nerlich states:

Many articles have been written about Milton and the telescope but I only want to quote from one by Marjorie Nicolson (1935): which claims that Milton never forgot the experience of looking through a telescope and seeing new worlds on the moon. This, she says, “is reflected again and again in his mature work; it stimulated him to reading and to thought; and it made Paradise Lost the first modern cosmic poem, in which a drama is played against a background of inter-stellar space”. 

The encounter with Galileo and the telescope left in fact many traces in Paradise Lost: “each of Galileo’s most famous discoveries is reflected in one or more passages in the epic. Among them are the countless newly sighted stars (7. 382-84), the nature of the Milky Way (7. 577-81), the phases of the planet Venus (7.366), the four newly discovered moons around Jupiter (8.148-51), the new conception of the moon (7. 375-78), the nature of moon spots (1. 287-9; 5. 419-20; 8. 145-48), and the nature of sun spots (3. 588-90)”. (Hunter, A Milton Encyclopedia, vol. 3, p. 120-121).

Suffering with Christ

How does one truly, learn, and understand the Gospel of Jesus?
Here is a letter from a Soviet forced labour camp. 

It is only by being a prisoner for religious convictions in a Soviet camp that one can really understand the mystery of the fall of the first man, the mystical meaning of the redemption of all creation, and the great victory of Christ over the forces of evil. It is only when we suffer for the ideals of the Holy Gospel that we can realize our sinful infirmity and our unworthiness in comparison with the great martyrs of the first Christian church. Only then can we grasp the absolute necessity for profound meekness and humility, without which we cannot be saved; only then can we begin to discern the passing image of the seen, and the eternal life of the Unseen.  

 On Easter Day all of us who were imprisoned for religious convictions were united in the one joy of Christ. We were all taken into one feeling, into one spiritual triumph, glorifying the one eternal God. There was no solemn Paschal service with the ringing of church bells, no possibility in our camp to gather for worship, to dress up for the festival, to prepare Easter dishes. On the contrary, there was even more work and more interference than usual. All the prisoners here for religious convictions, whatever their denomination, were surrounded by more spying, by more threats from the secret police.  

 Yet Easter was there: great, holy, spiritual, unforgettable. It was blessed by the presence of the risen God among us – blessed by the silent Siberian stars and by our sorrows. How our hearts beat joyfully in communion with the great Resurrection! Death is conquered, fear is no more, an eternal Easter is given to us! Full of this marvelous Easter, we send you from our prison camp the victorious and joyful tidings: Christ is Risen!

This letter is quoted at the end of chapter 4, ``God as Man" in The Orthodox Way.

Interactions with such Christians while in a camp, led Alexander Solzhenitsyn to embrace faith in Jesus.