Shed for you and for… who?

John H Monday 8th March, AD 2010

I’ve been reading (and enjoying, and benefiting from) Timothy Radcliffe’s book What is the Point of Being a Christian? over the past few weeks. Fr Radcliffe is a former head of the Dominican order, and in one of the later chapters of his book he turns his attention to the divisions that have emerged between Roman Catholics since the Second Vatican Council.

He rejects labels such as “traditionalist” and “liberal” as examples of the church allowing itself to be defined by the world’s terminology. Instead he talks about “Kingdom Catholics” (those who emphasise the church as the people of God on pilgrimage towards the Kingdom) and “Communion Catholics” (those who emphasise membership in the institutional church as a communion of believers).

Fr Radcliffe uses Jesus’ words of institution at the Last Supper to illustrate his argument that the church needs both these tendencies in order to be “a home in which everyone, regardless of his or her sympathies and allegiance, may be at ease”. In particular he points to the “slight difference” between Jesus’ words over the bread and over the cup, as reported in Mark 14:22-25:

The bread is given just to the disciples. The cup is also given to them, but is poured out for the many. … The bread is given to that small community of the upper room. His disciples share it together. The cup looks forward to the larger community of the many … It points to the Kingdom, into which all are called.

This tension – between the body given “for you” and the blood shed “for you and for many” (or “all”) – is, Fr Radcliffe suggests, “an intrinsic part of the Last Supper and of every Eucharist”.

He goes on to suggest that Communion Catholics tend to “privilege” the first of these, the blessing of the bread, Jesus as the one who “gathers us together round the altar into intimate communion”. Kingdom Catholics, by contrast, emphasise the blessing of the cup, “which reaches out to the fullness of the Kingdom in which all humanity is called into unity”:

It suggests the Christ who overthrows every boundary, who touches the lepers and reaches out to the Samaritans, who breaks the law and transgresses the boundaries. It suggests a Church which is turned outwards, towards all that is human, which seeks for signs of the Spirit working in the world.

We might well conclude from this (though Fr Radcliffe is too polite to say so explicitly) that a church which lacked this emphasis on “the many” – focusing entirely on the “for you” – would be marked by a damaging insularity, a turning away from the world and a shrinking into its boundaries.

With that thought in mind, let’s turn our attention to the words of institution as contained within the Lutheran Service Book (and in much the same form in previous books):

Our Lord Jesus Christ, on the night when He was betrayed, took bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it and gave it to the disciples and said: “Take, eat; this is My body, which is given for you. This do in remembrance of Me.”

In the same way also He took the cup after supper, and when He had given thanks, He gave it to them, saying: “Drink of it, all of you; this cup is the new testament in My blood, which is shed for you for the forgiveness of sins. This do, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.”

Oops. “Which is shed for you for the forgiveness of sins”. No mention of “the many”.

Now, I’m sure there are good reasons for this (and perhaps someone can suggest some in the comments). After all, Jesus’ words are reported slightly differently in each of the four places where they are given in the New Testament, so there is room for liturgists to prefer one version over another.

Perhaps the rationale is that the words of institution as spoken during the Lord’s Supper are spoken by Christ (through the minister) directly to those there. The emphasis is thus on the “for you” – i.e. you people in the pews right now, hearing the promise of Christ. (Though when Jesus was saying those words to his disciples in the upper room right then, he still referred to “the many”.)

However, one of the most common criticisms of the Lutheran Church – one expressed with particular force and eloquence in this post by Michael Spencer – is of its insularity: its tendency to turn in on itself and ignore the wider church and the wider world.

In the light of Fr Radcliffe’s argument, we can perhaps see this tendency reflected – and subconsciously reinforced, week after week – at the very heart of our worship.

(How) would you Adam and Eve it?

John H Monday 8th March, AD 2010

To my mind, by far the strongest theological argument against human evolution is the question of where this leaves Adam and Eve. Tim Keller turns to this in the reply to his third question in his essay Creation, Evolution and Christian Laypeople (PDF) (see previous posts 1 | 2):

Question #3: If biological evolution is true and there was no historical Adam and Eve how can we know where sin and suffering came from?

Answer: Belief in evolution can be compatible with a belief in an historical fall and a literal Adam and Eve. There are many unanswered questions around this issue and so Christians who believe God used evolution must be open to one another’s views.

Dr Keller observes that many Christians who accept evolution conclude that Adam and Eve were not historical but “an allegory or symbol of the human race”, with Genesis 2 being a “symbolic story myth which conveys the truth that human beings all have and do turn away from God and are sinners.”

Dr Keller accepts that individual Christians (including C.S. Lewis) may well be able to believe this, but that a loss of belief in a historical fall could be harmful “for the church corporately and for its growth and vitality over time”, for two main reasons.

First, because it harms confidence in the trustworthiness of Scripture: even if Genesis 2 could be read symbolically, Paul’s argument in Romans 5 clearly depends on there being an historic Adam to parallel the historic Christ.

Second, the New Testament’s account of sin and salvation is based on the historicity of Adam and his rebellion. If we don’t have that point of rebellion against God, what is the alternative? As Keller writes:

You may posit that some human beings began to slowly turn away from God, all exercising their free wills. But then how did sin spread? Was it only by bad example? That has never been the classic teaching of the Christian doctrine of original sin. We do not learn sin from others; we inherit a sin nature … we are “hard-wired” for sin.

So how can a historic Adam and Eve be reconciled with a belief that God used evolutionary processes (“EPB”, to use the terminology of the previous post) to create human beings?

Any answer we give here will necessarily be speculative: neither Scripture nor science gives us much to go on. The model Dr Keller gives most attention to is that set out in Derek Kidner’s commentary on Genesis:

First, he notes that in Job 10:8-9 God is said to have fashioned Job with his “hands”, like a potter shaping clay out of the dust of the ground, even though God obviously did this through the natural process of formation in the womb. Kidner asks why the same potter-terminology in Genesis 2:7 could not denote a natural process like evolution.

Keller then quotes Kidner as follows:

Man in Scripture is much more than homo faber, the maker of tools: he is constituted man by God’s image and breath, nothing less … The intelligent beings of a remote past, whose bodily and cultural remains give them the clear status of “modern man” to the anthropologist, may yet have been decisively below the plane of life which was established in the creation of Adam.

Thus Adam and Eve (whether or not we agree with Kidner that Eve may still have been made by special creation) were not necessarily the biological parents of the entire human race, they were established as “God’s vice-regents”, and:

…God may have now conferred his image on Adam’s collaterals, to bring them into the same realm of being. Adam’s “federal” headship of humanity extended, if that was the case, outwards to his contemporaries as well as onwards to his offspring, and his disobedience disinherited both alike.

But what about suffering and death? Doesn’t the Bible portray these as consequences of the fall? Dr Keller observes that “traditional theology has never believed that humanity and the world in Genesis 2-3 was in a glorified, perfect state”. Even in the Garden of Eden, “there would have had to be some kind of death and decay or fruit would not have been edible”, and God’s injunction to humanity to “subdue” the earth implies there was still work to be done to perfect even a “very good” creation. Keller continues:

The result of the Fall, however, was “spiritual death”, something that no being in the world had known, because no one had ever been in the image of God. Human beings became, at the same time, capable of far greater and far worse things than any other creatures.

Other models can be considered along similar lines, but the crucial theological point is (to quote Derek Kidner):

What is quite clear from these chapters in the light of other scriptures is their doctrine that mankind is a unity, created in God’s image, and fallen in Adam by one act of disobedience; and these things are as strongly asserted in this understanding of God’s Word as on any other.

In the conclusion to his essay, Dr Keller once again calls for Christians to form a “bigger tent” than either “the anti-scientific religionists or the anti-religious scientists”. He finishes:

When Derek Kidner concluded his account of human origins, he said that his view was an “exploratory suggestion … only tentative, and it is a personal view. It invites correction and a better synthesis.” That is the right attitude for all of us working in this area.

Amen to that.

Evolution and other stories

John H Sunday 7th March, AD 2010

Probably the most important point Tim Keller makes in his essay Creation, Evolution and Christian Laypeople (PDF) (see previous post) is in his answer to question 2:

Question #2: If biological evolution is true, does that mean that we are just animals driven by our genes, and everything about us can be explained by natural selection?

Answer: No. Belief in evolution as a biological process is not the same as belief in evolution as a worldview.

Yes, yes, and a thousand times YES!

However, as Dr Keller points out:

Today every effort is being made to insist that belief in the process of biological evolution leads necessarily to belief in “perennial naturalism” (to use Alvin Plantinga’s term)

- an effort in which New Atheists and creationists find common cause.

Against this, Dr Keller distinguishes between “EBP” (the belief that “human life was formed through evolutionary processes”) and “GTE” (“the Grand Theory of Evolution … as the explanation for every aspect of human nature”). He describes Sam Harris’ attack on the (Christian and evolutionist) Francis Collins’s nomination to be head of NIH as an example of the view that “if you believe in EBP, you must believe in GTE”, and continues:

GTE is fast becoming what Peter Berger calls a “plausibility structure”. It is a set of beliefs considered so basic, and with so much support from authoritative figures and institutions, that it is becoming impossible for individuals to publicly question them.

This then explains the venom with which some New Atheists attack their opponents:

[The new atheists'] disdain and refusal to show any respect to opponents is not actually an effort to refute them logically, but to ostracize them socially and turn their own views into a plausibility structure. They are well on their way.

One side-effect of this is that, when Christians hear a pastor (or fellow-believer) express support for EBP as the means by which God created human beings and other life forms, this troubles them because they assume this means their pastor is also advocating the anti-Christian ideology of GTE.

Hence, Dr Keller argues:

Christian pastors, theologians, and scientists who want to argue for an EBP account of origins must put a great deal of emphasis at the same time on arguing against GTE.

Examples he gives of where we can do this include Alvin Plantinga’s critique of self-defeating theories (that deny the capacity for human rationality on which they themselves rely) and pushing back against GTE’s “efforts to explain away moral intuitions”.

Personally, rather than looking for incompleteness within EBP (which can turn into a “God of the gaps” exercise), I’d prefer to emphasis the incompleteness of EBP as an explanation for reality. It’s not necessarily that there are aspects of human existence that EBP can’t describe on its own level. For example, as Dr Keller argues earlier in his essay, there is no reason why God couldn’t have used evolution to create our belief in the supernatural – and much the same could be said for our sense of morality. However, once EBP has said everything it can say, there is still more to be said about reality – other stories to be told, even at those points where the scientific account is at its strongest.

(This, incidentally, is why I don’t like to talk about “scientific explanations”, but instead “scientific descriptions” or similar: because “explanation” carries connotations of being an exhaustive, complete account.)

Dr Keller concludes this section with a call for Christians to unite against the ideology of GTE rather than fighting amongst ourselves over the scientific validity of EBP:

Many orthodox Christians who believe in EBP often find themselves attacked by those Christians who do not. But it might reduce the tensions between believers over evolution if they could make common cause against GTE. Most importantly, it is the only way to help Christian laypeople make the distinction in their minds between evolution as biological mechanism and as Theory of Life.

In my next post, I plan to look at Dr Keller’s answer to the third question he posed, on the historicity of Adam and Eve.

Tim Keller on creation and evolution

John H Saturday 6th March, AD 2010

Many thanks to Chris E, who (in a comment on a previous post) linked to a superb essay by Tim Keller on Creation, Evolution and Christian Laypeople (PDF) – one of the best things I have read on the subject of evolution and Christian faith. Indeed, I agree pretty much with every word of it, and if you want a far more eloquent exposition of my position than I could ever manage – read this.

Dr Keller begins by observing that “New Atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and creationists such as Ken Ham “seem to have arrived at a consensus” on one “truism”:

that if you are an orthodox Christian with a high view of the authority of the Bible, you cannot believe in evolution in any form at all.

However, Dr Keller observes that many question this premise, and argue that we do not have to choose between “an anti-science religion or an anti-religious science”.

The overall result is to leave many laypeople confused and uncertain, especially since those arguing for the incompability of evolution and Christian faith are often the loudest and most strident voices on both sides of the debate. He therefore addresses three questions that laypeople have concerning evolution and Christianity:

  • If God used evolution to create, then we can’t take Genesis 1 literally, and if we can’t do that, why take any other part of the Bible literally?
  • If biological evolution is true, does that mean that we are just animals driven by our genes, and everything about us can be explained by natural selection?
  • If biological evolution is true and there was no historical Adam and Eve how can we know where sin and suffering came from?

Keller gives the following answer to the first of these:

The way to respect the authority of the Biblical writers is to take them as they want to be taken. Sometimes they want to be taken literally, sometimes they don’t. We must listen to them, not impose our thinking and agenda on them.

He argues that Genesis 1 is “exalted prose narrative” rather than either poetry or straightforward prose, and endorses Meredith Kline’s argument that Genesis 2:5 (“because it had not rained”) implies a non-literal reading of Genesis 1. Hence:

Genesis 1 does not teach that God made the world in six twenty-four hour days. Of course, it doesn’t teach evolution either, because it doesn’t address the actual processes by which God created human life. However, it does not preclude the possibility of the earth being extremely old. We arrive at this conclusion not because we want to make room for any particular scientific view of things, but because we are trying to be true to the text, listening as carefully as we can to the meaning of the inspired author.

I hope to look at Dr Keller’s answers to the other questions in succeeding posts.

Catching our breath

John H Saturday 6th March, AD 2010

I seem to blog in fits and starts these days. After a quiet February, I’ve had a bit of a blogging frenzy this week, with four fairly heavy posts inspired directly or indirectly by James Alison.

I’m about to launch off on another series of posts, this time on an essay by Tim Keller, but in the meantime here’s a summary of the last few day’s posts before they get swept further downstream:

  • Relating to Jesus: on breaking up with “Jesus the boyfriend in my head” and instead seeking a liturgical and sacramental encounter with him in the Lord’s Supper, the daily office and the Jesus prayer.
  • No more scapegoats: on René Girard’s concept of the “scapegoat mechanism”, with particular topical reference to the Jon Venables case.
  • Mary as Ark and Tabernacle: how Mary “definitively and triumphantly” fulfils Old Testament “dress rehearsals”.
  • Magic Eyes to see: looking beyond the wavy lines of bread and wine to the 3D presence of Jesus’ body and blood.

Magic Eyes to see

John H Friday 5th March, AD 2010

More good stuff from James Alison (previous posts 1 | 2), this time in relation to the Lord’s Supper, where he uses a lovely analogy to explain transubstantiation – though, as we will see, I think his analogy works equally well with the Lutheran understanding of the Supper.

The analogy Dr Alison uses is that of “Magic Eye” images: those “glossy, colourful, two-dimensional pictures of what appear to be a series of wavy lines or patterns” which, upon being looked at in the right way, suddenly resolve themselves into a 3D image. (Or, if you’re me, don’t. But let’s not let that spoil a good analogy!)

As Dr Alison points out:

there is no magic trick here at all. The 3-D image is embedded in the wavy-lined pattern by an artist, and there is nothing subjective about what can be seen. It is not that some people looking at a “Magic Eye” picture see Dolphins, and others a Wensleydale cheese. Nor do the eyes need to be strained in order to see the image. The stereoscopic functioning of the brain will pick up what is there if given half a chance by the viewer, which may mean that the viewer must learn to un-strain their gaze.

Dr Alison describes a similar process occurring during the Eucharist:

[A]s we relax into our thanksgiving, so the apparent pattern which we are seeing, and taking part in – words of scripture, prayers, priest, gestures and symbols of bread and wine – becomes the contour of something else, something 3-D, and we find ourselves actually participating in the heavenly liturgy which we know to be just there, but cannot usually see.

What occurs is a “shift from the perception that it is we who are doing something, to the realisation that someone is doing something to, and for us”:

The 3-D picture kicks in. Not dolphins, but a Great High Priest, who is also a slaughtered lamb, coming out of the veil-less Holy of Holies, and giving us his body and sprinkling us with his blood.

What’s more, with a Magic Eye image, we come to realise that “there are not two separate pictures present simultaneously, one picture consisting of wavy lines, and another consisting of 3-D dolphins”. Rather, we realise that the wavy lines are merely “the contours which make possible the presence of the 3-D dolphins”.

Dr Alison argues that this is why the Roman Catholic Church teaches transubstantiation rather than consubstantiation:

Once the elements have been made alive to the reality of which they have become the living sign, their “breadness” and “wineness” are nothing but the contours of that reality, and not a “thing” in themselves at all. [...]

Jesus’ showing forth his self-giving is not something hidden by the elements of bread and wine; the elements of bread and wine are the manifestation of what that self-giving looks like and is.

This may appear to contradict the Lutheran understanding of the Supper, which is not “consubstantiation”, but which does assert that the bread and wine continue to exist while also being the body and blood of Christ.

However, I’d argue that the Lutheran understanding actually fits Dr Alison’s analogy slightly better than transubstantiation. After all, the wavy lines are still there; the point is that they are no longer significant to what is happening. In the same way, the bread and wine in the Supper are still there, but that’s not where our attention should lie.

Rather than focusing on the 2D wavy lines of the bread and wine, Jesus’ word calls us to relax our gaze and look upon (and eat and drink) the 3D presence of his body and blood, given and shed for us for the forgiveness of our sins.

Mary as Ark and Tabernacle

John H Friday 5th March, AD 2010

Some more insights from James Alison, this time in relation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, in his talk Living the Magnificat. I don’t agree with Alison on everything in this essay (he takes a very traditional Roman Catholic view on Mary: Immaculate Conception, Queen of Heaven, the works), but I was fascinated by his description of how St Luke presents Mary as the fulfilment of the Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle, describing each of these as “dress rehearsals” for the story that was “definitively and triumphantly performed by Mary of Nazareth”.

He argues that this can be seen in Luke’s choice of Greek words:

So the Spirit of God will overshadow – ἐπισκιάσει – her (Luke 1:35). The dress rehearsals for this include the Ark of the Covenant being overshadowed by the cherubim – συσκιάζοντες (Exodus 25:20), and the Presence overshadowing the Tabernacle – ἐπεσκίαζεν (Exodus 40:35) – in the book of Exodus.

(Note: for technical reasons I’ve had to transliterate the Greek in this post; any errors in doing so are mine alone. Corrections welcomed, through only very slightly gritted teeth…) (Update: issue now fixed, Greek letters restored.)

Each year the High Priest would emerge through the veil from the Holy of Holies, becoming in the process a “temporary incarnation of the divinity”. This provides the “background imagery” for the annunciation:

Mary is to be the real Holy of Holies, the real Ark bearing the covenant, the real Tabernacle into which Moses could not go. And because it is the real high priest, YHWH himself, the Creator, who is to emerge from her, no man needs to go into her first in order to come out again in different robes, as would have been the case with the High Priests of the Temple.

(As an aside, Dr Alison also suggests that the same link is found in Revelation 11:19-12:1, linking the Ark with the woman who is to give birth – support for the interpretation that identifies the woman with Mary?)

Another parallel is found in the account of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth:

When Elizabeth hears her greeting, John the Baptist leaps for joy in her womb. The verb in Greek is ἐσκίρτησεν and it appears in two significant places: it is the same verb which in Hebrew describes David dancing about, skipping before the Ark in 1 Chronicles 15, where also the arrival of the Ark is greeted with great shouts – and the verb ἀναφονέω is used of the Levites greeting the Ark and of Elizabeth greeting her cousin.

The same verb is also found in Malachi 4:2, which Alison translates as follows (emphasis of “her” is in the original):

But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in her wings. You shall go forth leaping (σκιρτησετε) like calves from the stall.

In each case, what is happening is the fulfilment of what had been “cultic objects”, with Mary “beginning to live out, slowly, painstakingly, in time, what those cultic objects had been pointing to”:

And it is this real performed, lived-out history over time, soon to be opened out through her son’s protagonism so that we may all become its performers and livers-out, which will itself be the crowning perfection of creation.

No more scapegoats

John H Thursday 4th March, AD 2010

The Bruce Hamill blog post I linked in my previous post mentioned the theologian James Alison, who I’ve since been reading with some fascination (even if he writes some things that are hard to understand…).

Dr Alison bases much of his theology on the philosophy/anthropology of René Girard, with whom I was similarly unfamiliar. In his essay Girard’s breakthrough, Alison describes Girard’s analysis of the “scapegoat mechanism” (or “surrogate victimage”). This is the idea that societies shore up their sense of unity and order by singling out scapegoats who can be blamed for social disorder and expelled:

That is to say, human desire, as we live it (and thus the formation from within of our “self” and our consciousness) derives, as a cultural fact, from desire becoming distorted by rivalry, until there is a point where there is so much group violence that unanimity (and thus peace and the avoidance of the collapse of the group) can only be restored when, apparently mysteriously, all become fixated on someone who can be held responsible for the collapse of unity and order within the group and then expelled, permitting the establishment of a new social unity over against the expelled one.

Hence “an act of collective fratricide against a victim is foundational to all human cultures”, with each culture having to maintain its belief in the culpability of the victim “by forging prohibitions, myths and rituals”.

What’s fascinating about Girard from a Christian perspective is his return to the Roman Catholic Church as a result of applying his theories to the Bible. As Alison writes:

Professor Girard had assumed that the Jewish and Christian sacred texts would show exactly the same thing as all other ancient texts and myths – the threat of collapsing social unity leading to violence and the emergence of a new peace around the cadaver of the victim.

He did indeed find this – that the biblical texts are “structured around sacralised violence”. However, “there was a unique and astonishing difference”, one found from earliest parts of the Bible (with the story of Cain and Abel) but coming to full fruition in the New Testament, where:

God is entirely set free from participation in our violence – the victim is entirely innocent, and hated without cause – and indeed God is revealed not as the one who expels us, but the One whom we expel, and who allowed himself to be expelled so as to make of his expulsion a revelation of what he is really like, and of what we really, typically do to each other, so that we can begin to learn to get beyond this.

As Dr Alison puts it in another essay, Being saved and being wrong:

The apostolic witnesses began to be able to perceive that God has nothing at all to do with human violence, or the human social order that is based on human violence. Rather, God is so entirely outside that order that he is able to subvert it from within, by taking a typical human act of violence, a lynch-death, a coming together of all against one who is considered especially guilty and troublesome, and making this into the showing, the revelation of who God really is.

He continues:

God’s goodness is shown, not in his accepting a particular human sacrifice to blot out our violence, but rather in his subversion from within of the whole of our mendacious sacrificial order by himself giving us a sacrifice, so that we need never construct our order sacrificially again.

Hence we are enabled by Jesus’ death “to recognise our complicity in the old story”, and instead “begin to forge a story in creative imitation of Jesus’ story” – freed from the necessity to play the old game of scapegoating and expulsion.

Why am I posting this today? Because the UK news media are currently whipping up a mob frenzy over Jon Venables, who (at the age of 10) was one of the two boys who killed the toddler James Bulger in 1993. He was released on licence in 2001, but has now been put back into prison after breaching the terms of his licence.

The government are refusing to give the reason for re-imprisoning Venables, though a cursory search on Google will locate news reports providing more details (and a search on Twitter will give an idea of the levels of anger and hatred towards Venables among the general public). No doubt by the weekend the full story – including details of Venables’ new identity, given to him on his release – will have emerged.

Now there is no suggestion at all here that Venables is an innocent victim. The Bulger killing was a terrible crime. But the sheer fury of the media and public response to his re-imprisonment is surely an example of the scapegoating mechanism in process.

There is a deep anxiety in our society about our children: the way we raise them, the world into which they are growing. The anger, fear and hatred directed towards paedophiles, or child killers such as Venables – a response which goes far beyond a simple desire to see justice done against wrongdoers – are an outlet for that anxiety: in Girardian terms, “decent society” seeks to establish a sense of unity and order by fixating on such figures and “expelling” them.

Jon Venables will no doubt be dealt with according to the law, and will receive whatever punishment he deserves. But what René Girard and James Alison are telling us is that this will do nothing to reduce the fears and anxieties of society or to establish “unity and order”, and that as Christians we are called (and indeed enabled) to escape from “this tedious story of the way in which this world shores up its security and peace at the expense of victims”.

Relating to Jesus

John H Tuesday 2nd March, AD 2010

Via Ben Myers, an outstanding post by Bruce Hamill on his break-up with his boyfriend: Jesus.

Hamill describes the relationship he used to have with Jesus:

Boyfriend was not the term we used, of course, but he was effectively a kind of invisible friend. I talked to him. Not all the time of course. In fact it was mainly when I was stressed. “Help me Jesus, I’m in over my head here” or, alternatively, “Thank you Jesus for this lovely sunny day.”

As he points out, this relationship was somewhat one-sided, even “egotistical”:

I did all the talking. It was all about me. I knew that Jesus was meant to do some of the talking. He didn’t really. I knew there were supposed to be techniques for listening so I tried to do some listening. You were supposed to read the Bible and then your take on what you had just read was taken to be what Jesus was saying. Alternatively when I had questions and asked Jesus about them I was supposed to wait and see what ideas came into my head. And if they persisted and I felt them impressing themselves strongly upon me, then I was warranted in regarding that as Jesus talking. It was a strange relationship!

In contrast, Hamill goes on to describe the relationship which Jesus sought to establish with his disciples (who, as a commenter points out, did not spend their time “sitting around Jesus singing him love songs”!):

The same Jesus who gave himself again to his disciples after they had contributed to the process by which he was killed, this same Jesus was concerned (prior to his death) that he be remembered precisely for and in his death. This is my body broken for you. This is my blood shed for you. Do this to remember me!

The Jesus of Christian faith is not an invisible psychological aid. The experience of resurrection is this: living he confronts us with his death. He wants us to know him as a man who poured himself out for the world and also as a man who was broken by the world. This death is the culmination of the person and it is this that determines whatever kind of “relationship” we might have with him.

Hence the relationship we now need with Jesus is (as Hamill puts it) a “liturgical” one:

I need to be constantly addressed by the drama of God’s encounter with the world as it culminates in the great revelatory victory of the cross of Christ. … Unless I am liturgically confronted by the forgiveness of my divine victim, Jesus, I will never be truly human nor truly participate in God’s life for which I was created.

As he concludes:

My hope is that eucharistic liturgy is the Spirit’s way of casting out romantic narcissism and making disciples.

All this certainly chimes with my own experience over the past few years, which have seen a similar shift from the “talking in my head to Jesus” model (though “talking in my head to Jesus” still has its place) to a more liturgical and sacramental encounter with him:

  • above all in the Divine Service, as Christ’s people meet together to encounter him present among us: speaking words of absolution, unfolding the Scriptures, and giving his body and blood to us in the Lord’s Supper;
  • in the Office, which provides a daily exposure to “the drama of God’s encounter with the world” as recorded in the Bible’s stories and songs; and
  • in practices such as the Jesus Prayer, which – while one level an individualistic “talking in my head” – has a “givenness” to it which it shares with the Office and the Divine Service.

What all this spares us is “the laborious exercise of all manner of psychological and spiritual techniques” to which Ben Myers refers. As Myers puts it:

[T]he only Jesus we want anything to do with is the Jesus narrated in the Gospels – not Jesus the friendly poltergeist (as Robert Jenson once put it), but the crucified and risen one who summons us to discipleship.

Have UK evangelicals drifted right?

John H Saturday 13th February, AD 2010

Apparently the FT’s magazine today has an article on the rise of evangelical Christians within the Conservative Party. (If anyone has a spare copy of this: I’d love to see it.) (Update: thanks to Phil for providing a link to the article on the FT website.)

Equally interesting is the rise of Conservatism among evangelical Christians. My personal experience – admittedly limited – is that post-war Anglican evangelicals tended to lean slightly left, under the influence of John Stott and his emphasis on social justice issues, and that a shift towards Conservatism has occurred since 1997. Go back further, to the 19th century, and non-Anglican evangelicals formed the backbone of the old Liberal Party (which, admittedly, wasn’t “left-wing” as we’d understand it; but it certainly wasn’t Tory, either).

A similar change that has occurred since I first entered evangelical circles in the mid-90s: a revival of creationism among UK evangelicals. Again, when I first returned to faith in 1994 there seemed nothing incongruous about being an evangelical who accepted evolution. Books such as Henri Blocher’s In The Beginning had a significant influence, and John Stott (again) was an example of an influential evangelical leader who accepted both evolution and even a non-literal reading of the Flood narratives.

My feeling – nothing scientific here! – is that young-earth creationism is now more common among younger evangelicals than it was, with intelligent design also commanding a great deal of support. Accepting mainstream evolutionary science feels like a minority position in a way that it did not 15 years ago.

I wonder if the internet has been a factor on both these issues. The web has brought UK Christians into closer contact with American Christianity. (I should know: I wouldn’t be a Lutheran today had it not been for exposure to reformational and Lutheran writers via the web.) And this in turn has increased the influence of American evangelical concerns such as anti-evolutionism and “culture war” issues rather than issues of economic and political justice; as well as encouraging the general sense of a correlation between political and religious conservatism.

It may also be a symptom of a wider fragmentation within evangelicalism, particularly between “conservative” and “open” evangelicals. (This is in many ways symbolised by Bible translations: fifteen years ago, the NIV was used almost universally among UK evangelicals. Now conservative evangelicals tend to prefer the ESV, with open evangelicals using the NIV or even NRSV, and charismatics possibly preferring the NLT. Again, just my perception, this.)

Sixteen years ago, I became a conservative evangelical in the John Stott tradition. I’ve admittedly moved from that tradition in a number of ways, but John Stott hasn’t changed – and yet I suspect he would now be seen as more of a “liberal evangelical” or “open evangelical” figure by many. (At least, he probably commands more support from those constituencies than from conservative evangelicals, among whom the main influences are now people like Mark Driscoll.)

I’d be interested to know what others think. Am I right that a shift has occurred on these issues? If so, why do people think this has happened?

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