"The Last Word" by Tom Wright. A Review

The Last Word - Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture. N. T. Wright (San Francisco: Harper, 2005) US$19.95

A Review by Richard Kew

Five years ago, when it was still possible for those of differing viewpoints have a relatively fair exchange of idea, I was drinking coffee with the rector of a large Episcopal congregation who is on the left hand side of the issues troubling us. One thing we agreed upon was the desperate need to deal with hermeneutics and the authority of Scripture. We both love the bible intensely, and neither of us was necessarily comfortable with the way "our side" handled it, so we felt the time had come to get this skunk out onto the table. Alas, events overtook us, and such a conversation is probably no longer possible in today's charge atmosphere.

Yet having read Tom Wright's latest book on the nature of Scripture's authority, I think we have here a tool which might help break up some of that logjam. In his preface, the Bishop of Durham says he was spurred to write about the authority of Scripture as a direct result of his significant involvement in the International Anglican Doctrinal and Theology Commission, as well as the Lambeth Commission which produced the Windsor Report. He dedicates the book to Bishop Stephen Sykes and Archbishop Robin Eames, the respective chairs of those panels.

When I was a very junior priest in Bristol, England, I attended a gathering at which J. I. Packer dialogued with one of the more 'liberal'intellects in the diocese about the task of Scripture. I remember only snippets of that afternoon, but a comment that stuck in my mind was Jim's observation that the next few decades would be spent ascertaining the place and nature of authority in the church.

What Packer said is truly the case, for in one way or another at the heart of so many of the battles that are rending the church today is our various understanding of the place of Scripture in this mix, and the way in which we interpret the text. The truth is, though, that our conversations about scripture (and almost everything else for that matter) are totally inadequate because they end up as personalized insult and bellicosity. Wright notes, "a good deal of debate is conducted today at a shallow and trivial level... We are all used to, and tired of, the heated exchanges which consist simply of name-calling ("fundamentalist," "radical" and so on)" (Page 21).

He goes on to point out that everyone is at fault. So-called conservatives ignore huge swathes of Scriptures' teaching in favor of focusing on their particularities, while those on the other side of the aisle spend their time "playing to a gallery stacked with iconoclasts" (Page 22). One of the problems is that gross polarizations have taken place in North America, spilling over to everywhere else, and this has not helped us as we seek to use the Scriptures appropriately in the significant debates of our times.

What Wright tries to do in The Last Word is to nudge us out of long-held and well-prepared positions, many of which are totally inadequate, in order that Scripture can speak powerfully both within the church and amidst the changed spiritual, social, political, ethical, and cultural topography in the West today. Bishop Wright offers little comfort to those on all sides who merely want to dig into worn out positions and lob shells at "the other side" from the safety of their own bunker.

This book is a pretty successful attempt by a massive intellect to give us lesser mortals a grasp of how he thinks we should understand and use the Bible in light of what he has learned of its place within the Christian tradition. It is his contention that contemporary discoveries and scholarship demand that we put our entrenched positions rising from the Reformation and the Enlightenment back into the hopper, and recognize that there is a great deal more to the Bible's authority in our lives than 2 Timothy 3:16. These 146 pages are, in fact, a commentary on a statement Tom Wright makes toward the outset that "the phrase 'authority of scripture' can make Christian sense only if it is a shorthand for 'the authority of the triune God, exercised somehow through scripture'" (Page 23).

What Wright is in fact doing is to demonstrate how he, one who was shaped and formed by a standard-issue British Evangelicalism of the 1960s and 1970s, has come to see the Bible's place in our thinking, acting, and believing, in light of years spent attempting to grapple with the whole swathe of biblical scholarship, without divorcing his calling as both scholar and pastor. He tells us that one of our problems is that we tend to use shorthand in our conversations about the bible, and the outcome is distortion. "The familiar phrase 'the authority of scripture' thus turns out to be more complicated than it might at first sight appear" (Page 24).

Shorthands, like the phrase 'the authority of scripture' are like suitcases in which we can carry complicated things around, but "too much debate about scriptural authority has had the form of people hitting one another with locked suitcases. It is time to unpack our shorthand doctrines, to lay them out and inspect them. Long years in the suitcase may have made some of the contents go moldy" (Page 25). We tend to forget that, excuse the pun, when we talk about the authority of scripture all of us carry around with it an awful lot of baggage from the church's and our own past.

Wright wants us to understand the richness of the story of God's engagement with his people and then to recognize that the authority of scripture is much larger than just how we happen to see and interpret the Bible. The doctrine of scripture's authority is "a sub-branch of several other theological topics: the mission of the church, the work of the Spirit, the ultimate future hope and the way it is anticipated in the present, and of course the nature of the church" (page 30).

He also wants us to recognize how our cultural environment has shaped our understanding of scripture, and then how the Enlightenment whittled away at the essence of what God's Kingdom and rule upon earth is all about. Authority, when we see it within the context of God's Kingdom plans, is much more than words through which God speaks to us. The Kingdom is about nothing less than God's work transforming the whole created order, and the authority of God within his Kingdom work is communicated to us, scripture having a peculiarly significant role.

The pithy theological analysis of this book is a masterpiece; yet there are so many tantalizing throw-away comments as he alludes to great areas of contemporary scholarship with which I am unfamiliar, that I kept wanting to say, "Stop, just a minute, enlarge on what you have just said." I found myself wanting to invite him to share with me a mug of good dark English beer in one of Durham's many pubs so that he could help me chew these things over.

One particular insight which struck me was this: "Recent study of the letters, and of the intention of the gospel writers, emphasizes the self-conscious was in which the New Testament authors believed themselves called to exercise their calling as 'authorized' teachers, by the guidance and power of the Spirit, writing books and letters to sustain, energize, shape, judge, and renew the church" (Page 51). Packed into this one sentence is enough for a whole day's conversation, and this was just one of those moments when I wished Bishop Tom had treated us to footnotes like those that abound in his heavier and more scholarly productions!

But he doesn't have time to pause, and just sweeps us on. He wants us to see that we live within a continuity with the early Christian community, rooted and grounded in the Israel of the Old Testament, and God's initiative in Christ to reform and transform God's people and God's world. "The written word, expressing and embodying the living word of the primitive gospel, was the Spirit-empowered agent through which the one creator God was reclaiming the cosmos, and as such it offered the way to a truly human life" (Page 58).

Wright then gives us a lightening tour through the first millennium and a half of the use of the bible, focusing on strenths and cul-de-sacs of the early and medieval church's use of the text, and that brings us screaching into the backyard of the Reformation. It is clear that some of the problems about the authority of the scriptures within the life of the church with which we struggle today are closely related to the Reformers' solutions, and the Counter-Reformation responses to their challenges then. We have managed to ossify them and turn them into weapons.

It is at this point that the Anglican in the writer comes to center stage, particularly in the wisdom of Richard Hooker, whose work more than four hundred years ago so shaped what has become the Anglican approach to the faith. Wright's priceless little summary of Hooker's understanding of the place of the written Word within the context of the living church, the nature of tradition and reason, and their interplay with it, is one very good reason for buying and digesting this book.

Here's a little teaser from that discussion. "Part of the legacy of Hooker... was precisely that holistic worldview which insists, not that scripture should be judged at the bar of 'reason' and found wanting, but that in reading and interpreting scripture we must do so not arbitarily, but with clear thinking and informed historical judgment" (Page 81).

This brings us to the Enlightenment, and then to the Enlightenment's successor and possible vanquisher, Postmodernity. The Reformation in many ways prepared the way for the Enlightenment, whose benefits Wright is swift to extol, however when it comes to the way we understand Christian believing and handle the scriptures, the Enlightenment leaves much to be desires. While the Enlightenment demands that we read the scriptures historically, the "Enlightenment project made deliberate attempts to demonstrate that such readings would in fact undermind the central Christian claims" (Page 84). It is within a landscape like this that many of us grew up, came to faith, learned our theology, and have sought to serve God within the church.

But if the mood of the Enlightenment was hauty, it is now being scrambled as Postmodernity comes along and challenges the Enlightenment's assumption that it knows best and it is the climax and summit of history. Whereas the Enlightenment taught us to pry the text apart with scientific precision, often reducing it to little bits, Postmodernity is at heart nihilistic, and asks us to deconstruct, "unmasking the power interests latent in texts and movements, not least those of the last two hundred years..." (Page 96). It is not the text, Postmodernity says, it is ourselves as we interpret the text that are most important.

Here's a personal aside. What has fascinated me in these last few years has been that those within the church who have been most on-board with the Enlightenment's mindset, are those most eager to use deconstruction -- one of the tools that most significantly challenges the ground upon which the Enlightenment stood. When we come to the bible those of a deconstructionist ilk have rendered "whole books unusuable because those writings are deemed guilty of what the postmodern Western world regards, in its new and highly self-righteous judgmentalism, as unforgivable ideological sins" (Page 97-98). Again, Wright's discussion of this phenomenon is worth the price of the book.

But in Bishop Tom's mind when it comes to contemporary misuse of scripture there is plenty of blame to go round, so culturally conditioned are we all. Even those of us who think we are being determinedly biblical are often guilty of playing fast and loose with the text, or bringing our own scissors and paste to it. Wright almost tears his hair out when he says that there is a "remarkable ignorance of what scripture is and teaches; an inability to use it in serious, mature, and indeed Christian ways" (Page 111). What is vital is that "we work our way through and out the other side of today's ideological debates" so that we can hope to see how the Kingdom's message speaks transformation into our contemporary environment.

The remedy to misreading both conservative and liberal, as well as the postmodern critique which, in effect, says that there is really no such thing as texts, only interpretations, is careful historically-rooted exegesis. He calls upon us to use the appropriate tools within the continuity of the church to see what on earth the Spirit is saying to us. The Spirit-led community, he asserts is a missionary community, and a missionary community is a scripture-reading community. "Scripture's authority is thus seen to best advantage in its formation of the mind of the church, and its stiffening of our resolve, as we work to implement the resurrection of Jesus, and so to anticipate the day when God will make all things new, and justice, joy and peace will triumph (Ephesians 1:3-23)" (Page 115).

Let's go back to that initial point Wright makes that the authority of scripture is, in reality, the authority of God exercised through scripture. I have no desire to spend my time thumping folks over the head with the Bible, although at times I plead guilty to having done so, but what I want almost above all else is to see the church put itself at the disposal of God through the holy texts that God has given to it.

My observation is that American churches in general, and the Episcopal Church in particular, have not given the right handling of scripture its appropriate place in our life, with the result that on all sides we have missed the mandate of God to us. Wright, therefore, keeps making the point that our minds (and therefore lives) are formed through the consistent, persistent digestion of scripture within the continuity of the whole Communion of Saints. The outcome of this formation is holiness, and biblical holiness is about a great deal more than our personal ethics (although they are the part of the story that the left sits light to, while the right sits light to the holistic implications of the story).

Tom Wright and I were formed in the same evangelical stream of Anglicanism at more or less the same time. We were taught by our mentors to love, honor, read, learn, and digest the richness of the holy Scriptures, allowing our minds and hearts to be formed by them. Like so many others, we have recognized the shortcomings of our ecclesial conditioning, and have in our different ways wrestled to be faithful to the God who called us in our use of his revelation to us, while recognizing that yesterday's parameters may be both limited and flawed as we move into a very different age.

However, I have lacked the intellectual tools to get beyond that sense of impasse. What this book has done for me is to open up new avenues of inquiry which, I hope, will lead me forward not only to a richer faith, but also a better way of handling the Bible as the Bible speaks to us within the raggedness of today's church. I will finish with Wright's closing words.

"The various crises in the Western church of our day -- decline in numbers and resources, moral dilemmas, internal division, failure to present the gospel coherently to a new generation -- all these and more should drive us to pray for scripture to be given its head once more; for teachers and preachers who can open the Bible in the power of the Spirit, to give the church the energy and direction it needs for its mission and renew it in its love for God; and, above all, for God's word to do its work in the world, as, in Isiaah's vision, it brings about nothing short of new creation -- the new world in which the grim entail of sin has at last been done away." He then quotes Isaiah 55:10-13 (Pages 141-142).

If I Were A Bishop

As many of you might be aware, I have been part of a committee that for the past year has been searching for candidates to be bishop in the Diocese of Tennessee. This has been an exhausting task, particularly in the midst of such difficult times in the life of the church, and I have spent more hours than I care to think discussing, praying, listening, interviewing, and so forth. Hard as it has been, it has been stimulating, and in the process I have done a lot of thinking about what it means to be a leader in the church.

As we move toward electing one of the candidates nominated I feel a lot more able to say what I think a bishop in tomorrow's world should be like, and while there is a continuity between past and future, I suspect that anyone elected and consecrated in this diocese or anywhere else, is going to have to think and reconfigure their ministry enormously, whether they like it or not.

An observation I make is that so many still seem to approach the notion of the episcopate with the "business as usual" mindset. The boat has been rocked and is taking on water, but there is this idiotic don't rock the boat mentality that prevails. There is no such thing as business as usual at this point in our history, and there is little precedent for all that we are attempting to deal with -- both at the grassroots in the life of congregations, and in the wider ecclesial sphere. Rocking the boat might be the only way forward in the long term.

One of the primary tasks of tomorrow's leader is that he/she is going to not only be picking up in the midst of a mess, but this leader is going to be charged with remaking the church so that it will be effective in the pursuit of its ministry. It will not be easy, and will require all the grace, intelligence, creativity, longsuffering, and wisdom that the leader can muster. What worries me about the games of ecclesiastical politics that get played when we come to electing is that we tend to veer toward the lowest common denominator than to go for the person who is best able to do the job. You only have to look at that sorry group, the House of Bishops, to see the fruit of this.

Tomorrow's bishop might seem to have some of the outward trappings inherited from predecessors, but the reality is different. I suspect that the effective bishop of tomorrow is going to need to be more like St. Cuthbert, the Celtic bishops of Ireland in the Dark Ages, William Henry Hobart, or Jackson Kemper, than the individual who held the office immediately before them. The culture is shedding its Christian clothing so fast that unless this person is out there leading the mission of the church, committed to proclamation of the Cross and evangelism, and modeling it for clergy and people alike, then there in a very short time there is going to be no diocese to speak of.

This requires tenacity and fortitude, as well as a capacity to both understand and interpret the Gospel for today's world. It will require the willingness to take calculated risks and experiment. It will require tons of courage, the developing of a thick skin, as well as great sensitivity not only to the people among whom the bishop ministers, but to God's will, purpose, and revelation in these circumstances. Sometimes the bishop is going to go out on a limb, and if he/she does not, then that person will not being doing their job.

The bishop of tomorrow, I think, will be more a person of the Kingdom than the church. By this I mean that the bishop will need to be theologically rooted in the fact that there is a great deal more in what Jesus says about the Kingdom of God being in our midst than personal salvation, piety, and church life. We need to be a church that applies the Gospel to the challenges thrown at us by the prevailing culture, from issues of war and peace, through sexuality and personal morality, to economics and the environment -- and beyond. As the Kingdom is rooted and grounded in the teaching of Scripture, the bishop needs to be a person maranated in the Word of God, the story of biblical theology, and be willing to wrestle to see how that theology speaks and works in the world of today.

There is more to it than that, because this is not just head trip stuff, it needs to be not only absorbed, put drenched in prayer. This means tomorrow's bishop has to be a person of prayer, someone who, as it were, reads and thinks over the bible on their knees. For what its worth, my observation is that far too many of our bishops have only the vaguest grasp of what Scripture teaches, and their spirituality is stunted. This may sound terribly judgmental, but I have rubbed shoulders with a lot of bishop in my time and am sorry to say that the truth is not necessarily easy to accept.

Those who are called to leadership in tomorrow's church, and by tomorrow I really do mean tomorrow and not just some time vaguely in the future, need to be counter-cultural people. This is hard for Anglicans who have swum comfortably in the waters of the culture for hundreds of years. We are now being asked to get out of that current and to join those who have been on the edge of the prevailing culture. If we do not, then we have no future.

I could go on and on, but one of the most important things is that tomorrow's bishop needs to be a global person. One of the infuriating things about most American bishops is how small-minded and provincial their acting and thinking is -- but then they only reflect the church which they are called to lead. We are part of a worldwide Communion which is part of the Church Universal. This means not only acting as a team player in that Communion, but also learning from that Communion and living into the life of that Communion. We live in a globalized world, and if the church is not as global as the Gospel is, then it will not be being the church.

The primary task of tomorrow's bishop is to be a missionary leader who is wholehearted to the point of death in their commitment to proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ. Every potential bishop of tomorrow should read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest Paul's catalogue of sufferings in 2 Corinthians 11, because Paul understood his apostolicity in terms of being a pioneer missionary. Tomorrow's bishop will be a pioneer missionary, and unless the bishop leads the diocese forward in mission, the diocese will die.

A Million Little Pieces

When my favorite pair of shoes began disintegrating literally while I was out yesterday, I slipped into a store to replace them. While trying on for size I asked for a shoe horn at the checkout I was given a solemn lecture not to walk away with it because they had lost several of these lovely things during the last few weeks. It baffled me that someone would deliberately steal one of these things, but it told me something about how we understand honesty and truthfulness in our culture.

Shoe horns are a long way away from best selling books, but in the last couple of weeks James Frey has become the post-Christmas cause celebre with his book, A Million Little Pieces. This supposed memoir had the good fortune of being picked up by that wealthy Nashville-raised denizen of taste in literature and just about everything else, Ms. Oprah Winfrey. If you have not been following this little soap opera, then you have not missed very much, but it is a fascinating illustration of the inroad rampant subjectivity has made into the popular consciousness.

James Frey is an individual who has written this memoir of his days as a drug addict. It is apparently a fast-moving page-turner that the likes of Larry King have described as "a good read." The trouble is that it seems to be fiction masquerading as autobiography, as much the product of Frey's over-ripe imagination as it is the tale of his life to date. He is now prepared to admit to fabricating proportions of the story he tells -- and the fascinating thing is that so few people care. On this Sunday in January it sits perched at the top of the New York Times best seller list, and is the number one seller on Amazon.com.

Now we should all realize that you are going read autobiography differently than something written about that same subject's life by a more disinterested observer. Let's face it, it is hard to be objective about yourself, and even the most honest among us is not very likely to write that disparagingly of ourselves!

I have read a lot of memoir in my time, and have found myself enriched by those which prod and seek to dig beneath the surface, whether I am talking of Augustine, Frederick Buechner, C. S. Lewis, or C. G. Jung. Now in addition to the masterpieces that stand out, there is plenty of autobiography that is eminently self-serving: Jack Spong's Here I Stand is a book which leaps immediately to mind. However, there is a difference between a writer's determined slant on their own life and outright and deliberate fabrication. Bishop Spong's take on things might often be novel, but he does not stoop to this.

Professor Mary Karr of Syracuse University, a specialist in the memoir as a literary form, and a memoirist, writes in todays NY Times, "In nonfiction, though, there's a different contract with the reader: you don't make things up." Yet this seems to be exactly what James Frey has done, yet Oprah among others has done little more than shrug and say, "So what?" In our world objectivity is out and subjectivity is in. I the reader am the one who needs to be wooed and impressed, even if that means intentially playing fast and loose with the facts.

We now find ourselves in a culture that has no desire to be hamstrung by the restraints imposed by objective truth, so the modern memoirist is more prone to employ the devices of the novelist. This approach is even creeping into the writing of history. Several years ago a serious biographer of Ronald Reagan had the timerity to introduce himself into the narrative of his book as a kind of theatrical prop, thereby supposedly freeing himself up to make the work more insightful. The result, alas, was just the reverse.

Randy Kennedy, one of the op-ed writers in the NY Times asks, "So how to explain what seems to be the increasing willingness of readers to accept truckloads of falsehood in memoirs, inventions much bigger than the reconstructed conversations or narrative elision that have long been the wink-wink conceits of personal history?"

I suspect there are a lot of potential answers to that question. One is that James Frey has done is to make a ripping good yarn of his life, mingling fact, fiction, and fantasy in telling a tale of a brokenness that is being redeemed. People want to be entertained, and to hear such stories because it gives them hope, even if they are not entirely true (although Oprah's website actually says of the book that it is "raw and honest"). (http://www2.oprah.com/tows/pastshows/200510/tows_past_20051026.jhtml)

Yet behind this is something that is far more worrisome, which is that increasing numbers of people are no longer as able to tell fact from fiction, and when the chips are down, it doesn't really worry them. Our contemporary culture gives much more credence to being entertained than to what is true. What is the difference, folks will rightly ask, between a writer who fictionalizes parts of his life to spice up the tale, and a television producer who in telling the story of, say, Prince William, or Laura Bush, plays with the truth in order to make their program more televisual?

Both television and the internet, coupled with the subjectivization of our culture, have added to our inability to discern the difference between truth and fiction. Add to this the leariness that there is in the postmodern mind when faced with truth, because it immediately asks "Whose truth?" and, perhaps, "Is this person using their notion of truth to impose their trip on me?"

This is certianly how the rising generations perceive the way in which those of us in the church present to them the facts of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In the past the veracity of facts mattered, now their importance seems to have become peripheral. Yet when a culture no longer seems to care whether the stories being told have any resemblance to reality but could very well be one giant fib, then there is every reason to be anxious.

I love reading stories that good writers, cinematographers, raconteurs, etc., have made up. I know when Garrison Keillor is spinning some yarn about Lake Wobegon, it is just that, and I enjoy it as such. I am being entertained and there are traces of honest representation of the foibles of the sort of people who live in Minnesota, but this is very different from James Frey passing off fiction as the facts of his life.

While James Frey will probably be a five-minute wonder, our sense of objectivity is now so compromised that episodes of this kind are sure to arise again. The Christian faith is true for a number of reasons, but one fundamental one is that it is rooted and grounded in God's great acts in history, the climax being the resurrection. The objectivity of facts should be important to us, as well as the manner in which we communicate them to our contemporaries in a world that seems willing to accept any cock and bull story because its notion of truth is so fragmented.

Homesickness

Quite regularly I find myself overwhelmed, sometimes to the point of near paralysis, by homesickness. This has been part of the pattern of my life almost since we arrived in the United States thirty years ago. Sometimes I can feel it coming on so I can prepare myself for it, on other occasions it creeps up on me unexpectedly pouncing like a cat upon an unsuspecting mouse.

I always thought that as I got older the pangs of homesickness would ameliorate, but if anything the reverse has happened. Certainly, the nature of the longing is somewhat different than it was three decades ago, but it is always there lurking in the background. I try to brush it aside, as one swats of pesky mosquito, but it refuses to disappear so easily.

After my parents had died my brother and daughter were going through Mother's correspondence and found a large collection of letters written by my father from Africa, Sicily and Italy. My parents had been apart since ten days before Dunkirk in 1940, and these missives are the fascinating record of a young married couple trying to hold a relationship together in time of war. Amidst them was one written from outside Naples on July 17, 1944, just three months before Dad went home and barely four months before I was conceived!

I am, at the moment, sitting in a deck chair outside the Mess Tent enjoying the cool of the evening and what a relief it is after the heat of the day. The sun has already disappeared over the hill which lies behind me and as I look in front of me its pink light is lighting up the cone of Vesuvius away in the distance. Its very beautiful but somehow or other I do not feel capable of appreciating it, for, as the days go by my mind runs more and more on memories of the green fields and woods of England for which I pine so much.

He goes on, Four years -- to me such things seem an awful long way away and sometimes I have to think hard before I can visualize scenes which four years ago were everyday things -- the view of the hills behind Englemere, the view over Mentmore from the top of Icknield Way, the view of Aldbury from the top of Toms Hill and countless others that I can think of. Lord how I long to see them all again when at last this exile is finished...

I go back and read these words from time to time, but cannot get through them without a lump forming in the back of my throat and tears coming to my eyes. It is as if history repeats itself because I yearn for precisely the same things that my father did, and did so a great while before I discovered he had written in such a moving way as he plodded up the west coast of Italy with the rest of the British Eighth Army. It is interesting that the same scenery dances before my mind's eye, filling me with nostalogia and a sense of being far, far away from something that is precious.

I have not had to face the physical hardships of war that my father endured, and at least my wife and I are together, but even as I look out of my window across the beautiful rolling fields of Middle Tennessee, part of me wishes with all my heart that I was watching the sun setting over that funny little town, and the countryside surrounding it where both my father and I grew up, and where my brother still lives.

Yet, and here is the twist. The England I left in September 1976 is not the England that exists today. Great changes have taken place, not just physically but also in the British personality. The England for which I dream is part real and part figment of a romantic imagination. I am like so many others as they age, because much of what I really long for has disappeared with the inevitable passage of time.

I would love to return to live in Tring, the place where I grew up, and to be able to stand on any spring, summer, autumn, or winter morning that I wanted and look out from the Icknield Way across the Vale of Aylesbury toward Mentmore, but I probably never will. Although we have done quite well on our real estate over the last twenty years, Rosemary and I can never afford property where land for development sells at close to $2 million an acre! But despise this dose of cold water, I would love to end my days where my life began, and to have my mortal remains lowered into the same chalky soil as my parents, perhaps even in the same village churchyard.

I suspect that there is a close relationship between homesickness and fantasy. Seldom is it rainy or cold in the England of my imagining, and I conveniently forget those long dark dank winter nights that are the counterbalance to the long beautiful summer days. Yet even if there is a close relationship between dreams and homesickness, it has a reality that is beyond dispute.

I am at the moment reading about the emerging church movement, something that may be far more significant than the serpentine machinations of the Episcopal Church, for it is attempting to turn the church into a missionary community effectively addressing the Gospel into this postmodern world. I applaud the younger people who are pioneering this massive task, often marginalized or laughed at by denominational leaders. As I read Eddie Gibbs' and Ryan K. Bolger's Emerging Churches (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. 2005) I have to accept that these new expressions of the faith in the postmodern world are coming into being at the expense of the church that I love, the one that I grew up in and which nurtured me. This is the church for which I am homesick.

The intensity of this comes home when I am faced each day by the difficulty of a person of my age and background reaching the people in the target area set for my own little congregation. The sort of church that I am, perhaps, capable of bringing into being is not necessarily going to cut ice with a thirtysomething couple newly transplanted fromt the West Coast, and trying to raise kids in Thompson's Station, Tennessee. I was formed and shaped by the modern world that is fast disappearing, that is where all my points of reference are, they are the shock troops for whom postmodernity is the only real culture that they have ever known.

So, our task as Christians is to translate the enduring message of Christ's love into a language and culture that is foreign to the likes of me. This means that there is a great deal about the church which I dearly love that is going to need to be put to the sword, to put it bluntly. While I long for the glories of Tudor liturgy, boy choirs, and the simple dignity of classic Anglicanism, tomorrow's congregations are going to see such things as being about as relevant as the secret rituals of a group of Coptic monks on the high plateau of Ethiopia.

My generation can do one of several things in such a situation. We can, for example, as is the case in most denominations, hold onto leadership and stand in the way of all that a younger generation of Christians brings in terms of richness. In many places we are doing just this. Not only are pastors of (conservative) Boomer-driven megachurches unable to get beyond their own enculturation of the Gospel, but so are most within the leadership of whatever (liberal) denomination you can think of.

One of the fascinating things about the emerging church movement is how much it values the contribution of Anglicanism -- although they can see what we are passing on needs to be radically messed with. Yet we Anglicans don't seem to have found a way to nurture and encourage these sort-of-Canterbury-pilgrims, nor will we really allow ourselves to be enriched by their vivacity and capacity to bring so much to life. If I could find some way of doing it, I would love to be set free from so many of my responsibilities to stand in the background to mentor, advise, and generally be a midwife to this movement in one form or another.

Yet even as I say that, I know it spells the end to the kind of church that suits me best. But the Gospel isn't about what suits me best, it is about being obedient to Jesus's Great Commission so that it works for the emerging world. My kind of church is in decline, but that does not mean the Gospel is without its grace and power to transform. The baggage that I appreciate needs to be either cut away or reconfigured so that a newly contextualized faith will work in the West, even if it does not show the world the face that I would like shown.

Homesickness is a self-indulgence. I actually sometimes enjoy wallowing in the nostalgic misery of homesickness for John Bull's England, sometimes even crying my eyes out as long as no one can see me! While it is a pretty harmless pursuit when indulged in as an individual sport or hobby, if we use it to hold onto yesterday's church, then we are committing an awful sin and standing in the way of the Gospel's advance. There will be a lot to answer for when we stand before the throne of grace.

Previous Avian Flu Posting

The previous posting on avian flu is to be found in the August archive: http://richardkew.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_richardkew_archive.html

Avian Flu and the Churches' Response

Out of the blue a couple of months ago I received an email from Dr. Tim Foggin, a family practitioner in the Burnaby, B.C., area of western Canada. Dr. Foggin had read something I had written here about the possibilities of avian flu, and was getting in touch with me to tell me that he has been working with some colleagues on the implications for the churches of such an eventuality.

Then Dr. Foggin invited me to participate in a gathering being organized by Canadian evangelicals in Vancouver, but, alas, the notice was short and there is no way I could do such a thing. Not only would I have loved to have participated in such a forum, but it would have given me an opportunity to see my physician daughter who, with her husband, lives only a few hours away in Washington state.

Dr. Foggin has since launched church_emergency_preparedness@yahoo.com as a group discussion setting. I would commend you to be in touch with him at that address to see if you can be added to the conversation. He is, as far as I know, one of the few Christians who is taking seriously the potential challenge that avian flu could be to the churches and society if it mutates so that it becomes transferable human-to-human.

This does not seem to have happened yet, and the World Health Organization is working extremely hard to monitor and control its spread, as you are probably aware. The last few days of news on BBC World have given significant coverage to the spread of avian flu in Turkey, especially among those who live cheek-by-jowl with their poultry in the eastern part of the country.

While it is foolish to panic at this stage, it is important to be prepared for all eventualities. It does seem that while many nations in the world are taking seriously the possibility that bird flu could match the great flu epidemic of 1918-1920 when in excess of 20 million in a much smaller world population died, the messages coming from the United States are mixed -- at the very best. Indeed, it seems to me that both federal and state leaderships have not taken the notion of a pandemic with the seriousness that they should.

With the dithering of government, this means that the churches have a vital role to play should this become a virulent flu that profoundly effects families, congregations, businesses, and so forth. It also means that it is important for pastors and Christian leaders to keep their eyes open on this front for to be forewarned is to be forearmed.

Now, there are extremists of the survivalist ilk who are stockpiling drugs, water, food, and so forth, with the hope of barracading themselves in their homes and not getting infected. Such foolishiness is not something Christians should emulate. The history of the church is replete with instances of Christians sacrificing their all, even their lives, during times of plague of one kind or another in order that people may be cared for in Jesus' name -- and not just the Black Death or ancient history.

In the 1870s there was a Yellow Fever epidemic in Memphis, Tennessee. People fled the city, but the Anglican sisters of the Community of St. Mary stayed behind and, with others, cared for the dying, themselves taking a terrible hit from the virulence of the disease. While we don't know what an avian flu pandemic might look like, or how lethal it might be, if it matches or is worse than the pandemic following World War One, it could be that this is the kind of response that would be expected of faithful Christians.

Or, are we as Christians, so earthbound that we cannot allow ourselves to think that such self-sacrifice is what God calls us to?

"The Narnian" by Alan Jacobs -- A Review

The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis by Alan Jacobs
(San Francisco: Harper. 2005)

Review by Richard Kew

As I scan my bookshelves I realize there are two people whose lives and writings I have pondered more than any others, and both of them reached their zenith at the same time, but in very different ways. The one is Winston Churchill, the other is C. S. Lewis, and I have spent the last few weeks in the company of them both! Alan Jacobs' book, The Narnian, has been both enchanting and a tour de force.

Lewis has been on people's minds of late with the The Chronicles of Narnia reaching the big screen and his children's books finding their way back to the top of the best seller lists. Jacobs' book, therefore, has been published at just the right time. Before getting into the content let me comment on the jacket which is itself worth the price of the volume. It has a photograph of Lewis wearing an old-fashioned dressing gown over the top of his street clothes, with Aslan's tail wrapped around him.

Alan Jacobs is an Anglican, and is Professor of English at Wheaton College. He brings to his subject both a love of Lewis's work and an insider's grasp of how something like the Book of Common Prayer (1662) nourished Lewis's soul once he had come to faith as a thirtysomething Oxford don. What Jacobs does is to tell the story of Lewis's life, but instead of a mere recitation of the facts, interesting as these are, he identifies the events and relationships that shaped Lewis's personality, and what it was that enabled for his subject's supreme creativity to engage with his gigantic intelligence.

I spent a day with Jacobs in the company of some others a few years ago, and was amazed by the man's learning and fluency. As the conversation progressed, there seemed to be nothing he had not read and fully digested. If I were looking for comparisons, he seems to me to be a bit like an American Alister McGrath, except that his expertise is English Literature, not theology and biology.

Jacobs has a profound love and respect for Lewis, and clearly reveres Lewis's mental abilities. When describing how Lewis wrote one of his major academic works, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama), he comments that he actually read "every single sixteenth-century book in the Duke Humfrey's Library, the oldest part of Oxford's grat Bodleian Library" (Pages 183-184). Here is one literary omnivore admiring the capacity of another!

I love the way that Jacobs weaves his insights about Lewis's creativity and imagination into a pattern that takes into account each chapter of the great man's life. I don't think I can remember another book about Lewis which as it identifies high points in his life illustrates how they interface with his writing. What he also does is to demonstrate the commonalities that there are from particular periods of Jack Lewis's career. For example, until Jacobs pointed it out I would not have thought that much comparison could be made between The Abolition of Man and the characters who appear in The Magician's Nephew. Yet obviously there is, and, by the way, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings get thrown in there for good measure.

There is an honest generosity about the way Jacobs explores the relationships that Lewis had with his father, his brother, his oldest friend, Arthur Greeves, his colleagues, Mrs. Moore, Joy Davidman, and others. As is always the case with a good biograpical work, even if you think you know everything there is to know about someone's life, you occasionally turn the page and there is a fascinating set of new insights and facts that are new to you.

I thought that I had a pretty good grasp on the nature of the relationship between Lewis and Tolkien, but Jacobs measures the delights and the tensions better than anyone I have come across. These insights go right through to the intense difficulties between the two that marred the latter years of Lewis's life. I love one little anecdote Jacobs cites not long after Lewis's first meeting J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewis commented in a letter that as a Protestant Irishman he had been raised to distrust Papists, then as a scholar of literature he was taught to distrust philologists. The joke was that Tolkien was both!

Jacobs does not shy away from some of the difficult questions about the life of Lewis like the problems he and his father had with one another, and the specific nature of his relationship with Mrs. Moore. Mrs. Moore was the mother of a friend who had died on the Western Front, and having promised he would care for the man's mother in case of his not coming back, he did so until the early 1950s when she finally died. Yes, Jacobs, admits, in the early days, when Jack was a confirmed atheist, there does seem to have been a sexual component to the relationship, but by the end of her life she had become a crotchety and difficult 'mother' who ran Jack Lewis ragged with her demands.

When Mrs. Moore was gone and Lewis was, as it were, available, there was in fact another female with whom he was very friendly, a poet and painter by the name of Ruth Pitter. It would seem that in her somewhat pushy New York way, Joy Davidman pushed in and stole Lewis's heart from this "mannerly and decorous woman" who "did nothing to pursue Lewis" (Page 269). Then Jacobs paints in relatively few words a fascinating picture of the relationship between Jack and Joy, and the impact that they had upon each other.

Yet even as these elements are woven together, there is within this mixture a careful attempt to unravel Lewis's worldview, and how he came to it. When his faith reached maturity, he was an old-fashioned pretty orthodox Anglican whose way of believing and thinking was given its form by the King James Bible and the historic Book of Common Prayer. It was part of his spiritual discipline to attend Communion on Sundays at his parish church and to worship each morning in the chapel at first Magdelen College, Oxford, and then Magdelene College, Cambridge.

His education having been philosophical and logically-based, he brought not just his love of the faery and the imaginative to his understanding of the faith, but intellectual tools that were ruthless in their analysis of flaky thinking -- and he did not refrain from using them. Lewis not only enjoyed the rough and tumble of discussion within the Inklings, but corresponded and debated folks who were his match who disagreed with him. Indeed, his mailbag was enormous, and his debating ability ferocious.

As far as Lewis was concerned, it is clear that "when it is necessary to approach difficult questions, one must... stick as closely as possibly to 'the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times'" (Page 215). Although he battled with facets of his sexuality, and although he came close to playing intellectual games to justify his marriage to Joy Davidman, he had a solidly biblical notion of truth, and the nature of ethical behavior and lifestyles. He would probably consider those who challenge these today as "men without chests" (from the Abolition of Man), and have felt that these were sectarian attitudes that come from curiosity exceeding faithfulness.

I could go on and on, for there is much in this book that is informative, entertaining, and challenging. It is beautifully written, as you would expect from an English professor, and well-organized. Jacobs understands Lewis well, and greatly admires this kind and charitable individual, a little eccentric as was the way with so many Oxbridge professors of his era, but one of the razor-sharp thinkers who we avoid at our peril.

Jacobs recognizes that Lewis was not without shortcomings, and when it came to things like his attitude toward women, which Jacobs makes plain was not misogynistic, he was very much the product of English boys' schools, the army, a virtually all-male university, and an age in which women had yet to come into their own. He belonged to a church that abhored any notion of ordained women at that time, as did virtually every other church in Christendom. In many ways, therefore, he was a product of his times, but we must not confuse his cultural conditioning with his formidable affirmations that reflect the truth from all times.

Read and get pleasure from Alan Jacobs' work. Meanwhile, revel in Narnia, have your mind stretched by books like The Problem of Pain, quake afresh as you discover the horrors of evil in That Hideous Strength, and meditate with joy upon some of Lewis's extraordinary poetry. As you do this look forward to the fact that one day we will meet Jack Lewis in "the Real Narnia" and can put to the man himself the questions we now have -- if, that is, we have any interest in doing so given the dimension in which we now find ourselves!

Happy New Year after a Rude Awakening

Our New Year's Eve began at 1.30 a.m. with flashing blue lights, sirens, and emergency vehicles crowding the road outside our house. Usually at that time of the night Lewisburg Pike is totally deserted, but as we peered out of the window we became aware of a small red pick-up truck in the middle of the hillside that slopes down to our house with a police spotlight being trained upon it.

Rosemary said, "We ought to go out and see what's going on!" This is precisely what we did.

This morning I have been surveying the damage, and it is a miracle that the young man driving the vehicle was not killed for he must have been traveling. He left the road some twenty feet before reaching the unpaved lane that leads to our neighbors and is the boundary of our property. He had jumped over a ditch, then flown through the fence onto our property barely missing a huge sycamore tree that would surely have killed him. The wheels of the truck did not touch the ground until he had gone over a small cedar tree some twenty-five feet from the lane. The little Toyota ended up facing the direction it had come, its back broken, leaking gasoline over the hillside.

The driver is very fortunate to be alive today to tell the tale. His stepfather, a local cop and horse farmer who lives just round the corner from us, told me as we shouted greetings across the battered fence that his stepson had a broken nose, possible internal injuries, but seemed able to get himself onto the ambulance. I didn't expect to be spending the wee small hours of New Year's Eve wearing clothes pulled over my pajamas directing a tow truck across what will in few months be a riot of Tennessee wild flowers.

From then on all I could manage was that fitful, dozing sleep which leaves you wondering where all these strange thoughts and dreams come from. These thoughts and dreams were intertwined with situations with which I had been involved during the week.

Most clergy try to take a few days off after Christmas, and I certainly have nothing against pastors grabbing some time with their family after what is for most a busy season. However, it has been my experience that while the week after Christmas should be a time to slow down a bit, it also ought to be a time to be available because this is the decompression period from one of the most stressful periods of the year for families. Every year for the last few years I have been glad that I have been around and "on call" because things have happened that needed pastoral care.

Believing, as I do, that the family is one of the basic building blocks of a stable and healthy society, and that families are under pressure today from everything under the sun, the priority that we give to pastoring husbands, wives, and children has to be high -- whether we are good at it or not. It is not easy being married today, neither is it easy to stay married and provide a stable, happy home, but quite frankly, the alternatives are far worse.

Throughout my ministry I have dealt with people on all parts of the marriage journey, from courtship to divorce court and beyond, and as painful as keeping a partnership afloat might be at times, there is longer and greater agony of picking up the pieces after a failed marriage -- especially when children are involved. I also have to say that adult children are often hurt as badly as little ones. To the couple struggling with a relationship that seems to be failing, divorce looks like an oh, so attractive escape, but the reality is in most of the cases I have seen, far different from the promise.

One of the things that makes marriage so difficult is that we have swallowed the notion that marriage is about happiness or having particular needs met, when it is in fact a lifelong union "established by God in creation" (Book of Common Prayer, Page 423)that takes a lifetime for a couple to meld together -- and there are always going to be times when one, other, or both, don't want to do it. That, however, is why we make vows before the Most High God to love and to cherish through all the vissicitudes of life, until we are parted by death. Even when there is failure in the marriage, forgiveness has to be part of the mix and the importance of the vows remains.

Just in the last few years I have watched couples who were at daggers drawn, marriages in which there was the worst kind of betrayal, do the necessary work that has led to something far better than they ever imagined possible before. The hard work has not been easy, but the fruit is delicious beyond measure. This leads me to believe that in almost any circumstance it is possible to put back together what has been broken. I would also suggest that those prepared to do the work are the ones who have gone further along the pathway of human maturity.

Thus, as the present crisis is forcing us to remake the church for a postmodern world, one of the areas of concern has to be the manner in which we make lasting, healthy relationships that will stand the test of time and the pressures of a destructive environment. This is a world in which the self is now considered to be something fluid and maliable so that I will all the time be responding differently to the question, "Who am I going to be today?", and where I am constantly adapting myself and adjusting myself to present a new image, or where we can trade in old (and perhaps tired) relationships in favor of exciting new ones. What do we have to say to this world by word and example?

The time has come to set the bar high, perhaps higher than is comfortable for almost all of us. Scripture does this, so Scripture has to be the model we seek to live into. It is only as we aspire for the heights that we will begin to live the kind of life that God Almighty and his Son, Jesus Christ, require of us.

And with those words, a bit preachy, perhaps, I say to you Happy New Year, and may God protect us in the months ahead.

A Letter from Jack Taylor

Before Christmas we had a pretty feisty discussion about the importance of marriage on the Toward2015 listserv. It got so feisty that in the end it was necessary for me as moderator to end the discussion. One of the things that I hate in our present climate is that we find it impossible to talk with civility with one another and instead launch into personal invective against one another.

The following piece by Jack Taylor from Dallas was something that I edited from being published on the listserv, but I believe that it puts a human face on the dilemma with which we are wrestling. I publish it here, not because I agree with Mr. Taylor, I do not and my critique of what he has written follows, but because I found it allows us to look beneath the surface at the implications of the two worldviews that are tussling with one another.

What I ask you to do is to read Jack Taylor's words with generosity and charity, and then, if you want, to read my thoughts on his words:

I read with interest Father Richard Kew's essay on his second daughter's marriage and congratulate him. I, too, have given away two daughters in marriage and have fine grandchildren as a reward. His reflections on the importance of marriage between a man and a woman gave me pause for reflection too.

Sadly, I was unable to give my third daughter's hand in marriage because her chosen partner was of the same sex, even though they were able to buy a home together and planned to bear a child together through a surrogate father. The home-purchase and child-bearing are perfectly legal in Texas, but not the fulfillment of their love, commitment and devotion through marriage, and, even more sadly for a Church that blesses all sorts of animals every Saint Francis feast day, even a blessing. They are no longer together, although my daughter once told me if they had been allowed to marry, there is no doubt in both their minds they still would be one.

Now before you criticize any fragility of their relationship, think of your own and if you are married, whether you still would be married if you had simply lived together and were unable to wed. Suppose we lived in a society where only landowners were allowed to wed, or where only those who could afford a dowry were allowed to became brides? Or a society that allowed marriage only among those from identical backgrounds? That would have prevented my wife, a Norwegian, and I, of Scots-Irish and Native American background, from marrying 46 years ago.

That may sound extreme. But think a moment, It wasn't long ago when there were laws that prevented men and women from marrying if they were of different races, and only a little longer ago when African-Americans were required to sit in church balconies and takes communion last. Gays and lesbians are allowed to sit anywhere among the rest of the congregation now, and with rare exceptions are welcome at Christ's table with everyone. But they are not fully accepted at the altar rail when it comes to marriage. That defies Christian logic and Anglican reason. It's as if there was an additional live in Galatians 3:28 that added a caveat beginning "except for".

Many of us in the church and society at large express fear that extending this kind of freedom and equality to gays and lesbians somehow threatens our own families, our children, even the stability of our society. But the greatest threat is not that at all. The greatest threat is the fear and loathing that the perception of such a threat creates among us, not to mention the idea that some of us are better than others and therefore entitled to more rights and privileges. Who among you really believes that and can still claim your Christian love embraces everyone, equally?

Merry Christmas,
Jack Taylor
Dallas>>

Richard Kew's Critique and Response to Jack Taylor

One of the things that orthodox Christians often get accused of is insensitivity. Having just enjoyed the delight and privilege of giving away my own daughter in marriage, I can only imagine the sadness that results for a father not being able to share this pleasure with one of his children -- so I feel for those caught in such a dilemma.

However, the implication in what Jack Taylor says is that because there is a broadening of civil liberties going on in our country, and because many states allow for same-sex couples to purchase property together, and even accept the use of artificial insemination to have children, that these relationships should be sanctified by the Christian community. This, I believe, is to make the cardinal error of identifying the legislative activities of a secular state within the context of an altering culture with the values of the Kingdom that are enshrined in Scripture and the church's tradition.

If we accept the presuppositions of a relativistic secular society which sits loose to the ethical values that have shaped monotheistic culture for millennia, I suppose that it can be argued that same-sex couples should have a right to enter into something that they consider akin to marriage. But just because society might want to do this, we do not necessarily have to accept that this is either good for society or the individuals involved.

The church's responsibility is to be faithful, and that faithfulness begins not with human propensities, desires, or policies, but with God's self-revelation that is rooted in the person of Christ, and played out in Holy Scripture. If this is how we live out our faith, then however good-willed we might be, we do not have permission to follow the whims of the culture -- not matter how much our sentiments might desire it. Our responsibility is to take seriously the recognition that God created human beings in his own image as two genders that are complementary to one another. This is the message from Genesis 1 onward that sets apart humankind from every other creature that moves upon the face of the earth.

Jack Taylor argues his case from broadening our definition of marriage by pointing out that we have altered social patterns inherited from the past. I think that most of us would say that all sorts of past cultures acted in ways that might have been inappropriate, but there is a significant difference between the manner in which we organize society from generation to generation, to such a fundamental given of what it means to be a human being, created in God's image, and with a specific gender.

Just because we do not appreciate that certain of our forebears chose to organize society to include slavery, or that it was "the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate," and that this has changed, does not mean that Christians are free to redefine what it means to be a man or to be a woman, whatever the contemporary laws of the land might say. They might have been wrong in the past, we could very well be wrong today with the changes we wish to bring to the cultural forum.

Jack Taylor's misperception is to think that moves in wider society to provide certain privileges to same-sex relationships that have previously been reserved for heterosexual married couples, mean the Christians should follow suit. Like others who argue the same case, he uses certain texts (like Galatians 3:28) out of context, as tag lines to justify such actions, filtering his ideas through one particular understanding of what equality means.

Jack then ends with the usual jibe against those of us who do not believe this is right by implying that we are homophobes, scared of extending freedoms to gays and lesbians because they threaten us. For some this may be true, but for the vast majority this is not the case. We actually find ourselves bewildered by how to lovingly apply what we believe to be a divinely given ordering of humanity in a society that thinks that it has a better way of doing things.

This debate over marriage is extremely important, and it is vital that we engage it thoughtfully and sensitively.

Retrospect of 2005, Prospect for 2006

I was driving home yesterday afternoon through the bleak December countryside having made a pastoral call, and as I drove my mind was turning over 2005 as it tried to find some way of assessing it. Certainly, in our family it was a red-letter year with the birth of our first grandchild, the marriage of our younger daughter, and Rosemary and I each turning sixty. But all this happened against the backdrop of uncertainty that is North American Anglicanism, and the joys of family were somewhat blunted by the discomforts we face in the church.

It has been a fearfully busy year for me, with much time given to the episcopal election process here in Tennessee, while continuing ministry in a struggling congregation. It is more than twenty years since I last played a part in selecting candidates for the episcopate, and not only are there more factors that now need to be taken into account, but the consequences of an episcopal election are more momentous than a generation ago. This week we will be announcing our slate of nominees, which means that from hereon out everything in the Diocese of Tennessee is going to be seen in terms of the episcopal election that will take place on March 18th -- and succeeding Saturdays, if we don't get a 2/3 majority in both orders the first time around.

What has encouraged me from our work on the Episcopate Committee is the sheer ability and the rich godliness of some of the people we talked to. We still have people of significant ability and grace in the Episcopal Church who have proven gifts of leadership.

But I guess the undercurrent of 2005 has been what the future of Anglicanism is going to be in the United States. There is then a trickle down effect from this which influences the life of a diocese and then the congregations of that diocese. It has certainly not been easy continuing to pick up and move forward a young and fragile congregation,when the noises and actions coming out of the denomination seem set on a course to undermine all that you are trying to do on a local level.

What is most frustrating about this is that those who are undermining our ministry seem to be in denial that they are doing any damage at all, despite the statistical and demographic evidence to the contrary. Then there is a particular vindictiveness that for some goes with their opposition of those of us who sit in the historic mainstream.

One of the most painful things in the last few months has been the disgraceful manner in which the Diocese of Rochester declared my former parish, now All Saints' Anglican Church, Rochester, extinct by twisting the diocesan canons to their purpose. Did the parish handle itself wisely? I don't think so, but the pastoral insensitivity of the bishop and the haughty arrogance of the diocesan convention demonstrated to me that there are those on the left who have an unhealthy hatred of what has historically been the Christian faith, and really don't understand the Gospel.

During 2005 I have finally accepted the reality that the Episcopal Church of the USA as presently configured will not continue to exist for much longer, and that our responsibility is to start building constructively for the future. I don't really know what Anglican Communion Christianity is going to look like in North America in the years to come, but I suspect it will include many of us who are part of
ECUSA, many of the more sensible separated jurisdictions both new and old, and I suspect a scad of those in the emergent churches who are exploring Anglicanism from the outside but would happily leap in if there was something acceptable for them to leap into.

I suspect what emerges on the faithful end of the spectrum will be pretty loosy-goosy for a few years, but that some order will evolve from a tangle of networks, structured ecclesial organizations, and floating affiliations. I suspect, also, that at some point, although millions of dollars will have been thrown in the direction of attorneys before it happens, we will see some means emerge for faithful Anglicans to graduate out of ECUSA without the persecution that goes with it right now.

Just as I look back to General Convention 2003 with horror, I look forward to General Convention 2006 with dread. It seems that we are just about able to restore some kind of stability when another one of these sickening events takes place. Conventions do not really seem to represent the thoughtful breadth of the denomination. I suspect that GC2006 will fudge on the Windsor Report because, quite honestly, conventions are events that are totally dominated, and their agenda is shaped by those whose understanding of the Christian faith is on a rapid trajectory away from biblical revelation.

The fudging that will take place on Windsor will probably be the nail in the coffin of ECUSA's relationship with the wider Anglican Communion, and the lid is likely to be put on that coffin in 2008 when the Lambeth Conference meets. Goodness only knows who will be elected Presiding Bishop in Columbus, Ohio, but whoever it is will, I expect, be every bit as disappointing as the present incumbent. I suspect, also, that the new Presiding Bishop is likely to continue the litany of denial that comes from New York that ECUSA is in trouble.

What really has been happening in 2005 is that clarity has emerged between those who affirm a faith, which they consider to be prophetic, and that in essence still thinks it possible to negotiate with and shape the believing in tandem with the prevailing culture, and those who believe that the faith is by its very nature counter-cultural. One of the things that those of us who are biblical and orthodox have yet to grasp, I think, is that the values we hold are so in-your-face to the culture that is emerging, that while we might be mainstream Christians we are no longer in any way mainstream Americans or Westerners. The 'left' in the church seem incapable of seeing this.

For me 2005 was a year when I had options that would have taken me out of the Episcopal Church of the USA, and I confess that there was a strong attraction, however the worst nightmare of those on the 'left' is that I (and many like me) have no intention of leaving. We are the remaining voices of sanity amidst so much insanity.

I believe that we are on the front line of the Christian conflict for this decaying culture. My mantra is that the issues of sexuality are merely presenting symptoms of far deeper challenges about the very nature of our humanity that will engross us as the century proceeds. I was pleased to see that Benedict XVI agrees with me in his most recent pronouncements!

Our task is to be missional -- that is to affirm by our words and actions the great truth that Jesus Christ is the one Way to the Father, and to keep lifting high the Cross as the means of healing the broken, soothing the hurting, and finding forgiveness of sin. We fail in our response to error when we allow church politics to take precedence over faithful proclamation. Thus, my commitment is to keep on building up this congregation that has been committed to my charge -- and using
creativity and imagination as I do so.

Our task is also to be fervent in our determination to discover and live within the context of the truth. Much of what passes for orthodox Christianity has about as much grasp of God's revelation in Holy Scripture, as what passes for Islam understands the content of the Muslim holy book.

Jon Meacham, managing editor of Newsweek, and the stepson of one of our clergy in Tennessee, wrote a wonderful review in the Christmas Day New York Times Book Review in which he displayed the very best of Anglicanism and its weakness. In the process of the review I applauded his affirmation that Christianity should engage our intellect and imagination, something that is woefully missing in a lot of what passes
for the faith in our culture.

However, in the same review he blinks and gives away the distinctive uniqueness of the Christian faith in an attempt to be pluralistic and multicultural. His instincts were right, but his theology was sloppy. While he is correctly reacting against the assertiveness of the religious right, his response demonstrates the inadequacy of American Anglicanism when it comes to understanding the fullness of the work of
Jesus Christ. It is against such a backdrop that we are called to be agents of the truth, for indeed, it truly is the Truth that will set us free.

So I come to the beginning of this New Year with both fears and great expectations. I am cautiously optimistic for the Diocese of Tennessee, I am hopeful for the Church of the Apostles, and I am committed to the revealed faith that is affirmed by the Communion. As far as ECUSA is concerned, I will continue to be part of it, but not with great enthusiasm. It has been decaying for a long time, and even at this late
stage miracles might be possible, but I am not holding my breath. To use Old Testament imagery, I think I am one of the 7,000 who has yet to bow the knee; I am part of a faithful remnant. This is not an easy ministry, but then whoever said witness would be a breeze in the hard places.

And now for something completely different...

It was the Monty Pythons who in the 1970s made famous the words, "And now for someting completely different..." After the bracing conversation on Toward2015 during the last week, let me bring that something completely different to the table.

A few weeks ago there was an article in The Economist dealing with the catastrophic effect of medical insurance bills on municipalities, and how promises made way back to retirees are coming home to haunt them. Meanwhile, pension and insurance woes are part of the mix that have humbled General Motors and Ford, and they were also major players in the recent transit strike in New York, but they are also in the process of wreaking havoc with Christian ministry.

Last Saturday at our diocesan council meeting in Tennessee we spent the longest time dealing with medical insurance-related issues. Like so many other Christian bodies we are struggling to keep premiums down, while at the same time providing adequate medical coverage to Christian leaders and their families. Smaller congregations are having a particularly hard time, but larger ones are not insulated from these problems. Patterns of insurance that have been standard in Episcopal circles, at least, for decades, are now in the process of being reconsidered, as they are in other traditions and denominations.

Looking on a macro scale, Medicare and Medicaid always seem to have funding problems, while 45-46 million Americans have no coverage whatsoever, while millions more, maybe 20-40 million, have totally inadequate coverage. I say all this even before the bulk of Baby Boomers start to retire, and begin placing untold pressures on an already overloaded and under-funded system.

We were chatting during the break that followed us dealing with insurance-related business at our council meeting, and I was surprised to discover that two of the archest capitalists on the council, men who have been successful in differing businesses, one of them related to insurance, agreeing with me that the system is badly damaged and needs to be re-assessed.

I have made no secret for years of my total disenchantment with our way of funding healthcare in this country, as well as our way of apportioning healthcare services. As a pastor I have walked alongside more people than I care to remember whose lives have been turned upside down by their lack of insurance or inadequate insurance when a crisis has struck. I was never presented with such gut-wrenching anxiety when dealing pastorally with folks covered by the much-maligned National Health Service in Britain, which provides basic coverage for everyone.

Add to this the fact that more and more information about our genetic make-up is being stored on medical databases, and despite all the privacy walls in the world, this is eventually going to fall into the hands of insurers, if some of it hasn't done so already. As the years progress, and as more and more congenital conditions (or potential conditions) can be identified, surmised, and tagged, it will become increasingly difficult for more and more people to get health coverage at anything approaching a reasonable price.

I suspect that in the next few years in the churches we are going to see more and more pastors either going without health coverage, or having to find additional funding or creative alternatives in order to get the healthcare their families need. It is entirely likely that we will see a steady flow of pastors leaving parish ministry because there is no way for them to get healthcare coverage, and we are going to see small dioceses and judicatories like our own here in Tennessee less and less able to cope with the medical pressures that are placed on us -- unless we can reduce the median age and the medical risk levels of our group.

I would go so far as to say that inadequate healthcare could very easily radically hamper the ministry of the People of God, unless we can find constructive way around the present mess that health insurance (and pensions) has become. I came away from our council meeting disturbed by the implications of what I was hearing but feeling helpless to do anything about it.

Rosemary and I have long since bailed out of the church-related system because we get a far better deal from the State, Rosemary's employer. In our case this is what makes it possible for our parish to afford a priest. However, our not being in the diocesan pool means with our very good record when it comes to consuming healthcare resources, doesn't help the Diocese of Tennessee as it seeks to deal with its ballooning problems.

Personally, I have believed for a long time that some kind of single-payer system is the only one that will work in the future, when so much information about what is hidden in our DNA is readily available to those who fund healthcare. I also believe that a single-payer system is probably the only way that healthcare can be provided with the justice that is presently lacking in America's healthcare delivery system. As the Kingdom of God has a strong justice component, we must take that into account in our thinking.

I would hazard that the place for us to begin tackling this issue as Christians is with the theology of healthcare (and tied with it justice and injustice in healthcare delivery), and then to move forward from there to exploring practical ways to ameliorate the intense challenge before our culture. Probably we need also to ask ourselves what we can as a society afford, and what we cannot afford, and then what are the best ways of helping people keep healthy.

So, there's something to chew on over Christmas...

Marriage Again

Why is it that I find myself inundated with what I think are good ideas that have nothing to do with the forthcoming business whenever I am on my was to a diocesan council meeting? This has happened several times of late, the most recent being last Saturday morning. I am sure the bishop wondered what I was scribbling as he launched the gathering.

I had been barreling down the road thinking of budgets and some of the challenges facing us, when from the back of my mind more thoughts on marriage started to emerge. I found myself coming back to ideas I had encountered several years ago in Diarmaid MacCulloch's magesterial volume on the Reformation. MacCulloch makes the point that "The Protestant Reformation... brought a momentous change in direction in the Christian history of sexuality... it reaffirmed marriage..." (page 609).

MacCulloch has his own agenda, and so uses quantities of data to make particular points, some of which are highly pertinent. However, as I have reviewed his chapter on love and sex in the Reformation period it is perfectly possible to unpack material to make a somewhat different point than those this Oxford University professor leads us to.

As I read these pages I find myself realizing that the Reformation was, like all great spiritual renewals, a period when attention was given to the ethical outworking of biblical truth. It was an era when not only was the medieval unbiblical theology that affirmed celebacy as "angelic" called into question, but it was also a time when there was increasing clarification in light of revelation of what might best be described as a confusion of role and identities.

In those years a set of standards was put in place that has, one way or another, prevailed in the West for much of the last 450 years as the general norm. This norm is now in terminal decay. You could say that our generation is living amidst the ruins of biblical standard that had been accepted until the deconstructionist mindset of this post-Christendom age swept it away.

The truth is that what Christians have considered the standard for all is now being relegated to counter-culture status. Marriage as a lifelong union between a man and a woman is being either sidelined and ignored, and in many instances is being ridiculed as hopelessly outmoded. There has been a huge growth across the western world of casual cohabitation, the progressive polygamy and polyandry of multiple divorces and remarriages, as well as a whole array of experimental domestic arrangements.

Right now in many places marriage between a man and a woman is ceasing to be normative. Just this morning the BBC is reporting on the implications of the newly-passed Civil Partnerships Act in Britain, which devalues what we have traditionally understood to be marriage while raising the profile of alternative arrangements. The laws of many other nations around the world are sliding in this direction, as they have already in places like Canada and the Netherlands.

Yet here is the tension -- the vast majority of the population still seems to look to and crave for the stability, security, and generativity that comes with a lifelong marital relationship between a man and a woman, within which children are brought into the world.

Some will say that folks have just been conditioned to think this way and that this antediluvian way of relating is likely to become far less prevalent. This may be so, and expectations may change as an array of alternatives are offered and experienced.

Yet could it be that Scripture is right? Could it be that deeply ingrained within the soul of human beings is a craving for a faithful relationship with a member of the opposite sex that is nurturing and only ended by death, even though we know such relationships make high and lasting demands? As I go about my pastoral ministry, talking with all sorts and conditions of people, both in and beyond the church, I am convinced that the bulk of the population regardless of cultural and societal pressure is drawn to this way of family life.

I, therefore, am perfectly happy to be counter-cultural. I have no desire to throw out the baby with the bathwater. If we are to be faithful to the Creator God who has revealed himself to us, then however chi chi the smorgasbord of alternative arrangements might look for the moment, believers are called to constantly assert our commitment to marriage whose principles are rooted and grounded in the biblical witness. This is one of our greatest calling cards and something for which more and more will yearn and crave.

However, to make such an affirmation will also make great demands upon us as we seek to live within this covenant and affirm the sanctity of marriage. It requires of us oodles and oodles of teaching and example. We need to challenge at its very root the prevailing mood of the culture that marriage has a ball-and-chain flavor, rather than this being the most freeing, happy, and healthful way for two people to live together.

It will also require that as we prepare couples for marriage, we develop scads of resources to help them live this counter-cultural relationship, and that we be there for them in a whole variety of ways to enable them to find their way through the maze of difficulties that challenge any such covenantal relationship. It is essential that we work hard with, and have our doors open to, married couples as they strive to grow within their marriage and to maintain its stability.

Such concentration on marriage does not mean that we should abandon those men and women whose marriages get into difficulty, and perhaps, come to an end. It does mean that we should stand alongside them as they walk through this dark valley and then enable them to come out of the murk and pain on the far side of such a personal disaster. I heard a divorced and remarried Christian man say not long ago that marital breakup is always sinful, but it also needs to be added that God's grace is sufficient.

Up until now it has been the relationship experimenters who have been considered the radicals and the adventurous ones. Some of their experiments may have been made to work, at least for a while, but just as so many ground-breaking pieces of architecture from the 1960s now look tired and jaded, I hazard that a lot of these alternatives are likely to be seen that way in not too many years. I would like to assert that the real radicals and adventurers are those of us who are committed the biblical notion of marriage being between one man and one woman for life. Maybe the time has come to rejoice in our new status!

Marriage

My thoughts have been very much on marriage of late. There are two obvious reasons for this -- the first is last Saturday, on a crisp sunny winter afternoon, I walked my younger daughter, Lindy, down the aisle, and watched her marry John Womack. This is the second time I have "given away" a daughter, and while I had my emotions more under control than when we married off her sister, there was a vast array of feelings that I have yet to have the courage to confront.

Last week a Baptist pastor friend of mine shared with me a quote from Chuck Swindoll as I was grappling with my inner feelings: "No matter how wonderful the groom, the father of the bride feels that he is placing a priceless Stradivarius in the hands of a gorilla." My new son-in-law much appreciated the joke when I shared this with him, which augers well for our future relationship!

The second reason it is much on my mind is that I am reviewing the Marriage Course materials from Alpha with a view to using them for marriage preparation and as an outreach into the area in which we are situated, where I am discovering not a few couples are living in a personal hell with one another. As this is proving to be a particularly difficult area into which to present the Gospel (five churches of varying backgrounds have ceased to exist during my time here), here is a need which might be a point of focus for presenting Jesus Christ.

But circumstances like this do concentrate the mind and get one thinking hard, for whatever label you put upon yourself in the spectrum of Christian believing, all of us have fudged, and fudged badly, on the sanctity of marriage, and its importance in a stable society. I live in the heart of the Bible belt where you would think higher standards would prevail. Not a bit of it: I would say that Southern Baptists and the Church of Christ are just as sloppy about marriage as Episcopalians and Presbyterians. For example, the mother of one of our church members belongs to a little Baptist church whose pastor is now on his third marriage.

It has for a long time been my conviction that one of the points on the ethical downward spiral of North American Anglicanism was the Episcopal Church's weakening of the marriage canons in 1973. I fully agree with my revisionist friends who say that those who claim orthodoxy cannot have it both ways when it comes to the sexuality issues that divide us. Unlike them, I do not believe this justifies changing our values to suit the climate, rather I would prefer to see us recovering what we have lost.

I am increasingly convinced that one of the primary building blocks for putting the Christian faith in the West back together is to not only reassert the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman, as counter-cultural as such a fundamental idea is becoming, but also to do all in our power to enable marriages that have been contracted to survive and prosper.

David McCarthy, Rector of St. Silas Church, Glasgow, was with us for the weekend to conduct my daughter's wedding, having been her pastor in Scotland for six years, and he was talking about the wrestling (or lack of it) being done by the British churches as they struggle with the civil unions legislation that has been passed. This legislation effectively devalues traditional marriage while raising the profile of other approaches to domestic partnership. This has created real challenges for marriage, but the flip side of that is that we should, perhaps, now be reasserting the value of this holy state.

Meanwhile, in the last few days I have been sent an article from the Washington Times that begins, "Polygamy rights is the next civil rights battle." Actually, you can probably make a better case from Scripture for traditional polygamy than some of the other alternatives now on display. However, I should imagine that what so-called polygamists want is something that enables multiples of people to live in some kind of legally-sanctioned relationship with one another, and that within this menage anything goes sexually and in every other way. Such households must by their very nature be unstable, especially in the context of the instability of today's society.

I shudder for the wellbeing of children brought up in such an environment. Having spent much of yesterday minding my five-month-old granddaughter, I would have hated for her to grow up with such identity and relationship confusion. As I have cradled this precious child in my arms, and as I baptized her on Sunday, I pray that she will grow up to be a woman of God not a confused individual not knowing who or what she is.

Which brings me back to my point that the time is upon us when we need to re-emphasize the importance of marriage, and also to do all in our power to enable husbands and wives to live the lives in partnership until parted by death that the Almighty intends. In such homes children can be raised in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and hopefully discover for themselves how to become mature men and women able in due course to covenant in marriage with a partner of the opposite sex. We in the churches must help this happen in every way.

I believe that such homes is what a vast majority of people want, but most of that majority have not the slightest idea how to make a healthy marriage and happy home happen so much damage has been done in the last 40 years.

I have been delighted as I have read Nicky and Sila Lee's The Marriage Book, which is a really accessible tool for building a lasting marital relationship. This is one of the resources my daughter and her new husband have been using in their marriage preparation, and I have found it both thoughtful, godly, and very practical. Within the context of Alpha's Marriage Course, which I think we may do at Apostles, this is one of the best ways of challenging today's malaise and laying a new foundation for tomorrow.

I write all this as someone who has been married for thirty-seven years, and who values this relationship more than anything else in life except his faith in Christ. But it has not always been this way. When we were in our late thirties, Rosemary and I came within an ace of coming apart. From that agonizing experience (as well as the other setbacks that have happened in our life together) we know how hard marriage can be, especially when the culture is beckoning with all sorts of false alternatives, erotica, the sex industry, experimentation, and so forth.

Both Rosemary and I now fear that we will outlive the other, for after nearly forty years of knowing each other within the context of our common faith in Christ, and I shudder at the thought of life without her. Of course, this is likely to happen, but it is one of those things we would rather not dwell on!

The truth is that despite all the pressures upon it, marriage is an honorable state given to us by God, and that for most people this is going to be the place where we can experience a fullness of life that is impossible elsewhere. This is not to say that marriage is necessarily for everyone, or that we should lack charity, grace, and generosity to those whose marriages have not survived the rough and tumble of today's living, but it is to say that Christians should work their hardest to make successful marriages the norm and not the exception.

If we were to start now concentrating on this one area of human life and relationships, I believe that faithful biblical Christians would have created a whole new church and culture within a generation or so. In the midst of so much "creativity" in human relationships now is the time to applaud and work for success in this most basic relationship, that which began between man and woman in Eden.

More on Language and Meaning

On Toward2015 Eric Turner wrote:

The challenge that I see is daunting indeed. When the meaning of language is in the hands of the hearer (or reader), then I don't even know how to have a conversation. I cannot count on my words meaning anything resembling what I intend them to mean, nor can I be confident that what I hear another saying is vaguely like the idea in their mind that they are attempting to transmit to me. Without shared language, relationship, even at the most rudimentary level, is impossible, reconciliation is meaningless and as a society we would be doomed to anarchy.

You are right, Eric. It is no accident that postmodernism traces its roots to the anarchism that prevailed in France in the 1960s, and its product is intellectual, linguistic, theological, philosophical, etc., anarchy. The problem is that anarchists when they take control, as they have done in the Episcopal Church, become unyielding tyrants.

Stanley Grenz pointed out, "the postmodern ethos is centerless. No clear focus unites the diverse and divergent elements of postmodern society into a single whole. There are no longer any common standards to which people can appeal in their efforts to measure, judge, or value ideas, opinions or lifestyle choices" (Grenz: A Primer of Postmodernism, page 19).

Language is, we are told, socially structured, and those on the anarchist end of the spectrum believe that they are doing us a service is loosening the deadening social holds from the past that limit the capacity of language, and then beginning the process of reconstructing it. The words become more fluid because the whole worldview behind them is no longer tied to yesterday's objectivities. Language, they believe, is one of the instruments that detains us within an outmoded mindset, but the truth is that as we loosen our grip upon language as we have received it we find ourselves moving away from notions of objective reality.

The difference between an orthodox Christian and a revisionist Christian when it comes to the manner in which we handle the text of Scripture is that those of us who are orthodox seek to unlock its meaning using objective, scientific, and empathetic tools to interpret what the author intended. The postmodernist believes text and interpreter must engage in dialogue as equals, or even with the text subservient to the reader, so that there can be an intersection between the horizon of the author
and the horizon of the interpreter.

The truth is that this creates exactly our environment, for as the Windsor Report put it, we begin to handle the text in such a manner that it echoes our predispositions rather than informing and shaping them from the mind of the author. The postmodern deconstructionist goes as far as saying that the text's meaning cannot be confined to the author's intention or even the reader's understanding and that it is meaningless to claim that any one interpretion of a text is necessarily correct in itself. As I engage with revisionist theology I am constantly coming
face to face with such anarchy.

The outcome is an approach to living, speaking, and believing that is highly speculative and totaly inconsistent. It leads to such thinking as what is right in one environment or setting may not be right in another (The Presiding Bishop's heresy). The problem with this is that the postmodernist cannot be consistent, and attempts to steal orthodox clothing, assuming that there is such a thing as right and wrong. If we are going to be truly contemporary in our thinking then we must
effectively say that something that is right for me, that self-actualizes me, is not going to necessarily be right for someone else. Furthermore, because it is right in this particular instance, need it always be right?

One of the best things I have learned from this postmodern melange is that there is no such thing as a totally independent, objective observer, and that we all stand and interpret from within the continuum of time and history. This inevitably colors my response to truth, text, God's revelation, whatever. Thus, in a way when I engage the text my horizon does intersect with the author's horizon and I am bound in some ways to understand the author through my own set of presuppositions.

This means that I must, among other things when reading and interpreting, be always checking to see how much of myself is getting in the way of what I am interpreting. However, I also have to challenge postmodernists to ask how much of themselves is getting in the way of the text, and whether their resort to relativism is not itself an attempt to castrate what words might say in order to ease my own discomfort as I encounter those words.

This time last year my brother was in Dubai in the Persian Gulf, where he had worked for several years in the late 1970s. At that time he build a 38-storey building that rested on compressed sand. The question I kept asking was what would happen to that building when the compression finally gave out. My brother was never able to find out because while he was there that structure was dynamited in order to make
way for something new and improved.

It is my assertion that postmodern thinking and its concomitant deconstructionism is like that building in Dubai, standing for the moment on a bed of compressed sand. In due course the inconsistencies and irrationalities that are the sand on which it is build are going to come to the fore, and the whole thing will come tumbling down -- but not before it has done a dreadful lot of damage. When this happens, however, this is not to say that we will return to Enlightenment rationalism.

Frankly, I believe that the revisionist theologies that have done such terrible damage to the mainline churches, particularly ECUSA, are far closer to their "sell by" date than most of their adherents are willing to accept. Yet while they are still around we find ourselves having to engage them, flaws and all, while all the time finding orthodox and biblical ways of engaging the culture which they reflect.

Yesterday's Language, Tomorrow's Needs

How hard it is to explain today's and tomorrow's realities using the language of yesterday -- that is something that seems to have come up on Toward2015 in the last few days. Quite honestly, the words "liberal" and "conservative," which still meant something a generation ago, have had their meaning scoured out, re-worked, even totally obliterated, in the rough and tumble of this deconstructed postmodern world.

As a result of today's climate I find myself wishing that I had taken much greater care in my studies of linguistic analysis in my student days. I think if I had done that I would have been much better equipped to work my way through the language quagmire in which we now find ourselves wallowing.

Someone who comes to the USA from another English-speaking country become quickly conscious of how eel-like words can be. Words which on one side of the Atlantic mean one thing, I quickly discovered when I arrived here, mean something slightly or totally different in this country -- and they may change their meaning again if I go to another part of this country. Thus, until you have adapted (and that can take years) you are in constant danger of miscommunicating. Often this can be entertaining, but I have been in circumstances where for a time it has really soured relationships because I have said something that has been totally misunderstood.

Those of us who are older, and who are much more children of the Enlightenment, are prone to use language differently than those who are natives in this emerging culture. We are also prone to carry with us the language and categories of the past and then to attempt to interpret today's realities through this grid. The words 'liberal' and 'conservative' are a case in point. I have honestly reached a point where I still use them because they are convenient shorthand, but am not necessarily sure what they precisely mean.

Yesterday evening I watched Prime Minister's Question Time on C-SPAN, which is one of the most entertaining shows on television. I always chuckle when I realize that a party of the left sits on the government benches on the right of the Speaker. Meanwhile the primary party of the right sits on the left, but alongside them is another party of the left, that calls itself Liberal Democrat. These folks used to be to the right of the Labour party, who are the major party the left, but now may be to the left of them -- or not, depending on where you are standing. Confusing? Of course it is, and so is the way we use language today because the categories we are attempting to describe do not fit onto yesteryear's Procrustean Bed.

The world we live in now has moved on from the world that these words more correctly described, and now we should be struggling for descriptive terms to use of the emerging world, and are failing miserably. Part of the reason for this is laziness. One of the problems that we have is that whereas the Enlightenment tended to think in terms of either/or, the post-Enlightenment world functions in terms of both/and. That I am theologically thought to be a conservative because I believe we have a responsibility to conserve the deposite of faith that has been entrusted to us, does not preclude me being a political and social liberal on certain issues, and a political and social conservative on others. Then in other aspects of life, this may be turned on its head again.

The truth is that I am not sure that I want to be pinned down to these categories any longer. My obligation as a faithful servant of Christ is to seek to be his obedient servant, and to place myself within the Scriptures and their worldview, which means that I am very likely going to be an uncomfortable fit in most places on the culture's spectrum of ideas and obligations. Gospel ideas are radical, conservative, progressive, traditional, forward-looking and even at times a little reactionary, and the challenge before us is living into them and finding a way beyond yesterday's terminology. It is our limited way of thinking that reduces the to just one point on this color-spectrum

The starting point of the task before us is to work hard to grasp exactly what is going on within the culture and then to seek to find the language that is most descriptive. The deconstructionist mentality that is now at play tends to believe that I can take words, use them, and interpret them according to my own lights. The result is that we lose our ability to properly communicate for in some way or other, language must represent reality rather than merely our own individual perception of what we think reality is.

This is not to say that language does not have some fuzzy edges, as in the case of an American English-speaker conversing with an English English-speaker and an Indian English-speaker, when it will be necessary on occasions to clarify the manner in which certain terms might be being used. However, most language is plain. When I say the word "horse" I should mean an animal that may be a variety of sizes, various colors, and can be used for riding, as a beast of burden, or for hauling transportation or farm equipment, I should not mean something that I have decided the world "horse" means.

This is the way the word "truth" is being used now. Because of the innate relativism in our culture, it is perfectly normal to hear people talking of as if there was a whole variety of truths, many of which are mutually exclusive of one another, but all of which are true.

My thesis is that if we are to understand (and then describe) what is going on we are going to need to be careful in the way that we use language, and that it is impossible to continue allowing yesterday's language (with all its baggage) to do the work expected of it today and tomorrow. Yet we are not working to move beyond this impasse. It will probably take a while for a new concensus to be reached, but this should not preclude us from taking the effort to push this descriptive task forward.

There are certain writing tasks that teachers will give their students to help them develop their vocabulary. One is, for example, to describe a screw without using the word spiral! Perhaps we should start looking for ways to describe our present realities without using the words "liberal," "conservative," "traditionalist," "revisionist," etc., for most of these descriptives belong to a world that is fast disappearing.

Personally I am at a loss to know how to describe myself. I conserve the Gospel as delivered to the saints, therefore that makes me a conservative, but I believe that there is an intense generosity in that Gospel, which makes me a liberal. I believe that that essence of the faith goes to the root of humanity's problems, and that makes me a radical, but as I live within the on going life of the church from the apostolic age until now, that must make me a traditionalist because I honor the tradition. I believe that the Gospel speaks volumes to now and tomorrow, and that must make me a progressive, but it challenges the values that have emerged in today's society (and which some in the church have taken on board), and I suppose that makes me a reactionary.

If I listen to the way others see me and describe me, almost all of these terms have been used of me, but affirmatively and perjoratively! Usually, the folks using such descriptions are Enlightenment-soaked folks who continue to see life in terms of either/or and find it difficult to grapple with the subtleties of both/and.

Do you see the nature of the challenge that we have before us?

An Interesting Oil-Related Theory

There is an excellent spread in the December issue of WIRED magazine dealing with the oil, oil prices, and alternative fuels (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/gas.html). WIRED's piece needs to be put alongside the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs (FA), in which there is an interesting piece about the global hunt that is on by China for resources.

Here's WIRED's thesis: while it might hurt to pay $3, $4, $5 or more for a gallon of gasoline, the more expensive this stuff gets the quicker we will move beyond the fossil fuel economy to something more environmentally friendly and sustainable. Because the price of crude has been artificially cheap for so long, there has been little incentive for the large energy companies to go looking for something that works better and does less damage to the ecosphere. But the world is changing.

The FA piece begins with the words, "An unprecedented need for resources is now driving China's foreign policy... Twenty years ago, China was East Asia's largest oil exporter. Now it is the world's second-largest importer; last year, it alone accounted for 31% of global growth in oil demand." And don't forget India. India's economy is on a journey that is as impressive as the Chinese, and because they do not have China's infamous one-child policy within the next generation there will be more Indians than there are Chinese.

It didn't require the brains of a rocket scientist a few years ago to see that sometime early in the 21st Century there would be a huge increase in demand for oil. This was bound to hoist prices to unbelievable levels, and would leave those who are not looking for or at alternatives floundering the the dust. Jeremy Rifkin was writing about this in the Nineties, although his projections of moving toward a hydrogen-based economy were rather too optimistic.

I was laughed at when I bought my Hybrid three years ago (you can look back on the archives of Toward2015 and see some of the things that were said of me on this forum). Today those same folks who pulled my leg mercilessly are now sidling up and saying things like, "My Suburban gets just about 20 miles to a gallon if I nurse it carefully, I am thinking about a Hybrid next time." When I bought my hybrid, while I was definitely making a statement about the environment, I was also making a statement about my pocket book because my reading had led me to conclude that the low prices we were paying for fuel could not continue for much longer. I guess you could say that in 2005 I hit the jackpot!

However, continuing this aside, as a Christian I believe that it is imperative that we function as good stewards of God's creation that he has entrusted to us, and trying to minimize the emission of greenhouse gases is one very effective way of doing that. You can imagine my thoughts this morning when I was cut off by a guy in a huge SUV that he then gunned like crazy going up a steep hill -- on the back on the SUV prominently place were several Christian insigia! A great witness that, selfish driving coupled with an unthinking hunger for the world's non-renewable resources. I wondered if there was any consistency with the Gospel here.

Back to WIRED magazine. What the author does is to illustrate how a steady price for oil at ever-increasing levels makes more and more attractive alternative sources of energy. For example, with oil right now selling in the $30-$70 range per barrel, it is feasible to create a diesel fuel from coal, to create biodiesel from vegetable oils, and increasing ethanol production. Over $70 a barrel, where it is likely to be in coming years, methane hydrates come into play, as does hydrogen and mining oil shale, and it will be back there e'er too long, you can be sure of that.

"For the better part of a century, cheap oil has fatally undercut all comers, not to mention smothered high-minded campaigns for conservation, increased efficiency, and energy independence." When the benchmark price for crude was, as it was for years, merely $20 per barrel, none of these things had a chance of getting off the ground and nor was it worth investing in alternative resources -- most of which will do far less damage to "this fragile earth, our island home" than the gas guzzlers that so many of us drive.

Could it be that Saudi Arabia will be put out of business by the genius who works out how to transform water into its constituent atoms, releasing their power and turning themselves back into water again? Its a nice idea, and not beyond the bounds of possibility in the future, if the desert kingdom has not used up all its reserves by then.

As WIRED says, "Smile when you see the big black $3 or $4 out in front at the gas pump. Those innovators need all the encouragement they can get. Shale oil, uranium, sunlight -- there's enough energy out there for a dozen planets..."