During the last couple of weeks as the General Convention maneuvered the church into deep mud I have been reading Phil Turner and Ephraim Radner's book, The Fate of Communion. In every way this is not an easy read, nor an easy time to readit, but it is the most exhaustive attempt to put the crisis through which we are living in the Episcopal Church into a well-founded theological framework.
I was getting toward the end of the book the other afternoon when I was brought up short when they wrote, A communion-oriented apprach to the temporal assault upon the church in her churches, will move the question, What are we to do? -- the strategic ecclesiological question -- to the question, What is God doing? The first question has no meaning outside the second, and may well simply need to be put aside in its shadow. Here we move into the realm of reflection upon God's providential ordering of the church's life, a form of theological and devotional discipline woefully under-practiced within modern Christian life. The agony of communion itself is apprehended only through such reflection as this (Page 254).
Since reading those words a few days ago they keep returning, demanding reflection and prayer on my part in the light of the depressing outcomes of the General Convention. I was not naive enough to think that GC2006 would, for example, respond to the Windsor Report as the Communion desired, but I had hoped for more hints of level-headedness than actually occurred. The only encouragement I had was reading reports of the Presbyterian General Assembly and realizing that we are not alone in this mess -- although wishing that the Presbyterians were handling it better than we have.
However, that these two great Christian streams are struggling with essentially the same concerns had me returning to the question that Turner and Radner ask, "What is God doing?" I have begun to come up with tentative answers and wish to share these with you in the hope that they will help shape your response to Columbus 2006, which I find myself believing was probably the last General Convention in the old scheme.
My first attempt to answer that question was to reaffirm one of the greatest and most comforting of all biblical truths, that God is sovereign and nothing on heaven or earth can prevail against him. This being the case our task as his covenant people is not to try to find the way through this morasse on our own but to see if through prayer, meditation, thoughtful pondering, Scripture, fasting, repentance, and every other Christian discipline to attempt to discover what his will and purpose is as we seek our way forward.
A key component of such discerning, as Turner and Radner point out, is patience -- not a fruit of the Spirit that westerners in general and Americans in particular are particularly wont to either develop or use. The grace of patience, however, is writ large on many a page of Scripture as part of our response to the living God. I am convinced from my many years of ministry that we almost always complicate issues by rushing to resolve them, often depending on our own strength and insights. Perhaps we are being asked now to learn afresh what it means to wait upon the Lord seeking clarity from him before advancing.
My second response to that question is that before we can move forward one inch God is calling us to repentance. During the last few years the Windsor Report has, rightly, called on those who have divided the church by non-biblical actions to regret and repent of their actions, and if anything came out of GC2006 it was that they were either unwilling or constitutionally incapable of doing so. Yet those on the left of this crisis are not the only ones for whom repentance is the appropriate response. We who claim biblical orthodoxy have undealt-with logs in our own eyes that we have missed as we have eagerly pointed out the splinter in the eyes of those who have missed the biblical mandate.
As I have looked at both sides in this controversy I have been struck by the way in which they have in many respects become mirror images -- and I include myself among those who lined up. We need to repent of many things, but at the heart must be our own culpability in what has happened. Just as it is failures by both husband and wife to destroy a marriage, so it is in this church crisis. Going back forty or more years the orthodox have failed to respond as they should to incipient error seeping through the whole fabric of the Body of Christ, now we are living with the consequences of that.
But there are other things that I see within myself and others that must hurt the heart of God: self-righteousness, bitterness, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, and a determination to push our agenda. These are not the fruit of the Kingdom of God, Paul tells us (Galatians 5:20-21). Communion, which begins in our relationship with God through Jesus Christ, should leave us "without an agenda" says Rowan Williams, as quoted by Turner and Radner (Page 257).
I find myself, despite my own desires and inclinations, being drawn into a season in which I must humble myself before the living God and seek forgiveness not only for my own grasping fallenness, but also for the part that I have played in this tragedy that is being played out in our midst. The pride of our Anglican heritage has been brought low, these great buildings and fine stones are being thrown down by the living God, and perhaps not one will be left upon another (Mark 13:1ff).
To use another biblical allusion, we are out in the wilderness, which is always the place of transformation. It took God forty years to get Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land, but he who guided them into the wilderness was the one who brought them ultimately across the River Jordan. When he had led them into the land Joshua challenged the people to choose this day whom they would serve, "but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord" (Joshua 24:15), for "far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord and serve other gods' (24:16).
One of the visitors to GC2006 was Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali of Rochester, England, and he observed that other gods were certainly there to be seen: One tendency that was informing the culture of the convention, in a major way, was to do with the diffuse religiosity of the present-day West. Such religiosity, in my view, has much in common with New Age ideas, vague as these often are, such as nature mysticism, or a sense of oneness with the world around, and pantheism, the belief that everything is divine: God is identified with Mother Nature and also with our own souls. Jesus then becomes just a special example of a god-self. Such a world-view is likely to be optimistic, inclusive and non-judgmental. It regards the world and the people in it as more or less as God intended them to be. Such people should be accepted as they are and, if they wish to be, fully included in the life of the Church without further question.
Nazir-Ali continues, We need to be saved from the consequences of our own thoughts and deeds as well as from the "wrongness" of the world. People need not just acceptance and inclusion but conversion and transformation. The work of the Spirit is not formless, vague and without direction, as some "progressives" would have us believe. It is, rather, that of witnessing to Christ, making plain the words and works of Jesus to us and glorifying both Christ and the Father who sent him. The Spirit is continually forming us so that we attain to the fullness of life in Christ.
The man sharing these words is neither a westerner, nor was he raised in the Christendom world that is our heritage. As an observer looking in on the American scene this is what he sees, and we ignore his wisdom and insights at our peril.
Which brings us back to that question, "What is God doing?" I would love to be able to give a definitive answer to that question but cannot. Much as is the case with my own life, things have seldom worked out as I would have planned or expected. There are times when I have looked ahead and thought that I could see the shape of things, yet no sooner have I told myself this than the earth shakes beneath me and my expectations are roiled. What is true of individuals is true of churches. The foundations on which we have rested have been shaken, and I suspect there will be little yesterday-style stability in the lifetime of most of us.
North American Anglicans are no longer "carriage trade" people, we are now being forced to be a pilgrim people trying to find a way out of the ruins of the past and into whatever future God has in mind for us. Turner and Radner's book ends with a call to holiness, something that North American Anglicanism has hardly modelled for many a long year. Such holiness of heart and mind is something God wants of us in our covenant relationship with him, and perhaps nurturing that holiness is the starting point -- long before considering how the church ought to be configured.
THE BOOK IS:
Ephraim Radner and Philip Turner: The Fate Of Communion: The Agony of Anglicanism and the Future of a Global Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006).
Monday, June 26, 2006
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Beyond General Convention...
I spent Sunday afternoon trying to immerse myself in the US Open Golf championship from the Winged Foot Golf Club rather than allowing the news that Katharine Jefferts Schori had been elected as Presiding Bishop to eat at me. However, when I logged on both on Sunday evening and Monday morning there were emails asking, "Where do we go from here?" I can honestly say that I don't know, although I am beginning to believe I that patience and prayer are the best counsel that I can give.
On Monday morning Ruth Gledhill, the Religion Correspondent of the London Times, was on the BBC World News. She is one of the most respected observers of the world Anglican scene, and suggested that while Shori's election is probably not going to cause a split within Anglicanism, it was yet another straw in the wind that something of this nature is less and less avoidable. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali of Rochester in England, a visitor in Columbus and an astute leader and theological mind, is saying something similar following the election.
Of all the candidates on the list I would have had to say that the Bishop of Nevada seemed not only the least likely to be elected Presiding Bishop, but also the least qualified. A dozen years in ministry, none served as rector of a parish, hardly seem qualification for leadership of a denomination at a time like this, however able an individual she might be.
Bishop Schori's election is a perfect illustration of Philip Turner's comment in his new book, co-authored with Ephraim Radner. He writes, Episcopal elections in America now turn on how the candidates stand on the issues, and behind each issue stand contending interest groups each pressing their particular cause. Seldom, if ever, does one hear questions asked about the candidate's grasp of Christian tradition, the depth of their life in Christ, or what might be called their wisdom in the Lord. The ability of a candidate to further what is common seems in no way to be a qualification for office. The important thing is their commitment to a particular set of interests. In short, the life of the Episcopal Church has been politicized all the way down, and the result of this process is erosion of the church's communion" (The Fate of Communion, page 141).
I know little about Bishop Schori, and have no intention of criticizing or defaming her -- that would be churlish. Bishop John Howe of Central Florida, whose opinion I respect, says that she is a delightful and brilliant person, although lacking in experience and seasoning. Personally, having known a good few Presiding Bishops going back to Henry Knox Sherrill of the 1940s, who I met about a year before he died, Katharine Schori does not seem to measure up to the stature of most of her predecessors. I wish her well and promise her my prayers, but wonder if her election isn't yet another symptom of the deepening malaise of a denomination lost in the wilderness.
However, her election and actions of the General Convention suggest that our problems have reached massive proportions which cannot be dodged or fudged. Yet these difficulties will not be solved by ranting, fuming, losing our cool, and whatnot, but by much care being taken in fellowship with our sisters and brothers in Christ around the world to find God’s will and do the right thing. Unilateral action and anger by faithful people will not help but only hinder and hurt both in the short-term and the long-term.
My own spiritual and theological conditioning, which is rooted and grounded in the genius of Anglicanism, shies from division. I have done a lot of study of Scripture on this issue in the last three years, and not only did Jesus call us, his disciples to be one, but Paul echoed the Lord by saying, "Endeavor to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace," (Ephesians 4:3).
The question puzzling me now is how. Let me quote Philip Turner again, words with which I agree and resonate, but, nevertheless, struggle: Any rejoicing in or acceptance of our divisions can only be read either as failure to get the point of what God is 'up to' in and through Christ and the church or a deliberate rejection of his providential purposes... in the midst of the inevitable divisions that appear in the process of handing over the faith and practice of the apostles, the godly attitude is one which leads us to 'make every effort' to overcome our divisions. To put it another way, in times of greatest stress, 'patience' as well as love and truthfulness, is a power of soul necessary not only for the peace of the church but also for the truthfulness of its witness (Ephesians 4:2). (The Fate of Communion, page 169). I commend the whole passage by Turner from which this clip has been taken.
The question is how to make sense of such an obedience at a time like this. Early this morning as I sat looking out of the window watching the dawn break across the misty newly-mown hay field behind our house, I found myself being forced to think about what continues to be for me the unthinkable as we seek a faithful way forward. Let me say that I lean in the direction of Dean Turner, and am merely pondering the point, not recommending we necessarily pursue it. What I found myself wondering was whether we want to be an ecclesiastical equivalent of Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, nations that have now disappeared from the map.
The Yugoslavs managed to create a network of sovereign nations out of one federal country at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, much disruption, the destruction of the economy, genocide, the entrenchment of hatreds, continuing suspicion, and the agonized involvement of nations and troops from across Europe and the world. The former Yugoslavia has not been a pretty sight and will take generations to recover from this disastrous trail of events.
On the other hand, the Czechs and the Slovaks when they found themselves no longer able to live together in anything approaching national harmony, negotiated the famous "Velvet Divorce" under the leadership of Vaslav Havel, the dissident writer turned president. Today both Slovakia and the Czech republic are prosperous countries in the heart of Europe and part of the European Union. While there may not have been the long history of tension between the two that had existed for centuries in the Balkans, such a bold move that ultimately peacefully divided the land in two could easily have led to much bloodshed.
If Bishop Nazir-Ali is right, if the warnings of the Archbishop of York remain unheeded, if the carefully argued theological plea of the Bishop of Durham has not been listened to, if the anguish of the Global South in the Communion is not enough to persuade the left within the Episcopal Church to draw back from divisive actions, then perhaps the time has come to start talking about talks that might lead to some kind of "Velvet Divorce" that is as amiable as possible – or some way of living under the same roof in a semi-detached kind of manner, not getting in each other’s way.
I hope it is clear from what I have already said that I have no real desire to break up the tenuous unity of the Episcopal Church, nor do I believe it faithful, but it seems that there are those in the church so set upon a course of theological and ecclesiastical novelty, that they do not either want nor value that unity which I treasure on the basis of my faith in Jesus Christ because they think they have the power to get their own way.
There are a variety of convictions living under the roof of the Episcopal Church, but it might fairly be said that these broadly break down into two categories. There are those who are committed to belonging to the wider Anglican Communion, to assent and submit to the values of the Windsor Report, to be part of the historic continuity, and to be in full communion with Anglicans throughout the world and the discipline of doctrine and fellowship that such a relationship demands.
Then there are those who have a distinctly American and postmodern vision for the church. They believe the church is acting prophetically and appropriately and want to press forward along this course. It is also clear that those walking down this path have little desire to be held back from their quest by those of us who because of our convictions cannot journey where they wish to go.
Has the time come when we must recognize that we have are now at an impasse, that patience has run out, and that perhaps the best way forward is a negotiated separation rather than a vitriolic battling that will ultimately be destructive to all involved, to the Gospel, and the only winner will be the lawyers? Personally, I consider this second, third, or fourth best, as almost every divorce is, yet I do not see any will on the left to allow those who stand in the mainstream of Anglicanism to live under a roof with them as anything but harried creatures, or the desire of those on the right to necessarily continue doing so.
There is sadness in my heart, for what I write is not what my inner being wants. While not a theological liberal and innovator, I have been generously supported and loved in my long ministry by many who are. Indeed, I would probably not be a priest today if it was not for a former bishop who nurtured me in the midst of crisis. He and I were theologically poles apart but he loved me and supported my family through the darkest tunnel. There may be truth in the adage that we all need each other, but how can we find a way forward when living under the same roof becomes more and more of a challenge?
On Monday morning Ruth Gledhill, the Religion Correspondent of the London Times, was on the BBC World News. She is one of the most respected observers of the world Anglican scene, and suggested that while Shori's election is probably not going to cause a split within Anglicanism, it was yet another straw in the wind that something of this nature is less and less avoidable. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali of Rochester in England, a visitor in Columbus and an astute leader and theological mind, is saying something similar following the election.
Of all the candidates on the list I would have had to say that the Bishop of Nevada seemed not only the least likely to be elected Presiding Bishop, but also the least qualified. A dozen years in ministry, none served as rector of a parish, hardly seem qualification for leadership of a denomination at a time like this, however able an individual she might be.
Bishop Schori's election is a perfect illustration of Philip Turner's comment in his new book, co-authored with Ephraim Radner. He writes, Episcopal elections in America now turn on how the candidates stand on the issues, and behind each issue stand contending interest groups each pressing their particular cause. Seldom, if ever, does one hear questions asked about the candidate's grasp of Christian tradition, the depth of their life in Christ, or what might be called their wisdom in the Lord. The ability of a candidate to further what is common seems in no way to be a qualification for office. The important thing is their commitment to a particular set of interests. In short, the life of the Episcopal Church has been politicized all the way down, and the result of this process is erosion of the church's communion" (The Fate of Communion, page 141).
I know little about Bishop Schori, and have no intention of criticizing or defaming her -- that would be churlish. Bishop John Howe of Central Florida, whose opinion I respect, says that she is a delightful and brilliant person, although lacking in experience and seasoning. Personally, having known a good few Presiding Bishops going back to Henry Knox Sherrill of the 1940s, who I met about a year before he died, Katharine Schori does not seem to measure up to the stature of most of her predecessors. I wish her well and promise her my prayers, but wonder if her election isn't yet another symptom of the deepening malaise of a denomination lost in the wilderness.
However, her election and actions of the General Convention suggest that our problems have reached massive proportions which cannot be dodged or fudged. Yet these difficulties will not be solved by ranting, fuming, losing our cool, and whatnot, but by much care being taken in fellowship with our sisters and brothers in Christ around the world to find God’s will and do the right thing. Unilateral action and anger by faithful people will not help but only hinder and hurt both in the short-term and the long-term.
My own spiritual and theological conditioning, which is rooted and grounded in the genius of Anglicanism, shies from division. I have done a lot of study of Scripture on this issue in the last three years, and not only did Jesus call us, his disciples to be one, but Paul echoed the Lord by saying, "Endeavor to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace," (Ephesians 4:3).
The question puzzling me now is how. Let me quote Philip Turner again, words with which I agree and resonate, but, nevertheless, struggle: Any rejoicing in or acceptance of our divisions can only be read either as failure to get the point of what God is 'up to' in and through Christ and the church or a deliberate rejection of his providential purposes... in the midst of the inevitable divisions that appear in the process of handing over the faith and practice of the apostles, the godly attitude is one which leads us to 'make every effort' to overcome our divisions. To put it another way, in times of greatest stress, 'patience' as well as love and truthfulness, is a power of soul necessary not only for the peace of the church but also for the truthfulness of its witness (Ephesians 4:2). (The Fate of Communion, page 169). I commend the whole passage by Turner from which this clip has been taken.
The question is how to make sense of such an obedience at a time like this. Early this morning as I sat looking out of the window watching the dawn break across the misty newly-mown hay field behind our house, I found myself being forced to think about what continues to be for me the unthinkable as we seek a faithful way forward. Let me say that I lean in the direction of Dean Turner, and am merely pondering the point, not recommending we necessarily pursue it. What I found myself wondering was whether we want to be an ecclesiastical equivalent of Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, nations that have now disappeared from the map.
The Yugoslavs managed to create a network of sovereign nations out of one federal country at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, much disruption, the destruction of the economy, genocide, the entrenchment of hatreds, continuing suspicion, and the agonized involvement of nations and troops from across Europe and the world. The former Yugoslavia has not been a pretty sight and will take generations to recover from this disastrous trail of events.
On the other hand, the Czechs and the Slovaks when they found themselves no longer able to live together in anything approaching national harmony, negotiated the famous "Velvet Divorce" under the leadership of Vaslav Havel, the dissident writer turned president. Today both Slovakia and the Czech republic are prosperous countries in the heart of Europe and part of the European Union. While there may not have been the long history of tension between the two that had existed for centuries in the Balkans, such a bold move that ultimately peacefully divided the land in two could easily have led to much bloodshed.
If Bishop Nazir-Ali is right, if the warnings of the Archbishop of York remain unheeded, if the carefully argued theological plea of the Bishop of Durham has not been listened to, if the anguish of the Global South in the Communion is not enough to persuade the left within the Episcopal Church to draw back from divisive actions, then perhaps the time has come to start talking about talks that might lead to some kind of "Velvet Divorce" that is as amiable as possible – or some way of living under the same roof in a semi-detached kind of manner, not getting in each other’s way.
I hope it is clear from what I have already said that I have no real desire to break up the tenuous unity of the Episcopal Church, nor do I believe it faithful, but it seems that there are those in the church so set upon a course of theological and ecclesiastical novelty, that they do not either want nor value that unity which I treasure on the basis of my faith in Jesus Christ because they think they have the power to get their own way.
There are a variety of convictions living under the roof of the Episcopal Church, but it might fairly be said that these broadly break down into two categories. There are those who are committed to belonging to the wider Anglican Communion, to assent and submit to the values of the Windsor Report, to be part of the historic continuity, and to be in full communion with Anglicans throughout the world and the discipline of doctrine and fellowship that such a relationship demands.
Then there are those who have a distinctly American and postmodern vision for the church. They believe the church is acting prophetically and appropriately and want to press forward along this course. It is also clear that those walking down this path have little desire to be held back from their quest by those of us who because of our convictions cannot journey where they wish to go.
Has the time come when we must recognize that we have are now at an impasse, that patience has run out, and that perhaps the best way forward is a negotiated separation rather than a vitriolic battling that will ultimately be destructive to all involved, to the Gospel, and the only winner will be the lawyers? Personally, I consider this second, third, or fourth best, as almost every divorce is, yet I do not see any will on the left to allow those who stand in the mainstream of Anglicanism to live under a roof with them as anything but harried creatures, or the desire of those on the right to necessarily continue doing so.
There is sadness in my heart, for what I write is not what my inner being wants. While not a theological liberal and innovator, I have been generously supported and loved in my long ministry by many who are. Indeed, I would probably not be a priest today if it was not for a former bishop who nurtured me in the midst of crisis. He and I were theologically poles apart but he loved me and supported my family through the darkest tunnel. There may be truth in the adage that we all need each other, but how can we find a way forward when living under the same roof becomes more and more of a challenge?
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
General Convention and the Misuse of Motorcycles
One of our congregation is a managers of one of the rather more fashionable restaurants with the thirtysomething set. The other evening, when work was over, one of the employees of the restaurant was hanging out with some friends in the parking lot. He had had a few beers and was fooling around on his motorcycle -- one of those racy jobs that weaves in and out of lanes traffic on the Interstate going at high speed.
It would seem he was doing wheelies and things, being egged on by his buddies as he did so. In normal circumstances, I am told, this was a fairly responsible individual. My friend, the manager, knew nothing of what was going on outside until the guys who were with him came rushing in to announce that he had had a most horrible accident when he had misjudged his tomfoolery and had hit a curb then a wall at high speed.
Today this young man who is only twenty-four lies in the trauma unit of one of the local hospitals. He is being roused from a deep (and then medically induced) coma, and when he awakes he will be told that he will never walk again. While he was wise enough to be wearing his helmet, when he hit the wall he broke his back and severed his spinal cord. The manager of the restaurant is mortified at what has happened and the friends are basket cases.
Tragic as this is, I believe it to be a cautionary tale. This week the General Convention has gathered in Columbus, Ohio. Today the Archbishop of Canterbury sent a fairly clear warning that the Convention should act with care, or there would be tears (double meaning there: tears and tears). He is right and should be listened to with care.
But I wonder whether his words will receive such care. I have been watching Conventions since 1976, and have hung around most General Conventions since 1985 until this year and have watched the dynamics of the things. They take on a life of their own. There may be a lot of responsible individuals in the two houses of the bicameral body, but when they get together they can at times be more like that group of young men who had a few beers after work, then egged their friend on until he injured himself irreparably.
I am at present reading Philip Turner and Ephraim Radner's new book, The Fate of Communion. It is not an easy read but it is stimulating in the extreme and is certainly an intellectual window on all that has been going on through which we need to look with great care. One of the questions raised early on is whether the vision for the church catholic on American soil works alongside America's radical commitment to democracy. More on this when I review the book, but I am of the mind that the Convention lacks checks and balances that would prevent some of the foolishness that we have especially experienced in the last few years.
I am profoundly grateful that Dr. Williams using Archbishop Sentamu as his messenger, sent a stern warning to the Convention to behave like men and women of God who belong to a worldwide Communion that ought to be one of those checks and balances. I fear, however, that the American church's sense that it is a 'special case' will brush the wisdom and pleas of the universal church aside in favor of its own blinkered take on it believes the faith to be. The Archbishop has said as plainly as diplomacy allows what needs to be done for there to be no irreparable damage -- the thought of which he abhors.
It would seem he was doing wheelies and things, being egged on by his buddies as he did so. In normal circumstances, I am told, this was a fairly responsible individual. My friend, the manager, knew nothing of what was going on outside until the guys who were with him came rushing in to announce that he had had a most horrible accident when he had misjudged his tomfoolery and had hit a curb then a wall at high speed.
Today this young man who is only twenty-four lies in the trauma unit of one of the local hospitals. He is being roused from a deep (and then medically induced) coma, and when he awakes he will be told that he will never walk again. While he was wise enough to be wearing his helmet, when he hit the wall he broke his back and severed his spinal cord. The manager of the restaurant is mortified at what has happened and the friends are basket cases.
Tragic as this is, I believe it to be a cautionary tale. This week the General Convention has gathered in Columbus, Ohio. Today the Archbishop of Canterbury sent a fairly clear warning that the Convention should act with care, or there would be tears (double meaning there: tears and tears). He is right and should be listened to with care.
But I wonder whether his words will receive such care. I have been watching Conventions since 1976, and have hung around most General Conventions since 1985 until this year and have watched the dynamics of the things. They take on a life of their own. There may be a lot of responsible individuals in the two houses of the bicameral body, but when they get together they can at times be more like that group of young men who had a few beers after work, then egged their friend on until he injured himself irreparably.
I am at present reading Philip Turner and Ephraim Radner's new book, The Fate of Communion. It is not an easy read but it is stimulating in the extreme and is certainly an intellectual window on all that has been going on through which we need to look with great care. One of the questions raised early on is whether the vision for the church catholic on American soil works alongside America's radical commitment to democracy. More on this when I review the book, but I am of the mind that the Convention lacks checks and balances that would prevent some of the foolishness that we have especially experienced in the last few years.
I am profoundly grateful that Dr. Williams using Archbishop Sentamu as his messenger, sent a stern warning to the Convention to behave like men and women of God who belong to a worldwide Communion that ought to be one of those checks and balances. I fear, however, that the American church's sense that it is a 'special case' will brush the wisdom and pleas of the universal church aside in favor of its own blinkered take on it believes the faith to be. The Archbishop has said as plainly as diplomacy allows what needs to be done for there to be no irreparable damage -- the thought of which he abhors.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
The Da Vinci Code -- Movie Review
You know, I often read movie reviews, and then find myself shaking my head at the world-weariness of the reviewer who does not seem to be able to find anything good to say about a particular production. During the last few weeks I have read some pretty mean reviews about "The Da Vinci Code," and reckoned that I was getting a lot of the usual shoulder-shrugging that I have come to accept as normal for such types. I gather it even got hissed down at the Cannes Film Festival, a rare accolade!
While I think that some of them have been overly cruel about "The Da Vinci Code", I have to say that if it hadn't have been for the fact that millions have read the best-selling book of the same name, that this baby would have had fearfully mediocre takings at the box office. Hanks acts well, but then Hanks almost always acts well. If you are a Hanks watcher, then this is a fascinating new episode for the man who first caught attention in "Bosom Buddies." There are other roles like Silas, the albino monk, that are particularly well done, but if it hadn't have been for the millions that Sony have poured into the movie for special effects, magnificent settings, and so forth, this would have been little more than an adequate depiction of Dan Brown's story.
And it went on too long. Toward the end I realize that I was not especially engaged with the story but was trying to see if I recognized the location where the thing was being filmed. The film would not have lost anything if another 10-15 minutes had been lopped from it. Part of the reason for the difficulty I had concentrating was that it is incredibly difficult to turn into a screen play a book that is set in so many places like this one. Chapter-by-chapter in the story the writer is able to jump from London to Paris to goodness knows where else, but a movie director has to try to bounce you around the place without losing the thread of the tale. In this it is only partially successful.
Enough for the production itself, what about the tale it told and the message it presented? By and large it was pretty faithful to the book, but as we were walking out of the cinema my wife turned to me and said, "You know, the movie is even more postmodern than the book." Relativism, especially religious, certainly runs riot through its pages, and every effort is made to diminish the Christian faith at the expense of the other spiritual streams that run through this story. The distinctiveness of Christianity are stripped away in a vague kind of gnostic pablum.
One of the comments I made on emerging into the fresh air was how powerful a medium cinema is when it comes to communicating a message because it can with great skill and subtlety by-pass the mind and go straight to the emotions. As various techniques were used to play up the Mary Magdalene thesis, especially that she appears in Da Vinci's "Last Supper" and was the wife of Jesus of Nazareth, I found myself so fascinated that if I had had little in the way of background information I could have swallowed what was being presented. The question I came out of the multiplex was whether we would ever have the resources or the ability to counter such skilled debunking of the faith. On top of that, such works require an awful lot of money, and the churches have never had access to that.
I don't want to grizzle to much, however. I had an entertaining evening watching this movie, and saw some lovely shots of London, Paris, and the Scottish countryside. The story is interesting even if the author's attention to detail leaves an enormous amount to be desired. I don't think the movie is anything like fair to the Roman Catholic church, although the obviously Catholic characters in the piece were for me some of the more compelling figures. Sophie, the female star of the production and Hanks' sidekick in this helter-skelter chase, is gorgeous with a winning smile and hair that never seems out of place even when the most violent things are going on!
Go and see it if you want to, but take the message with a pinch of salt.
While I think that some of them have been overly cruel about "The Da Vinci Code", I have to say that if it hadn't have been for the fact that millions have read the best-selling book of the same name, that this baby would have had fearfully mediocre takings at the box office. Hanks acts well, but then Hanks almost always acts well. If you are a Hanks watcher, then this is a fascinating new episode for the man who first caught attention in "Bosom Buddies." There are other roles like Silas, the albino monk, that are particularly well done, but if it hadn't have been for the millions that Sony have poured into the movie for special effects, magnificent settings, and so forth, this would have been little more than an adequate depiction of Dan Brown's story.
And it went on too long. Toward the end I realize that I was not especially engaged with the story but was trying to see if I recognized the location where the thing was being filmed. The film would not have lost anything if another 10-15 minutes had been lopped from it. Part of the reason for the difficulty I had concentrating was that it is incredibly difficult to turn into a screen play a book that is set in so many places like this one. Chapter-by-chapter in the story the writer is able to jump from London to Paris to goodness knows where else, but a movie director has to try to bounce you around the place without losing the thread of the tale. In this it is only partially successful.
Enough for the production itself, what about the tale it told and the message it presented? By and large it was pretty faithful to the book, but as we were walking out of the cinema my wife turned to me and said, "You know, the movie is even more postmodern than the book." Relativism, especially religious, certainly runs riot through its pages, and every effort is made to diminish the Christian faith at the expense of the other spiritual streams that run through this story. The distinctiveness of Christianity are stripped away in a vague kind of gnostic pablum.
One of the comments I made on emerging into the fresh air was how powerful a medium cinema is when it comes to communicating a message because it can with great skill and subtlety by-pass the mind and go straight to the emotions. As various techniques were used to play up the Mary Magdalene thesis, especially that she appears in Da Vinci's "Last Supper" and was the wife of Jesus of Nazareth, I found myself so fascinated that if I had had little in the way of background information I could have swallowed what was being presented. The question I came out of the multiplex was whether we would ever have the resources or the ability to counter such skilled debunking of the faith. On top of that, such works require an awful lot of money, and the churches have never had access to that.
I don't want to grizzle to much, however. I had an entertaining evening watching this movie, and saw some lovely shots of London, Paris, and the Scottish countryside. The story is interesting even if the author's attention to detail leaves an enormous amount to be desired. I don't think the movie is anything like fair to the Roman Catholic church, although the obviously Catholic characters in the piece were for me some of the more compelling figures. Sophie, the female star of the production and Hanks' sidekick in this helter-skelter chase, is gorgeous with a winning smile and hair that never seems out of place even when the most violent things are going on!
Go and see it if you want to, but take the message with a pinch of salt.
Monday, June 05, 2006
Can A Phoenix Fly? -- Part Two
As I ponder the responses, both published and private, to my last piece with this same title, I noticed a tendency to think of North American Anglicanism just in terms of ECUSA, when the Anglican obedience on this continent has a much wider pull and reach. One of the tragedies of North American Anglicanism has been its tendency to fragmentation, and in this respect (although most Anglicans may not be happy with the comparison), we are much more like Baptists than anything else. I suspect that the roots of so much division are to be found somewhere in the wider American personality, but that is a discussion for another day.
One of the great joys for me during the time I worked on the US Anglican Congress, was to begin to get to know godly Anglican men and women who are part of smaller, separated jurisdictions. I have over the years developed a particular fondness for the granddaddy of all the smaller jurisdictions in the United States, the Reformed Episcopal Church; I suspect that if ECUSA had the same kind of clergy swap arrangement with them that we have with the mainline Lutherans, then I could function very happily in their midst.
So when I talk of North American Anglicanism I mean a much broader swathe of believers than just the old, declining mainline denomination. But I suspect that we need to cut that swathe even broader than that because in the emerging church movement is a great warmth toward Anglicanism. I have been heard to say a number of times in the past that we need to develop relationships with the emerging church types, because whatever kind of Anglicanism is re-born during the next generation or two, they are probably going to need to be part of it.
As I have explored the strengths and weaknesses of post-denominationalism, and as I have sought to understand what it means to be a biblical and catholic Christian as the culture's clothing becomes more postmodern, it has seemed that the denomination as we know it is increasingly an anachronism. This is not to say that 'families' of believers will not continue to affiliate with one another for fellowship, mutual encouragement, administrative support, and so forth, but it is to say that the lumbering top-heavy monster that most denominations have become is a quaint left-over from a bygone age.
Perusing the budgets of the Episcopal Church we can see how much the beast needs to be fed and how little we get from it -- and what I say of ECUSA is said similarly by friends in other mainline traditions. As we watch Ford and General Motors dying on the vine because they are structured for the past, we are also seeing the inevitablity of something a parallel happening in the mainline denominations.
When I was working on the 20/20 Taskforce six years ago, at a time when I was still persona grata in National Church circles, it was obvious that if evangelistic growth was to take place resources of every kind would have to be poured into the grassroots. The denomination could create an environment for growth that would encourage congregations and dioceses to set their eyes on the prize and give a good chance of Gospel expansion. Although there were inadequacies (especially theological) in the report we presented to the Executive Council in October 2001, if it had been acted upon we might have seen fascinating evangelistic things happening.
However, the denomination, led by those whose agenda had more to do with sexuality and redefining what it means to be human, gutted the report, sidelined forward thinkers and actors, and then changed the agenda. The outcome of this is the disaster that we now have on our hands. It is extraordinary hard work to grow congregations, particularly when the culture is in full flow against the biblical faith, and it is much easier to marry the spirit of the age -- which is precisely what ECUSA has done, thus destroying what was its last great hope.
However, as our bishop here has put it, all that has happened does not mean that God rescinded the Great Commission, and even amidst the ruins of what might of been we have work to do. As a mission congregation pastor I have learned to my cost that the actions of the General Convention made my work a hundred times more difficult and significantly reduced funding. This is one of the reasons I find myself shuddering what the General Convention will come up with this time to further hamper the progress of the Gospel.
If Anglicanism is to re-emerge as a potent force for the faith in North America, then like Anglicanism in so much of the Global South it has to be thoroughly biblical and thoroughly missional. This is going to mean faithful Anglican believers finding ways to cooperate and work together. Structure must follow mission, rather than the other way round. Whether inside or outside of ECUSA, faithful Anglicans have an obligation to get together and work together with other believers from other traditions for the biblical faith here in the USA.
Today's world is a bracing climate that takes pleasure in humbling bloated organizations, and ECUSA will not be spared. The car companies are today's poster children of this reality, but in the corporate world we watched this sort of thing going on for a quarter of a century or more. The structures of ECUSA are already living on borrowed time, and as funding further dries up so retrenchments will take place until they are forced to face up to changing realities: whoever is elected, the one at the helm when this takes place will be the next Presiding Bishop.
In the marketplace customers and shareholders ultimately dictate terms, in the ecclesiastical marketplace it is members in ordinary congregations. If structures are divorced from the concerns of the grassroots, then they have already hollowed out the foundations from beneath their feet.
But there also have to be ways of enabling faithful Anglicans to cooperate with one another. One of the tragedies of the fragmentations of the last decade is that folks who once worked together closely now seldom even talk to each other. Not only has the rending of the church broken relationships, but we all then become so intent to build up our own little empire that we do not have the time or spare energy to ask how we might share our resources our outward reach to the glory of God. I believe that part of the thrust of John 17 is that Jesus meant Christians to work together because their effectiveness is decreased when they attempt to go it alone.
If Anglicanism is to experience a resurgence, then whatever our present jurisdictions we are going to have to get beyond our present circling of our own set of wagons to address the bigger and more pressing task in hand. This will require generosity, grace, and humility -- characteristics that are in short supply. It also means that there need to be leaders who are willing to draw divergent groups together, and be prepared to let go of what they perceive to be their power and authority for the benefit of the larger whole.
But just being buddy-buddy isn't going to do it. Those who have separated themselves for ECUSA have done so for what they consider to be good reasons, and at their heart is theology. A worthy Anglican churchman said to me when I was in England several weeks ago, "I perceive there to be something of a theological deficit in the Episcopal Church." That, I told him, was a massive piece of British understatement! However, not only ECUSA can be blamed for theology-lite, the same has to be said for many Anglicans outside ECUSA.
It is vital that the faithful take this deficit in hand. As J. I. Packer said in Nashville a couple of years ago: from the pews upward we have a massive task of biblical re-education on our hands, and we fail to do it at our peril. But it is not just in the pews that a demanding and faithful theological education needs to be undertaken, the institutions that train men and women for leadership have the same challenge before them. I would hazard that we would not be in the mess we are today if the seminaries had been faithful to the revealed faith and doing their job properly. In some cases those seminaries teach almost anything but the revealed faith. I hazard that many of our clergy could not, as Windsor puts it "walk together" with the Communion because they do not really know what historic Anglican Christians believe.
When next I write on this topic, theology and theological education are the issues that I will address.
One of the great joys for me during the time I worked on the US Anglican Congress, was to begin to get to know godly Anglican men and women who are part of smaller, separated jurisdictions. I have over the years developed a particular fondness for the granddaddy of all the smaller jurisdictions in the United States, the Reformed Episcopal Church; I suspect that if ECUSA had the same kind of clergy swap arrangement with them that we have with the mainline Lutherans, then I could function very happily in their midst.
So when I talk of North American Anglicanism I mean a much broader swathe of believers than just the old, declining mainline denomination. But I suspect that we need to cut that swathe even broader than that because in the emerging church movement is a great warmth toward Anglicanism. I have been heard to say a number of times in the past that we need to develop relationships with the emerging church types, because whatever kind of Anglicanism is re-born during the next generation or two, they are probably going to need to be part of it.
As I have explored the strengths and weaknesses of post-denominationalism, and as I have sought to understand what it means to be a biblical and catholic Christian as the culture's clothing becomes more postmodern, it has seemed that the denomination as we know it is increasingly an anachronism. This is not to say that 'families' of believers will not continue to affiliate with one another for fellowship, mutual encouragement, administrative support, and so forth, but it is to say that the lumbering top-heavy monster that most denominations have become is a quaint left-over from a bygone age.
Perusing the budgets of the Episcopal Church we can see how much the beast needs to be fed and how little we get from it -- and what I say of ECUSA is said similarly by friends in other mainline traditions. As we watch Ford and General Motors dying on the vine because they are structured for the past, we are also seeing the inevitablity of something a parallel happening in the mainline denominations.
When I was working on the 20/20 Taskforce six years ago, at a time when I was still persona grata in National Church circles, it was obvious that if evangelistic growth was to take place resources of every kind would have to be poured into the grassroots. The denomination could create an environment for growth that would encourage congregations and dioceses to set their eyes on the prize and give a good chance of Gospel expansion. Although there were inadequacies (especially theological) in the report we presented to the Executive Council in October 2001, if it had been acted upon we might have seen fascinating evangelistic things happening.
However, the denomination, led by those whose agenda had more to do with sexuality and redefining what it means to be human, gutted the report, sidelined forward thinkers and actors, and then changed the agenda. The outcome of this is the disaster that we now have on our hands. It is extraordinary hard work to grow congregations, particularly when the culture is in full flow against the biblical faith, and it is much easier to marry the spirit of the age -- which is precisely what ECUSA has done, thus destroying what was its last great hope.
However, as our bishop here has put it, all that has happened does not mean that God rescinded the Great Commission, and even amidst the ruins of what might of been we have work to do. As a mission congregation pastor I have learned to my cost that the actions of the General Convention made my work a hundred times more difficult and significantly reduced funding. This is one of the reasons I find myself shuddering what the General Convention will come up with this time to further hamper the progress of the Gospel.
If Anglicanism is to re-emerge as a potent force for the faith in North America, then like Anglicanism in so much of the Global South it has to be thoroughly biblical and thoroughly missional. This is going to mean faithful Anglican believers finding ways to cooperate and work together. Structure must follow mission, rather than the other way round. Whether inside or outside of ECUSA, faithful Anglicans have an obligation to get together and work together with other believers from other traditions for the biblical faith here in the USA.
Today's world is a bracing climate that takes pleasure in humbling bloated organizations, and ECUSA will not be spared. The car companies are today's poster children of this reality, but in the corporate world we watched this sort of thing going on for a quarter of a century or more. The structures of ECUSA are already living on borrowed time, and as funding further dries up so retrenchments will take place until they are forced to face up to changing realities: whoever is elected, the one at the helm when this takes place will be the next Presiding Bishop.
In the marketplace customers and shareholders ultimately dictate terms, in the ecclesiastical marketplace it is members in ordinary congregations. If structures are divorced from the concerns of the grassroots, then they have already hollowed out the foundations from beneath their feet.
But there also have to be ways of enabling faithful Anglicans to cooperate with one another. One of the tragedies of the fragmentations of the last decade is that folks who once worked together closely now seldom even talk to each other. Not only has the rending of the church broken relationships, but we all then become so intent to build up our own little empire that we do not have the time or spare energy to ask how we might share our resources our outward reach to the glory of God. I believe that part of the thrust of John 17 is that Jesus meant Christians to work together because their effectiveness is decreased when they attempt to go it alone.
If Anglicanism is to experience a resurgence, then whatever our present jurisdictions we are going to have to get beyond our present circling of our own set of wagons to address the bigger and more pressing task in hand. This will require generosity, grace, and humility -- characteristics that are in short supply. It also means that there need to be leaders who are willing to draw divergent groups together, and be prepared to let go of what they perceive to be their power and authority for the benefit of the larger whole.
But just being buddy-buddy isn't going to do it. Those who have separated themselves for ECUSA have done so for what they consider to be good reasons, and at their heart is theology. A worthy Anglican churchman said to me when I was in England several weeks ago, "I perceive there to be something of a theological deficit in the Episcopal Church." That, I told him, was a massive piece of British understatement! However, not only ECUSA can be blamed for theology-lite, the same has to be said for many Anglicans outside ECUSA.
It is vital that the faithful take this deficit in hand. As J. I. Packer said in Nashville a couple of years ago: from the pews upward we have a massive task of biblical re-education on our hands, and we fail to do it at our peril. But it is not just in the pews that a demanding and faithful theological education needs to be undertaken, the institutions that train men and women for leadership have the same challenge before them. I would hazard that we would not be in the mess we are today if the seminaries had been faithful to the revealed faith and doing their job properly. In some cases those seminaries teach almost anything but the revealed faith. I hazard that many of our clergy could not, as Windsor puts it "walk together" with the Communion because they do not really know what historic Anglican Christians believe.
When next I write on this topic, theology and theological education are the issues that I will address.
Friday, June 02, 2006
Eat This Book -- A Review of Eugene Peterson's book
Eat This Book -- A Conversation in the Art of Spirital Reading by Eugene H. Peterson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006)
A Review by Richard Kew
The other day I heard of a large congregation in a denomination whose theology and style mean it presents itself as far more conservative and orthodox than my own. Indeed, they make great play of their willingness to place themselves under the authority of Scripture. The pastor of this congregation was discovered to have been sexually involved with a female staff person for a considerable time. When the matter came before the staff and the board there was a strong move to retain that pastor's services before it was headed off by a vigilant staff person who pointed out that this man had contravened the very fundamentals of Christian morality.
The point of this story is that it does not matter where we look today, the churches are being shaped more and more by the prevailing culture than by the mind of the God who called them into being. It is voices like that of Eugene Peterson who remind us that if we are the People of God then we cannot allow ourselves to be formed by the culture, we must put ourselves in the place where we are formed by God -- which means rediscovering how to read, nourish, and form ourselves through our drenching in God's Word. He says, "An enormous amount of damage is done in the name of Christian living by bad Bible reading" (Page 82).
Eat This Book is a slender volume by Peterson standards, a mere 180 pages, but it took me two months to get through it. Part of the reason for this was that I did not have the time to sit down and read it with a lot of continuity, but part of the reason was that even if I had had such time, I would not have been able to hurry along because there is too much in here to rush over.
I consider Eugene Peterson as one of my mentors. I joke that I knew him before he was famous, which is true. Back then I was drawn to seek his friendship and counsel because I perceived a person who (to use a quote from John Updike that he uses early in this book) had discovered "that truth is holy, and truth-telling a noble and useful profession" (Page 8). Eugene Peterson is a truth-teller, par excellence, someone who had been captured by the truth, was determined to follow it wherever it might lead, someone who I felt worth learning from and make a model for my life.
This book is the second of a series in pastoral theology, and is all about what it means to be in the business of the Truth. For Peterson this is about getting on with what Austin Farrer calls "the forbidding discipline of spiritual reading," which is the text being used to form our souls. The task is forbidding "because it requires that we read with our entire life, not just employing the synapses of our brain. Fordigging because of the endless dodges we devise in avoiding the risk of faith in God. Forbidding because of our restless inventiveness in using whatever knowledge of 'spirituality' we acquire to set up ourselves as gods..." (Pages 9-10).
This gives a flavor of the book. This volume not for the fainthearted. It is not for those who are interested in fashionable spirituality or culturally acceptable and ecclesiastically respectable religiosity. This book is about absorbing the Book so that the one who reads might run. "Reading is an immense gift, but only if the words are assumulated, taken into the soul -- eaten, chewed, gnawed, received in unhurried delight" (Page 11).
The last several paragraphs I have just looked at the introduction to Eat This Book, and it took me several days get beyond them into the rest of his carefully crafted case. He begins that case with these words: "The Christian Scriptures are the primary text for Christian spirituality. Christian spirituality is, in its entirety, rooted in and shaped by the scriptural text. We don't form our personal spiritual lives out of a random assemblage of favorite texts in combination with individual circumstancs; we are formed by the Holy Spirit in accordance with the text of Holy Scripture" (Page 15).
And so the stage is set for one of the most eloquent pleas I have ever encountered that the People of God have body, mind, and soul captured the the substance of the Word of God. This is a message that needs to be heard by chic and trendy Episcopalians, learned Presbyterians, arm-waving Pentecostals, miracle-obsessed Charismatics, Pope-loving Catholics, and every other believer wherever they are on the spectrum. Peterson does not accuse any of us of not being biblical, but he suggests in as winsome a way that there is a strong possibility that all of us have fallen short of what it means to delve into the heart of the living God who has revealed himself in this library of books that we call Holy Scripture.
I want to pull the Scriptures back from the margins, Peterson asserts, for that so often is the place to which the church and individual Christians have consigned it. It is only when we do this and digest the Book with the passion of the prophets of Jerusalem, Babylon, and Patmos, that we discover its words are like honey on our lips and in our stomachs. "Holy Scripture is something other than mere gossip about God, it must be internalized" (Page 20).
There has been a baffling array of offerings presented in the last generation or so and labelled as spirituality. The extraordinary thing is that when the culture calls something spiritual the churches jump onto its bandwagon. Eugene Peterson is not against spirituality, but he doesn't have a lot of time for the ersatz spiritualities of our age. Christian spirituality "means going against the cultural stream in which we are incessantly trivialized by the menial status of producers and performers, (and talking to clergy) constantly depersonalized behind the labels of our degrees and our salaries. But there is far more to us than our usefulness and our reputation, where we've been and who we know; there is the unique, irreproducible, eternal, image-of-God me" (Page 23).
This leads him on into some strong Trinitarian theology, for it is only by allowing ourselves through Scripture to be enveloped by the wholeness of GOd that we discover precisely what it means to be a follower of Jesus, the incarnate second person of that Trinity. So having plunged us into the nature of the Godhead, Peterson brings us back to the text of Scripture the place where the Triune One reveals himself, for if we are to discover God in these pages then we need to take what we find with the utmost seriousness.
It is Eugene Peterson's belief that every man and every woman is capable of entering into a fuller understanding of Creator and Redeemer by becoming a bible reader. The living God speaks to us through Scripture, he asserts, and as we seek to live out obediently what the Word says to us we find ourselves in the presence of that living God. He leans heavily on Calvin's assertion that all right knowledge of God is born of obedience.
Peterson also challenges us to careful exegesis of the text. This, he says, is neither small-minded nor is it pedantic. "Exegesis is the care we give to getting the words right. Exegesis is foundational to Christian spirituality. Foundations disappear from view as a building is constructed, but if the builders don't build a solid foundation, their building doesn't last for long" (Page 53). As we look at what has become of our own denomination and as we then look at the slipshod way that Scripture has been treated, it is hardly surprising that lacking an adequate foundation the building is toppling.
The first part of Peterson's works is a pretty demanding theological work out, but all of it is good stuff exceptionally written. I did not learn anything new, but I was asked in a fresh way to consider old truths that too readily get overlooked. After this theological work out Peterson becomes more practical, and provides in the second section the best presentation of the Lectio Divina that I have ever read.
"Lectio divina is the strenuous effort that the Christian community gives... to rehydrating the Scriptures so that they are capable of holding their own original force and shape in the heat of the day, maintaining their context long enough to get fused with or assimilated into our context, the world we inhabit, the clamor of voices in the daily weather and work in which we live" (Page 88).
Lectio Divina is a way of handling the Scriptures that abandons any attent to take control of the text, but to allow the text to take control of us. It is not a linear process but one that allows us to read and loop the words back into the moment-by-moment business of thinking and living. It is learning to listen to the Word that was first spoken and which we now encounter as written. I will not bore you with the details of Peterson's instruction about Lectio Divina and will allow you to read them for yourselves. However let me end my comments on the lectio with his final statement on the issue that "it is astonishing how many ways we manage to devise for using the Bible toi avoid a believing obedience, both personal and corporate, in receiving and following the Word made flesh" (Page 117).
The final section of the book is Peterson's own meditation on the history of biblical translation and his own experience of doing it as it grew out of his own ministry a number of years ago. The fruit of that work was The Message, a paraphrase that stands alongside J. B. Phillips' great paraphrase of an earlier generation.
What Eugene Peterson says at the end of the book in reflection on his own ministry is that "I wanted to gather a company of people together who read personally, not impersonally, who learned to read the Bible in order to live their true selves, not just get information that they could use to raise their standard of living. I wanted to counter the consumer attitude that uses the Bible as a way to gather religious data by which we can be our own gods, and then replace it with an attitude primed to listen to and obey God, to take us out of our preoccupations with ourselves into the spacious freedom in which God is working the world's salvation. I wanted to somehow recover that original tone, that prophetic and gospel 'voice' that stabs us awake to a beauty and hope that connects us with our real lives" (Page 176).
In short, what Eugene Peterson does here is give us an in-depth guide on eating this Book, the greatest of all Books, God's revealed Word.
A Review by Richard Kew
The other day I heard of a large congregation in a denomination whose theology and style mean it presents itself as far more conservative and orthodox than my own. Indeed, they make great play of their willingness to place themselves under the authority of Scripture. The pastor of this congregation was discovered to have been sexually involved with a female staff person for a considerable time. When the matter came before the staff and the board there was a strong move to retain that pastor's services before it was headed off by a vigilant staff person who pointed out that this man had contravened the very fundamentals of Christian morality.
The point of this story is that it does not matter where we look today, the churches are being shaped more and more by the prevailing culture than by the mind of the God who called them into being. It is voices like that of Eugene Peterson who remind us that if we are the People of God then we cannot allow ourselves to be formed by the culture, we must put ourselves in the place where we are formed by God -- which means rediscovering how to read, nourish, and form ourselves through our drenching in God's Word. He says, "An enormous amount of damage is done in the name of Christian living by bad Bible reading" (Page 82).
Eat This Book is a slender volume by Peterson standards, a mere 180 pages, but it took me two months to get through it. Part of the reason for this was that I did not have the time to sit down and read it with a lot of continuity, but part of the reason was that even if I had had such time, I would not have been able to hurry along because there is too much in here to rush over.
I consider Eugene Peterson as one of my mentors. I joke that I knew him before he was famous, which is true. Back then I was drawn to seek his friendship and counsel because I perceived a person who (to use a quote from John Updike that he uses early in this book) had discovered "that truth is holy, and truth-telling a noble and useful profession" (Page 8). Eugene Peterson is a truth-teller, par excellence, someone who had been captured by the truth, was determined to follow it wherever it might lead, someone who I felt worth learning from and make a model for my life.
This book is the second of a series in pastoral theology, and is all about what it means to be in the business of the Truth. For Peterson this is about getting on with what Austin Farrer calls "the forbidding discipline of spiritual reading," which is the text being used to form our souls. The task is forbidding "because it requires that we read with our entire life, not just employing the synapses of our brain. Fordigging because of the endless dodges we devise in avoiding the risk of faith in God. Forbidding because of our restless inventiveness in using whatever knowledge of 'spirituality' we acquire to set up ourselves as gods..." (Pages 9-10).
This gives a flavor of the book. This volume not for the fainthearted. It is not for those who are interested in fashionable spirituality or culturally acceptable and ecclesiastically respectable religiosity. This book is about absorbing the Book so that the one who reads might run. "Reading is an immense gift, but only if the words are assumulated, taken into the soul -- eaten, chewed, gnawed, received in unhurried delight" (Page 11).
The last several paragraphs I have just looked at the introduction to Eat This Book, and it took me several days get beyond them into the rest of his carefully crafted case. He begins that case with these words: "The Christian Scriptures are the primary text for Christian spirituality. Christian spirituality is, in its entirety, rooted in and shaped by the scriptural text. We don't form our personal spiritual lives out of a random assemblage of favorite texts in combination with individual circumstancs; we are formed by the Holy Spirit in accordance with the text of Holy Scripture" (Page 15).
And so the stage is set for one of the most eloquent pleas I have ever encountered that the People of God have body, mind, and soul captured the the substance of the Word of God. This is a message that needs to be heard by chic and trendy Episcopalians, learned Presbyterians, arm-waving Pentecostals, miracle-obsessed Charismatics, Pope-loving Catholics, and every other believer wherever they are on the spectrum. Peterson does not accuse any of us of not being biblical, but he suggests in as winsome a way that there is a strong possibility that all of us have fallen short of what it means to delve into the heart of the living God who has revealed himself in this library of books that we call Holy Scripture.
I want to pull the Scriptures back from the margins, Peterson asserts, for that so often is the place to which the church and individual Christians have consigned it. It is only when we do this and digest the Book with the passion of the prophets of Jerusalem, Babylon, and Patmos, that we discover its words are like honey on our lips and in our stomachs. "Holy Scripture is something other than mere gossip about God, it must be internalized" (Page 20).
There has been a baffling array of offerings presented in the last generation or so and labelled as spirituality. The extraordinary thing is that when the culture calls something spiritual the churches jump onto its bandwagon. Eugene Peterson is not against spirituality, but he doesn't have a lot of time for the ersatz spiritualities of our age. Christian spirituality "means going against the cultural stream in which we are incessantly trivialized by the menial status of producers and performers, (and talking to clergy) constantly depersonalized behind the labels of our degrees and our salaries. But there is far more to us than our usefulness and our reputation, where we've been and who we know; there is the unique, irreproducible, eternal, image-of-God me" (Page 23).
This leads him on into some strong Trinitarian theology, for it is only by allowing ourselves through Scripture to be enveloped by the wholeness of GOd that we discover precisely what it means to be a follower of Jesus, the incarnate second person of that Trinity. So having plunged us into the nature of the Godhead, Peterson brings us back to the text of Scripture the place where the Triune One reveals himself, for if we are to discover God in these pages then we need to take what we find with the utmost seriousness.
It is Eugene Peterson's belief that every man and every woman is capable of entering into a fuller understanding of Creator and Redeemer by becoming a bible reader. The living God speaks to us through Scripture, he asserts, and as we seek to live out obediently what the Word says to us we find ourselves in the presence of that living God. He leans heavily on Calvin's assertion that all right knowledge of God is born of obedience.
Peterson also challenges us to careful exegesis of the text. This, he says, is neither small-minded nor is it pedantic. "Exegesis is the care we give to getting the words right. Exegesis is foundational to Christian spirituality. Foundations disappear from view as a building is constructed, but if the builders don't build a solid foundation, their building doesn't last for long" (Page 53). As we look at what has become of our own denomination and as we then look at the slipshod way that Scripture has been treated, it is hardly surprising that lacking an adequate foundation the building is toppling.
The first part of Peterson's works is a pretty demanding theological work out, but all of it is good stuff exceptionally written. I did not learn anything new, but I was asked in a fresh way to consider old truths that too readily get overlooked. After this theological work out Peterson becomes more practical, and provides in the second section the best presentation of the Lectio Divina that I have ever read.
"Lectio divina is the strenuous effort that the Christian community gives... to rehydrating the Scriptures so that they are capable of holding their own original force and shape in the heat of the day, maintaining their context long enough to get fused with or assimilated into our context, the world we inhabit, the clamor of voices in the daily weather and work in which we live" (Page 88).
Lectio Divina is a way of handling the Scriptures that abandons any attent to take control of the text, but to allow the text to take control of us. It is not a linear process but one that allows us to read and loop the words back into the moment-by-moment business of thinking and living. It is learning to listen to the Word that was first spoken and which we now encounter as written. I will not bore you with the details of Peterson's instruction about Lectio Divina and will allow you to read them for yourselves. However let me end my comments on the lectio with his final statement on the issue that "it is astonishing how many ways we manage to devise for using the Bible toi avoid a believing obedience, both personal and corporate, in receiving and following the Word made flesh" (Page 117).
The final section of the book is Peterson's own meditation on the history of biblical translation and his own experience of doing it as it grew out of his own ministry a number of years ago. The fruit of that work was The Message, a paraphrase that stands alongside J. B. Phillips' great paraphrase of an earlier generation.
What Eugene Peterson says at the end of the book in reflection on his own ministry is that "I wanted to gather a company of people together who read personally, not impersonally, who learned to read the Bible in order to live their true selves, not just get information that they could use to raise their standard of living. I wanted to counter the consumer attitude that uses the Bible as a way to gather religious data by which we can be our own gods, and then replace it with an attitude primed to listen to and obey God, to take us out of our preoccupations with ourselves into the spacious freedom in which God is working the world's salvation. I wanted to somehow recover that original tone, that prophetic and gospel 'voice' that stabs us awake to a beauty and hope that connects us with our real lives" (Page 176).
In short, what Eugene Peterson does here is give us an in-depth guide on eating this Book, the greatest of all Books, God's revealed Word.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Avian Flu -- Puzzle or Pandemic?
While news sources today have been giving much more time to Osama bin Laden, the Palestinians, and Immigration legislation in Congress, probably the most disturbing piece of news was quickly rushed over if it was mentioned at all. It came from the island of Sumatra in the huge nation of Indonesia, and is about the possible transmission of the H5N1 virus by humans to humans.
I had to dig into the web to find more information than that, but, as is often the case, the BBC came up with a very full and very thorough story (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/5011210.stm).
It would appear that beginning with the death of a woman several weeks ago, six other members of her family have gone down with the disease and subsequently died. There is no evidence of their close proximity with poultry or other birds, neither is their evidence that the virus itself has mutated. However, this puzzle has the World Health Organization flustered and worried.
As those of you who have kept up with my meanderings for a while will know, pandemics in general and the avian flu in particular have been on my mind for several years now. This, I have suggested, would be one of the great challenges to come before Christians as part of a troubled world. The question we need to be asking is whether this is just another puzzle and false alarm, or whether this might be the start of what could become a global pandemic that will take many lives.
I pray that it is not the start of a pandemic, but we as Christians and churches need to be prepared for the worst while praying for the best. I have for a while now been following the work of Dr. Tim Foggin of British Columbia, who has kept apace with the possibilities of what might happen and how churches might respond. You can get onto Dr. Foggin's list by emailing him at church_emergency_preparedness-owner@yahoogroups.com.
Now is the time to be thinking and preparing for the consequences of such a terrible event -- putting it off will make it too late to respond effectively and meaningfully. We need also to pray that those fighting this disease will be able to quarantine it and prevent a break out from Sumatra, or wherever else a human-to-human virus might be mutating and incubating. We need also to think seriously about how we would respond in such difficult and demanding circumstances.
I had to dig into the web to find more information than that, but, as is often the case, the BBC came up with a very full and very thorough story (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/5011210.stm).
It would appear that beginning with the death of a woman several weeks ago, six other members of her family have gone down with the disease and subsequently died. There is no evidence of their close proximity with poultry or other birds, neither is their evidence that the virus itself has mutated. However, this puzzle has the World Health Organization flustered and worried.
As those of you who have kept up with my meanderings for a while will know, pandemics in general and the avian flu in particular have been on my mind for several years now. This, I have suggested, would be one of the great challenges to come before Christians as part of a troubled world. The question we need to be asking is whether this is just another puzzle and false alarm, or whether this might be the start of what could become a global pandemic that will take many lives.
I pray that it is not the start of a pandemic, but we as Christians and churches need to be prepared for the worst while praying for the best. I have for a while now been following the work of Dr. Tim Foggin of British Columbia, who has kept apace with the possibilities of what might happen and how churches might respond. You can get onto Dr. Foggin's list by emailing him at church_emergency_preparedness-owner@yahoogroups.com.
Now is the time to be thinking and preparing for the consequences of such a terrible event -- putting it off will make it too late to respond effectively and meaningfully. We need also to pray that those fighting this disease will be able to quarantine it and prevent a break out from Sumatra, or wherever else a human-to-human virus might be mutating and incubating. We need also to think seriously about how we would respond in such difficult and demanding circumstances.
Monday, May 22, 2006
Can A Phoenix Fly?
One of the things that has been said to me repeatedly by liberal/progressive/revisionist (or whatever you want to call them) friends during the last three years is, "Why can't you get over what has happened?" My responses have varied, sometimes angry, sometimes self-pitying, but essentially to do with the fact that it is hard for truth and error to live in union with one another. By the standards of the breadth of universal Christianity throughout the ages (throwing in the values of Islam and Judaism also) the actions of the Episcopal Church in 2003 led down the dangerous path of error.
I have spent much of these years grieving what is as well as what might have been. One doesn't get over such pain in the twinkling of an eye, but as I have hinted before, we cannot spend the rest of our lives being mad at what happened. A former colleague of my wife's had maintained his resentment against the university for several decades, in the process turning himself into one of the grumpiest old men I have ever come across.
I recognize that tendency to grumpiness within myself and must fight it for it is neither helpful, nor constructive. I cannot spent the rest of my life mourning the folly of the Episcopal Church, as Queen Victoria spent the residue of her long life dressed in black and wishing her "dear Bertie" would come back from the dead. The Episcopal Church that once was died in August 2003, the mortal wounds being inflicted by its own governing body. Soon that body will meet again, and I doubt whether it is capable of being loyally Anglican despite the desperate desire of tens of thousands of faithful Episcopalians -- perhaps an overriding majority.
Just the thought of another General Convention after the last one stretches my grumpiness quota, and to misquote Scripture I find myself wondering, "Can anything good come out of General Convention?" But whatever misguided ecclesiastical power players come up with, we must get on with the business of being the church, that gloriously beautiful Bride of Christ. We have turned it into Cinderella with amnesia.
This is something to which I have been giving considerable thought over the last months, and which I intend to be talking about at a gathering I will be participating in later in the summer. During the next few weeks my first faultering attempts to get my thoughts into some kind of order will find their way to this forum. I will not so much be being prescriptive as attempting theologically and strategically to look for ways beyond the chaos that General Convention 2003 thrust us into -- despite the endless warnings that they received.
What I am presenting is meant to stimulate creative discussion. Faithful North American Anglicans have gone off in a variety of different directions during the last few years, and while certain courses of action have been misguided, I am trying to start where we are now rather than where we wish we were. I am hoping that we can do something in this discussion that will help us recover from the wounds that have been incurred.
There are many on all sides of this equation who want nothing better their old denomination back. What has to be said from the outset is that whatever our yearnings and desires, we cannot put the clock back and so have no option but to move forward playing the hand that has been dealt and is now on the table.
As soon as one says something like this ECUSA loyalists (especially on the left) turn on you and say that all you want to leave the Episcopal Church and do the dirty on it. Nothing could be further from the truth. However, what the left does not seem wiling to realize is that by forcing their agenda upon the church in August 2003 they themselves cut off the legs from under the Episcopal Church as we had all known it. They changed the agenda themselves, and in so doing opened the door for a discussion and decisions that were far more far reaching than they ever imagined possible. Actions have consequences, something postmodern people do not seem to realize.
August 2003 was the tipping point of something that had been happening for a long time. While the presenting issue was to do with sexuality and was focused on one particular individual who probably ought not to have been elected bishop, August 2003 was more like a swollen gland in a child's neck, which points to a much greater malaise in the whole body. As the left pursued their agenda of what they believed to be human and civil rights, they were (perhaps unwittingly) raising huge theological, ecclesiological, missiological, anthropological, spiritual, institutional, political, and cultural questions.
Pandora's box was opened and what flew out was a lot more than I believe they bargained for. However, as the old Greek myth goes, when the lid was finally forced back on Pandora's box all that was left inside was hope. It is that hope which I now find myself clinging to and am toying with. By bringing these cards into play the left have actually given us an opportunity to remake North American Anglicanism for mission in a post-Christendom and post-denominational world, we fail to pick up the challenge at our own peril. I have no idea where that might lead, but I suspect that God has something significant in store for us if we are but prepared to follow the pillar of fire through this dark wilderness night.
One of the delights of my recent trip to England was a private lunch with Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. I came away from sharing sandwiches and juice with him in his study so thankful that God had put such a sensitive and thoughtful man at the helm of the Communion at this particular moment in history. What struck me particularly was the pain he feels over the divisions in the Communion as a result of North American actions, and his determination to do all that he can to try to keep this rich fellowship of believers together.
His commitment has had me pondering for the last couple of weeks the close relationship that there has always been between unity and mission, and trying to work out what on earth that means in our present circumstances. During the last several years we who claim biblical faithfulness and orthodoxy have often responded from the less settled parts of our gut rather than with the heart and the regenerate mind. We have a huge amount of work before us, and doing it wisely and well precludes sticking out our tongues and saying dreadful things about those who disagree with us, however tempted we feel to do so. We are being tested just as much as those who stand to the left of us, God forbid that we be found wanting.
So, to my subject line question, "Can a phoenix fly?" I don't know the answer. I don't even know whether there is a phoenix left in the ashes, or what that phoenix might look like, all I know is that God is calling us to something different that builds on the foundations of the past, not sweeping them away -- whether we are still part of ECUSA or not.
My old friend and mentor, Alec Motyer, writes in his commentary on Exodus that, God "wants us to live in the courts of earth according to the rules of the courts of heaven... (therefore) we are called... to ransack Scripture to discover the distinctive features of a godly lifestyle and to follow through with a discipline of obedience to the word of God. This is what the Lord sought in his redeemed at Sinai, and it is still the calling of the Israel of God (Gal. 6:16)" (J. A. Motyer, The Message of Exodus. InterVarsity Press, 2005, pages 244-245). This is the challenge
I have spent much of these years grieving what is as well as what might have been. One doesn't get over such pain in the twinkling of an eye, but as I have hinted before, we cannot spend the rest of our lives being mad at what happened. A former colleague of my wife's had maintained his resentment against the university for several decades, in the process turning himself into one of the grumpiest old men I have ever come across.
I recognize that tendency to grumpiness within myself and must fight it for it is neither helpful, nor constructive. I cannot spent the rest of my life mourning the folly of the Episcopal Church, as Queen Victoria spent the residue of her long life dressed in black and wishing her "dear Bertie" would come back from the dead. The Episcopal Church that once was died in August 2003, the mortal wounds being inflicted by its own governing body. Soon that body will meet again, and I doubt whether it is capable of being loyally Anglican despite the desperate desire of tens of thousands of faithful Episcopalians -- perhaps an overriding majority.
Just the thought of another General Convention after the last one stretches my grumpiness quota, and to misquote Scripture I find myself wondering, "Can anything good come out of General Convention?" But whatever misguided ecclesiastical power players come up with, we must get on with the business of being the church, that gloriously beautiful Bride of Christ. We have turned it into Cinderella with amnesia.
This is something to which I have been giving considerable thought over the last months, and which I intend to be talking about at a gathering I will be participating in later in the summer. During the next few weeks my first faultering attempts to get my thoughts into some kind of order will find their way to this forum. I will not so much be being prescriptive as attempting theologically and strategically to look for ways beyond the chaos that General Convention 2003 thrust us into -- despite the endless warnings that they received.
What I am presenting is meant to stimulate creative discussion. Faithful North American Anglicans have gone off in a variety of different directions during the last few years, and while certain courses of action have been misguided, I am trying to start where we are now rather than where we wish we were. I am hoping that we can do something in this discussion that will help us recover from the wounds that have been incurred.
There are many on all sides of this equation who want nothing better their old denomination back. What has to be said from the outset is that whatever our yearnings and desires, we cannot put the clock back and so have no option but to move forward playing the hand that has been dealt and is now on the table.
As soon as one says something like this ECUSA loyalists (especially on the left) turn on you and say that all you want to leave the Episcopal Church and do the dirty on it. Nothing could be further from the truth. However, what the left does not seem wiling to realize is that by forcing their agenda upon the church in August 2003 they themselves cut off the legs from under the Episcopal Church as we had all known it. They changed the agenda themselves, and in so doing opened the door for a discussion and decisions that were far more far reaching than they ever imagined possible. Actions have consequences, something postmodern people do not seem to realize.
August 2003 was the tipping point of something that had been happening for a long time. While the presenting issue was to do with sexuality and was focused on one particular individual who probably ought not to have been elected bishop, August 2003 was more like a swollen gland in a child's neck, which points to a much greater malaise in the whole body. As the left pursued their agenda of what they believed to be human and civil rights, they were (perhaps unwittingly) raising huge theological, ecclesiological, missiological, anthropological, spiritual, institutional, political, and cultural questions.
Pandora's box was opened and what flew out was a lot more than I believe they bargained for. However, as the old Greek myth goes, when the lid was finally forced back on Pandora's box all that was left inside was hope. It is that hope which I now find myself clinging to and am toying with. By bringing these cards into play the left have actually given us an opportunity to remake North American Anglicanism for mission in a post-Christendom and post-denominational world, we fail to pick up the challenge at our own peril. I have no idea where that might lead, but I suspect that God has something significant in store for us if we are but prepared to follow the pillar of fire through this dark wilderness night.
One of the delights of my recent trip to England was a private lunch with Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. I came away from sharing sandwiches and juice with him in his study so thankful that God had put such a sensitive and thoughtful man at the helm of the Communion at this particular moment in history. What struck me particularly was the pain he feels over the divisions in the Communion as a result of North American actions, and his determination to do all that he can to try to keep this rich fellowship of believers together.
His commitment has had me pondering for the last couple of weeks the close relationship that there has always been between unity and mission, and trying to work out what on earth that means in our present circumstances. During the last several years we who claim biblical faithfulness and orthodoxy have often responded from the less settled parts of our gut rather than with the heart and the regenerate mind. We have a huge amount of work before us, and doing it wisely and well precludes sticking out our tongues and saying dreadful things about those who disagree with us, however tempted we feel to do so. We are being tested just as much as those who stand to the left of us, God forbid that we be found wanting.
So, to my subject line question, "Can a phoenix fly?" I don't know the answer. I don't even know whether there is a phoenix left in the ashes, or what that phoenix might look like, all I know is that God is calling us to something different that builds on the foundations of the past, not sweeping them away -- whether we are still part of ECUSA or not.
My old friend and mentor, Alec Motyer, writes in his commentary on Exodus that, God "wants us to live in the courts of earth according to the rules of the courts of heaven... (therefore) we are called... to ransack Scripture to discover the distinctive features of a godly lifestyle and to follow through with a discipline of obedience to the word of God. This is what the Lord sought in his redeemed at Sinai, and it is still the calling of the Israel of God (Gal. 6:16)" (J. A. Motyer, The Message of Exodus. InterVarsity Press, 2005, pages 244-245). This is the challenge
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
When A Wanderer Returns
WRITTEN IN THE DELIGHTFUL VILLAGE OF NETTLEBED, ENGLAND
It always takes a few days to readjust to being back in Britain. While it doesn't take long to get used again to driving on the left hand side of the road, or to thinking in pounds rather than dollars, there are some elements of reacclimation that require more significant acclimation.
The first emotion I always feel when I arrive back here is an overwhelming sense of 'home-ness.' Whether it is the rich green fields and the hawthorn in full bloom (as it is at the moment), there is that sense of relief that comes with knowing that this is where I came from, and ultimately, as a result, this is where I belong. Yet on every trip there are the moments that tell me I am perceived as something of an interloper: like the comments of the young Muslim woman in the watch and clock department of a Birmingham store the other morning who drew attention to my vaguely mid-Atlantic accent.
Whenever I return to England, the visit begins with the romantic haze of a returning exile, and it takes five or six days to get beyond this and start seeing the country as it really is, as Oliver Cromwell put it when posing for a portrait, "warts and all." In the last few days I have found myself seeing and hearing things that make the country stack up poorly against the American South, where I have lived for more than two decades now.
What impacts me almost every visit I now make is how secularized a nation this is. Little by little over the years the trappings of Britain's Christendom heritage have been peeled away as the layers are removed from an onion. When we left some thirty years ago, for example, there was barely anywhere on a Sunday where a store would open, but the other morning in search of food for my mother-in-law, we slipped into a supermarket and discovered wall-to-wall people. I would hazard that Sundays are now a healthier business day for many British retailers than any other day of the week. The quiet English Sunday with worship as a primary option is a thing of the antediluvian past.
Then there is the way in which the churches in general, and the Church of England in particular, are pilloried. Very little of any good news about the church is shared by the media, and good news there is, but do anything that questions the prevailing values of the land and bishops, archbishops, or faithful laypeople are howled at by a ravening hoard. Last week, when the bishops and other religious leaders speaking in the House of Lords opposed the Assisted Dying bill on good solid theological grounds, they were mauled and accused of not listening to the voice of the majority.
Yet if the churches were then to start reflecting the prevailing culture, they would be accused of not doing their job properly and watering down what they believed in order to curry favor with the masses. The Church of England is not alone as the target of such criticism.
Ruth Kelly, a newly appointed minister for equality in the Tony Blair government, has been given a battering in the last few days because she is a conservative Roman Catholic and a member of Opus Dei. How can Ms Kelly do her job fairly if she holds these personal views, the critics scream, and behind that assertion is the unspoken wonderment that so intelligent and successful a person could be so benighted in her beliefs.
To the majority of native-born Brits religion is irrelevant, and it is hardly a big step from there to an increasingly ferocious opposition of things religious. It may have been there before I left this country, but these days there always seems to be a sting in the tail of this criticism that is both poisonous and barbed.
This all stems from the fact, I believe, that Britain has shed almost all its historic Christian clothing, and with that comes an increasing intolerance of faith, and in its place is put a crass materialism that I find intensely unattractive. This is not to say that the USA is not also an intensely materialistic nation, too, but in the corner of America where I live there is still enough overt faith within the public system to soften some of the harder corners of this one dimensionalism.
As I wandered around the center of the city of Birmingham the other morning I could be forgiven for being tempted to believe that Muslims are the only observant people of faith in that city. Perhaps 10% of all the women I saw were dressed in various degrees of Islamic modesty, from colorful scarves thrown with studied nonchalance over their cascades of dark hair, to total coverage in black with nothing but a slit for a pair of eyes to peer through. Such women were a profound contrast to many of their non-Muslim sisters, some of whose level of undress left virtually nothing to this lustful male's imagination -- and I am not talking just about teenage girls.
I find myself now wondering whether the onion of our Christian past in Britain has now been peeled of so many layers that little or nothing remains except materialism in all its harshness, and a sensual permissiveness that has buried within it the seeds of its own destruction. Could it be, I ponder, that we are watching the last chapter of Britain's glorious Christian heritage disappearing, and what will replace it? Islam is certainly one of the contenders, but it is certainly not the only one.
Yet there might be some straws in the wind that the worm is turning, and maybe I will cling to them and hope against hope. For example, there is a modest upturn in church attendance, and a senior cleric told me last week that there has been a surprising and significant increase in vocations to ordination. Could this be the early warning of a change in the spiritual and moral climate?
What is very clear to me is that the United Kingdom in particular, and the whole of western Europe in general, is a needy mission field. While I do not expect it to be an easy field for ministry and evangelism in the years ahead, I recognize that it is one that we ignore at our own peril. Last week we had lunch with some old friends and former parishioners and talked about 'retirement.' None of us are eager to spend our golden years tending roses, walking our dogs, or looking for new aches and pains to be hypocondriacal about.
Our conversation began focusing on our peers, rising elders who are part of a generation that has up to now not taken much notice of its soul, not taken care of its personal and familial relationships, and not saved for old age as it should have done. Could it be, we wondered together, that just as we teamed up to minister together in the Sixties and early Seventies in what was then known as Swinging London, we might now team up again and reach out in Christ's love to an older generation that is increasingly restive about its own mortality? We will see what God has in mind.
It always takes a few days to readjust to being back in Britain. While it doesn't take long to get used again to driving on the left hand side of the road, or to thinking in pounds rather than dollars, there are some elements of reacclimation that require more significant acclimation.
The first emotion I always feel when I arrive back here is an overwhelming sense of 'home-ness.' Whether it is the rich green fields and the hawthorn in full bloom (as it is at the moment), there is that sense of relief that comes with knowing that this is where I came from, and ultimately, as a result, this is where I belong. Yet on every trip there are the moments that tell me I am perceived as something of an interloper: like the comments of the young Muslim woman in the watch and clock department of a Birmingham store the other morning who drew attention to my vaguely mid-Atlantic accent.
Whenever I return to England, the visit begins with the romantic haze of a returning exile, and it takes five or six days to get beyond this and start seeing the country as it really is, as Oliver Cromwell put it when posing for a portrait, "warts and all." In the last few days I have found myself seeing and hearing things that make the country stack up poorly against the American South, where I have lived for more than two decades now.
What impacts me almost every visit I now make is how secularized a nation this is. Little by little over the years the trappings of Britain's Christendom heritage have been peeled away as the layers are removed from an onion. When we left some thirty years ago, for example, there was barely anywhere on a Sunday where a store would open, but the other morning in search of food for my mother-in-law, we slipped into a supermarket and discovered wall-to-wall people. I would hazard that Sundays are now a healthier business day for many British retailers than any other day of the week. The quiet English Sunday with worship as a primary option is a thing of the antediluvian past.
Then there is the way in which the churches in general, and the Church of England in particular, are pilloried. Very little of any good news about the church is shared by the media, and good news there is, but do anything that questions the prevailing values of the land and bishops, archbishops, or faithful laypeople are howled at by a ravening hoard. Last week, when the bishops and other religious leaders speaking in the House of Lords opposed the Assisted Dying bill on good solid theological grounds, they were mauled and accused of not listening to the voice of the majority.
Yet if the churches were then to start reflecting the prevailing culture, they would be accused of not doing their job properly and watering down what they believed in order to curry favor with the masses. The Church of England is not alone as the target of such criticism.
Ruth Kelly, a newly appointed minister for equality in the Tony Blair government, has been given a battering in the last few days because she is a conservative Roman Catholic and a member of Opus Dei. How can Ms Kelly do her job fairly if she holds these personal views, the critics scream, and behind that assertion is the unspoken wonderment that so intelligent and successful a person could be so benighted in her beliefs.
To the majority of native-born Brits religion is irrelevant, and it is hardly a big step from there to an increasingly ferocious opposition of things religious. It may have been there before I left this country, but these days there always seems to be a sting in the tail of this criticism that is both poisonous and barbed.
This all stems from the fact, I believe, that Britain has shed almost all its historic Christian clothing, and with that comes an increasing intolerance of faith, and in its place is put a crass materialism that I find intensely unattractive. This is not to say that the USA is not also an intensely materialistic nation, too, but in the corner of America where I live there is still enough overt faith within the public system to soften some of the harder corners of this one dimensionalism.
As I wandered around the center of the city of Birmingham the other morning I could be forgiven for being tempted to believe that Muslims are the only observant people of faith in that city. Perhaps 10% of all the women I saw were dressed in various degrees of Islamic modesty, from colorful scarves thrown with studied nonchalance over their cascades of dark hair, to total coverage in black with nothing but a slit for a pair of eyes to peer through. Such women were a profound contrast to many of their non-Muslim sisters, some of whose level of undress left virtually nothing to this lustful male's imagination -- and I am not talking just about teenage girls.
I find myself now wondering whether the onion of our Christian past in Britain has now been peeled of so many layers that little or nothing remains except materialism in all its harshness, and a sensual permissiveness that has buried within it the seeds of its own destruction. Could it be, I ponder, that we are watching the last chapter of Britain's glorious Christian heritage disappearing, and what will replace it? Islam is certainly one of the contenders, but it is certainly not the only one.
Yet there might be some straws in the wind that the worm is turning, and maybe I will cling to them and hope against hope. For example, there is a modest upturn in church attendance, and a senior cleric told me last week that there has been a surprising and significant increase in vocations to ordination. Could this be the early warning of a change in the spiritual and moral climate?
What is very clear to me is that the United Kingdom in particular, and the whole of western Europe in general, is a needy mission field. While I do not expect it to be an easy field for ministry and evangelism in the years ahead, I recognize that it is one that we ignore at our own peril. Last week we had lunch with some old friends and former parishioners and talked about 'retirement.' None of us are eager to spend our golden years tending roses, walking our dogs, or looking for new aches and pains to be hypocondriacal about.
Our conversation began focusing on our peers, rising elders who are part of a generation that has up to now not taken much notice of its soul, not taken care of its personal and familial relationships, and not saved for old age as it should have done. Could it be, we wondered together, that just as we teamed up to minister together in the Sixties and early Seventies in what was then known as Swinging London, we might now team up again and reach out in Christ's love to an older generation that is increasingly restive about its own mortality? We will see what God has in mind.
Saturday, May 13, 2006
The Tyranny of Choice
I spent some time yesterday watching on the BBC Parliament channel the procedings of the House of Lords. They were debating the second hearing of a bill on Assisted Dying. I did not see the whole debate by any means, which was more than seven hours long and had over eighty peers addressing the issue, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, together with other bishops and religious leaders.
I confess that I greatly appreciated both the manner and the quality of a discussion that eventually led to a fairly significant defeat of the bill, although this only delays its reintroduction for a few months. Interestingly, afterwards the BBC 24 Hour News channel did not then have a balanced discussion of what had happened, but gave six or seven minutes to the disappointed emoting of a woman whose brother had gone to Switzerland last year in order to bring an end to his own severely ill life.
While one cannot but be sympathetic with such agonies euthenasia is not the solution, for it raises far too many questions and creates far too many dilemmas for patients, families, physicians, the helping professions, and so forth. This was something that, as I listened, the proponents of this bill both on the floor of the chamber and in discussion on air, were conveniently overlooking or minimizing. Those making arguments for assisted dying constantly backed up their statements by arguing that an apparent overwhelming majority of the public think it a good idea, and, more important, people should be free to choose.
Our culture in the west is one that seems besotted with the notion of choice. Under every circumstance, it would appear, we must be as free to choose from as many options as possible, whether it be the model of car we drive, the brand of coffee we drink, or where and when we meet the Grim Reaper. The right to choose is now being as ferociously applied to the ending of life as it has for the past 30+ years been applied to the beginning of life. It is argued in both these cases that the right to choose says something about the dignity of life, I would contend that it says a great deal more about the desire for autonomy by the individual.
Euthenasia is a slippery one, because when dealing with the voluntary termination of life we are dealing with a complex set of issues. Like so many clergy I have sat with families who have been agonizing over the dying circumstances of a loved one, and the choices before them are often neither easy nor attractive -- and there is often that sense that people have been artificially kept alive beyond their capacity to cope.
However, those arguing for assisted dying in the House of Lords debate yesterday were speaking from the presupposition that a person's life belongs to them alone and, therefore, is something that they can choose to end for themselves if it becomes too much of a burden. Lord Joffe, the author of the Lords bill, wasn't too impressed by the arguments that had been put forward by religious leaders who sit in the Lords, although he rightly castigated some of the religious media for being crass.
In a society where everything has become a commodity choosing has acquired an almost tyrannical dimension. I have the right, it seems, to choose anything and everything I want, and boundaries of any kind are an unwarranted limitation on my freedoms. Putting off or putting on life, therefore, has become akin to putting off and putting on clothes at the beginning or ending of the day.
When a culture declares itself independent of God, then what is God's and is Godgiven becomes my own to do with as I like. Life is therefore something to be consumed as and when I want to do so, rather than something that is given to me by my Creator and of which I am a steward. Indeed, in the midst of this contemporary autonomy, the very notion of stewardship seems old-fashioned and out-of-place, especially if aligned with John Donne's noton that "no man is an island until himself."
The truth is that behind the arguments for euthenasia that I heard on the television from the Houses of Parliament there is ultimately a utilitarianism. When persons become a burden and cease to be useful, then they should be free to shuffle off their mortal coil and cease being a trouble to themselves and, if they have them, their loved ones.
There is little doubt that within the next few years the debate about assisted dying will be coming to an elected assembly near you, if it hasn't arrive already. The Oregonians, the Dutch, and the people of the Northern Territory of Australia, have already passed legislation allowing for controled euthenasia, and surely we are all going to be forced to engage this discussion as well.
Religious arguments were impatiently swept on one side by some in the Lords yesterday, but these really seem to be the primary bulwark that stand between us and practices that once established are open to the most blatant abuse. The questions that, perhaps, we ought to be exploring is what might be the legitimate limits of choice as well as what is the nature of life, and is it ours to do with as we please.
I confess that I greatly appreciated both the manner and the quality of a discussion that eventually led to a fairly significant defeat of the bill, although this only delays its reintroduction for a few months. Interestingly, afterwards the BBC 24 Hour News channel did not then have a balanced discussion of what had happened, but gave six or seven minutes to the disappointed emoting of a woman whose brother had gone to Switzerland last year in order to bring an end to his own severely ill life.
While one cannot but be sympathetic with such agonies euthenasia is not the solution, for it raises far too many questions and creates far too many dilemmas for patients, families, physicians, the helping professions, and so forth. This was something that, as I listened, the proponents of this bill both on the floor of the chamber and in discussion on air, were conveniently overlooking or minimizing. Those making arguments for assisted dying constantly backed up their statements by arguing that an apparent overwhelming majority of the public think it a good idea, and, more important, people should be free to choose.
Our culture in the west is one that seems besotted with the notion of choice. Under every circumstance, it would appear, we must be as free to choose from as many options as possible, whether it be the model of car we drive, the brand of coffee we drink, or where and when we meet the Grim Reaper. The right to choose is now being as ferociously applied to the ending of life as it has for the past 30+ years been applied to the beginning of life. It is argued in both these cases that the right to choose says something about the dignity of life, I would contend that it says a great deal more about the desire for autonomy by the individual.
Euthenasia is a slippery one, because when dealing with the voluntary termination of life we are dealing with a complex set of issues. Like so many clergy I have sat with families who have been agonizing over the dying circumstances of a loved one, and the choices before them are often neither easy nor attractive -- and there is often that sense that people have been artificially kept alive beyond their capacity to cope.
However, those arguing for assisted dying in the House of Lords debate yesterday were speaking from the presupposition that a person's life belongs to them alone and, therefore, is something that they can choose to end for themselves if it becomes too much of a burden. Lord Joffe, the author of the Lords bill, wasn't too impressed by the arguments that had been put forward by religious leaders who sit in the Lords, although he rightly castigated some of the religious media for being crass.
In a society where everything has become a commodity choosing has acquired an almost tyrannical dimension. I have the right, it seems, to choose anything and everything I want, and boundaries of any kind are an unwarranted limitation on my freedoms. Putting off or putting on life, therefore, has become akin to putting off and putting on clothes at the beginning or ending of the day.
When a culture declares itself independent of God, then what is God's and is Godgiven becomes my own to do with as I like. Life is therefore something to be consumed as and when I want to do so, rather than something that is given to me by my Creator and of which I am a steward. Indeed, in the midst of this contemporary autonomy, the very notion of stewardship seems old-fashioned and out-of-place, especially if aligned with John Donne's noton that "no man is an island until himself."
The truth is that behind the arguments for euthenasia that I heard on the television from the Houses of Parliament there is ultimately a utilitarianism. When persons become a burden and cease to be useful, then they should be free to shuffle off their mortal coil and cease being a trouble to themselves and, if they have them, their loved ones.
There is little doubt that within the next few years the debate about assisted dying will be coming to an elected assembly near you, if it hasn't arrive already. The Oregonians, the Dutch, and the people of the Northern Territory of Australia, have already passed legislation allowing for controled euthenasia, and surely we are all going to be forced to engage this discussion as well.
Religious arguments were impatiently swept on one side by some in the Lords yesterday, but these really seem to be the primary bulwark that stand between us and practices that once established are open to the most blatant abuse. The questions that, perhaps, we ought to be exploring is what might be the legitimate limits of choice as well as what is the nature of life, and is it ours to do with as we please.
Monday, May 08, 2006
What On Earth Is Going On In Tennessee?
It is Monday breakfast time in Tennessee, and I expected at this moment that I would be sitting in my daughter's home in Birmingham, England, bouncing my granddaughter on my knee. Instead, due to the machinations of the airlines and the weather, I am at home and we will be making another attempt to get across the Atlantic Ocean today -- this time going through Cincinnati rather than Atlanta, and having been upgraded to the more comfortable seats "up front."
However, such unexpected time at home with nothing scheduled to fill it gives me an opportunity to ponder the last few days, which have been a marathon, and have included a failed third attempt of the Diocese of Tennessee to elect a new bishop. One bonus from the weekend is the strange sense of relief I have that one of questionable theology and ethical values was elected Bishop of California -- rather than some of the alternatives! I envy the Californians in that they were able to achieve this feat in three ballots, whereas we haven't managed to get a bishop in three meetings of the Convention.
So, what is going on in Tennessee? The truth is that we are caught on the horns of a dilemma. I think we are living with the convergence of several streams.
The first is that in August 2003 the ground shifted. The actions of the General Convention were received with anything but enthusiasm by the people of the Diocese of Tennessee. Rather than walking out the large majority of orthodox and conservative people have got themselves organized, and during the succeeding years have become a force in the diocese. This has meant major shifts in a number of the organizational facets of diocesan life.
The second is that as a diocese we have continued to attract (and develop) biblical and orthodox leadership so that today the majority of the active clergy will broadly lean in that direction. This diocese under its present leadership has been committed to a strategy of evangelism, discipleship, and growth, and the truth is that those without a biblically-shaped passion for the transforming love of the living Christ have a patchy track record and limited passion in this area of Christian ministry. We are, I think, starting to struggle with what it means to be faithful Christians in a postmodern, post-Christendom, post-denominational world.
The third is that the diocese is trapped by its past. Historically the three dioceses in Tennessee have sought a 2/3 majority in both orders to elect a new bishop; this is the first attempt to elect a bishop in Tennessee sinc 2003. What happened in Minneapolis scoured out what might be called the middle ground. The candidates in our election were not voted on in the light of who they were, but in the light of what they were perceived to represent. The outcome, therefore, was predictable polarization. Clearly, there is enormous sense in today's climate in altering the diocese's constitution to bring us into line with the rest of the church with a simple majority being required.
But we are trapped by the past in other ways, too, because retired and non-parochial clergy have the vote. It has been fascinating to see characters appear from the woodwork who haven't set foot in Tennessee for years in order to participate in an episcopal election. These priests have never met the candidates, never attended any of the any of the walkabouts, or asked any searching questions, and as a result have warped the electoral process. It is seldom that I applaud the House of Bishops, but I concur with their willingness to remove vote but not voice from their number who are no longer in active ministry. We in the Diocese of Tennessee have to come in line in the same way with this one.
What we are seeing is yesterday's tired tail wagging today's dog. The fear of many of these individuals is that the Diocese of Tennessee will leave the Episcopal Church, and for many of these retired priests do not seem to care that the denomination that they served has changed radically, neither have they listened to the responses of the candidates when challenged on this issue.
Talking with some of these older priest fascinated me, because what became clear was how lightweight and theologically fuzzy they are. As one man began a statement to me on Saturday, "It would be nice if..." and then came up with something that he did not seem to realize was way outside of the parameters of Scripture, catholic Christianity, the Book of Common Prayer, etc., etc.
I am firmly of the mind that if an ordained person does not have any responsibility or accountability to keep a diocese alive and moving forward, then that ordained person ought to be asked to prayerfully sit on the sidelines, to speak but not to vote. It has convinced me that when I retire while I intend to continue exercising a ministry, I will not engage inappropriately in the counsels of the church. I am convinced that if we were to remove this group from the electoral reckoning in Tennessee, then a very different picture would emerge.
So the task ahead of us now is to find some way of building a consensus around a candidate who is acceptable to the overwhelming orthodox majority in the diocese, but at the same time who can pick up a good proportion of the dissenting minority. I think we can see the beginnings of this happening, but no one is going to pretend it will be easy. It is frustrating that yesterday's men and women have played a dog-in-the-manger role in preventing the diocese from moving forward at a critical time, but we must accept the sovereignty of God in our circumstances and prayerfully ask him to show us how we can make something positive out of this.
This will require a lot of grace, but that grace must be accompanied by a robust theology, not the watering down to a lowest common denominator that Episcopalians are so good at. Sloppiness might solve immediate problems, but in the long term it creates a thousand other difficulties.
So, hopefully today I will head for England today to a couple of weeks of just being grandpa. While there I will be praying, dreaming, and seeking what God's will might be for us. We have clearly become a bellwether diocese, and we have to find a way of breaking free of what are now negativities from our past so that we can move forward with Gospel power into the future -- and all this within the context of leaking barque that is the Protestant Episcopal Church of the USA. That is no small challenge.
However, such unexpected time at home with nothing scheduled to fill it gives me an opportunity to ponder the last few days, which have been a marathon, and have included a failed third attempt of the Diocese of Tennessee to elect a new bishop. One bonus from the weekend is the strange sense of relief I have that one of questionable theology and ethical values was elected Bishop of California -- rather than some of the alternatives! I envy the Californians in that they were able to achieve this feat in three ballots, whereas we haven't managed to get a bishop in three meetings of the Convention.
So, what is going on in Tennessee? The truth is that we are caught on the horns of a dilemma. I think we are living with the convergence of several streams.
The first is that in August 2003 the ground shifted. The actions of the General Convention were received with anything but enthusiasm by the people of the Diocese of Tennessee. Rather than walking out the large majority of orthodox and conservative people have got themselves organized, and during the succeeding years have become a force in the diocese. This has meant major shifts in a number of the organizational facets of diocesan life.
The second is that as a diocese we have continued to attract (and develop) biblical and orthodox leadership so that today the majority of the active clergy will broadly lean in that direction. This diocese under its present leadership has been committed to a strategy of evangelism, discipleship, and growth, and the truth is that those without a biblically-shaped passion for the transforming love of the living Christ have a patchy track record and limited passion in this area of Christian ministry. We are, I think, starting to struggle with what it means to be faithful Christians in a postmodern, post-Christendom, post-denominational world.
The third is that the diocese is trapped by its past. Historically the three dioceses in Tennessee have sought a 2/3 majority in both orders to elect a new bishop; this is the first attempt to elect a bishop in Tennessee sinc 2003. What happened in Minneapolis scoured out what might be called the middle ground. The candidates in our election were not voted on in the light of who they were, but in the light of what they were perceived to represent. The outcome, therefore, was predictable polarization. Clearly, there is enormous sense in today's climate in altering the diocese's constitution to bring us into line with the rest of the church with a simple majority being required.
But we are trapped by the past in other ways, too, because retired and non-parochial clergy have the vote. It has been fascinating to see characters appear from the woodwork who haven't set foot in Tennessee for years in order to participate in an episcopal election. These priests have never met the candidates, never attended any of the any of the walkabouts, or asked any searching questions, and as a result have warped the electoral process. It is seldom that I applaud the House of Bishops, but I concur with their willingness to remove vote but not voice from their number who are no longer in active ministry. We in the Diocese of Tennessee have to come in line in the same way with this one.
What we are seeing is yesterday's tired tail wagging today's dog. The fear of many of these individuals is that the Diocese of Tennessee will leave the Episcopal Church, and for many of these retired priests do not seem to care that the denomination that they served has changed radically, neither have they listened to the responses of the candidates when challenged on this issue.
Talking with some of these older priest fascinated me, because what became clear was how lightweight and theologically fuzzy they are. As one man began a statement to me on Saturday, "It would be nice if..." and then came up with something that he did not seem to realize was way outside of the parameters of Scripture, catholic Christianity, the Book of Common Prayer, etc., etc.
I am firmly of the mind that if an ordained person does not have any responsibility or accountability to keep a diocese alive and moving forward, then that ordained person ought to be asked to prayerfully sit on the sidelines, to speak but not to vote. It has convinced me that when I retire while I intend to continue exercising a ministry, I will not engage inappropriately in the counsels of the church. I am convinced that if we were to remove this group from the electoral reckoning in Tennessee, then a very different picture would emerge.
So the task ahead of us now is to find some way of building a consensus around a candidate who is acceptable to the overwhelming orthodox majority in the diocese, but at the same time who can pick up a good proportion of the dissenting minority. I think we can see the beginnings of this happening, but no one is going to pretend it will be easy. It is frustrating that yesterday's men and women have played a dog-in-the-manger role in preventing the diocese from moving forward at a critical time, but we must accept the sovereignty of God in our circumstances and prayerfully ask him to show us how we can make something positive out of this.
This will require a lot of grace, but that grace must be accompanied by a robust theology, not the watering down to a lowest common denominator that Episcopalians are so good at. Sloppiness might solve immediate problems, but in the long term it creates a thousand other difficulties.
So, hopefully today I will head for England today to a couple of weeks of just being grandpa. While there I will be praying, dreaming, and seeking what God's will might be for us. We have clearly become a bellwether diocese, and we have to find a way of breaking free of what are now negativities from our past so that we can move forward with Gospel power into the future -- and all this within the context of leaking barque that is the Protestant Episcopal Church of the USA. That is no small challenge.
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Critique of Stem Cell Research
The other day there was an article published on the Episcopal News Service website regarding Stem Cells and Stem Cell Research. I shared it with Dr. D. Joy Riley, a physician, former medical researcher, and bioethicist. Joy is an increasingly important voice among orthodox Christians dealing with this issue. I asked her if she would comment on the article.
What follows is first the ENS piece and then Joy Riley's responses. I think you will find them interesting.
Richard Kew
FROM THE EPISCOPAL NEWS SERVICE
While the debate over the many ethical implications of stem cell research rages, studies in molecular genetics, genomics and cell development continue to yield new information. One of the learnings which may be surprising to many is that the differentiation of a stem cell depends on the environment or microniche where it resides.
"What a cell's neighbors 'say' to it chemically, and what it says to its neighbors, impact what kind of cell it becomes," reported Dr. Christie A. Holland, retired Professor and Chair of Virology, Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Children's Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
"If context matters in ethics as well as in the development of a cell," posed Karen LeBacqz, bioethicist in residence at Yale, "we need to realize that we are talking about a different context here. It is a great pity that the debate around stem cells got framed in terms of the abortion debate. They are very different contexts."
Holland and Lebacqz were addressing the Ecumenical Roundtable on Science, Technology and the Church, as part of the program, "Embryonic Stem Cell Research: Churches, Ethics, and Politicians" presented by members from the United Church of Christ. This year's Roundtable was hosted April 27-30 by the Executive Council Committee on Science, Technology and Faith at the Emrich Retreat and Conference Center in the Diocese of Michigan.
Ron Cole-Turner, H. Parker Sharp Professor of Theology and Ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, led off the panel with a review of the history of the debate surrounding stem cells, and with the hope that the panel would serve as a resource for those at the meeting who may be called upon to speak to the issues in the political arena.
Olivia Masih White, who teaches biology at John Carroll University in Cleveland, reviewed the basic biology of stem cells, clarifying terms and adding "What I taught 20 years ago is completely different than what I teach my biology students now, and the best contemporary science is still changing."
Sandra Michael, convener of the Episcopal Network on Science, Technology and Faith, commented that she was glad White made the distinction between the two types of stem cells, totipottent and pluripotent. "This is rarely clarified in popular presentations on stem cells and is critical for understanding how they work."
Michael's research as Distinguished Service Professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton is in the genetics, endrocrinology and immunology of reproduction. "Just as people who aren't specialists in these topics need clear and thorough scientific explanations, scientists and clinicians need to consider the issues in a religious context as they apply the knowledge gleaned from their research."
The interplay of science, ethics and theology in the panel enabled the 40 Roundtable participants -- Lutherans, Presbyterians and Methodists as well as the UCC team and Episcopal hosts -- to clarify the other scientific terms which are used confusingly in politics and the popular media, as well as to explore the implications of stem cell research and therapies.
Lebacqz raised the question of just access to therapies developed from stem cell research, since the stem cell lines approved by the current administration for federal funding are not diverse enough to meet the needs of different ancestral groups. The ethics around the acquisition of eggs and somatic cells for research are exceedingly complex, and also generated discussion.
Stem cell therapies hold the promise of both increasing longevity and of improving the quality of longer lives, giving rise to another cluster of questions. Interestingly, the Working Group on Faith and Genetics in the Diocese of Massachusetts, also ecumenical in makeup and represented by several members of the Roundtable, has announced that the science of human aging and efforts to slow it will be the group's next topic for study.
Lebacqz conlcluded the formal presentaion with a series of her own theological questions. "What," she pondered, "Does being 'made in the image of God' mean in our time? For me, our dignity is relational; it has to do with communication, with being in communion with others and God." She concluded by returning to the science. As we understand more about how cells communicate and provide a context for one another, we see the resonance between science and theology deepen.
FROM DR. D. JOY RILEY
This is a proactive group; they are ecumenical in scope, but I am not sure there
is a diversity of opinion RE stem cell research. That is unclear. I mostly
take issue with such comments as these:
1) "If context matters in ethics as well as in the development of a cell,"
posed Karen LeBacqz, bioethicist in residence at Yale, "we need to realize that
we are talking about a different context here. It is a great pity that the
debate around stem cells got framed in terms of the abortion debate. They are
very different contexts."
Embryonic stem cells have, by definition, embryos as their source; in harvesting embryonic stem cells, embryos are destroyed. That is precisely what the abortion AND the ESC debates are about: embryos are human. These vulnerable humans are destroyed in both instances, with the latter utilizing them effectively for parts. Whether a calf is killed on the roadway, or cut up with a butcher’s knife for veal parmesan, the calf is still dead. The differing “context” is that of the garbage heap or the diner’s plate.
2) "Ron Cole-Turner, H. Parker Sharp Professor of Theology and Ethics at
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, led off the panel with a review of the history
of the debate surrounding stem cells, and with the hope that the panel would
serve as a resource for those at the meeting who may be called upon to speak to
the issues in the political arena."
Cole-Turner advocates being a resource for the political arena, although he does not say on which side. The book he edited on human cloning (Human Cloning: Religious Responses, Westminster John Knox Press, 1997) however, does support research up to fourteen days after fertilization or zygote formation, on what he terms “pre-embryos.” It should be noted that this is a term usually employed for semantic purposes; it is not a scientific term.
3) "Lebacqz raised the question of just access to therapies developed from stem
cell research, since the stem cell lines approved by the current administration
for federal funding are not diverse enough to meet the needs of different
ancestral groups. The ethics around the acquisition of eggs and somatic cells
for research are exceedingly complex, and also generated discussion."
The question of justice is a valid one, but I think this is a back door approach. The argument here is one for ESC (embryonic stem cell) research. What the embryonic stem cell research lobby wants is tax dollars in order to do research that is at least controversial. I think the real question here about justice, is, should those who understand this destruction of nascent human life for what it is have to pay for something they consider morally reprehensible? As there are no therapies to date from embryonic stem cells, the question of justice between ancestral people groups rings rather hollow at this time.
The acquisition of eggs is ethically very questionable; on this we agree. The number of human eggs required for therapeutic cloning research would be astronomical. From whence would these come? Egg procurement requires females of reproductive age, but over 21 years, in order to give consent (at least in the United States), for a procedure that entails a number of risks. In South Korea, two egg “donors” from the Hwang Woo-Suk debacle have filed suit for not being duly informed of the risks.
The acquisition of somatic cells is not typically problematic, ethically or physically, unless one has a problem with his/her cheek (mouth) being swabbed with a Q-Tip! The inclusion of somatic cells as ethically complex is somewhat spurious.
4) “Lebacqz concluded the formal presentation with a series of her own
theological questions. ‘What,’ she pondered, ‘Does being made in the image of
God mean in our time? For me, our dignity is relational; it has to do with
communication, with being in communion with others and God.’ She concluded by
returning to the science. ‘As we understand more about how cells communicate and
provide a context for one another, we see the resonance between science and
theology deepen.’”
Does this mean that only those who can communicate with others are human? How far
does this argument extend? Embryos cannot relate, so they are not made in
the image of God? What about those whose disease states render them incommunicado with others? Are they "no longer made in the image of God" or "never were in the image of God?" What about their eschatological potential for being in communion with God and others? What if they "speak" a language of angels, and not of men, so we are the ones without understanding?
These are a few of my thoughts. . .
What follows is first the ENS piece and then Joy Riley's responses. I think you will find them interesting.
Richard Kew
FROM THE EPISCOPAL NEWS SERVICE
While the debate over the many ethical implications of stem cell research rages, studies in molecular genetics, genomics and cell development continue to yield new information. One of the learnings which may be surprising to many is that the differentiation of a stem cell depends on the environment or microniche where it resides.
"What a cell's neighbors 'say' to it chemically, and what it says to its neighbors, impact what kind of cell it becomes," reported Dr. Christie A. Holland, retired Professor and Chair of Virology, Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Children's Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
"If context matters in ethics as well as in the development of a cell," posed Karen LeBacqz, bioethicist in residence at Yale, "we need to realize that we are talking about a different context here. It is a great pity that the debate around stem cells got framed in terms of the abortion debate. They are very different contexts."
Holland and Lebacqz were addressing the Ecumenical Roundtable on Science, Technology and the Church, as part of the program, "Embryonic Stem Cell Research: Churches, Ethics, and Politicians" presented by members from the United Church of Christ. This year's Roundtable was hosted April 27-30 by the Executive Council Committee on Science, Technology and Faith at the Emrich Retreat and Conference Center in the Diocese of Michigan.
Ron Cole-Turner, H. Parker Sharp Professor of Theology and Ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, led off the panel with a review of the history of the debate surrounding stem cells, and with the hope that the panel would serve as a resource for those at the meeting who may be called upon to speak to the issues in the political arena.
Olivia Masih White, who teaches biology at John Carroll University in Cleveland, reviewed the basic biology of stem cells, clarifying terms and adding "What I taught 20 years ago is completely different than what I teach my biology students now, and the best contemporary science is still changing."
Sandra Michael, convener of the Episcopal Network on Science, Technology and Faith, commented that she was glad White made the distinction between the two types of stem cells, totipottent and pluripotent. "This is rarely clarified in popular presentations on stem cells and is critical for understanding how they work."
Michael's research as Distinguished Service Professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton is in the genetics, endrocrinology and immunology of reproduction. "Just as people who aren't specialists in these topics need clear and thorough scientific explanations, scientists and clinicians need to consider the issues in a religious context as they apply the knowledge gleaned from their research."
The interplay of science, ethics and theology in the panel enabled the 40 Roundtable participants -- Lutherans, Presbyterians and Methodists as well as the UCC team and Episcopal hosts -- to clarify the other scientific terms which are used confusingly in politics and the popular media, as well as to explore the implications of stem cell research and therapies.
Lebacqz raised the question of just access to therapies developed from stem cell research, since the stem cell lines approved by the current administration for federal funding are not diverse enough to meet the needs of different ancestral groups. The ethics around the acquisition of eggs and somatic cells for research are exceedingly complex, and also generated discussion.
Stem cell therapies hold the promise of both increasing longevity and of improving the quality of longer lives, giving rise to another cluster of questions. Interestingly, the Working Group on Faith and Genetics in the Diocese of Massachusetts, also ecumenical in makeup and represented by several members of the Roundtable, has announced that the science of human aging and efforts to slow it will be the group's next topic for study.
Lebacqz conlcluded the formal presentaion with a series of her own theological questions. "What," she pondered, "Does being 'made in the image of God' mean in our time? For me, our dignity is relational; it has to do with communication, with being in communion with others and God." She concluded by returning to the science. As we understand more about how cells communicate and provide a context for one another, we see the resonance between science and theology deepen.
FROM DR. D. JOY RILEY
This is a proactive group; they are ecumenical in scope, but I am not sure there
is a diversity of opinion RE stem cell research. That is unclear. I mostly
take issue with such comments as these:
1) "If context matters in ethics as well as in the development of a cell,"
posed Karen LeBacqz, bioethicist in residence at Yale, "we need to realize that
we are talking about a different context here. It is a great pity that the
debate around stem cells got framed in terms of the abortion debate. They are
very different contexts."
Embryonic stem cells have, by definition, embryos as their source; in harvesting embryonic stem cells, embryos are destroyed. That is precisely what the abortion AND the ESC debates are about: embryos are human. These vulnerable humans are destroyed in both instances, with the latter utilizing them effectively for parts. Whether a calf is killed on the roadway, or cut up with a butcher’s knife for veal parmesan, the calf is still dead. The differing “context” is that of the garbage heap or the diner’s plate.
2) "Ron Cole-Turner, H. Parker Sharp Professor of Theology and Ethics at
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, led off the panel with a review of the history
of the debate surrounding stem cells, and with the hope that the panel would
serve as a resource for those at the meeting who may be called upon to speak to
the issues in the political arena."
Cole-Turner advocates being a resource for the political arena, although he does not say on which side. The book he edited on human cloning (Human Cloning: Religious Responses, Westminster John Knox Press, 1997) however, does support research up to fourteen days after fertilization or zygote formation, on what he terms “pre-embryos.” It should be noted that this is a term usually employed for semantic purposes; it is not a scientific term.
3) "Lebacqz raised the question of just access to therapies developed from stem
cell research, since the stem cell lines approved by the current administration
for federal funding are not diverse enough to meet the needs of different
ancestral groups. The ethics around the acquisition of eggs and somatic cells
for research are exceedingly complex, and also generated discussion."
The question of justice is a valid one, but I think this is a back door approach. The argument here is one for ESC (embryonic stem cell) research. What the embryonic stem cell research lobby wants is tax dollars in order to do research that is at least controversial. I think the real question here about justice, is, should those who understand this destruction of nascent human life for what it is have to pay for something they consider morally reprehensible? As there are no therapies to date from embryonic stem cells, the question of justice between ancestral people groups rings rather hollow at this time.
The acquisition of eggs is ethically very questionable; on this we agree. The number of human eggs required for therapeutic cloning research would be astronomical. From whence would these come? Egg procurement requires females of reproductive age, but over 21 years, in order to give consent (at least in the United States), for a procedure that entails a number of risks. In South Korea, two egg “donors” from the Hwang Woo-Suk debacle have filed suit for not being duly informed of the risks.
The acquisition of somatic cells is not typically problematic, ethically or physically, unless one has a problem with his/her cheek (mouth) being swabbed with a Q-Tip! The inclusion of somatic cells as ethically complex is somewhat spurious.
4) “Lebacqz concluded the formal presentation with a series of her own
theological questions. ‘What,’ she pondered, ‘Does being made in the image of
God mean in our time? For me, our dignity is relational; it has to do with
communication, with being in communion with others and God.’ She concluded by
returning to the science. ‘As we understand more about how cells communicate and
provide a context for one another, we see the resonance between science and
theology deepen.’”
Does this mean that only those who can communicate with others are human? How far
does this argument extend? Embryos cannot relate, so they are not made in
the image of God? What about those whose disease states render them incommunicado with others? Are they "no longer made in the image of God" or "never were in the image of God?" What about their eschatological potential for being in communion with God and others? What if they "speak" a language of angels, and not of men, so we are the ones without understanding?
These are a few of my thoughts. . .
Monday, May 01, 2006
Dreaming of a Future for North American Anglicanism
Today I intend to finish reading James Holland's huge book, Together We Stand: America, Britain, and the Forging of an Alliance. Recently published in the USA by Miramax Books, it focuses on the North Africa campaign of World War Two, when for the first time Americans and Britons effectively fought alongside each other, cooperating and even merging their resources as necessary. The northern coastlands and deserts of the African continent was where the Anglo-American special relationship was properly forged, and political and military tactics that are still being used today were pioneered in 1942 and 1943.
That extended battlefield was the test bed from which has emerged many aspects of our contemporary world, yet even as the leaders on the Allied side were fighting for their lives, and victory seemed anything but a slam-dunk, they were already talking about the sort of world they wanted when the war was over. Churchill, aided and abetted by others from half a dozen nationalities, foresaw a totally different scene than the one which had entered the conflict in 1939.
Foreseeing required dreaming, envisioning, planning, and winning adherents to the vision. When Europe and parts of Asia lay in ruins when finally the hostilities ceased, when Stalin was intensifying his grip on Central and Eastern Europe while the Soviet Union was licking its wounds from at least 20 million casualities, and when the world was reeling at the discovering of the extend of the Holocaust, many of those dreams must have seemed beyond achieving.
Yet the dreamers were not bowed down. They were thinking up the United Nations, NATO, the liberalization of world trade, the extension of human rights and freedoms, and so forth. It may seem that in the intervening years some of their initiatives have gone awry, but we cannot underestimate the good that they did at the time. Where would Europe have been today without the Marshall Plan? What would have happened to Japan if the United States had not picked its old enemy up and helped dust it down? That generation of heroes who made this happen, the Greatest Generation, were extraordinary men and women to whom we owe an enormous amount.
Those who built the world we now inhabit became and arms, legs, and heads of an older generation like Churchill, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and so many others who dreamed how such a world could be born, but knew that age and energy would prevent them from necessarily going there. Like the landowner planting acorns so that generations hence will sit in the shade of mighty oaks, so it is our responsibility to do the hard work of dreaming into being a new kind of church.
Some years ago I read Karl Slaikeu and Steve Lawhead's book, The Phoenix Factor, a helpful little manual to enable individuals survive a personal crisis and grow as a result. The book is full of good advice that I know I have used on myself and with others in my years in ministry. The truth is that even the most traumatic crisis can itself become the springboard for growth and health. In their introduction the authors write, "Crisis theory points to a remarkable fact of human growth and development: newer, more satisfying, and more productive ways of living can come about only after the old ways have died" (Page x).
This book came off my shelves several months ago as I started to think what might be beyond the crisis that the Episcopal Church has inflicted upon itself, the climax of that crisis being reached with the actions of August 2003 that have been so destructive of fellowship and of worldwide communion. It could be that there are all sorts of people thinking long and hard about this, developing a strategy, and I am just not privy to what is going on, if so then discount what I say. If not, then can those of us who are mainstream Anglicans get down to doing the kind of planning and dreaming that enabled the Allies of the Second World War to remake their world.
I tend to see a lot of anger, despair, peeling away from the denomination, finger-pointing, and downward spirals of disappointment. I confess that I have shared these feelings in great depth, and have often wondered on a month-to-month basis whether my own little mission congregation can even survive in the midst of such a troubled pond. There is one chapter of the Slaikeu/Lawhead book that is entitled, Managing Painful Feelings, and I can assure you that I have spent a long time going over some of its pages again.
"In some cases the intensity of the current crisis ties directly to the fact that it dredges up old feelings -- you are now experiencing the pain of the current crisis and the pain of a previous crisis all at the same time" (Page 83). I certainly think this has been the case with many of us who are historic Anglicans within the American Episcopal scene. August 2003 was the trigger, a boil burst and out flowed years of resentment, anger at a compromised theological education system, bitterness at mistreatment by high-handed bishops, and so forth. Like a surgeon on an old-time sailing ship in the midst of battle, we have been knee-deep in blood and guts, and wondering why we are making such little progress.
Maybe the wastelands of the Gulf Coast are a visual aid. Katrina swept through and left behind total devastation. There are now pockets of restoration, and in many places a lot of the mess has been cleared away, but the whole area is a long way from restoration, and that is not going to happen overnight. I saw a piece the other night about the recovery of San Francisco from the 1906 earthquake and fire, and it took about twenty years for the city to get back into its stride -- meanwhile Los Angeles overtook it as the greater metropolis of the West Coast. The Gulf Coast will take years to come back, and right now they are looking toward another Atlantic hurricane season. Anglicanism won't recover overnight, despite our native impatience.
The impact of August 2003 upon the Episcopal Church was not unlike Hurricane Katrina, and while there are pockets of recovery here and there, and while some of the mess has been cleared away, we can see that it will take years to build something new. Meanwhile, we face with increasing dread the prospect of the next "hurricane season:" General Convention 2006. This is likely to be preceded by another destructive firestorm coming from San Francisco and the Diocese of California this Saturday, where any notion of theological sanity seems to have been abandoned.
Yet even in the midst of this we need to be dreaming and trying to envision the sort of future that we want for Anglican Christianity in North America. If we do not start envisioning and dreaming in this way, then the likelihood that we will have little or no future. If we cannot get beyond our anger and hurt, then we will be taken down by our anger and hurt, and in the process will do great damage to the wonderful Gospel of grace that has been committed to us by our Lord Jesus Christ.
If we are to rise from a crisis like a phoenix, then we need to start making radical changes -- not just outward changes, but inward changes, too. This process begins and ends on our knees. Those in the secular world who plan for the future have developed all sorts of wonderful tools to help envision what sort of future God might be calling us to, and we should learn how to make use of these. While there are encouraging islands of hope, they need to be linked together and expanded, and instead of a culture of fear and despair, the time has come to develop a strategy that has a vision attached to it that tens of thousands of lay and ordained Anglicans can focus around and move forward toward.
Such a vision will need to be looking not just three, four, or five years out, but ten, twenty, thirty, forty, and be willing to hold our course in terms of the objectives we set ourselves, despite inevitable setbacks. Mission must be the organizing principle of our work, holistic mission that is rooted and grounded in the fact that when Jesus came into Galilee and from there sent us into all the world. He came saying that with him the Reign of God planting a foothold in their midst.
The last few years have finally stripped us of our carriage trade image, and despite the posturing of the Episcopal Church Center and company, we are recognizing that we are a small and almost irrelevant denomination on the American scene. This may be a painful realization, but it is an incredible relief, too. We can now stop pretending to be chaplains to the culture, and can get on with the business of taking the transforming message of Christ into that culture. We may have lost something, but if we are missional people then we have gained a lot more.
Too long we have been living, for example, with the negative imagery of a denomination that is coming apart, if we are to be creative and effective in the future then not only do we need a vision and a strategy for tomorrow, but we must find ways to start thinking like winners again. By that I do not mean replicating the crass morale-boosting sessions that crop up in business enterprises, but by recognizing that we are under the sovereign hand of God and he who calls us will enable us to be his agents in this hard place -- and agents of transformation. He knows exactly where we are because he put us here!
I have a dream of a very different American Anglicanism some fifty years down the road, but as a sixty-year-old I know I will never see it, at least from this side of the grave. I dream of an Anglicanism that has been cleared of the debris of these turn-of-the-millennium crises, and is moving gracefully and faithfully across what will be a very different post-Christendom landscape reflecting in its love and dynamism the Good News of our biblical heritage.
I see it as an Anglicanism that is flexible and not wooden in its structures, recognizing that it needs to be moved forward by mission opportunities not held back by political in-fighting and turf-wars. I see this Anglicanism as self-giving and self-sacrificing, moving ahead without counting the cost, toughened as it engages in spiritual conflict rather than weak, flabby, compromised. I see it as a caring partner with other Christian traditions, teaching them and yet eager to learn from them.
This Anglicanism I envision will be rooted and grounded in the triune God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, and thoroughly biblical. It will have thought through the biblical faith in such a way that it will have shed its Enlightenment age packaging and come up with something a lot more appropriate and beautiful for that time. Indeed, because it is missional it will be constantly willing to test all its theology and attitudes against Scripture, modifying them where they are found wanting.
I suspect it will also be instinctively global, engaged in mission with Anglicans in orther parts of the world, and welcoming Anglicans from far away places to share the mission with us. It also has every possiblity of being flamboyantly multi-ethnic and multi-cultural.
I do not believe that a compromised Anglicanism will have survived in anything but small pockets here and there. Endowments can keep religious institutions alive for a long time, and there will always be those who prefer their faith to be tamed or undemanding. However, I believe the confusing tangle on the orthodox side of the spectrum now will have reached a far greater degree of order and cooperation. We need to remember that division is a characteristic of the Enlightenment approach to Christianity, not the more centrapetal approach that will prevail in these, by then, far post-Enlightenment days.
Slaikeu and Lawhead write, "You know you have successfully resolved the crisis when the crisis event has been woven into the fabric of your life in such a way that you are ready to face the future and get on with the business of living... There is a big difference in people who have integrated the crisis event into their lives and those who have not. Those who have are looking ahead: those who have not are directing their main energies backward toward the past" (Pages 202-203).
I like the look of the Anglicanism that I dream of, and I pray that my generation can, like the Churchills and Roosevelts of the World War Two era, set the trajectory that this future might face, leaving it for the next generation to put flesh and sinew on these bones. If we are to do this, then there is much inner work that we need to get done in fellowship with Christ and one another, and then a lot of planning and dreaming.
Perhaps our mental image needs to be that of King David and the Temple. Forbidden by the Lord to build his Temple in Jerusalem, David said, "Well, at least I can provide the materials for my son to do what is barred to me." So, he made preparations, but it was Solomon who did the building. Let us pray that in the days ahead orthodox Anglicans will stop taking it out on one another and starting sitting down at the table together and say, "Now, how do we rise like a phoenix from these tragic circumstances that have been thrust upon us?"
This, I believe, is the godly way forward.
That extended battlefield was the test bed from which has emerged many aspects of our contemporary world, yet even as the leaders on the Allied side were fighting for their lives, and victory seemed anything but a slam-dunk, they were already talking about the sort of world they wanted when the war was over. Churchill, aided and abetted by others from half a dozen nationalities, foresaw a totally different scene than the one which had entered the conflict in 1939.
Foreseeing required dreaming, envisioning, planning, and winning adherents to the vision. When Europe and parts of Asia lay in ruins when finally the hostilities ceased, when Stalin was intensifying his grip on Central and Eastern Europe while the Soviet Union was licking its wounds from at least 20 million casualities, and when the world was reeling at the discovering of the extend of the Holocaust, many of those dreams must have seemed beyond achieving.
Yet the dreamers were not bowed down. They were thinking up the United Nations, NATO, the liberalization of world trade, the extension of human rights and freedoms, and so forth. It may seem that in the intervening years some of their initiatives have gone awry, but we cannot underestimate the good that they did at the time. Where would Europe have been today without the Marshall Plan? What would have happened to Japan if the United States had not picked its old enemy up and helped dust it down? That generation of heroes who made this happen, the Greatest Generation, were extraordinary men and women to whom we owe an enormous amount.
Those who built the world we now inhabit became and arms, legs, and heads of an older generation like Churchill, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and so many others who dreamed how such a world could be born, but knew that age and energy would prevent them from necessarily going there. Like the landowner planting acorns so that generations hence will sit in the shade of mighty oaks, so it is our responsibility to do the hard work of dreaming into being a new kind of church.
Some years ago I read Karl Slaikeu and Steve Lawhead's book, The Phoenix Factor, a helpful little manual to enable individuals survive a personal crisis and grow as a result. The book is full of good advice that I know I have used on myself and with others in my years in ministry. The truth is that even the most traumatic crisis can itself become the springboard for growth and health. In their introduction the authors write, "Crisis theory points to a remarkable fact of human growth and development: newer, more satisfying, and more productive ways of living can come about only after the old ways have died" (Page x).
This book came off my shelves several months ago as I started to think what might be beyond the crisis that the Episcopal Church has inflicted upon itself, the climax of that crisis being reached with the actions of August 2003 that have been so destructive of fellowship and of worldwide communion. It could be that there are all sorts of people thinking long and hard about this, developing a strategy, and I am just not privy to what is going on, if so then discount what I say. If not, then can those of us who are mainstream Anglicans get down to doing the kind of planning and dreaming that enabled the Allies of the Second World War to remake their world.
I tend to see a lot of anger, despair, peeling away from the denomination, finger-pointing, and downward spirals of disappointment. I confess that I have shared these feelings in great depth, and have often wondered on a month-to-month basis whether my own little mission congregation can even survive in the midst of such a troubled pond. There is one chapter of the Slaikeu/Lawhead book that is entitled, Managing Painful Feelings, and I can assure you that I have spent a long time going over some of its pages again.
"In some cases the intensity of the current crisis ties directly to the fact that it dredges up old feelings -- you are now experiencing the pain of the current crisis and the pain of a previous crisis all at the same time" (Page 83). I certainly think this has been the case with many of us who are historic Anglicans within the American Episcopal scene. August 2003 was the trigger, a boil burst and out flowed years of resentment, anger at a compromised theological education system, bitterness at mistreatment by high-handed bishops, and so forth. Like a surgeon on an old-time sailing ship in the midst of battle, we have been knee-deep in blood and guts, and wondering why we are making such little progress.
Maybe the wastelands of the Gulf Coast are a visual aid. Katrina swept through and left behind total devastation. There are now pockets of restoration, and in many places a lot of the mess has been cleared away, but the whole area is a long way from restoration, and that is not going to happen overnight. I saw a piece the other night about the recovery of San Francisco from the 1906 earthquake and fire, and it took about twenty years for the city to get back into its stride -- meanwhile Los Angeles overtook it as the greater metropolis of the West Coast. The Gulf Coast will take years to come back, and right now they are looking toward another Atlantic hurricane season. Anglicanism won't recover overnight, despite our native impatience.
The impact of August 2003 upon the Episcopal Church was not unlike Hurricane Katrina, and while there are pockets of recovery here and there, and while some of the mess has been cleared away, we can see that it will take years to build something new. Meanwhile, we face with increasing dread the prospect of the next "hurricane season:" General Convention 2006. This is likely to be preceded by another destructive firestorm coming from San Francisco and the Diocese of California this Saturday, where any notion of theological sanity seems to have been abandoned.
Yet even in the midst of this we need to be dreaming and trying to envision the sort of future that we want for Anglican Christianity in North America. If we do not start envisioning and dreaming in this way, then the likelihood that we will have little or no future. If we cannot get beyond our anger and hurt, then we will be taken down by our anger and hurt, and in the process will do great damage to the wonderful Gospel of grace that has been committed to us by our Lord Jesus Christ.
If we are to rise from a crisis like a phoenix, then we need to start making radical changes -- not just outward changes, but inward changes, too. This process begins and ends on our knees. Those in the secular world who plan for the future have developed all sorts of wonderful tools to help envision what sort of future God might be calling us to, and we should learn how to make use of these. While there are encouraging islands of hope, they need to be linked together and expanded, and instead of a culture of fear and despair, the time has come to develop a strategy that has a vision attached to it that tens of thousands of lay and ordained Anglicans can focus around and move forward toward.
Such a vision will need to be looking not just three, four, or five years out, but ten, twenty, thirty, forty, and be willing to hold our course in terms of the objectives we set ourselves, despite inevitable setbacks. Mission must be the organizing principle of our work, holistic mission that is rooted and grounded in the fact that when Jesus came into Galilee and from there sent us into all the world. He came saying that with him the Reign of God planting a foothold in their midst.
The last few years have finally stripped us of our carriage trade image, and despite the posturing of the Episcopal Church Center and company, we are recognizing that we are a small and almost irrelevant denomination on the American scene. This may be a painful realization, but it is an incredible relief, too. We can now stop pretending to be chaplains to the culture, and can get on with the business of taking the transforming message of Christ into that culture. We may have lost something, but if we are missional people then we have gained a lot more.
Too long we have been living, for example, with the negative imagery of a denomination that is coming apart, if we are to be creative and effective in the future then not only do we need a vision and a strategy for tomorrow, but we must find ways to start thinking like winners again. By that I do not mean replicating the crass morale-boosting sessions that crop up in business enterprises, but by recognizing that we are under the sovereign hand of God and he who calls us will enable us to be his agents in this hard place -- and agents of transformation. He knows exactly where we are because he put us here!
I have a dream of a very different American Anglicanism some fifty years down the road, but as a sixty-year-old I know I will never see it, at least from this side of the grave. I dream of an Anglicanism that has been cleared of the debris of these turn-of-the-millennium crises, and is moving gracefully and faithfully across what will be a very different post-Christendom landscape reflecting in its love and dynamism the Good News of our biblical heritage.
I see it as an Anglicanism that is flexible and not wooden in its structures, recognizing that it needs to be moved forward by mission opportunities not held back by political in-fighting and turf-wars. I see this Anglicanism as self-giving and self-sacrificing, moving ahead without counting the cost, toughened as it engages in spiritual conflict rather than weak, flabby, compromised. I see it as a caring partner with other Christian traditions, teaching them and yet eager to learn from them.
This Anglicanism I envision will be rooted and grounded in the triune God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, and thoroughly biblical. It will have thought through the biblical faith in such a way that it will have shed its Enlightenment age packaging and come up with something a lot more appropriate and beautiful for that time. Indeed, because it is missional it will be constantly willing to test all its theology and attitudes against Scripture, modifying them where they are found wanting.
I suspect it will also be instinctively global, engaged in mission with Anglicans in orther parts of the world, and welcoming Anglicans from far away places to share the mission with us. It also has every possiblity of being flamboyantly multi-ethnic and multi-cultural.
I do not believe that a compromised Anglicanism will have survived in anything but small pockets here and there. Endowments can keep religious institutions alive for a long time, and there will always be those who prefer their faith to be tamed or undemanding. However, I believe the confusing tangle on the orthodox side of the spectrum now will have reached a far greater degree of order and cooperation. We need to remember that division is a characteristic of the Enlightenment approach to Christianity, not the more centrapetal approach that will prevail in these, by then, far post-Enlightenment days.
Slaikeu and Lawhead write, "You know you have successfully resolved the crisis when the crisis event has been woven into the fabric of your life in such a way that you are ready to face the future and get on with the business of living... There is a big difference in people who have integrated the crisis event into their lives and those who have not. Those who have are looking ahead: those who have not are directing their main energies backward toward the past" (Pages 202-203).
I like the look of the Anglicanism that I dream of, and I pray that my generation can, like the Churchills and Roosevelts of the World War Two era, set the trajectory that this future might face, leaving it for the next generation to put flesh and sinew on these bones. If we are to do this, then there is much inner work that we need to get done in fellowship with Christ and one another, and then a lot of planning and dreaming.
Perhaps our mental image needs to be that of King David and the Temple. Forbidden by the Lord to build his Temple in Jerusalem, David said, "Well, at least I can provide the materials for my son to do what is barred to me." So, he made preparations, but it was Solomon who did the building. Let us pray that in the days ahead orthodox Anglicans will stop taking it out on one another and starting sitting down at the table together and say, "Now, how do we rise like a phoenix from these tragic circumstances that have been thrust upon us?"
This, I believe, is the godly way forward.
Monday, April 24, 2006
The Da Vinci Code and Company
A few evenings ago I slipped down to Barnes & Noble, and spent an hour going through the religion shelves looking for books that are riding the rapidly rising Da Vinci Wave. I ended up with nine or ten volumes that I spread out on a table in the Starbucks section of the place and perused. I finally chose three or four to read and returned the other volumes to their shelves.
The last few days have found me going over these books in an attempt to get to the bottom of the Da Vinci Code phenomenon that has been riding high now for several years, and which is reaching something of a fever peak as the relase date for the move of the best-seller draws near. The hardback of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown has now been on the New York Times Best Seller list for 159 weeks, and this week was its second week on the top of the paperback lists. There is now an illustrated Da Vinci Code, Da Vinci Code tour guides, and I expect all sorts of other ephemera will appear in coming months. This has become a big cultural "event."
Maybe it was fitting that I read The Da Vinci Code soon after it was published, on my way home from Minneapolis in July 2003, where I had been addressing a pre-convention gathering. (Needless to say, I have not be invited to speak at any gatherings in Columbus in June, and probably never will be again!). The book was commended to me be someone as a great read, and so it is. If you are looking for a page-turner, then this is it! However, from the supposed factoids on the first page, I was irritated by the way it played so fast and loose with facts, and was so badly researched.
Don't get me wrong, The Da Vinci Code is a terrific yarn, my problem was that its author seemed unable to separate fact from fiction -- which makes him a very contemporary kind of person! The book leans heavily on Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which when I read it some years ago struck me as a puzzling piece of pseudo-religious exotica, a book that seemed determined to make a massive case with a minimal amount of evidence. The Da Vinci Code is very much the same in its use of facts, scholarship, and evidence.
This week's New York Times Best Seller list has no fewer than three of these kinds of books on the non-fiction lists, and then The Da Vinci Code is there in the fiction lists. One of those non-fiction pieces is The Jesus Papers, written by Michael Baigent, one of the co-authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. He and his colleagues recently challenged Dan Brown in the British court system for plaigerizing. They lost their case, but gathered huge amounts of publicity, which translated into book sales, and in the midst of it out comes this latest offering that is sub-titled, Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History. Coincidence?
There seems to be a cycle of these kinds of books. Every few years out comes another little batch filled with what purports to be 'new evidence' that Jesus did not die, Jesus did not rise, Jesus did not exist, Jesus married Mary Magdalene, or whatever the latest flavor of the month might be. With some of his own flourishes, Michael Baigent actually warms over and adapts the arguments of Hugh Schonfield, whose book, The Passover Plot, was published while I was in seminary -- and I remember clearly the delight I had in watching Michael Green, who taught me New Testament, using careful scholarship to demolish it and show was a shallow piece of work it was.
Well, just like alien space craft crashing near Roswell, NM, or extra-terrestrial research taking place at Area 51, there are some bad ideas that never die. Indeed, what Baigent and, earlier, Schonfield mostly do is re-present notions that have been around for at least 1900 years and regularly come up for air. Baigent writes well, and some of the things he asserts are fascinating, but the book is a little bit like attempting to make a fine Persian rug with colored grasses!
What fascinates me about all these kinds of books is that there are extraordinary juxtapositionings of ideas, facts, half-facts, and fictions, and then they are all tied together and something is made of them. Furthermore, they read like papers I wrote when a student, where I would attempt to make a huge case with very, very limited information. For a time, I thought I was a master at making one or two pertinent points stretch for ten pages, until a professor called my bluff and threw the paper back with a failing grade. At that point the penny dropped, if I was going to write something with substance I needed to do the requisite research and preparation.
As I read Baigent, I find that he doesn't stack up well against the great New Testament and Church History scholars whose work I have delighted in over the years: Oscar Cullmann, Joachim Jeremias, Tom Wright, Leon Morris, E. Earle Ellis, Howard Marshall, William Barclay, C. H. Dodd, Charlie Moule, and so many others. Reading his stuff is like watching a club golfer trying to make his way in an Open Championship at St. Andrew's. He might get some good shots off here and there, but he is no match for the real pros.
Again, as I read Baigent, I found my own brain putting some interesting connections together. There is a flavor about his writing that seemed to ring bells with me and I found myself asking where I had read material presented in this kind of way before. Finally, I realized that there seemed to be an affinity between Baigent and the way that John Shelby Spong writes. A pleasing style takes limited scholarship, evidence, and facts, and somehow manages to weave something interesting but highly questionable out of it.
The problem with The Da Vinci Code and its flotilla of other products is that these things get the kind of marketing that rebuttals will never get. Tom Hanks playing the lead role in the movie of The Da Vinci Code is going to be heard and believed by far more people than the attractive written response of a Lee Strobel (which I would thoroughly recommend).
People have always loved stories, and what these detractors from Gospel truth have done is to hijack the story and make it their tool for presenting their question mark that they want to raise over the Christian faith as it has been revealed. Somehow or other, in this age when narrative and illustration goes far further than careful argument, we have to learn how to repossess the form of the story so that it grabs the attention of those who are seeking after truth, much as Jesus's parables did for his followers two thousand years ago.
This is the point where scholarship, faithfulness, artistry, media talent, and resources intersect. It is not that the church does not have access to these (although perhaps not the financial resources that are available to Hollywood, etc.), but it does have an abiding story that when artistically presented catches imaginations. I find myself wondering whether it is an accident that this latest surge of pseudo-scholarly attacks on the faith come three or four years after "The Passion of the Christ" was in the cinemas, or maybe I am paranoid.
Yes, it is important that we challenge with evidence these cases which are made with such slender evidence, but it is also important that somehow we find a way to winsomely and wonderfully present the alternative case.
The other day a friend suggested I look at the Author's Note at the end of Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. Anne Rice is not a writer I have taken a lot of interest in, but at my friend's urging I got the book and found myself fascinated, for here is a novelist who really understands the importance of careful, methodical research and scholarship. In this afterword she tells of her journey from old-fashioned Roman Catholicism, through atheism, and back to the Christian faith.
As she had prepared to write this book she had expected that she would find fellow travellers among the more skeptical writers and scholars who have flourished since the Enlightenment, "and that Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud" (Page 312). She goes on, "In sum, the whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horrified by it if he knew about it -- that whol picture which had floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years -- that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I'd ever read."
Her assessment becomes even more tart: "I was unconvinced by the wild postulations of those who claimed to be children of the Enlightenment. And I had also sensed something else. Many of these scholars, scholars who apparently devoted their lives to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books. This emerged in the personality of the texts" (Page 314).
I, too, sense that there is this dislike of Jesus in certain corners of the church, but that dislike turns to something stronger in the writing of a Dan Brown, a Michael Baigent, and others. All this means that those of us who love Jesus with heart, soul, mind, and strength, have our work cut out.
The last few days have found me going over these books in an attempt to get to the bottom of the Da Vinci Code phenomenon that has been riding high now for several years, and which is reaching something of a fever peak as the relase date for the move of the best-seller draws near. The hardback of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown has now been on the New York Times Best Seller list for 159 weeks, and this week was its second week on the top of the paperback lists. There is now an illustrated Da Vinci Code, Da Vinci Code tour guides, and I expect all sorts of other ephemera will appear in coming months. This has become a big cultural "event."
Maybe it was fitting that I read The Da Vinci Code soon after it was published, on my way home from Minneapolis in July 2003, where I had been addressing a pre-convention gathering. (Needless to say, I have not be invited to speak at any gatherings in Columbus in June, and probably never will be again!). The book was commended to me be someone as a great read, and so it is. If you are looking for a page-turner, then this is it! However, from the supposed factoids on the first page, I was irritated by the way it played so fast and loose with facts, and was so badly researched.
Don't get me wrong, The Da Vinci Code is a terrific yarn, my problem was that its author seemed unable to separate fact from fiction -- which makes him a very contemporary kind of person! The book leans heavily on Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which when I read it some years ago struck me as a puzzling piece of pseudo-religious exotica, a book that seemed determined to make a massive case with a minimal amount of evidence. The Da Vinci Code is very much the same in its use of facts, scholarship, and evidence.
This week's New York Times Best Seller list has no fewer than three of these kinds of books on the non-fiction lists, and then The Da Vinci Code is there in the fiction lists. One of those non-fiction pieces is The Jesus Papers, written by Michael Baigent, one of the co-authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. He and his colleagues recently challenged Dan Brown in the British court system for plaigerizing. They lost their case, but gathered huge amounts of publicity, which translated into book sales, and in the midst of it out comes this latest offering that is sub-titled, Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History. Coincidence?
There seems to be a cycle of these kinds of books. Every few years out comes another little batch filled with what purports to be 'new evidence' that Jesus did not die, Jesus did not rise, Jesus did not exist, Jesus married Mary Magdalene, or whatever the latest flavor of the month might be. With some of his own flourishes, Michael Baigent actually warms over and adapts the arguments of Hugh Schonfield, whose book, The Passover Plot, was published while I was in seminary -- and I remember clearly the delight I had in watching Michael Green, who taught me New Testament, using careful scholarship to demolish it and show was a shallow piece of work it was.
Well, just like alien space craft crashing near Roswell, NM, or extra-terrestrial research taking place at Area 51, there are some bad ideas that never die. Indeed, what Baigent and, earlier, Schonfield mostly do is re-present notions that have been around for at least 1900 years and regularly come up for air. Baigent writes well, and some of the things he asserts are fascinating, but the book is a little bit like attempting to make a fine Persian rug with colored grasses!
What fascinates me about all these kinds of books is that there are extraordinary juxtapositionings of ideas, facts, half-facts, and fictions, and then they are all tied together and something is made of them. Furthermore, they read like papers I wrote when a student, where I would attempt to make a huge case with very, very limited information. For a time, I thought I was a master at making one or two pertinent points stretch for ten pages, until a professor called my bluff and threw the paper back with a failing grade. At that point the penny dropped, if I was going to write something with substance I needed to do the requisite research and preparation.
As I read Baigent, I find that he doesn't stack up well against the great New Testament and Church History scholars whose work I have delighted in over the years: Oscar Cullmann, Joachim Jeremias, Tom Wright, Leon Morris, E. Earle Ellis, Howard Marshall, William Barclay, C. H. Dodd, Charlie Moule, and so many others. Reading his stuff is like watching a club golfer trying to make his way in an Open Championship at St. Andrew's. He might get some good shots off here and there, but he is no match for the real pros.
Again, as I read Baigent, I found my own brain putting some interesting connections together. There is a flavor about his writing that seemed to ring bells with me and I found myself asking where I had read material presented in this kind of way before. Finally, I realized that there seemed to be an affinity between Baigent and the way that John Shelby Spong writes. A pleasing style takes limited scholarship, evidence, and facts, and somehow manages to weave something interesting but highly questionable out of it.
The problem with The Da Vinci Code and its flotilla of other products is that these things get the kind of marketing that rebuttals will never get. Tom Hanks playing the lead role in the movie of The Da Vinci Code is going to be heard and believed by far more people than the attractive written response of a Lee Strobel (which I would thoroughly recommend).
People have always loved stories, and what these detractors from Gospel truth have done is to hijack the story and make it their tool for presenting their question mark that they want to raise over the Christian faith as it has been revealed. Somehow or other, in this age when narrative and illustration goes far further than careful argument, we have to learn how to repossess the form of the story so that it grabs the attention of those who are seeking after truth, much as Jesus's parables did for his followers two thousand years ago.
This is the point where scholarship, faithfulness, artistry, media talent, and resources intersect. It is not that the church does not have access to these (although perhaps not the financial resources that are available to Hollywood, etc.), but it does have an abiding story that when artistically presented catches imaginations. I find myself wondering whether it is an accident that this latest surge of pseudo-scholarly attacks on the faith come three or four years after "The Passion of the Christ" was in the cinemas, or maybe I am paranoid.
Yes, it is important that we challenge with evidence these cases which are made with such slender evidence, but it is also important that somehow we find a way to winsomely and wonderfully present the alternative case.
The other day a friend suggested I look at the Author's Note at the end of Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. Anne Rice is not a writer I have taken a lot of interest in, but at my friend's urging I got the book and found myself fascinated, for here is a novelist who really understands the importance of careful, methodical research and scholarship. In this afterword she tells of her journey from old-fashioned Roman Catholicism, through atheism, and back to the Christian faith.
As she had prepared to write this book she had expected that she would find fellow travellers among the more skeptical writers and scholars who have flourished since the Enlightenment, "and that Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud" (Page 312). She goes on, "In sum, the whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horrified by it if he knew about it -- that whol picture which had floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years -- that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I'd ever read."
Her assessment becomes even more tart: "I was unconvinced by the wild postulations of those who claimed to be children of the Enlightenment. And I had also sensed something else. Many of these scholars, scholars who apparently devoted their lives to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books. This emerged in the personality of the texts" (Page 314).
I, too, sense that there is this dislike of Jesus in certain corners of the church, but that dislike turns to something stronger in the writing of a Dan Brown, a Michael Baigent, and others. All this means that those of us who love Jesus with heart, soul, mind, and strength, have our work cut out.
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