The Hard Corps - Dai Hankey

I got this because it looked fun. I was interested to see what a series of Bible studies on 2 Sam 23:8-39 would look like. It's surprisingly good - I'd say it's pretty much ideal for a group of young Christian men / teenage lads wanting to think through how living as Christians doesn't mean being less masculine. Of course, it sometimes ends up heading towards the allegorical - "Shammah drew a line and said that God's enemies could come this far but no further. How do we need to do that in our battle against sin?", but that isn't necessarily invalid, and the examples he uses are helpful ones.

Anyone / everyone / each one - Colossians 4:6

There's an important difference between "anyone", "everyone" and "each one".

When I see a shop advertising "everything £1", I sometimes think of trying to get the entire contents of the store for only £1, because that's what they are offering. Likewise, when Paul says in Colossians 4:6

Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone. (NIV 1984)

what the passage clearly means is that somehow we are enabled to come up with a clever answer that will work on everyone. Except that isn't what the Greek says.

What the Greek says is literally translated as "how it is necessary for you to answer each one", and that is very different. That means that each individual is distinct, that some people will need one answer and others another and that God will equip us with wisdom as to how to answer each person well. That's what the passage really means.

The "every" is there in the Geneva and the KJV, but I don't know if it meant exactly the same there. Among modern translations, it's in the NIV (and the new NIV!), the NRSV and the Good News. The ESV, the NKJV, and the HCSB get it right though. But then, so did Wycliffe back in the 1300s!

More on Women Bishops

Three of the best articles I've read about the women bishops vote:

• Philip Giddings' speech at Synod. Philip is the chair of the House of Laity, and explains why he voted against.
• Tom Wright's comment on it, and some of the arguments. For what it's worth, I think he's wrong on Junia but agree on almost all the rest.
• Frank Field's comments on Newsnight. Frank is a former governmnet minister, a keen advocate of women's ministry and a lay canon at Chester Cathedral.

On Women Bishops and Yesterday's Synod Vote

It's worth saying right from the start – I'm not on Synod. Had I been able to vote yesterday, I would probably have voted “yes”. But I grew up in the conservative evangelical camp, and I know a good proportion of the 44 clergy who voted “no” yesterday.

I think it's important to debunk a few myths.

First, this isn't about equality. I know to outsiders it looks like it is, but it isn't. It's actually about identicality, and there's an important difference. Everyone (I hope) on synod agrees that men and women are equal in status and in the sight of God. Everyone agrees that men and women are not identical on a purely biological level. The question is to what extent men and women's differences work out as differences in the roles they play within church.

Secondly, this isn't about rights. No-one has the right to become a bishop. It isn't a “promotion”. It's a horrible job where you can't be part of a normal church fellowship and work far too many hours with far too many people who expect you to have all the answers. Jemima Thackray wrote a great piece in the Telegraph this morning where she argues that the real question should be whether women can have the opportunity to serve in this job. In some ways the even more important question is “Is God calling women to serve in this way?”. Women who say they should have the right to become bishop shouldn't have it, because they don't understand what they say they want.

Third, this isn't about traditionalists in the house of laity spoiling everyone's party. Yes, this time it was voted down because people thought it didn't cater well enough for those who would rather not have a woman bishop. Personally, I'd have voted for the motion because I think it does cater well enough for conservative evangelicals, even though conservative evangelical friends say it doesn't. But last time, 2 years ago, the archbishops proposed a motion which would have catered well enough for them. It was overwhelmingly passed in the houses of clergy and laity, but voted down by modernists in the house of clergy. If those clergy had passed it then, we'd have women bishops by now.

So what is this actually about? It's about how we handle profound disagreements. The Church of England as a whole has been rightly trying to keep people on board, and be as accommodating as possible to those who have good reasons for disagreeing with women bishops, while still trying to move ahead with them. The problem is that the Church's structures are somewhat Byzantine, and sometimes working at counter-purposes and it therefore moves very slowly indeed.

What we haven't done enough of, I think, is actually discussing the reasons for disagreement rather than stating them. For example, a lot of the opposition hinges around one paragraph in Paul's first letter to Timothy. I have listened to a fair bit of the debate, and I've only heard that paragraph discussed by those against women bishops. Now I can see several ways to argue that the paragraph doesn't apply to women bishops today, but I don't really see that argument being engaged with at a national level. Of course, all that discussion should have happened decades ago, but as far as I can tell it just hasn't been done.

The C of E will get there in the end, but in the meantime we need to be patient, we need to be loving, and we need to keep listening to each other, and not just letting it wash over us, but engaging with what the other person is saying. Then, maybe, we'll be able to move on from this and work together for God's glory.

The Puritans - Their Origins and Successors by D.M. Lloyd-Jones

Puritans have a very bad name in most of the Church, apart from a small section of it where they have a very good name. That small section mostly owes its existence to some conferences started by Lloyd-Jones and J.I. Packer in the 1950s. This book brings together Lloyd-Jones's closing addresses from those conferences from 1959 to 1978, on diverse topics such as:

• biographies of individual Puritans (Henry Jacob, Howell Harris, William Williams)
• some figures from the Evangelical Revival (Edwards, Whitefield) and how they were influenced by the Puritans
• Puritan views on a number of topics, especially church order, church and state and religious experience
• in depth studies of the teaching of one Puritan in one area (e.g. Bunyan on unity)

Lloyd-Jones roughly sees the Puritans as starting with Tyndale, reaching full flowering from Knox and ending in 1662. The key to Puritanism seems to be discontent with the C of E, and of course Lloyd-Jones pushes quite strongly that the logical consequence of Puritanism is leaving the C of E. I'd love to have seen him address why the energy of the movement and so much of the good they did just vanished within just a generation of them leaving in 1662.

I don't agree with the Puritans on everything, and I'd love to see some day a sensitive treatment of how so many of them ended up so wrong on culture, etc. I don't agree with Lloyd-Jones on everything - it's telling that when he draws the distinctions between Knox and Hooper who started out very similar but diverged, I agree with Hooper and I'm pretty sure Lloyd-Jones agreed with Knox.

Having said that, I really enjoyed this book. Lots of food for thought - lots to agree with, and lots of reasons to be all the more surprised that those who most love the Puritans today in the UK tend to be strongly opposed to some elements of Puritan theology which I quite like...

People who cannot see this subjective element in Calvinism seem to me never to have understood Calvinism. Calvinism of necessity leads to an emphasis upon the action and the activity of God the Holy Spirit. The whole emphasis is upon what God does to us: not what man does but what God does to us; not our hold of Him, but 'His strong grasp of us'. So Calvinism of necessity leads to experiences, and to great emphasis upon experience; and these men, and all these older Calvinists were constantly talking about 'visitations', how the Lord had appeared to them, how the Lord had spoken to them...
p.210

Resources for Daily Bible Reading

Here are some of the best online resources for daily Bible reading...

• Explore do a free app for iPhone / Android.
• The King's English works through famous phrases from the King James Bible
• Robert Murray M'Cheyne's Bible reading plan is a good way of working through the Bible in a year (New Testament twice). Or you can do it at half speed and cover the NT once a year and the OT once every 2 years.
• For the Love of God is a brilliant series of books which provide helpful devotional thoughts on one of the passages from M'Cheyne's plan as a blog. It lets you do the plan at either full speed or half speed.
• You version is a Bible reading app for mobile phones with built in Bible reading plans.

I don't use any of those. Personally, I find internet-enabled devices too much of a distraction when trying to read the Bible. But I know some people might find them helpful...

Vaughan Roberts - "A Battle I Face"

Vaughan Roberts has done a superb interview with Julian Hardyman, in which he (Vaughan) speaks honestly about his struggle with same-sex attraction.

It's a really good read - I've got a huge amount of respect for Vaughan anyway, and that just went up another notch or two. Someone needed to say what he has said, and I'm glad it was him.

Did Jesus Have a Wife?

There's a lot of chatter going round the internet about a bit of ancient paper which mentions Jesus having a wife. Most if it is the usual bad journalism - here's a proper scholar's take on it.

And a nice article here points us back to the fact that Jesus might not have a wife, but he is engaged - to us.

Prayer, Praise and Prophecy - A Theology of the Psalms

I bought this book on the basis on one quote on the cover. It says this

"...a marvellous handbook to the Psalms. If I were teaching a course on the Psalms, this would be my textbook." Dale Ralph Davis

As so often, I find that I agree with Davis. At theological college, I read quite a few books on the Psalms; this has better scholarship than any of them. He mentions the trendy theological theories, but stands back and evaluates them sensibly. He mentions form criticism (for example), shows some of the value of it, and critiques it too. It's the best treatment I've read of the academic issues, including Psalm ordering and the formation of the Psalter.

But it's also written as a Christian who doesn't feel he has to tick the boxes of the non-Christian academic world. He writes things like "To understand the Psalms Biblically is, of course, ultimately to understand them in terms of Christ." (p.280) There are whole chapters on Christological and Christocentric interpretation of the Psalms, which was somewhat taboo (and wrongly so) at theological college.

There were a couple of omissions - I don't recall any discussion of the history of composite Psalms (e.g. 89), and the Proc Trust hermenteutic of Jesus as the perfect singer of Psalms only got a small look-in, but they're only fairly minor.

Overall - brilliant. Pastorally warm, encouraging, academic but not dry, well-informed but not in thrall to scholarship.

Virtue Reborn - Tom Wright

It seems that Tom Wright had three purposes in mind in writing this book. It is a book about how Christians should seek to act in the light of their faith. It is also a book showing how the ancient philosophical idea of virtue is reinterpreted in the New Testament, and again it seeks to show how many of the alternative models of Christian living (e.g. legalism) are flawed.

The UK title is a characteristic Wright pun. It is about the rebirth of virtue as an idea in modern ethics, about the fact that virtue as classically understood is not enough – we need to be reborn, and about how the fruits of that rebirth can be well explained using the language of virtue. In the US, it's called "After you believe". I don't know if that's because SPCK think Americans are stupid.

There are a lot of good things about this book. It's the first time I've seen Wright rebuff one of the common misinterpretations of his work – the idea that “Christian living in the present consists of anticipating the final kingdom-on-earth by working and campaigning for justice, peace, and the alleviation of poverty and distress.” Instead, Wright's basic scheme is this:

1. The goal is the new heaven and new earth, with human beings raised from the dead to be the renewed world's rulers and priests.
2. This goal is achieved through the kingdom-establishing work of Jesus and the Spirit, which we grasp by faith, participate in by baptism, and live out in love.
3. Christian living in the present consists of anticipating this ultimate reality through the Spirit-led, habit-forming, truly human practice of faith, hope, and love, sustaining Christians in their calling to worship God and reflect his glory into the world. (p.59-60)

Virtue Reborn is just about the best book I have ever read on how difficult obedience leads to habits, which leads to formation of character, which leads to transformed desires. It is brilliant on the importance of thinking through actions and views in the light of the gospel.

The more genuinely spiritual you are,... the more clearly and accurately and carefully you will think, particularly about what the completed goal of your Christian journey will be, and hence what steps you should be taking, what habits you should be acquiring, as part of the journey toward that goal, right now. (p.137)

There is a popular view that when we believe in Jesus, God transforms our hearts so dramatically by his Spirit that afterwards we just need to do “whatever comes naturally”. Wright commendably takes a very strong stand against this. However, as often with Wright, there is a real danger that he throws the baby out with the bathwater. So he asserts that Luther held that view (p.52) and does not even mention the idea of “sanctification” in Reformed theology – it is as if evangelicalism has uniformly taught that view since the Reformation, and therefore the choice is either Wright's understanding or an easy-believism. In his bibliography (p.246), he does recognise that his depiction view on Luther is not wholly “balanced and rounded”, but he doesn't even mention the long and faithful heritage of those Protestants who taught and believed that we need to work out our salvation.

The other danger Wright faces in opposing easy-believism is that he downplays the work of the Spirit. He does not mention the possibility, for example, that the Spirit transforms our hearts and minds apart from the slow work of Christian obedience or that he creates in us new desires to do what pleases God. In reality, of course, it is both/and. We should work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, because it is God who works in us, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. (Phil 2:12-13).

Overall then, a good book, a helpful and important book. But Wright again seems to make his characteristic error of over-reacting against those whom he disagrees with.