Funny Sign

From the BBC website:

Anglicans and Abortion

My friend Sean forwarded this onto me.

Important link.

It's an online petition protesting at Anglican support of the pro-choice organisation, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice in the US, and encouraging the Anglican Communion to take a more explicit stance against abortion, as well as to take more practical action to help make abortion unnecessary. The group are also formulating a statement on the use of human embryos in stem cell research.

Early Christians and the Bible

Lots of Christians view the Bible in lots of different ways. I think it is very useful to think about how the early Church viewed it.

The reason for that is because of the apostles. It was the apostles (plus a few of their friends) who wrote what is now the New Testament. It was the apostles who had been personally commissioned by Jesus to tell people about him. It was the apostles (equipped and strengthened by the Holy Spirit) who founded the church. I'd therefore want to make two assertions:

• Jesus and the apostles were right in their view of the Bible
• If we want to know their view of the Bible, a good place to look is the early church

For example, I think that Polycarp of Smyrna and Papias, who grew up in a church led by John and went on to lead churches of their own, would be in a fair good position to tell us what John meant and how he meant his writings to be understood.

Authority

The first thing that is worth noting is that they all regard what we'd now call the Bible as authoritative. Actually, the Bible didn't exist in its present form then. What they had was the Old Testament, a collection of four gospels, various collections of letters and assorted other stuff. But for the early Church, if the Old Testament taught something, or if the apostles taught it, that settled the issue.

Tradition

Early on, especially while the so-called Apostolic Fathers (people like Polycarp, Papias, Ignatius, who had known the apostles) were alive, they didn't draw much distinction between what they had written down by the apostles and what they remembered the apostles saying. They saw the two sources as basically saying the same thing.

By the late 100s AD, all the Apostolic Fathers were dead, and there were people suggesting (mostly weird) new ways of understanding the Bible. The response of church leaders like Irenaeus and Tertullian was that the Old Testament and the writings of the apostles should be understood as they had been understood by the church before - that they should take the traditional understanding, because the tradition went back to Jesus and the apostles.

By the mid 400s AD, Vincent of Lerins summarised it well. He said that Scripture was "sufficient, and more than sufficient", and that it should be understood in the same way as it had been understood "always, everywhere and by everyone". If that wasn't clear, it we should go with the opinions of whole church councils, and if there was still doubt, we should follow the opinions of Christians who lived holy lives.

This of course raises an interesting question - should we understand the Bible in the "traditional way"? Should Luther have understood the Bible in the same way as the rest of the church? The answer is that it wasn't how the church had always understood the Bible. Over the 1500-odd years between the apostles and Luther, there had been a significant drift. Luther based a lot of his opinions (as did Cranmer, as did Calvin) on going back and reading early Christians. In fact, they saw that they needed to show that at least bits of the early Church agreed with them.

If quite a few Christians wrote on a topic between AD100 and AD350, and all of them say essentially the same thing about it, I think that's the right way to interpret the Bible. But not between 1200 and 1450, because that doesn't have the same guarantee of apostolicity at one end.

Christ and the Old Testament

One area where the opinion of early Christians is pretty much unanimous, and disagreeing from many modern Christians is about the Old Testament. Early Christians thought it was all about Jesus (Jesus is recorded as thinking that too).

Justin Martyr put it well in his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew (2nd century).

The Scriptures [OT] are much more ours than yours. For we lt ourselves be persuaded by them, while you read them without grasping their true import.

The normal way of interpreting the Old Testament is what we now call typology. John Chrysostom defined typology as "prophecy in terms of things" - what happened to on person or group of people acts as a picture for what happens to another. Where Platonic philosophy had a lot of influence on the Church, this sometimes tended to spill over into uncontrolled allegorising. But Christians in Antioch, especially Diodore of Tarsus and Theodoret, drew up some helpful guidelines for using typology with historical passages in the Old Testament, which they described as Theoria. I'm going to use my sermon on Psalm 21 as an example, because this is the approach I used there.

• Keep the literal sense of the text. It is still true, it still matters.
• There must be a correspondence between the historical figure and the spiritual one. For example, David and Jesus were both God's anointed king over his people, and were both called "Messiah".
• The two figures need to be apprehended together, though differently. So in Psalm 21, David praises God because he is victorious over physical enemies. In my application of it to Jesus, Jesus praises God because he is victorious over spiritual enemies.

Summary

So, to summarise. Early Christians saw the Bible as authoritative. They saw that it should be interpreted in line with the way it had always been interpreted, and they saw the Old Testament as being about Jesus.

I wish that more of the church agreed with them!

Quotes from Reagan

I keep meaning to write something on how the early Christians used the Bible. Instead, here are some quotes from Ronald Reagan.

Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'

All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.

I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.

I tend to describe my political views as somewhere between Ronald Reagan and the Green Party...

Selecting Leaders

What do the following Biblical characters have in common?

• Mirian and Aaron in Numbers 12
• Abimelech in Judges 9
• Ish-bosheth in 2 Samuel 2
• Absalom in 2 Samuel 14-18
• Adonijah in 1 Kings 1
• Jereboam son of Nebat in 1 Kings 12
• Zimri in 1 Kings 16
• Omri in 1 Kings 16
• Athaliah in 2 Kings 11
• Shallum in 2 Kings 15
• Menahem in 2 Kings 15
• Herod
• Diotrophes in 3 John

There may be others, but those are the ones I can think of quickly.

Answer - they are the people I can think of who put themselves forwards as leaders over God's people. All of them persuaded others it would be a good idea. And all of them are judged for it.

Now how do we go about getting leaders for churches?

I hadn't thought this through as clearly when I was going through selection for ordination in the C of E. But I knew I didn't want to put myself forwards. On the other hand, however, the vicar at my church was fairly new and hadn't got round to setting up a group or anything to ask people if they would think about ordination, and it was pretty clear he wasn't going to ask anyone to think about it just yet. It took me ages to get to the point where I felt compelled to ask him if he thought I would be suitable, and even then I felt horribly guilty for asking, but it felt like I had to do it.

This post arose out of a conversation I had a few days ago with a leader at a local church. He said he got people involved if they volunteered rather than asking them. I think that's the wrong approach.

Leaders should not volunteer. They should be selected.

Of course, there is still plenty of scope for "we need 5 people to help out at this event" or conversations along the lines of "Have you thought about getting involved with any groups in the church?" // "I'd really like to help out with the children's work" // "Oh - that's great."

Affective Preaching

Random question - why are conservative evangelicals so afraid of affective preaching?

(By affective preaching, I mean preaching where the preacher displays strong excitement or sadness or pain or something. Preaching which engages the emotions as well as the mind and not just through the mind. Preaching that is designed to move people. And I don't mean acted stuff - that's rubbish.)

Is it that we're scared of emotions? Or scared of using other people's? But surely there's an important balance - if we're preaching through something that is really really tragic and where we have to understand something of the depth of the sadness to understand the passage (as Psalm 137), shouldn't we be willing to take them there?

I heard a sermon on Psalm 137 last night. It was good, and very well applied (I think that's the most difficult bit with that passage) but I think it would have been better if we'd gone with the Israelites and seen more of their grief to get inside what they were feeling.

Why Women Shouldn't Lead Churches

I've said before, and I still think it, that the theological arguments seem to me to be inconclusive, and that in the C of E at the moment, it should be an issue of conscience as to whether women lead churches. I'm part of a denomination where women do lead churches, and I'm fine with that. I've got friends who are women who intend to lead churches, and I'm happy to support them in that. I wouldn't be happy to be a woman who led a church, but that's because I'm a bloke.

I've also said before that there are some things which seem to me utterly obvious from the Bible, which are relevant to the whole area.

• Leadership is about service. The point of the "leader" is that they are meant to serve, to equip everyone for using their gifts to build one another up.
• Women should be involved in positions of responsibility in churches, including doing stuff "up front"
• Men and women are not identical. The marriage relationship is equal but not symmetrical.
• Faced with a choice between a woman who believed in the Bible and a man who did not, I'd much rather have the woman leading my church.

But given all of that, if I was going to vote on whether women should be appointed from now on to lead churches, I'd vote against it. Here are some reasons:

• The early church was socially revolutionary in lots of ways. Yet while they had women in leadership positions, and churches led by married couples, even couples where the woman seemed to be more theologically aware or in some way dominant (e.g. Priscilla and Aquila) I am not aware of any churches where the sole senior leader was a woman. Why not? Theological education does not seem to have been a requirement. Neither does social status. If we apply the famous principle from Vincent of Lerins - that we should interpret Scripture in accordance with the way it has been done everywhere, always and by everyone, it is clear that the interpretation which allows women to be the sole leaders of churches is an innovation, and so more likely than not to be wrong.
• If we examine those groups where women have been allowed to lead churches, the first one of note is the heretical Montanist group (in many ways similar to some modern Pentecostalism). More modern examples are generally churches or provinces that are dying and where the authority of the Bible is respected less, which suggests it is an unwise route. I am not saying there is a causative influence in any direction; I am making an observation about the company we keep.
• As it stands, with women leading churches, there is an inconclusive Biblical argument that we should not (but strengthened by tradition), a strong cultural argument that we should and a strong argument from tradition that we should not. To my mind, the arguments against probably have it on balance.

My mind may of course change in the future.

David F Wells - God in the Wasteland

An interesting read, and one which got me thinking. Wells is at his best as a critic of culture, though sometimes he comes across as an old man who just prefers his way of doing things. He is, however, very good at turning a phrase, as is evident in the subtitle of the book - "The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams". I've put some more quotes from him here.

I've discussed the main theme of the book here (marketing the church), and spun off it in a direction which Wells hinted at but doesn't seem to have followed much here (are we all liberals now?).

He never really gets to the level of Schaeffer in providing a really big picture or in terms of getting doxological. Having said that, he is good as a cultural critic, and he does seem to get to the root of issues, but what he doesn't seem to do is dig around that root and see that actually there are good bits, and there are ways in which he is affected by the bad bits that he hadn't spotted. I think Wells's real value though is as a flagwaver - alerting people that something is up.

One of the things which makes him very good at that is his phrasing. Here are some more great quotes.

... our unflagging preoccupation with psychological wholeness as a substitute for holiness...

I suspect Wells would not like being cut up into soundbites, but I think the genre of soundbites, despite its many weaknesses, has some excellent qualities.

It is the conceit of modernity that the past is nothing more than a dead weight, that constant innovation is the only key to a better life and richer truth... And we persist in this delusion despite the fact that the lives of us moderns... are everywhere characterised by emptiness, superficiality, banality and destructiveness, whereas the lives of those who lived in previous ages and knew so much less than we do today were often comparatively more human, more serious, and more profound.

Or this, which I'm not sure about, but answers my questions as to why Wells is so anti-marketing...

Even when the machinery is hooked up to market specifically religious claims, it provokes little angst in postmodern quarters, for the machinery itself is perceived to render the marketed object harmless: it's just one more commodity in a crowded marketplace.

Are we all Liberals Now?

This is spinning off something David Wells wrote in God in the Wasteland. According to Wells, Schleiermacher (in many ways the founder of modern theological liberalism) argued that God was as we experienced him in ourselves. Wells argues that the church today has essentially followed Schleiermacher on that.

That got me thinking. What if the three main traditions today - evangelicalism, charismaticism and catholicism - complete with their weaknesses and so on, can all be explained by saying that they are all essentially liberal?

I'm not suggesting for one moment that those three traditions are mutually exclusive - there are certainly plenty of people who are within at least two of those traditions, or even all three.

What if the essence of modern catholicism is that it says that God is as we experience him in the Eucharist? Does that explain what is often the narrowness of approach, the insistence on doing things our way? Does it explain the doctrinal paucity and growing emphasis on inclusion? It seems to.

What if the essence of modern charismaticism is that it says that God is as we experience him in worship? Does that explain the uncritical acceptance of passing trends? Does it explain the way that language is often used suggesting that God is not experienced by people who worship in different ways? Does it explain the exaltation of the worship leader? It seems to.

What if the essence of modern evangelicalism is that it says that God is as we experience him in the Bible? Does that explain the narrowness of vision, the rejecting people who think differently even if they seem to base their opinions on Scripture? Does it explain the hugely cerebral nature of so much and the exaltation of the preacher or the Bible scholar? It seems to.

As Wells points out, God is bigger than we think he is. He is bigger than our experience of him. He is transcendent. And it seems that when we forget that, we are essentially idolaters. Maybe we are all liberals now. We certainly need to recover our sense of God's transcendence and holiness.

Advice for New Theology Students

A friend pointed me today to this article by John Frame (originally a booklet). It's pretty good advice for people starting theological college, especially in a directly Reformed context.

I've got to give advice to the new first years here. I'll probably tell them to spend as much time praying as they possibly can, to make their top priority learning to preach and to read Provan, Longman and Long's A Biblical History of Israel before going near any university stuff on the Old Testament.