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All Along the Watchtower

~ A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you … John 13:34

All Along the Watchtower

Author Archives: Geoffrey RS Sales

Material world

09 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Faith

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Catholicism, Christianity, Evangelism, Jesus, Materialism

IMG_0214

I was talking to a chap the other day after our usual Saturday morning preaching session in the local town. He wanted to know why we were bothering, science, he said, explained everything, so why did we need Jesus – all there was, he said, was what we saw. So, I asked him. did he think there were no radio waves? when had he last seen one – and yet his radio worked. How did he feel about electricity, where, again, he could see the results but not the thing itself. We live in a world where there are all sorts of things which we can’t see, but we can see evidence suggesting things we can’t see exist and matter – so why be so in denial about the spiritual?

We ended up having a coffee, as he seemed to want to talk further. It turned out he was in town buying a wedding present for his daughter who is getting married at the end of the month. As I’ve two daughters, we ended up chatting about modern youth – the way you do. His lass had just taken out a mortgage on a house with her future husband. There you go, I said, proof positive that there is more to this world than things we can measure and weigh. After all, I pointed out, his daughter was just making a huge and life-transforming decision on the basis of what – a feeling? She loved her fiance, and he loved her –  but what proof did they have of that – except their committing their lives to each other? What sort of scientific decision was that? Could they weigh and measure love? I assumed that her future husband thought his future wife was a beautiful  but again, where was the proof she really was? Had she been weighed, measured and compared against what society considers ‘beautiful’? Was there even a scientific consensus on what beauty was? Rubens, after all, liked his women to have plenty of curves, whilst modern fashion designers like the opposite. Yet, again, people make life-changing decisions without what scientists would call ‘evidence’. So why, when we allow so much leeway for non-scientific ‘evidence’ do we insist on it in the realm of the spiritual?

Our western society is in denial about the one thing to which all humans are heir – death. Where, for our ancestors, even for my parents generation, and certainly for their parents, death in the midst of life was common enough to have acquired whole sets of rituals – laying out in the parlour comes to my mind, and the wearing of black by widows – we are in denial. Funerals ‘celebrate’ the ‘life’, because so many believe that after that there is nothing. Life exists because it exists, we die, perhaps procreate, we consume, and we die. There is no ‘purpose’. Yet few people act as though that is the case, we act as though it matters what we do with our life, because we have an inbuilt sense that it does matter. But the moral codes which underpin our lives here in the West rest on Christian foundations of what is good and bad, and as we distance ourselves from that, it is by no means clear that the moral codes will survive.

Already we actually have discussions about at what stage it is right to kill and infant in the womb, not because its survival might threaten the life and health of the mother in a physical way, but because the woman has the ‘right to choose’. To a consumerist society that sound seductive. But we all ignore the fact that rights are not absolutes – we all have to negotiate with others about which ‘rights’ matter and where my rights end and their rights begin – how do we coexist? For this we have relied on shared values. But I am not sure that we any longer share as many as we imagine. If her right to choose means her partner or her baby in the womb have no rights, then that’s not an assertion of any moral principe, it is an exercise in power dynamics.

If we see no wider purpose in life except consuming and materialism, then it makes sense to concentrate on our own selfish needs. Babies cost money, children cost much more, why bother? Use your money on yourself. No doubt some way will be found to provide the next generation of workers to pay for your pension and to look after you in your care home.

The evidence is, it seems to me, that materialism produces an impoverished existence for most folk. It suits a society based on knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. At any rate, it was good to see the chap at our meeting on Sunday, and I hope he’ll come back. There’s more to life than we can see – as we can see by looking at it.

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Christianity and religion

08 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Bible, Faith

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Baptists, Catholic Church, Christianity, controversy, history, Jesus

jesus-facepalm

There are those who would draw a distinction between being a Christian and being religious. I think our friend Bosco is one such to judge from the comments he sometimes makes. As I understand it, they see religion as a set of codes designed to control people’s’ behaviour, and Christianity as something else – a personal encounter with Christ; what I don’t understand is the distinction. We do not encounter Christ in some historical and personal vacuum. The Bible itself is not simply the product of the Holy Spirit guiding the Evangelists, it is the product of an historical process, and we can trace pretty accurately the way in which it came to have the form most of us receive it in today. To be ignorant of that is to be ignorant of what, for Protestants, is the critical part of our faith; how can we really think that we have the knowledge to understand the whole of Scripture by our own efforts? Those who claim the Spirit inspires their understanding have a problem if that understanding is not that held by others who make the same claim. By all means, in this relativistic world, claim your ‘facts’ are preferable to my ‘facts’, but outside this world, some facts are just that – facts. Neither you, myself, nor anyone else we know encountered Jesus without knowing something about him, and if we know anything about him, we know something, even if it is something we dislike, about Christianity. It is typical of contemporary man to think he need know nothing about the past.

Are some Christians, as Jessica wrote last week, too judgmental? Yes, of course they are. Jesus knew better than anyone the way this temptation is one to which religious people can succumb. Historically, Christianity has always recognised this tendency, and ever and anon in its history, there have arisen movements to revolt against it – whether early monasticism, the Friars, the Lollards, the Reformation, the Jesuits, Baptists and so on and so forth, Christianity has evinced an ability to remind itself of its roots in repentance and amendment of life. We can, as modern man likes to, pretend that we are the first set of people to act in this way and to recognise that elements in the mainstream church or churches have become soft, complacent and lacking in vigour and evangelising zeal – but no one familiar with St Anthony, St Francis, John Wycliffe, Martin Luther, John Calvin or John and Charles Wesley is going to fall for such a perversion of our history.

All these men have in common one thing, a zeal for the Lord and a sense that the church in their time needed a shake up; being full of sinners, the Church usually does need shaking up. But the other thing they all have in common is that in time the movements they helped start began to exhibit the same symptoms they once criticised. The same is true of more modern Christian movements. It is arrogant folly of anyone to imagine that they can claim exclusive and new revelation, and worse for them not to realise the temptations such an attitude gives rise to.

Wherever I disagree with my Catholic friends, or my Anglican ones, I agree with them on much more. We are untied in a faith in a Christ we all see as the Second Person of the Trinity, and whom we read not simply through our own personal encounter, but through the encounters of many who have walked this way before us. We can take that illiterate contemporary view that somehow we are uniquely qualified to know the revelation of Jesus – or we can have the modest humility to learn from our ancestors. Religion is simply derived from a Latin word meaning to bind – and if we are not binding ourselves to Christ, then we do not deserve to be with those who were first called Christians in Antioch when Peter was the elder there.

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Bloodless persecution?

07 Tuesday Jun 2016

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Faith, Persecution

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Christianity, controversy, Free Speech

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/christian.street.preacher.arrested.again.in.scotland/34157.htm

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/christian.street.preacher.arrested.again.in.scotland/34157.htm

It behoves us to take care n our use of words. As anyone experiencing the truly dreadful referendum campaign in the UK can bear witness, constant scaremongering just devalues the currency, and we all know what happened to the boy who cried wolf when the wolf finally turned up. So, to talk about the persecution of Christians in the West when many of our fellow Christians are losing their lives in Africa, China and the Middle East, is something to be done with extreme care. Nasty words in the press and a general lack of respect are not to be spoken of in the same breath, but, that does not mean there is a not something akin to a bloodless persecution going on.

I have detailed on this blog in the past several cases where street preachers have been arrested by over-officious policemen, and we know that in addition to those Catholic adoption agencies which have closed rather than comply with the Government’s drive on same-sex marriage and adoption, many simply changed their names and went along with it – that is of course in the Apostolic spirit – of Judas Iscariot that is. If Christians do not accept the new definition of marriage and do not comply with these laws, then they have to expect to take the consequences; but since we are not to comply with unjust laws which contravene the word of God, we have not choice. That is one form of bloodless persecution.

It is, naturally, fine for ageing rock stars to refuse to provide their services to areas where they disagree with local government policy on what the Americans call ‘bathrooms’; but woe betide a baker who exercises the same freedom in his business. While we might think ‘hate speech’ should be banned (as it happens, I don’t, but I am in a small minority, it seems, of believers in real free speech), we should be careful since preaching the Gospel can be so defined. We have already had one Student Christian Union banned from campus because it offends gay people, and doubtless, given ‘generation snowflake’s‘ notoriously thin skin, there will be more such. Before we all concur in banning ‘extremism’ it would be as well to remember that the ‘thought police’ (as one police chief has described it) have already shown an interest in those street preachers I referred to earlier. There is no agreed definition of either hate speech or extremism, and anyone who thinks they will not be applied to Christians spreading the Good News is living in a fantasy world.

Many Christians will no doubt do what some of those Catholic agencies did, and quietly go along with the new order of things, but the demographics in Europe give cause for concern. ‘Low fertility rates’ (aka contracepting and aborting your way out of existence) see our population falling are bound to see a decline in the number of Christians and a rise in the number of Muslims. But the optimistic figures from the respected Pew Research Centre from just over a year ago now look ludicrously optimistic with the influx of refugees into the Continent in the past year. So, we can hardly expect the climate to improve with regard to Christianity.

All we can do is to continue to live according to the Gospel and spread it as best we can. But I think my grandchildren’s generation may pass a severe verdict on our stewardship.

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Dwell in peace

20 Friday May 2016

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Anti Catholic, Blogging, Faith

≈ 40 Comments

Tags

Christianity, controversy, love, Peace, sin

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This place is, as far as I know, unique in that it does not confine its exploration of Christianity to one church, or one part of one church. It is remarkable that it has survived for four years, but latterly some of the internecine strife which has been such a marked feature of the Catholic blogosphere since Pope Francis became Pope has seeped in.  It is inevitable. For a long time, indeed since before the Second vatican Council (and long before) there have been strains within the Catholic Church between what in other contexts would be called modernisers and conservatives. Both sides have used language about the other which resembles that used by the early Church Fathers when confronting those they held to be heretics – given what both sides think is at stake, that’s inevitable. It looks ugly, but no one familiar with these sorts of arguments can be surprised by it. Holding together a Church which has in it German theologians like Cardinal Kasper and some of the more traditionalist African bishops is not, as the Anglicans discovered long ago, an easy task. Until the election of Francis, conservative and traditional elements could, if not rest easy, at least think that the worst effects of Vatican II had been moderated, and that some of the issues the liberals agitated so strongly for were settled – no women priests, no communion for the divorced for example. Francis, an old man in a hurry if ever there was one, has unsettled such a consensus. He has emboldened the ageing sixties radicals, and has tended to dismay the conservatives. If anything is clear about the man, it is that this is deliberate – he’s a Hegelian, he believes that out of thesis and antithesis there will emerge a synthesis. I wish him luck but think he’ll need it because the Truth is not to be found in some triangulation exercise, but in Christ Jesus.

These things are a matter for the Roman Catholic Church, and I bring them up only because they have begun to intrude here. My own views are conservative on matters of doctrine and social policy; they were when I was a young man, they are now. But they have changed. When I was young I firmly believed what I had been taught and what I had read, which was that the Roman Church was the great whore of Babylon and the Pope the anti-Christ. It was not that I had come to this conclusion by myself, it was the product of the environment in which I was raised, and in my grandfather’s house in Belfast there were a great many books and tracts which ‘proved’ these things with ‘irrefutable proofs’; nor were such ideas novel, they went back hundreds of years; they were part of the tradition in which I was reared. They were returned, and with interest, by the few Roman Catholics with whom I came into contact. I was assured by them that their church was the only road to salvation and that like all “proddies”, I would be frying in hell once I had died. Then, in my mid twenties, what had been a growling background noise became something more serious. I remember being in Belfast fro Christmas 1968 and finding myself in place which seemed to be falling into some kind of civil war. The Catholics, who had long been discriminated against, found leaders who convinced them that violence was the answer to their problems – and if most Catholics were not part of that violence, they did not oppose it. Those, like my own family, who had relatives who had fled north from the narrow theocracy of de Valera’s Ireland, were determined to meet fire with fire. And so it was that two sets of people who confessed Christ was king, bombed each other, shot each other, gave refuge to the bombers and the shooters. There were many other reasons for the “Troubles”, but those who now argue religion was only an excuse were not there – it was the underlying narrative – both sides felt that if the other triumphed, their tradition would be extinguished. After my grandparents died in the early 1970s, I stopped going back very often; it was too painful.

In the meantime I had the great good fortune to end up teaching in a place where another new, young colleague, was a sort of Catholic I had never met before. He understood much about my own tradition and though a Catholic, had read Luther and Calvin, and had a fondness for Spurgeon’s sermons, and could quote parts of The Pilgrim’s Progress by heart (he was an English teacher after all, and that was a time when we knew huge amounts of poetry by heart, but he knew much prose too). In talking to me about these things, there was in him nothing but the desire of a Christian to explore the fullness of how people had come to know the Lord. Such an attitude led me to seek to find out more about his church. The witness he gave simply gave the lie to so much I had been brought up to believe. He talked with knowledge and humility about his Church, not defending the indefensible. He was the first person I ever knew who mentioned child abuse. He had something of the prophet about him even then, and said that the day would come when this would damage his beloved Church; it was, he said the joint product of satan attacking his church, and of men who worshipped their church rather than the Lord, thinking that somehow it was better to cover these things up for the good of the church, than to expose and deal with them as a good Christian ought. He drew parallels with what I was experiencing when I went back to Belfast. Men, he used to say, sadly, invested too much in institutions and too little in Him whom they worshipped. That truth came to me in many ways across a long career in school mastering.

We can all become over-invested in our own vision of our own church, and to the extent that we can say bitter things about those in our church who think otherwise. We can, as they used (and still do in some parts of) in Belfast, to embrace a history we did not create and come to embody its evils even as we celebrate its glories; nothing man touches is free from pitch, and we forget that at our spiritual peril.

And here, you may be glad to know, endeth the sermon. To those who have no idea why I am giving it, I envy you. To those who do, I ask only one thing, that you ponder it and see if there is anything in it – it behoves old men to dream dreams, after all.

May the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Amen

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Women elders?

18 Wednesday May 2016

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Bible, Faith

≈ 44 Comments

Tags

Christianity, controversy, Elders, Women elders, women priests

art5bm

Catching up on the posts here, I noticed that Jessica recently referred to ‘churchianity’. It’s an interesting concept – and a useful one. One difficulty faced by anyone who values tradition is the question of how old that tradition is? The other question to ask is whether that tradition is more important to a person than the plain words of Scripture? These are hard questions to ask, and even harder to answer.

So, Jessica told us yesterday about the history of women deacons in the early Church, and entirely as she predicted, the comments were all about women priests. Here’s the puzzle to me – why the tremendous effort to either avoid dealing with her evidence, or to address its implications now? I say this knowing that I belong to a congregation which does not have female elders and has no intention of having them. But then we do not take a sacramental view of the role of the elder and base ourselves firmly on Paul’s teaching in 1 Timothy 2:8-15. 

None of this is to deny women important roles in our church, but it is to say that the Bible imposes two restrictions on the ministry of women: they are not to teach Christian doctrine to men and they are not to exercise authority directly over men in the church. These restrictions are permanent, authoritative for the church in all times and places and circumstances as long as men and women are descended from Adam and Eve. If we look at 1 Timothy 2:11-12 we can see what Paul was getting at in terms of restrictions. He is all in favour of women learning, but not in favour of them teaching men or having authority over them. There is no restriction on women doing other things in the church, or even in leading Bible studies classes for the children, but we hold that the exercise of the authority of an elder is reserved to men.

We can, and many do, take the view that in such matters the Bible is culturally conditioned, but where does that end? It is precisely that argument which has been effective in overthrowing, for some, the clear Biblical prohibition of homosexual practice. If we want the church to be conformed to the world, then this is the way to go – though this is the opposite of what Paul says in Romans 12:2. Of course, it is more comfortable to ignore Paul – but he who wants comfort should not embrace the way of the Cross.

To conclude, no one is saying that women cannot teach men per se. To say that would be to make a nonsense of the many times we read of women giving men information they needed. So, it was not wrong for Rhoda to tell everyone that Peter was at the door (Acts 12:14). It was not wrong for women to relay commands to men (Matthew 28:10). It was not wrong for women to tell the apostles that the Lord had risen (Mark 16:9).  It was not wrong for the Samaritan woman to tell people what Jesus had done (John 4:29). It was not wrong for Priscilla and Aquila to work together to teach Apollos (Acts 18:26). It was not wrong for Philip’s daughters (Acts 21:8-9) to tell their inspired messages to men. It was not wrong for a woman to teach her husband by example (1 Peter 3:1-2). Women were allowed certain sorts of teaching from women – but not that they should have the authority of an elder. The functions of authoritative teaching, rebuking and leadership of an elder were confined to men. That leaves much room for women, and I can see no reason why they cannot serve as deacons.

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Have mercy?

15 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Blogging, Faith

≈ 49 Comments

Tags

Christianity, controversy

 

Pope Francis 54

Discussions on the Internet tend to follow certain lines, and sometimes, even when that is not where they start, it is where they go. Thus, when, as she did recently, as I have done more recently, Jess or myself write about the importance of love and mercy, there is a tendency to meet it with something like the following formulation: ‘It is not mercy or love to tell a drunk that he is not a drunk.’ Now, since, re-read as I will what she has written and what I have written, I cannot find any suggestion we are saying any such thing, this response must come from some other area of debate. I suspect it comes from arguing with those who do seem to think that you don’t have to repent – though I have to confess I am not familiar with Christians who argue this position. At any rate, not being of that persuasion, and being as ready to resort to sharp words as the next sinner, I do confess I can react to my words being so characterised with some acerbity.

Now it may be that some pastors/priests are offering what my good friend Servus describes here:

the wellness of the patient is not treated with placebos and telling the patient that they can continue on as they are

Here again, I can only think that he must have come across priests and pastors who do this; not having done so myself in my much narrower world, I can only wonder at anyone who is a Christian minister of any sort who would say to the sinner ‘carry on that’s fine’. Again, I have no experience of such a thing. If it really does happen – that is if it is not a case of misreading or misunderstanding what a pastor says, then that is deplorable; but I should reread several times before I could be convinced that I was not misunderstanding what was being said. In my many years as a Christian, I have never come across this phenomenon.

On the subject of mercy, Servus has written eloquently that:

A priest should show mercy but like any medical doctor it would be malpractice to tell a diabetic that he can continue to drink a milk shake and eat a pizza anytime he has the uncontrollable urge to do so. The patient may think this an act of mercy but it is not

Again, if Catholic priests are doing this sort of thing, I’m sorry to hear it. If this is a reference, in part, to the heated issue in the RCC of divorced people receiving communion, then I can see it from more than one side. I can see that a man in the pew might be scandalised if a fellow catholic he knew to be divorced was receiving communion, especially if he read Paul’s warnings about receiving unworthily this way. But I can also see that the priest might know a thing or two which would not be common knowledge and might have come to the conclusion that it was a real act of mercy to allow communion. If the RCC does not allow such pastoral discretion, well, that’s a matter for it, but my point is that what the censorious fellow in the pews is not seeing or knowing may have a significant bearing on that person receiving communion; so perhaps the censorious fellow might bear that in mind. Moreover, is he is the right frame of mind to receive communion if he is sitting there seething about another fellow’s supposed sin? My point here is simple, sometimes we have imperfect knowledge and we should, perhaps be more willing to refrain from judging our peers and our pastors? No doubt, as one always can, one could find texts to justify our indignation. But I am unsure of the quality of ‘love’ which makes one censorious of others when one lacks full knowledge – not least when it presupposes the pastor is resiling from his duties.

I can see how a cursory reading of the recent document from the Pope could be read, theoretically, as offering the sort of ‘placebo’ of which Servus speaks. But I think that is at best a partial reading. What I see (and the old boy and I are about the same age) is a vastly experienced pastor, used to dealing with the mess that is many people’s lives, trying to pass on his experience, and trying to help his flock in their daily struggle to live a real Christian life. So, on that remarriage/divorce issue, he wrote: ‘most people in difficult or critical situations do not seek pastoral assistance since they do not find it sympathetic, realistic or concerned for individual cases’. No use responding that’s not your experience – unless you have the experience of a Bishop or a Pope. The experienced and merciful pastor is trying bring some of those people back by creating a frame of mind where they will not feel their church is like that with them – and doing so whilst, as he wrote: ‘declining to present a new set of general rules’. Is that not true mercy at work? As he puts it:

… it follows that “without detracting from the evangelical ideal, there is a need to accompany with mercy and patience the eventual stages of personal growth as these progressively appear”, making room for “the Lord’s mercy, which spurs us on to do our best”. I understand those who prefer a more rigorous pastoral care which leaves no room for confusion.

But I sincerely believe that Jesus wants a Church attentive to the goodness which the Holy Spirit sows in the midst of human weakness, a Mother who, while clearly expressing her objective teaching, “always does what good she can, even if in the process, her shoes get soiled by the mud of the street”

The voice of experience tempering the theorist – sounds like Christianity to me.

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Rules and Regulations

14 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Bible, Blogging, Faith

≈ 129 Comments

Tags

Christianity, controversy

redeemed-and-forgiven

Irony has always amused me. Yesterday C put up a quotation from Merton and the comment stream went on to illustrate what Merton was saying about conservatives. It was a caricature said my friend Servus – reading his and other comments I found myself wondering – and not whether it was a caricature.

The reaction to this latest Papal pronouncement, like that to the last one, and to anything he says, is a reminder, if one were needed, why some of us stand in wonder at the Catholic Church. Do we really need 264 pages on the joy of love which prompts outpourings of bile? I’m sure that if your mindset is one which goes to rule and regulations, it must be really irritating to have someone going on about love and making exceptions. I read a book daily in which a fellow called Jesus does this and a group of people who know every letter of the law keep condemning him. But it didn’t matter, the mind-set that it is the law and its letter that counts, and that, as I read somewhere, ‘Canon Law is not for the fainthearted’, won through. Across time, ‘repent and believe’ found itself needing huge compendia of documents and expert interpreters – more or less what had happened with Judaism by Jesus’ day, and, of course, exactly what he found most objectionable about it. How does this happen? It clearly speaks to a profound need in some people, and I can imagine that to such people, it must be profoundly frustrating when instead of getting a cut and dried, black and white answer from somewhere deep in the compendium, they get a leader who keeps talking about love and mercy without making it clear that the former involves sinners being called out on their sin, and the latter involves making sure that they are really sorry before forgiving them. For me, and for many, however, the problem is that Jesus did not do this. He was, from their point of view, rightly castigated by those who thought it a key part of their faith; but there is no sign Jesus thought they were correct.

Institutions have rules – which may be part of how Christianity came to be encumbered with so many pages of documentation. To query the need for all of this is not (though it will be seen as) tantamount to saying anything goes. Christ’s teaching does not amount to a free pass, but it is possible to overdo the terms and conditions – not least considering Grace and Faith are free at point of acceptance. Paul’s most profound letter, Romans, has fewer than 8000 words. I have no idea how many are in the Catechism, or various Protestant confessions of faith. My own faith is easily summed up. I believe Jesus is the promised Messiah, the Son of God, and that he died to save me from my sins. I find the New Testament a good guide for life and try to follow it. When I was a young man and keen to tell others what they should be doing, I could bang on for hours about the Westminster Confession and the rules. One day I stopped, and simply concentrated on trying to conform my behaviour to that of Jesus as often as I could, and when I failed (as I do every day) I apologised and tried to do better next time. I felt no urgent need to use a conduit to Jesus, as he kindly told me I could talk to the Father directly. If Mary and the saints want to pray for me, I never reject a prayer, but I don’t think they have some special influence on God. I don’t need a long exhortation to tell me to love my wife and be faithful to her, neither do I need convoluted reasoning to tell me that people have complicated private lives and that the best thing to do is to approach them as Jesus did. That adulterous woman was clearly guilty under the Law – the Pharisees wouldn’t have bothered bring her if there was a legal loophole – and in the Bible I use she never said ‘sorry’ and Jesus never said ‘I’m only not going to condemn you if you say sorry’. No. he said he did not condemn her and told her to go away and sin no more. It is much harder for me to try to follow that example than to wait for those who have sinned against me to apologise; so I try the harder route – it is good for me. I am ever mindful God loved me when I was dead through sin, and in my sin he found me and saved me; I feel a sense of obligation to at least try to imitate what I have experienced from him when I deal with those who have trespassed against me. That Lord’s Prayer stuff – simple, but hard for sinful men and women.

I do what I can to help the widows and the orphans, I do what I can to spread the Good News we are saved by faith in the Lord Jesus. Those who feel this last needs huge compendia and complex systems of laws which require experts to penetrate the arcana, will feel that way. But the older I get and the closer I come to meeting my maker, the less need I feel for that sort of thing – and the more conscious I am of the overriding summary that love of God and of neighbour are the fruits of faith. For the rest, well, if you subscribe to complex systems, you are always going to get lawyerly types on all sides arguing over the precise meaning of x, and how it fits in with precedent. I simply do not see the Lord Jesus saying that was how it would be for his people.

It may really be the case that Peter and the apostles really thought that what the Great Commission needed was great long lists of does and don’ts and great systems of rules and regulations, with terms and conditions over which clever men could argue endlessly – or it may be that across two thousand years the same set of instincts which led the Jews to over complicate and define and to know the letter but not the spirit of the law has prevailed – as it seems to in our fallen nature. Jesus has forgiven me – but his yoke is light, and he did not want heavy weights attached loaded on those who follow him. That’s all in those fours short gospels. The sabbath, after all, was made for man, man was not made for the Sabbath. Perhaps it is just that as one ages, what really matters becomes ever plainer?

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Fight the good fight?

06 Wednesday Apr 2016

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Church/State, Faith

≈ 35 Comments

Tags

Christianity, Church & State, controversy, Faith

Pope-Benedict-XVI

There’s been a lot of comment here about anti-intellectualism and modernism. It seems to me profoundly anti-intellectual to think it is even possible to reject wholesale the predominant mode of thought in our Western Society. I should think the notion that it is possible to reconstruct one’s mindset to align it with that of someone in a pre-modern era itself a construct made possible by modern thinking. I have a friend who did convert to Eastern Orthodoxy because, after reading all he could on it and following internet discussion boards he decided it was the closest to the authentic voice of the Christian Church founded by Christ. He had to be rebaptised, since his new Church did not recognise his Catholic baptism. He struggled with the ethnic aspects, and when he said, on one of those internet boards that he did not think it possible to unthink his Western intellectual heritage, he found himself rebuked by several men who said they had done just that. Examining the exchange, it seems to me like a rush to see who could close his mind the most. It struck me as a bit of shame that group did not follow its own logic and give up the Internet, which was surely the product of the Enlightenment thinking they were rejecting; they could all have retired to the cave of Adullam together and followed the shadows on the wall. They would, not doubt, have been the purest remnant possible.

It found myself, as I do here, wondering at what point Christianity so lost its self-confidence that it found it necessary to reject several hundred years of thinking and opt for some ‘Golden Age’ view of itself? In its journey through the ages, Christianity has shown itself remarkably adept at finding in the thinking of all ages what is of God, and adapting it to God’s purposes. This business of insisting on not heeding voices of reform and of standing on the past is particularly relevant as we mark the 500th anniversary of Luther nailing his theses to the door of the Cathedral (which of course he never actually did). If you look at what he was condemning, much of it most of us, would condemn. If Christians were, as seems to have been the case, being told they could buy time off purgatory by buying indulgences, then I expect our Catholic friends here would say that they were not being told what their Church truly taught; yet that was what they were being told. I mention that not to get into a discussion on it, but to show that reform is a constant necessity in any organisation led by fallen humans.

Do I reject ‘nationalism’, no, I don’t, because I reject the notion that it is inevitably association with atheist thought and anti-clerical; it was in nineteenth century Europe, and it was in reaction to that Pope Pius condemned it. Neither do I reject ‘liberalism’ – and I doubt anyone does. It gives us freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and if any Church finds these things a threat, it needs to ask itself what Truth has to fear from either of these things? In our time the real danger to the Faith comes from those who believe in neither and wish the enthrone a narrow, secularist, anti-religious viewpoint as the norm.

The Enlightenment took many forms, not one, and it may be that some of the things to which it gave birth severely frightened religious establishments then, and now. To think we can stop the process of change or turn back the clock is wishful thinking; what we could, if we engaged, do, is Christianise that process – as we have in the past and will do so again. For those who wonder how this might be done, I highly recommend reading the encounter between Jurgen Habermas and Benedict XVI – a summary of which can be found here. It may, of course, be significant that that discussion was not being carried on the Anglosphere with its unfortunate tradition of entrenched opposition between reason and faith, and that the atheist view was being taken up by a genuine intellectual as opposed to Richard Dawkins.

Modern and modernist ideas are part of the air we breathe, and to think we can unthink ideas is the sort of conservatism which gets conservatism a bad name. By all mean defend the last ditch – but there is a reason it smells – it is full of dead matter. We fight the good fight in faith, confident that if Truth is with us, it will prevail. If we don’t believe that, perhaps we should find a cave on Athos and wait for the end – and leave the struggle to those who don’t think that all valuable contributions to human thought stopped at some point in the nineteenth century?

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A mad, mad world

28 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Anti Catholic, Faith, Islam, Politics

≈ 54 Comments

Tags

Christianity, sin

Persecuted-Middle-East-Christians

Appeasement is not a word to be used lightly by anyone of my generation – we saw its results in our childhood, with the bombed out cities and the austerity, but it is hard to think of a better term to describe the decision by a County Court Judge that a Pakistani man cannot take his son to church because it upsets his mother, who is a Muslim. The man himself is a ‘non-practising’ Muslim, but found after his divorce that the local Christian community embraced him and his son, who likes going to the leisure centre run by a local church. But his ex-wife ‘insisted that their son could “become confused” if exposed to religions other than Islam – a notion the boy’s father rejects’. The Judge accepted her argument and the father cannot take his son to the church or its leisure centre.

Clearly we have here only one side of the argument, but let us look for a moment at the idea that the boy could ‘become confused’ if exposed to other religions than Islam. Perhaps the mother should take the child back to Pakistan, where, as events in Lahore this morning show, the Taliban have their own way of ensuring that no one gets confused by other religions – going to the trouble of planting a bomb in a park to target Christian children and their parents celebrating Easter. Meanwhile, in Glasgow, a Muslim shopkeeper was stabbed to death by a Pakistani man hours after posting a message on his Facebook page wishing his ‘beloved Christian nation’ a happy Easter. The man’s family are now in hiding, fearful of their lives. This seems one of the results of not allowing children to know about other religions. So how thoughtful of the Judge to ensure that another child will not be exposed to disturbing ideas such as tolerance, ecumenism and religious freedom.

And yes, before we get all hot under the collar, let us remember those within our own churches who are not that far away, mentally, from these people. I saw, in Belfast, what happens when Christian children are brought up in enclosed communities where they are taught that it is a sin to depart in any way from the strict letter of whatever law it is the church leaders set down. I remember talking to a Catholic boy when I was about 12, and he said he really shouldn’t be talking to me, because I was a ‘proddy’ and was going to go to hell – Father Flannery had told him that, and Father was a saintly man who had ensured his sister got sent off to the Magdalene laundries for the sin of getting herself pregnant out of marriage. I got a ticking off from the local Minister for talking to the Catholic boy, who was a spawn of Satan and a follower of the whore of Babylon. If I fail to share the rose-tinted view of the past of some here, it is because that sectarian past was far from rose-tinted. That little Catholic boy grew up to plant bombs which killed people we both knew, and but for the Grace of God, I could have gone the same way.

Like that poor little Pakistani boy, we were kept away from children who worshipped differently than we did; like that Pakistani shopkeeper, we were berated if we wished a Catholic ‘happy Easter’ – and yes, God help us – like those Pakistani Taliban, I knew people who called themselves Christians who took up arms to kill others in ‘the cause’. If I am wary of legalism in religion, it is because I have seen where it can lead. On the rare occasions I go to Belfast nowadays, I am amazed at its modernity – it seems like any other city elsewhere – until you to some of the places where it isn’t.

Quite how it can be that any Christian can genuinely believe that Jesus would be in favour of treating others who confess his name badly because they don’t do as I do, I fail to grasp any more. when I was a young man, I was taught that we, alone, had the right way, and that it was an act of Christian love to tell others they were wrong, and to make them see things our way. It was, I came to realise, the mind set of narrow sectarianism, which was so far from the love of Christ, that it had done what Paul forbade, it placed salvation on the back of the strict letter of the law and not faith. What was it we were so frightened of that we wanted to insist on the sound of our own voices and drown out those of others? Where had Jesus said so? The one time he resorted to violence was driving the moneylenders out of the Temple – to listen to some of my preachers in my youth, you’d have thought it was his main activity.

I hope the story about the little boy is exaggerated, and if not, that common sense prevails. If we appease those who wish to destroy us, if we forget our common humanity and insist on our identity as a Catholic, a Protestant or a Muslim, then we risk going further down a road which, having been down, I do not recommend.

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Justice for the Vicar of Stiffkey

22 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Anglicanism, Faith, Satire

≈ 78 Comments

Davidson_with_Douglas

I see the Church of England has thrown Bishop Bell to the wolves – one allegation of sexual misconduct with a child and he’s busted. That’ll teach anyone to stand out for their principles and oppose area bombing in a war where to do so singled him out for abuse from the press – best stick with the consensus – after all, what else is the C of E for? If we’re house-clearing for the C of E, it’s clearly time now for it to make a handsome apology to Harold Davidson, the Vicar of Stiffkey, who didn’t, it seems do anything more than try to rescue prostitutes and fall foul of a bad-tempered old Bishop of Norwich.

Despite being based out on the North Norfolk coast where he was supposed to be ministering to the locals, Davidson decided his real calling was in Soho, where he became known as the ‘Prostitutes’  Padre’. When he was eventually charged with committing ‘immoral acts’ in 1932, the Press had a field day. On the one side were a set of charges which showed that, at the least, Davidson had behaved unwisely and gained himself a reputation as a ‘sex pest’ in Soho where, as we would now surely admit, he had simply been trying to understand the lives of the local sex workers? But to the press of the day this was not clear, any more than it was to the Consistory Court, which took the judgmental view that a photo of the rector with a young woman showing her bare backside to the photographer suggested he was guilty as charged; how judgmental of them? Perhaps she was cold and he was just clothing the naked?

Poor old Davidson, after his defrocking, protested his innocence and raised money to pay his legal bills by exhibiting himself in shows at Blackpool in a barrel, and later, at Skegness, posing with lions in a cage. When the inevitable happened, Davidson went to a version of a martyr’s death; he should surely be recognised as a martyr to the cause of progressive Christianity?

It more than time that the C of E reexamined this scandalous miscarriage of justice. It’s pretty clear that some of the girls were lying, and there’s every reason for the Church to reexamine the case, admit it got it wrong, and do justice to poor old Davidson. It may, of course, be that he actually believed in the literal truth of the Resurrection, but that was not uncommon then, even in the C of E, and it should be overlooked in favour of the fact he was a victim of persecution by Norfolk toffs and narrow-minded clergymen. He was a victim of prejudice, and even if he was not up with the latest thinking that there is nothing from which sex workers need rescuing, he had a clear leaning to the poor and needy.

Who are we to judge? If a Rector based in Norfolk wants to spend his week ends in Soho helping sex workers, who’d be narrow-minded enough to say he’d be better off doing his day job? It is another example of the need for historical justice – don’t know about ‘Rhodes must fall’, but ‘Harold must rise’ seems to be the way to go.

 

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