D.I.V.O.R.C.E.

16 Wednesday Sep 2015

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The Pope has decided to get with the divorce culture (traddy-Catholic blogs & idiots in the media), the Pope has decided to help Catholics pastorally (his supporters) the Pope has moved the church toward accepting divorce (liberal Catholics) – and so we can go round the circle to the point at which liberals, traddys and media ignoramuses meet. Divorce is the scourge of the age, and, along with the horror that is abortion, a clear sign that the devil is at work amongst us. I doubt how many people, even those in churches fully understand what they are embarking on – which is why I’d guess that most Catholics who end up divorced would get an annulment on the grounds they didn’t know what they were entering into. Preparation for marriage in many places is next to non-existent, and with so many folk living together before marriage, something of a formality where it does exist.

This age is not one which values working hard at something. Young folk seem to me to be fed a narrative of romantic love and sexual satisfaction which are just about bound to lead to disillusionment. Heightened feelings never stay at a high level, and if you want to be loved always, get a dog. Real people can’t always be as attentive as we’d like, and we can’t always be as appealing as we think we are. It’s easy to mistake a need for company for being in love; it’s easy to mistake lust for love; feelings are a bad guide to the long-term – they change, and we do. Mrs S and I have now been together for more than half a century, and that’s required the patience of a saint from her, and a certain amount of self-knowledge from me; we have little signals which tell us both when one of us is pushing the other a bit much, and sometimes we miss them and end up being cross with each other. But after this amount of time, we’re as close to one flesh as two folk can be – when she needs, as she has until recently, full-time care, then that’s my job. Sure, I’m happy for professional ‘carers’ to help, but I care for her because we have memories going back fifty odd years, and a love we’ve shared, which has gone from being a set of feelings to something so deep in us both that it is part of us.

But we belong to a generation and a type of folk where, when you got married, you knew it was for life. It never occurred to either of us that, when things got tough, as they did from time to time, that we could quit. I’ll not say it never occurred to either of us to stray, as I can speak only for myself, but if the thought crossed either of our minds, it was to be dismissed, though, if I am honest with myself, it never actually occurred to me; she’s the perfect woman, and I knew from the moment I met her that she was the one for me; I felt, and still feel, so lucky to have her that I’ve never been tempted to push that luck! That six months of marriage preparation we went through was a good one – it asked us to think very seriously about what we were about to do. Now, of course, there’s never a guarantee that attaches to anything – but as Mrs S and I approach yet another wedding anniversary, I’m sure that the fact we’re both Christians who pray about our marriage, and see in it a time of trial as well as a cause of celebration, has helped. The fact that we never considered that word which forms the title of this post also helped – you work stuff out when you don’t have an escape clause.

Only I am saved?

15 Tuesday Sep 2015

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

≈ 65 Comments

Tags

Baptists, Christianity, controversy, sin

There’s no more pointless exercise than trawling across the internet claiming to be saved. If you think you are, you think you are. If, as one person here does, you then make the claim to know who else is, then you take on yourself what God alone knows; best of luck with that. Christ died for us all. Not all of us will receive him. If you feel a personal assurance that you are saved, that’s good; what’s bad is claiming to know that others are not saved. We are his sheep, we know the sound of his voice. We are not the shepherd and nowhere in Scripture are we told we, the sheep, know which bleats mean the other sheep are saved. Sheep are none too bright, and any sheep who thinks he knows such things is dumber than the average sheep.

I first committed my life to God at the age of 11. Before that, I knew who he was, but had no assurance that he knew who I was. At that age I came to know him as my personal Saviour. But that assurance is not unconditional – and can’t be. we see in Acts and John’s letters saved people, people brought to Jesus by Paul and John, lapsing and falling away. We can, as some do, say it shows they weren’t ‘really’ saved, but for me it’s better and more accurate to say they have fallen away. If folk fall away and decide to commit adultery, then we can’t say it has no effect on their salvation – any more than we can say that if they turn from their sin and repent, God will not receive them as a Prodigal. We underestimate His mercy, just as we overestimate our own position if we think being saved means we can’t be tempted to fall away. Satan likes us to think we can’t be touched in that state he can reach us.

A recent theme here has been that of this place as one where Christians can interact with each other, sometimes robustly, and sometimes helpfully, without in any sense compromising their beliefs. I have come to accept that the Catholic Church has sets of beliefs it has developed from Apostolic times, and those who have a problem with that need to do more reading. My own reading and praying don’t lead me to think that its way of doing things is the only way, and it no longer preaches its version of the ‘I’m saved’ thing – which was the ‘no salvation outside the Church’. It now seems to say that God alone knows where the boundaries of his church are – which is a good thing. A shame, then, that some rabid folk on my side of this debate can’t get off their high horse and admit the same. The old Pope only says he’s right in certain areas, the old Prods think they are infallible on everything – none of us are that.

Across a long life, I’ve moved from the intolerance that comes from being relieved that I’m saved, to the tolerance that comes from the Holy Ghost leading me to see that God’s mercy and wisdom are wider and deeper than anything my sinful self can conceive. If you’re saved, good. But don’t go round telling others they aren’t – you may end up with a nasty shock. I reckon old Dives thought he was a shoo-in.

Endings?

03 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Faith

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Baptists, Christianity

Last Friday I went down to the outskirts of Manchester for the funeral of an old friend – in your mid 70s it happens with increasing frequency; at this rate I’ll need to update my old black suit, as it’s had a deal of usage over the last five years. When Mrs S asked whether the expense could be justified, I pointed out they could always bury me in it, and I know she’d not want me to look scruffy at the undertakers; this, she agreed was a very good point. Mind you, the trouble of going to the shops for one may yet defeat that objective.

I first met Frederick (he hated being called Fred) at school, and we stayed in touch across many years. He was brought up a Congregationalist, and I was a Baptist. I daresay that the theologians, had any been interested, could have told you the difference, but to me the similarities were marked, and as I looked around the Masonic Hall where we had the wake (tea and coffee only, Frederick could not abide the demon drink and left firm instructions there was to be none at his funeral), it occurred to me that it was more than Frederick we would soon be burying – a whole culture would soon be lost. It’s not one the anthropologists seem to have studied, but someone ought to at least outline its features.

The first thing that would have struck an observer would have been the age of the congregation. Leaving out Frederick’s grandsons and great grandsons, the majority were over 65, and all from within a fifty mile radius of where Frederick had lived his entire 76 years; in fact, it’d be more accurate to say that most of them lived within walking distance of the chapel, of which they’d been members since before it became the United Reformed Church. It was a whole culture; what the clever folk would call an ‘ecosystem’. Let me explain.

As lads, Frederick and I would go to Sunday school (different ones at different chapels), and we’d join the same cub troop and scout troop, which met at the Congregationalist Hall (because that was bigger and posher than our hall). We’d go to Bible study classes, and in the school holidays the Scout troop would go away to North Wales or the Wirral, and we’d spend a week under canvas doing our ‘badges’ and generally having fun fording streams, building camp fires, climbing trees and trying not to kill each other by food poisoning. For both of us, as for our contemporaries, chapel was more than a part of our life, it was the weft and warp of it, it was built in to all we did. He met his future wife at a chapel outing, and we both married in chapel – him my best man at my wedding in my chapel, me his best man at his in his, as it were. Our moral and ethical code came from Chapel, and woe betide anyone who flouted it – a clip round the ear was the minimum tariff exacted from us for minor infringements. Frederick left school at 14 and went into the mill to learn how to become an engineer, I stayed on with a county scholarship and ended up at what folk then called ‘The University’. But as I ended up teaching just across the Pennines, we stayed in touch. He was godfather to my eldest, and I reciprocated.

Congregationalism was like Frederick, and he like it: understated, seemingly unemotional – repressed folk would call it now, and modest to a fault. ‘well done lad!’ was about the highest praise anyone could be given, and ‘not a bad effort at all’ was very high praise indeed. The outsider would have observed little talk of God, save at chapel, but that was simply because he was in our minds constantly – he was our father and we prayed to him, and we talked to him in prayer always; we’d no more think of singling him out for special mention than we would our own dads – it wasn’t the done thing.

One of the grandchildren, to whom I got talking, asked how his granddad could reconcile there being a God with the hard life he and his grandma had led – by his standards there was not much in the way of material possessions, and after the mill closed Frederick had struggled for a while, though the family never wanted; they never wanted because the chapel made sure there was always food on the table. When Frederick’s fortunes changed and his little engineering business made some money, he was, on the quiet, a big donor to the chapel’s foodbank; as he put it when a new Minister asked him why, ‘those who have received should give – that’s plain Christianity in my view’ – and so it was. Frederick had no explanation for how God could be love and the world be what it was – that was the way it was, and folk could puzzle their heads until they ached, and it would still be that way. But there wasn’t a widow in that congregation, or an orphan in it who went uncomforted or unfed. As in my chapel, if someone was known to be in need, the Minister or an elder, would go round to the folk ‘with a bob or two’ [for our American readers, a ‘bob’ was a shilling, now 5 pence] and collect money and goods, which would be quietly taken to the needy by a friend. It wasn’t charity, it was ‘helping out’. The Apostles had done it, and if it were good enough for them, then we’d jolly well better think it were good enough for us. Those who couldn’t provide cash would cook something, or provide clothing. It was what St James called ‘true religion’.

Most folk didn’t trouble their heads about theology. They, and we, would read the Bible, listen to the Pastor or Minister, and we’d ‘get on with it’. That was a good Lancashire/Yorkshire phrase; there was always a great deal of ‘getting on with it’ – life was tough, sometimes very tough, but you got on with it, you prayed, you went to chapel, you helped others and they helped you. Agnes, Frederick’s widow, had already had seven offers of meals – she can’t cook because she’s got bad arthritis in her hands – as well as a lift to chapel, and one to the shops. The grandchildren wondered whether Nana would have to move south with them, but their dad explained that she had a full support system in place – which had little, if anything, to do with the Social Services.

I think that system will see me out – provided I don’t linger and wear out the new suit (should I get it). Some will think the lives led were narrow and confined, but for me, they were good lives well-lived in the fear of the Lord. If anyone asks me to believe these folk won’t go to heaven because they were in the wrong church, I’m having none of it; my God’s greater than that. Frederick died, as he had lived, in the love of Christ – and I’m looking forward to singing the old scout songs when we meet again on the other side of Jordan’s banks.

Signs & Symbols

02 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Faith

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

Baptists, Catholic Church, Christianity, controversy

My good friend Dave Smith, always a font of knowledge on Catholicism (if you want to know something, my advice is first stop at his blog, because if it’s not there, there’ll be a link to it there), posted an interesting link which bears on what I was saying yesterday about religion. I can’t comment on what American baptists believe, but I can on what my own tradition holds, and the notion that we think in terms of an invisble church and don’t think of the people as the church and the church as a community is just plain not right. I’d have thought most Christians would focus on our alientation from God and the fact of sin – not least because Jesus was Incarnated, died and rose to end that state of affairs. As for the notion that:

Protestants emphasize the individual’s existential inner response to God rather than the idea that God is “with us” working to save us in and through the physical and historical world.

I am not sure I follow; how can God be with us in this world except through the physical world? Must be missing something there, I suppose. The idea that there is no connection between ‘Christ and culture’ is another one which passes me by. It is not, as Fr Longenecker seems to think, that:

faith is set up in dialectical opposition to the wisdom of man and the ways of the world

so much as our faith challenges the so-called wisdom of man and aims to set what is wrong right – but I thought we all thought that. Is he saying Catholics do not oppose the wisdom of this world?

I can’t attach any meaning beyond a failure of understanding, to the notion that Catholics are communitarian and Protestants individualistic; surely we’re all both? We’re saved in the church and we’re saved individually? If Fr L thinks otherwise, perhaps he should have spoken to some Baptists over here during his sojourn with us? Quite where he gets the idea that we wouldn’t be feeding the homeless knowing we are feeding Christ astnishes me – does he imagine that none of us ever read the verse: ‘Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’? Yes, of course, we’d also like to introduce the homeless man to Christ, but is Fr L really saying he wouldn’t? For a man calling for us all to be better informed for ecumenical dialogue, I am afraid he’s very ill-informed about what my tradition teaches.

Just so he knows: we believe there is a church and it is us, the people of God; we don’t think magic things happen because someone lays a hand on someone who had a hand laid on him by a fellow who says he did too going all the way back to Jude or Peter, we think the Spirit moves all of us; we’re perfectly happy with the idea that Christ is with us in the bread and wine, which we also think is a memorial – it isn’t either/or, it’s both. Praying ‘differently’? Well, I’ve been at Catholic charismatic events which sounded much more extempore than anything I’ve heard in my Baptist chapel. But yes, we don’t do the Rosary, and we don’t do Eucharistic adoration, but then we don’t think the Apostles did, and they were fine on it, as we are. As for producing different music and literature, last time I looked, our salvation depended on Jesus, not our taste in music (and if I may sound a sectarian note, anyone singing ‘Shine Jesus shine anywhere near me needs to have their running shoes on – if that’s what Fr L means by Catholic music, forget it!).

I usually like Fr Longenecker, for whom I’ve a deal of time, but he needs to get out more in Baptist circles – then he’d realise that trying to generalise about us is about as useful as doing that about Catholics. Cardinal Kasper and Cardinal Burke are both Catholics – I can’t generalise beyond that.

Religion

31 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Anti Catholic, Faith

≈ 47 Comments

Tags

Baptists, Catholic Church, choices, Church & State, controversy

You sometimes find, in my neck of the woods anyway, folk who say they’ve no time for ‘religion’, they believe in Jesus, they have a personal relationship, and they need no other company. We all come to him as he would have it, and I’ve nothing to criticise there, but I am puzzled nonetheless. Religion comes from the Latin word ligare which means ‘to join’ or ‘to link’. We are linked/joined to God, but in that we’re linked to others; we are children of God – not orphans. if we are adopted, we are not only children. We don’t come across lone Christians wandering about in the New Testament – Christians join together in churches and are, collectively, The Church.

We can see what folk who object to religion are getting at. It is usually what used to be called ‘priestcraft’ – the idea that there are some in Church who lord it over the others, and, beyond that, the way in which Christianity was coopted by the Monarchs to bolster their prestige. No doubt to be a ‘Lord Bishop’ with a seat on the House of Lords and lawn-sleeves is a fine thing – but to the way of thinking of some of us, it isn’t a very Christian thing unless it is done with humility. No doubt some folk are so good that they can manage to be a ‘Lord Bishop’ and not become proud, but what a temptation for the poor fellow; we should pray for such.

But just because sinners have, and do sin, and just because some aspects of religion may not be to our taste, does not mean we should reject religion. I can’t make out, myself, how you can be joined to God and not joined to the others who are; to be a Christian is to be part of a joining. I sometimes ponder whether those rejecting religion know what they are saying (I also wonder sometimes if they know what they are talking about at all – but that’s another topic for another occasion!)?

There’s no doubt that priests have lorded it over their flocks, but then there’s no doubt some evangelical pastors have done so too; it is the ones who have not – the majority – to whom we should be looking, and by which we can judge any ‘religion’.

I sometimes hear say that Protestants and Catholics have a different idea of the Church. Happen so, though since the Church is the body of Christ, and though we are many we are one body, I’m not sure quite what the difference is. I believe there is one church – in bits, to be sure in terms of communion with each other, but then, mutatis mutandis that’s what the RCC also holds when it talks about imperfect communion with itself. I’m not a fan of the idea of the invisible church. It would be a convenient way of avoiding looking at the scandal of division, but division there is, and we should be honest and admit it. If it fits with Catholic tradition to say Rome is the fullness of the Church, or with Orthodox tradition to say that the Orthodox Church alone is the one true church, then it fits with their traditions; perhaps they should both take a cold hard look at where those traditions have led them and the world and ask whether that fruit is the fruit of the outworking of the Holy Spirit or the pride of men?

In turn, my lot might care to wonder whether portraying ourselves as the embattled guardians of some kind of Primitive Christianity is not also a sign of the working of pride? Are bishops really so terrible a thing? Is Rome really the anti-Christ? Have we evangelised so well that our countries redound with praise of Christ? If the answer to this is no many times over, then we, too, might reflect in humility on our part in the divisions.

We are bound together. But as a wise man once said, we can hang together – or we can hang separately.

Seeking the kingdom?

28 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Bible, Faith

≈ 54 Comments

Tags

Baptists, Christianity, Faith, Testimony

There was an implication in my last one that the sort of faith I was fed in my youth, concentrating as it did on the fear of God and with its image of the Father as a stern but just judge, was not one which, when the winds of change hit, turned to have deep roots. That may, of course, just have been my view, but I don’t think it was; I think, though, it was superficial. For those who just went because it was ‘the thing to do’, that was what they came with and took away. But it wasn’t true for all of us. Some of us may have come for that, or because of that, but we acquired something else in the process – and that can best be called the ‘new spirit’ of which the New Testament speaks. Christ’s living word evangelised us.

I sometimes think that the way our faith is taught focusses too much on the two great festivals – Easter and Christmas. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying the Resurrection and the Incarnation are not vitally important – but I am saying that are not everything. Catholics now, I think, number Sundays outside festivals as ‘in ordinary time’. I don’t know the derivation of that, but don’t like what (perhaps wrongly) I take to be the implication. For me, studying and reflecting on Christ’s mission during the Incarnation and before the Resurrection were what struck deep roots. Luke hit home hardest.

In Luke I encountered a Saviour who reached out to the marginalised and the sinner, indeed to those marginalised by their sins, and who prayed and told me prayer was important. So I tried to do the same, and the prayer mattered more than I could have known. I’d come to prayer as part of the code – we asked God for things, and we praised him. The Lord’s prayer apart, I found it hard, still do. I am not good with extempore prayer – and that helped me. It was in the silences when I had given up struggling to find words that there was a still, small voice to be heard. So I developed my own habit of being silent and just being there with God. I recall once telling a friend this, and he described it as ‘like sunbathing’ I’ll take his word, we don’t get enough sun in these parts, though we get plenty of the other stuff in which you can really bathe; but it expresses it well enough. It is a suffusing of God’s presence. Jesus told us he must preach the good news of the Kingdom (Lk 4:23) – and that Kingdom was not in the future, it was now – or could be.

The Spirit gives life, we are told, but there was a condition – that could happen only once Jesus had died for us (Lk7.39b). The Kingdom of God is what happens when the Spirit comes, or so it seemed, and seems still, to me. God is love, and light, and in that love we are loved, and by that light we are lit.

Only on reflection did it occur to me that this was my own out working of the doctrine of the Trinity. Concentration on the Father alone gave an unbalanced and shallow faith, only through the Son and the Spirit could balance be found and the deep wellsprings of faith be tapped. That being so, I stayed where I was because it was where God in fullness was. I know that for others that fullness is, they say, found in their churches. I’ve nothing against that, and indeed, once I had come to it myself, I renounced denominational rivalry. If a fellow believes he’s found the fullness of the Trinity in his church, I am glad for him – or her. And long before it became a suspect phrase, ‘who am I to judge?’ was on my lips. Not as a refuge in relativism, but as a surrender to the infinity of God’s mercy. These things are too high for me, I know only that me and my house serve the Lord God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is the Trinity which deepened and balanced my faith and which struck roots which have withstood the tempests. I’ve a sense it’s so for all believers, so I let the theologians argue – and go away to a quiet place where that still, small voice is found – and I thank God for his mercies.

The Irish referendum: a contrarian’s view

22 Friday May 2015

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Church/State, Faith, Persecution, Politics

≈ 67 Comments

Tags

Baptists, Christianity, Church & State, controversy

Today Ireland will vote in a referendum on whether to approve of ‘same sex marriage’, and this, in the same week that a bakers in Northern ireland were told they had discriminated against a customer who had asked them to bake a cake with a ‘pro-gay’ slogan; so much for the slogan that ‘gay marriage’ wouldn’t be a bother to you if you didn’t want to marry a homosexual. It is painfully clear that the main consequence of the lobbying on this issue is the suppression of the freedom to express the traditional Christian view of marriage and sexual relations. In the hierarchy of made up ‘rights’, those of a tiny minority of vociferous homosexuals trump those of a minority of vociferous Christians.

By all accounts, the attitude of those on the ‘yes’ side of the Irish campaign has been intolerant in the extreme – tearing down ‘no’ posters and hounding those who expressed the counter view. If that side of the argument is filled with ‘passionate intensity’, then the same cannot be said for the formerly dominant Irish Catholic Church. Archbishop Martin of Armagh could not, it seems, find a way to express a view on how Catholics should vote in the referendum, and his fellow Bishops have not, on the whole, been much better. After the tremendous damage done to the Church there by the Paedophile scandals, it may well be that the hierarchy’s backbone has been so effectively filleted that it no longer exists. Protestantism, the great bulwark against the the tide in the North, does not really exist in any meaningful form in the South, and has had little effect on the referendum. The centre does not only ‘not hold’, in Ireland, it scarcely exists – if the polls are to be believed.

There’s the rub of course. With so much of the media on one side, and with the voices on that side being both clamant and nasty, no one can be sure how far the man and woman in the street is willing to express their view to a pollster. We saw this in the UK election a few weeks ago.

Ironically, a campaign which began in support of freedom of expressiona and against discrimination has ended by exhibiting exactly the characteristics its original supporters fought against. There’s a lesson in that for Christians. The professional tolerance merchants who tolerate any opinion as long as is one with which they agree, did not invent that way of being. Look at what the Catholic and the Anglican Churches did when they held the whip hand with the political establishment – exactly the same. My own ancestors, having being persecuted by the Catholic Church for Lollardy, then by the Anglicans for nonconformity (I come from a long line of awkward customers), would not have been surprised by the intolerance of the new Establishment, even though its intolerance of other views is not based on an interpretation of Christianity. Power tends to corrup, as Lord Acton noted. It has, in its time, corrupted Christians, and now it corrupts liberal atheists.

We are called to bear witness to the truths we receive from Christ. We are not called to impose them on other people by force of the law. Those Christians whose churches have spent hundreds of years doing just that, claiming it was in God’s name, are ill-equipped to garner sympathy when they protest against non-Christians doing it in the name of the god called equality.

The Irish must look to their own consciences. If the Catholic Church has done the job it should have done in helping form those consciences in a Christian way, the result should be a clear no. If it is not, then that Church and its hierarchy should hang their heads in shame, admit they have failed utterly in catchesis, and enter a period of prayer and repentance before beginning the process of rebuilding.

My ancestors stayed true to Christ when men in pointed hats and robes living in palaces persecuted them, and they will stay so when men in rainbow-patterned hats living in media palaces do so. We have not sought to impose our way of life on others, and we shall turn the other cheek, as we always have, and we shall dwell with the Lord. If the State wishes to enact godless laws, I am neither surprised, nor deterred. The State is not God’s, and attempts by Catholics and Anglicans to use it for their ends have failed utterly, leaving the State able to quote past Church support for its intolerance, and the two main Churches in these islands with nothing useful to say. They should try prayer, and they should try repentance. They sowed the wind and they shall, assuredly, reap the whirlwind.

Not being decadent

11 Monday Aug 2014

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Catholic Tradition, Faith, Islam

≈ 34 Comments

Tags

Baptists, Catholic Church, Catholicism, Christianity, controversy

Over at Rorate Caeli (yes, I am that sort of Baptist, I read good orthodox Christian sites of all kinds) they have kindly responded to some of my comments on their series of the decadent West. I was, and must confess still am, sceptical that bringing back head-coverings for women in Church is going to make much of a dent in the spread either of secularism of Islam, although, as I indicated in my original piece, I thought it not improbable that a return to Gospel truths might result in ladies wearing hats in church again; in my own chapel they’ve never stopped. My point was, of course, not that wearing hats in church is not ‘Gospel Truth’, it was, and is, that form must follow the Spirit; if it does not, then the danger is that obedience to form makes us no more than ‘whited sepulchres’. I do not say it does, I say it is the temptation Satan puts in the way of those of a traditionalist mind-set. As Jaroslav Pelikan commented in his 1983 Jefferson lectures, a copy I have to hand:

“Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.”

That is not at all what RC suppose I meant when writing that I am:

attracted by the idea that by becoming decadent, by leaving behind the Gospel message as our ancestors of all times until less than a century ago understood it (fifty years ago for Catholics), we’ve become more faithful to the ‘real Jesus’ or some tripe like that. That, in short, a bit of decadence is actually a good thing.

What I find unattractive is a concentration on form. That is not to say that form cannot be infused by the Spirit; it is to say that too often, those who bang on about it seldom mention the Holy Spirit. If, like the wonderful ‘slum-priests’ of the Oxford Movement, who worked in the poorer parts of our large cities, they bring both uplifting form and the authenticity of service to the poor, then fine and marvellous and three cheers. If, like far too many traditionalists I have met, it means pursing your lips when someone comes in wearing the wrong clothes, I always advise a quick course of the epistle of St James; good man, James, got it right first time:

²For if there come unto your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment;

³And ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, Sit thou here in a good place; and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool

Note well, I do not say that tradition is a bad thing and that it always leads to form being preferred to the Spirit; but I do say, because Our Lord Jesus said, that it is a temptation to which the very religious are liable.

The fact that, as I read it, RT thinks in terms of custom when I am talking about ‘Gospel Truth’ concerns me. Custom is of time and place and not immutable – were that not so, then the Church would be led by Jewish fishermen, and the Pope would have a mother-in-law; so let us not pretend that because we like the way custom was at point x, there is anything sacred about our preference; and let us never mistake the form for the Spirit. It was the sin of the Pharisees; it is a sin to which any conservative orthodox Christian is liable; it is my own besetting sin as it happens.

I’ve no idea where RT gets the idea that I am in any way in favour of some ‘unincarnated’ version of Christ’s message. There’s always a danger whenever anyone gets into generalisations, and I’m sorry to see RT, whom I respect, going down a version of the Bosco route; when he generalise about all ‘cathols’ one rolls one’s eyes; when a good Catholic generalises about ‘a Protestant notion’, one feels much the same way.

The Word is not written, it is a person, the living Jesus Christ, who said he woud be with his followers even to the end of earthly time. To say to those of us who go out every week to proclaim him in the market places and the malls, that:

We don’t want to do anything to show we love and honour God because what’s important is that we love and honour God in our hearts

is the sort of broad generalisation best avoided unless one wishes to look a little foolish. We’re not just preaching to those who do not have the Word (although unless we go out and meet them, they’ll not know He’s there), we’re involved in ministering to the poor and to the needy; this, as old James knew, was ”true religion”.

An my point is that it is by such exercise of ‘true religion’ that we best combat Islam and he secularists. We put ourselves where Our Master put himself, and if some maiden offers to clean our feet, we don’t think she’s being presumptuous or disrespectful – and we don’t ask if she’s got her head covered.

I do not say that form is a bad thing, or that all those who respect it, are wrong; if so, I’d be condemning myself. But I do say it is a creation of time and space, and if we cannot, in our time and space, create forms of beauty which will capture the present generation, then we are indeed a decadent civilization.

What is worship for?

06 Wednesday Aug 2014

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Bible, Faith, Prayers

≈ 9 Comments

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Baptists, Christianity, Grace, Jesus

One of the things you’ll hear when talking with folk whilst doing open air evangelisation is that they don’t need to go to church to pray; the implication, sometimes made explicit, is that church is therefore a waste of time. That seems to me, as I say when it mentioned, a mistake, as it misses two very important things: the first is the teaching and support functions fulfilled by a church; the second is being a part of the body of Christ.

One of the main differences between my own church and the more liturgical ones is that the latter have a sacramental dimension. They see, especially the Catholics, the Mass as Christ’s sacrifice (not, as some Protestants mistakenly claim re-enacted, but, if I have it right, recreated; I’d appreciate help on that one), and therefore worship is centred on the Eucharistic sacrifice and on Christ himself. Again, and if I am wrong, I happily accept correction, this is the great argument for the priest facing east at the Mass because he leads the people in the sacrifice and they all face towards the divine sacrifice. For us, the centre of the service is the reading and explication of the Lord’s word, and the focus is more upon us as a community remembering the sacrifice of the Lord, although there are, and I think it is an increasing number, those among us who are quite prepared to believe that Christ is, in a way not to be explained, there at the Communion table. So, if you are an Anglican, Orthodox or Catholic, you miss a very great deal indeed by not being there in the presence of the Lord and by not receiving him in the elements. If you are a Baptist or Methodist, you miss a great deal by not being part of the family which meets to hear the Lord’s word expounded. We can, and we do, study our Bibles, and anyone who has been into a Baptist chapel will have remarked on the fact that we all take our Bibles with us, and we read the text even as the preacher reads it out in full before expounding on it. The preacher will ask the Lord to open our hearts and minds so that we might understand his word aright. One of the things which shocks me whenever I attend and Anglican or Catholic service (which I do from time to time) is the, to me, scandalously short sermon. Here we feel short-changed if it is less than forty-five minutes, and out own preacher can do an hour with no discernible difficulty. This feeds us. To this we look forward, and at Bible study in the week we’ll usually discuss the sermon.

It matters to us that we meet as a group. It was what the early Christians did. We don’t, in Acts, find folk inspired by the Holy Spirit simply saying that they had not need of other Christians. Paul constantly preaches that we are all parts of the one body; we each of us find our place, and we need our elders to guide us, and we need a preacher to do what Phillip did for the Ethiopian.

I studying intently, and together, what the Bible says, we come together in the presence of the Holy Spirit, and we pray for His blessing on the words we are about to hear. We come in quietness, and we come in humility. The gift we have been given is great, beyond our desert and beyond price. We come, most of all, to say thank you to God who, though we were far off, loved us first – and as with any love, we want the whole family to be involved that we might, together, come and give worship to the One God who has saved us.

Remembering and forgetting?

04 Monday Aug 2014

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Faith

≈ 13 Comments

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Baptists, Christianity, Church & State, controversy, Obedience, sin

This centenary of the outbreak of the Great War is one which brings mixed feelings in the Sales household. My paternal grandfather, who was born in 1896 refused to fight; a devout Baptist, it was against his deepest convictions; he’d no time for any ‘just war’ theories; war was wrong, killing a sin, and no man and no cause could justify it; if everyone took that view, he used to say, then war would stop. He knew they didn’t, but as a stubborn Yorkshireman, that counted, as he put it ‘for nowt. If you saw a fella jumping off a cliff because t’Government said it were in a good cause, would tha’ go an do t’same?’ My mother’s father was a Quaker, and he, too, was a pacifist. Both my grandfathers served in an ambulance unit, indeed it was there they met and formed a life-long friendship which led to their children marrying. I remember them both, and during the Second World War, by now, too old to be called up, they served as wardens with the Red Cross, helping those who had been bombed out in Manchester. So, the Sales family experience of war was not one which has much in common with the commemorative celebrations which take place across the UK today. I share my grandfathers’ feelings; they admired the courage of the men whom they helped, but they thought it misapplied. They couldn’t see how killing could produce a just peace, or indeed any sort of lasting peace; a century on, we can pretend all we like, but the facts of the world in which we live do not support the idea that killing folk in industrial quantities brings peace.

But, as I used to argue with Grandpa Edwin, at least about the Second World War, what is one to do in the face of overwhelming evil? The members of ISIS would be quite happy to strike the right and left cheeks of every Christian they could find, and, one suspects, equally content to crucify them; should we really stand by and let that happen? As a lad I used to have prolonged arguments with my grandfathers about their position on this. I respected both of them hugely, not just for standing by their principles, but also for their service on the western front. That is certainly worth the remembering. But what it is we forget? Whilst our politicians acknowledge the sacrifices made by those who fought, they ought not to expect us to forget that it was politicians and their ambitions which got those men killed in such large quantities; and it was their mistakes which brought European civilisation to ruins. Those were the views I have inherited, and with them I still concur. But on the wider issue for which both men made such a stand, I confess myself divided.

My own father did not fight in the Second World War. He lost his religious faith along the way, and it mutated into a social concern which led him into the British Communist Party, which opposed the war – at least until the Soviet Union was attacked; then the ‘imperialists’ war’ became ‘the peoples’ war’. Had he been on the extreme political Right, he’d have been interned, as it was, he was conscripted as a ‘Bevin boy’ and spent much of the war down the mines; it laid the foundation for a career in the Trades Union movement, where he found something to replace the faith which he had lost. Somehow, he retained a faith in the essential decency of the British working man, which went along with a faith in the essential selfishness of the ‘bosses’. For dad, the Attlee Government was the new Jerusalem, and the war that mattered to him was the one on poverty and suffering and want. That religious impulse was not lost, just, as I’d see it, and saw it then, misplaced.

A century on from the point at which the world plunged itself into chaos, I honour those, my own kin and others, who refused to follow any voice save that of their conscience. Without such, the world would not be worth saving. In the remembering of the good things, let us not, however, forget the bad – and let us hold the men of power responsible for the blood they shed so easily.