Silent women
Sven has an excellent analysis of this issue up at his theology blog.
Good from bad
Occasionally, we can see a few good things in the bad – and the Christian Peacemaker Teams are seeing many new recruits after their workers were kidnapped.
(_Thanks to Leaving Münster for the news._)
Incarnation-tide
Now here’s a good idea – renaming Christmas
Muslims to guard Christian churches
News from Indonesia this Christmas is that Muslim organisations are to help guard Christian churches there. In recent years there have been several bombings in Indonesia, including several in 2000 of churches during Christmas, blamed on Muslim extremists. The thing to focus on here is the word “extremist” – and to notice carefully the response of the majority, which is to oppose the violence and to help protect their neighbours, whatever their religion.
Surely, an example to follow and applaud.
pax et bonum
Rowan Williams on the Trinity
Sven quotes an explanation by Rowan Williams of the nature of the Christian Trinity. This is interesting because it’s aimed specifically at Muslims. For Muslims, God is One and indivisible. Hence, when they hear bad explanations of the Trinity, they get very worried because it sounds like Christians believe in three gods, not a single God at all. And, for a muslim, the greatest sin is putting any other creature on the same level as God. WIlliams manages to explain that, for the Christian as for the Muslim, there is but one God. The Three Persons who Christians distinguish are not separate gods but are aspects of the one Godhead. As Williams explains it:
we say that the one God, who is both source and outward-flowing life, who is both ‘Father’ and ‘Son’, is also active as the power that draws everything back to God…This is the power we call ‘Holy Spirit’.
I’ve also posted before about my own humble metaphor on the nature of the Trinity.
pax et bonum
Social Gospel
After my recent post about a saying of Desmond Tutu’s, I’ve been involved in a debate elsewhere about this. The interesting thing is the opposition to seeing any aspect of social or political action in the Gospel message itself. The position there (among the commenters) seems to be that the Gospel is a purely spiritual message about personal salvation. Good works seem to be merely the outworking of that salvation. But I can’t go along with that. When Jesus proclaimed his mission, He didn’t talk about spiritual things. He said that he had come to proclaim freedom for prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour (Luke 4:18,19). Jesus wasn’t concerned only with the spirit but with the whole person – indeed, the very notion that we can separate the “spirit” from the rest of a person was invented much more recently.
Part of the reason that the Gospel must contain some of this works stuff is that, without it, the news really isn’t very good! The good news is not just (or, indeed, not really) that we can be saved from our sins. The good news is that the meek will inherit the Earth, that the poor will be blessed (especially in Luke’s version!). The powerful are to be put down from their thrones and the rich sent away empty (the Magnificat). The Gospel is not purely spiritual – it is relentlessly social and political. For, without a social and political aspect, it cannot truly be spiritual. It would only be theoretical.
pax et bonum
Nigerian debt repayment
The Jubilee campaign is calling the UK Govt’s decision to accept a debt repayment from Nigeria ‘obscene’, because the amount is twice what the UK spent in aid to the whole of Africa this year.
Gospel truth
Waving or Drowning passes on a saying of Bishop Desmond Tutu’s.
I don’t preach a social gospel; I preach the Gospel, period. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person. When people were hungry, Jesus didn’t say, “Now is that political or social?” He said, “I feed you.” Because the good news to a hungry person is bread.
pax et bonum
Christian Carnival 99
The 99th Christian Carnival is up at Attention Span.
Flaws in Intelligent Design
I generally don’t post about this, but I’ve been involved in debate on another blog and I thought this point bore repeating: Intelligent Design is bad theology. That is, it tries to tell us things about God and Creation that are harmful to our understanding of both (and of science, of course).
Intelligent Design is an attempt to meld fundamentalist Biblical Creationism with 20th century science. It does this by accepting that science explains most stuff – it even explicitly accepts that Darwinian evolution explains almost all living things. However, it also claims that certain features of our biochemistry could only have arisen by the intervention of a (carefully unspecified) Designer. Now, laying aside the point that this is bad science (for example, every claimed example of “Intelligent Design” is flawed in such crude ways that it takes only minutes or seconds of thought to see the flaws, given a decent understanding of the real issues involved), I want to talk about the effect of ID on our theology – the way we think about God and the relationship between God and Creation.
(click for more)
Of but not in
Dissonant bible continues an interesting dissection of Rick Warren’s famous The Purpose-Driven Life. The question here is Warren’s continual depiction of heaven as our eventual destination and Earth as something temporary and to be done away with – in contrast to the biblical picture of heaven as everywhere that God is in charge and of Earth as something God will redeem and recreate in perfection.
Again and again Warren describes the end of this life as leaving earth behind. This is not your permanent home or final destination. You’re just passing through, just visiting earth…your homeland is in heaven.
And to ‘prove’ this, once more Warren uses distorted translations or paraphrases of carefully selected bible verses
The articles are especially interesting for the way in which they show, once again, how easy it is for people to misread the Bible by taking verses they like, reading them out of context (or in a preferred translation) and extrapolating from them in isolation from the actual thrust of the passage.
pax et bonum
In a Godward direction
Tobias Haller of In a Godward direction reflects on the “plain meaning of Scripture”.
Vatican and gay priests
The Vatican has published a new document outlining the new approach to homosexuality in candidates for ordination in the Roman Catholic Church. Father Jake has quite a nice discussion of this that’s worth reading. The interesting thing about this document, it seems to me, is not the prohibition on sexually active gay men becoming priests – that’s hardly a change and hardly a surprise. No, the change is that it is now to be regarded as a total barrier to becoming a priest merely to have “deep-seated homosexual tendencies”. In other words, if you’re gay, you cannot be a priest in the RCC.
Actually, it’s even worse than that. The document says that no one can be ordained as a priest if they even “support the so-called gay culture”. Which means nothing less than that anyone sympathetic to the cause of gay Christians can no longer be a priest in the RCC. What is truly shocking about this particular ban is that no justification for it is even attempted. There is an attempted rationale for blocking gay people from the priesthood (which appears to rest entirely on the statement that their sexual orientation “seriously obstructs them from properly relating to men and women”) but none for those who merely “support” the culture (whatever that might mean).
And possibly the strangest thing of all is that, although the document is dealing explicitly only with the act of ordination (i.e. who it will make priests in the future), the logic it puts forth is effectively saying that any priest in the RCC who has “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” is not, in fact, validly ordained. They don’t fulfil the requirements for the priesthood, aren’t fit to be priests and would be totally barred from ordination. How long can it be before someone points out the illogic of this position to someone in authority – and, when they do, which way will they jump? Will this document be repudiated, or will all gay priests be cast out? Or will they live with the contradiction?
Update
Thanks to Father Jake for passing on this funny link.
pax et bonum
John Sentamu installed
John Sentamu has officially become Archbishop of York – the first black archbishop in the Church of England. Ruth Gledhill has a very good report on the service (sounds like it was excellent!), and also gives some insight into the sort of man Sentamu is. Also, the sermon that Archbishop Sentamu preached at the service is available, and is also excellent.
WHO IS JESUS AND WHAT DOES HE MEAN FOR THOSE WHO PUT THEIR TRUST IN HIM? That, for me, is the critical question of our time…
It’s a scandal of the Church in England that in the past decades it has tried everything except to stick to Jesus’ plan for the world: Corporate-discipleship, fraternal-belonging.
We’ve had our reports, our commissions, conferences, seminars, missions, synodical reviews, liturgical reforms – the lot. But little attention has been given to the question, “Who is Jesus and what does he mean for those who put their trust in him?“
Che Guevara once said, “If our revolution isn’t aimed at changing people then I’m not interested.“ The trouble with virtually all forms of revolution and modernising strategies is that they change everything – except the human heart…
The scandal of the church is that the Christ-event is no longer life-*changing*, it has become life-*enhancing*. We’ve lost the power and joy that makes real disciples, and we’ve become consumers of religion and not disciples of Jesus Christ.
(_Thanks to Maggi for the tips._)
pax et bonum
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