So long, and thanks for all the fish!

pax et bonum

pax et bonum

Formula has a purpose, and a valuable one, in supporting mothers who cannot breastfeed. But when sold as a genuine alternative, especially to people who cannot afford it and cannot use it properly, it is extremely dangerous.

pax et bonum

Whatever the merits of the various positions on human sexuality, my greatest sadness is that we have allowed ourselves, within the Primates’ Meeting in particular, to lose sight of what it means to live in Communion…I fear we are in danger of setting up something akin to the Roman Curia – and I am especially worried that the Primates, gifted and blessed and called as they are in so many ways, are nonetheless so unrepresentative of the totality of the Body of Christ…
When we look back on the history of the Church, it has always been assailed with divisions to be overcome. The unity of Christ’s people is one of the prime targets of the devil…The devil’s purposes are far better served when people look at us and see us fighting and quarrelling, and doing so in ways that fail to reflect the spirit of charity, tolerance and gracious magnanimity that has always characterised the best of Anglicanism…
I suspect that future generations will see this as something of a storm in a teacup, and certainly not as central to the Christian life. For the centre of Christian life is Jesus Christ. As I said at the TEAM conference, God’s eternal Word did not come as a philosophical concept, nor as a political programme. Nor was the Word made text. But the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.

This is a wise and articulate man, and I’d urge anyone interested in this issue to read what he has to say. I hope and pray that the various Anglican churches, and especially their leaders, listen to him. Sadly, it seems as though he is to retire soon. We need voices like this.

pax et bonum

Sorry for the late notice – I only heard about the petition today from Dave at CartoonChurch. The problem is that the UK Government is changing the Highway Code, and some of the changes will make life rather more dangerous for cyclists. The new regulations change the wording in a subtle but crucial way – cyclists would now have to use cycle lanes “where possible” rather than the old “where practicable”. The problem is that there are some truly awful and dangerous “cycle lanes” around the country. There’s one here in Cambridge that is famously only 8 inches wide, and runs down the middle of a very busy road between two lanes of traffic. The new regulations would require all cyclists on that road to use it – despite its danger (it’s nowhere near wide enough, for a start), whereas the older version left the judgement of whether to use it to the cyclist.

The other thing that concerns me about this is the roundabouts – the new regulations would require cyclists to be in the left-hand (outer) lane, regardless of which exit you want to use. There are lots of roundabouts whose left-hand lanes funnel all traffic down the first exit – not good if you’re wanting to turn right! And, either way, if you’re cycling on a roundabout and wanting to turn right, you do not want to be sideswiped by a car. Having the right to position yourself on the road so as to avoid this danger is surely something that should not be eroded.

There’s also an electronic petition, which is worth signing, but the print one is more urgent. It would also be useful to contact your MP to ask them to support Thursday’s motion.

For more information about the regulations, look here and for examples of why cycle lanes aren’t always useful, look here.

pax et bonum

pax et bonum

Update (21 May): The decision has been reversed, apparently, and Mars-brand chocolates will now be OK again. I can’t find an official page for this news, but it was reported on Radio 4 this weekend.

The response from Masterfoods when questioned is also truly stunning.

“If the customer is an extremely strict vegetarian, then we are sorry the products are no longer suitable, but a less strict vegetarian should enjoy our chocolate,” said Paul Goalby, corporate affairs manager for Masterfoods.

“Extremely strict”? A vegetarian is someone who doesn’t eat meat or any other pieces of an animal. What is a “less strict vegetarian”? Someone who’s happy to eat a little meat, just not too much? Or someone who’s happy to eat meat as long as they don’t know about it?

Now, I’m not a vegetarian. But I am someone who takes seriously the ethical provenance of the meat I do eat. And we can be pretty darned sure that this rennet will be lowest-common-denominator animal product and not ethically sourced. So now I won’t be able to eat Masterfoods products produced after the 1st of May this year with a clear conscience.

Will you?

pax et bonum

(PS I’ve filled in the Masterfoods comment form and let them know my opinion. If you have an opinion, why not let them know?)

pax et bonum

Gordon Brown (generally accepted as the the next leader of the Labour Party and hence the next Prime Minister) is already being advised to drop the party’s commitment to the cards. It’s reckoned that he needs to do some serious work if Labour is to win the next election, and ditching expensive and pointless schemes like ID cards would be a good first step. If we must spend this money, let’s spend it on something more useful.

pax et bonum

How does one separate the two, if sin involves more than behavior, as both the Law and Jesus maintain? Jesus does not deal with sin apart from sinners. Without a word about hatred, Christ on the contrary tells us that we should love the sinner and forgive the sin…
It is impossible to “hate the sin” apart from the sinner, as if sin had some reality apart from the desires and actions of fallen human beings, as if you could somehow extract the sin from a person and vent your purifying fury upon it. Such a notion is very far from the Gospel.

pax et bonum

pax et bonum

Here are (from left to right) Martha, Lola and Kirsty. (Everyone else in the family chose the names. I wanted Butch, Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, but that got vetoed!)

They’re living in an Eglu, a very up-to-the-minute style chicken house, all in nice easy-to-clean plastic! And for exercise area, they have an old greenhouse that’s lost its glass and instead been wrapped in chicken wire.

There are more photos here.

pax et bonum

pax et bonum

The point is, though, the number of people whose entire online life is in the hands of one online service or another – all your email contacts stored in GMail, all your calendar likewise, word processing online, backups on a remote server, and so on. These services are all well and good, and fill a need, but don’t rely on them always to be there. Even Google could vanish overnight, and take all your details with it. If it’s important, really really make sure you have a copy yourself.

This whole topic has a personal aspect just at the moment – the main system drive for my home computer died on Wednesday. Totally dead, isn’t recognised by the BIOS at boot time, hardware-failure dead. And, of course, my last backup is three months old. Time to see how good those data recovery services are…

Back your data up, folks. External hard drives are very cheap these days. I’ve just ordered one of these – a 250 GB external drive, which is more than large enough to store everything for several years, and just plugs into a USB port, for just £55.

pax et bonum

pax et bonum

pax et bonum

If you don’t hear from me for a few days, don’t worry – I’ll reply to any comments after Easter. We’re having a computer-free weekend!

pax et bonum

Went to a dinosaur park today and saw models of neaderthal man. They got me thinking. They made tools and fires and things. But was God their God? I know that we didn’t evolve from them. But at what point in evolution did God become the God that he is for human-kind?

Good question! The first thing to say is that we don’t know the answer, and can’t this side of heaven. But I do have a few thoughts.

It’s usually been held by the Church that the thing setting humanity apart from the animals is the possession of a rational soul. That is, the power to think, speak and reason is what makes us human. If so, we would have to suggest that Neanderthals were also human in this sense. And so, yes, God would be their God, too. Of course, God is the God of the animals and the rocks and the stars, too, so in that sense it’s trivial. But, if the Neanderthals sought any God then the triune God would the One to whom they would be reaching. And I believe that God would reach back to them.

If the Neanderthals had no soul then, we’d have to suggest, they would have no desire for God, no experience of the numinous. And that problem would solve itself. It raises issues, though, of what then really distinguishes us from animals – if Neanderthals thought and spoke and reasoned and crafted and created, why are we any different?

However, there’s one final thought that makes sense to me and might help. If Neanderthals and other hominins were en-souled (had the divine spark that makes us different) then their story and salvation is the same as ours. Just as, we are told in the Bible, salvation was available to those to died before Christ was born, so these others would partake in that salvation. And if they weren’t en-souled, there’s nothing to worry about.

To answer your question, then, I personally suspect that we aren’t the only species to have had souls. I’ve no evidence for this, but there’s no evidence against it either. Insofar as we have any idea of what the soul is, we relate it to ideas of self-awareness, of rationality, of awareness of personal death, of creativity. All of these things appear to have been present in Neanderthals and possibly other hominin species. So, either souls were given once, a long time ago and shared among many species, or they were given several times, as a few species came into the place in God’s plan where they needed one.

Perhaps not very satisfactory, but an answer, at least!

pax et bonum

If you truly believe that the price has been paid, not to God but by God, who has it been paid to?

The first thing to say is that I don’t find a “price” model of the atonement particularly useful, partly for this reason. The idea that the crucifixion was a price paid to God has serious issues – Jeffrey John articulated some of them. But, for a starter, there’s a definite logical problem with God requiring payment and then, by legal sleight of hand, paying Himself and claiming that that makes everything alright. If He could sidestep payment by paying Himself, why require the payment in the first place? The alternative (which is the idea actually found in the NT) is that the price was paid to Satan – we were slaves to sin and Christ redeemed us (i.e. paid the price) from that slavery and set us free. But I don’t like this idea much, either, if taken too literally, because I don’t think that Satan has that much power.

One major problem with all these models is that they fail to account for the resurrection – there’s simply no place in them for it. Indeed, it’s something of a problem, because it effectively sidesteps the “payment” by negating it. If the payment is a death (whether paid to God or Satan or anyone else), that’s cheated by a resurrection. There hasn’t really been a death at all – the person’s life continues.

Personally, I think that models like Christus victor (also found in the NT and the dominant model in the early Church) are good – by his life, death and resurrection, Jesus won the victory over sin, death and the devil. This necessarily encompasses all parts of the Incarnation, not focusing on Good Friday to the exclusion of everything else. Or (I think I’ve mentioned it here before) the idea from Catherine of Sienna of medicine – we were sick with sin, sick to death, and the only medicine is death itself (see Paul’s discussion of how death is what liberates us from the Law). Jesus came and tasted death for us, and was the only one who could do so and survive (being God). Then, we partake of His death by our baptism and our new life in Christ. He feeds us as a wet-nurse fed a baby, taking the strong medicine herself so that the child may receive the medicine in diluted and tolerable form in her milk.

The point, as I’ve said previously, is that there is no “One True Model” of the atonement. What the Bible presents is the fact of the atonement. All we can do is try to wrap our minds around it. Claiming that we have it all tied up (especially in such flawed models as penal substitution) is arrogance. If the Bible gave us a single model, it would be different. But that isn’t how it is. The only thing we can do is to look at multiple models and let them criticise one another, in the hope that we will be able to hold the good pieces of each without letting our vision be too distorted by the bad pieces.

pax et bonum

On the cross Jesus dies for our sins; the price of our sin is paid; but it is not paid to God but by God.

Not to God but by God.

pax et bonum

Researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia found the brain is limited in the amount of information it can absorb – and presenting the same information in visual and verbal form – like reading from a typical Powerpoint slide – overloads this part of memory and makes absorbing information more difficult. (From The Register.)

Finally, proof of what we’ve all known for years! The scientists go on to explain that it’s the habit of reading out Powerpoint slides that is the problem – explaining a graph or chart is quite different, because the visual and verbal information is different. But simply reading out what you’ve written on the screen is a No No.

Will they learn, though?

pax et bonum

pax et bonum

pax et bonum

pax et bonum

pax et bonum

pax et bonum

One of the interesting things to come out of the ‘beyond the fringe’ research was that peoples personal aspirations, not surprisingly, where for happiness, family, relationships and success. However more surprisingly people on the whole didn’t chose those who had achieved this as those hey admired, rather they chose, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and yes Jesus. Might they secretly wish they could be like that too? Might the gospel that frees us from sin and death be the gospel that says, actually you can be like Jesus?

pax et bonum

On one level, it is astonishing that anyone who lived through a good part of the 20th Century could say something like this. What are we to make of those noble, well-intentioned Bolsheviks, Marxist materialist atheists to a man (and occasional woman), who ended up building one of the most oppressive and murderous brace of regimes in human history? When people quote this phrase to me, or some equivalent, and I enter this objection, they often reply, “but Communism was a religion,” a reply which shifts the goal-posts and upsets the argument…
any set of beliefs which can induce decent people, who would never kill for personal gain, to murder for the cause, is being defined as “religion.” “Religion” is being defined as the murderously irrational.
Pretty sloppy thinking. But it is also crippling. What the speaker is really expressing is something like this: the terrible violence of the 20th Century has nothing to do with right-thinking, rational, enlightened people like me.

Arrogance can creep up disturbingly easily when discussing moral matters. Which leads neatly into this second quotation, from Maggi herself wondering why she (as so many of us) ends up writing a lot more than she means to when talking about deep issues.

The great 20th century protestant theologian, Karl Barth, was far more verbose and abstract than I shall ever be, and I take heart from him when I think I’m getting too involved in complexities of words and thought. But I take heart even more from this little anecdote. Someone once asked Barth whether he could sum up his whole theology in just a few words. Barth paused for a moment, and then replied, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” When words get too much, I always remember that.

pax et bonum

pax et bonum

Q: How many editors does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: I can’t tell whether you mean “change a lightbulb” or “have sex in a lightbulb.” Can we reword it to remove ambiguity?

pax et bonum

“The fact that William Wilberforce became a committed Christian and championed the passing through Parliament of the Bill to abolish the Slave Trade could be, and indeed has been, taken by Christians to be both evidence and example of how Christianity inspires radical social action and transformation. Although that is an attractive thesis and has within it seeds of truth, the fuller picture is much more complicated.
“The Establishment countenanced both slavery and the trade, fearing that abolition would threaten the British Empire with economic ruin. The Bishops, with the notable exception of the Bishop of Chester, Reilly Porteus, who later went on to become ‘Bishop of London’ sided with the Establishment.”

(From Ekklesia.)

(Maggi also has some thoughts on the issue.)

pax et bonum

Marking the fourth anniversary of the invasion, Christians planted 186 crosses, each bearing the name of an Iraqi killed by US or UK forces.
Each cross represented a thousand people killed since the invasion, said campaigners…
According to a survey published in the Lancet last October, at least 186,000 Iraqis have been killed by coalition forces in Iraq since the beginning of the 2003 invasion – 31% of all violent deaths in Iraq up to June 2006.
A BBC/ICM survey of more than 1,000 people, released yesterday (Tuesday) suggested that the Iraq war now has support from less than a third of the UK population.

(From Ekklesia.)

pax et bonum

“The billions of pounds spent on arms could be spent alleviating world poverty” World Vision chief executive Charles Badenoch said. “Then we would not only have a more just world, but a more secure world.”

pax et bonum

pax et bonum

Wikipedia remains excellent as a casual source for information, but is it up to the job of being a serious encyclopedia?

pax et bonum

Flowers handed to mothers this Sunday will come from workers in developing countries who have risked their health for unsafe, insecure jobs supplying UK supermarkets, a new report suggests.
‘Growing Pains’ by anti-poverty charity War on Want investigates the human cost of cut flowers in British supermarkets, and calls on consumers to buy fair-trade flowers…
Flowers are likely to be the most popular Mother’s Day gift with £225m lavished on seven million bunches.
Although shoppers are increasingly aware of the environmental damage caused by pesticides and air miles, the report said they were “largely unaware” of the human price paid for their flowers by workers in poor countries.
A study of 8,000 flower workers in Bogota in 2002 found they had been exposed to 127 different pesticides, one fifth banned in the US for their toxicity.
Colombian flower workers – 65 per cent of whom are women – are being paid 50p an hour. In Kenya, the wage is £23 a month. Overtime is “compulsory” and workers have to put in longer hours in the run-up to celebrations such as Mother’s Day. Sexual harassment is “widespread”.

pax et bonum

pax et bonum

How is it that so many people miss the implications of the question of the crowds, in Acts 2? When they ask, “What must we do to be saved?”, Peter doesn’t say, “Do? What must you do? Goodness, you don’t do anything. You just pray a quick prayer and receive.” Instead, he tells them what to do: change the direction of your life, expressing this through the Jewish practice of a ceremony to wash away your sins and implant your in the community, and you will receive the gift of the Spirit that Jesus promised to all those disciples that he was sending out. This is true for yourselves, your children and even the Gentiles that God is calling.

Graham’s discussing an article from Christianity Today, which goes on to say:

Anyone can, and most Americans do, “believe” in Jesus rather than some alternative savior. Anyone can, and many Americans sometimes do, say a prayer asking Jesus to save them. But not many embark on a life fully devoted to the love of God, the love of neighbor, the moral practice of God’s will, and radical, costly discipleship.
If it comes down to a choice between our habitual, ingrained ways of talking about salvation and what Jesus himself said when asked the question, I know what I must choose.

pax et bonum

At least, I think it was amusing. Either that or appalling…

pax et bonum

it is possible to reach a point where the only real thing being said about the Eucharist is that nothing happens!

He then goes on to note that:

One of the likeable aspects of the Anglican view…is their reluctance to go beyond the clear pronouncements of scripture. So, our Anglican pastor was happy saying that Christ was “somehow” present in the bread and wine but couldn’t – and wouldn’t – say more than that.

Shared ignorance is indeed sometimes better than shared certainty.

pax et bonum

Media atheists of the narrower kind are fast becoming the new best friends of fundamentalist Christians. For every time they write about religion they are doing very effective PR for a fundamentalist worldview. Many of the propositions that fundamentalists are keen to sell the public are oft-repeated corner-stones of the media atheist’s philosophy of religion.
Both partners in this unholy alliance agree that fundamentalist religion is ‘the real thing’ and that more reflective and socially progressive versions of faith are pale imitations, counterfeits even…
the more fundamentalists can set up the disagreements concerning religion in terms of a Manichean struggle between the forces of God and “atheistic secularists”, the more troops they can summon to the defence of intolerant versions of Christianity.

pax et bonum

pax et bonum

(Anne is responsible for finding this one!)

pax et bonum

(Thanks to Maggi for the link.)

pax et bonum

To put it in anglo-catholic terms (which might resonance with Christians of other traditions)...the climax of the Eucharist is not the receipt of the communion elements of bread and wine but the sending out into the world which ends the Eucharist or Mass. Mass of course has the same root word as mission – so mass and mission share a common purpose rather than being in some uneasy tension.

pax et bonum

(Thanks to Father Tobias for the link.)

pax et bonum

pax et bonum

By Easter you will be richer, leaner and wiser. You’ll have more space, more time, and a clearer perspective on life framed by a new vision of God.

pax et bonum

pax et bonum

more cruel and unreasonable are they than brute beasts, that cannot be persuaded to be good to their Christian brethren and neighbours, for whom Christ suffered death, when in this sacrament they be put in remembrance that the Son of God bestowed his life for his enemies. We see by daily experience that the eating and drinking, together maketh friends and continueth friendship; much more then ought the table of Christ to move us so to do. Wild beasts and birds be made gentle by giving them meat and drink: why then should not Christian men wax meek and gentle with this heavenly meat of Christ? Hereunto we be stirred and moved, as well by bread and wine in this holy supper, as by the words of scripture recited in the same. Wherefore whose heart so ever this holy sacrament, communion and supper of Christ will not kindle with love unto his neighbours, and cause him to put out of his heart all envy, hatred, and malice, and to grow in the same all amity, friendship, and concord, he deceiveth himself, if he thinks he hath the spirit of Christ dwelling within him.
Thomas Cranmer, (Defence of the True and Catholic Docrine of the Scacrament, 1550).

(As an aside, I actually find it reassuring that the number of Primates who cut themselves off in this fashion has actually reduced since the last major meeting, when 14 did so. Perhaps they are understanding that standing aside in this way is declaring their own unworthiness, not someone else’s.)

pax et bonum

(Thanks to Father Jake for the tip.)

pax et bonum

(Thanks to Alastair for the tip.)

pax et bonum