A Service of the Moment

Typical, isn't it? We've had one of the warmest winters ever, with the heating off comfortably for some hours of many days at least, and now, as one of my rare own services comes, the snow is falling and laying. I doubt that I'll be speaking to many people.

Update Insertion

Indeed , down to single figures, though the service was well appreciated and generated a lot in the way of positive group debate afterwards about both Jesus and the congregation's distant past. Also one said that my services used to be hard to follow but doesn't know why but seem to be easier to follow now. I said it's probably because I am wearing out. The music was very varied too.

But, aha, the effort that goes into these services is made worth it thanks to remote viewing on the Internet. The service and sermon (in .PDF format) represents my own slight shift away from postmodernity and back towards modernity. I'm asking questions about history without becoming an empiricist - no, even history has multiple schools of approach. I'm using what others say to point out my own quest for more discipline in what can be said and what cannot be said.

I left the sermon and service writing to very late. It was only done this week. I could have tackled many subjects, but what I wrote I wrote quickly because it is where I am at. Yes it says Muhammad's birthday was Saturday and that one of the four Jewish New Years is coming up. It sees that the C of E is making important decisions. But, in the end, this is a service not attached to a calendar but to the way I am thinking about science, history, the paranormal, Jesus, transcendence and such thinking's relationship with Unitarianism.

Derby Dumps the Covenant

The results in the Diocese of Derby Synod as spoken by the retired Tim Gudgeon:

House of Bishops: For, 0, Against 1 (Bishop Humphrey absent)
House of Clergy: For 1, Against 21, Abstained 2
House of Laity. For 2, Against 24, Abstained 1

Result: comprehensively defeated in all houses.

Update: Gloucester also voted against, Canterbury probably voted for...

So far more than half the dioceses do not with to add a further, international, level of authority and restraint to decisions made by the Church of England.

Time for Rowan Williams to go, me thinks, as his policy comes apart. He'll be trying to overcome the votes of dioceses regarding their rejection of male co-bishops.

So What if Diarmaid MacCulloch Opposes the Anglican Covenant?

So, Diarmaid MacCulloch opposes the Anglican Covenant, and there is no doubt that his addition as a patron of the No Anglican Covenant Coalition is an appointment of substance, certainly for his understanding of ecclesiology in many different Reformed and Catholic institutions. You'll get a better quality of writing and insight than, say, in that recent Doll paper, and if Rowan Williams has ordered that to be distributed you have to wonder if that is the best they can do.

But there is a weakness in Diarmaid MacCulloch's appointment. He is like me: he isn't actually a Christian (if still a Reverend) and can only be a friend of the Church of England. My comment is now from the outside, and so is his analysis.

This was made clear in his series on A History of Christianity on BBC 4. His position regarding the Bible was surely non-committed (and I agree) and he, like me, understands Christianity to be a 'cult of an individual' (that is, Jesus of Nazareth).

I do not think Jesus of Nazareth has any special powers or privilege of place, and the position regarding the Bible is a personal break from identifying with the Christian communities that produced the 'post-Easter' faith that colours the presented view of Jesus of Nazareth. People on the inside identify with those communities, and obviously the proto-orthodox that became orthodox. His comments were to come at this from the outside too.

My position regarding the Anglican Communion Covenant is that it will freeze the Church of England and do it damage, but whether it has the Covenant or not isn't going to persuade me to join up. I made the decision after a long consideration that I don't believe the essentials believed by most Church members, and for a while I was increasingly 'hanging about' and only participating in choice chunks of its liturgy. I'd stopped taking communion.

In the end it is up to the Church of England and the other Anglican Churches whether it adopts this thing or not. The issue won't affect me, though I'd campaign even harder for complete disestablishment. Frozen by such an international contract, I would not want this institution to have any influence on the law on marriage, for example. It is already pretty ethically bust.

The issue won't affect Diarmaid MacCulloch either. He might turn up for the odd Evensong, but it is a culturally religious (if still religious) involvement, surely. I'm impressed with his view that Eastern Europe in the early days of the Reformation was an example of pluralism well before the 'West' was born as we now know it - a result in part of Socinian and Unitarian Churches apparing in that band of geographical space. As such, then, this appointment to the No Anglican Covenant Coalition is that of yet another liberal. I would have thought it needed some right wingers in Church terms and from within.

But, yes, the arguments are bound to be of the highest quality.

Treat the Amendment Like the Covenant Should Be Treated

Interesting that this document promoting the Covenant should be sent to bishops on command of Rowan Williams. Talk about mischief! It's just one side of the argument, yet again. Here is a nugget of its summarising anti-American stuff:

And yet if we take the statement at face-value, it must express how these Episcopalians feel about their situation. These rich and powerful Americans, the most privileged people on earth, identify their own experience of being oppressed and persecuted for their advocacy of gay rights with, for example, the experience of black South Africans under apartheid.

And, later:

Rather than living as citizens of Christ's kingdom here on earth, the advance guard of his reign of justice, mercy, and peace, we are living as creatures in a Darwinian jungle, 'red in tooth and claw', using every available legal and illegal, political and verbal means to slash and savage one another, and all for what end - the right to claim the label 'Anglican'?

We do have a way out of this mess. Since we are caught up in the divine life, it ought to be second nature to us. The Covenant document...

Phew! This rubbish distributed to English bishops on the orders of Rowan Williams! No wonder half the dioceses are revolting. More is available in detail. Then, indeed in Blighty, and more immediately pressing perhaps...

It's regarding women bishops. It's been through the dioceses and it comes back to General Synod. This is the legislation to be passed on making women bishops. The idea is at this late stage to have another go at adding in the Archbishops amendment so that in some dioceses there will be a male bishop and in others there will be a female bishop and a male bishop, because there will be parishes that say no to the female one. She will have to accept that he - the pure bishop - has powers and responsibilities over the non-participants in her ministry. If there is a male led diocese but he had been consecrated by a woman bishop, then there will be a male and a pure male presumably. This is called co-ordinate ministry, though the two might not be co-ordinated. And if it is the same pure male chap hovering over many dioceses, with many different female and impure male bishops, then it will start to look like a whole of a province or at least a non-geographical diocese that guarantees purity. Should then an Archbishop arise from a female consecration of a bishop - and, let's face it, Sentamu was shoved up the greasy pole in record time - then presumably the pure male non-geographical 'diocese' as a whole will have to look for alternative oversight.

The different General Synod from the one that said no to the Archbishops' amendment last time might be told to 'read the ordinal' and vote as told by Archbishops, but if it is then it must go to the bishops. If they then said no to the Archbishops and their amendment but let's vote on the legislation as unchanged, then the Synod would say 'Hang on, we voted for its addition' and presumably would not vote for the unchanged to go through. If, on the other hand, the bishops say yes to the Archbishops, then the whole lot goes through the dioceses again.

But it went through the dioceses and most of them said no to extra special provision, as in the Archbishops' idea for co-ordinate ministry.

Once again Rowan Williams shows how he rams the brake on any progressive movement, as he is doing with the Covenant. John Sentamu is just his sidekick, and both of them operate by all the various means available to get their way, even when the whole Church by its representative bodies seems to have made its position clear. It's like a constitutional crisis between the Church and its representation from below and the purple that is its guide from above. Rowan Williams seems to think that the Church is Catholic and run from above.

But if so then the women can add themselves to gay people as doing their self-sacrifice for the purposes of the wider 'Catholic Church' project, and of course the whole female consecration thing might then come under the auspices of the Anglican Communion Covenant. After all, a province of Anglicanism that does not have female bishops might throw in an objection to the mother Church (that provides the Archbishop of Canterbury) having female bishops. The Standing Committee would then have to examine this and, of course, the Church of England could never be put on the outer ring of the Anglican Communion - after all, how then could it provide the Archbishop of Canterbury as one of the Instruments of Communion? When it comes to relational consequences or no women bishops, it will be no women bishops.

So, girls and boys, now's your only chance to say no to the Archbishops' amendment just as you ought to say no to the Covenant. It will only hold you back for years and years.

Radio Chadderbox in Jamaica

Lara Crofter: This is a networked interview from Lara Crofter of Radio Chadderbox interviewing the Archbishop of the North of the Church in England, the Most Reverend John Sendmehome. I'm not in Wykkyfish but, well, humm, Jamaica. Lovely!

John Sendmehome: She volunteered and that was even better.

Lara Crofter: Oh I get it. I've not heard that one before. You're a bit of a joker, we know that, keeps things from getting too serious: but tell me about your past. A big family?

John Sendmehome: Apparently if your parents never had children the lacklihood is you won't either.

Lara Crofter: I hadn't thought of that, like big and small families down the generations. True though. You are from Kenya?

John Sendmehome: Nah nah, Uganda. So many children yah see at Christenings look just like their father, when it's a pity they don't also look like the mother's husband; but I'm pleased to say that I look like no one on earth. Like I did a christening recently and she insisted to me he looks lack her working class man because the baby was bald, sleepy and uneducated.

Lara Crofter: But you didn't always do christenings. You were a lawyer?

John Sendmehome: What? Ahkay, let me tell yah. I grew up in a village and was often wandering off, so my mother changed my name from Luzim to Sendmehome. This way adults from various surrounding villages started bringing me back rather than using the big stick and telling me to clear off. She kept asking, "Where is Canaan?" and people would say, "In the Bible." So my first name was also changed from Canaan to Canu but since I was an adult I have answered to the simpler name of John.

Lara Crofter: Can you tell me...

John Sendmehome: Nah, John now tell yah. They say spare the rod and lose the child; I had a happy unspared childhood. I thought about Rowan instead of but that's also a girl's name. So many children in England tell me, you knah, that until they were fifteen they thought their name was Shutup.

Lara Crofter: You were successful. Well, I don't know. Perhaps I am working class or female.

John Sendmehome: Mah parrents paid for my school, but when Idi Amin became King of Scotland I thought I'd better go quick and see Scotland and so I moved to London and Cambridge as I soon preferred the Chach in England to the Chach in Scotland. Yes I have climbed or rather been pushed up the ecclesiastical grassy poll and now I am Archbishop of the North and represent an acceptable face of what they call radical inclassavity because there is acceptable and unacceptable yah see in ecclesiastical circles. But I still do christenings, just as ah still do burials and cremations.

Lara Crofter: But racism, that's a nasty feature of life. Has racism ever affected you?

John Sendmehome: Well the difference between cladgy, who are not racist because they prah a lot, and lay papple, who can be racist given the behavioural athics of secular society, is that some cladgy might call me shit but others in the laity have gone that bit further materially in their physical hattred. Racism denigrates people by category, by surface label, and no one shad do that but it has happened and badly and you have to deal with the difficulty and the pann it brings.

Lara Crofter: So radical inclusivee... inclusivity... and what is acceptable and unacceptable. I mean, here we are in the West Indies. So did the Church say yes to slavery and now only relatively recently has seen it as an evil, so, er, what about other forms of inclusivity and like valuing all human people. See, my brain hurts now and I might be thick, but it doesn't mean all women are thick. You favour marriage reform? Mr Cameron says gay marriage will strengthen bonds in society, and he's in favour because he is a Conservative.

John Sendmehome: See, Idi Amin as the King of Scotland. That's the sign of a dictator because you can't overturn the history and traditions of Scotland lack that, and in the same way David Cameron cannot overturn marriage, which is dependent on traditions and what sociatties, lack Scotland, understand. Marriage is between a man and woman.

Lara Crofter: So like gay people and relationships but they don't have the difficulty and pain that it brings.

John Sendmehome: Well friendships are good for everybody and so we said okah to Civil Partnerships.

Lara Crofter: Men and women together can be friends but they can't enter into Civil Partnerships. I thought the idea was gay people could kind of get married in a civil sort of way.

John Sendmehome: You can't have a situation where a man can ask another newly wed man in the hotel how he left his wife in the morning, and he says "smoking" and the other says, "Wow, really, mine was just a bit sore." I mean, we are tacking differently here: the State has no way of gifting marriage to anybody, you know it is not the rall of government to gift marriage.

Lara Crofter: I thought that's what they did do. Like, I got married in a civil ceremony and I can't then come down to your Church and get married again to someone else, much as I might want it you know. Not that I would but the government says I can't.

John Sendmehome: Yes it's lack the Mormon who says I wouldn't want my daughters to marry you. It's but strong traditions and what the people like working class people have long thought. Most of society actually sees this as a most ardered thing. So we said Civil Partnerships can be set up as lack civil marriage in that they should have no prayers - they are not marriage.

Lara Crofter: So a civil marriage is not a marriage then? It's just a friendship?

John Sendmehome: Nah the government, the State, says it is a marriage. So it is a marriage withat prayers. Look I am trying to find an aggament to refuse gay marriage or whatever it would be called. It can't be as good a marriage as the one I can do when I move my hands about and say magic wadds. Well, let's try the aggament from what lots of people think it all as about. I mean it's a big job to turn that around. Lots of entrenched attitudes, lack mine.

Lara Crofter: People have changed their minds, and quite quickly.

John Sendmehome: Lack as if gay people are not human beings - something that some cladgy, who are not racist, matt say, even if the lay people under secular society have changed their minds: well, look, that language doesn't work but all ah am saying is that the State should not redefine marriage. Set against tradition and history, dictators have tried to do it; even Idi Amin didn't dah that so why should David Cameron or Nick Clegg dah it or who's that other one? Social structures have been existing for a long time and the State cannot overturn them.

Lara Crofter: Who is controlled by tradition and history, who can't overturn social structures, if the time seems right to change? Isn't there an argument about new women clergy and bishops like you except they are women?

John Sendmehome: General Synod, at is contralled by tradition but can avverturn things. Well it goes through the dioceses and then needs two thirds, except the Covenant doesn't need two thirds as that might be too high a haddle. See, we are also widerning our observance of social and cultural structures through bringing in the Covenant. Archbishop Rowan Tree cannot see any ather future than having the Covenant, and this will surely not allow us to have gay marriage or bless with prayers civil partnerships, so we don't want marriage outside that wadder tradition and prejudice in the world that makes us think of as if marriage where we have prayers you know.

Lara Crofter: You're afraid the State might demand you do marriages. At the moment the Church has to marry anyone on its doorstep. Like there's your marriage and I like that, and there's civil marriage and I like that. Which one is better?

John Sendmehome: Ah no. General Synod, and lack the Archbishop says it as a body should 'read the ordinal' and take its cue from bishops. Look, we are just trying to stop others extending marriages. If people want religious registrations to lack marry them, then the present dictatorship says it will require an application to the registrar to have the worship place authorised and then the ahganisation will have to give approval, and in ahh case this means General Synod only and not bishops or anyone else. So gay friendly cladgy cannot jump the gun.

Lara Crofter: Then I can't see the problem, but may be I am a bit thick. It's then just other religious groups: Unitarians, Quakers, some Jews...

John Sendmehome: It's rather almost lack somebody telling you that the Chach, whose job is to waship God, will become an amm of the Ammed Fasses as if they must take amms and fight. You're completely changing tradition when you do that.

Lara Crofter: But my point is no one is asking you.

John Sendmehome: We ah the State Church. Does this not count for annathing anymore?

Lara Crofter: But people getting married with you has for a long time been a convenience; I mean your Church isn't much working class who use your churches like public conveniences.

John Sendmehome: Ah, yah, well that's a different matter. The Chach must do more to avoid its leadership being solely whatt and middle class.

Lara Crofter: I mean your Church was upper and middle class wasn't it, isn't it?

John Sendmehome: I don't want whatt whacking-class parishioners just being relagatted to making tea after services.

Lara Crofter: Don't women do that?

John Sendmehome: Yah. But to tackle all that I think we need to replace books with DVDs and audio books, because the simple people cannot read. We need DVDs showing whaah gay people cannot actually marry. We need support groups for single mothers and whaah they should marry men. I don't think we need theological books at the back of chaches with all that mumbo jumbo confusion but let's have cladgy tacking away for MP3 players in whatt whacking class pockets to help them disadvantaged think like me.

Lara Crofter: Or like Rowan Tree.

John Sendmehome: Does anyone manage to think lack him? Nah, we want inclassion: lack they put me on to chair the committee for minority ethnic Anglican concerns, just ethnic lack, and we mad progress but that now seems to be going backwards because black whacking class people and a lot of women who had been raised Anglicans are now joining Pentecostal churches. That’s a huge drain and I don't want to have to replace them with gays.

Lara Crofter: I fancy a walk. I've not been here before. Thank you then, is it Canaan, no Canu?

John Sendmehome: Simple John will do.

Lara Crofter: Thanks simple John. Over to the studio in Wykkyfish.

Guests in Disguise at Radio Chadderbox!

Peter Levite: Well, welcome to a one off Radio Chadderbox Religion Review. Now we must be honest but we're down on our religion content broadcasting statistics, and we've taken the opportunity to invite visitors to the region and some of our old friends for a round table review of what's going on. But, apparently, I'm told some of you are not blogging any more.

Rowan Tree: I'm very pleased to hear it and whilst we may pray for people who blog I want us to pray even more for the Anglican Communion.

Graham Monarch: Excellent Archbishop: we pray for the Anglican Communion. In the name of...

Peter Levite: Not now, Bishop Monarch of somewhere I can't remember. No one remember? OK. So you, then, and I welcome our illustrious visitor to this region, Rowanov Treetri, the Archbishop of England.

Rowan Tree: No no. Apparently, the Russians as Orthodox have not exactly reviewed but we could say overviewed my standing within the identification they make of the Anglican Communion, and in such a manner have not requested but supposed that I return to a simpler name, although I must reflect upon their President Arthur Pewty and his ethical and bureaucratic standing as leader of a much larger organisation if not itself of the claim of being apparently dysfunctional.

Peter Levite: So you are now the Most Reverend Rowan Tree again.

Rowan Tree: This is the outcome of our conversations.

Peter Levite: And coming north you meet our more regular guest, Archbishop John Sendmehome, the Archbishop of the North. Have you changed your rather controversial sounding name?

John Sendmehome: What do you call a man hanging on a wall?

Peter Levite: I don't know. What do you call a man hanging on a wall?

John Sendmehome: Art. What do you call a man with a seagull on his head? Cliff.

Anthony Wedgewood Bigg: I worry about how we are going to train our faithful men to their parish ministries given the standard of leadership today.

Peter Levite: Welcome Bishop Bigg who is soon, what, a bishop of oversight of Confessing Anglicans? Is that a yes? Let me then introduce a woman who became a Unitarian minister here and then left it to marry the Anglican priest Rev. Tilgate after all and became an Anglican again, properly, Les...

Elbee: Nope. No no. I am now Elbee. I could be Eltee but for continuity I'll be Elbee. My husband is busy running the parish, our new home.

Peter Levite: Oh. And here we have er...

Pluto: Pluto.

Peter Levite: Pluto? You've changed your name as well? What's going on? You used to come here with Reverend Jade Stowaway. But this is...

Als Bells: Als Bells. I'm not wanting to say much. But we both worked with Wok Pan together and advanced clergy fashion and the all essential make up.

Peter Levite: So you now call yourself after a planetesimal, or a tiny planet, Pluto.

Pluto: I don't have much to do with Jade now, if I ever did. Jade seems to be very happy in London.

Rowan Tree: I am most impressed with the work you have been doing for the Anglican Communion in helping us to, I think, understand and work out the differences right in the dioceses by which we can put into process that which can bring us closer together in terms of identity in the much larger Catholic Church.

Pluto: Once I was really really conservative, but different about women, and I was and am really really charismatic and love it, but I'm also Anglican and that's wider than me and then there's all that abroad too so thank you yes. I'm Pluto but I might go back to, well, you know.

Harry Tickpaper: Yeah, not bad for a curate either: foreign travel, dealing with the big issues already.

Peter Levite: Local person Harry Tickpaper, who surely saw Elbee as a suitable Unitarian minister.

Elbee: Harry, I remind you that I co-ordinated the resistance to the Anglican Communion Covenant. And I promoted equality and gay inclusion in the Anglican Church. I said about honesty, being really honest and I told the world a lot about psychology.

Peter Goole: If liberals are resisting the Anglican Covenant, there must be an argument in favour of it. That's what that ugly chap said and I agree with him as he is Protestant and sound, though I'm a bit more Catholic and the Pope is a good chap really, gay in the proper ecclesiastical sense of the word.

Anthony Wedgewood Bigg: Eh? Well I don't think this gets to the heart of the problem, which is the actual need, in the churches, to maintain the narrow path of raising faithful ministers.

Rowan Tree: At this particular point I'd want to say that there is no future, corporately or individually, without the Anglican Communion Covenant coming into play; I cannot simply see what else could be suggested that would take its place. I have set out all the conclusions to which the various indaba processes must arrive.

Graham Monarch: Absolutely, Archbishop, and may I say how we receive your teaching with such humbling kneebendingness. In the great cold ice sheets of life, there is none like the Anglican Covenant. I know that people like Elbee have resisted it, and the dioceses are wobbling, but no one can resist the ice sheet that is the Anglican Covenant. And, yes, careers will depend on whether you sit on top of the ice or are consumed underneath the ice.

Anthony Wedgewood Bigg: I don't think this gets to the heart of the problem, as I repeat, which is the actual need, in the churches, to maintain the narrow path of raising faithful ministers and to do this we may need the same in overseers and have to look overseas, and I don't mean to The Episcopal Church or the Church of North India, but the Anglican Church of North America and many of the African Churches with their leadership.

Pluto: I invited Reverend Goole along. He's like with me but not with me, but he blogged too and, well, he didn't get a job after being a curate. So he now works in a bank.

Peter Goole: And I was upholding orthodoxy.

Peter Levite: Finally I invite a new local guest, the Most Reverend Doctor Barry Morgan Morgannwg Hankee, of the Arian Anglican Church, which is in a semi down the road from here? We were expecting your new associate Molly Lawyer Bakerman as well, but she hasn't come.

John Sendmehome: Semi or not, would your lot like to stop meeting in our cathedrals?

Barry Morgan Morgannwg Hankee: They are OUR cathedrals. The Anglican trinitarians and Roman Catholics before us are apostates and heretics. As for, humm, Bishop Molly, she is known for disappearing.

Rowan Tree: I wrote about the Arians and would suggest that your assertion is somewhat debatable.

Barry Morgan Morgannwg Hankee: Not only is the true faith Arian, but Jesus Christ was a Jewish first born of creation and spent most of his life here in England. And after his uncle buried him, and his spirit arose, his uncle came back here and established the first Christian church. So we should have our cathedral of Christendom at Glastonbury. You as a Unitarian attender should agree with me Harry.

Harry Tickpaper: Believe me. You have nothing to do with Unitarianism and all claims of connections are bogus. Francis William Newman is a hero of mine and he was no Arian, never mind many of the others your publicity mentions recent and past, near and far.

John Sendmehome: I just luuuuv Prog Rock. I met Phil Collins once and said do you play things on request and he said yes, so I said can you play cards instead?

Peter Levite: So what is with all this name changing then? Elbee, my researcher says you had this leading blog and fantastic statistics and then, without notice, it closed down.

Pluto: No more statistics chasing, unless I do.

Elbee: No, no more statistics chasing and women bloggers achieving more. Peter: can I call you that? I just love local ministry. Once we moved location we decided without notice that I should shut down the blog completely.

Harry Tickpaper: Without notice. Speaking generally, blogs are dangerous things. If you have a blog, and you are a minister of religion, the locals start to read it. And that way they start to question your direction. They don't necessarily understand. Also, the places where you candidate also read the blog and you can't get a job after being a curate. And if you are married, and your partner is the boss, you can't queer his or her pitch, so to speak. And if you oppose the core policies of the bureaucracy, like on the Covenant, then there are others that mark you down. There are lots of underhand things happening at the moment.

Rowan Tree: I hope you are not implying that I have anything to do with matters so called underhand.

John Sendmehome: I hope you were not implying that I have anything to do with these underhand things going on.

Graham Monarch: The disloyal oppostion should realise that there are career consequences as well as relational consequences. It's called Church order.

Elbee: I just love local ministry. I decided for the Anglican Church and that means, necessarily, of course, compromises.

Harry Tickpaper: But let's not mess about: when that Covenant comes into play, you folks in favour of inclusion will be frozen, stuck. All the things you campaigned for will be impossible.

Rowan Tree: They will not be impossible. These matters will rather be not quite subjected but invited into a process where those slow to accept potential change, yet without a particular consensus, will still be able to be heard and therefore those that go ahead with such change will simply undergo relational consequences - as mentioned - that will not happen if they opt in to the process.

Peter Levite: And Pluto, what about you? Your blogging?

Pluto: There are lots of exciting changes going on out there and in my head. I want to still have that debate that comes from that really really engaging theological discourse, the text that Gadamer drives our total world view as ministers of religion even if most people have a secular outlook or, as I have discovered, abroad, with different faiths. But, Elbee, that's not necessarily local ministry, and so I'd chosen just to converse the textual drive with the people who want to engage and stimulate...

Als Bells: And we can talk about fashion and make up too, without being told we are letting us girls down.

Pluto: But then that might not be enough fresh air and I want the fresh air. Let's just do it regardless.

Rowan Tree: I empathise with this desire for theological dialogue, and indeed away from my direct governance responsibilities I can discuss the exegesis of the Qur'an or the Bhagavad Gita in lectures, or tackle matters of the economy and motivation. I recommend Juan de Mariana's A Treatise on the Alteration of Money which is all about a Spanish perspective on Kings and altering the coinage: low on theory but a practical early modern theological economics. And of course there is the theology of the faithful relationship between pairing individuals that we can negotiate. I have every sympathy with the Gadamerian view derived from Heideggar that Being is dynamic and action-based through time and indeed I work upon this in some narrative detail.

Peter Goole: But is this orthodoxy?

Barry Morgan Morgannwg Hankee: The sooner we re-establish orthodoxy the better, and properly scriptural. Arius was right.

Peter Goole: You telling me I'm not scriptural?

Barry Morgan Morgannwg Hankee: Jesus walks around the earth, and yet 1 John can say no one has seen God? That's one against the Trinity is it not? You're extra-biblical.

Elbee: Oh come on. The Trinity says that God is social and Christ is the headline figure one follows, right, in the Spirit - I think.

Peter Goole: Is this orthodoxy?

Barry Morgan Morgannwg Hankee: It's clear that Christ is the first born of all creation and that is clear from the opening words in John's gospel which is far more Gnostic than the faithful direct words of the Gospel of Thomas.

Pluto: The Trinity and our faithfulness to the threefold God is part of our necessary standard of performance as Christians, delivered in revelation in total, as a whole textual encounter, and in any case I feel it as experience when I'm in the right kind of worship group. Though I'm committed to all the more mundane Anglican traditions and see more in them than I did. Do people understand this?

Peter Goole: But is it orthodoxy?

Harry Tickpaper: It looks like orthodoxy. It should appear like orthodoxy, and of course it sounds great, but when the untrained eye goes beyond first impressions it becomes a confusion. But the world view we have is technological; ours is about what works; paradigms are subject to shifts of course but need better foundations than 'expectations of performance' or story telling, and I'm saying there is a place for a return to history and what is possible and not possible in history, just as we must have science and not the make-believe of miracles or supernatural endtimes. I'm postpostmodern now, but I always was a soft postmodernist.

Elbee: I'm postmodern, I really believe in postmodernity.

Pluto: I'm postmodern - as in postliberal and poststructural. Not that I was liberal, in the past anyway. See, I understand English and grammar and I love theology when it is all about grammar!

Elbee: I'm still liberal. It's just that Harold Wilson is no longer my blogging bishop and I have other responsibilties and constraints.

Als Bells: I'm postmodern when it comes to fashion. Imagine stuffy clergy and the most fantastic things to wear - that must be postmodern because they clash.

Peter Goole: I'm orthodox. I blogged and even I couldn't get a job. People kept saying, 'You're a banker, you're a banker' on Skype and so I became a banker instead.

Peter Levite: I find interviewing via Skype very unclear with picture and sound. So then we have blogs shutting down and one going private and even an orthodox chap - he says - has paid the price. What about progress on ordaining women bishops? That's in the news.

Harry Tickpaper: You have a woman bishop now, Mr Arius.

Barry Morgan Morgannwg Hankee: Arians do not ordain women presbyters, but as Archbishop I will ordain women in exceptional circumstances when I feel like it.

Rowan Tree: I think that the dioceses have demonstrated well their acceptance for ordaining women as bishops, but have however failed to demonstrate their acceptance of necessary safeguards for those who are not able to be ordaining women as bishops, or find problematic the apostolic succession of women as bishops within Catholicism; and so both of us as archbishops will want to see that we can retain the relevance of the ordinal that does not accept women as bishops as well as that which does accept women as bishops, and members of the Synod should read the ordinal and take its cue accordingly - or I will get very angry.

Graham Monarch: We crave your leadership, Archbishop Tree.

John Sendmehome: You know I agree with you; I always do. A bishop walks along and sees a woman trip over on a bad pavement. He leans over to help her up and says it's the first time he's rescued a fallen woman and she says it's the first time she's been picked up by a bishop.

Elbee: I think ordaining women bishops is a vital first step in inclusion that will help the Church in England and...

Harry Tickpaper: So if it doesn't happen you would have to consider the future.

Elbee: Oh no.

Harry Tickpaper: So if the Church is unethical in some of its fundamentals in how it treats people, it matters not what you do...

Elbee: Stop sniping from the outside.

Rowan Tree: But in examining this the position for us has rather to be seen from the perspective of the Church not pursuing human rights as in a secular agenda but the ethics that are ecclesiologically and theologically derived, so that in wishing to retain a modicum of Catholicity of Church order and and the fellowship of belief the importance we attach is that of the process of retaining these as we struggle with the issues that seem to be simpler from the perspective of secular human rights. And therefore we ask those who are affected, seemingly on the one side discriminated against, to involve themselves in Catholic order and Reformed belief by self-sacrifice to these and to do so with a certain willingness against the wider project of retaining the Mind of the Communion as a whole.

Peter Goole: It's much simpler. We are all capable of conforming to the Bible, so if you are a Hindu man and love another man you can become a Christian man and love a woman.

Pluto: I need to think, er blog, about that.

Anthony Wedgewood Bigg: The narrow route certainly makes things quite simple to follow.

Elbee: I love the fact that our Archbishop is an intellectual. I really fancy him for that.

Harry Tickpaper: In your dreams.

Elbee: Yes, in my dreams. What's wrong with that? Why do you come across as so hostile? I'm a liberal like you are.

Harry Tickpaper: I'm not hostile; it is an unfortunate effect of being liberal to liberal and the difference when you do not want to cut the rope no matter what is on it.

Elbee: Why should I cut the rope? Relationships with institutions and people in them are complicated.

Harry Tickpaper: I agree. No one should cut the rope they need. If you need to sit on the branch, don't saw.

Pluto: Gosh, I know there are liberals but being liberal in the Church is really scary. I think Oh, liberal in the Church and then I put the brakes on. But if I go private, the brakes might go on and be warmer enclosed like in the garage with a green door and I won't press the pedal hard enough but if I keep in the fresh air and lots of evangelicals are looking too then I might bang the brake pedal down harder and sooner and let the heat go off away as it can. This is a Dickens of a business to decide.

Rowan Tree: 1978 I think was the zenith or nadir year for liberalism in the Church, at least that which arrived at quite an intellectual confusion regarding myth it and needed, I think, a different approach of narrative and world view and one that is more secure in the Church.

Harry Tickpaper: Not so, with clarity. Because...

Peter Levite: I wonder whether we have an intellectual weatherman or whether he is just the region's climactic joker. Hah! Where are you?

George Hudson: I left Leeds station for a tourist runaround, presently heading towards the attraction of Mill Chill church with its mosaic inside and the gothic in and out.

Barry Morgan Morgannwg Hankee: Consistent with the true Arian view to be expanded I am sure.

John Sendmehome: Ah but Leeds Parish Church, now that's the real deal for a cathedral that is not a cathedral, with an oversight that has no oversight, you know. The vicar asks a parishioner there why he gasped and then gave a large sigh of relief when he read out the Ten Commandments. Because, he said, he'd lost his wallet and 'Thou shalt not steal' made him think it was stolen but then 'Thou shalt not commit adultery' reminded him of where it would be. Don't forget to come to the real cathedral though, and that doesn't mean you Mr Morgannwg Hankee.

Pluto: Hey everyone I'm Rachel Marsovenus and I am going to carry on blogging in public! Hooray!

George Hudson: The rain will run off the pitched rooves quite rapidly and down the gothic window when it comes later today. Like everything else, it'll take longer to get to the east coast and so it's back to the behind the times Peter.

Peter Levite: Haven't they got the gothic window in yet and why is a window coming to the east coast?

George Hudson: The rain later today, etcetera.

Peter Levite: Yes so come here for the up to the minute news. Thanks to my guests for their variably anonymous appearances.

Who Jesus Thought He Was

One might suppose that Jesus did not simply join John the Baptist's messianic group, but that also that John obviously saw in Jesus qualities of leadership. However truncated regarding the loss of John the Baptist's leadership, the baptism and the temptation come together in the narrative and the first question is what is the temptation about?

In Jesus's culture and mindset, his doubts about his mission are going to be transferred to Satan working on his mind - and that suggests the trial of doubt for the full term indicated by the symbolic 40 days. If the problem is one of self-identifying as the messiah, Jesus can work a miracle. But the scriptural path of the messiah (that is also that of the suffering servant) since Moses forbad the use of a miracle since water had come from a rock. So, to be faithful, there could be no proof. But then Satan was interested in Jesus and that in itself is a kind of proof - otherwise, why be tested?

So who did Jesus think he was? The notion that he was God comes only from some in the Christian community as his titles were escalated and translated more into the pagan worldview. He might well have thought, from the desert on, that he was the Son of Man, though one that needed to be transformed from heaven to be the full-blooded messianic figure and this might have been him or someone else. That was God's business, and on that even 1 John 4:12 put that no one has seen God. So Jesus wasn't God, quite obviously, and if he was a lot of people including the man himself missed this rather important point. But if the Son of Man has an enhanced meaning for Messiah, as well as a less enhanced meaning, the gospels use it in both the first person and third person, as if Jesus is referring on some occasions to another. That's the ambiguity at the heart of it all. We also have no information that Jesus ever stated that he was in the family line of David, which would make him both son of David and Lord of David if Messiah. Again, this suggests some sort of transformation. The Son of Man who undergoes suffering becomes the Son of Man who is that transformed figure, by God - a very human and difficult existence before the mighty version. It could be two Messiahs but they ought to be connected to be fully biblical.

What is so is that these ideas are utterly strange to us, and could be said to form a cultural delusion. But then all cultures are capable of creating meaning that a later culture finds to be a form of mass deception. What looks to us as nuts can be quite credible at the time, when many expected the last days and there were a number of Jesuses running around the place and either faded away or were knocked off by the authorites, as Jesus was, suffering a Roman crucifixion rather than a Jewish stoning (by accident or intent).

The issue is his faithfulness to his scriptures, regarded as literal and historical (in that myth and story were overwhelming and without our recent centuries of critical apparatus), and then a question of strategy. That was about healing and preaching the imminent Kingdom, not changing society itself but saying the poor had preference in such a coming Kingdom (and thus he healed to remove demons and make them sinless and ready), and then putting himself in harms way so that the suffering could be complete and the transformation - or events of that kind - take place.

And this is why, in my view, Jesus is interesting for his reverse ethics, but simply a man of his time. So what if a Paul, who never turned up at the relatively unknown man's crucifixion, idealised him into a salvation figure and made a bridge from Jews to Gentiles. Jesus is not a revelation into our line of history, but history is just a spiral of cultures and forms. Transcendence might be worth pursuing, to which Jesus pointed in his own culture's style and manner, but not Jesus himself who was as mistaken as anyone can be in such a supernaturalist culture.

See Campbell, Steuart (1996), The Rise and Fall of Jesus: the Ultimate Explanation for the Origin of Christianity, Edinburgh: Explicit Books, 94-100.