Pluralist Speaks

Radio Chadderbox in Jamaica

2012-01-29T03:50:00.005+01:00

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!

2012-01-27T05:20:00.032+01:00

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

2012-01-24T18:00:00.002+01:00

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.

Loonies that would Run the Asylum

2012-01-23T17:59:00.005+01:00

Update

Bishop Benn has removed his endoresment. Good, though he obviously didn't read it sufficiently before endorsing and adds no apology now.

Original Blog Entry

No bellweather bishop, he, but one nevertheless, who gives support to special training of male only presbyters and the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, Bishop Wallace Benn, has given general support to a book that accuses the Queen of breaking her Coronation Oath by signing into legislation bills passed by Parliament that apparently break the Ten Commandments. Bishop Benn says:

“This makes interesting and disturbing reading. We desparately need to understand, as a nation, that our Creator knows what is best for us, and to return to His way as the best way to live.”
Rt Rev Wallace Benn, Bishop of Lewes

The book is by Stephen Green, the one well known for public ranting and dominating over a, well, strict household (to put it mildly). People committed to the ways of respect, peace and spirituality might want to keep their distance, but Wallace Benn obviously does not. Here is a choice piece from the book:

2 The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.

See: Gen 18:12; Is 59:1-15; Matt 19:5; 1 Cor 7:2-5; Eph 5:21-33, 1 Pet 3:6.

This Act reduced the minimum age for homosexual activity to 18, redefined enforced sodomy as "rape," in order to equate buggery with sexual intercourse, and legalised buggery on women. It also introduced an offence of "marital rape," drafted by the Law Commission, unknown in the Law of God, and in conflict with the marriage service of the Book of Common Prayer, where the promises given by a man and woman to each other establish a binding consent to sexual intercourse. The right to petition the Court for the restoration of conjugal rights was abolished by the Matrimonial Proceedings and Property Act 1970 at the instigation of the Law Commission. (Law Commission Report 23, 1969)

In other words, he is a supporter of marital rape by denying that it exists as a concept. A fundamental principle of contemporary life is the consent of the individual, the individual who feels, thinks, worries and hopes. If you break that consent by unintended error, then apologies and restoration are needed, but to break that consent deliberately is simply criminal. Such a stance of consent must surely have superior value over what appears in a myth bearing book, whatever one believes about it.

We do not want Puritan rule again. It was good when that went. But nor do we want rule by the Book of Common Prayer. The other side of the Restoration, and then tolerance extended, and then humanism, was that people had fun again, had variety, and could be valued for who they were as themselves in their dealings with others.

Submitted to Hull Calendar

2012-01-23T15:24:00.003+01:00

The roughly bimonthly calendar wants some historical content and I was given the task to tell of its origins.

Although the Elizabethan Church intended to retain and contain its Puritans, the yo-yo of liberty under Cromwell and then the Restoration in 1660 meant that many Puritans could not accept reintegration via assent to the Book of Common Prayer in 1662.

What is Puritan religion? It is a belief in God already knowing your salvation or damnation. They were trinitarians. Many a Puritan looked for and demonstrated signs of personal salvation, and this was through godly living. You might be favoured with a large income, but you didn't consume. Many were merchants, and made good early capitalists by preferring to invest than consume, and they also built charities. But they also rejected earthly displays of being religious in favour of a severe simplicty in worship.

The Presbyterian Puritans believed in the broad parish Church, not in the supremacy of the local congregation like the Independents, and they would have preferred to stay in the Church of England.

Then the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672 (for only a year) allowed licensed congregations to meet legally. Hull's libertarian governor (the Duke of Monmouth) made the city a haven for outcasts.

The Puritan Samuel Charles, ordained in 1655 and ejected at Mickleover in 1662, came to Hull and began his ministry when two meeting houses (Blackfriargate, a chapel, and Richard Barnes' house where Joseph Wilson preached) merged. They formed one congregation at Bowl Alley Lane in Christopher Fanthrope's house in 1680.

The repressive Lord Plymouth replaced the the Duke of Monmouth in 1682. This soon led to much fear. When in 1685 the Duke of Monmouth was discovered and executed, many non-conformists, including Leonard Chamberlain, were put under house arrest and feared for their lives.

However, another Declaration of Indulgence was issued in 1687 to Roman Catholics and non-conformists. Bowl Alley Lane was reopened and the Reverend Charles returned. Then William of Orange replaced James II and Protestant liberties were granted in the 1689 Act of Toleration.

The congregation left Christopher Fanthrope's house for a new chapel built by 1693. The Trust Deed of 1689 under his name gives no doctrines to be preached: only the worship of God and the administration of the Sacrament. They relied on their Bibles. Chapels built in this period copied their style from the Halls of the London Merchants' Companies. They had pan-tile roofs, strong benches and alleys between them. Self-government by trustees reflected the Gilds own governing system too. Samuel Charles died and the next minister, Reverend John Billingsley, appointed 1694, was the son of an ejected minister.

The Octagonal chapel in Bowlalley Lane Chapel was not built until 1803, and three years later the first declared Unitarian minister, William Severn, friend of John Wesley and ex-Wesleyan, took office. Unitarianism was still, as such, illegal until 1813.

Puritan faith changed because it was difficult for wealthy trust leaders to retain a severe and disciplined faith, and secondly they allowed their ministers to be their own preachers of religion. Ministers had to train in the dissenters' academies that were seedbeds for different ideas of biblical interpretation, and English Presbyterian chapels did not demand assent to credal declarations of membership. You rented your pew and the minister preached. Thus they evolved and later there was a new distinct movement that argued that the doctrine of the Trinity was not in the Bible; thus an identified Unitarianism inhabited Presbyterian chapels.

YUU at Hull

2012-01-22T03:46:00.004+01:00

It was a day session at the Yorkshire Unitarian Union quarterly meeting at Hull. I was there from 10:30 as people gathered until 17:30 as most were leaving, many Hull folks clearing up.

The morning session was about Unitarian Approaches to Easter, especially for preachers, and I thought that would be interesting. Then the national General Assembly President would lead a session and then would come the business meeting.

I was sat alongside at least one enthusiastic chap from outside the YUU meeting for the morning session, so the interest in the potential of the session attracted in others. However, I was a little disappointed. I suppose I thought it would be a critical investigation of Easter, so that we would look at Easter say in a service and tackle it differently from those under an obligation to uphold orthodoxy (at least in public). But the session started with who comes to Unitarian churches, and the list included sceptics, rational Christians, Mystical or Gnostic Christians, Christian atheists/ agnostics, Spiritual humanists, Buddhsits, Pagans, Radical Catholics, various seekers. So it was a question of relating to them, or some of them, the preacher retaining the sense of self-integrity while reaching out to the congregation as is in each case.

My contribution was you can describe Easter, like in phenomenological RE, or critically examine it, and some of us wanted to get into details, while others said you can say focus on all sorts who take on the system. The Pagan Easter takes place at Christmas, someone well said, in terms of death and new beginnings. It sort of moved from rotating around these issues, and I'm not convinced by an apparent new flexibility of science on matters of death and life, to a video of fluffy nice type images associated with coming back to life and births, which may or may not be appropriate. Easter ought to relate to the depressed in a congregation as well as those who can see hope ahead, it was said.

I just think that whilst a worship service is there to bring people together and give a wide content, the subject of Easter offers Unitarians an opportunity to tackle what doesn't add up in the claimed Easter story; nor was there a sense (for me) of people going from this meeting to say, "Humm, I can do this in Easter services soon." I won't be doing an Easter service this year. My service is one day after the birth of the prophet Muhammad. Now that could be interesting. Already, then, cue the music of Yusuf Islam and The Beloved, but perhaps not what Yusuf would say.

Then after some snack came a well appreciated meditative devotion presented by a Hull member (with a faith stance of an Eastern direction, but he knows how to speak and lead as he does so a yoga group).

A 'Cairns and Candles' session was led by the GA President. The session used a book from 1904 about a Yorkshire Unitarian Union County Bazaar to support churches and it giving information about them at that time. In 2014 the YUU marks its bicentenary, but many Yorkshire congregations (like Hull) have origins in the 1662 Great Ejection of about 1700 Calvinist ministers from the Church of England. They met under persecution in houses and the Declaration of Indulgence allowed some chapels to appear, and then trinitarians were free to organise (with social penalties) from the 1689 Act of Toleration. Trust Deeds laid down few formal limitations but they all assumed trinitarian worship. The first Hull minister fasted on the day of his ejection each year. Some churches did begin later and as a result of disgruntled Methodists in one case and the Unitarian Domestic Mission in another (and assisting others). Scarborough started as a temperance hall in 1871.

So people from each congregation or for another congregation relayed a memory they had to build a cairn from one stone each. The cairn isn't just historical but a means to guide the way ahead. The point was made at the end of this part that not only do people come to the Unitarians from Christianity but also from an older and different Unitarianism, so that now it develops more towards a Many Beliefs One Faith position, not just accommodating but valuing persons. Also many people well up on Internet religion haven't the skills to give and take within a real congregation, whereas many in a congregation perhaps need to get Internet skills and on to its religion too.

The candles part was then hopes for the future per congregation. For example York was down to 6 or 7 people and now has 39, and there are practical and idealistic hopes for the future. Hull could improve its building inside and be more attractive outside. There was also a general hope for more tolerance in religion, a reference by one to Don Cupitt's apparent view that fundamentalism in Islam and Christianity is a passing phase.

In a general discussion but as much presenting I mentioned my participation in electronic communication and to a wider group of people. I said I notice quite positive statements about the Unitarians and this at a time of quite some flux, especially some pessimism about the behaviour in the bureaucracy of the Church of England and also the transience and questioning the sensibility of fringe Catholics, and that there is a lot of shaking out to take place in time to come.

Nevertheless, there was and going into the business meeting something of the reality of things. Pudsey is closing and that's it. Pudsey had asked for responses from the General Assembly again and again and seemed to get nothing. The process had been traumatic, and the people would remain friends but would not seek new accommodation and all the business of setting up. The General Assembly only seemed to take an interest when the remaining trust money was likely, but the trustees will distribute that. But there is good too - new people in the movement preaching and the YUU can give concrete support towards training. There is also the 50th year of Send a Child to Hucklow that gives children holidays that would otherwise miss out. This wants to raise £50,000 this year.

There was concern too for the non-participation of Leeds in YUU affairs, and then what was perhaps the (small?) elephant in the room. What looked like being passed by to me but was raised late on produced the most lively exchanges. Without going into details here, suffice it to say that Unitarian churches organise their own oversight, as oversight has different and specific meanings in church life. As congregations arrange their ministerial and other oversight, alone or associating as independent gatherings, no one person simply announces oversight of collections of congregations and such claims are bogus. Also, Unitarians have Lay Persons in Charge and Lay Pastors, and Ministers are recognised on the GA Roll. The GA cannot interfere in what congregations decide to do, but it does have a Roll of Ministers and that is the connection in the recognition of ministers. Various factual correspondences, hopefully persuasive, will be written.

And then followed the all important provided tea and chat: I mainly seemed to be talking about Florence Nightingale, with two who knew better than me, an Anglican of a lower sort according to a supporter of a higher sort, surely a lesbian, a statistician and somone who laid in her bed for later life. Also of course early members of our congregations were very anti-Socininian, and yet Socinians were tolerated better than Unitarians for opinions, but in 1813 toleration for Unitarians was followed by chapels suddenly declaring the name (although it took until 1844 to secure the trust funds via the Open Trust myth as used in Parliament).

Hot Air and Cold Bodies

2012-01-18T04:11:00.004+01:00

Update

No one can read Martin Reynolds' three continuous comments without thinking that in Wales this chap once used to be a friendly neighbour of the here accused Rowan Williams; what Martin Reynolds says is direct and devastating (and surely of 'in the know'), whereas folks like me are writing only on the lines of general principles after so many dubious press reports (in the usual 'not in the know' fashion).

Original

Original reports regarding Jeffrey John and potential legal action were worth ignoring in their interpretation at least, being caught up in notions of ambition up a hierarchy. Is it not the substance of the matter about the fact that a set of rules is created (that are allowed under an exemption from the Equality Act) and yet even these are applied with additional and distasteful discrimination? Why is there no equivalent inquiry of a heterosexual unmarried but partnered as to their current sexual conduct and repentance of previous sexual activity?

And in a credal faith, a mistake is made that the more you believe of the list the more religious you are, and the more you add to the list the more religious you are. So the attitude of discrimination assumes that its existence is evidence of religiosity whereas those who seek equality display secular acceptability. The inclusivity of the widest human fellowship is itself a religious attitude.

Jesus Talking

2012-01-14T19:15:00.004+01:00

So what language/s did Jesus speak? The first and most obvious answer is Aramaic, related to Hebrew but not Hebrew, though Hebrew is one language of scriptures. His dialect would have been Galilean Aramaic, a bit rough at the edges, and also regarding Peter. The question is, though, did he speak any other language?

Jews in dispersal used Koine as a common language between them, whatever else they spoke. Many came together each year as Passover. There are a number of doubful meetings between Jesus and others that, with no translator, would have meant a necessity of him speaking Koine, the common Greek of the time. Despite his whole mission being of Jewish culture and end-time, and his focus upon them, there were suggested meetings between him and some Gentiles. No Roman centurion would have spoken Aramaic, though Matthew 8:5-13 is unlikely to be historical. One rather doubts much of the sequences leading to the execution, as if Pilate could be bothered. But again direct speech needs Koine. If they did, soldiers mocking Jesus at the cross would have spoken in Koine. But before all this, any meetings with Gentiles - like the woman who caused him a rethink - meant speaking the general language of the whole region and beyond.

The Septuagint is the Greek language Bible, as not everyone could understand Hebrew. It is possible that some sayings originated in Greek.

So we know Jesus used Aramaic; he might have understood Hebrew, but he probably did also understand Koine. Jesus was a builder, but in family terms he was the one who got religion more than most, and would have studied scriptures the most, and for that needed communication and languages. In joining John the Baptist's (possibly related) group and then leading it after his demise, he needed to communicate with other Jews and possibly even some Gentiles and to do that Koine was necessary.

See Campbell, Steuart (1996), The Rise and Fall of Jesus: the Ultimate Explanation for the Origin of Christianity, Edinburgh: Explicit Books, 58-59.

Jesus at the Jobcentre

2012-01-10T20:51:00.003+01:00

Was Jesus a carpenter that got religion? I suggest carpenter is too narrow and that he also did a stint as a steward. Yes, today you'd think of stone and brick as well as wood and perhaps the steward doing tea and coffee on Network Rail or even on the HS2 to come in 14 years (wnhen others will be building maglevs). So the question is about whether Jesus was a builder and can he fix it yes he can.

For a time I liked the idea that Jesus as a carpenter was 'Tekton', a Greek mistranslation of the Aramaic 'Naggar' which can be both carpenter or scholar, and thus Jesus was actually a scholar. But no. Such is against the evidence of given metaphors in the gospels and that in the Septuagint it comes from the Hebrew charash meaning craftsman. Tekton is an artificer but archi-tekton is a master-builder and the use of tekton in the Septuagint is in the context of the building trade.

He'll have been self-employed like many of those who became his disciples. Good one for the new and coming right wing New Testament.

In Palestine at the time, houses were built of sun dried mud or clay on a stone foundation. The stones were rough, except for the corner stone that was made squared off. Timbers in walls may have been inserted to keep the walls supported as they dried off unwarped; timbers were used on flat rooves with coverings of lathing and plaster. Thus a builder handled stone, wood, plaster and bricks, being a mason and carpenter.

The reason Jesus gets called a carpenter is likely because the Authorised Version of the Bible translates more narrowly according to timber framed houses of its own day with a greater division of labour.

Really? Well, look at the metaphors. Onlookers will mock the person who lays down the foundations but can't finish the job in building a tower, says Jesus. There is a tower in a vineyard. There is a house built on sand compared with a house built on rock. Jesus's assebly will be built on stone, and the stone the builders rejected will be made into the corner stone (those Kingdom reversals again).

The best one though is the mote and the beam. Builders went about carrying beams of wood on their shoulders. Look out, they might say, and people certainly did. But someone might be rubbing their eye with a splinter in it, and thus not see the beam about to clobber them in the face. A nice almost binary opposite for Jesus to play with.

The metaphors are not from carpentry: they are from building, and so Jesus becomes the archetypal and indeed reversal by theology Bob the Builder.

But a steward, even a bar steward (careful!)? This is based around the apparent first miracle, and only in John's Gospel, of water becoming wine and the wine getting better later in the event. It fulfils no scriptural (Hebrew Bible) purpose in messianic times, and (as important, given mistakes) that John does not say it does. So it is presumably based on something happening, an event recalled that adds in to the early Church theology of Jesus.

One speculation has been that it was Jesus's own wedding, but there is no need for a rabbi to be married and nor a reason that must follow to suppress or make secret his marriage as such. Not in John's Gospel anyway. Jesus's mother is present, unusually, as the family was abandoned during his ministry; Cana is close to Capernaum (speculating as Jesus's birth place and home), and given that the steward of the wine would be bt custom a friend or relative of the family getting married then Jesus could well have been doing that job as organised by his mum (or mum and dad). Mum turns to Jesus about the wine running out, and this is the basis of his job.

But the builder might well be a bit of a newbie doing the stewarding job. Stewarding means oganising the servants doing the heavy lifting. The wine that most common people drank at that time was a pretty horrible vinegary stuff, as in John's gospel elsewhere, where water was added as of need and made it worse. The story starts with water going into the big pots, but of course it all will have started with undiluted wine sitting in them so high for some time and forgotten about regarding the start of the celebrations. Water gets tipped in at the beginning, and wine comes out in the usual kind. In that it gets better simply means tipping in some mixture to appear to reverse the usual diluting as time went on.

Theologically it has come to be another of those ethical reversals, so things get better as the Kingdom of God nears and will come.

See Campbell, Steuart (1996), The Rise and Fall of Jesus: the Ultimate Explanation for the Origin of Christianity, Edinburgh: Explicit Books, 57-58 and 115-117.

Geoff Sedman

2012-01-07T06:34:00.003+01:00

Geoff Sedman, who I always called Mr Sedman, has died. He had a business in Chanterlands Avenue, Hull, dealing with Disc Jockey and Public Address systems.

In 2010 the church gave me the task of putting in a sound system. Up to that point CDs as available were being put into CD players and then subsequently they were prepared by me but into a domestic machine with me, the equipment and its speakers hidden behind a curtain. I wanted the church to install a stereo high quality music system.

Now one could either go and buy something and make every mistake, as I'm afraid had been done with yet another domestic player, or go to a shop where they look after you. There was an obvious shop to visit, but there you also pay through the nose.

It was by chance that near to my just moved building society branch there was a Disc Jockey and Public Address equipment repair shop, and so I went in and met Mr Geoff Sedman. Very soon I realised he was the man for the job because he knew his equipment and would sell and install. I went in a number of times and I talked and he listened and advised. I told him how we did what we did, what was wanted, and in high quality stereo. He arranged to come down to the church and look it over, and indeed arranged to install it with assistance. The powerful four speaker, mixer, dual CD system was his recommendation and taken. As we started with it, and the microphone was feeding back, he paid attention to that to come down again as part of replacing it. The point was that he engineered the microphone to be radio connected and free of feedback even when the slider is fully up: the result is people are often away from the microphone and being amplified, and yet nearby speakers are not feeding back. In fact I was only just now talking about a second microphone to be used for the notices or by me for 'how to sing this'; With Mr Sedman's death I shall have to remember what he said and whjen agreed try to purchase elsewhere - the business is simply to fold - and I must get it right.

Friday 6th I'd just dropped off a church member and made my way to Chanterlands Avenue, parked and saw the notice that due to bereavement the business was closing down and to ring a number. So I went to the building society and also asked to borrow a pen, which they said I could keep, and then went to write down the number. I thought I might be ringing Mr Sedman himself and a sudden decision to stop, though I suspected it might be his death. As I wrote the number, the next door newsagent came out and said it was he who had died, on Tuesday, and we agreed that he was very good at what he did.

At home I rang the number and said that I visited something like once a fortnight for chats. I'd given him a Freeview box which he used for a large TV in a workshop, and he was looking at a DAB radio either to tell me how to work it or to dump it. She was looking at her father's stock and wondering what was whose. So I was given the time of the funeral, just down the road, in the small chapel at 3:20 Thursday.

What I liked about Mr Sedman in our both electronics and wide ranging chats was that he investigated what was true. In his fast moving area of business, he would open up equipment and find out what was wrong and put it right if possible. So customers would come in and say what they thought was wrong but frequently it was something quite different causing the fault. And of course often items were almost built to go wrong after say fifteen months (as he once put it) and there was no purpose in repair. But he dealt with big systems like hefty speakers and mixers, and heavy lights. With him I even talked about installing video and computer input. For myself there has been the issue of a tape player not playing at quite the right speed, and he did say if I bought a simple player from him (with all the right inputs and outputs) it would be exactly right - except cassette tapes are themselves unreliable. He knew about computer use to edit and transfer. We joked about people who buy fancy packs to make these transfers whereas it's all available via a few wires and free software.

He continued to ask how the speaker system was doing, and there was always the reassurance that if there was a problem he would be on to it, and he could supervise any extension.

But all that depends on life, and once life is gone that knowledge is gone too. So is another kind of hub. He would shake his head at some of the eccentrics who turned up at his shop, never to buy anything. The DJ world and people fiddling with equipment draws in the long haired and bald male and some I met with the strangest of opinions. He constantly wondered where they came from. He seemed to treat me differently, but I bet I was just one more eccentric. He liked rational thought and not taking the obvious common view. For example, we discussed the level of freedom in Russia with some fidelity, as in it being much freer now but cut off points in the arena where Putin's power matters. These chats really were wide ranging. Religion as commonly given was about how people thought long ago, he stated, and he realised that I agreed with him. So I talked about the sociology of knowledge. I never made any attempt to ask him to try out the Unitarians; the simple fact is if he'd wanted to come along he'd have done so. The last time we met and the phone went I said I'd go, but he said, "Are you going?" So I said OK I'd stay and ended up being there an hour. I don't know who needed to stand and lean on his PA speakers more, him or me, but he often cleared a seat so I could sit down, and from there the conversation went on.

It'll be interesting to see whether any other odd-bods turn up at his funeral. There must be a DJ community that rotated around his shop, even if they are all individuals.

So there we are: Geoff Sedman, one of the little people in this world who kept up with change (he kept learning), has made a practical difference by changing things for the better in a concrete manner.

The Right Wing Bible: Economic Miracle Passages

2012-01-04T04:16:00.009+01:00

What an excellent idea, the best since someone produced The Golden Treasury of the Bible. It is an intended, conservative-political (as understood in the United States) rewrite of the Bible.

Translation should avoid a liberal bias
Assert free market principles (e.g. in parables)
Translate into current conservative terms (as language changes)
Remove apparently later social and liberal content
Use political terms understood today
Affirm hell and the devil Use terms of addiction
Assert open minded witness approach, especially Mark and John (as writers)
Remove gender inclusive language
Raise the reading level
Economy of words and consistent words

Peculiarly, what Americans call Conservative, we call Manchester or Economic Liberal, so that what they are against is the Social Liberal, the Progressive and Social Democracy. Conservatism in our country has been the preservation of traditions, and not to remove what works: the Thatcher government was not Conservative and certainly not One Nation Conservative, but Economic Liberal.

One of the problems now is that we have Conservative Party David Cameron in coalition with Orange Liberal (towards the Economic Liberal) Nick Clegg, though Clegg leads a mainly Social Liberal party. At the last Liberal Democrat conference he kept referring to liberals and liberalism as if the Social Democrats had never merged with the Liberal Party, and they were not exactly left wing and liberals have a successive progressive tradition.

The stupidity of the project applied to the Bible is that such thought in it is precisely NOT the thought forms of our present day. (Was it not Thomas Jefferson who produced a Deist Bible with miracles removed? What a plonker!)

According to Economic Liberals, the True Economic Bible [I shall call it] includes these messages:

By choosing a manger for his birth, Jesus's parents showed how poor people can afford cut-price accommodation. Let's face it, there is Travelodge. Animals can keep the poor warm. Also claiming that only the mother was a parent reduced the liabilities of the working father but he still took responsibility and provided maintenance. He's not like today's absent fathers and they do the deed! Non-dad Joseph of course made the crib himself and produced some repairs to the stable in barter for their stay.

The birth was in Bethlehem so that Joseph and Mary could register as right wing voters, and they ran from the Stalinist Herod - but had Jesus been a bit older they'd have faced him down.

The boy got himself a private education amongst the best RE teachers; so he showed initiative.

When Jesus was a youth, Uncle Joseph of Arimathea gave him a thorough training in self-reliance on a boat travelling to Britain, and thus Jesus established the first Christian church here; his non-dad also gave him a trade as a builder, so that all ministers of religion should be self-reliant.

Jesus was hopeless in his home town and it is quite right that the young should travel away to seek their life's fame and fortune. Yes, he did heal the paralytic in Capernaum who went on to compete in the regular Olympic Games. Jesus also healed a paralytic at Bethesda, which is proof that he visited North Wales along with other more southern parts of Britain. Bethesda of course has a non-conformist chapel free of left wing ritualism.

Jesus collected disciples from among the self-employed and hard working population. No one on benefit joined Jesus's crew.

By turning water into wine Jesus saved the sponsors of the wedding party an unnecessary expense. He saved the best until last so that those who remembered the drink when more sober went out next time to buy cheaper plonk. If Jesus was bodily alive today he would supply 'Tesco Value' wine that, when drunk in quantity, would be become better than the best French wine - and that would teach the European Union a thing or two for pursuing socialised capitalism.

Mary Magdalene paid her own way, and the boys showed how important it was to have a domestic female servant so that they could concentrate on doing the external work. She lit the fires, did the cooking and provided other favours. She thus made sure that when Jesus said he loved John, he meant only that John was just his best mate and that they could play the divine game of golf together (where Jesus resisted temptation and did not get a hole in one every time).

The story of the five loaves and two fishes demonstrates about cutting back on welfare for the poor: let them eat the barest minimum; indeed, the best welfare is that which fills the baskets back up again. Marie Antoinette was an avid reader of the True Economic Bible but the French forgot all about it when it came to setting up the European Union.

When Jesus walked on water it saved him having to hire a boat and it was quicker: Jesus shifted across that lake faster than Roadrunner. It demonstrates not having to rely on others for oil.

Jesus showed through his healing that there was no need for a National Health Service, or at least it could be privatised to volunteers like him (who did it for free or small donations). Jesus even opened his own Ear, Nose, Eye, Throat, Foot and Demons consultancy, showing the importance of the unpaid sector. He saved others and himself much on National Insurance and private insurance and then there was the miracle of the crowned teeth.

Jesus showed the strength of voluntary education when the Gentile woman seeking some medicine for her daughter and not a kennel for a dog changed his mind and he learnt something new. Educators have used this incident as a definition of learning ever since.

Jesus advocated modern agricultural methods by having the swine jump off the cliff all at once. Cursing the fig tree speeded up recycling agricultural waste for next season's manure.

Jesus produced the miracle of the spring so that Zebedee so equipped could bounce into The Magic Roundabout.

Jesus produced the miracle of camels walking through the eyes of needles and told business men to go and do thou likewise (he particularly liked talking in King James English).

Jesus said, "My Kingdom, My Kingdom, a horse for my Kingdom," and so he got a good deal with Mr Shanks and thus walked throughout his mission except for the donkey bit.

Jesus showed how to save on heating bills by eating some Ready Brek and climbing a mountain, where he glowed and kept everyone warm.

Jesus picked up a small piece of stone and, making it square, pushed it into a wall after which lots of coins with Caesar's head appeared and he said Caesar should do what Caesar does but actually do a lot less and then there could be more one armed bandits.

Jesus knowingly arranged with Judas the collection of thirty pieces of silver so that it fulfilled a biblical prophecy, and then this helped towards court costs and thus shows no need for Legal Aid.

Jesus was an inventor, like he produced the first superglue as when a disciple chopped a soldier's ear off and Jesus stuck it back on. This is an example of producing added value, as from then on the all important military had better treatment for wounds.

Resurrection was a way to avoid the effects of injuries (and insurance claims against the Romans, lots of adverts at the time) and save on health costs, extending his own life. Not being selfish, Jesus had raised a few others too, although they may have gone on to die again.

Being resurrected saved the tomb space for someone else, and so the wealthy Uncle Joseph of Arimathea could collect some death rent from another occupant's family. This is an efficient use of space.

When the boat caught a lot of fish on one side this was a principle of making a clear economic choice for which there was a major increase in efficiency. Earlier, in a remarkable miracle called 'paying your way', a fish actually paid Jesus for being caught when it produced a coin in its mouth.

The Ascension was a cost free way to dispose of the transformed body and an example again of self-reliance. It is also an example for a privatised space programme to replace NASA.

But then, of course, parables are meant to be flexible and mean what you take them to mean.

What if One of Us

2011-12-31T07:19:00.006+01:00

The service on Sunday is congregational, so I hope to be able to introduce this music to the 'divine worship'... [This happened - it formed a mini-sermon and music before the collection]

I've chosen a piece of music that I rather like as music and also theologically. One of Us is a song written by Eric Bazilian and released by Joan Osborne in March 1995 on her album Relish. The song was written in one night, to impress a woman and it worked in the sense that Eric Bazilian married her.

The song asks about how one relates to God; and whilst it ties in with both the Islamic chant that God is Great it also relates most closely to what can be called secular urban theology. Relating to the central Christian theme that God became one of us, the song makes the notion even more ordinary - as in God being just a stranger on a bus trying to make its way home.

Harvey Cox wrote a celebrated book in the 1960s called The Secular City, which is a theology particularly derived from German modernist evangelicals Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The idea is that instead of asking questions of our place in the language of religion, we are just busy, and trying to live ethically under an invisible God and, Harvey Cox says, a Christian revelation. The book is a complete theological acceptance of secularisation as the norm of thinking and living and therefore the freedom of humankind to organise itself in whatever way it cares within the city. This approach is highly critical of denominations, and sees a special role for Christians in universities rather than in inheriting mediaeval forms of religious understanding. Theology and social science, indeed theology and politics, overlap. This approach to theology was very much in opposition to the Paul Tillich approach of existential theology, that is the theology of asking lots of questions about existence for which there are systemic theological answers. People are too busy, too urban, to bother to speculate, but they meet the transcendent in both the big political changes and in the little - especially social - activities of life and yet the people who do so believe in such encounters share the same discomposure [269] as those who are non-theists and say no such transcendence exists.

If you think such secular theology contains the seeds of its own destruction, via a contradiction between the secular and the theological, then such a cultural rejection of religion has been tackled by making this modernist theology postmodern: in other words modernist secular theology of invisible realism became a theology of human doing and human performance based purely on text.

Although this landmark understanding of modernist secular action theology gained quite some popularity, and was fully agreeable with a sort of linear progress to secularisation, a human insistence on asking questions has persisted; and we can hardly be church without asking questions. And not everyone is quite so busy. There is nothing wrong in asking questions: it is the answers that have been the problem. Indeed this secular theology assumes too much about the givenness of the hidden revelation, and even the postmodern theology that followed later is too conserving about the core revelation. Harvey Cox went on to change his mind: secular modernity was too optimistic, and so he looked east and indeed embraced the religious questions of many faiths, faiths that are capable of inner transformation. He now says that the first three hundred years of Christianity were the Age of Faith, then came the Age of Belief that lasted until very recently, and now we have an Age of the Spirit with a deliberate move away from dogma in our religiousness: there is not a textual turn globally but a personal experiential turn. The song indeed asks questions, and one of the strongest questions for many is about the invisibility of transcendence - where has God gone? - and what it is to have any kind of belief today; but the song does say something like - and this is interesting - that if you were to meet God, such might be just "a slob like one of us". Some people celebrate Christmas with all its tinsel and jolly myth, but one central idea behind incarnation, especially in the secular city, is that it is utterly ordinary and unremarkable.

Joan Osborne does vocals, percussion and acoustic guitar; Eric Bazilian is on the guitar, mandolin, chant, saxophone, harmonica and electric piano; Mark Egan gives the bass; Rob Hyman plays piano, organ, synthesizer, Mellotron, drums and gives backing vocals; and Andy Kravitz plays the drums and offers percussion.

One of Us by Eric Bazilian sung by Joan Osborne.

Cox, H. (1966), The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, London: Penguin Books; Cox, H. (2010), The Future of Faith, New York: HarperCollins.

Down the Pub

2011-12-29T07:23:00.009+01:00

So my friends say in the pub, that sociology is 95% "shit" on the basis particularly that it is full of cliches and jargon. "No, shortcuts," I said. and I'm sat there as one then says greed and property is just human nature and the other said no, because the Red Indians didn't have property. "Ah," I said, "so you are saying property is derived from sociobiology, that economic and social organisation derives from our biology, and looking at animal behaviour..." And the other is saying property is purely a human construct and thus he is a sociologist - an amateur sociologist.

So the sociologist then said it is urban living and property that make people less individual. I said I think it makes them more individual. He said less connected. Ah, yes, well: in rural society people had more connecting bonds between the same people, "whereas you might only know Jim down at the gym." And online you can wholly construct your self. You're less yourself, he said, less with others. Well, not only a sociologist then, with urbanisation as a cause, but a Durkheimian [Yes I know this is via urbanisation, but his focus was on the essence of being human; I did mention the social geography of towns in passing]. The other - for whom Marx was also "a load of crap" - said it's about alienation. No, I replied. Alienation is when you are not attached to the labour value of your work, whereas Durkheim used anomie, a consequent of loss of collective conscience - or, to use the jargon, conscience collective. Hee hee.

Somehow this conversation drifted to theology, where the sociologist of the two said believers cannot do academic theology because they already have the answer. I said that is a criticism but you have theologians who are believers. They do theology from the inside; a critical approach. I said theology is not religious studies. Religious studies looks at it all from the outside. It's the phenomenology of religion - relates to RE in schools too. I said of my online friend who expresses Kantian like personal experience and also examines the texts as texts, positions that don't relate well to each other. That's theology. I said I do theology but it is more open ended.

Meanwhile we noted the higher number of women in the pub than usual, and the sociobiologist said that if he was more sober he'd have given me a better argument. I was on soft drinks because I was driving. Our other compatriots were visiting Wales.

Clever people know that had I been teaching or properly academic, I'd not have jumped to Durkheim but gone first to Tonnies and all that about the Gemeinschafft and Geselleschaft, or community and association, that derives from rural and urban connections of interaction. But the 'sociologist' started from the Red Indians and was interested in the self, and so the social-individual conscience and anomie was the jump point.

Have a Postmodern Christmas: I'm Sure Yule Will

2011-12-24T20:28:00.010+01:00

So here we are, where we all share in a holiday like we all use the common era dating system. It has its necessities, its various origins, and now we all join in one way or another.

The transient Muslim attender at the Unitarian church I attend, now back in Iran, sent an online Christmas card of Santa and sledge. So we can all join in. I have to say that putting carols to CDs to sing to has just about had me wasted. It was too much. I faciliatated a short informal singalong at the Friday coffee morning.

Sometime next year there will be more consideration of adding an extension to the Hull church at the front. It is practical, for better space inside and access, but there is the architectural side. I'm afraid that I am unimpressed: to me a concrete white front of two unequal curves has provided what an architect thinks a church might look like. I think it is minimalist modernism. And I had my own postmodern doodle, which is not to be taken too seriously.

Proposed by me
Now
The idea is a postmodern frontage. Why is it postmodern? Because it has different styles in the one building, with a plastic top to light up that represents a flaming chalice, but a plastic window design below that represents the window of the old steepled church knocked down on this site in 1976. It's a bit playful.

So I was asked what is postmodernism in architecture, and it is in bringing several past styles together that didn't mix, and use them to point to the future. So postmodern art? Well, that is playful and a joining of styles that were once distinct. And postmodern theology? I said that represents the literary turn, so that there isn't any objectivity in the world as such, and you can't do history, so what you have is the text, and for conservative postmoderns you have the text as encounter and you identify and perform according to that text. For liberal postmoderns there are no boundaries, so different texts eclectically mix and match. Trouble is, some evangelicals that call themselves postmodern still go on about personal experience, which is not what it should be about. Liberal postmodernists should show a tension between the self and the collective - the intersubjectivity of conversations about constructing the meanings of things. There is the market place and the person in the market place.

So you can have a postmodern Christmas. That's the wrapping paper of the carols, and you discover such text is all you have! The wrapping paper is the message. But liberals will want to draw in other meanings, and the Pagan is the most obvious, but then also the ideas of the universal baby, new life, new beginnings, then that the Buddha was given a miracle birth, or some nativity ideas could well have come down the Silk Road as did ideas of resurrection at the other end of living. Buddha did actually beat Christ to recognition by about 500 years.

But as with all postmodernisms, some of this is just intensive modernity. Ideas of Christmas as the universal baby or new beginnings were subjective ideas anyway. It's just that the postmodern reaches out for ever more connections to the point of loss of overall meaning too. The conversation becomes almost chaotic, overflowing with different ideas on the meaning of Christmas. Like in architecture, all sorts of things jumble together. It becomes postmodern when the modernist intensity is such that there is a collapse of the sense of space and time.

Have whatever sort of Christmas you understand. I will. Yule will I'm sure.

Bye to Lesley

2011-12-21T06:35:00.021+01:00

I'm not going to go back and look for the first time I referred to Lesley Fellows, now Lesley Crawley, on this my blog. She has decided to close down her blog and concentrate on her family and local ministry now that she is married and in a new ministry setting.

In my blog Lesley was referred to for being against the Anglican Communion Covenant, for her anti discrimination stance (also against religious bureaucracy) and for her 'edge of Anglicanism' viewpoint. What made her edge of Anglicanism interesting for me was that I was over the border, first simply by my views and then via my return to the Unitarians. So there was something to examine there, whereas my parallel anti-Covenant writing has taken on the characteristic of tying up loose ends.

She also was refashioned by me into a fictional figure, Lesley Bloke, who, long before any real world public pronouncements, was not only tied up into becoming a Unitarian minister encouraged by a certain Harry Tickpaper but also pursued to remain Anglican and with him by an Adam Tilgate. He was the one with the tendency to say "Okay" after many sentences. I'd no real idea who the real person Alan Crawley was, except I did listen to Radio Christmas with him as a presenter saying "Okay" a lot when asking Lesley about the environmental and No Anglican Covenant issues and about her religious outlook, with his questioning about whether she had consulted the Bible at all; but then Internet searches reveal so much about her, him, many people really, and also me for that matter (but then I know this). Thus I was also on a drawing spree (assisted by her Facebook photographs; she also started drawing too as a result of mine but didn't keep going) and produced multiple drawings of Lesley and later added a few of Alan too, to be used both fictionally and really.

While this fiction was going on sporadically, to follow the real world news, and was brought to an end, there was Lesley's real world of not getting employment within Anglicanism, and showing the gap between being a curate and landing a more substantive position in itself. She was not the only one. Lesley was ahead of herself being just a curate and co-ordinating the anti-Anglican Covenant position, as well as producing blog entries that went to the core of the discrimination that was the basis behind drawing up the Covenant. I'd just point out that her husband also had a blog and gave it up, and there must be little doubt that finishing his blog helped him get paid ministry later on.

The facts grow that blogging is dangerous, particularly if you have a paid role in a Church. We've seen it with a number of clergy. There is always the potential conflict between local confidentiality and blogging it out in public - but that self-evidently never happened here (nor has it with anyone who has been under this pressure). This privacy tension, I don't think, is the problem with blogging: it is the ideological conflict.

The conflict can have several forms. Perhaps they show you are not denominational enough, or that in discussing the denomination you are being too critical. Perhaps they show an ethical concern that isn't contained (or indeed specifically rejected) within the religious bureaucracy - for example, gay equality. Perhaps they show a viewpoint that is ideologically not the flavour of the time, as with a liberal Christian view. Lesley was 'guilty' of all of these.

It is odd that ministers of religion give out sermons, but when they blog they put themselves at risk. But then the sermons are given (in Anglicanism) under a promise to conform, and are said locally and perhaps are forgotten as quickly as they are given. Even if they follow a this-worldly or more humanist logic, the result ought to be the same. The trouble is, produce this on a blog and it starts to look suspect, and it isn't good enough to want to draw in the secular atheist at the same time. It looks like one being thing in one arena, and something else in the wider public. I got to a point where I asked Lesley to give some defences of Christian orthodoxy, about which none of them were particularly satisfying. I noted too a fall-off in some of the more purely ideological statements to refashion Christianity, with most being about equality and some being anti-Anglican Communion Covenant. I did notice, though, constant praising of her then most local bishop, a blogger himself of moderate comment who is nevertheless - if occasionally - dangerously touching on the anti-Covenant himself; she has since changed location.

In addition, Lesley showed positive commitment to environmentalism and postmodernism. The latter was practical - much about church rooves. It was odd, though, not to read any comment on the government reducing subsidies recently on solar panels on said rooves and elsewhere. Her commitment to postmodernism was of the open kind of postmodernity and the more social: I have Rachel and her blog for the stranger conservative textual material. I'm not convinced that Lesley was dealing with postmodernity all the time: much of it was just ordinary modernist pluralism, which exists in a secular space with people having various own views like her own. It is a similar criticism behind Rachel's reporting of why postmodernism, except hers is that Barthian view as translated into more about text when it touches on her 'faith encounter'.

Then another part of her blog was all the personal material, particularly full of psychological theories. Blog entry after entry could be like this combination of lifetime disturbances and psychological explanations, another basis of her religious humanism. Then came the very unfortunate KTL version of an STD, the Kissing Transmitted Lethargy, a 'sinful' result of the DNS BMA C, or the blog-open Declaration of No Sex Before Marriage for Anglican Clergy. It was exposure all around, but her blog survived the imposed lethargy.

Lesley at one point put herself into a dangerous pit, which is the one claiming the need to be honest. Start doing that, and it leads to demands - but that was when I started asking her for some orthodox defences. I noticed that this claim started to be dropped in favour of promoting faith and doubt, which is a more common liberal stance (and indeed not so liberal). I became a blogging terrorist, partly because I was now outside the Anglican fold, and I was as much a terrorist for Lesley's blog as for say Rachel's (and a very nice terrorist at that, I might add. I like to think of myself perhaps as a Lieutenant Columbo giving some respectful underarm bowling at my persistent persons of encounter).

To be ideologically fringe is one thing, for which many are once they've done enough theology, but I still think the real bureaucratic nasties will come out should the anti-Covenant folk succeed. There is a possibility now that the dioceses will not pass the thing, and if not champagne corks popping in some places will be accompanied by knives sharpening in others.

Equally, should the Covenant be passed there is then a real ethical question to folks like Lesley as to how they will be able to minister under that kind of bureaucratic ice age imposition, given the commitment to equality, to liberality, to the postmodern and the rest. Now she won't have a blog by which to answer the question, should the unfortunate day come.

I think a mistake Lesley made with the blog was to become too attached to these ratings. I have never bothered with them. I get comments and a non-published response too, and the knowledge of my blog runs wider than these. I suspect a lot of it is due to linking. She also provided a service in reviewing other blogs, from which mine disappeared I noticed. I rarely got a mention, boo hoo. To give up the blog in her case does mean giving up the attachment to these ratings. One of the attachments was of being a female blogger, to overcome the male tendency to write and express, and for Leslety to advance the cause of equality. But to become attached to ratings means to need to blog every day, and she was blogging to produce something by 7 am each morning, and often with a stack waiting on these ideological, equalitarian and anti-bureaucratic subjects. If I published something that drew a response, the only reason to wait was the stack. The commitment to blog also meant a move to Wordpress and its apparent more flexible presentation and potential. I thought shall I follow suit: but one thing I missed then on Lesley's blog was the absence of a blogroll to go to others. It might take a while to write a blog, but often it should take just a few minutes to read and move on.

So that's it then: cold turkey before Christmas as the blogging drug is drained from the system. I have myself considered ending this blog, but I haven't simply because there are things to say on occasions. Sometimes it goes days without an entry, and that's because there is nothing to say. My drawing has gone the same way - much less now, but occasionally I will add a personality. But then there can be a flurry of activity in the speciality news or more personal. I wonder whether Lesley will actually go blog teetotal, because to blog somewhere else, or do a Facebook equivalent, can be the means to return to heavy drinking. So we will see. Too much else crowds out the blogging, but sometimes the need to react and respond is overwhelming and, after all, blogging isn't supposed to be as damaging as being an alcoholic.

So, Lesley's Blog, RIP.

If You Don't Believe It Why Do It?

2011-12-19T18:10:00.003+01:00

Oh dear. Now some want to sing carols on Friday, as there is no service on Sunday. We've had two services of these already. This along with mince pies on Friday. So I am not done yet with collecting and providing music. All I know is that New Years Day has a service completely clear of Christmas music, which is different from more standard Christian churches many of which won't touch a carol until Christmas Eve. In those days I went to the night time service, and then avoided carols from then on. So I sort of joined in with the myth, to some extent, given that it plugged in with the rest of the myth all year round and I was participating in it as a year-round calendar.

The point is that whilst I can see at least a point about Easter: the tragedy of life, cruelty and always the possibility of coming out on the other side, I've never really got on with Christmas at all. I know it can be about the universal baby, innocence, joy of new (human) life and all that, and a sort of second birthday for all, rather like the Queen has two birthdays, but it has never had meaningful significance once available to choice.

As for the Jesus stuff, well that has never been important. I've taken the view, from the beginning, that he was born in Galilee and unnoticed, probably (or as likely in) in Capernaum. Actually there is a not unexpected parallel with his death: around the passover period Paul as Saul would have been in Jerusalem and a crucifying of a certain Jesus drew no interest from him whatsoever. That's what the occupying Romans did: swept up the noise makers and kept up an example of oppression. It's the existence of the small community and last days thinking that brought Paul to the idea of the Law as limited and a Messiah for the last days as a breakthrough and contradiction to aspects of the Law. But let's leave that for now, as it is thirty years on. Incidentally the ministry of Jesus can have been extremely quick, perhaps no more than a year.

But to go back. The whole thing about either starting in Galilee and going to Bethlehem, or starting in Bethlehem and going for a long trip, is pure myth. 'Can any good thing come out of Nazareth ?' asks John's Gospel, and Jesus himself never made anything of coming from Bethlehem (which he surely would have, had he had such an origin, in terms of adding to his authority). There was no empire census requiring also women and children to travel, and indeed no taxation basis for Joseph alone to so travel. Herod died 4 BC so how could have he been alive when Quirinius was in office? Luke's account is pure fiction. Matthew's journey would have been 450 miles and Matthew even adds to prophecies to meet (to be called a Nazarene). There was no massacre of innocents. The universe didn't alter itself to provide some star, presumably a story because magi looked upwards and such predictive astrologers were wanted. Magi followed a star that fell from the sky when Mithras was born and Mithraic legend also provides shepherds. Isaiah 1:3 helps the birthplace, as does Hermes, and 7:14 is the origin via the mistranslation into Greek of virgnity at birth. All human beings need two parents.

The fact that these things can be written is evident of what passes for 'truth' in the Bible once the myth grabs its place and gets developed, this in particular by a later community to backtrack and announce the birth of a great prophet (whose titles were undergoing escalation). The source of these stories is the Jewish scriptures and the need for consistency. Some evangelicals today ask why writers would put in deliberate and known non-truths, and thus demand that all of it must be true (like some historian working with first hand documents). Er, no; unfortunately for them, it isn't like that. It is why the New Testament is full of mythical interpretation and is only ever biography-like.

I've over purchased food like the rest, and the sweeties I normally shun (looking at my budget and body size) have been let through. I suppose I regard the present as a kind of festival of lights, when it is coldest and darkest and yet we, as humans, make light and also keep eating for when things grow again. But I'm as little into the Pagan thing either about the round of the year: OK, it is but so what. I'm much more interested in the puzzles and explanations of science, where the mysteries are far more fascinating and that is because they do provide workable explanation. There is so much that is incredible and I'd rather busy my brain with this material, to the extent that I can understand it and then to push to understand it a little more. For me, theology ought to be humanist (in the most general sense) or it is about the "woo woo" that Brian Cox mentioned most recently. Theology needs to be about parameters of the possible and impossible.

Ernst Troeltsch said the Christian myth was powerful simply because it had shaped Western society, almost like a truism. It's internal truth or falsehood was irrelevant culturally. But, even not as a literalist, this is no excuse to centre one's own story on something far more insignificant than its historical impact. It annoys me even that I 'sacrifice' my myth making from a larger minority into a small group that particularly denies a narrow incarnation through the year, and one that also looks at other insights, I find that it capitulates at Christmas time and repeats the Christian season's worst and most gooey features.

Rev Now and Future

2011-12-16T02:26:00.016+01:00

Undoubtedly there is a third series possible in Rev, but if it ended after two (and there's a Christmas edition coming next week) it would be a good finish with programmes that packed in known themes in the Anglican world in particular among the unmentioned denominations. It's as well written as say Fawlty Towers, which did stop, but it will always be hampered by the number of 'in' jokes and the absence of wider knowledge among the general public, whereas Fawlty Towers didn't require knowledge of the hotel sector in the tourist industry.

Anyone who saw the completely amoral archdeacon referee the football match in a previous edition realised that there was a secret there, and in the final one of the series the Rev and his Reader sidekick stumble across the Archdeacon and his boyfriend at a bed shop. The Reader is actually worse than the Archdeacon, and learns the tips about being ever so 'umble when going towards either getting ordained or becoming a bishop. Colin meanwhile gets a secular job, and immediately displays his inability to hold one down - he eats the Rev's pizza when he should have been delivering to others.

In all this the genuineness of the Rev is underlined. No, he really is without career ambition as all he ever wanted was to be was a priest in a place like this. His frustrated wife walks off to walk with others to assess her marriage and as a result the Rev is jumped on by his eager cook and cleaner. Many male Revs know such doting congregants. In a third series the development would have to be with the headteacher. He fantasises about her, and she knows it and can manipulate him. I was interested though in how the Rev could talk to her on the level about the Archdeacon and his appalling personality preventing him from being a bishop, and there are such people in congregations where the Rev can have such on the level chats with equals. They are usually semi-detached and reliable, and they don't gossip. Well, there's a Christmas edition coming (party behaviour?) but I'd have liked to have seen his eye stray when his wife wandered off. Instead he does something productive and goes and has a sperm count, and as with the Archdeacon and boyfriend the collar is not worn for that particular outing. He is now allowed to look at a soft porn mag to get himself excited.

The point about the Archdeacon also was that behind his appalling bureaucratic personality was a human being, seen there in his relationship. The Reader's "Cherry" may be indeed a girlfriend or a pet or imagined as neccessary. When faced with rejection by the interviewing Archdeacon, the Reader wields the big threat of potentially outing the Archdeacon. The Archdeacon, who'd said no, immediately folds and passes the Reader on to a clergy selection conference. But the suspicion was that the Archdeacon could see the Reader copying him and all the techniques and actually stopped him (until his interest was threatened). However, when the Archdeacon faced the now inevitable question when he was himself interviewed (he might have got through years ago), he had no choice but to admit his relationship. He could have gone either way, but to deny his relationship was a step too far. Of course he shouldn't really be a priest at all in an active relationship, and also if celibate he can be a bishop but these days no one would go through even on that basis. With the killer question asked, that's it and the game is up. Such is the Church of England today - corrupted by inequality and sex.

As a series it leaves everyone where they were. When Only Fools and Horses hit its peak it was because the characters had changed situations and the comedy was a matured 50 minutes a time. What went wrong then was that they became millionaires and the writer couldn't give up, so they lost the money again and the whole comedy was harmed as a result. So either it stops with the Christmas one coming or change has to take place.

For example, there are now divorced priests and remarried, and some simply don't tell the truth that allows them to move on. The only angle forward, given that the Reader is blocked and the Archdeacon cannot be bishop (and has lost a lot of his leverage), is for development with the Rev himself and for him not to be the self-doubting tortoise that beats all these careerist hares. We've had a high flying female curate but perhaps he needs another curate, and would certainly need one to counter what would always now be a frustrated Reader stuck in his ministry.

I have two criticisms that I think do stick out. One is that the wife did not appear to be a solicitor at all, but a trapped vicarage-bound clergy wife. Secondly, after the headteacher lost her boyfriend she might have rebounded on the Rev in a far more dangerous way than this week's cook and cleaner filling the home vacuum.

Nevertheless the comedy has shown insight and hasn't had to contrive events too much; it would be a quick way to learn about the insides of the Church of England and the DVDs will have that potential. Church bureaucracies and discrimination create dishonesty where there should be expressions of honesty and love. This was a series that said the little guy can win through while all the mess goes on around, but perhaps the ethos of winning through needs challenging. Anyway, the writers clearly did manage to create an up to date Barchester Towers.
Note: all the images are from the BBC online broadcast and are here as illustrative.

Ten Reasons for the Covenant Refuted

2011-12-15T20:01:00.003+01:00

Let's counter these arguments from Andrew Goddard at Fulcrum straight away.

1. It has been consistently supported by the Church of England...

Obviously not, when given to dioceses to discuss. At best it is divided down the middle, and you do not innovate when divided.

2. It is a development in line with the Communion’s evolving life and is faithful to Anglicanism’s theological and ecclesiological tradition and identity.

But it goes over the line, forcing autonomous Churches - and particularly the Church of England as supplier of the Archbishop of Canterbury - to freeze developments that are culturally relevant.

3. It gives form to a vision of ‘communion with autonomy and accountability’ that has been central to the Communion’s self-understanding and is a genuine Anglican via media avoiding the dangers of both a centralised, controlling Curia and a fragmenting, fractious federation.

Anglicanism is not a federation (a central bureaucracy with sovereignty at the centre) but is a confederation at best: Churches are the centres of authority and provide higher simply for discussion. The Communion is not a Church. But the Covenant produces a real danger of curia by procedure at the level of the Standing Committee and it handing out 'relational consequences' in a new two tier Anglican Communion.

4. It enables Anglicans across the world and Christians in other denominations to understand who we are as Anglicans and how we seek to live together and share in God’s mission together as part of the body of Christ.

But perhaps they ought to understand that Anglicanism is not a unified world wide group but a Communion of Churches - in the plural.

5. It provides a clear agreed framework for debate, diversity and development through shared discernment within agreed affirmations and commitments.

It is an extra forum for decision making. There is no basis for decision making that then has 'relational consequences'. This is an innovation of centralising what has never been.

6. It facilitates changes in continuity and dialogue with both our Anglican tradition and our fellow Anglicans around the world and thus serves our unity in Christ.

Such unity, presumably, extends to other denominations too like the Lutherans and Roman Catholics to name but two. But they make their own decisions. Surely Anglicanism is about such unity when making your own decisions, not uniformity. Lutherans manage with such diversity. If you want centralisation, join the Roman Catholics. Even the eastern Churches (those rejecting original sin - what a difference!) have autonomy one from the other.

7. It preserves provincial autonomy but allows the clear articulation of the catholic consensus within the Communion and an ordered – rather than the recent chaotic – response within Anglicanism when provinces believe they need to act contrary to this.

It is not a consensus, but the leadership of unrepresentative elites. Look at IASCUFO and how it assumes its right to support a Covenant, and the Covenant does not yet exist. But the Church of England by dioceses does not have a consensus. Nor do several Anglican Churches destined for the second tier should this ever be passed.

8. It offers the best, perhaps the only, means of preventing further bitter fragmentation by enabling the highest degree of communion among Anglicans.

Anglicans will organised roughly into African, southern and Western groups quite autonomously. This makes cultural sense.

9. It does not explicitly address specific controversial issues but cultivates practices and provides processes for addressing whatever innovations – for example, lay presidency – might arise when some Anglicans may feel called to act in a way that others do not recognise as faithful developments.

If it is not about the gay issue what else is it about? Or perhaps it would have frozen women's ordination had this proposed centralisation process existed in the early days.

10. The Archbishop of Canterbury has asked the Church of England to support him and the other Instruments in working for the widest possible acceptance of the covenant within the Communion.

He is the least of reasons to support the process, given his track record so far in producing a bishops-as-communion bureaucracy, and then there is his likely retirement very soon: so let a new Archbishop have his space to take a more back seat and looser view of Anglicanism.

Yes, the Covenant itself is divided by the blocs of Anglicanism: those who reject it because their Churches remain highly supernatural and even magical in outlook and raise the Bible in such fashion with authoritarian leadership - so want doctrinal control. Then there are the southern Churches who reflect more in the way of modernity, and then the Western Churches that have handled great change and must manage within secularised societies and adapt to these. The Covenant is itself divisive.

The fact remains too that some evangelicals are dedicated to an international Anglicanism into the sphere of Western Anglican Churches. They are as much breaking any moratoria as others, and started doing it before episcopal ordinations of relationship gay people. Perhaps this is the future diversity of Anglicanism: something to live with. The Covenant won't stop them, as they shall ignore it. They organise in entryist fashion with plans and fellowships and ought to be flushed out to build their own Churches when in other parts of the world. As for the global south leadership (the rest of them, rather) who says they are representative.

The Church of England has responsibility to itself and its autonomy. By not adopting the Covenant, it protects that autonomy and, more so, present constitutional relationships with the State and its own ability to alter these without interference from without. There could be a situation in the future where a Covenant from without restricts what the Church of England can do, and this raises concerns in Parliament for as long as establishment continues and causes in effect an internal Church crisis. It is better then that the Covenant never sees the light of day, and made up groups like IASCUFO can stop imagining that it does exist.

I ASC U FO

2011-12-15T03:05:00.006+01:00

Bishop Bob: "I ask you, eff oh."
Bishop John: "You ask me what?"
Bishop Bob: "No, I ask you, eff oh."
Bishop John: "Are you asking me, or telling me to, you know, eff off?"
Bishop Bob: "I'm talking about the Covenant and I ask you, eff oh."
Bishop John: "I see. It's come down to this. Because I have stated a few moderate criticisms but support the Archbishop about the Covenant you are asking me to eff off."
Bishop Bob: "No I'm not, I'm asking you about I ask you eff oh. It met in Korea."
Bishop John: "Met in Korea?"
Bishop Bob: "Yes I ask you, eff oh."
Bishop John: "But I don't know who met in Korea. You've only just mentioned it."
Bishop Bob: "Let me quote: 'Aware of our mandate to promote the deepening of communion between the churches of the Anglican Communion, we emphasised the importance of being a fully representative group, and we greatly regret that some of our members were not present. We re-affirmed the significance of the Anglican Communion Covenant for strengthening our common life.' I ask you, eff oh."
Bishop John: "If you are asking. It is not a fully representative group, in fact doesn't represent anything; it is made up from the top, like the whole Windsor thing, with deliberate exclusions based on apparent moratoria ignored. It supports something that doesn't yet exist as if it does exist. In representing no one they reaffirmed something they should never affirm and so what if they do? But why do you keep telling me to eff oh?"
Bishop Bob: "Don't worry, you've answered me. You're obviously not being collegiate or loyal, and don't think we are going to invite you to diocesan meetings to pass the Covenant. So eff oh."
Bishop John: "I ask you."

IASCUFO is the InterAnglican Standing Committee on Unity, Faith and Order.

The Postmodern and Religion - What are they Like?

2011-12-14T17:29:00.007+01:00

Modernity springs from the consequence of Kant's subject centred reason that produces a means to truth and a being of the self. This shift to the individual is a major change from trying to locate truth in the idealised heavens or in the realities of earth, the old Plato and Aristotle division. It is the trancendental subject. Christianity is inescapably Platonic, but Aquinas did a good job in grounding it in the greater earthly means of reasoning, following on from the same that had happened in Islam with Ibn Sina. If you go from Kant you need strategies to secure reasoning, as the transcendent individual is a hard act to sustain, but Habermas is the most contemporary modernist to argue that conversation between disinterested subjects is the means to truth. The alternative of Hegel was a synthesising of contrasting positions, an initerated binary to unity principle of eventual pure spirit upwards, and the binary contrast itself has been a vital means to structure truth (that what is is defined by what it is not). But if one extends these concerns to social institutions, then the objective becomes those collective, somewhat demanding even compulsive institutions that make us who we are. So my subjectivity as a reasoning person comes up against the objectivity of today's sociology of knowledge. Objectivity is well secured, but as one of those concrete realities that limits the subject, and does so because of the extent of institutional arrangements all around us. For many argue that these institutions are of all pervading capitalism, shaping economic arrangements into social identity including the functions of the modern Western family.

The postmodern is the multiplicity of the self as fragmented identity, the transience of the self and therefore the question of being itself. The Hindus were pretty clever at relating the self and its being to Being as pure, and both of these in postmodernity break down; the Buddhists understand this, in that no-self attaches to no-being. But here care is needed. Postmodernism is not a form of Buddhism because Buddhism has a (in a Western sense) realist method, that of right practice that reveals right truth, that being is transient. Postmodernism does not allow for right practice, but a variation so many in identities that there is no right anything. But are we in postmodernity or rather a position where the secular has so undermined inherited platonic and earthly reasoning that some other modernity is active. After all, science still discovers even if it can't quite get its overall Einstein and Quantum paradigm secured.

A number of more practical claims to postmodernity follow economics, culture and religion. In economics the ex-mercantilist system released into the ways of the invisible hand produced, in the end, mass production, labour organisation, classes, mass consumption and an ordered ideology of capitalism that all would improve for all via inequality. Capitalists produce their own moderating tendencies: the rule of law to protect property, but also equal voting leads to systems of education, health and reproduction which its ideology can swamp and shape, even when those institutions are free at the point of use or made easier to pay. The bureaucracy was the rational ordering principle: the trained individual rising through the corporation apparently on merit to fill each office. Charismatic power is essentially revolutionary power, and can be religious or political, Jesus or Gandhi or Marx or Lenin. Sacred power is always premodern and about tradition - reason is its own. Culture, then, is consistent, but may be divided by class, and there are several lesser identities of gender, ethnicity and youth, that again are seen shaped by capitalism from a history of exploitation.

Religion, being sacred, was feudal, and was so at the Reformation (still attached to States) but the rise of the denomination created a Middle Class religion of capitalist values. At first the mercantilists argued for their inclusion in the political class, and later the capitalists or liberal ideologues. Progressives and socialists also agitated, some religious and fewer secularist, but the Keynesian and welfare dream of inclusion allowed capitalism to develop further and went well beyond religion if consistent with some theologians' calls for economic justice.

First of all there is the need to identify claims that high modernity has become postmodernity. In terms of the economy, it means a whole direction towards consumption and by style. Care is needed as there is still mass manufacturing, even if much has gone east. Nevertheless, manufacturing has become more selective, and just in time, as have services. Have mass brands vanished, as guarantors of quality?

An economic sector of increasing impact is the information society. Whereas the mass media produced edited versions of reality for large scale consumption, now anyone and everyone can produce media (from text to video) for instant consumption. In this sense the global can be local, and the local global - giving voice to every regional extremist. Regions of censorship struggle to keep out individualist and small group speech that contradicts overall policy. There is no doubt here that space has shrunk and time has become concentrated.

But in addition style wins over substance, and the appearance of things becomes as important as content. Content is transient, so longevity hardly matters. What is the point in having an electronic instrument that can last years, when it will be superseded. Better that it looks good, and the next item looks good. But this then becomes the all pervading principle for everything, even that which could last.

It is then the intensity of time shifting that changes the perception of time. The sense that we want it and want it now affects groceries that come from across the world, and so nothing is ever 'in season' any more.

The subjectivity of opinion breaks down distinctions between high art and popular culture, so that popular culture can become art objects. Trash is pretty too. It is realised that there is no way one can assert the quality of art, only (perhaps) the quality of work - but then machines can produce quality and the machine is value free. Many an artist has a concept and allows a little factory to make the object: other people's skills.

Architecture mixes past, present and future. It is produced quickly and much looks plastic, but its styles borrow pleasant shapes from an ordered past. The move to modernist functionality and minimalism is too boring and soulless, so there is a re-enchantment by visual appearances.

Economy, society and culture become detached. The economy no longer provides competing metanarratives. Communism (that upheld socialism, however much socialists wanted a democratic alternative) fell, and capitalism was victorious, though arguably capitalism itself is failing and falling. Media saturation carries its own multiple ideologies. The decline of a western working class is a decline of mass keynesian consumption, and an underclass lacks purchasing power. The middle class is choice making, but aimless in its cultural choices.

More specifically, rational bureaucracies of economic power defer to technical experts within the organisation and many of these disagree and compete on interests, and team working deliberate decentralises and empowers, though much of this is illusory.

The linguistic turn has impacted upon many disciplines, so that there are critics of close correlations of research: constantly a question of and a breakdown in meaning. The limitations and criticisms of science and history lead to a focus upon texts and language, and academia can become sterile in this focus. The story becomes important as a means of coherence, but there are lots and lots of stories, and they can be history-like and biography-like when they cannot be history and biography. Indeed science can tell its story, even as its paradigm seems to be coming apart weighed down by dark matter and dark energy and neutrinos that go faster than light.

BUT... Surely people can still tell the difference between saturated images and their reality, even understand that 'reality television' isn't real and is a construction. Criticism here has a positive and still worthwhile function. Science may have lost much of its linear optimism, but it can still be done, as can mathematics, as can social science research - and the latter has not been reduced to the same as the novel. As capitalism fails, tensions over scarcity resume, and a compassionate society can be a critical society that needs to take power back. This needs collective organising, and more than just dissipated movements of interests divorced from the big political push (say Green, animal rights). The capitalist organising by experts is still ideologically secure - promote the profit principle for capital - and the fact that team working is an illusory empowerment suggests a false consciousness may be quite active. There is still mass unemployment and the underclass is not always in and out of inadequate levels of work: supply side labour market measures cannot make up for a lack of paid work. Bad housing is always bad housing: style doesn't come into it and basic needs do. If postmodernity is simply a more intense subjectivity, and set against the unaffordable, and there is still discrimination between style and substance, then really there is more that is continuous than discontinuous with modernity. There always were many narratives, choices, and consumption, and to some extent we always had a fragmented self.

The real test, perhaps, is to the extent that space and time are confused, and the extent to which transience is underlined. Derrida showed that binary systems are not as secure as they think they are: that each opposite contains a bit of what they deny, as revealed when reading between the lines. Metanarratives are filled with doubt but, as for metanarratives, I would suggest that the secular metanarrative as a sociology of knowledge is very powerful, of a belief in science underlined by technology that achieves solutions, and giving explanations that are naturalistic. There is no equality of explanation between the secular, the supernatural and the magical, no space for Radical Orthodoxy to muscle in and start proclaiming that sociology is some form of secular theology. The supernatural and magical are in serious decline as explainers of anything at all, whether in the Bible, Qur'an, Bhagavad Gita or Church traditions. Research, either for regularity or validity, remains vitally important.

It is the power of the secular that leads all religion into choices. The once big Christian world explains as little as other religious choices. What are the mechanisms, for example, of understanding atonement as all around one man: how do these work? The inability to explain these in any meaningful sense undermines such doctrinal religion. There is no comparative historical base for investigating a supremacy of one person as a God-man: it can only be a doctrinal assertion from the beginning. Magic or supernatural intervention does not overcome brain death and the instant work of maggots.

Religion then is going to be both modernist and postmodern, to the extent that it is both experiential and subjective, and of varied and different texts and stories. What they are going to do is focus upon one's own, or one's group's, direction in constructing a life and an ethic. When someone says, I am convinced I am right because of my experience, then they will hear an account just as valid to itself and its own experience. Indeed the other person will have a belief and experience that might simply change in themselves. The issue for postmodernism or high modernism is whether it will work as a society, and perhaps the task of religion is to show that it can. So religion is to serve the world, and to show the world that it can work together in its diversity. Rather than being performers of doctrines, religion should perhaps be open and creative. Paul Lakeland wants still a distinctive Christian religion in postmodernity but sees it as serving in providential care with both Christ and the silent and distant God in the background (1995, Postmodernity: A Christian Identity in a Fragmented Age, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 110, 109). Christ is the other of God and a historically particular person in which I can see myself reflected (110). Christ as such is les the focus and becomes more the revealer of God (as once was) (111). Well, maybe, but under postmodernity Being itself is compromised and any Christ as any self is going to be multiple in reflections.

Open and liberal, this postmodern faith checks itself, but even if more conservative it can be said that if Christ is the only way to the Father, then Buddha is the only way to that Enlightenment, and Islam is the only submission to the pure transcendence that wills what it wants, and Hinduism unites being with Being. When conservative, packages are themselves and their own languages; when more open constructions of religion can take a bit of this experience and that, often from several people in conversation, and find ways that jigsaws parts together. In a plural setting you make your own packages, but the existence of others is a means to doubt and hold back on your own or group's tendency to imperialism.

Hitching a Postmodern Ride

2011-12-14T07:06:00.007+01:00

I'm grateful again to Rachel for giving a wider audience to some speakers like Steve Hollinghurst, a Researcher in Evangelism to Post-Christian Culture, who spoke on 23rd November to her and clergy colleagues at Swanwick.

He spoke on postmodernity and stated that modernity lasted several hundred years and postmodernity will not become clear until it can be assessed from a future vantage point. It could take generations.

I am interested how it is that people almost embrace postmodernity yet tell us they have something eternal as a Truth that we ought to acquire.

If they have something called Truth, then perhaps they ought to be more clear in their opposition to postmodernity. Otherwise they can be accused of being manipulators.

He stated, according to Rachel, that postmodernity is happening. Print and the printing press led to one revolution and the Internet is now of this kind. There is gender equality and the rise of feminism; there was invention of the motor car. The CD is a blip. The banking crisis a mini-wave, micro-productivity and upgrading hardware and software part of life.

It seems to me this is quite a bizarre set of examples. Surely the car is modernity - a large producer economy piece made affordable as part of mass production. Feminism again is about a group identity along with class, and is part of modernity. The CD isn't a blip if it is part of the long reach of reliable music continuing with the MP3. The CD can be seen, again, as modernist: large scale, reliable, producer products. The MP3 undermines production companies by individual downloads and choices among a vast storage capacity with the players. The CD as a playing and recording device continues.

He seems to be haphazard because he was not presenting any theory. So he mentioned the fall of communism as a global impact where globalism becomes glocalism and affects every day matters like moving house. I don't know how the fall of communism affects moving house. He might have a theory somewhere there but he seemed to go in for contrasts instead.

So modernity is as with a book culture and authoritative whereas the internet creates a democracy where everybody's voice can be heard but it makes everything temporary. All become privileged with the personal story - that authority rests within themselves.

When we get to authority resting with individuals, again this is a feature of modernity. People carve out different identities for themselves dependent upon their contexts. But in modernity the whole liberal, individualist enterprise was about experience.

Kant proposed the autonomy and authority of the individual. This has two main impacts: one on the supreme subjectivity of truth to the universal and the other on the individual as being. There is nothing postmodern about this; indeed Habermas as a critic of its sufficiency takes a stage further to intersubjectivity of truth via interest-free conversation: that a group of people unhindered by economic interests will coalesce to the truth. Hegel had long since regarded Kant as unable to bind people together, but he moved to the notion of absolute spirit.

All the time there is the maintenance of the individual and the impact of the collective; for a sociologist, there are 'higher' objective and organising forces. It is the point that society and culture forms the individual.

The difference is, I suggest, between modernity and postmodernity is the collapse of the created objective and the subjective and even the self is deemed to be transient. The surface appearance of something becomes its all, as fleeting signs point to themselves and nothing more concrete - if they do.

The second way of understanding modernity (and therefore postmodernity) is to contrast it with premodernity. The principle of modernity is rational organisation, such as the pyramidal bureaucracy occupied according to merit. The previous organising principle was the sacred, as in many religious organisations (such as in the laying on of hands or spiritual benefit within caste). Modernity became more flexible in organisation according to experts as well as bureaucrats and in team working; each of these spills into postmodernity when the experts disagree or the teams become completely localised.

Of course Steve Hollinghurst's interest is religion and he saw postmodernity in terms of people wanting to choose to believe and not wanting to be told what to believe. People do not want to be guided for rites of passage; they have it all worked out. Also postmodernity leads to reaction: Kepel 's 'The Revenge of God' witnessed a rise in fundamentalism from which people 'stand against' to safeguard and protect.

Again, the 'Homeless Mind' is a feature of modernity and plurality. He referred to consumerism and no doubt this is significant, but again consumerism is not new. Certainly the spirit of the New Age, of purchasing religion, is affecting churches so that they become religious service providers. People pay to receive a package and couples for weddings come with their list of requirements. Well they do for all rites of passage, as in many a crematorium funeral.

I don't know why postmodernity leads to the unchuched rather than dechurched. In postmodernity people are potentially in all sorts of groups (and out again) as they acquire identities according to wish. What he is referring to is caused from a mass movement of modernity called secularisation. That indeed did dechurch and by generation (collapse of Sunday Schools) meant unchurched. In Europe the working class were only marginally churched, and then the urban middle class followed on in underlining secularisation.

He stated that the unchurched means there is nothing deeply buried to reawaken; there are no Christian truths there in the first place. The unchurched, unlike the dechurched, are less likely to pinpoint a moment of conversion and instead slowly come to relationship. There is more belief in a higher power and of spirituality.

I cannot see why this should not be so. Surely people join groups, get a moment of conversion, then get critical, and finally leave and move on. That's a postmodern pathway, of serial, parallel and multiple identities (a more intense form of modernity).

He contrasted that in Japan people attend without believing as they see religion as providing for certain basic needs. In Britain people believe but they do not attend. Surely this is contradictory to the principle of being unchurched if there is nothing buried to reawaken. What are they believing?

In predicting a new reformation he asked how they effectively communicate timeless truths and talks of an eternal gospel that has spoken through pagan, classical, medieval and modern worlds. Each time we saw different expressions of the deep truths of God.

God's new life is spilling out - and asks how can those people doing spirituality can be lodged back into the apparent timeless story.

Another given is the "must" that mission is framed in terms of the social dimension of the Trinity. Why?

He stated that Christendom (and imperialist church planting) was at least confident with a vision. Big stories were told that organised people and took over the reign of chaos. Really? There was chaos was there? The truth is more that superstition continued long after sacred churches organised themselves, and it has only been modernity that has killed off some frankly harmful beliefs about demons.

Churches were inculturated. It suggests (to Rachel and others?) the homogeneous unit principle (HUP) of demographically similar people becoming Christians when crossing few or no racial, linguistic, or class barriers. In the midst of all this diversity, their aim is to recover a peculiarly British Christianity.

Christians will have to use analogies, avoid theory and tell stories from out of which people can make their own connections. He stated that the Reformation once captured and expressed that new individualism in reaction to the corporate, feudal world that had preceded it.

Er, no it didn't. The Reformation was an appeal to the princes of the feudal world who wanted autonomy from the Holy Roman Empire, such as it was, and Catholic connected State power in general. Protestantism gave states more autonomy, but it wasn't the autonomy of modernism. That was to come later. Religion remained associated with the State.

Apparently Steve Hollinghurst is in the evangelical debate about saving all or not: it may not be universalism, but a particular kind of patience, a holy waiting with God for this to happen. This waiting is also faith post September 11 2001, which ought to be sacrificial and hesitant and not triumphalistic. There's the lack of spirituality inside our churches and the need to recover sacred spaces and perhaps the ways of the early church fathers and Christian mystics. The idea of being reconciled in Christ is the emphasis is on diversity in unity. Loving God and loving my neighbour also demands a far reaching ecumenism and the God outside as well as inside the Church.

It strikes me as a form of arrogance, that postmodernity is a phase through which this certainty needs to navigate. If these folks are so certain about truth, then they should campaign against the postmodern full stop.

Much of the postmodern is in fact high modern. It is continuous with the capitalist individualism that has taken place so far. A producer capitalism of mass production, mass consumption and mass culture has been replaced by just in time, style consumption and chosen transient group identities. But there is still the corporation and multinational, and the banks that failed were not supposed to be transient entities.

Where postmodernism does count is in the dislocation of space and time. Thus out of modernity comes a town centre that looks like every other town centre, and a dislocation of space. Every Lidl and Aldi is the same, except for being clockwise or anticlockwise. Macdonaldisation is a modernism that becomes postmodern as it repeats spaces. Culture is no longer high and low, but everything seems to be a form of advertising. Architecture shows time past, present and future often in one building. Utility and indifference in economics becomes lost. There is an inability to do history, so some revert to texts only with readers separated from the writers, and science is criticised (beyond losing optimism: it becomes trapped). In postmodernism the wrapping paper is the gift, or at least is a seamless part of the gift, and indeed one cannot tell the difference between a gift and an exchange (rather an important distinction in religion and ritual).

The modernity of individual autonomy and experience does lead on to consumer religion and the transience of choices, but much postmodern religion is a rejection of liberal autonomy in favour of the text and collective performance. It cannot see value in culture, only cultural performance. It's a dead, frozen approach to religion, presumably held to because of the attraction of orthodoxy for its own sake. Either that or it is believed.

I suggest that there is a lot faddish about postmodernism and the religious. Basically, many an evangelical is still driven by experience, particularly by the charismatic individual experience they interpret along received grounds. They are experience reinforced. They then take that into a criticism of other people's experiences and a pushing of their own. If you take away their theory and their intellectualism, even their religious standing, they will claim their experience and its interpretive power. They are not really postmoderns at all: they just don't want to miss out.

Nick Clegg's Political Blunder

2011-12-13T03:03:00.007+01:00

The European issue has not as much damaged the Conservative Party, given its march in the sceptical direction, as damaged the coalition. Nevertheless, I think the person to emerge from this the worst is Nick Clegg. Perhaps I would say this, in that I cannot see myself voting Liberal Democrat without Nick Clegg standing down.

David Cameron faced with a treaty intent to bind together countries fiscally for the longer term benefit of the euro used his veto. He wanted to protect essential British interests, including the very City of London that had played such a part in landing us in the economic mess in the first place. But actually, go back decades and you find British policy towards the pound always coming first and manufacturing and business coming second. The Treasury has competed with, overshadowed and finished off other economic departments over and over again: more often with Labour governments that tried to build a different economic base. The last Labour government (both Blair and Brown) was more like Conservative governments in its liberal economics and light touch regulation towards the City, and thus weak regulation was unable to detect the mess (see recent news items regarding the Royal Bank of Scotland).

In playing his veto, Cameron has stopped nothing, though he is right on the limited point that a set of treaties between EU countries cannot override existing core treaties of the 27. If the 26 make rules that contradict the core treaties of the 27 then the British government can use other institutions, like the European Court, for a defence of its interests. But these would be based on an issue by issue basis, and presumably there won't be any other actual treaties set up for fiscal unity that contradict the core ones. In simple terms, the veto on economic matters like national budgets cannot be overturned (into say QMV) without a treaty change affecting the 27.

The question is did Cameron act alone. According to government accounts, Nick Clegg was consulted and he gave Cameron consent regarding the need to veto. Clegg then says it was a bad decision, and today stayed away from the House of Commons. Some think that in between Clegg saying yes to Cameron and making his criticism on Sunday, he received nothing but negative reaction from his MPs and Lords' grandees. So as much as Cameron tilting to his backbenchers, Clegg bent towards his own political party.

Did Clegg say yes? The cabinet approved the strategy in general ahead of the Council of Ministers (Prime Ministers) meeting but with warnings, as from Vince Cable, as regarding the effect of isolation on the British economy. Of course, here again, Vince Cable has responsibility for trying to recover the real economy, whereas George Osborne's focus stretches to the fate of the pound and banking. Then Cameron consulted Clegg during the meeting...

Comparison is made with Chris Huhne representing EU interests in the Climate Change conference who has been seen (even by John Prescott) as constructive and positive, showing how Britain can be at the centre of the EU.

There is no doubt that Nick Clegg has made several blunders during his time in government. There's also no doubt that he loves being in government and next to his soul mate Cameron (in terms of upbringing and social status). Cameron and him probably still get on far better than Blair (who would have got on with both of them) and Brown did in the previous government. The point is that Clegg lacks political skills.

If Chris Huhne can run free of questions that might otherwise dog him, he'd be a far better leader of the Liberal Democrats. As I understand it, Nick Clegg is going to lead the Liberal Democrats into the next election in 2015. This will be a disaster, as it was he who created all that litter in the notorious election advert about politicians not being truthful, only to operate a bare faced turnaround in government regarding student fees. Furthermore, the policy was always going to be sacrificed for a coalition, so the electorate was told a bare faced lie. This was yes under a collective party decision, but Clegg fronted it, and the one way a political party can signal its remorse and change of direction is for the leader to go. Paddy Ashdown went too quickly (his own decision) whereas others afterwards were forced out. Clegg needs to indicate he will go, or the party, to avoid disaster, needs to force him out.

Rev from a Non-Rev

2011-12-12T02:59:00.014+01:00

I can no longer watch the BBC's Rev in the manner of The American Soldier. Eh? I hear you read. The American Soldier is a sociological study about people who adapt and change their behaviour in expectation of a future role. All I want to say further on that is that I applied to train to be a Rev. with emphasis on the need for pastoral training, and that the academic had largely been done, so the rejection on the grounds of my intellect at services leaving people puzzled and character not relating to people in pastoral situations means I am untrainable. I sometimes wonder how I gave that chap a lift home today, who once occupied my house, or chatted to some very ordinary people over sandwiches after the afternoon advent-Christmas-Yuletide service.

The premise in inner city Rev (the focus of programme 5) is that he is in contact with a number of down and outs within his city ministry. There is a battle between the administration and the hierarchy and the pastoral needs on the ground. The banking chap played by Richard E. Grant is another kind of pastoral reality, preferring the group at Notting Hill near a model agency so that there is "pussy all round" - now he's sober. The Archdeacon represents the hierarchy and administration (after all, he was promoted) and increasingly so does the Reader: and the Reader is told by the Rev once out of danger with the accounts that they would review the week (that is, get the priorities right). The Reader is himself as in The American Soldier, an aspirant of the cloth and he is dangerously entertained by the amoral Archdeacon. He will come with recommendations.

Offering a bedroom to the crack addict who was going clean a little while after prison is, of course, over the fine line. In the end, he is back to where he was: his begging for his drug habit with a petrol can as if a taxi driver. Indeed, so was the banker, in reverse. The banker was better when he was rubbish, rather than managed on a sober life. He was as much a dodgy dealer as Mick, indeed a drug financier. The Rev. though stole from him, but it didn't matter - just another opportunity for a repayment schedule, suggesting that all banking is theft.

Colin, also of lowlife, is the sort of chap who just gets by, from one fantasy life in his life to the next, but he sort of manages to get by. He had no time for Mick, so there is discrimination among the dispossessed. Colin is within the church community, and can be contained, whereas Mick even with his weird reading of basic Bible stories, cannot be contained. The more general truth is that the Colins don't go to churches. Well, there are one or two that come within orbit, and he is the only one in the drama.

And meanwhile, unless Roman Catholic: there is the pastoral situation at home, which in the Rev.'s case is trying to get his wife pregnant (give her a role in life beyond the secondary attachment to his role) [I'm reminded that she is a solicitor, but the fiction suggests she finds the home life attached to his job limiting and she is in the driving seat for the baby - allowing for his willing duties in this regard].

I sometimes reflect on my own church community as a contrast. You would think Unitarians were intellectual and lower middle class. Once upon a time ministers were academy educated and preached on the Greek myths. Not any more. Ours is (I think it's fair to say) much more ordinary among the ordinary, and is across the north. Here is a small number of mainly retired and economically inactive folk who somehow hold their heads above the water line. They are all moderate plain speakers, many of whom would cheer on David Cameron on nationalistic terms (not me, not at all). The days of the middle class families who once supplied the trustees and core congregation down the generations have gone (the families still exist, however), and these folks left are the gathered. So we do not, as such, and probably never did, pick up the urban lost even in the days of education and welfare and leisure outreach. Not the Micks, and not quite the Colins either. But there is, including in the 'not much money' folk, a merging into a lower middle class and graduate (or similar through experience) grouping, and these tend to discuss, further, denominational matters. The denomination will have to recruit its ministers from this tiny handful as repeated in other congregations. Today's service, with its theme of 'colours' at this time of year, drew in residents of homes provided by the Leonard Chamberlain Trust - thus I had two invites to attend. A few of the usual core people stayed away: they don't believe in Christmas and don't like carols and all that (and neither do I, to be honest). These invited are our 'needy', so to speak, or at least those who have been enabled by the charity to live independently, including me. They come to this service, and also to the Sutton Feast Day service the Unitarians provide, and which, this last year, I took, and I didn't lose anyone intellectually at all. In fact some said it was the best one they had ever attended. Perhaps I should take up accountancy.

Note: all the images are from the BBC online broadcast and are here as illustrative.

Death to Life and Religious Myth

2011-12-09T04:09:00.007+01:00

Some programmes are the finest we can watch, and one must be After Life: The Strange Science of Decay. For anyone interested in themes of simplicity into complexity and in themes of resurrecting, this is a must. It's up there with Armand Marie Leroi's What Darwin Didn't Know, the programme that looked at how two lakes independently produced the same number of interacting fish species and how by genetics that we now know that the eye evolved, stage by stage, just once.

The programme on decay was an experiment (with some themes off) of a best sealed room in Edinburgh Zoo where the temperature is high and animal and vegetable food is left. Some is in packs and some in the open. There is the contents of a typical family barbeque. A few flies are let in. There is also a big of composting going on. People can go around and look in, and Dr George McGavin makes his visits with other experts and asks the public to sniff things and even retrieve a £5 note from lots of maggots.

The main agents of decay are mould, bacteria and maggots during the room's 80 days. The three agents compete, and the flies produce maggots and then there's an explosion in fly numbers, must of which get drunk on wine and rotted vegetables.

Two aspects I found particularly interesting, and one was simplicity. Fungus broke down living matter, but then trees developed and for 50 million years stayed ahead of fungus and locked in carbon to make an oxygen rich earth that made for larger insects than we see now. Indeed the earth developed life. Eventually fungus evolved to get at the wood, and now turns dead trees white as it does its decaying job.

But a slime mould is a single cell body and can be huge. It is now shown to demonstrate pattern behaviour (like lots of birds forming efficient patterns in the sky: they just do). The mould spreads, finds food, cuts back leaving channels, and does so with back ups. The single cell must get its food, not cost too much and tackles damage. Create a map of 'centres of population' and a slime mould will produce the most efficient transport system. The efficiently planned one around Tokyo is superseded by the slime mould. In the same way, slime mould can do motorway planning in Britain, which can only be an improvement.

Like the maths of fractals, we have simplicities that appear to contain intelligence because simple rules create patterns. That's how the fractal works - an iterated virtual number equation from which beauty comes.

These are what I call signals of transcendence.

Then we have the business of decay. The atoms of nitrogen get moved from the decayed matter into growing matter. The forces of decay break things down, and clear away the mess, but also create the constituents that form new life.

The religions of the far east reflect this in their rebirth myths and that of circular time. For the more linear time approaches, the Iranian belief in resurrection imported into some Judaism and into Christianity is about death becoming life restored (and made full). So religions are reflections upon wider natural processes and also ethical behaviours for us more self-conscious ones. Yes, there are particular myths and old stories that relate to wider universal themes.

But an interesting point to add here (as regards the previous blog entry). If there was some tomb for a body that some claim was uniquely so far restored and transformed into a spiritual body, then when death occured not only would the brain have died and died pretty much immediately but the maggots would have got to work at an instance. More likely, as a historical point, the bodies of the executed were dumped by the Romans into lime pits so to precisely speed the rotting and gas bloating that would take place more openly and obviously - and the lime pit also goes for the bones.

The reason for making these connections is to try to plug religion back into the natural world and to give religion some life again itself. It's not that the stories of religion no longer work, but that in secularisation they are being shortcutted - we may as well go direct to the science and these narratives. Yet there is a lot still in Shiva as a God of destruction and recreation, for example, as there is in moving from death to life. My objection is simply in the particularity, where much of religion (and Christianity I know best) doesn't work on its own terms, by its own claims. I'm not a person to start praising Jesus or the work of the Holy Spirit when these are myths for what are ordinary processes that fascinate and are themselves incredible: particularly the maths and science of patterns and the way systems interact in the processes of change and renewal.

Note: all the images are from the BBC online broadcast and are here as illustrative.

So to Fundamentals

2011-12-06T04:33:00.005+01:00

I like the fact that Rachel blogs on some core issues and beliefs, and in the light of recent events I want to respond to her recent blog entry on the resurrection and her listening to Christina Baxter and others.

Whilst I wish I didn't want to give the impression that the Unitarians for me were 'second choice', the fact remains that if I believed in 'the resurrection' as an event I would almost be forced to be an Anglican or mainstream Christian, which was where I started. I know that there are Unitarians who do believe in the resurrection as an event, just as there are Anglicans who see it as a myth - that is pointing to the experience of having to go through destruction in order to have growth on the other side (and do look at the BBC Four programme coming up on the meat and veg that rots and decays to go on to produce new life).

If you do not believe that the resurrection is an event, or that there is an incarnation that is specific, then a liberal claim to 'follow Jesus' is little other than of a cult of personality, simply because you should follow what he teaches and not him. I do not follow Jesus because I do not follow individuals: I rather ask if what they are saying is useful and interesting and if we can make something of it. Answering yes to such is simply answering yes to what is found to be useful.

New discoveries made through science are indeed very much a reason why I do not believe in the resurrection. By resurrection I mean, here: that a person actually died, that the body was transformed and came back to life in that new state, and of the same consciousness - Jesus himself - and the transformed body and its consciousness vanished into the heavens (however understood) so it has not been seen since. There is no body to find.

The first scientific point is that when we die, the brain dies in such a way that it cannot be retrieved. It is not only dormant, it is lost. Secondly, whatever might be the particle physics of being conscious (and being conscious about being conscious), once you die that memory recalling body dependent will die consciousness is finished. If consciousness has any continuance it is regarding any creature, time or space, and with new memories should they be in a memory understanding creature. Highly unlikely and rather Buddhist. The me-ness of me is always internal and singular and death means it is broken.

The analogy I would use for resurrection is that of energising, as in Star Trek. The person who goes into the energiser dies: destructs. That person comes to the end. The person who is reformed at the other place is a carbon copy, yes sharing the memories of what made this person that person, but is nevertheless a copy who only thinks he has been alive a long time. The person who energised had cut the rope.

So although my body might be remade every 7 years, it does so bit by bit that keeps me continuous. When I die I'm then done. Like the energised person, a resurrected person that dies is cut off, or he never died.

That a body might be transformed and then relives, carrying its injuries without becoming a cripple, then creates a further problem of how that body is to be vanished. Of course if the body is a spiritual body - that Pauline oxymoron - then it can vanish. But it was hardly then a body at all - bodies do not go through walls.

And then, when you look at the texts, they are all in story form and contradictory, and are really about legitimacy of leadership and about ritual correctness. The eucharistic meal is given legitimate place though them, as are the apostles who'd met the one apparently risen.

The surprise may be in reflection that there is a first of the resurrected, one to start, but there is no overturning of the general theory of resurrection and they are waiting for that first one to come back. We should not be surprised that in times of expectation stories and beliefs get adapted and changed. They do - check out more recent religious movements at times of formation (like the Bahais or the Mormons). Basically they believed it -resurrection - and our medical and scientific professions do not.

So what is this 'event' that Christina Baxter refers to? No more than a charismatic community holding beliefs we no longer share, making theological stories about a messianic leader expected to return and finalise events. People's storytelling is so fantastic, the escalation of Jesus's titles so rapid, that this is what it is about.

So it is about myth and story telling. The old historians realised that they might decide about some of the sayings and events of Jesus the man, but they couldn't and cannot do the same for resurrection. You can't do incarnation historically either. Today we get people who are text focussed only and become 'poststructural' and that's because there is no event to find either. History, like science, cannot do resurrection.

To say that 'I believe' does not make a belief into an event. It remains a belief.

The powers that killed Jesus are the powers now that kill other ethical and not so ethical beings. There is no change in this. Suffering continues, and in the twentieth century reached an industrial scale. We might just claim to have grown up since, until you look at this war and that war, and the dangers presented by the present economic strife. As the Jews say, no messiah came because no new reality came along.

If there is incarnation in any sense then it is a general sense of hope and belief in the material world. But the material world is a food chain, it is a world of agony in reaching whatever it might. I rather think it is just an evolving chaotic system into which we conscious humans might inject a bit of compassion. But it is transient; the sun will die and the universe will became exceedingly spacious and dead, probably; but humans will either self-destruct or evolve out before the sun dies.

So Jesus is no more or less than Gandhi in terms of ethical heights (and we can do history about Gandhi), and ontologically is exactly like the rest of us. Jesus, the Buddha, Gandhi - they are teachers and live out their lives accordingly and take the consequences. Gandhi was shot by one of his own for being too generous to others. Jesus was killed by others for being too generous to his own.

So there are all sorts of qualities and heights we might look towards. There are clues to the good. We see them even in the arts. We can call them signals of transcendence. Perhaps there is, therefore, transcendence. But I rather doubt it. Culture is still, like all things, transient and ongoing. Lord Clark thought the Romans were the height of culture, whereas a revisionist will say they were brutal and also lacked innovation and those Barbarians were much more compassionate and flexible. So much of value is simply subjective or, perhaps, conversational.

Maybe Jurgen Habermas is right - that without interests we can find the conversational Truth. Or maybe we are never devoid of interests and there is always more than one truth. Truth is like the end of the rainbow, and we all see our own rainbows.

If this is transcendence, then it is plural. It draws from all around, and makes for all around.

So to be scientific, and historical, and literate, and religious, is to understand the huge change of outlook to our narratives. Not long back people believed in the faeries and they would kill children if they thought these had been swapped for faeries. They believed in spirits that grew the crops and sent the weather. The Church stood as supernatural with a powerful man-God and compromised with such magic. But we don't believe in those things now - we don't believe in faeries nor in resurrected beings.

Some people believe in ghosts and take equipment along. Others take equipment to identify water underground (and, er, just see if they really do). Yes there are all sorts of hangings on. But I notice how today's neo-Pagans are into earth based liturgies of personal reflection and change rather than any real belief in some supernatural God and Goddess that will change what is happening. Abracadabra, let's have fun.

Rituals, we discover, are told in terms of meeting or encounter, but are actually about gift-exchange of useless tokens for a material effort and the spiritual gift of binding people together. Why so? Because the social anthropologist has done the work and seen the impact, and none of it is dependent on whether the primary story is true or not. And even then that religio or binding is somewhat more sophisticated than a straight exchange.

No doubt that several Christian stories relate to the nature of life dying and returning, and of human suffering and rejection and yet a coming through on the other side. The stories are quite fantastic and sophisticated: the gospels and even New Testament are a good read. But it is clearly myth, and it is this way round. So much was set in motion by that cultural figure of two communities, the Greek (Roman) and Jewish; so much was lost in the destruction by Rome of the Jews in 70 CE including the home of the Jewish Christians. Some of it was preserved, but we know what dominated and what took on the Gnostics.

Believing this is so, that here is the operation of myth in communities, it is important to say so and clearly. The dominant narratives, about how we really think and assume, are quite different.

Yes, neutrinos go faster than light and physics professors need to do much rethinking. They know that with so much dark matter and dark energy. But the method of physics is the narrative method, not some unchanging inherited tradition that represents an entirely different mode of thought. We do not - we really do not - believe like they did. And I'll be dogmatic on this one: up against a Christina Baxter I think I'm right and she is wrong, and that I can draw evidence and historical movements and she can only draw on myth.

It is why I am not a Christian and cannot be Anglican, because I would not say - as some do - well I believe in this but in another way, and oh I also 'follow' Jesus (like I follow a good football team). I say I disagree. The Trinity is a human construction, and so is the rest, that the incarnation can at best be generalised, as can be transcendence, and that the resurrection did not happen in terms of happening to one particular conscious man.

Saying that means I won't say the promises, either with fingers crossed or with a lie. I don't say it in order to minister, or in order to have position or role. That's because the bureaucracy expects obedience to the faith as evolved to the 'saints' and I don't think it was so. I read the same as the rest, and it isn't so. And what I wouldn't say as a minister I don't say as a lay person.

No to Me as Possible Rev (Part 2)

2011-12-05T17:24:00.005+01:00

I've since had feedback as to why I was not going to be interviewed for training for Unitarian Ministry. There were two main connected reasons:

First was the doubt that I can relate to other people who are not as intellectually gifted as me.
Second was a question of character that I can relate to individuals in the social settings or contexts of ministry.

As for people being thoroughly Unitarian or not, or reliable or not, the demand for five years ministry or repay the training is a response to the realisation that ministers come and go. Of course I was looking at the criteria and how someone would be more valued as a potential minister, which was clearly about people involved in the denomination at many levels: the more levels the better.

So in the end it comes down to what I've heard before: that I only relate to people at my level. I'll have to let my longstanding friends know this, one of whom achieved A levels and another a degree, and indeed none of my larger circle of friends achieved my level or number of degrees.

More important, and to the point, and thus I see the two reasons as one, really, is of my character in being unable to relate to individuals in the social setting of ministry. One clear example is in taking services, where the content of what I preach leaves people struggling to keep up. Other settings are pastoral, and also (though not explicitly stated) representing the denomination outside.

Presumably the character thing is that although I could take services to relate to people, presumably I ignore them enough not to do so. I mean, it's not as if I chat to only some people after a service. I ask about people and talk to who is there - after all, there aren't enough of them to be selective.

The music I do also has a lot of thought put into it, but it isn't only for the thoughtful. I also respond to all kinds of criticisms. OK, so I don't think I should model my music provision on Classic FM, as I prefer a wider canvas and sometimes music that is different. Perhaps Unitarianism is a kind of Classic FM whereas once it was BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4.

If people, say, looked at my liturgical services so far, they'd see that these do relate directly to means of spirituality far beyond intellectual people. It might take an intellectual to produce them, in the sense of learning about liturgy and spirituality, but they reach out to a movement where the last liturgical book was Orders of Worship in 1932 and then a little effort in Sheffield.

This character thing is the view from a long time back that I am somehow aloof and out of touch with the ordinary person. I made the point that none of this is new, as it was said over twenty years ago, and as for not being interviewed "on this occasion" this judgement was made about me 22 years ago when I started training for ministry and which went wrong in year one as I didn't bend enough to give to highly local liberal Christian congregations what they expected. Then I was surprised that the spirit of freedom, reason and tolerance, didn't extend to the reality of freedom of thought I'd learnt was the defining identity of Unitarianism. My view was a hope that many of these congregations had moved on, and even if they have the view of me as remote or aloof has not changed.

The judgement - and it is agreed that it is a judgement - is based on an image of me, and an image of Unitarians as they now are, and the roles available to ministers in this denomination. The judgement of me is simply too one sided. The judgement of the movement seems to be that it is not intellectual, and that it is fundamentally 'ordinary' in contrast and presumably the everyday people like everyday content in their services. The roles in ministry are highly pastoral and limited, and so there is very little place for intellectual input never mind how it is practically exploited.

I've just read a column in a recent The Inquirer by a minister who I think is seen as a perfect fit. He is not long out of training, and his whole approach is about people sharing their life stories with him and what a privilege it is to be alongside them. This is a very valuable ministry for sure, and necessary, and I bet he relates best to what there is, the people in his visiting and those he encounters for rites of passage. But whilst he too is about 'being', this is a very 'doing' understanding of ministry. My view is that the stipend ministry is also about being reflective, about using the intellect available and applying it - applying it to define what you are about, to put into worship materials, to think for others as well as to assist others in thinking. It is about being a person for others. A ministry works better when there are square pegs even among repeating round holes.

Anyway, on this, my decision to apply was in itself a form of closure. This is a movement of, now, small and struggling congregations, and many wondering what it is about. The people wanted to minister are those primarily pastoral and directly pastoral. I have only made actual applications for ministry within the Unitarian denomination: in the Anglicans I've never done it because I have never matched the required belief - asked to choose between Real Absence (acceptable) and non-realism (not acceptable) I chose non-realism. However, I did take (yes a high level) theology group and it was among ordinary people, as far as I could tell, and I did there conduct worship and prayers, and people have always said how refreshing and different they were.

Asked for a list of books on contemporary theology and Unitarianism for this application, I did stop at a hundred, and I've read more than most on Unitarianism despite a struggle to make those contemporary in theology. What is the role for someone who stops at a hundred?

Anglicans do have a wider range of ministries, where I might have fitted better, but I simply could not make those statements of belief I did not share, whereas where I could make and develop beliefs in Unitarianism but where there simply isn't that variety of ministry available any more. Perhaps I was born a hundred and fifty years too late for this group, when I would have fitted what that Unitarianism then valued.

He's Going But He's Still Banging On...

2011-12-04T04:58:00.010+01:00

Is the Rowan Williams to resign soon? The Advent Letter 2011 suggests he is. In his own words he puts:

Throughout the time of my service as Archbishop I have tried to keep before my own eyes and those of the Communion the warnings given by St Paul about the risks of saying 'I have no need of you' to any other who seeks to serve Jesus Christ as a member of His Body.

He says we all live in imperfect Churches, but he wants to improve what he sees as one.

Four years on from the infamous, even fundamentalist-accepting, Advent Letter of 2011, the one written for this year is still banging on about the Anglican Communion Covenant.

First of all there's a list of his travels and then the matter of one voice in the world comes with the 'holistic mission' within the Anglican Alliance for development, relief and advocacy, the activities around which:

...have shown the importance of Anglicans speaking with one voice on issues of poverty and injustice.

And:

It is one of the true signs of hope for the Communion that we are capable of meeting and working together...

Thus the Archbishop of Canterbury gets to the Anglican Communion Covenant, via the Primates needing to discuss further the proper extent of Primates discussing. (Well, if they don't know this, how can they have a Covenant?) He still wants one, despite the negative responses that have been building up from whole provinces, from within provinces, and via campaigning. He clearly realises that there is opposition:

In spite of many assurances, some Anglicans evidently still think that the Covenant changes the structure of our Communion or that it gives some sort of absolute power of 'excommunication' to some undemocratic or unrepresentative body. With all respect to those who have raised these concerns, I must repeat that I do not see the Covenant in this light at all. It sets out an understanding of our common life and common faith and in the light of that proposes making a mutual promise to consult and attend to each other, freely undertaken. It recognizes that not doing this damages our relations profoundly. It outlines a procedure, such as we urgently need, for attempting reconciliation and for indicating the sorts of consequences that might result from a failure to be fully reconciled. It alters no Province's constitution, as it has no canonical force independent of the life of the Provinces. It does not create some unaccountable and remote new authority but seeks to identify a representative group that might exercise a crucial advisory function. I continue to ask what alternatives there are if we want to agree on ways of limiting damage, managing conflict and facing with honesty the actual effects of greater disunity. In the absence of such alternatives, I must continue to commend the Covenant as strongly as I can to all who are considering its future.

But it is not how he sees this Covenant that matters. It's how others would see it and use it. Obviously he won't be around when it operates: not that he could stop a bureaucratic process once in motion. Later, he continues:

The question remains: if the moratoria are ignored and the Covenant suspected, what are the means by which we maintain some theological coherence as a Communion and some personal respect and understanding as a fellowship of people seeking to serve Christ? And we should bear in mind that our coherence as a Communion is also a significant concern in relation to other Christian bodies - especially at a moment when the renewed dialogues with Roman Catholics and Orthodox have begun with great enthusiasm and a very constructive spirit.

And also on a uniformity of views in the Communion, seen to be a Church:

Yet we have to pray continually to be made more truly the Church by being set free to receive more of Christ, more of the gifting of the Spirit. As St Augustine wrote in his treatise on baptism, if we were a perfect Church, we should no longer need to pray the Lord's Prayer, asking for the Kingdom to come and for our sins to be forgiven.

But there is actually some more to this, too, and with something of a dig at the unmentioned:

This year has been the anniversary of the great 1611 Bible, the King James or 'Authorized' Version, and in the UK we have had a large number of very powerful and imaginative celebrations of this. It has focused for me yet again the question of what a Church looks like that is authentically biblical. It is clear enough that Christian communities that are vague or lukewarm about the unique miracle of the Word made flesh once and for all in Jesus of Nazareth, and about the revolutionary demands this makes on individual lives and relationships, are imperfectly biblical churches.

Whilst, he says, don't attack or undermine them, like he just did. He's not talking about the Quakers and Unitarians, after all, and he ain't no liberal anyway.

What he doesn't get is that a Communion already so divided up won't come together because some piece of paper outlining a process says so. One third of the Communion's Primates absent at Dublin would not trust this process as adequate: it isn't doctrinal enough. Many wider afield are disappointed. Other provinces do see that the process affects their autonomy and ability to make decisions. After all, either the process does or it is pointless.

The contractual agreement that is this document (it isn't a Covenant) purports to offer is not one that carries sufficient trust to make the agreement. The Standing Committee is not seen as 'representative' and indeed the most representative body, the Anglican Consultative Council, is the least involved.

He keeps misunderstanding a basic fact, that the Anglican Communion is not a Church, but consists of Churches. There will always be sharp differences within such a Communion. It does not have to agree. It is not some body to show off as unified to the Orthodox and Roman Catholics, Churches for which there are also differences with many Anglicans (and not with some Anglicans in each case). Anglicans have had a more general view of unity on core elements; but in as much as some are adding to these core elements then the disagreeing will inevitably be more obvious and something for his successor to handle rather more loosely and with less of a sense that he is presenting a Church to other Churches.

Unless, of course, the Covenant is passed, and then the next Archbishop is forced into a bureaucratic role, and the Church of England that provides him is frozen as regards what it can ever decide for itself. This is why Rowan Williams's 'inability to see' is basically due to wearing blinkers.

No Rev for Me

2011-12-02T17:52:00.006+01:00

I received a letter this morning from the Director of Ministry for the Unitarians saying the interview panel has decided not to interview me on this occasion. I've taken up the offer for a conversation on Monday at which the Director will have papers in front of her. I'll be more informed then, so this blog entry is before all that and in general terms.

First of all, I am not surprised. I thought they might just interview me, but wouldn't be enthusiastic to have me admitted for training. This just saves on the travel.

When I was told to leave Unitarian College in 1990, after a largely wasted academic year there, I said to myself this would take ten years to sort out. In the end it took more than twenty to arrive at a point that actually is a form of closure. I needed to make the application and then to see what happened, to leave it in the hands of others.

It seems to me that the Unitarian denomination wants people for its ministers who are like Unitarian sticks of rock, with the name going right through. The people have to be deeply within the denomination, active at several levels, and without any doubt to their commitment. When it comes to ministers, what they want (I think) is denominational workers and co-ordinators: principally people's people (quite right too) but then not intellectual carriers and creators of a movement as well. There is plenty in the way of writing warm prayers but theology has died. There is no theology of diversity, no working through the postmodern in the context of past Unitarian thinkers applied to today. So if we think of 'workers and intellectuals', the Unitarian denomination is now, really, purely congregationalist and about workers.

Not that I would not have worked. But let's be clear. What was lost was the last twenty of so years. In that time I would have been creative and dynamic, and made all sorts of risky enterprises with action and thought. I would have been a bit of a loose cannon only in the sense that some of the available congregations were small and stuffy, often producing a very limited and rather clapped out form of liberal Christianity (not even a radical Christianity of some mainstream churches), and I'd have wanted to make something more creative and diverse. People then didn't trust my neo-Pagan-Humanism as was.

Today I am definitely not that through and through denominational person. After all, in 2002 I was right on the margins of the church I attended, and left in 2004. I made a religious life on the other side of the river and only returned about 2009/2010, having become marginal in the Anglican world. The reasons were different: my marginality in Hull was in how people related to each other, whereas my marginality in Barton was simply belief and practice. I was thoroughly post-Christian.

The problem has been I've seen myself in ministry - as a stipend receiving fully rounded minister in all aspects, including that of reflection - since before I even took up any formal religious affiliation. It began back in agnostic days at the University of Essex, during a stay where the academic course collapsed, but where I saw a model of ministry that made a lot of sense. That then was put into action in Anglicanism some years later, but I've never believed the basics in the C of E and so have always struggled to stay with that. It was my decision in the end, once in contact with the Unitarians, to go down that route, and after dismissing myself at the first interviews was accepted a year later - only to discover within training that the denomination was not as 'free' as it makes out within each committee possessed congregation.

When I have thought of myself having take a different road, I think by now I'd be utterly frustrated. I can't say the Anglican words and don't wish to; had I been doing it I'd have become like some old soak, I think. I would have lost credibility with myself mouthing and representing things beyond belief.

BBC online image from Rev - and no light of appearance with me!

Technically I don't even qualify as a candidate for Unitarian ministry in that I have never taken up membership of a congregation since. I attend weekly and I am as active as anyone, now back at Hull, but although I am now seen here and there beyond Hull I remain more ecumenical and free thinking. I justify that in Unitarian terms too, after Martineau himself, but the pressure to be reliable is to be a dyed in the wool denominationalist.

There is something else as well. I keep looking at something that seems to be dying. At 52 and ageing, I'm looking at something that would have received still creative effort but the situation is becoming chronic. There are successful congregations where there is a community setting or a radical urban ministry, but too many places are handfuls of people. They are where I am; we went to a place that once had turned itself around only to be disappointed. In such a situation, the role of ministry (paid for from historic money) as a beacon of a changing tradition and as pastoral needs some serious thinking through, but too many efforts are in propping up the ship. All denominations are falling fast, but being small the Unitarians are facing the critical structural issues earliest.

I don't think many people know now why they are Unitarians. I see it as being a social gospel of diversity coming together - people of difference who try to get on with each other. (Actually the people look rather of the same sources, so it is mainly difference in thinking and even then it isn't so much different.) Difference able to focus together is what our society needs. But others still think of the continued Unitarian existence as some sort of gentle Christianity, or easy listening religion. It actually isn't, because it is the difficult business of trying to work out an ethos of compassion from diversity and taking the risk of being open to the plain and romanticised, the rational and the irrational. But there is a real risk, that I would have tried to counter, that the Unitarian denomination is becoming a thought-less denomination. This, it seems to me, is a bleak prospect.

I wouldn't have wanted to train at Unitarian College in Manchester, and not because of the ecumenical aspect (which I rather like). It is because the Unitarianism is defined there in a constrained manner. I would have preferred Oxford (or however linked to it at distance learning) but apparently that also has 'right wing' tendencies within. It's as if the radical edge is condemned to be edged, as if there is no sharpness or definition.

My view is that the denomination doesn't just need workers and pastoral people. It needs characters that are odd and at the margins, for

that extra creativity and risk. Such people are always a bit shifting along and different, and my offer was something like that and use of intellect.

If I sound too independent, I have to say that I find some independents I've encountered yet again disappointing. I'm really not into dressing up and grand titles and all that. I like the notion of a lay movement in which the ministers are facilitators, which was my intention - to use the time to reflect and pass on. But then, so what? Isn't the Unitarian denomination, as it structurally creaks and cracks, simply becoming a loose collection of lay people doing just about everything? That's probably where the future lies. Lacking a progressive education model of ministry, the basis of ministry is being lost. We'll probably end up locking up most buildings and quietly meet in houses, probably with a web presence too. These are interesting times for formal religion, maybe for some end times in a way no one once quite believed.

Interfaith Rev

2011-12-02T03:25:00.007+01:00

[Updated below...] So this week's Rev theme was interfaith, with football as a religion too. Indeed the Archdeacon runs an interfaith competition (football is also war without killing) and, when he turns up to prance about as referee, he says to Rev. Adam, "Today my Bible is the FA Code of Conduct."

When Adam gets aggressive with losing, he scrums and tells it like it is regarding the nasty side of other religions, and then takes advantage of his after party wife throwing up to score a goal that the referee allows - it is, after all, in the rules.

Colin, not long ago having been baptised conditionally is suddenly Buddhist orientated. He even reacts against the Rev.'s smoking (after all, Colin laced his drink previously). He says that, "unlike Christianity", Buddhism is about non-violence and not telling lies. Colin though loses that peaceful Karma to the alternative religion of the game when the Rev. goes forward and scores his goal.

The Reader prefers play bowls; his objection to football is illustrated in not many signing up - due to "congregations of over 60s with hip problems". There is even a reference to the feminisation of Anglican Christianity, as Rev and Reader smooth each other's 'dresses'.

But all through this is the ongoing sub-plot, with the headteacher that the married Rev. fancies, and she knows it and even plays on it. Plus there is the frustrated vicar's wife and the prospect of a dull vicar's wives' party. One turning up to what turns out to be a good night is a Rev. herself; Adam asks her about the chances of a vicar married to a vicar. She replies, "I know - quite high."

Yes, Revs. get to marry Revs., don't they. I can think of one recently in the blog world, which my own imaginary side of my blog rather predicted. (Go back and look at the story of Radio Chadderbox...)

As for Adam's professional fancy, she dominates him. She asks Adam if he would like to see her in her shorts? Er, no... The new teacher (who was in Channel 4's Teachers and much differently) represented the New Atheists, and he clashes with the Rev. all right. He even knows his religions better than the Rev., in an Anglican schools with 60% Muslims. But he doubly clashes because she falls for him and he starts calling the headteacher 'Babes' (surely unusual?). He builds her a bicycle. This teacher was employed because he was "good", she says, not because he had lied about being a Roman Catholic (a reference to the ongoing corruption of faith schools) - and then he also comes and plays football for the Roman Catholics. Which is a reference to people retaining denominational labels when the belief isn't there.

But the bicycle killed him and allowed the Rev. to take an assembly with a story about heaven and thus to quite easily pass the test (score 1 indeed) as to whether the school was being true to its religious foundation or not. The Rev. has to say that the teacher did not believe in heaven but he does, although he does not know what it is.

So although when I watched it first I thought not as good as the two previous editions, I think they bunged a lot in again and it is a good insight into the Anglican world.

Two more to go, this series, and I wonder if he gets any closer to his attractive headteacher... If the series is cumulative, she might turn to him (after all his wife wanted a baby over a few of them; no mention this time after that horrid kid), but the episodes are also self-contained. It's very good, and of course the comedy writers must also know when to stop.

Updated...

Oh, and he shows the cross to the atheist teacher is if in a horror film to something satanic, who takes it and subsequently holds it upside down. And bicycling is also represented, like football, as another religion - as in the Rev. didn't know she was... not Catholic but a bicyclist, when she turns up with "Matty" for the football game (to play for the Catholics). Once again the teacher is another successful figure that the Rev. is jealous about. The series is all about the story of the hare and the tortoise, and many an evangelical doesn't like the Rev. because he is a tortoise and not one of their hares.

Note: all the images are from the BBC online broadcast and are here as illustrative.

Explaining Neo-Orthodoxy and Its Non-Realism

2011-11-29T17:31:00.008+01:00

I am asked by Peter Carrell in a comment (older post comments need my approval - it stops personalities attacking one another beyond my notice)

I would be interested in hearing more from you on this [Neo-Orthodoxy]. Why does it lead to non-realism? Why would trinitarians of old dismiss it as heterodox? Would you care to name who are the neo-orthodox in the Anglican theological world today?

It leads to non-realism because of a dismissal of culture and worldy reality as sources of objective truth. All neo-othodoxies, whether Catholic or Protestant, are Platonist - idealism is based in the pure in the heavens. Karl Barth has nature corrupted to an absolute degree, as a loyal Roman Catholic states:

...if we believe this new gospel of his [Barth], God would be reputed as having said that, ever since the sin, nature is so corrupted that nothing of it remains but its very coruption, a mass of perdition which grace can indeed still pardon, but which nothing henceforth could ever heal. Thus, then, in order the better to fight against paganism and Pelagianism, this doctrine invites us to despair of nature, to renounce all effort to save reason and rechristianize it.

Gilson, Etienne, 'The Intelligence in the Service of Christ' from his book Christanity and Philosophy (1936) in Pelikan, Jaroslav (1990), The World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought, London: Little Brown and Company, 218-233.

The relationship of Christianity and reason, then, is best grounded in the Aristotle approach given its marriage into Christianity by Thomas Aquinas, for here reality is grounded in our world and being, and that is a reality which needs healing (says Christianity).

Of course there are degrees of extraction, but I am referring to neo-Orthodoxy which is double specific line. The God of Barth is entirely one way, from God downwards, and so is invisible and unreachable. That God exists in a dramatic encounter, and that becomes a textual inheritance. So it is text, but text devoid of cultural root. Now we might say that the cultural root is obvious - it is Hebrew and Greek - but these are no more than wrapping paper for the text as the drama. If you happen to be a chosen believer, the encounter almost goes through the culture and indeed through the text. But the point is how to understand if from where we are. It becomes then a drama in itself, a narrative, and a story.

It is no accident that this stuff, with help from Bonhoeffer, becomes part of secular theology, that is theology of a humanity come of age when it no longer asks religious questions. This busy person just gets on with life. To ask questions, Tillich style, is to wallow in cultural issues, including cultural issues of religion. But where there are cultural issues, or a Church likely to be corrupt itself, these are entirely transient. Indeed many in their religions are entirely mistaken.

So from a cultural perspective, the religion of Christianity is non-real. It starts with revelation and encounter, but it translates as being unreal. It is not rooted in anything, other than the invisible.

The Catholic side of neo-Orthodoxy self proclaims its Platonism (so what if Plato is also cultural!) and it produces its premodern Christianity inside the postmodern space identified. Far from the Church being corrupt, John Milbank's Anglo-Catholic Church is pure truth. It is the deposit of peace and reason; its reason triumphs over secular reason. Secular reason is untrue, because it is a false theology. Therefore the world is false, and indeed has broken down into postmodernism. In that bubble of space, this non-realist Platonic source of truth, the Church (under God and Christ) is a non-objective anywhere else existence. In the Protestant version there is Lindbeck's ecumenical Church, and people in it simple have 'standards of role performance' rather than any other truth claim. Like with the biblical version, you can only perform.

So there is a sharing of non-realism with Cupitt, but from an entirely different angle, as Cupitt retains connection with the world's dominant narratives rather than the failure of the Church and Bible to connect with a larger modernity (and most of postmodernity) and therefore its sectarianism.

It is heterodox because the older folks, including the liberals, retained a connection in reality with this world. It either was full on Aquinas, or, in the liberal sense, the limitations introduced by science and social science - in other words, research.

The Unitarians of old used all the language: Christ (our brother, our leader), the Holy Spirit (the energy of God - as said Rev. in episode 2) and God the Father, the creator. The Incarnation became general and complete rather than tradition-and-person specific. Of course they were labelled as heterodox, because it isn't enough to have modes of activity or a plurality of actions, or the often heard today of the social and collective nature of the Godhead getting on nicely with each other. The Trinity is about philosophical precision of the relationship of the Godhead, and one that is both in the heavens and redeeming the earth in a dynamic eternal relationship. These days, unable to explain it, people shortcut it. Neither Milbank nor Lindbeck nor Frei nor Barth are redeeming the earth.

So I know about Milbank and a few of his fans (including some Lutheran). As for the biblical bunch, well there's my mate Anglican curate Rachel. She likes nothing better than a good trip to some New Wine church or some independent gathering for an arms-out knees-up. She is, she says, a poststructuralist. She says that many tutors in her just left theological college are fans of Frei and Neo-orthodoxy. Perhaps they live isolated lives.

I'm a liberal soft-postmodernist when it comes to religion. Otherwise I'm not, really. I think religion is culture, but culture is transient and we make religion up, including God. It's like the arts. Research in the arts is no more than the latest trend, or how we arrived at where we are. Research elsewhere is more important.

I do allow for signals of transcendence. A fundamental one might be chaos theory. Anyone listening today to the UK Office for Budget Responsibility and the Chancellor adjusting his plans should refer to chaos theory. It is a fundamental in weather, in economics, in evolution and in mathematics. It gets very little treatment in theology because too many people have become sectarian and retreated to their neo-orthodoxies. The simplest mathematic equations with virtual numbers, just repeated, produce fantastic shapes, and you can never know the starting point sufficiently to know the outcome. What a theology of creation and sustaining that makes.

Still Revving Along

2011-11-27T03:33:00.008+01:00

I actually think the third Rev (BBC - showed on Thursdays and will Monday) is better than the second, and that was very observant. It covered evil, but got in even a comparison of ghosts and Holy Ghost, the latter identified (modally - oops, a heresy) as the energy of God. The paranormal was being dismissed: naturalistic interpretations were everywhere, starting with the heat, the radiator noise and more. Dreams don't have a conflict of explanation, but are our narrative clearing houses, so involve the evil and the naughty pleasures too. All the time the 'real' evil was being demonstrated by the dislocated child who hated and didn't co-operate, getting the vicar's wife to consider she didn't want a child (but does). Yet, despite all the naturalism, the hear-all Archdeacon (another location of evil) came to tell Adam the vicar to leave it to the "experts", as if there are any experts beyond the pastoral role that was given to the new and displaced resident of the old people's home. Then the fear factor was finished so well with the disappearance of the child left clumsily in the resident's hands, the desperate search that can cause anyone to think oh no and why me and what powers are running things... And of course the thank you with the girl sat in the park waiting is just as naturalistic and normal as any other event. The girl is nicer on leaving, and Adam accepts the gift of the protecting toy - indeed put at his bedroom door after so many bad dreams. A bit of superstition, then, does no one any harm.

It just about had everything in it, this one, and remains so closely observed of the inner Anglican world of clergy and wish to be clergy, of faithfulness and doubt, muddling through, and those strange supernatural beliefs that are involved.

Note: all the images are from the BBC online broadcast and are here as illustrative.

Neo-Orthodox Realistic?

2011-11-23T05:37:00.007+01:00

One of the hidden points inside last week's Rev was that Christianity is not historical. It might be consequential (for some), but it is not sequential. Also it has no primary documents available in terms of history, so that all techniques of historiography have to be from a distance, and in some cases (horror of horrors) a dependency on the consensus of historians. Historians ought to be specialists on primary documents, sceptics in a way that your average amateur (for example making assumptions doing genealogy) are not.

So the New Testament as such is a presentation of community views and beliefs after the death of Jesus and becomes selective in a fast moving reforming of tradition including across a Jewish and Greek cultural shift. Nineteenth century historical theologians soon realised just how limited were the sources, that the history was both less available and more spread out.

The full title of curate Abigail's PhD thesis was (not is because it doesn't exist) NeoOrthodoxy and Realistic Dialectical Theology, later losing the Realistic when stated by the Reader (Rev Adam's sidekick, who thinks he'd make a better Rev.).

The point is, however, that dialectical theology is not realist if by realist it means there is a dependency on the world to back up the realism. Realism is, well, often based in the world (Aristotle). Given the intellectual source and drift, this realism would have to be idealised and located in God (Plato), but then the focus is on the argument of opposites (to extract the truth from exhausting the argument) purely based on the text as received and present. The method leads precisely to dropping the realist element wherever it is (Plato, is, after all, no one but a human philosopher). So whilst no one would call Karl Barth a non-realist, nevertheless a rejection of the world and its institutions (especially religious) and indeed culture - but a focus on the text and extracting its truth (from what is and what is not - very binary in contrast) - leads to others producing a pure text no world narrative conclusion, meaning non-realist.

Why? Because text is cultural and yet culture is rejected as transient and inconsequential. Therefore text is left as itself, like an island, just sent as revelation, but revelation located in a drama of events as understood and therefore to be treated as such.

Failure to understand (though the above is my interpretation, not his), says Hans Frei, leads to The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative. Or, rather, I suggest, telling us this leads Hans Frei to tell about the non-realist basis of the biblical narrative - though he might not use such a descriptor.

Of course the text is supposed to have impact somewhere, but it is not (as the present highly narrative based Archbishop would have it) about having biblical narratives that relate to your own narratives in life. This is where your experience, and your story, is illuminated by the biblical stories. No doubt the biblical stories come first, as revelation, or indeed because they have special relevance, but the relationship on human stories suggests a dependency on human stories and that wouldn't do. That's where liberalism creeps in, because liberalism is always about individual subjective experience, and once you have subjectivity you then have objectivity and you do have realism.

Though of course what is objective and what is subjective can start to clash and each affect the other, to cause something of a breaking down. Just as you can push Karl Barth on, so you can push James Martineau on and produce an open non-realism. Martineau is not dialectical, not at all: the only contrast is between his apparent realism (at a liturgical and collective level - his residual Christianity) and his utter subjectivity or individualism as authority.

Which is where "anagogical" comes in, because it is a mystical interpretation of a word, passage, or text. The extraction of a text into meaning by contrast isn't simply mundane but at a higher level. Humm: but care is needed or the interpretation and impact shoots back off into heaven again and the dialectical between sacred and secular remains unfinished. The enthusiasm of secular theologians for the Karl Barth and Bonhoeffer source was precisely because the anagogical is so limited and because you end up with a busy, secular world with a God so high and dry that the God is virtually invisible. Well, that's non-realism for you, when complete - or, at least, the option of realism is more hidden than ever.

Whereas, the Martineau route is the questions route, the beliefs of individuals route, where individuals might think their beliefs are 'real' but where, thanks to collective confusion, they are not. Or - at least - the option of realism is somewhat more hidden than folks realise.

So I would like to read Abigail's thesis, and wonder precisely at the use of the word Realistic - and what is the meaning of the ic after Realist. A more convincing title would have left the ic off. That then subjects the title itself to a dialectical examination:

NeoOrthodoxy and Realist Dialectical Theology

That's better. Because, had the title been:

NeoOrthodoxy and Non-realist Dialectical Theology

Then she would never have been a high-flyer on her way to St. Paul's.

Note: all the images are from the BBC online broadcast and are here as illustrative.

Twelve Reference Points for Religious Pluralists

2011-11-20T05:35:00.002+01:00

A Liberal Pluralist View...

God

This is a focus or summary of what matters most, as a direction for life (even if not taken). It has to embrace more, not less. For some it might be polytheistic, others a high and dry theism. For me there are many signals of transcendence but a transcendence is probably not real, so somewhere from real absence to non-realism, the latter being my own preference (as a soft postmodernist or high modernist otherwise).

Prophetic Figures

No one is unique and yet we are, each of us, unique. There simply isn't the information about people we do know and those we don't know to create an ethical top ten prohetic figures never mind top one. A prophetic figure will be shaped by a fast or slow moving tradition to being a tradition's understood as top prophetic figure! Treating someone as divine (alone) is, though, and can only be, simply dogma and indeed tradition. All sorts of people have given of themselves for a greater good, and it's not clear that Jesus ever did this. It seems odd to rely on a cruel regime to achieve a death on to which to build a theology, plus Jesus is too much focused in one tribal culture (he needed to be universalised afterwards); but it is perhaps typically tragic that it was a Hindu that shot Gandhi dead for apparently being too generous to Muslims - and that generosity is necessary. Buddha is important for spiritual technique and practicality; I find Muhammad too compromised; and Baha'u'llah is compromised by similar literalism and is full of nineteenth century assumptions in a shift from one closed culture to another more open. Many minor figures are often all the greater and some given prominence are dubious at best.

World

It is important to be world affirming. Buddhists who attune themselves into being compassionate are world affirming, and there is nothing incompatible with individualism and being for the world. Research is important into how the world functions: so social anthropology and sociology are examining tools which a more universal theology can use. The Barthian route to non-realism is too world denying; it has to be a Martineau-like universal incarnation route that affirms the collective and individual in such a way that the two break down into a form of postmodernism.

Cultural Change

Religion is not unchanging, and nor is there some protected unchanged core. Cultural shifts with periods of rapid charismatic change are the essence of religion, and a challenge now is to rediscover a religion for a secular and scientific age and one consistent with social research. All religion is within culture, and all uses language and the arts.

Scriptures

No text should be privileged so that some is scripture and some are not: the only difference is that some are more focussed on God things than others and those communities that were developing God ideas. But all sorts of texts can be used religiously.

Traditions

These are means to ends, routes that others discovered useful for developing spirituality. They are not fixed and every tradition should be allowed its history of change. The unethical should be dropped and replaced. A lot of tradition is actually invented tradition, with a claim to the past that does not stand up (e.g. some forms of ritualism, and the neo-Pagan) but if these 'work' in providing understanding then they can be used - it's just that we should know what they are and their limitations.

Unitarianism and Other Bodies

Unitarianism should be a vehicle for such pluralistic, possibly universalistic faith. I take an Anglo-American evolutionary view of Unitarian, meaning a community of change over time. For me, Unitarian is the adjective of a broader pluralism, whereas others will be more denominational. Presumably being more denominational has standards of role performance, and as such is postliberal and even conserving when set in a more postmodern religious context. The Quakers solve the problem of many voices by being quiet, at least in worship tradition. They may well be more cohesive but the answers religiously and socially may not be the right ones. People of liberal outlook should support it wherever it is found, but also to see institutional arguments for what they are. Many Church of England and similar bodies make arguments for ethical outcomes that are solved simply by leaving. It looks ever more unlikely (from the bottom up) but if the top down imposes an Anglican Communion Covenant then Anglican liberals ought to be told that their options are very limited - so let's hope they are not. I also would like to see a less egotistical Liberal Catholicism, that it is also a means to a greater end of spirituality and tolerance.

Inclusive Ministry

There should be no blockages to ministry on grounds of agenda or consenting relationships that do no harm. Ministry as trained and educational is important, but ordination probably is optional. Rituals should be extended to assist the stability of society across its diversity: it is one of the roles of religion to see the deeper in relationships. I would have friendship ceremonies as well as marriages and partnerships. We should also consider reflective ceremonies of letting go, as with divorces. Places to gather might vary, though many a church is potentially an open space and starts with an open space, and such may be a genuinely bottom-up movement.

Other Belief Traditions

Pluralists should always attempt the widest possible interaction with people of different faith, starting with other pluralists and then universalists, and then moving on to those liberal about particular traditions, and then those who discuss their traditions, up to the point where the door is held shut by others. Pluralists though ought to pay attention to their own critical theology, and not just be a form of 'easty-listening' religion to any old material.

New Patterns of Worship

Whilst inherited forms are a resource, pluralists should be experimental and find new expressions of means to reflect and contemplate and go on to act in the world. Worship is about finding worth. This means new liturgy, new songs, and new patterns of worship.

Holistic Mission

The purpose of mission is simply to make more available the space by which others may use the resources available by which people can reflect, contemplate and ask themselves about their own lives' directions, supported by other people, including the natural place of death. It's not about signing on the dotted line. Part of this should have charitable and social impact, where possible.

Evangelism

The purpose of religious structures is to further human and wider animal well being, even if such is subject to continual debate. It must mean freedom, toleration and mutual support, and the realisation of a spiritual appreciation. The planet and universe will go through its own cycles and human kind will probably evolve out (even if it doesn't self-destruct) so its ultimate purpose is to accept its own place just as the individual uses religion to accept their own life and death.

Examining the NACC Position

2011-11-18T04:47:00.008+01:00

The Anglican Communion Covenant looks like it is shaking and is on shifting ground. Its supporters look to be on the defensive, a bureaucratic solution for bureaucrats to unify what is shaping up to have various blocs of Anglican identity around the world - a reality that no document can alter.

In this light then, I want - as an outsider - to turn the argument around and look more critically at the No Covenant side in the Western Anglican Churches. As once an individual in an Anglican church, I came to the ultimate conclusion (if I hadn't before) that there is a boundary to belief and practice and I was outside that boundary. Thus, much as the Anglican ethos in some worship might satisfy, I didn't relate to its beliefs and nor to the stucture of personalised hierarchy. I am in favour of diversity, and of non-credal approaches, but such puts me outside not inside. On this basis I opposed the Anglican Covenant from the off, and I wonder about the position of the No Anglican Communion Covenant Coalition.

Its recent argument was in response to Fulcrum's defensive position. The response is my focus here.

Simply speaking, no one knows the position of the Church of England regarding the Covenant. Fulcrum speaks bureaucratically when it thinks the Church of England is in favour, given the bias of presentation, but the tests of membership so far show division for and against and a dislike when the argument is more balanced. If the Covenant is passed, it will be with considerable division and will not be a good basis on which to operate.

Again, the evolving life of the Communion is already a centralised picture, of more gatherings and institutions for worldwide gathering, but each of these gathered while preserving what was the case. Moving towards decision making with consequences is quite a different development, and this is what the Covenant represents. It is a leap forward in bureaucratic management, given Catholic and Evangelical justification because such are available for centralised Catholic and Protestant gatherings. It doesn't mean that these are Anglican, which has avoided such centralisation on a worldwide basis.

Once again (says I), everyone uses the language of federation wrongly. Federation does not mean loose association. Federation means a strong centre and subordinate parts with autonomy over subsidiary matters. For example, the United States is a federation but the European Union is a confederation. In the European Union the States are sovereign and sovereignty is shared, and on essential matters unanimity is necessary if there is to be one Europe wide position. The Covenant would create a federation by reactive Standing Committee using the meat of Section 4, creating Communion wide policies by dispute resolution, and excluding those not on the agreement side by an outer ring definition of Anglicanism. Federations are necessarily compulsive or divisive. Federation is bureaucratic. At the moment the European Union is a confederation: its Commission can propose legislation but cannot pass it - this is up to the Council of Ministers and some negotiation with the European Parliament - although the Commission is also reactive in terms of carrying out agreed regulations. Treaties entered into by States allow the superiority of European law. At present Anglicanism is a confederation of sovereign Churches, and the centre is no more than discussive; however, Anglicanism has broad similarities in different regions of the world on the lines of theological and ecclesiological ideologies so they may choose to get on together more closely.

A confederation will have an Archbishop of Canterbury rather like the ones produced now; a federation has one that makes decisions and they matter. Bureaucrats will refer to the Archbishop now, but it is a bureaucracy that gives the occupier of an office actual powers.

It is where the No Anglican Communion Coalition (NACC) refers to diversity of opinion that one can puzzle: what and where should there be such diversity of opinion. When the NACC says that Anglicans do not agree on how Christians should live and share in God's mission, then surely there must be some agreement on what makes Anglicanism and even uniformity. Unitarians are diverse, diverse to the point of individualism, and also with an evolving tradition in Britain and America that's Christian, Pagan, humanist and Eastern, a catechism tradition in central Europe that's Christian, homegrown pagan and ex-Christian missionary content in India and some new rural charismatic types and urban progressives in Africa. You really cannot pin down Unitarianism, except in blocs of degrees of individualism, but surely Anglicanism has more uniformity than this.

A communion need not be a federation, and indeed is compatible with confederation. But confederation has some shape, some principles of inclusion. The European Union has Western, liberal democractic principles of inclusion for sovereign States and the use of European wide free markets.

NACC itself does not address the limits of innovation. We might say that these are the Trinity, threefold ministry and some sort of book using liturgical tradition. The latter is breaking down by many charismatics and evangelicals ignoring their obligations. Threefold ministry starts to break down when there is lay presidency of Communion, but some have a Presbyterian view of bishops already. As for the Trinity, many who blog of a NACC sympathy are not exactly very good defenders of the Trinity, doctrine, the centrality of Christ, the existence of the Holy Spirit, and Anglicanism has produced a variety of liberal theologies that question the Trinity.

My argument from the inside for diversity was precisely to include those who questioned the Trinity. Realising that this is rather a naughty thing to do openly, and many a sympathetic liberal did not (still use all the cliches), I wandered elsewhere. A non-realist is hardly a trinitarian. I laughed on Thursday at the comedy Rev. (BBC 2) in that the up and coming female curate was hot on Neo-Orthodoxy - the topic of her forward thrusting thesis, another source for playing theological bullshit bingo. Neo-Orthodoxy is the means to a form of non-realism, or certainly a form of postmodernism that the trinitarians of old would have dismissed as completely heterodox. They knew how to defend the Trinity. The trick in the latest theological fast lane is in the use of the word 'Neo'. But, yes, the Neo-Orthodox can go places inside the bureaucracy because Neo-Orthodoxy has the intellectual and virtual appearance of one thing and yet the contents of something else - Karl Barth's invisible hand made narratively invisible into text.

The question is whether NACC is just a Liberal Protestant view, and what is the extent of its Liberal Protestantism?

But there is a further point I have made before. If the Covenant is passed, and the bureaucrats win their federation, what will the members of the NACC do then? Because the Covenant is a freezing body, where any innovation will be at the speed of the slowest. The Church of England as provider of the Archbishop of Canterbury to such a federation will be forced into the slow lane, indeed the stop lane, of any progressive innovations. Of all Churches it will be the least free. Liberals in the past have put up and shut up, usually on the basis that they occupy the centre positions and the liberal agenda slowly evolves through. In the past thirty years plus the theological agenda has gone backwards (except it allowed a route through for the Neo-Orthodox deceptivity), but social inclusion has continued to press. When the door is slammed shut, and there is no longer that chance to change, what will the liberals do then?

As With the Norse Gods Again

2011-11-13T21:06:00.002+01:00

I don't think today is any exception, despite a Remembrance Day service led by a professional minister in every sense of the word (yet, retired). There is a sense in which we are seeing a change as big as the loss of the Norse Gods taking place as regards our religious institutions.

The Quakers in Hull might be happy, because their numbers will have risen by one. An occasional attender of the Unitarians has, apparently, moved over to attend there. But this is not an unusual pattern: people who join churches are often the already interested. People do join the church, otherwise it would have vanished long back: but they tend to have histories of attending elsewhere.

Today a board that was found with the names of the lost during 1914-1919 was displayed. The names were family names all recognisable within the church until recently. None of these families supply members any more. Some of the surnames were related to other surnames, and criss-crossing, because down the years they supplied the church with members, and they kept having relationships and getting married. The family trees will interlock over and over again.

In my time a younger Strachan was the uncle of an older Strachan, as well as cousin; now there are no more nor the related. Names still large in the city no longer come in to the church.

Recent posts have looked at the disconnect between Christianity and the public in Europe. There is the straightforward decline in numbers. There is the loss of intellectual content in supplying answers to questions of existence. There is the ethical mismatch in questions of equality and value of persons. The whole business of St. Paul's in London has been a perfect example of a disconnected Church rushing to catch up.

The Unitarians have all sorts of plans and strategies at the very lowest level to increase numbers; the schemes are given fail-safe status by their writers. But I can say we've had no visitors through the door at all by which these plans could be exercised. We are not full-on with publicity, but we are far from publicity free and invisible. People are not even visiting nowadays.

It might be better in a more cosmopolitan place, which imports habits of religious observance from around the world. But this is nothing to do with a small congregation holding on to its visitors. The church has done this. It is that the curious are simply not attending. The argument that so many people out there are Unitarian-compatible makes not a jot of difference to trying out attendance.

People talk about the rise of the Eastern religions, and there is that growth. But these are about the odd group here and there within the city. This increase is at the tiny level. There is a lot of 'spiritual' and even 'New Age' but the groups simply don't exist: these are private expressions. You might find the odd Wicca group here and there.

This is not me starting to despair, but rather simply a recognition of the situation. In terms of where we are now, we are like people within a snow storm. We are close to it and we cannot see around, but I bet this is as historically significant as the end of the Norse Gods. In the snow storm we look for scraps and pieces to keep going, but afterwards what was before is not coming back.

I remember at school, in the 1970s, being given the impression that Christianity had replaced Judaism, and that was a load of rubbish, as was the impression that lots of Gods had been replaced by the superior understanding of one God. That was nonsense too, as no God can be its equal and superior, just as can be a polytheism of thinking. What is remarkable is that those assumptions could be given to children just a short time ago.

In my head on Remembrance Sunday was the religious service that could incorporate the fallen and the need for conditions of peace. We could be reminded that capitalism is there to serve us, and not for Europe to decline again into conditions that led to reaction and war. But Remembrance Sunday was also about what there once was.

Soon there will be some more CDs of a Unitarian choir singing hymns with introductions. Why is this? Because there are more and more churches where no one can play a keyboard, either due to old age or low numbers. Producing two CDs will be very helpful, but let's not be unaware as to why this is happening. For us it might go through an excellent sound system, as these CDs add to prepared CDs, but for many it will be popping the originals into some small player. The same virtual congregation will be reproduced up and down the land. The same people appear, as if in a cartoon, repeated each time. But the reality is that the different people are ever fewer, needing the prop of a virtual congregation.

Be Less Mad and More Afraid

2011-11-09T17:57:00.006+01:00

There is a lot of crap flying around at the moment, in relation to the Church of England Newspaper carrying itself a nasty little article on the so-labelled Gaystapo, likening gay activism for equality to the Nazis, the Nazis who killed many homosexuals and instituted terror and evil. There is enough being said about this to bother to add more, along with the apparent shock that this is said by someone of the Church and then published by a Church of England representing (if not representative) organ.

As someone who has a crack at Fulcrum every so often, and occasionally offers it an outside point if view, I want to turn to the viewpoint that at least Alan Craig is honest and upfront in his anti- gay activism homophobia, whereas Fulcrum is complicit in that whilst yet preaching in a more respectable language. It's the argument made by Jonathan Hagger, Mad Priest, as in this comment:

The only reason why Craig is a bad advertisement for evangelicalism is that he is not hiding his evangelical bigotry behind worthless platitudes. I respect the man for having the balls to be honest to his churchmanship and beliefs. In my opinion, Fulcrum is a bad advertisement for evangelicalism because they are a Trojan horse and when this becomes public knowledge evangelicals will be seen to be the haters that they truly are plus they will be outed as deceitful

Jonathan gets accused, by Tim Chesterton, of replacing one blanket statement by another.

I think my argument is a little different about Fulcrum. It's that if follows a primarily bureaucratic ethos. It thinks it is the centre of, and defines, Anglicanism. In its pushing a bureaucratic solution, it loses the ethic of what is the cost of that solution and I think it ignores that ethic.

As far as it is concerned, The Episcopal Church has fallen out with the bureaucratic ethos that says all Anglican institutions should refer to all other Anglican institutions before it comes to its own ethical decisions. But that's not good enough, when many an Anglican Church is part and parcel of a deep social and political homophobia of very serious consequences to those involved. The ethos of the institution is upheld by the Evangelical (Protestant) notion that this is a community of believers, and the believers are of a Bible that has no pro-gay verses within it.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has also promoted this bureaucratic ethos, advancing this Covenant, and he has done it on the basis of a Catholicism that allows the possibility of change but where it would be decided among the international Anglican purple. In other words, the collectivity of bishops overrides the organisation of management in each Church's synodical structures. He showed this perspective over his choice for the Bishop of Dover as a Synod timetable manager: he told the Synod rejecting his choice that members should read the Ordinal.

So there are two movements here to create a conserved Church and would be sealed up as such by the Communion Covenant.

To some extent, the issue is a so what? Robert Piggot in his recent Our World showed that in one year over 180,000 people left the Roman Catholic Church in Germany because of its unethical stances; in Finland a 1000 a week leave; and Protestantism halved in Europe in 50 years. This pattern is common across Europe. In Holland, a minority try to carve a new, different, ethical approach to theology, reflecting contemporary concerns. Also in Holland you get the conservative backlash into a smaller Church; indeed the Roman Catholic leadership wants a smaller purer Church. The reaction to Germans saying no to paying the religion element of their taxes is for the Roman Catholics to excommunicate them. Talk about closing yourself down.

The Church of England is becoming an irrelevance. It would be sad if its resources are not made available for a religious recognition of gay partnerships or marriage. But then it should be allowed to aim for its own social irrelevance. There are other providers.

For decades, Anglican people of more liberal persuasion have put up with Evangelical and Catholic moves to make their Church more conserving, partly because the liberal ethos has retained at least some spaces within. I found and indeed created a small space for liberal exploration within, but I was also falling away.

There is an increasing argument against the Covenant and it may well not succeed. The liberal element that was once mainly willing to give it a try now realises just how dire this document is, and let's be under no illusions: it will affect the ethos of every parish. Even some Evangelicals reject its bureaucracy. This is not some remote, international document. It bureacratizes and freezes everything, right down into the core. It will stop any change, any flexibility: it will turn variation into defiance. It makes more of hierarchy. It means more social irrelevance and a sclerotic Church.

In the end, the issue is not about the bureaucrats or the crazy people likening gay rights to the Nazis, but what will the liberals do should the Covenant come in and freeze things up. That's when, finally, the likes of Fulcrum will have hit above its weight and caused a Church suitable for bureaucrats and hierarchs alike. That's if it comes in.

Fulcrum Getting Desperate?

2011-11-06T18:34:00.003+01:00

Bury St. Edmunds and Wi[th]chips diocese saying no to the Covenant wasn't obviously persuaded by Fulcrum's latest attempt to shore up the document in addition to Anglicanism.

In A Churchgoer's Guide to the Anglican Communion Covenant by Fulcrum (it does have the ability to make some statements) it states, early on:

Fulcrum has consistently supported the covenant but is aware that there is little accessible material explaining it. As a result, many people are relatively uninformed or are being misinformed about it and its significance by some opponents.

Crumbs! I mean St. Mundsed Bury with Vinegar is one of the few dioceses where they had a presentation of a 'no' point of view. It's as if any presentation of a 'no' point if view is to misinform. But look at this sentence:

There are two main alternative visions competing with the covenant - GAFCON’s more narrowly defined confessional approach and the path of unaccountable independence through unilateral innovation. Despite their fundamental differences, these minority views may unite in rejecting the covenant which is much more recognisably Anglican than both of them.

Indeed they may, probably because they are more than minority views when it comes to informing ordinary folk in synods what is involved and then asking for a vote. The actual debate on Fulcrum itself isn't consistent in support.

The Shrinking Religion of Europe

2011-11-05T07:06:00.004+01:00

BBC News Channel (and BBC Worldwide) is showing Robert Pigott's report on Catholicism and Lutheranism and Protestantism in general in steep and even active decline in northern Europe, and looks at the Don Cupitt style theology resulting in the Netherlands. The programme is called Europe's Christian Exodus. Do also see my previous posting on Klaas Hendrikse.

The Excellent News So Far

2011-11-03T06:13:00.003+01:00

So, fantastic, we may say, that at last Gay and lesbian couples can celebrate their big day in religious premises opting into a new scheme.

The fireworks can go off a month on from now, so for many it will be 'Remember, remember the 5th of December'.

Gunpowder there will be, but we'll leave treason and plot to the Church of England and others who say "Not in our back yards, front yards, inside, or anywhere."

No doubt any gay people doing the ceremony in tents will be removed.

The ability of gay couples to marry will follow on later, we assume (given David Cameron's warm words to other Tories), but this will also need to have the obligation on the Church of England to marry all within the parish to be limited to heterosexuals, as well as giving the freedom of other Churches and religious groups to refuse the minority the ability to marry in their settings.

Florists might consider opening shops nearer to Unitarian churches, Quaker meeting houses and Reformed synagogues.

Catthorpe Road Problem

2011-10-31T03:42:00.007+01:00

This is my solution to the ridiculous M1, M6, A14 Catthorpe interchange, probably the worst in the country. The current A14 relies on a single carriageway road with dumbell roundabouts where two major streams of traffic cross each other on one of these roundabouts (M6 to A14 and A14 to M1) and this along with local traffic between villages.

A new A14 extension is built to the south with the A5 involved in a subordinate short merger; the once added slip roads from the M6 eastwards are removed. A bridge takes local traffic over the A5 with a new spur to join it, and a new roundabout is made around a public house to assist other local movements.

M1 traffic for the A5 would still have to use the A303 north of this map segment, and indeed where traffic was going would decide which roads they used. No more would M6 to A14 traffic cross the path of A14 to M1 traffic, on a minor roundabout. M6 north to M1 would use the A426, east of the map segment. M6 from the west to M1 south would travel to the end of the M6 returning back to a simplified merger. M6 to the A14 would use a new southern spur road that would also give improved and immediate access to the A5, without having to use the M1 and need to come off it many miles south using the A428. The A14 traffic from the east would also enjoy better access to the A5. The catthorpe to Newton road would have a safe bridge over the A5 and only join it via a new spur road south. This would also become the new local access to the M6.

I think this is arguably more elegant, capacity of traffic enhancing and in keeping with other road use than other solutions, for example within the Society for All British and Irish Road Enthusiasts (SABRE - such useful modern and old maps there). The disadvantage is that traffic from the A14 north still has to slow down to use two roundabouts, though two lanes in one direction can be available throughout, including on the single lane road under the M1.

The maps shown derive from the Ordnance Survey both as is and then as altered by me. I am claiming fair use of a minimal amount to illustrate my idea, but if this is an abuse of copyright please inform me and I will redo the map diagram. See previous entry for comment on this and a response.

QI Half Right

2011-10-30T02:23:00.007+02:00

On the latest edition of QI (BBC2 - 8/16, the one with Sandi Toksvig, Clive Anderson, Henning Wehn and Alan Davies), Stephen Fry said that the Puritans did not escape persecution, but went to America to persecute.

Half right. Because the evidence of persecution (especially after the Civil War) is that they met in secret in houses, that they suffered the Five Mile Act that threw their meeting places outside towns, and had to wait for the King's Indulgences and then the Act of Toleration in 1689.

The Puritans wanted liberty for themselves. What is true is that they wanted a Puritan Commonwealth, a pure godly land where they could practice their ideas alone. Indeed, these first imported Americans could be called Religious Communists.

It is only later, as they had liberalised, that they began to see liberty as an ideal - for themselves and others.

He also claimed that Puritans were pictured in their Sunday best, in black, but otherwise wore clothes like the rest of the people. Only, however, if the clothes were sober, plus we know that the more moderate and parish minded Calvinists wore less severe clothing than the Independents and clear sectarians.

The Puritans were Bible only people and yet reasoned their Bibles, first in a harsh trinitarian way (and very opposed to Socinians, even to the point of wanting the death penalty) and then via many and various theories of interpretation the academies set up continued the liberalising through Arminianism and even into Socinianism later on.

They were merchants, saving money and investing, and rich people don't keep a severe religion down the generations. They later became the capitalists that wanted in on political life (the 1832 Reform Act) to overturn the feudal Church of England monopoly. We now see that at St. Pauls the Church of England has joined the capitalist establishment.

Radical Orthodoxy Exposed

2011-10-27T22:33:00.006+02:00

Listening to the BBC interview, I really do think that Giles Fraser is over-generous to his colleagues. Of course everyone wants to respect the professionalism and position of colleagues. But what exactly is the conscience of the position on the other side?

I don't know, and it is not health and safety: but what worries is the position of the Church as an institution.

My summary book, Postmodernity, by Paul Lakeland (1995), Minneapolis: Fortress Press, has several mentions of what he calls Countermodernity, or what can be seen as the premodern in the postmodern space. This is the Radical Othodox position which, within its Christian Platonism, states that the Church is the Community of Peace (Lakeland, 1995, 70). All history should be read through Church history (properly understood, of course). Christianity is the "exemplary form of human community" (1995, 69, from Milbank (1991), Theology and Social Theory, Oxford: Basil Blackwell) - and this trumps the social sciences' attempt to identify the same.

One can see in the need for Giles Fraser to resign, just what a dangerous position is created by conservative forms of postmodernism. The Church as institution comes first (or, in Protestant cases, the Bible) and it always comes first. It is (in this case) the nonfoundational metanarrative (1995, 69) of ethics.

But here we surely have the proof otherwise. The protesters have a social science reasoning against capitalism. It is demonstrably failing. Against this the Church is now preparing for violence against them. If this does not trash Radical Orthodoxy I don't know what does.

Update

There's a longer and freer flowing explanation in The Guardian online; interesting that Giles Fraser says in it that St Paul's and Wren doesn't do "the incarnation" in the sense that Giles Fraser can imagine Jesus born in a tent and St. Paul (himself) was a tent maker. So this implies a division in the Church, an architecturally identified one in which part of the Church isn't as "incarnate" as the rest. Meanwhile his resignation is sacrificial as there is no other job lined up (and not the Dean of Southwark as a cynical view might have - though perhaps he should apply rapidly). I don't agree with his view of incarnational nor the transfer of the birth narrative, but I can see it is a view held with consistency.

Integrity

2011-10-27T16:17:00.004+02:00

So Giles Fraser has quit from St. Paul's. His view of the Church was of peace, of bias to the poor and the right to protest. The view of St. Paul's seems to be of removal, of being in with the capitalistic system and authorities that surround the building. removal is likely to show a level of violence, compulsion certainly. Thus it is a tourist and heritage site with a high price for entry. It's about 'posh' worship then. No one was fooled by the 'health and safety' reasons given for closing the church while the occupation has been taking place.

It is another example of the Church looking after its core institutional interest first and last. It's sad but this outcome was predictable. It is a black day in the history of S. Paul's. The rest is just idealism, and of a few individuals like Giles Fraser.

A few minutes after posting this, I added a rhyme on to Facebook:

As I was going by St Paul's
A protester grabbed me by the hand:
He said, "Inside, they miss the tourists they like to fleece,"
"So they are coming to grab us, using the police!"

Dawani's Residence

2011-10-25T19:54:00.007+02:00

It's good that the head of the Orthodox Jews and the head of English Anglicans in the south are, well, pals, after the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks went along to the Lambeth Conference in 2008 and gave a little talk about Covenants in general. It was not an endorsment for the sort of Covenant the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has wanted, but for him it added depth to the notion of having a Covenant in general terms.

So now the Chief Rabbi has helped Rowan Williams get Anglican Bishop Suheil Dawani a residency permit in East Jerusalem.

Israel stole the land from the Palestinians after the 1967 war, unrecognised by others, whereas other land taken it continues to occupy and hasn't absorbed into Israel (although they built that horrid wall in Palestinian land: a bit like a householder putting up a boundary fence into the neighbour's garden). From Jerusalem, the bishop, whose diocese dates from 1841, reaches out to the West Bank (where he was born), Gaza, Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Dawani lost his residency permit because the Israelis alleged that he helped sell Israeli land to Palestinians, and he denies it. One thinks so what if anyone did: selling land doesn't alter the State's jurisdiction does it? He says he didn't and he's going to be very sensitive to his position and location given the Israeli theft of land and occupations.

Well let's hope the fact that they have reached across to gain mutual help is one way peace can be achieved.

Context of the St. Pauls' Dilemma

2011-10-23T04:28:00.003+02:00

I admit I have very little sympathy for St. Pauls, London, and its dilemma over the protesters outside. Anyone who wants to go into St. Pauls, other than during one of the services, has to pay a fat fee. It is increasingly the case in so many of these cathedrals.

When you go in these places there are then charges for photography, the ever present and over-priced shop, and some internal attractions demand extra entrance fees. These well staffed places tell you how much they cost to maintain themselves and this comes across as if they are without reserves and donors.

They want to be 'serving the gospel' (as they put it), meaning putting on services, but they are also part of the establishment. They don't critique capitalism anything like enough that they could, as they are part of the architecture and inheritance of feudalism and sit amongst the architecture of capitalism.

In the late 1980s and the early 1990s communism collapsed, except in China where they converted their authoritarianism into a state capitalist outfit that has, along with Western delusions, led to capitalism's imbalance and fundamental weakness all over the world.

Usually a developing nation takes on cheaper labour and the lower end technical manufacturing, and later catches up with the Western world. Japan did this, via a vertically integrated economy of corporations and lots of little workshops. It has been in a fifteen year slump. But what China has done is develop by state intervention and private dynamism (and back-hander corruption) and kept its exchange rate low; it has financed its expansion by lending to the West, and the money slushing around in the West had been expanded through its make believe gambling financial system. It all finally blew up.

As the protesters say, capitalism is crisis, because on the one hand the governments bailed out the banks and now the governments are going around bailing out one another, thinking that the banks are going to have to take some hit after all. It is a merry go round of incapability: only the Germans, it seems, have benefited from the euro because, of course, it is set lower than the mark would be if it was for Germany only. It benefits from the weaker economies, rather as the Chinese benefit from keeping its currency artificially low. Europe does not have the regional policy necessary to maintain a euro of unity, nor has Europe been prepared to allow whole areas to go into economic sluggishness while other parts do well - as has been the case in the United States. Europeans are not expected to travel to Germany to get work. Nevertheless, many governments in the euro did not keep to the rules, and in the fantasy of higher living standards than available they have themselves either gone bust or are near to going bust.

Christianity is, really, at its own decision point, though I suggest it has also undergone a similar crisis of its own. It doesn't have intellectual credibility (it explains nothing) and only a minority of people observe its rites and rituals, except on occasions - and fewer of those rites of passage are observed too. In places it has lost much ethical goodwill too, like in Ireland (child abuse) and Spain (child trafficking), though it still can from sources still generate an ethical argument.

I have never bought the idea that Christianity is a bias to the poor. Jesus of Nazareth preached reverse ethics from the assumptions of his day in his last days idealised vision, but he chose his twelve tribe leaders from among capable small business people - people who had boats, who maintained their own living, and people who were paid. They were not like sanyassins or close, not of the poor.

When Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire, whole families including slaves were baptised at a time and traders became Christians as a mark of honesty and respectability - their mobility was how it carried through the Empire. Eventually its monotheism was an attraction to a centralised State. The earliest days showed a tension between being Roman and Greek and being underground. It was underground by necessity, not by choice.

And since Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy and the Protestant Churches were all allied with monarchs, princes and social systems. The Reformation took hold thanks to the political support that reduced down the reach of the Holy Roman Empire and Catholic empires. It is only after the United States had a different approach and Europe's working class was generally unchurched (except for the time of churches offering welfare, education and leisure provision) that the churches started losing the middle class as well.

Paternalism was a counterforce and some parish priests considered the poor, as well as the sheer desperation of Victorian inequality (rather like in the USA today), and denominations like the Unitarians were a sort of guilt-ridden middle class Church; but it is really only in its marginalisation that Christianity has started in parts to think about minorities and economic ones in particular. Its evangelical wing remains both individualist in salvation terms and generally (but not always) right wing.

So here we are as capitalism is in deep trouble. All the West has to somehow overcome the capitalist crisis while maintaining democracy. People are saying that they will not put up with the cuts, the loss of jobs and attacks on the poor. No one will grasp the necessity, even whilst protecting the savings of individuals, that countries have to default and banks have to go bust so that a lot of it can 'start again'. There needs to be the strengthened state to regulate these commanding heights of the economy and yet still a liberal state in terms of liberty and accessible democracy. At the moment we have governments behaving like monetarists when the new crisis equilibrium has curves like the Keynesians understood (governments should be spending and employing: quantitative easing of money does bugger all). We don't know what will happen in China when it fails to retain the growth that buys off genuine reform and change but part of the 'start again' is that China won't be able to maintain its artificial imbalance.

Giles Fraser might give his quick, liberationist, support the protesters comment, but in the end the Church has been part of the feudal State, part of the establishment, in with capitalist investments and part of its theology has always been to support these. No suprise then if its cathedrals contain entrance charges, shops, added attractions and are, increasingly, part of the tourist and heritage industry. In which case there are models for them, as in Fountains Abbey and Riveaulx Abbey (etc.).

When it's Going; When it's Gone

2011-10-17T20:51:00.003+02:00

A website for non-believing clergy - still active, and who want an exit-strategy - has become public, although to be a member you would have to be screened.

It is a fact that any clergy person who has lost their beliefs and had left was, at one stage in the process, at a point of having lost their beliefs (or enough of them) and had not yet left.

Not quite behind the scenes are the well known 'New Atheists', but there is more to it than this.

There was a short study in 2010 by Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola on 'Preachers Who Are Not Believers' in the journal Evolutionary Psychology Volume 8(1). 2010 and it soon gets into those not quite non-believers who are actually happy with their condition and ministry. When discussing recruiting candidates, there were:

two others cited concerns about the term “non-believing.” Though neither of them believed in a supernatural god, both strongly self-identified as believers.

But what do they mean by this? Are they perhaps deceiving themselves? There is no way of answering, and this is no accident. The ambiguity about who is a believer and who a nonbeliever follows inexorably from the pluralism that has been assiduously fostered by many religious leaders for a century and more: God is many different things to different people, and since we can’t know if one of these conceptions is the right one, we should honor them all. This counsel of tolerance creates a gentle fog that shrouds the question of belief in God in so much indeterminacy that if asked whether they believed in God, many people could sincerely say that they don’t know what they are being asked.

This is not just agnosticism, the belief that one does not (or cannot) know whether God exists, but something prior: the belief that one cannot even know which question – if any – is being asked. Many people are utterly comfortable with this curious ignorance; it just doesn’t matter to them what the formulas mean that their churches encourage them to recite. Some churches are equally tolerant of the indeterminacy: as long as you “have faith” or are “one with Jesus” (whatever you think that means) your metaphysical convictions are your own business. But pastors can’t afford that luxury. Their role in life often requires them to articulate, from the pulpit and elsewhere, assertions about these very issues.

Pastors do afford this luxury, however; and that's the point. They can become very sophisticated at doing so, and I can think of these strategies for so doing.

Biblical matters become history, only located in the past.
Church tradition is revered but not projected into the present: liturgy is a museum of forms with an emphasis on art, music, theatre and ancient language.
Detail of the biblical narrative examined as narrative.
Focus on "questions" over any answers.
Use of "stories" as a framework to matters others treat as revelation.
Reinterpretation words like 'ultimate goodness' (but not if they give the game away).
Avoidance of straightforward terms where simple explanation would give the game away.
Formal terminology used but then little in support.
Phraseology used asserting what one is supposed to do.

As for types of preacher and pastor who lose their beliefs: no one is immune. I suggest that the people who lose their beliefs fastest are the charismatics and evangelicals. The charismatics are full of praise, and then one day wonder what it is all about. It's like the gas has gone off bang. The evangelicals have the demand for strong beliefs that one day they cannot meet. Jonathan Edwards (no not him; the runner) lost his beliefs virtually overnight. It is the people who are or have managed themselves into forms of liberalism that go more slowly. They have, after all, managed this transition so far and have acquired strategies of presentation. Some do it in theology college. They create a space for their own losses. Eventually, though, a crunch point comes.

Again this is an institutional matter. In a community like the Unitarians, you can formally believe as you wish. If you are uncomfortable with the expressions of religion around you, then you might well leave - but then as a pastor you create the expressions and the question then is whether you meet the needs of some in the congregation that want more. Your creativity with words is thus pastoral and you should be able to be clear about your own interpretation. If that can't satisfy the congregants, then there is a problem. You should say to them, then, please use the words as you feel they mean, and they should not be demanding your agreement with their interpretation. It is not a community of one intended belief. Of course if that congregation as a whole is pretty much inclined towards a stronger interpretation, then the pastor ought to find a different pulpit. To be lying then is just dishonesty.

Which of course is the point. There is always the issue of honesty and dishonesty when a preacher in office uses strategies to avoid. Again, there can be pastoral reasons to stretch a point, but this cannot be permanent.

A religious humanist who puts out a 'sounds like' Christian message and who only presents this message is being dishonest. The preacher really would have to believe that this radical shift is Christianity today so as not to live in too much tension, but then when will they be clear about this to others who see it as the loss of the essentials?

The website referred to, however, is mainly concerned with people in a job as ministers, who face consequences from community, family and income should they declare their actual loss of belief and purpose. They know they have to go, it's just that it needs arranging.

There are, of course, those pastors who travel so lightly that they never really know when the zero point has come, or that it arrived and they are so dyed in the wool that they just keep going and keep going. They probably get to employing no strategies any more and just plod along as it is what they should do and do do and no one is any the wiser, including, eventually, the people who do it.

Boundaries of Belief

2011-10-17T01:12:00.010+02:00

The issue arises about where are the boundaries of particularly Christian and post-Christian groups.

The issue arose certainly in my time in the Church of England. I remember a priest who said you can be unitarian in the Church of England but not a non-realist (effectively a denial of the reality of God). Of course there were people including ordained who had come to a non-realist position.

So the issue is not what you become, and how you might wriggle with the intepretations, but when it comes to seeking training or a new post, or indeed going for confirmation.

I suppose you can just about be unitarian in the Church of England if you are strong on God and on Jesus as a human exemplar, but why not then have Jesus as a human exemplar of what God would be like? After all, God may not be the all-loving being but simply acts as God will (the sort of unlimited Islamic model) for which your protection is either belief or exemplary behaviour.

I've always settled on the view that you should somehow be able to affirm resurrection, incarnation and God in the material. You don't need to affirm bodily resurrection, because the texts are ambiguous, but you ought to be able to say that the texts are on to something happening. I came to the view that the texts demonstrated something that was not happening, other than in the views of the early Churches based on the original Jewish expectation and the Pauline twist.

Old Catholicism as created in small groups in Britain is probably similar but with plenty of add-ons (e.g. home-grown Pagan) and stretched edges, a sort of liturgy with relaxation about interpretation. Liberal Catholicism, with its early history of diving into Theosophy and Krishnamurti, and its consideration of magic along with the supernatural, can be a combination of the liturgical orthodox and all manner of reinterpretations and additions. Some of the 'higher' manifestations of Liberal Catholicism seem to go back into the wider reaches of the first hundreds of years of Christianity and even incorporating the spiritual and Gnostic.

In the Unitarians as such there aren't any boundaries, supposedly, but actually there are in some chapels (by practice, expectation, whom they hire), and in any case you are going to have to be comfortable by the use of theistic language, however it is intepreted. It has to mean something at least, otherwise it will get very tedious. It is relatively easy for it not to be supernatural, and to have a human-level focus, but the language is bounded about a lot. It is quite clear that prophetic religious figures are all human and subject to the same limitations and mistakes as the rest of us (this being so obvious it hardly needs saying), though some older interpretations minimise the limitations and emphasise the prophetic achievement.

There are many groups where it is very easy to join in and very demanding to become a member. The charismatic types are like this: culturally familiar but signing on the dotted line demands quite a hurdle to jump and keep jumping (beliefs and expectations). I remember how apparently progressive and welcoming the Baha'i's were but then you discover that the main figures are regarded, in the texts too, as infallible and then you discover the limits of the inclusivity (try and be gay in the full sense, for example, or be a woman and have a place in the Universal House of Justice) and you discover things like the Baha'is affirming something like evolution but not the full science of evolution and indeed the method of science - because of what the prophetic figures at the time didn't understand and yet they are given the privileged treatment of infallibility.

It is amazing how, though, people become inculturated to the group and adopt its views. Things that they did not believe as individuals they take on once committed to the group. Nevertheless, people do go through groups; they do even come out of the most demanding of cults. In strongly believing groups, people entertain private doubts very privately, and then discuss with a few trusted people (often to find they are not to be trusted) and then at some point there is marginalisation and isolation, until the group magnet has faded and they leave.

The necessity to leave (moving house, changing jobs) is often a means by which people drop former beliefs that they were once so willing to express. Churches know this, which is why they are keen to get people hitched up to the right kind of church in the new location. Churches may seek out the people who have moved from another area into theirs, as information is passed along.

I think that for some Unitarians there is a fading away. They attend less often, and then even less often. They are missed by the congregation, but given space people fade away and eventually they've simply broken the connection. This also happens in the more anonymous Christian places of worship.

I sometimes think that we are observing a period of fundamental transition from the inside, that really there is a death of the churches taking place. We can stress their positive benefits for personal support and reflection, and community building, but other than for these large and entertaining media type churches the sub-culture of church life is being lost.

It is actually quite difficult to enter a 'mainstream' church and understand what is going on and why. The eucharistic ritual and its language will be strange to many - it is an acquired taste (wherever performed). I still think Unitarians are trapped into a model that is part of a past late Victorian sub-culture, yet I am less able to say how to break free. After all, meditation groups and the newer Eastern groups are themselves small in numbers. I'm quite convinced that many of the collective beliefs are reproduced by individuals in expression, but in all practical terms they don't operate (in ordinary life, as ordinary explanations for things).

The process of secularisation (which is a complex analysis) is one which shifts those Church boundaries. To keep people in, you have to be more liberal and perhaps members become more culturally attached; to attract people in you have to be part of the easily understood contemporary culture and that means distinctiveness comes in other ways, particularly in jumping through the hoops of belief.

Perhaps the thinking ought to go in different ways entirely: for example, the most likely to come to attend a more standard church are the early retired. What sort of fellowship or ministry does that group require that would be reflective for their lives and time ahead? It is not then about beliefs at all, even if these are so often operating as boundary markers.

So the institutional boundaries of belief are shifting, but in the end churches may have to stop and settle at what they have got, and are forced into being more sectarian in that sense. All groups are destined to be small, and even the big ones are only big in terms of the percentage of the actively religious.

Me Elsewhere

2011-10-15T18:29:00.001+02:00

I'm published on You, Me and Religion.

The Cultural-Linguistic

2011-10-11T17:04:00.004+02:00

It's funny how one goes back to some books, even those disagreed with. Some clear books can be summarised in a few sentences. One such is the second, but most noticed, standard book on postliberal religion and theology, that of the Yale School, and it is George A. Lindbeck's (1984) The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and theology in a Postliberal Age (London: SPCK). It explains the basis of much that passes for conservative postmodern theology these days.

It gives three bases for doing theology. One is propositional, that is foundational, which is that knowledge is secured in Truth. Much theology has claimed that. Another is experiential-expressive, that is theology which in liberal terms has truth in terms of translation into personal experience. The theology the book proposes is non-foundational so called cultural-linguistic. In Christian terms it is an ecumenical average (my word) that acts as a standard of role performance. The language is that of inherited doctrine and group identity by performing that.

The book is odd because it doesn't think its own manifesto will come about. As the propositional basis of Christianity slips away - because of the secular narratives that dominate intellectual and common practical thought - the book suggests that the experiential-expressive will retain the upper hand. It says, for example:

How, as modern Christians put it, does one preach the gospel in a dechristianized world? Those for whom this problem is theologically primary regularly become liberal foundationalists. The first task of the theologian, they argue, is to identify the modern questions that must be addressed, and then to translate the gospel answers into a currently understandable conceptuality. If this is not done, the message will fall on deaf ears inside as well as outside the church; and unless postliberal theology has some way of meeting this need, it will be judged faithless and inapplicable as well as unintelligible by the religious community.

The postliberal method of dealing with this problem is bound to be unpopular among those chiefly concerned to maintain or increase the stock or membership and influence of the church... (page 132)

The point is to maintain the teaching, the ecumenical catechism. This author dislikes the liberal route, because the symbols of Christianity can go on to mean anything of experience, whereas the propositional route no longer holds.

But why then call it cultural-linguistic? What is cultural about it - other than to freeze something of a past culture? If it is revelation, then it is foundational at least in revelation. This is what the Radical Orthodox do: they push their own postmodern bubble into a premodern Christendom.

The analysis of this book goes on:

Western culture is now at an intermediate stage, however, where socialization is ineefective, catechesis impossible, and translation a tempting alternative. The biblical heritage continues to be powerfully present in latent and detextualized forms that immunize against catechesis but invite redescription. There is often enough Christian substance to make redescriptions meaningful. (page 133)

So, presumably, the author is waiting for a time when there is no cultural Christian residue in order that the frozen beliefs can be left frozen or as nothing. The present situation even prevents teaching clear Christian beliefs to the children of churchgoers, so powerful is the culture and the residue left. The process goes on, so:

When or if dechristianization reduces Christians to a small minority, they will need for the sake of survival to form communities that strive without traditionalist rigidity to cultivate their native tongue and learn to act accordingly. Until that happens, however, catachetical methods of communicating the faith are likely to be unemployable to mainstream Christians. The by no means illegitimate desire of the churches to maintain membership and of theologians to make the faith credible, not least to themselves, will continue to favor experiential-expressive translations to contemporary idioms. (pages 133-134)

I find this utterly bizarre. The faith is clapped out in its own communicative terms, so it is better to shrink and freeze it to the point where a few act it out in remaining communites. But he already realises it is hardly going to be the future.

However, I notice this policy in the most experiential-expressive groups of all - as it shrinks - the British Unitarians. It is the argument that, OK whilst the theology may have gone from our lips the appearance of being a church should be maintained. This involves addressing God, keeping saying the Lord's Prayer, having a church service structure, maintaining traditional hymns among the mix, and even when new putting such hymns in the old presentation and then there is the maintenance of some distinctive church like architecture or arrangements. We continue to have Christmas services and even Easter, in some cases even Pentecost (instead of saying, hang on, we've moved to a different breeze). I'm afraid I squirm somewhat when I get to Unitarian Christmas services: they are all tinsel and no content, because after all we do not believe in the very point of their existence. Translation into 'universal babies' etc. is just more of the same gush. You can so translate it out, but it is very inefficient. And this is often without the presence of children, which is another excuse for the nonsense in the content.

The problem here is that the younger adult who would avoid church but might attend a meditation group with a talk will see exactly what is to be avoided despite the difference in actual content and meaning. My point is that the reason the content is gone, that the theology has died (we are no longer translating - it died), is because we have moved on to seek out and reflect upon more salient ideas of Western spirituality. We should have the guts of our Puritan forebears, for example, who would avoid all mention of Christmas even on Christmas Day.

Incidentally this is from someone who is picked to take the Easter service each year, presumably because I can tackle it and make it consistent with a Unitarian view. But the point comes when the argument is done and we ought to move on. Yes I can examine the Bible and say why not a resurrection but can we perhaps do a Pagan spring instead (and many do). I wish we would do this with Christmas - just make it Yuletide and be done with it.

But to return to the book in general. One notes the current decline of the Methodists and United Reformed Church, and one wonders why the argument should not be extended to their particulars. Why not end up with rump communities that witness to the reasons Methodism broke from the Church of England or that the URC maintains two orders of ministry rather than three? Presumably you would not because the arguments are clapped out - but they can just as much be 'rules of performance' as any other. So if the Trinity is an argument that few can maintain - it becomes some sort of idealised socialisation within the Godhead - well then let that drop too. But then that would be a core belief, so defined in one of those ecumenical councils. I noticed its modalist (heretical if core: creator, redeemer, sanctifier) use last Sunday. Unitarians used all that language in the past, because they knew it wasn't enough to be the doctrine of the Trinity. My point here is that its defence now is so weak it would satisfy many a Victorian Unitarian who used God the creator, Christ and redemption, and the Holy Spirit for sanctification when those words had meaning. But we tend not to use them now, because they are vacated.

The point about cultural-linguistic is that language and culture changes. We have dialects that become new languages, and languages that import so that people start to hear across languages. Old secure languages die, and languages carry concepts that change. You cannot freeze to something arbitrarily fixed at some three to four hundred years after Jesus of Nazareth and then throw in a bit of Reformation clean-up (including, for Unitarians, the left wing of the Reformation). You have to be in dialogue with the present. And the present narratives of science and social science are very powerful because they use research and because they work. People see that technology works and explains. So religion ought to be about this - a reflection on our world as is, and world as could be as we argue out the ethics of what is and could be. You cannot privilege the arguably clapped out in terms of explaining anything.

Labels Best Avoided

2011-10-09T19:18:00.004+02:00

I'll admit something. I've put myself on a dating website for a few weeks past. I won't reveal where. So far I've gained some correspondence. What is interesting about this to this blog is the categories people use in identifying themselves.

It is interesting to see how people relate themselves to race. Race is a construction that is rather narrow, and as DNA evidence of mixing shows, often unsustainbable. So many application forms involve the same myth of clear cut categories. It contributes to recent discussion: that here to get some regularity of measurement dividing lines are established to get one category set against another, but here there is a research argument for undermining (re-researching) the whole business of race. Ethnicity will go further, because it is based on appearance, language, location, group and community identity. The categories are still crude, however, and upset by economic and social class (power and status) and also by patriarchy.

The dating website is also interesting regarding the category of religion. I would say that the most numeric category is No Religion, and then there is quite a bunching who put Spiritual/ New Age. Some of those give that content, but many say no more. There are a variety of Christian categories, and the most populous are Christian/ Catholic and Christian/ Other. It takes something, I think, to go for Christian/ Protestant. My own is a simple Other.

There is no doubt that carrying and expressing a religious preference is a burden. It might suggest someone who attempts to self-organise in an ethical manner, but it also suggests someone who believes in mumbo-jumbo and has joined a group that the potential partner might want to avoid. These days people don't like joining groups, especially ones that demand commitments of the mind as well as time and money.

I am reminded of a new Unitarian minister who has spoken and written of the privilege felt in sharing people's life stories in the context of a congregation. The ministry is justified in pastoral terms with an emphasis on what people say and share. Certainly I have had moments myself in which my stressful situations have been shared (when in an Anglican setting, as it happens). But whilst there are ministers who have this privilege, many ordinary folk simply get on with the stress and do not wish to find such a group or person or share with them the life story so far. They rely on networks of friends, if they have them, or families (if the families have not betrayed them), or perhaps prefer to tackle problems alone. Rites of passage involve a time of wider contact, but it is noticed how many more of these are either avoided or placed elsewhere.

I don't deny the importance of the pastoral contact in a community of for those who seek it. My difficulty with it is where, beyond the meaning-making and the reflection thereof, it becomes the primary purpose of the encounter or even the religious group. The pastoral surely involves a connecting of the collective story and the personal one, even if on a largely unstated or subtle level. This is also, I suggest, an adult pursuit: I'm not convinced on arguments that 'children are the future' simply in terms of activities provided and certainly not in terms of indoctrinating. Children grow up and leave, even if they carry off some sort of deposit of some orientation; this is more about adult meaning and adult problems, hopes and wishes.

The religious groups have every right to seek out those who want to make meaning in a religious and spiritual manner. The pastoral follows on from that, and then if asked for. There is a right to set out the shop window and have the door open. There should be opportunities to browse and perhaps have a drink, but also to walk out again (breakages to be paid for?). Nevertheless, today, many will simply walk by and it is a label to avoid. Despite the surveys that always over emphasise the religious return (because people will give researchers what they think the researchers want), in reality they increasingly stay away and it is a tough world for the organised religious and increasingly a problematic label itself.

Postmodern Limits

2011-10-07T04:56:00.006+02:00

Sometimes I think I have always held the same religious views, that is agnosticism. Other times, I think I keep changing. My current change seems to be a movement away from postmodernism. Then I wonder if I ever was a card-carrying postmodernist: always a soft one, never thoroughgoing.

Where I am most postmodern is at the level of critique, to use the full resources of the ambiguity of language to undermine constructions of certainty. Yet, at the same time, I see a danger of language fundamentalism, piling all forms of reality into the workings of language. Data comes through language and symbol systems, and these must be the subject of rigorous enquiry themselves, but data does, I suggest, come through and not just from.

Watching two programmes on BBC 4 on Thursday gives the place and limits of the postmodern. The Horizon programme on dark energy, dark matter and now dark flow, shows a construction of astro-physics that is getting ever tighter in its own knots of thought. Galaxies will only rotate as they do with dark matter, but also it seems that as space increases, dark energy increases and pushes the constituent parts apart ever faster (though, The Sky at Night reminded us that Andromeda out there will clash with our own galaxy in billions of years time, even if the spaces within both will make it less of a crash than descendents might fear). Then we find the cosmic background behaves as it does if there are other universes, and so there is a different flow than if we were sealed in. So all this shows the standard model, though robust from attack, is just that - a model. It has lots of tested parts, lots of mathematics that work, but it looks a bit like Ptolemy and his earth centred solar system.

We can do a lot of postmodern application to the standard model about mythic construction and the like: a lot but not wholly so.

Then we come to yet another history of science programme, where accidents and eureka moments in the mind add to actual rational processes to produce progress. This is all about the history of electricity: what it is, that it is universal, and how in contemporary physics it is the electrons of one atom moving to another so creating a flow - especially with some nice acid wetted combinations of metals. It took the accountancy insight of Benjamin Franklin to initiate the idea of positive and negative and thus apply this across. There is a metaphor stage, to be refined by application.

Ok: Professor Jim Al-Khalili's story is neat, but these are discoveries. They are not altered by different forms of story telling. Their place and significance can be inside schemes of understanding, and these paradigms shift because of the data being rather nasty to the present, perhaps a weight of falsifications tip over an explanatory scheme.

We walk on these high wires of understanding, knowing that so much is explained, but so much is begging, and suddenly another wire will cross over and take more in.

In social science data within cultures also has the power to refute. It is more complex, charting patterns of human behaviour and institutional causes and effects, but there are similar experiments of regularity and then deep textual and symbolic investigations of meaning at a more intimate level.

Another limit that exists on postmodernism is that of pain. Never mind about pleasure: that is a difficult one. If you punch a wall, it hurts, and if a big weight hits you it hurts too. One can write stories and narratives about the meaning of all this, but pain hurts and people who suffer disorders after traumas are not simply writing their own life stories in the negative for which a different story or the right amount of therapy will free them.

Where I have least sympathy with postmodernism is the notion that it gives 'space' for any old cultural construction to have the same legitimacy as any other. First of all, it is pluralism that gives space for difference, and that might just be a clash of competing objective values. Liberalism gives space for competition. But beyond that we might develop a more fluid basis of stories in space, which lack objective anchor.

Seeing as I quoted it in my recent booklist for my ministry application, I'm having another look at Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology (2004) by the Lutheran James K. A. Smith, thus extending radical orthodoxy beyond its Anglo-Catholic home. Yes it is related to the Yale School postliberals, Duke, and Peter Ochs at Virginia (page 41). It sets Jerusalem against Athens and dismisses the neutrality of the secular (42).

The neutrality of the secular is a red herring. It is not about that but about research and about data. It is about getting results back that you don't like. My evangelical friend Rachel on her blog mentions her doing (with international visitors) some indaba (as now redefined) about contemporary society:

We have been discussing witness in a pluralist, postmodern context.

This means she has her collective package as a whole and wants to input it into a world of different views and stances. My point would be that a pluralistic world in all its stories is affected by the data we have received, data leaking into all these stories we hold.

Just as discoveries rewrite science, so they ought to rewrite religion. The idea that religion just carries on pumping out its sealed revelation or Church based myth into the world - taking advantage of doubt and construction - is just a form of sticking your head in the sand and, at worst, arrogance.

And just before this, just below, the same blog has those piles of myth about an apparent saviour's birth as if it is history. It is, as ever, treated as factual, though presumably a story based approach to 'reality' is dealing in stories. Of course, they will say yes, a story, if we accept all stories are equal.

But that is precisely the point. Yes your story is equal to other unsubstantiated stories, but there is a world not of intellectual constructions not that grants one neutrality as such but about where there are rules to acquire data carefully. One discipline that does this is history. We are all well aware that there are different houses of history, and whilst there is no need to call history a science as by the most extreme empiricist, most of them do put great stress on careful reading and interpretation of primary sources. The birth narratives of Jesus simply do not pass any historical test. They are just story telling. There's a good case to dismiss all those narratives separated or combined and simply think he was born, unnoticed, of two parents somewhere around Nazareth or Capernaum and he got caught up in his world of contemporary religion rather than just build many things like his dad did (assuming a great deal here). This account too lacks historical near-certainty, but I'm not going to base the meaning of the transcendent on it. Far from it: for me the transcendent would come from science and nature, from the arts, from values and ethics. It doesn't come from a supernaturalist story of specifics.

It is no good saying, "Ah but you need to have faith." Having faith doesn't make things come true; having faith in your head or mine does not overturn the limitations of the historical method. Having faith is no alternative to science when it comes to the need for two parents to give some new pairs of chromosomes or the rapid destruction of the brain after death.

Of course you can be super-sophisticated and discuss the stories in terms of the little meanings and values they reveal, for example the value of being born in poverty and thus the divine cares about poverty if we label the baby as divine. But it is all very round-about and the long way around - and one suspects the ethics come first as to what part of the stories we care to highlight. Some draw power from these stories through world-view belief, but - rather like inventing the nuclear bomb and not being able to uninvent it - once you know these are stories the branch has been sawn off already. You can still sit on it, but you are also sitting on the ground.

Of course some might be happy to negotiate the story in a liberal direction before then trying to apply it to other fields of activity. But that is not what the strong Radical Orthodox and biblical equivalents do. They just construct their own castles in the sky instead. But what fragments are left and to do what, and why then subscribe to the whole in a formal sense?

And, in any case, surely it is much more rewarding to build religious insight not on 'delivering' some fixed package at the rest of us, as if we are missing something, than to try and build religion from the wonder and awe of science and human culture at its ethical and creative best.

This is when the current stories of creation are so fantastic and visionary: opening themselves to big graphics and notions of wonder, on top of which we can plaster science fiction that motivates the doing of the science. So it's a wonderful story of bang and inflation, of spinning and acceleration, of vast distances, of the unseen and multiverse, of the bizarre tiny, and the paradoxes that light is always doing the same speed whatever speed we might be doing, even if by doing a lot of speed we get comparatively younger than others who remain stationary and yet who see light doing the same speed. Oh yes, and what of those neutrinos? That's data for you - either it is an error of the equipment, or it matters to the big story that has anchorage in reality.

Twenty One Years

2011-10-02T22:49:00.005+02:00

I have a lot of sympathy for MadPriest and his ongoing agonies. He wants to be accepted by his Church, and by Church he means the one that is possessed by the nation. It is a hierarchical Church, and the hierarchs keep saying no, or suggest anonymity.

My suggestions previously are to go independent, rather in the way the folks do who join The Open Episcopal Church. I also suggest a pause: do no religion. Suggestions that are relevant include change denomination (even temporarily).

Back in 1989 I'd finished a Sociology of Religion Ph.D and had well settled on the Unitarian line. I first said no at to them interviews in 1988 but then said yes a year later in 1989. I went to the General Assembly (again) and met my future Principal in Lincoln. It was all go, and then Manchester was a shock. Chapels were quite conservative and I made a few mistakes, but the locals on committee didn't see me fitting in. When my Buddhist orientated Principal took a service in Manchester in pure liberal Christian form, when I had not (thinking it was a student only service), I realised that all the stuff about freedom of belief and no test of belief was somewhat far from the truth. The most telling report on a short (not quite) placement visit was that I was competent and all that but where would I exercise a ministry?

After dismissal I finished off a few preaching engagements where I said what I really thought, and then that was it. Religion and me was finished.

Yet at the time I said this would take ten years to sort out now, and I thought career wise about education. I flopped trying to be a Business Studies teacher, but I did all sorts in the education arena. I finally got a PGCE through Religious Studies, though I cannot be an RE teacher given the behaviour of pupils that I cannot control.

One and a half years later after UCM dismissal I went to the local C of E and took a back seat, except I was asked to take a men's service and they didn't know what had happened (it was very multifaith). The priest used that event to shift himself to a more religious humanist position in his own pulpit expressions. A look in at the Unitarian Upper Chapel didn't last long. Also I attended the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order and even wriggled into Western Buddhist Order situations. I liked them. So I was not even considering the Unitarians at this time.

Then I moved to New Holland (still with my mother) where we both went to Lincoln and Hull Unitarian churches, gradually focusing on Hull, where I realised some regarded me as the bad boy of the church and so I did not take up membership. That was useful as it got into some disputes: they could not be pinned on me. At the time I did a Theology MA and formulated a very religious humanist position. Eventually I left over how a minister was dismissed (see, distant echoes of my own past).

I made a real effort to be C of E in a friendly parish from 2004. I tried to be a postmodern liberal gentle Anglo-Catholic. I was even considering ministry when there. But it never even went to a first stage. I was asked about the "promises" I would have to make, and that one hurdle ended even talking about it. When a curate later made her promises, I stopped taking communion and so went straight down the candle. I had been on the slow decline before this; Don Cupitt had given up too; and I headed a theology group where I could see none of the arguments adding up.

I did have some links developing into Liberal Catholicism, the tradition, but in the final analyis it has never appealed. I think the essential is the congregation, and I wasn't sure I wanted to represent a more magical Catholic tradition with such notions as apostolic succession. Rather I have always preferred a market place of ideas and discussion among equals of different views gathered together.

While I was out of the Unitarians they had another minister, shrank, regathered and I joined afterwards. The situation has been theologically stable for me for quite some time (really, it has been pretty much the same since the Derbyshire C of E and Buddhists, the MA adding to my theological resources). Getting involved and being needed, to do the music, I have more or less stumbled into applying for ministry.

I mentioned it vaguely on the Hucklow Publicity Weekend. There was the Ministry Inquiry Day when I arranged just to look and go with Mhoira Lauer-Patterson. She pulled out and I went. I only told congregation people after I had been. I was unimpressed with Contextual Theology at UCM (not a Unitarian context, not my context) but HMC (in Oxford) seemed straightforward. It didn't seem practical or likely, however, until I rang up about it and it seemed right to fill in the form. If you don't fill in the form, nothing proceeds.

So it has taken not ten but twenty one years to come to this point of restoration. The form is not me in 1989. Now it has a less intense non-realism but has an MA Contemporary Theology and PGCE RE to add to the mix. So what they've got is something very academic, and this is screamingly obvious.

The movement is 2000 people fewer than 20 years back, and I think the churches have pluralised somewhat as some of the old guard have died. These churches have recruited (they would have collapsed otherwise - Hull people for example are mainly after me, even if I remain the youngest) but they haven't recruited as much as needed. Nevertheless, the question is the same: is there a place for someone like me?

If the answer is no, then it is sort of understood. If the answer is yes, it is because there will be a use for me. It is for the Church to decide, and it is on the level. Let's be clear: I would be in need of pastoral and some managerial training. There is no doubt about it. But what has gone forward, again, is someone who thinks and can leave people wondering what on earth I am on about.

There was a time when Unitarianism was a movement that had intellectual ministers, and they could preach remotely and yet have social and commun

ity status. There was a connection into a town's social and cultural life. This is not how it is now, because the ethnography is bottom up and so much theology has died. The issue is whether there is a role for someone to assist in the collegiate understanding of this approach to religion, one that rises above history, or whether now ministry is almost wholly pastoral and hardly about ideas at all. This bothers me if so; and the Unitarian Church is still a gathered Church. But sermons, after all, have become shorter and shorter, and many are historical and values based.

So my thoughts towards MadPriest are to take time out, to rest, to move away, to do something different, and see how things change before some sort of restoration can become practical. It has taken me 21 years, and the answer no makes as much sense as the answer yes this time.

Received Legal Action Threat

2011-10-02T18:38:00.007+02:00

Today I was sat at the music area with the music going towards the beginning of the service. Bishop Mhoira Lauer-Patterson of the Liberal Catholic and Apostolic Church came in to give me a CD for her service next week and told me she had "been instructed" to give me a letter. She was busy and had to go, so didn't stay to hear Chris Pilkington all about the association of the founders of the Co-op and the Unitarians in Rochdale and the shared principles to this day.

The letter to says it was delivered by hand and uses the Church notepaper for her diocese of Northumbria and Rheged.

Headed 'WITHOUT PREJUDICE' in light blue, it then in black ink states that "Taking instruction" from her "Internet lawyer", I am to be aware that on my blog I was "acting independently of the Hull Park Street congregation" and engaged in "illegal acts" on the blog by placing parts of an email from Rt. Rev. Dr. Mhoira Lauer-Patterson in the public domain without permission. I have 48 hours to give a public and personal apology.

Also I am to remove all inflamatory and defamatory articles including her name from this blog within 48 hours.

"Appearing to have blackened the name of Mhoira lauer-Patterson and her character", I have committed the "unpardonable offence" of defamation. "This is an illegal act" and if I persist and do not remove the material, "then legal action will be taken against him."

I am advised that "publishing offensive and defamatory material on the Internet is illegal", that "cannot be described as journalistic licence" as such is "contrary to the code of ethics of journalists".

So she gives notice of the above and "reserves the right to take legal action" should I not comply with her wishes.

Well, oh dear, I spent from the end of 2009 to the start of 2011 going backwards and forwards to my solicitor, and he would not have written a letter like that not at any point "instructed" me to write something similar.

First of all, lawyers do not instruct, either to construct a letter or to hand deliver. Lawyers take instructions from clients. Secondly, letters written in pseudo-legalese are not very convincing, as this one is not convincing.

Just to be kind I'll rewrite the blog entry to remove chunks of the email. But the email chunks were for accuracy. It was an email written in direct language against me - "How dare you..." etc. and accusatory against the General Assembly, wholly based on a blog entry and full of misinformation itself. I might have just binned it, but I am not collaborating in its message. The issues were public ones and were in public.

No I am not apologising or removing anything else.

Now I am, however, bound to quote from another email, and this one matters. This is the necessary section, starting with its title:

Don't take things too seriously Adrian...

From Very Rev Dr Mhoira Lauer-Patterson

Date 2011-09-26, 16:35:17

To Worsfold, Adrian

Dear Adrian: Look, I hate to say this, but you are taking things far too seriously. My points were to ponder over, NOT any criticism of you. I am not accusing you of anything, least of all lacking in research as you always do a far more detailed analysis than I would do. Yes maybe we have gotten off on the wrong foot, so let's start over huh? On the matter of 'privacy' I felt I didn't need to add 'for private info only' as I took it that as a gentleman, you would respect the views of any woman. The problem is that we women talk openly to each other and then we forget it all and start again. I know that men do things differently and don't open up as much, but hey, lets get over it and carry on. Right? Anyway, I attach for your perusal my service sheet for the Harvest Festival on 9 October.

I'm afraid this email completely undermines the letter. As I said, lawyers take instructions from clients. The letter is trying it on for effect.

The letter appears to be of something it is not. It is not close enough to the advice of a solicitor: no solicitor would have even have mentioned a Unitarian congregation or body that was not involved, said I "appeared" to do something (you either do or you don't), written "unpardonable offence"and "illegal acts", or stated that if I didn't comply legal action would be taken and later on only might be taken, nor added the drivel about journalistic licence and ethics, and the solicitor would have given the date of the specific offending blog entry.

It seems that I am not a gentleman and do not respect the views of a woman, but, hey, let's get over it and carry on shall we, or stop playing silly games for appearances. As a gentleman I have removed the chunks of email text in the said blog entry of 24 September 2011. Or perhaps the good bishop wants to spend some money and get a lawyer.

What I am also Telling the Ministry Committee

2011-10-01T03:45:00.003+02:00

The application needs a statement of religious position, within a thousand words. I wrote this (936):

Statement of Religious Position

I retain the position, as explained in my 1998 MA Dissertation and talk to the Hull and District Theological Society, that I promote the 'gospel of plurality in proximity': that is the witness of difference coming together and not seeking particularly an ideological or faith-position consensus. This is a social gospel because society is highly diverse and yet diversity can be shown to come together and share.

The idea behind this is communicative reasoning in an arena of ideas, but not that of Jurgen Habermas as if to achieve an instrumentally unaffected point of reason. Although I am not a thoroughgoing open-postmodernist, I am so in religion in that I regard it as being like one of the arts. No one can say, in the arts, what is most true or the best. There are crafts and skills, qualities and satisfactions, but there is either a clash of truths (Isaiah Berlin) or a relativity of shaping and in the end it comes down to the latter.

I am not a thoroughgoing open-postmodernist like Don Cupitt (though his Jesus and Philosophy was a later realist wobble due to his Jesus Seminar attachment), who says he follows the dominant narratives provided by science and social science simply because they are the large scale successful narratives. Rather, one can carry out deductive experiments in sciences and social sciences and receive answers one would not like. This anchors them and offers some small scale realism and even objectivity. Larger explanatory paradigms will shift but the investigated details matter. Religion cannot do this: it can only borrow some techniques when it moves into history (e.g. the historicities or houses of history) and defy this when generating in pseudo-science.

In taking a theology discussion group in an Anglican church, I came to the view that at no point did liberal Christianity actually work, in terms of securing Christ at a centre, although I had slightly altered my religious position to that at the borderline between non-realism and real absence, and I was able to use the language of transcendence more easily. This has been carried forward in a more relaxed manner in a Unitarian setting. I'm well versed in the language of Christianity and can use it, but I don't believe in any of its core claims and also think it gives us no information.

I did have an anthropological view of religious ritual that was dangerously structuralist. I still think there is mileage in the notion that we come together in material cost and hope to gain spiritual benefit via the practice of some ritual, often strange and indirect, for which a product is a binding together communally and an intention to go out and serve the world. The problem is that this 'universal' can be deconstructed, in the actual particular, as to what people think they are doing and do: in other words, nothing beats a bit of qualitative ethnography to undermine apparent structural universals.

Rather than providing information or indeed locating universal gift-exchange (but nothing prevents these: they are just unreliable when based on myth systems), religion is about praxis, about using resources and effects towards a spiritual goal - a discipline found in worship that I understand as reflection and contemplation. Like art, it is about being appreciative and worthwhile. I have moved slightly towards the position of John Hick, but retain the notion that each of us has dialects of languages that means translating across different understandings is problematic. When pushed, I revert to signals of transcendence and not a Real and these are contained within out understandings.

I have no time for conservative forms of postmodern religion because in their postmodern bubbles their premodern claims contradict the research that social scientists (and scientists) do. Even less strident postliberal positions (like Lindbeck; Liechty is an open postliberal) that claim to be cultural-linguistic only freeze culture to some past idealised point. It denies wider cultural anchoring (indeed it denies the objectivity of this world, as it is in a line from Karl Barth). I see hints of this even when some Unitarians say that our chapels should be recognisably Christian in what they do even if not in what they believe. Religion, even as art, must relate to the common narratives ordinary people use, which are increasingly this worldly and practical, driven by a sociology of knowledge that derives from technology doing things.

If Karl Barth leads to one kind of postmodernism, then James Martineau leads to the other. He argued for the subjective centre of religious authority, yet retained a more conserving collective language of liturgy. I have my own interest in liturgy (not complete in the book lists above). These two, collective objective and individual subjective when pressed against each other collapse into a kind of postmodernism of faith, and do so as chapels continue to give pulpit led reasoned services. The collective forms clash with individual sentiment, and force the language into being more poetic and less precise, and signs that are increasingly of their own pointing. The upshot is the positive impact of what these words and artistic forms of support do to one's own spiritual road. In a situation evolving liturgy, the upshot is one towards where lex orandi lex est credendi (the Alexander Schemann position) and yet must be incomplete for individuals and therefore only a rough guide to collective identity. I remain arguing for more artistic support of all kinds, and less of the long Puritan shadow. There is a shift more towards a Buddhist style praxis and individualism, through the practice of worship.

Adrian Worsfold 1 October 2011