Follow up: The ACI Hymn

After the previous post, with yet more output from the Anglican Communion Institute, it's time for a good old hymn:

Guiding others, Ephraim Radner,
Pilgrim thinks a barren Church;
ACI, claims it is right and,
Orthodox without a search;
Keep on writing and accusing,
Wordprocess on for evermore;
Keep it up as if you'll never bore.

Spread this o'er the Anglican Communion,
Church order not folk below;
America, on to the website,
An usher of 'lectronic flow:
Heading Europe, over China,
Legging back across the ground
Be rest in computers where we're found.

Heterosexual, never homo:
Ministry and blessings same.
Obsessive 'sexts' repeated ever,
To intend ecclesial shame.
But the fact is, things are moving:
Holy Spirit, prophets' call:
Churches' time to include us all.

Over all the Anglican Communion
Autonomy is the key;
Diverse places, culturally managed,
Insights local and what needs be:
Western Churches, meet their people,
Minister to all and not just some:
Others can later do what these have done.

Covenant Watering

After some reading back and forth I think that the Not the Same Stream blog (Modern Churchpeople's Union related) is on to something regarding Ephraim Radner's obscure open letter to other members of the Covenant Design Group and also the Windsor Continuation Group dated 11 January.

I had my fingers burnt recently when I misread in part a piece from the Anglican Communion Institute when I said that they wanted to give God a push towards carrying out their views, as part of a larger piece that attacked the assertion made again and again without evidence that The Episcopal Church (TEC) is moving toward Unitarianism. The latter and main argument stands but these members of the ACI have decided to become something of a self-appointed witness for what they regard as tradition within TEC whilst others have set up some peculiar body called The Anglican Church of North America.

Ephraim Radner writes his letter as a:

concerned member of the Covenant Design Group... [with] ...a simple plea for us to do our work better in the midst of continuing ecclesial disintegration.

He indicates his view that his bishop, the Rt. Rev. Robert O’Neill, ordained to the transitional diaconate a publicly known partnered homosexual because, Ephraim Radner thinks, the opposition had moved away within his own diocese in Colorado. Thus statements of keeping to a wider Communion position had been overturned by the action and he thinks that this feeds structural separation.

I thought the Windsor "ban" was against ordaining partnered people to the Episcopate, not the diaconate, and thus nothing is overturned.

Not the Same Stream highlights this paragraph (I do wish it would sort out its absolute line endings, it's very untidy):

And who should offer a different testimony, if not you and us together, at least serving groups ostensibly committed to and charged with forging a better way for our Communion? We cannot control events and the decisions of others. But we can certainly engage honestly and squarely what is at stake and avoid equivocating (yes, we do too much of that); we can speak clearly and not secretly or in code; we can offer concrete and effective proposals, and not diplomatic blurs; and we can prosecute them with all the energy God has granted us rather than being sidelined by the doubtless real but nonetheless surmountable bureaucratic obstacles with which common life across the globe presents us.

Some points here need highlighting again!

• avoid equivocating (yes, we do too much of that)
• not [speak] secretly or in code
• not [offer] diplomatic blurs
• sidelined by ...bureaucratic obstacles

Given that this is addressed to the Covenant Design Group, as a concerned member, this looks like a criticism of the group, yet itself given in equivocating manner, secretly or in code, using diplomatic blurs.

Well, the early February meeting of the Primates in Alexandria will discuss the Covenant and hear from the Windsor Continuation Group that recommends a ban of partnered gay people to the Episcopate.

The suggestion from the letter is that the Covenant preparation has come under equivocation, code, diplomatic blurs and bureaucratic compromises and will be a fairly useless document - useless enough to get the nod from Western Churches and just have it as one more document.

Of more concern, perhaps, in the dark and dubious world of Anglican politics, is that the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has asked the GAFCON primates to prepare a paper and present the case for the Anglican Church of North America to the Anglican Consultative Council (to enter the Anglican Communion) and that apparently [see comments] these primates will do this at the Alexandria meeting.

Of course papers presented then go on shelves, so this in itself indicates little, but it might give false encouragement to the schismatics. On the other hand Rowan Williams may have just followed procedure, the rest is hyped by the GAFCON crowd [see comments].

Church and Education

I have just submitted my next piece for Episcopal Café that follows on from the previous entry.

So now this develops on from that - I try not to repeat what I submit elsewhere beforehand, otherwise it undermines the point of submitting externally.

I present the theological material as neutrally as possible, so that people can make of it what they will. It can be treated in a confessional manner. However, I am not myself treating it in any kind of confessional sense whatsoever. I believe strongly that people should be free to treat material in any way they wish, including scepticism about it and even about faith positions. The point about presenting is to facilitate discussion, and such may go off topic - so what, if this is what is prompted and draws on experience.

I've been attracted by the ideas of Paulo Freire (1921-1997) in a general sense. What I hate about so called education today is that it is more like training. It has to come with qualifications and is about the economy. Work will make you free. We have a Prime Minister now with a Protestant Work Ethic. So much of education that was for the sake of education has declined, including that leisure education with social and welfare motivations that was provided for the retired. Education - but actual education that is experience-drawing and critical - enhances the person. I generally warm to the idea that the teacher learns and the learners teach, though often I take it that the teacher learns thanks to the preparation of teaching material. Still, the context here is a maturity of learning that enhances well being.

Now it seems to me that churches should be a place of such voluntary, adult learning: that which draws upon and enhances what has been, that builds the community.

So much that passes for church learning I must criticise. Alpha, for example, is the McDonaldisation of church learning: bite size ready answers for whatever questions may arise. It is a recruiting method (or a recycling method, really). It is marketed and carries power connotations: power and influence for Holy Trinity Brompton, power and influence for generally one kind of Christianity delivered with a copyright notice. It's capitalism in religion. It is also lazy teaching and learning, a sort of unwrapped national curriculum of sectional Christianity.

Instead I'm more interested in mutual clues and prompts, suggestions and possibilities. Work and success do not make you free, even if you need enough money to get by: being human more fully makes you free. In this I do follow the liberal educational ideal of building up, but also recognising the conflictual relationship some of us are in when the predominant role of education is to fit into a market economy. We do need consciousness raising in this matter, to recover something that we did start to build after the Second World War.

This is why, when I present material, it is not to be confessional. I will give my view of course, but one among many. I think churches, if they can see things this way, can be part of the building up of communities with actual educational programmes (of many kinds, including leisure skills and debates). Of course those that pursue a kerygma can present such as an alternative value as part of building difference. Why not? Education is, I am suggesting, an important role for any church.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I'm pleased that the St. Mary's Barton In Depth group has sharp and active discussions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the theme on Tuesday, and my particular presentational narrative of all these theologians (from nineteenth century liberals to early twentieth century moderns) had a sudden, new, contrast of words which may or may not be accurate. It was that in the Christianity by living, by secular encounter, by being busy, Bonhoeffer really did believe there was the gospel in there, more of a kerygma than a kernel.

I'd not thought of this distinction by these terms before. My point into the discussion was this: that the liberal theologians of the nineteenth century were all looking for a kernel of Christianity, limited as it was by the methods of history and sociology and other academic disciplines. It might be said that the kernel was the teachings of Jesus, the ethic. Liberal, simple Christianity came down to that essence, though of course the ethic could be extracted out of Jesus. Another liberal kernel is the Kingdom of God as something to be introduced on earth. The kerygma, though, is something more: preserved, surrounded, Christ the person and the mission, the vital gospel narrative, regarded as essential, something in revelation and special. Bonhoeffer maintained this claim, I thought.

One member thought my main point was in the paragraph:


The task was to live, Christianly, as if God was not present; and had he lived Bonhoeffer might have gone on to reinterpret some key Christian motifs, metaphors and creeds.

The puzzle remains for me how you can be a religionless Christian or secular Christian (even - as later developed by others). The point about those seeking to get to a kernel or kerygma is to remove the religious wrapping paper and get to what is inside. I did make the point in discussion that for some Christians the wrapping paper is everything, following the whole thing as they have it, even in a bubble of detail like the Radical Orthodox. The context was of course "a world come of age", interpreted not as a moral achievement but simply a different way of practical thinking that does not involve God as last explanation for the unexplainable.

This approach is much different from Paul Tillich thinking that in this world we ask lots of existential questions for which he gives correlated Christian answers. Something is much more hidden with Bonhoeffer. We just don't know what such worship including liturgy would be like.

A few of us had attended the Tuesday evening service in which the sermon, that God is in the muck of the world, was consistent with my paper and the discussion, though the sermon may have been partly the result of him skimming the paper - as I was told the next (Wednesday) morning (14th) from the copies I was given to hand out on the evening.

One member was clearly a Bonhoeffer enthusiast, so I thought it worth pressing where this anchoring point was found, and this was ambiguous. A different approach here, about trying to think of different metaphors for religion, based on mystery, isn't the approach of Bonhoeffer, where for him there is pointing away from mystery to some other anchoring of this kerygma in the busy life encounters.

Personally I am not convinced by Bonhoeffer. First of all I think Christianity is religious. I take the point that many people just don't ask overtly religious questions, but that's no evidence of some different gospel existence (if such a thing makes sense). Secondly, I do not privilege some sort of kerygma, or protect it up front, but rather agree with the liberal theologians that it should be accessible to the other disciplines, like a search for a kernel. For me, the metaphors of crucifixion and resurrection work, not because they exist and invest the bumpy life we lead (of tragedy and new beginnings) with meaning, but because our bumpy lives support metaphors like crucifixion and resurrection. I am myself rather torn between postmodern presentational approaches to the wrapping paper - the religion of religion! - and some sort of kernel seeking.

At present my withdrawal from taking communion is based on the kernel seeking side (I don't believe in a full scale, rounded, essence of kerygma, though I examine this), that the space where the kernel might be found is vacant; whereas my participation in communion has been a more postmodern approach to religion and all its wrapping paper as religious. I have little time for a belief in a/ the mystery either: my approach is much more a pathway one, a discipline one, one of active reflection and contemplation. I would have benefited from a survived Bonhoeffer's later writings had he rewritten some metaphors and creeds.

One member mentioned Eberhard Bethge (1909-2000), of whom I'd written nothing and, actually, knew nothing. He was a friend of Bonhoeffer and married his niece. He brought much of Bonhoeffer's material into the public realm, but I notice the puzzling statement that Bonhoeffer's paradigm is out of date and provides no answers to our pressing questions. I'm not sure this is so: Bonhoeffer did connect to the paradigm shift still with us, and just has one approach towards this, but one left off at a point where we have to think for ourselves.

Meanwhile next month we are bringing forward Reinhold Niebuhr and will talk about him with reference to the current credit crunch. To that end I rewrote the presentation on him that I will make.

The Fort Worth Song

You put your left arm in, your left arm out,
In out, in out, you shake it all about;
You do the Iker Kikey and you turn around:
And you want to keep her out.

Whoa-o the Iker Kikey,
Whoa-o the Iker Kikey,
Whoa-o the Iker Kikey,
Knees bent, arms stretched,
Raa raa raa.

You put your right arm in, your right arm out,
In out, in out, you shake it all about;
You do the Iker Kikey and you turn around:
She's going to come about.

Whoa-o the Iker Kikey,
Whoa-o the Iker Kikey,
Whoa-o the Iker Kikey,
Knees bent, arms stretched,
Raa raa raa.

You put your left leg in, your left leg out,
In out, in out, you shake it all about;
You do the Iker Kikey and you turn around:
Tell her she must keep out.

Whoa-o the Iker Kikey,
Whoa-o the Iker Kikey,
Whoa-o the Iker Kikey,
Knees bent, arms stretched,
Raa raa raa.

You put your right leg in, your right leg out,
In out, in out, you shake it all about;
You do the Iker Kikey and you turn around:
Time to send a missive out.

Whoa-o the Iker Kikey,
Whoa-o the Iker Kikey,
Whoa-o the Iker Kikey,
Knees bent, arms stretched,
Raa raa raa.

You put your whole self in, your whole self out,
In out, in out, you shake it all about;
You do the Iker Kikey and you turn around:
A new bishop is about.

Whoa-o the Iker Kikey,
Whoa-o the Iker Kikey,
Whoa-o the Iker Kikey,
Knees bent, arms stretched,
Raa raa raa.

Whoa-o the Iker Kikey,
Whoa-o the Iker Kikey,
Whoa-o the Iker Kikey,
Knees bent, arms stretched,
Raa raa raa.

Interesting Day...

A visit not from the suffragan but the diocesan bishop for the morning service. I found him very personable and communicative. Certificates were handed out to younger people, and indeed to other people including myself - for completion of The Bishop's Course: Exploring Our Faith over a two year period. Interesting that I did, and where it got me.

The sermon was something like this: that if we were John the Baptist's people, we would go home now - after all we've repented and had a blessing; but as partakers of the Eucharist meal we are Jesus's people. The problem with that essential division is what about the people who don't go forward, including, now, myself? Should we have said thank you for the reminder and gone home? Am I no longer a Jesus person, because I disagree with making statements and promises of a faith - statements about Jesus that I think are false, yet still recognising in a more voluntary and critical way some of the messages of Jesus?

There was a West Gallery Choir Evensong, for a change, that continued the Christmas theme (indeed, not just Epiphany) because of the method of presentation, and I listened and participated in expressing beliefs that are a fiction. This really is about a claimed history of the world that I don't recognise, a salvation-incarnation faith that has slipped through the fingers if it was ever in the hand. Well it's a story, but people want to make it into an alternative history of the world.

Then I watched much of the Channel 4 (plus 1) broadcast of Christianity: A History as presented in part 1 by Howard Jacobson. I rather think he has it right. Jesus, the Jew, had a message rooted in his own faith, and it is Paul, of "doublethink", who created this religion of salvation about Jesus. In two hefty bursts the Romans destroyed the Messianic Judaism of the day, and that strand held within Jesus's family was lost (there are claims of continuance: for example the Kanai Jews for whom Jesus is the fore-filment of the Law). From the New Testament time grew the division that was to become outright anti-semitism, as at York, and (interestingly) Lincoln in this country, long before the Nazis.

I'm afraid I'm with Howard Jacobson here, and I put it that Jesus pointed away from himself to God in his end time preaching and teaching, and that it is the early Church we are presented with in the New Testament that turns the focus around (even to look forward). And yet even doublethink Paul did not regard Jesus as divine, even if Jesus had the sole job as Lord in bringing in the Kingdom (Paul says Jesus will yield the Kingdom to the Father: the Nicene Creed says it will have no end - a critical difference).

Of course I haven't suddenly discovered these opinions; it is just that you somehow merge them with the tradition and try to extract the Jesus ethic out of the awkward tradition. It is just the conviction that you follow what seems to be right. This conviction seems to be right.

At one time the catechumens went home. As the confirmed went to the Thanksgiving Prayer that was to the Eucharist, the others left. At one time Christianity was accessible to the people who went home, and usually came for worship less clubby. Now it's nearly all for insiders, those who agree, and it rather excludes the rest. I don't know how it is going to recruit new people.

I could be less rigid: why not be as easy going as the rest? I might be, and might be very inventive with my theology again. I could be a Radical Orthodox and live the bubble in fantastic detail, and not believe a word of it. But I still used to think as Howard Jacobson does, and I do now. The difference is that now I feel more consistent.

Over on Fulcrum one or two keep going on about false teachers and the like, in a kind of narrow band of people who put the New Testament document up as the highest authority regardless. It isn't: it is deeply flawed. The false teacher, really, was Paul: a manager of churches where some Greek culture people wanted to join the monotheists without having to have bits chopped off their willies and not obeying strange food laws. Paul let them in, because once he said you can't be faithful to the Law and have a Messiah (to Jews who followed Jesus's urgent message) and then he changed sides without changing his mind and said you have to believe in salvation by Messiah and not need the Law - it had done its job containing sin. So he let a lot of different people in and turned the thing into something else. He even had a stripped down focused ritual for the Christians when they had continued a love feast more in the Jewish manner, and he said that his spiritual experience was the resurrection that thus was an event, as well as something about expectation. The faith was in one of those highly creative, meltdown and reforming charismatic periods you get when there is a period of intense social and political rupture, when hope is built into rituals. See Peter Owen Jones (also on TV) when he looks at those faiths that take from the past but arise after a local ground-shifting rupture.

Michael Goulder taught New Testament, knew all this, and after a long time sent his collar back, but others have been doggedly on the edge or off the edge and still participated. That's what I'm thinking about now: that I really honestly don't believe the presentation as given but I shall just participate as a practioner and as an extractor of this material. Or, inevitably, a point comes, sometime, when I shall end up going home.

Format and Content

I'm keeping an open mind two programmes in about Around the World in 80 Faiths presented by the Anglican priest at Firle, of Chichester Diocese, Peter Owen Jones.

The problem with the series, as it bashes away through ten (branches of) faiths per programme, is that of format over content, that it is too quick.

Nevertheless there may be a theme growing, and it is that some faiths are clearly narratives in process, and are as much new and present as old and ancient. Whether in some islands or peninsulas, huge disturbing events have the consequence of shifting the religious landscape. Thus there is the John Frum cult in Tanna that responds to the American impact on the island in the Second World War, and the South Korean growth in Pentecostal Christianity that is both a response to the huge events there that left original faith approaches moribund and now almost a factory faith responds to the mindset of individualist capitalism and prosperity.

When it came to urban witchcraft, however, he responded to his own longer prejedices despite learning by his participation, raising issues that should never have been raised in a more objective view. The issue was never 'devil worship' in the first place, but what he never mentioned - that this faith is not ancient witchcraft but another recreation based on what witchcraft might have been. It is a different mentality from a science educated urban living largely middle class membership. It's another sense of being cut off from a past as aboriginal ritual is now dislodged from original beliefs.

Another theme seems to be syncretisim in the newer emerging faiths. A late friend of mine, a Unitarian, was fascinated by Cao Dai (High Place, of Vietnam, that started with a seance in 1925 and now has two million followers), but I wonder if the details and rules Peter Owen Jones discovered and its actuality would have impressed my friend the same. Some syncretism is simply an attempt at reconciliation in a formal belief and rituals structure after disturbance, in this case French Colonial rule. Some look back to deeper cultural and anciently co-ordinated principles in attempting to access what loosely (must be loosely) called the divine (from spirits to further interpretations). Sometimes less formality and rule making allows for more space and exploration.

Some news journalists say if you can't say it briefly it may not be worth saying, and on that basis of summarising the series is worthwhile: but there are thousands not eighty branches of faiths and there are aspects common worth studying in depth - as anthropology, as religious studies.

Peter Owen Jones's approach seems to be a combination of religious phenomenology (description of the religion in essentials) and quick anthropology and occasional critical comment from his own perspective. This itself is rather loose. I suppose you watch and take what is of benefit.