Posh and Becks style weddings? Or something even better?

This article made me aware of just how conservative many of my colleagues must be when it comes to weddings because what the report appears to be trying to do is get them to loosen up a bit:

 Under Church rules, vicars have wide-ranging powers to decide how weddings should be conducted. While some have been prepared to experiment, many have until now taken a traditional approach and been reluctant to allow couples to innovate.

I suspect that some of them have been reluctant because they are wanting to preserve the dignity of the event -but of course that means that they run the real risk of being taste Nazis (reminds me of the saying that the Church of England would die of good taste). Now I suspect that there could be some weddings that I'd be uncomfortable to do -but I'm pretty certain that my own tolerance for 'different' is wider than most; I find myself constantly surprised at the inability of people often especially clergy to allow others to be different and even to discover in their difference some interesting and even delightful things. It's often the case that in showing an interest and being helpful we offer an affirmation which brings smiles.

But my real beef is with what this report doesn't (and probably can't) do: break the building connection. As a parish priest I've had the duty and joy of serving with congregations whose buildings are not ... well ... photogenic.  I've also been inspired by the film Robin Hood (you know, the Kevin Costner one) where the wedding of Hood and Marion takes place in a woodland clearing. That's what I want to be able to do. But to do it the law has to change: we have to stop only allowing CofE weddings in church buildings and license the clergybeing so that they could carry out the ceremony anywhere (if necessary checks could be built in to such legislation if there were concerns about trivialising or inappropriate places).
I  don't necessarily think that huge numbers would want to be wed in a forest glade or a circle of stones, but I do think that we should allow for the possibility, and I'd be keen to give it a go.
Church to allow Posh and Becks style weddings - Telegraph

New Evangelical Manifesto -part the last

The final chapters of the book cover things like ending the death penalty and making peace. At one level, there's nothing new here, but some main important arguments are collected together. I found myself wondering who the target audience would be for this book. I suspect that died-in-the-wool hard-line rightists would simply not engage: the mere fact that the positions here challenged their own would damn them. However, it would give pause for thought to those who had a somewhat open curiosity as to how biblical Christians might come to different positions from their own. I think, too, that it would help consolidate those who are changing their mind or have recently become dissatisfied about the political interpretations of the faith put out by the right. I hope it might also help those who hold back from Christian faith because they can see how unlovely the rightist interpretations are -these last ones already sense a dissonance between Christ and Christians, they just lack the background to be able to articulate a position based on where (I think) the Spirit has already led them in their hearts.

To me this is the one thing lacking: a missional (pneumatological) perspective. Could it be that the rejection of the rightist positions is in fact a move of the Spirit: the difficulty being that human argumentative passion has fastened many into political/social perspectives that are at odds with the Spirit of Christ? Articulating socially-compassionate and evidence-based perspectives, then, becomes a proto-evangelium linking the Spirit's work in arousing people to justice and mercy with the gospel and the communities of Christ following.

It would be interesting to take hold of the insights articulated in the Making Peace chapter and apply them to doing so with the Evangelical Right ... wouldn't that be 'fun'?

New Evangelical Manifesto -Race, women and children

There are a series of chapters on race, women and children. All of them focus on the way that the issues raised call for responses that go beyond Evangelicals' comfort zones. The race chapter does a nice job of showing how the individualism of Evangelicalism is inadequate to meet the real requirements for racial reconciliation. The chapter on women is well narrated and passionately told, but in the end had the weakness of dealing with the 2 Timothy 2 passage by means that would be least convincing to evangelicals and likely to confirm fears that 'New Evangelicalism' is a stalking horse for liberalism though there are some well-made points. By contrast, the chapter on children does a really nice job of considering children as portrayed in the Gospels. It then moves on to enunciate principles and an evidence-based approach to achieving them rather than an ideological one.

New Evangelical Manifesto; neighbouring Muslims

How do New Evangelicals relate to the religiously other? One of the most important test cases in this would be Muslims, and the appositely-name Rick Love takes up the task in this collection of addressing it. The interesting flash-point of departure is the question from a Muslim about why his Christian street-neighbour appeared to love his family less than did the non-Christian street-neighbours -a question intensified by  it being a response to a presentation stating that Christians are to love God and to love their neighbours as themselves. This leads into a reflection on why a Christian might treat a Muslim neighbour less generously than non-believing neighbours might treat them. Rick Love identifies three things that probably contribute to this sad state of affairs. One is terrorism and the ill-treatment of Christian communities in some Muslim-majority societies. A second is a theological bias to Israel and thus against Muslim middle-easterners. The third is negative stereotyping. And so in the face of this 'fear that drives out love' (nice soundbite); how should we seek to replace fear with love. Rick Love writes from a background well-able to remind us of the great diversity of 1.5 bn of the world's population -as against the stereotyping based on worst-cases. He points out that many perhaps 50% of Muslims are from a Sufi background where the love of God is more important than the externals of religion; where the poetry of Rumi is considered an important inspiration. Such an Islam is resistant to terrorism and more favourable to peace-making. It's a form of Islam which often sees Jesus as an inspirational figure. An interesting reflection on probable figures would indicate that there are probably about as many terrorists among the Muslim population as there are KKK members amongst Christians in the USA.

The chapter explores the interesting suggestion that Muslims are the new Samaritans -in terms of the way that Jesus related to them in the context of the NT. And it is followed up with a contemporary parable of the Good Samaritan with a Muslim family playing the role of the good Samaritan.

What I found interesting, because it's something I've become concerned about; is the critique of friendship evangelism because it violates the pure and direct obedience to the command to love neighbour by making serving them and genuinely befriending them instrumental to their conversion. Of course it is possible to love by sharing the most important beliefs we have; but that needs to find its place genuinely as love rather than a duplicitous ruse to propagandise.

The racial dimension of God's mission is the topic Lisa Sharon Harper tackles in chapter 11. "Is America a postracial society" (yeah, I know, the question assumes that the USA is America -Canada? Mexico? Brazil? ...) and reminds us of a series of issues and events of the 1990's when racism was very much an issue and the USA very much not 'postracial'. One of those issues was how the churches responded to the challenges, an example of Promise Keepers trying to address race but without realising that cultural power was (is) an important dimension of the matter. The problem here was/is that the individualism ('personal salvation through an individual decision for Christ') frames racial issues that way, and elide structural and culturally-wide dimensions. In fact dismiss them as distractions from personal (individual) responsibility. For white evangelicals, living self-segregated lives; the experience of encountering structural unrighteousness is rare and so the a-political view of the world is rarely challenged in a meaningful way. I'm reminded of the British evangelicalism that I was introduced to in the 70's and 80's which was heavily formed by public-school and elite university leadership and naturally tended to take the same sort of approach. But here, somehow, a lot of that changed. Perhaps it was the fair-trade and drop-the-debt campaigns combined with growing awareness of needs of our inner cities because these are actually mission fields and encounter bred fuller understanding and broader engagement. (That's not to say British Evangelicalism is hunky-dory on the race front).

Much of the chapter is a telling of USAmerican history of race and racial discrimination. the point being to show how fiscal and political instruments helped to create and solidify white domination and so to remind us that similar instruments are needed to redress matters. The word 'repentance' is chosen for this. Evangelicals were at the forefront of the abolitionist movement -but it turns out that this was something of a high-water mark and since then the movement has tended to quiescently take the segregationist side. But that is to fail to love neighbour.

New Evangelical Manifesto -changing the bad world

Jennifer D Crumpton shares a concern about people trafficking mainly for sex -new fashioned prostitution using the internet as a shop-window. Worse, much of it amounts to sexual slavery fuelled by threats, violence, blackmail. She outlines the horrendous and huge problem reminding us of the disgusting abuse of human beings involved and points out that it is becoming well ensconced in the USA. A truly horrifying story is told of abduction, brutalisation and sexual slavery in ordinary America. Of clients who were ordinary family men with children. The numbers of men who are paying for sex -including knowingly soliciting for it with under-age girls are disturbingly high. We should, of course, remember that the way that sexual imagery is used in everyday culture surely plays a part in 'normalising' the mentalities that underlie the behaviours. She points out that active participation in making changes for people such as those caught up in sex trafficking is what is needed from the churches. To participate in God's liberating action and right-wising reign.

This is a chapter which deserves reading more than my comment. There are some very real evils which affect and blight many; they put some of the campaigns beloved of certain Evangelical groups into perspective. I would say there is a degree of straining at gnats and swallowing camels involved; this chapter helps us to see that.

Andi Thomas Sullivan writes about people suffering from preventable diseases. So many of which are not only preventable but the cost of their prevention is pretty low. The concrete example in the chapter is that of insecticidal bed-nets which can prevent malaria. And how handing them out can give a real sense of participating in God's commonwealth. It is an inspiring story of practical help for good; how something relatively simple can be used for the good of many and the social enterprise needed to make it happen -not in a paternalistic fashion but in partnership.

These chapters are a salutary reminder that combatting evil is not just  about praying and recruiting souls to pray the sinners prayer but partnering with God in making the world a better place.

New Evangelical Manifesto [5] A story to challenge us.

Steve Martin writes a chapter called Kingdom Community. He begins with an appreciation of the hard work and prayerful care of thousands of pastors and for the work of the Holy Spirit in the church down the ages. He tells of leaving the pastorate having discovered that he could not be prophetically challenging -concretely in finding himself unable to challenge the Iraq war though convinced of its wrongness. It is from what he interprets as a wilderness perspective that he writes.

I liked his candour here though I retain my caution having seen too many 'prophetic' voices pouring forth their own dyspepsia rather than  what seems to be an authentic word from God. That said, the humility Martin's writing seems to show makes me less suspicious than in some other cases.

In considering the 'community' dimension of the title, he mentions the things that one would expect, but then adds a conclusion that a church worthy of the name and calling would be one that produces at least a few people capable of living out the most challenging of Christ's teachings, for instance 'love your enemy'.

I warm to this in the sense that there is an implicit recognition that discipleship is something we grow in and into; that people enter into discipleship with varying backgrounds and predispositions to different aspects of discipleship. The danger of that is to let some off the hook that require the challenge -indeed the potential is there for people to duck challenge on the basis that someone else is doing it.

There follows a discussion of enemy love moving beyond the personal to the corporate: loving those designated enemies of our society. And this moves into a look at the parable of the sheep and the goats, noting along the way that churches are not good at risking ministries of justice while ministries of pastoral care are relatively uncontroversial. Yet the message of the parable is clear enough: God wants us to care for others; for the strong to care for the weak. Illustrating this he tells the story of Elisabeth Schmitz who stood up for Jewish people in Nazi Germany, concerned that the Church was failing to do or say anything. She protested against the Kristallnacht violence, and resigned from her job teaching history, declaring that she could no longer teach according to the Nazi curriculum. She went on to be involved in rescuing Jews from the regime. She loved those her State declared enemies -at great cost. She fulfilled the implied agenda of the parable of sheep and goats.

I loved this chapter because that's where it ends: not with a blueprint for a church, just a reminder that loving neighbours and enemies is a radical act and that our churches need to be incubators of people who can do this.

Amen.

New Evangelical Manifesto [4] theology into the world

Paul Markham writes a chapter entitled A Theology that 'works'. For him the chapter has an existential origin in the sense of not really 'fitting' in Evangelical circles and discovering he was not as alone as he had thought. He also notes that 'new Evangelical' is not a self-designation for most of the people the label is designed to designate: these are people who tend to resist labelling.

Markham outlines a characteristic of New Evangelicals as 'having a Kingdom vision for the common good'. In fact he identifies striving for social justice as the unifying characteristic of the group and that it is a spiritual issue. Furthermore, they (we) are willing to engage in partnership for the common good which implies with people of good will beyond the Christian faith. More than this, such partnerships are  most likely to be 'grassroots' -what I would probably call 'bottom-up' and 'self-organisinng'.

What I found intriguing was linking this with the story of Nehemiah: noting that Nehemiah did not do the SMART planning thing but rather empowered and encouraged people to work together and to do their bit and in so doing to discover their community with one another. He doesn't mention the word 'emergent' or 'emerging' -but here it lurks close behind and so exposes why those terms have had saliency.

I loved this phrase: 'empowering communities to become co-creators of the world not merely consumers of it'. Just so, and I think that the co-creator theme is actually also important, in fact characterising. Related to this is the phrase 'the Commonwealth of God'.

The bottom up approach to action is mirrored by a bottom up approach to theology: rather than starting with the theory and methodology from first principles, let the action open up the imaginative space to understand better and more fully both what is going on and what the theology is. A willingness to "start in the middle" and trust that clarity can emerge is another characteristic.

I found this chapter helpful, because it has a real sense of laying bare some important dynamics of what is happening. The odd thing is that it doesn't quite name them or join them altogether and the word 'emerging' -which would do the latter- only occurs right at the end and not in that way. But it is that word that captures and pulls together the phenomena being identified and furthermore explains the occurrence of the word for at least some 'new Evangelicals'.

In the next chapter, Glen Harold Stassen writes about Kingdom discipleship as being God's vision for the Church. The diagnosis here is that many churches separate Jesus as personal saviour from Jesus the one who calls us to be disciples -following his teaching and example. Furthermore he notes that in practice Christologies that are docetic or gnostic inform their thinking. I think I'd say that monophysite ought to get a look in and perhaps not so much gnostic. Whatever the analysis, the point Stassen is making is that 'conversion' is important.

He mentions too the importance of an incarnational approach by which he means 'entering into the lives of others different from ourselves' (p.66) in a costly way; it's actually an 'incarnational solidarity' especially with the poor. This requires a 'participatory' 'christomorphic' grace; that is to say a recognition that God gives us grace to work with God and that it is a grace that forms us into the image of Christ. He notes that such a grace challenges our culture's relegation of faith matters to the private sphere. And this means, I would say, that his next point is a logical outcome; justice is something not merely about secular authority but something that our faith asserts and looks to find mirrored in the public sphere. Stassen mentions then that prayer is an important lesson from the lives and ministries of Bonhoeffer and MLK. He rightly notes the mismatch between the agenda of the right in the USA which seems to draw from Ayn Rand and, on the other hand, the teaching of Jesus. It is good to know that Stassen detects signs that megachurch leaders are choosing the latter rather than the former to help form their view of faithful Christian living where it impinges on the public sphere.

If I have a concern about Stassen's article it is about the centrality of conversion. I have a phobia about that word. I have a conversion story myself, so it's not a 'phobia' rooted in lack of experience or envy. Rather my concern is twofold. One aspect is knowing people who find it difficult to say they had a conversion because they cannot recall a time when they didn't have a real sense of God's involvement in their life and living formed by Christ. Another aspect is the way that that conversion becomes a procrustean bed forcing people to tell their stories in a certain kind of way, including distorting them by removing aspects that don't work so well and heightening or re-interpreting events to provide the required fit with the canonical story-arcs. One of the ironies of this is that when I deal with evangelical youth, I discover most of them are the products of Christian homes and their 'conversions' are arguably more about transition to adulthood  and integrating their faith in that. That's not to deny there is an element of commitment (or recommitment), but it is to note that there is a huge amount of cultural interpretation and translation going on.

To be more positive and to step back from projecting my hot-button reaction onto the article; I think that he actually means that we have an identity which is founded in Christ rather than social or political loyalties. But the danger is of using a word like this where certain connotative meanings are so prevalent. I suspect that its use is a kind of shibboleth; I can't decide whether it is well or ill to pander to the apparent need for it.

New Evangelical Manifesto [3] -Cizik changes his mind

For those of us who aren't USAmerican Evangelicals, Richard Cizik had worked for a number of years for the National Association of Evangelicals until he was resigned (just so: sometimes a resignation is not freely offered but coerced) because of remarks he made on a radio show. This prompts a reflection on changing ones mind. His remarks were that he could support gay unions and government funded contraception as a way to avoid abortion. He was also suspected of voting for Barack Obama and had been talking about the need to embrace the climate change issue but not as denialists.

This resignation led to him being dropped from other organisations and speaking engagements and to numbers of former colleagues and 'friends' ceasing to be in contact. He reflects that although he got support from a number of people, most Evangelicals who dissent over political matters with the party line have little or no support and face a lonely time. Cizik notes that Putnam -a sociologist- thinks that there is evidence that USA Evangelicals choose their church by its politics not its theology. Cizik argues that this points up the problem for USA Evangelicalism: it has been captured by conservative politics and the Gospel has been made subservient to that.

From this background he develops ideas about what  'new Evangelicals' might be. He notes the word traces back to 'good news' and feels that USA Evangelicals have become bad news, noting that they have become marked by being against things: anti liberal; anti-social gospel; anti-communist; anti trends. In doing so, the baby is often thrown out with the bathwater.

Cizik sees the 'new' bit of 'new Evangelicals as, firstly, a concern for building bridges beyond narrow sectarian boundaries -such as with scientists over climate change.  Secondly it's about not politicising the church. This is about engaging for the common good. I think he means by 'politicisation' what I might call 'becoming party political': I make this distinction because, in the end, 'political' is pretty much everything that we do in the public arena; the difficulty is when particular party disciplines, lines and loyalties are invoked to the detriment of building bridges and trying to identify commonalities -which is the political in the sense of 'the art of the possible'.

The fact that many USAmerican Evangelicals might label these characteristics as 'heretical' is a sad indictment of the party-political captivity of USA Evangelicalism. And this hurts us all: if I identify as Evangelical, I have to spend time explaining that this is not a cipher for USAmerican political nastiness (because that's what most people I interact with in GB think it is -rather like many Brits think the Conservative Party has a tendency to be the 'nasty people's party' because of the self-righteous, selfish and uncaring attitudes of its members).

And the 'nasty people's party' epithet is not irrelevant: Cizik's own experience is of being on the receiving end of personal attacks -not to mince words; unloving attitudes and hateful behaviour. The unrepentant unchristliness of those who are supposed to represent Christ is deeply hurtful and offensive.  Cizik spends some wordage explaining his thinking and the actualities of his positions and it is revealing, not least as it uncovers the actual disagreements of sections of the Evangelical community in the USA with the [tea-] party-political 'official' line; Latinos, African-American and often younger Evangelicals are likely not to sit square -or even comfortably- with some (or more) of the agenda.

This article is a cri de coeur for religious liberty and a proper separation of church and state: ironic given USAmerican history and foundations. Odd and disturbing that Evagelicals of the USA should so desire a Christendom model and to act in ways that are decried when they proceed from papacy.

The important remedy he identifies is that space must be created for people to be heard: for Evangelicals to dissent from the 'party-line' and to raise their concerns coupled with a willingness to be corrected. Of course the implication is that it also needs to create a space for people to change their minds; something that is excoriated in the political sphere. Surely a Christian public discourse should count on the need to repent -literally to change ones mind and more than that; to celebrate it.

Evangelicals -wrong on the Bible. [New Evangelical Manifesto 2]

Cheryl Bridges Johns in the third article (A Disenchanted Text; where Evangelicals went wrong with the Bible) starts with the alleged (and I happen to think it likely to be true) decline of Bible understanding and knowledge in the USA -including among Evangelicals. I say 'alleged' because it was reasonably unsubstantiated and I'd have like to have seen some kind of references to research (ditto with some of Brian McLaren's -though it that instance I have seen the research so didn't feel the need for referencing so strongly. Presumably part of the editorial policy).

The sting is not in the tail but near the start: "The problem does not lie primarily with people who do not read the Bible. It rests with the way that Evangelicals read the Bible." Both sting and thesis. This is linked to Weber's reading of western history since the Enlightenment as 'disenchantment' -a disenchantment which affected the way also that the Bible was received. In response some asserted that the Bible would be seen to be scientifically valid and worked up a theory of inspiration to match. However, asserts Bridges Johns, this move gave rise to a kind of Deist Bible (that's my characterisation phrase, not hers, though I think it represents her idea) where God was present at its creation but not particularly active in its reading. This was linked with a dispensationalist approach which systematically removed miracle from the post-apostolic ages. Thus reading the Bible became a rational exercise. Ironically, in effect, a rather low view of scripture and a high view of reason. This modernist view and usage of scripture has characterised Evangelicalism ever since.

So when younger generations become 'disenchanted' with the culture and culture wars, they may consider the Bible to be part of the problem or they may simply not know how to make use of it. This points to a need not to 'go back to the Bible' but to get back 'to the God in the Bible' and this entails a re-conceiving of our view of Scripture.

This view resists seeing Scripture as a set of propositional texts but rather as a teaching and community-forming text. Bridges Johns several times writes about recovering the Bible as "Holy Scripture". To do that would mean allowing it to deconstruct the readers; to challenge identity and re-form it rather than simply to bolster it. What is needed is a properly Pentecostal appropriation of Scripture, that is pneumatological, where we feel and know ourselves addressed by God in it; we realise that God's truth and God's presence are inextricably linked.

This means that there is a dialogical relationship between discovering Scripture as community-forming and identity-fashioning and its elusive reflexive quality challenging and subverting ill-founded identity and mis-established community -again that is my characterisation of what I think Bridges Johns is arguing. She puts in it terms such as "the deconstructive power of the Scriptures brings grace and judgement into the world, beginning first with the people of God."

I think that she's broadly-speaking right in the call for a pneumatological reading of scripture. What we need to be wary of is thinking that this solves problems. It is important to note what kind of church it requires to read such Scriptures: a Church that knows how to listen humbly to the other in genuine love and respect; a Church that knows how to argue with charity rather than a desire to win arguments; a Church that knows that our listening to each other and the scriptures will provoke repentance and may take time for us to discern wisdom from foolishness (and I use that pair rather than right and wrong, deliberately). And this is because we will still have to wrestle with human frailty as interpreters. I would suggest that perhaps our problem with Scripture goes even further back: to choosing Platonic ontology as our route for philosophical understanding rather than the Panta rhei of Heraclitus. Thus Scripture tended to be approached as a 'once and for all' thing rather than a 'living' thing (as suggested by an oft-quoted passage in Hebrews).

Reviewing A New Evangelical Manifesto [1]

Recently a different voice has been emerging in the USA:
 The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good (NEP) exists to advance human well-being as an expression of our love for Jesus Christ, which is itself a grateful response to his love for us and for a good but suffering world. The result of their recent deliberations is the book A New Evangelical Manifesto.

I'm aiming to review it as I read it. It consists of a series of articles collected together. I'll aim to write something about each over the next month or so.

The first article is by Brian McLaren and is very much a mise-en-scene of Religion, Christianity and particularly Evangelicalism in the USA today. He reminds readers that the stats indicate that the numerical health of Evangelicalism is probably more down to transfer growth, fleeter cultural adjustment and lower overheads but that it seems that this has only bought Evangelicalism about 30-40 years before the decline that afflicts mainline churches starts to settle in.

He points out that the cultural shift we've been experiencing in the West poses new questions that make the old questions traditionally fought over by Christians rather irrelevant. The driver here is new situations faced everyday: no longer are other faiths an abstract set of propositions and a theological stance, rather they are a set of practices of- and reactions to- and conversations with real people. He reminds us that the costs of running a church have gone up such that smaller churches are sliding into unviability and in turn this affects and is intensified by age-demographics. And of course, there are predictable responses to this: blaming several ways, despair, denial, guilt-tripping ... so far, so familiar.

A less -noted consideration is perhaps less relevant or recognisable in GB than in USA: the role that the political clout of the Evangelical right has had in turning off the younger generations: the religious label has become so bound up with the political that a plague on both houses is called down. This is different between the two sides of the anglophone Atlantic: the USA has tended to see a right-wing political engagement by Evangelical churches. If anything, over the last 30 years, British evangelicalism has tended to become left-leaning -at least in social matters relating to power, wealth, poverty, war economics and so on.

something that probably does play on both sides of the Pond is the tendency for Christians to retreat into nostalgia, nativism (a kind of nostalgia for the old social settlement of white, heterosexual male dominance) and negativity. McLaren points out that these are precisely the attitudes that tend to put younger people off. And actually, not just younger people. Such people can't hear the actual Good News we are supposed to be about because the Bad News of our attitudes and disconnection shouts so loudly through our institutions, habits and misguided pet peeves.

I was interested to notice how McLaren highlights a dynamic in Evangelicals that seems also to exist among Muslims in the face of post-modernity: a desire not to be labelled by the conservatives as being liberal or in some way 'infidel' which leads to a tendency to try to position oneself in such a way as to continue to allow the conservatives to do the defining and also to fail to listen to the most important critiques of those most in touch with the cultural issues involved.

McLaren's hope is for a networking by 'new' Evangelicals with Jesus-centred people in other polities: Orthodox, Catholic, Mennonites and so forth.

I think he's right, but the difficulty will be whether this 'tendency' can manage to drag the semantic centre of 'Evangelical' towards the centre and leftwards. It is a shame that etymology is not determinative of meaning, because in this case it would very much help the cause.

Steven Martin's essay 'How the Church went wrong' follows McLaren's. This starts with a recognition of the gap between NT hopes for the Church on the realities of many people's experiences and the force of it is exemplified by the angst about whether the effort of going to church will really be repaid by the experience which many people face.

In the face of this, he proposes that following Jesus is to deliberately and habitually do what the world deems impossible. The Constantinian comrpomise is identified as being close to the root of the Church's failure to commend in word and deed such a following of Jesus. This is a familiar thesis, and the quibbles that it wasn't so much Constantine as those who came after that actually did what is criticised don't really take away from the fundamental point that the all-too-often easy acceptance of state power by churches has usually led to betrayal of gospel values. Of course, what isn't examined is what better response there might have been and how might it have played out -a great topic for some counter-factual histories. But the remaining issue in this aside is whether we can develop a useful and faithfully-Christian way of using power -and a wise eschewing of it when called for.

Martin briefly recounts the terminus ad quem of Constantinian Compromise in the form of Church apologists for Nazism: people of impeccable piety but who committed crimes against humanity and/or were apologists for them. So the problem is actually about whether piety follows Jesus or is actually a way to follow the ways of the world with a veneer of faith, religion or spirituality. And the former is 'impossible' whereas the latter is deemed realistic.

While I'm signed up for the main message of this essay: I'm niggled by some things. One is the issue of whether being a Christian really means leaving government, as mentioned above. Another is that I'm quite worried by those who are keen on the idea of radical discipleship and 'living the impossible' but who seem to be radically unempathic, judgemental and offputtingly uncompromising. Now I know that Martin isn't advocating for their responses but I'm wary and weary of those who use the trajectory of this sort of argument to ensnare the fired-up in some profoundly un-Jesus-like stuff too.