Reasons Young Christians Leave Church

Hard to resist finding out what this shows up: The Barna Group - Six Reasons Young Christians Leave Church: 

One big reason uncovered is that "much of their experience of Christianity feels stifling, fear-based and risk-averse" which is in contradistinction to their "desire for their faith in Christ to connect to the world they live in." Interestingly, part of the reason, I think, that I've found myself in a 'meta-church' ministry: I don't find myself drawn to servicing the stifling and fear based ways of many churches and drawn to connecting faith more fully with the world.

The fearfulness is perhaps related to another dimension of dissatisfaction: "Teens’ and twentysomethings’ experience of Christianity is shallow." I suspect that the shallowness is a fairly direct consequence of the risk-aversity.

The next set of reasons deserve fuller quotation:

 "“Christians are too confident they know all the answers” (35%). Three out of ten young adults with a Christian background feel that “churches are out of step with the scientific world we live in” (29%). Another one-quarter embrace the perception that “Christianity is anti-science” (25%). And nearly the same proportion (23%) said they have “been turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate.” Furthermore, the research shows that many science-minded young Christians are struggling to find ways of staying faithful to their beliefs and to their professional calling in science-related industries." 

I'm particularly interested in this because it resonates so much with what I'm so often finding in my work and relating with young people. I would want to underline that we need to pay heed to this. And this is probably related to another theme emerging from the research where the issues expressed are captured in this sort of way: "not being able “to ask my most pressing life questions in church” (36%) and having “significant intellectual doubts about my faith” (23%). "

Sexuality also comes up as a major issue, mainly this is something about the tension between church and culture in this area. It's not so much about same-sex attraction in particular as the general difficulty of such different attitudes between the two domains of living.
There is a hopeful note sounded: 

"many churches approach generations in a hierarchical, top-down manner, rather than deploying a true team of believers of all ages. “Cultivating intergenerational relationships is one of the most important ways in which effective faith communities are developing flourishing faith in both young and old. In many churches, this means changing the metaphor from simply passing the baton to the next generation to a more functional, biblical picture of a body – that is, the entire community of faith, across the entire lifespan, working together to fulfill God’s purposes.”"

Again, I've seen something of this and would add that newer generations are far less hierarchical and don't defer just because of established social positions but tend to relate well to being engaged in an open and friendly manner where respect is given as well as received on the basis of common humanity and offering what one has to the 'conversation'. 

Retelling Atonement Forgiveness-Centred (7)

The Eikon of Forgiveness.

The image I find myself returning to again and again in relation to the cost of forgiving (recast into a theological key), is summed up in the phrase 'the Cross is the Eikon of Forgiveness'. This is really what is at the heart of what I'm wanting to say and is , in fact, where I started in my own thinking before trying to write these last few posts (immediate precursor here) -which have been explorations of some related issue by way of background.

The core thesis that the phrase references is this: that the Cross of Christ is a showing forth in spacetime and human affairs of the costliness of God's forgiveness. I would actually like to find a stronger way of expressing it than 'showing forth' because 'showing forth' might seem to indicate only a kind of picture rather than being in some way the real thing. And this perhaps allows us to glimpse why I would want to use a word like 'eikon' rather than picture.

A picture is not the thing itself, merely a depiction of it, a representation of it in another form but without the reality of it involved. This is not adequate when we are talking of the Cross and forgiveness because the Christian tradition (scriptures and the history of theological reflection on them) tends to regard the Cross as an actual divine-human effectual event -one where something actually happens. 

An ikon -'eikon' to evoke the original Greek more fully- is not supposed to be a mere picture. it is meant to be a point of interaction between heaven and earth where the person depicted is in some way actually present to the viewer and vice versa. Thus, in the phrase 'eikon of forgiveness' I'm trying to convey the idea that the cross is a point of interaction between heaven and earth where what is depicted (in this case forgiveness) is made actual 'for us and for our salvation'.

Forgiveness actualised in human space-time

I think this is where I'm differing from the theories of atonement I was given as my defaults through Christian nurture. And I'm not necessarily seeking to displace them, rather add to them: I think that each has interest and can be helpful in appropriate circumstances as well as being unhelpful if used or pressed inappropriately (which may be happening with PSA in our culture).

In quick and dirty terms what I'm proposing under the heading 'Cross as eikon of forgiveness' is that we focus on the cost of forgiveness to the forgiver; the fact that it hurts us to forestall our retributive desires and that we suffer agony of personal miseries when righting the wrong and 'expunging' the detriment is frustrated (even if willingly by our own choice). This is brought about by our refusal at the point of forgiving to re-export the wrong back to the harmer; we decline to put the pain back into circulation in human affairs; to absorb ourselves the detriment and to neutralise it in our own person rather than to seek to pass it on (however just such a handover might be).

That pain and cost as experienced by human beings is what is brought to culmination in the intersection of divine and human life in the crucifixion of Jesus. On the cross of Christ we see the pain-cost of forgiving human ill, fleshed out in time-and-space and in human affairs. On the cross of Christ we find God demonstrably bearing the weight of the divine refusal to put the pain of wrongdoing back into human affairs. And we find God absorbing in God's own being the detriments and neutralising them in God's own 'person'. This is what it costs God to forgive, real-ised in the reality of divine-human life.

There, that's the core of the thesis.

What has to happen now is to explore it further in terms of what it means for divine-human life and how it fits with what we already think about God's ways with and in the world.

Next post.

Posts in the series:

Posting 9 Analogy: human to divine and back again 
Posting 8 Eikonic forgiveness explored further

posting 7 The Eikon of forgiveness

posting 6 The cost of forgiving

posting 5 Counter mimesis

posting 4 Reacting to being wronged

posting 3 To know all is to forgive all?

posting 2 Forgiveness in human life

posting 1 Love and Anger

Retelling Atonement Forgiveness-centred (6)

The cost of forgiving

In the previous post I noted that we could consider retributive anger as a reverse-polarity dynamic of mimesis and concluded that forgiveness, then, is somehow to end that counter-mimetic dynamic. The important thing to notice now, then, is that forgiving costs the forgiver.

It seems to me that part of what the successful completion of the counter-mimetic move achieves for the affronted is satisfaction, a sense of completion, of peace even. There is a very real and potent psychological satisfaction in seeing revenge, justice or proper and adequate acknowledgement of the wrong. One might regard this as a form of relief: the sense that the wrong no longer has to be borne as a personal detriment (even if the effects of it do). The ongoing personal hurt of the wrong can be laid to rest.

So, in order to forgive, we have to be willing to forego that satisfaction and to retain within ourselves the ongoing personal hurt. In short, we have to choose not to try to 'export' the hurt back onto the wrongdoer but to bear and process the hurt ourselves.

Bearing the cost.

It is this bearing the hurt ourselves which I think is the key to re-imagining the Atonement. The hurt of the original detriment is compounded in the refusal to pass it on to another: the pain is held, experienced and processed by the one hurt rather than relieved by counter-mimesis.

Really this kind of forestalling of counter-mimesis can only be achieved by having a strong motivation to do so. Of course, I am thinking of love and at the moment I can't think of other motivations, except related ones, that would be sufficient to enable the forbearance necessary. it could be a variety of pathways of love that lead to such forbearance. 
It could be love of the perpetrator themself which stays the retributive move, as when a parent might bite back their telling off of their child recognising that redemptive purposes might be better served by different reactions; for love of the child and hope for their growth and potential, a constructive approach is called for. So their forbear to punish in the hope of repentance which might be made more difficult by punishment.

It could be love of someone who would be hurt collaterally by the retribution, for example withholding a consequence for someone for the sake of their children who would be unjustly hurt in some way by the retributive action.

It could be proper self-love -where the offender is not in a position to be confronted by a consequence of their offence (maybe they've died, or they are too far away physically or socially) or simply too inured by their own justifications (rightly or wrongly) for the wrong done). In such circumstances, to give up the counter-mimetic impetus is a way to mitigate the wrong and prevent it from continuing to make one a victim by poisoning ones inner life and relationships with bitterness, brooding or distracting thoughts and desires.

As I write those things , I note that I've not said anything about regret, remorse or repentance on the part of the offender. I do think that such things are significant in the processing of forgiveness and that in many cases forgiveness cannot take place in the sense of reconciliation without them. It is also the case that there are times when, in a fuller sense of the term, forgiveness should be withheld until there is some indication of repentance else collusion or enabling of continued wrongdoing is the likely result (co-dependancy?).

However, we should note that even where a fulsome apology, amends and repentance are in view, forgiveness still requires the 'gift' of remittance of the counter-mimetic dynamic. It may be easier but in many cases it is not significantly easier to let go and to forgive a penitent than an impenitent. It still costs us as witnessed by many people who have baulked at it. Repentance or not, forgiveness still requires of us to forgo the retributive impetus; it still costs, and that cost is what I'm trying to focus on.

Previous post. Next Post (probably the most key post in this series).

Posts in the series:

Posting 9 Analogy: human to divine and back again 
Posting 8 Eikonic forgiveness explored further

posting 7 The Eikon of forgiveness

posting 6 The cost of forgiving

posting 5 Counter mimesis

posting 4 Reacting to being wronged

posting 3 To know all is to forgive all?

posting 2 Forgiveness in human life

posting 1 Love and Anger

Retelling Atonement Forgiveness centred (5)

Reverse polarity mimesis.

More on being hurt and reacting to it.

From the prior post we have understood that when we are hurt, we react with anger. That anger is, at its best, a driver towards in some way righting a wrong. (At its worst it's simply vengeance and prejudice). Part of the reaction is about transferring our anger to the other by hurting back. The reaction to a wrong is a kind of reverse mimesis kicked off by a detriment. In 'regular' mimesis we take into ourselves and reproduce within ourselves something from outside of our inner world. Usually it is something that we encounter in people in our acquaintance circles. Usually desire drives and fastens the imitation.

Now this is my take, I've not found this particular theory or way of looking at either mimesis or reacting to wrong. So consider the the next bit 'experimental' and your reaction to its plausibility is part of testing it out. Also let me know if you've come across the like before. However, recall that it is an attempt to theorise something that happens, so if I've got it wrong, then then there still remains something to be explained -it would simply be that my way of explaining it would be misconceived.

I'm proposing that our mimetic drive is thrown into reverse in the case of our being personally harmed (that is taking a detriment which is transmitted through personal agency and with person-generated intentionality and meaning). Rather than desiring to add the mimetic target to ourselves, the fact that it hurts means we defend against it and we do so by trying to reproduce something of the hurt in the perpetrator/s. This probably relates to our sense of fairness (which seems to be deeply embedded in humans) which trades hurt for hurt.

So whatever forgiveness is, it involves dealing with this reverse-mimetic reaction to personal detriments which are felt to be unmerited or under-merited. Somehow or other, forgiveness undertakes to remove it, nullify it or take it out of play between us.

Previous post.  Next post.

Posts in the series:

Posting 9 Analogy: human to divine and back again 
Posting 8 Eikonic forgiveness explored further

posting 7 The Eikon of forgiveness

posting 6 The cost of forgiving

posting 5 Counter mimesis

posting 4 Reacting to being wronged

posting 3 To know all is to forgive all?

posting 2 Forgiveness in human life

posting 1 Love and Anger

Retelling Atonement Forgiveness-centred (4)

Reacting to being wronged.

To forgive involves wrestling with our own reactions to being wronged. As we've seen in previous posts, being wronged involves more than simply having something bad happen to us but a moral agency -another being with understanding and choice- either deliberately inflicting some kind of detriment on us or hurting us through a negligence which could be regarded as a failure to take proper forethought or care in carrying something out. Perhaps the phrase 'sinned against' captures much of that.

So, someone hurts us, whether with malice aforethought or negligently, our reaction is of personal affront: someone has hurt us, it is not accidental and we have no reason to dismiss the person as outside (perhaps 'beneath') our concern about what they might think of us. That hurts emotionally and produces an emotional reaction in us usually one to push away the cause of the hurt: it is to defend us by securing our personal boundaries and/or by removing the source of the hurt in some way. In turn this often becomes anger. This anger may be at the perceived injustice of the detriment to us: we haven't deserved it, or it is out of all proportion if we have in some way deserved something of it; we have been disrespected; we have been misunderstood or misrepresented explicitly or by implication (and therefore have not deserved the treatment we have received).

Having started to push away the hurt by focussing on its undeservedness (and so we don't have to take it to heart in the way we would if it were thought to be deserved), we may focus on the agent/s of the hurt. Their blameworthiness enables us to push away the hurt to some degree: if they are unfair, negligent or misinformed, then we are 'okay'. The implication is that  if they are 'okay' in this matter, then we are not; we have entered into a zero-sum game. Our anger tends either towards changing the person who hurt us or even towards eliminating them. Either of these ends might be served by punishment which could be redemptive or restorative or on the other hand simply retributive.

It is worth noting that perceptions of degrees of malice or negligence play an important role in the reaction. So also perceptions of the relative 'value' of the hurt in our lives; whether it is serious for us or relatively minor. This may be related also to our valuing of the perpetrator of the hurt: if they are important to us the hurt is likely to be greater or to matter more.

Does this relate to love?

In what has just been set down, there is little mention of love. We noted in earlier posts that anger is related to love. So how does that fit here? I would suggest that there are a handful of connections: one to do with proper self-love; another to do with the perceived lack of loving by the perpetrator/s; and still another to do with the love of the perpetrator.

Anger and proper self-love

Loving our neighbours as ourselves implies that loving ourselves is at least taken as read and further that it is possible to love ourselves in such a way that doesn't prevent loving God and neighbour appropriately. this is proper self love and I would suggest that it a non-competitive desire to look after ourselves and acting to take care of ourselves is not of itself a bad thing, we would expect that in certain matters and in ways that acknowledge that others and God have legitimate claims upon us we would do so. in fact such self-care is part of caring for others: not being a burden on others. As is making sure that we are fit to play our part in caring for others and taking our part in the Missio Dei is proper self love. It is also legitimate for us to regard ourselves as capable of being sinned against and that those who might disrespect us or harm us as sinning. Such sinning against us is something we might in some circumstances even challenge for the sake of not setting a precedent which would harm others or even for the sake of challenging, in effect, the perpetrator to repent.

I would see the act of turning the other cheek to be an instance of the latter. If Walter Wink is right (and I think he was), then the presentation of the left check (having been backhanded on the right cheek) would represent an invitation to the perpetrator to repent of a semiotic of superiority and to give the blow representing an equality between perpetrator and 'victim'.

Thus is it possible that we might be rightly angry out of a proper self-love when we are disrespected, treated unjustly or derogated. Of course, given our fallenness, it is quite possible and likely that such anger may actually flow from improper self love rooted in pride, disinformation or confirmation bias against certain people or classes of people. But evil is never original and always twists good and is rooted in more fundamental goodnesses.

We might recall by contrast that self-loathing is also not right: it is regard ourselves in a way radically differently to the way that God regards us, it is to become a burden on others and it means not finding in ourselves analogues by which to understand how to love others.

Here the matter we looked at in earlier posts should be recalled: if we are not angry about the mistreatment of one who is loved, then we probably don't really love; we are in fact indifferent to them.

The failure to love by perpetrators

In this case anger is a reaction to negligence: the failure to give proper regard to the consequences of actions or inactions so that people are harmed or disrespected collaterally. This is a failure to love neighbour who is 'owed' the respect of being considered. When we love others we consider how our actions (or inactions) might have impact on them. Not to do so is to declare, in effect, that we do not regard them as worthy of our attention or respect. The reaction to this is rightly that other human beings (including ourselves) are worthy of consideration. As a Christian I would frame this worthiness of consideration as being grounded in human beings being made in God's image and objects of God's love (which has a further implication we shall look at later).

The disrespect of insufficient regard likewise should generate a degree of anger because we care. And in caring we desire the good of the one loved and the righting of the wrong.

Love of the 'enemy'

'Enemy' is in inverted commas because it's a way of naming 'perpetrator' in a way that connects our relationship with perpetrators of wrong with Jesus' teaching about loving enemies. It is recognising that we can be angry with a perpetrator for the sake of their own greater good: in doing wrong, the perpetrator is marring God's image, acting as less than they are called to be and harming themselves in more ultimate terms. it is right for us us be angry at such things, even where self-inflicted. 

The hurts of others?

Some forgiving involves how we respond to the hurt of others. Usually these others are those with whom we identify and that is mostly 'our loved ones', though it's worth noticing that loved ones can include those admired from afar like artists, performers, sport-players and others. When these others are harmed, we become angry. Our identification with them generates in us analogous senses of outrage and protectiveness to when we our directly threatened ourselves. Such anger can be assuaged by things being put right with the 'victim' which further demonstrates the reality of the identification and of the love.


Prior post in this series. Next post in series.

Posts in the series:
Posting 9 Analogy: human to divine and back again 
Posting 8 Eikonic forgiveness explored further

posting 7 The Eikon of forgiveness

posting 6 The cost of forgiving

posting 5 Counter mimesis

posting 4 Reacting to being wronged

posting 3 To know all is to forgive all?

posting 2 Forgiveness in human life

posting 1 Love and Anger

Retelling Atonement forgiveness-centred (3)

To know all is to forgive all?

This proverb makes sense best when 'forgive' is understood as 'excuse' and it has the strength of alerting us to the frequent mismatch between the number of occasions in which we take personal offence and the number of occasions in which personal offence is not really justified. That is to say that many of us assume or presume much of the time that some wrong done to us is deliberately, perhaps even spitefully, meant or some kind of blameworthy negligence. The proverb alerts us to the possibility that much of the damage and hurt we do to one another is actually not really 'personal' at all in the sense of malice or inconsiderateness. It recognises that many people act out of limited knowledge, habits of mind and action and even from out of their own damaged-ness and compulsions which are not necessarily under their 'personal' control. In such circumstances they are not truly blameworthy and so are excusable. If forgiveness is most truly about putting aside personal affront which responds to the malice or inconsiderateness of others, then to know all is to discover there is nothing to forgive.

However, the proverb is probably too optimistic: there are occasions when malice and blameworthy negligence are key factors in hurts we sustain in our personal interactions with others. And so while we might be able to say “To know all is to excuse much” we might also have to say “To know all is to understand what truly needs forgiveness”. In putting it that way I'm indicating that I think that that, once all the excuses are made and due weight given to mitigating factors, such as ignorance, irresistible compulsions or cultural relativity,  there is likely to remain a residue at least of blameworthy acts or planning of culpable acts which cannot be excused and for which we are truly responsible to some degree. It is these that concern forgiveness. My own suspicion is that these are less frequent or common than some theologies would lead us to suspect. On the other hand 'responsible to some degree' might mean that there are more than more 'optimistic'  or relativistic anthropologies might suggest which, as per the proverb in the heading, could well suggest that there are very few or none.

One of the areas where I want, at a later point, to probe further in relation to culpability, is that relating to socialised wrong-doing, in particular in relation to our participation in organisations -corporisations- which subsume us to varying degrees in their own emergent agency. The question that these pose is how far do they subsume our individual agency, and how far are we responsible for their ill-deeds and to what extent are we excusable or even victims of them?

So this piece on excusing should help us to approach forgiving more properly starting in the next post.

Prior post here. Next post here ...

Posts in the series:

Posting 9 Analogy: human to divine and back again 
Posting 8 Eikonic forgiveness explored further

posting 7 The Eikon of forgiveness

posting 6 The cost of forgiving

posting 5 Counter mimesis

posting 4 Reacting to being wronged

posting 3 To know all is to forgive all?

posting 2 Forgiveness in human life

posting 1 Love and Anger

Retelling Atonement forgiveness-centred (2)

In this post (prior one here) it's time to consider how forgiveness tends to work (or not) in human relationships and in particular to pay attention to the way that love and anger are involved.

Forgiveness in human life

In looking at some of the stories on the Forgiveness Project website, one of the things that became clear to me is that 'forgiving' covers a range of things in everyday language. In some cases people use the term to speak about putting aside differences, in others it can be about accepting in good faith what they have come to believe is someone's 'honest mistake' and recognising that no ill-will lay behind the act. Sometimes it seems to be mostly about recognising a shared humanity and ones own frailty and prone-ness to err as much as the one being forgiven. And sometimes it is a costly putting aside of hurt and anger and a refusal to allow such woundedness to continue to define a life or attitudes.

With CS Lewis, I would say that forgiveness proper is about putting aside a righteous anger and that we should be wary of mere excusing which is actually about finding that there is actually nothing to forgive. That said, excusing, finding common humanity, awakening to humility, reframing ones sense of proportionality are all clearly, from the stories on the Forgiveness Project website as well as the simple experience of listening to people in the struggle to forgive, are all part of dealing with our own inner sticking points on the way to forgiveness. Sometimes we have to clear away closely related issues and emotions in order to face the central task of forgiveness. Sometimes doing that clearing away makes the central task easier and reframes it in such a way as to diminish the struggle, perhaps considerably. Sometimes it simply makes clearer the next part of the struggle.

The central task, then, is about the putting aside of anger and its alienation, but that needs putting in context to grasp more fully the various dimensions involved. We'll do that by considering more carefully in relation to human actualities.

Forgiving in life

Perhaps it would be well to start by asking why there is a need to forgive at all; what is it about human life that raises the issue of forgiving? When our family had a dog, I would sometimes do something accidentally that caused pain to the dog. My automatic reaction was to say sorry but then to chide myself because the dog couldn't understand 'sorry'. What was more effective was making a little bit of a fuss of him to reassure that I was still well-disposed towards him and to try to say that the pain was not any fault of his. I was also conscious that he didn't seem afterwards to carry any resentment, or any apparent need to re-establish a good relationship: the incident was forgotten as far as I could tell and in a sense, perhaps, 'forgiven'.

In mentioning that human-canine interaction I have in mind by implication a contrast or at least comparison with human interpersonal transactions. As more fully meaning-making creatures with a marked interest in reading the attitudes and intentions of others, we tend to add further layers to an incident where one may inflict pain on the other. We interpret the intentions and 'messages' of the hurt using contextual clues, subsequent actions and/or memories of prior 'transactions' with our conversation partner. So, for example, if I step on my friend's toe, she may take stock of several things to understand what I might have 'meant' by it -or at least what it might mean.

My friend might note contextual clues. Different clues might tell different stories about the meaning of my stepping on her toe. If we've been ballroom-dancing together she may have in mind two hypotheses: one being that I've mis-stepped and her foot was in the way, that is it was an accident, a mistake, a clumsiness on my part. Another hypothesis could be that I did it deliberately. The latter hypothesis might be considered to be confirmed if she saw a smirk on my face and/or we had just been talking about how I never stepped on toes. That might be interpreted as deliberate and probably playful on my part.

My friend might weigh subsequent events. If I said sorry it would be taken as a sign of the accidental nature of the incident -unless my tone of voice was sarcastic or in some other way appeared to be insincere. Alternatively, if I went on to collapse onto the floor, my friend would probably assume that my treading on her toe was a first sign of my seizure or my loss of balance. Though it could be read as an inadvertent accompaniment to a piece of clowning on my part, particularly if I bounced straight up and said “Ta da!”. Though in the latter case it would probably be read not as a simple accident but as misadventure for which I would be somewhat blameworthy because of attempting a risky manoeuvre.

My friend could call to mind incidents from the history of our interactions. She might recall I had done this a lot but normally, apparently, not deliberately and so her first thought is likely to be that this is yet another example of my clumsiness. On the other hand she might recall that we had recently quarrelled about my clumsiness and suspect that I had sought revenge for a perceived slight by doing deliberately what she had commented on as clumsiness.

What these interpretive cameos begin to show is that our understanding of what happens to us plays a key role in our response to them and especially when other human agencies are involved and we try to read the intent in mind behind the action. What is implicit in the cameos is that it makes a difference whether we perceive someone's action to be deliberate or with some degree of intention. And if with intention, whether that intention is malign, careless or relatively benign.

If the action is not deliberate, we may not be pleased but we tend to excuse it and our anger is diffused. Sometimes we might perceive the actions of others as careless and feel some degree of affront that the potential for harm or slight to us was not given sufficient weight. In such a case we will tend to be angry but recognise that there may not have been bad intentions behind it or that even there may have been good intentions. In such cases we may relatively readily put the incident behind us.

At other times we will suspect or even know that the other person hurt us deliberately. At such times it is much harder to put the incident behind us: the personal detriment weighs as heavily or even more heavily in the hurt taken. That is to say the fact that person-to-person ill-will is involved and that harm was intended adds a further dimension to the matter. As the advert for at least one film has it “... and this time it's personal”, meaning that the matter is of holding someone personally to account for a wrong done to a particular person (the chief protagonist of the film in this case) and of feeling the need to find some recompense or even revenge. Yes, it is a matter of perceived justice but it is personally felt and not some impersonal or abstract principle.

We should remember that our justice systems are arguably not really there first of all to administer impersonal justice but to stop personal justice being administered because 'personal justice' has a much greater tendency to become revenge and to overstep the bounds of proportionality and so to fuel cycles of violence. They stop personal justice by substituting impersonal, 'blind' justice in a similar way to how bureaucratic systems attempt to stall prejudicial procedures, bribery and croneyism in corporate life. I would like to put down a rhetorical marker at this point to note that modelling a theory of Divine Atonement on a deliberately-impersonal model may be less than satisfactory -forgive the pun.

Next post here...

Posts in the series:

Posting 9 Analogy: human to divine and back again 
Posting 8 Eikonic forgiveness explored further

posting 7 The Eikon of forgiveness

posting 6 The cost of forgiving

posting 5 Counter mimesis

posting 4 Reacting to being wronged

posting 3 To know all is to forgive all?

posting 2 Forgiveness in human life

posting 1 Love and Anger

Divine liturgy and culture

I'm intrigued by this pieces about the 'choreography of the Orthodox Litiurgy because it skirts aoround the issues but raises implicitly the questions we all wrestle with about the relationship of cultural context to meanings when Christains meet together with a tradition having roots in a different culture (even if a temporal difference more than a social or geographical one)

"Where the aesthetic significance and meaning of the ritual was largely understood  innately by the  faithful in  more traditionally Orthodox societies, this intuitive understanding is now lost. Most of the faithful do not understand much of the symbolism behind the art and action of the Liturgy. The aesthetics of the Divine Liturgy are now understood only by a small specialized group. Because there is a lack of innate understanding, much of the beauty is either missed or misinterpreted by the faithful. Many either vehemently insist on the purity of the ritual without understanding its meaning simply because it has always been done that way, while others too easily discard or replace powerful elements and gestures because they also do not understand its significance (Vas Avramidis) "

In actual fact this situation is not so different in principle from catholic ceremonial in the west. Much of that is rooted in symbolism which was presumably 'innately' understood in the late classical and early medieval world. But 'innate' is the wrong word if we think that means it is somehow the 'body language' is not learned but instinctual: it's all cultured and that means it can and does change. One sign of change is that something that people 'just got' now needs to be explained.

I think Thomas Cranmer's principle that liturgical language should be "understanded of the people" should be considered to apply to the body language of corporate meeting, the gestural praying relating to readings, intercession, confession, collection of money, setting table, preparatory actions, handling bread, wine and their associated vessels: in short ceremonial. This is a language in that it expresses and conveys meanings. However, if it fails to do the latter, it is likely that the body language it is using is no longer 'understanded of the people'.

So there are only two recourses open, logically, and the quoted passeg names them both: one is to teach people the language (corresponding to 'learning 'em Latin' to be able to take in the mass) the other is to 'translate' the body language into forms of gestural expression which draw on forms and habiti that readily make sense.

Actually, there is another possible response and that is to eschew body language in corporate prayer altogether. But I tend to discount this because, in fact, I don't think it ever happens. Some /many people think it does, that they don't do liturgy or ceremony. But in fact they do: there are always unstated 'rules' of organising meetings which are unnoticed. This means that either they seem obvious and 'natural' which probably indicates that they reflect the everyday out-of-church culture of the church members or that they have been tacitly socialised into the ecclesiastical language of space and gesture without realising it. So, in actuality, we're still left with the two choices previously mentioned.

As someone who believes that the Christian faith is wholistic; a body-mind-spirit thing, I would counsel that we recognise that we can't avoid using a language of body, space, artefact and gesture and so we should reflect on what we want to express when we pray together, how our wider culture tends to express such things and put the two together.

Retelling Atonement forgiveness-centred (1)

nullIn this first post in this area I want to consider mostly
Love and anger.
I've been long reflecting on models of the atonement. At college, before ordination, I did a study -complete with pilot study of Evangelical church members- of how people became Christians with aparticular interest in whether a sense of guilt and forgiveness was an important aspect (basically, 'no' except for a minority ). So, in respect of PSA (penal substitutionary atonement) I found Scot McKnight's article here Center of Atonement | Theology, News & Notes | Fuller helpful in sketching out some of the issues behind the PSA debate of late:

The Neo-Puritans believe that the most genuine, authentic experience of the gospel and personal salvation is to comprehend in a profoundly humiliating encounter with the utter holiness of God that a person is a wretched and vile sinner, and therefore also knows both that he or she deserves nothing but wrath and hell but has experienced, by the sheer grace of God, an elective salvation so that he or she has been welcomed into the arms of the Father through the Son’s propitiatory and reconciling work. (Their worship follows this pattern.) My contention is that penal substitution is required by the gospel of the Neo-Puritan. To question this is to question everything.

I tended to agree with the proposition that the Evangelical gospel seeks to answer a question few people in our society ask: 'how do I find deliverance from my guilt?'. So a lot of Evo preaching heads into the business of guilt arousal rather than finding ways to respond to the other questions being asked. And because for many Evangelicals, in fact, the existential dread of wrath and a guilty conscience is actually not a very prominent/real subjective experience, they don't actually 'tell' the PSA story that well or with much conviction. Indeed it tends to be mangled or scrimped and heard as, well, "cosmic child abuse". it is possible to articulate PSA with a degree of care to avoid that charge (as, I think, Jim Packer did and a helpful example ofwhich is set out here) -but then you have to be prepared to talk Trinity -and that may not be helpful in an evangelistic situation with limited time. The other effect is to pretty much put a wrathful idea/image of God centre-stage which actually works in popular imagination against the one of the primary attractions of a Christian theology that God is love.

Most people see wrath and love as mutually exclusive; and so that needs looking at. Most people don't really understand forgiveness. These dysunderstandings are linked. And the real challenge is to tell the Cross story in a way that holds love central, puts wrath into a congruent perspective and clarifies forgiveness. Anything else is going to miss the mark -NT-theological pun intended.

So I want to sketch out such an approach. It is a kind of 'practical theology' account in that it starts with a consideration of human forgiving and supposes that analogies to divine forgiveness are possible (else why let 'forgiveness' figure so highly and frequently as a concept in Scripture?).  To get some better idea of the human dynamics you might want to look at the 2004 posts I made under the 'forgiveness' tag. in those posts you will see me trying to uncover the psychological dynamics of forgiveness and hints of how this might relate to God's forgiving. In this latter respect, a  more recent post commenting on what I think is a Barthian approach may show something of the genealogy of my thinking.

I am taking it, too, that forensically-centred, cosmic-battle or exemplary approaches may not claim any last words -as McKnight argues in the linked article.

Love and anger: closer than we often think
I want to start with love then anger then forgiving and being forgiven. God is love, and many reckon that anger has no part to play in our thinking about relating to God because love and anger are conceived to be mutually exclusive. However, as I learnt from CS Lewis, we should remember what love is and involves. In my experience love can be a driver of anger. Lest that sound too oxymoronic, let's notice that in fact most people would actually think there was something wrong with a parent who did not get indignant (and I think that is a form of anger) or even outraged if their child is mistreated, bullied, or discriminated against. That anger is born of love for the child. The anger is directed to challenging and righting or at least mitigating the wrong being done to the child. I note, with interest a recent editorial in the Guardian that seems to point in the same direction: outrage and indignation arise from caring about the good.

However, that is not holding the two emotions towards the same person simultaneously, so the illusion of the incompatibility of love and wrath could be maintained. Maintained, that is, until we consider the matter more fully still. Perhaps the child is being bullied by her brother, who is just as cherished as his sister. Does the parent fail to be angry about the wrong because the perpetrator is loved? No. The parent is cross, and cross with the brother yet the brother remains loved. JM Barrie's Tinkerbelle was said not to be able to have two emotions at once on account of being so small. We being bigger can. And God being, in a sense, bigger yet certainly can have both 'emotions' at once and do so in relation to millions and billions. Even so we should note that the two emotions are actually not so different but share a commonality: without love, there would be no anger. Without anger, we doubt the depth of the love.

So the first thing to notice is that love generates anger when the beloved is harmed. That anger is directed to rectifying the harm, the wrong. In so doing it can be directed to the wrongdoer (especially where the wrongdoer identifies with the wrongdoing).

The second thing to notice is that the anger doesn't nullify the love and that we (and God who is ever greater) can both love and be angry with a beloved (I note that I can't find a simple transitive verb for 'be angry at' ...).

Let's note too, that it doesn't necessarily require that someone else be involved. We parents can be cross-out-of-love with children who harm themselves or even just put themselves in harm's way. Witness the parent who rescues a child from running in front of a moving car -quite often relief competes with anger and the child may be scolded as well as hugged.

So, I argue, God-who-loves-us is enraged-out-of-love for us when we harm ourselves or harm others whom he loves. And this love-born-anger is about the desire for the best, the welfare of the beloved and the love-born-drive to right the wrongs involved.

In brief, this means that if we think that it is great that God is Love, then we have to be prepared that such love has to be outraged by the wrongs done to the beloved. If it is not so outraged, then it is not love: it is indifference, or apathy, but not love. We should also frame this consideration globally: God loves everyone. So when I wrong someone else, I am wronging someone whom God loves. When someone wrongs me, they are wronging someone whom God loves. When I harm myself or even just fail to be my best, I am wronging someone whom God loves.

None of this is to say that what I've just presented exhausts what human anger is about. I've presented anger in a more noble form. It is of course possible to find human anger that is not rooted in a virtuous or godly love for others. It can be irritableness -or worse- at being inconvenienced or slighted or pouting about such perceived mistreatments of ourselves (or sometimes significant others). In a few words, it can be selfish or narrow-minded or 'petty'. But before moving on from that observation, let's notice that even these instances are still the same dynamic as the more noble version we first considered, it's just that they are based in less noble motives. It's not so much that the anger is wrong, but that the 'wrong' it seeks to right is not really wrong or it is selfish or petty or unworthy.

The  interesting and important thing even here is that the dynamic is nevertheless basically the same. A wrong is done to someone (or something) that we hold in our affection or esteem -it may even be ourselves. We react out of love for whatever-it-is with a desire to right the perceived 'wrong': a desire that carries a surge of energy to take down/away the wrong and wrongdoer/s. The main problem is that the wrong may not be really wrong or disproprotionate or even misperceived. With regard to that latter: most of us have probably known times when we have been cross about a wrong done to us or to others, an injustice. Only to find that anger deflate as we discover that in fact it was not wrong or unjust; we'd got wrong what was happening, misinterpreted and so misapplied our anger. It is not so much the anger that is wrong as the misjudgement, lack of charity, quickness to think ill or whatever other lack of charitable disposition. It is most fundamentally about truth and humility.

And this is part of the problem for PSA. It tends to sound as if it is portraying God as displaying an anger that is rooted in  taking umbridge at a slight to his honour or that his rather arbitrary rules have been ignored or flouted. It is not seen as related to noble love but something rather petty. God should just 'get over it' is the thought that lurks so easily as a next step from that perception.

In subsequent posts I hope to take the argument further in the following sorts of ways:

What's this got to do with forgiveness?
To answer this we need to consider, first of all, a working definition of forgiveness. We then have to relate it to what we've noticed previously about love-born-anger and love itself. And we should note at the outset of this bit of enquiry that there is much misunderstanding of forgiveness around -just as there is about love and anger.

Can this apply to God in relation to humans?
God-talk is inescapably analogical. The question is how far and how truthy is the the analogy?

Next post in series...

Posts in the series:

Posting 9 Analogy: human to divine and back again 
Posting 8 Eikonic forgiveness explored further

posting 7 The Eikon of forgiveness

posting 6 The cost of forgiving

posting 5 Counter mimesis

posting 4 Reacting to being wronged

posting 3 To know all is to forgive all?

posting 2 Forgiveness in human life

posting 1 Love and Anger