Ultimate Rest -a review.

 A number of years ago I had a sea-change in my way of receiving communion and recently one of my colleagues in ministry confided that they had undergone a similar change. It was a move to recognising that it was all about the gift, about God's grace and allowing God in Christ to bless us. Previously he and I had been schooled in a free church sort of tradition that had the effect of making it all about our remembrance and somehow we'd imbibed the notion that we had to make it effective by having the right sorts of holy thoughts as we chewed and sipped. 

It seems to me that this approach is very consonant with what David Hewitt is exploring in this book: the change in posture from striving to receiving and resting.

The subtitle is 'The Essence of the Beautiful Gospel" and that is a helpful description. The beautiful gospel is that in Christ God as done everything to bring us into the divine life and so we rest in what God has done. As I read, the old song  'Do not strive' kept coming into my head. This book is an extended meditation and exploration of entering into God's Rest. It was good to be reminded latterly in the book that "if the version of the gospel you have heard doesn't sound to you like good news, then you've not heard the gospel". And I also found it helpful to be reminded that "the gospel has often been presented as a proposition, when in fact it is an announcement." I think that definitely bears reflecting on further.

The exploration and reflection takes us through various biblical passages and this is a strength of the book -that it is scripturally based but in a way that is not picking at minutiae but pulling out a major theme. I felt the approach to the early chapters of Genesis was helpful by focusing on the spiritual dynamics as they relate to contemporary readers which must surely be the right sort of approach.

I was intrigued by a reflection on the word 'insouciance'. David takes it positively as a state of mind of being unperterbed. This challenged me as my associations for the term are drawn from Peter Pan where the insouciance of youth is more focused on a sense of not caring about others.

I found the contemporising of Philippians 4:7 quite helpful too. 'Talk through everything at the beginning of the day or before things happen. And (if you cannot understand it all) be thankful for what you can see God is doing. God's peace becomes the hallmark of the day.' (Though I think that some of the meaning of the preceding verses is carried over into that rendering. The single verse goes like this: "And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."). I felt that this was a useful peace of advice.

I think that this is a book to be read a chapter at a time and reflected on rather than read all the way through. As a reviewer I was asked to turn around the review in a month. I think I'd have liked to be able to take longer in order to really let some of the thoughts sink in before feeling I had to move one

I have to confess that I enjoyed too that this is a book written from a British context (Scottish to be more precise though he was brought up not far from where I was brought up in the English midlands) rather than north American. Not that I have anything against the latter but it was just nice to see something by a fellow Brit. I enjoyed too that the theological underpinnings of this mentioned names like the Torrance brothers and Karl Barth. Welcome too was the inclusion of insights by Julian of Norwich. There are a lot of quotes also from John Crowder.

I liked too that there are appendices with a practical slant and that these have been written by other people. I commend the collegiate approach especially in a book that has clearly been written from a community base.

I've also got some homework to do following on from reading this. David uses a couple of English language Bibles which I'd not come across before and I felt that their renderings of the passages discussed were helpful in putting things across and opening out layers of meaning. These weren't the only versons; David seems happy to use a variety (ESV, The Message ...) choosing according to which seems best to convey the meanings that he's wanting to emphasise. One of them I need to look up is The Mirror the other is the Passion translation.

I think whan I wanted more of was ways to help me/us to rest in God in practical terms. Now the appendices do this and there are nuggets of this in the text. It probably says more about where I'm at with it, but I did have a sense of 'yes, I know this' but what I am looking for is things that will help me to interrupt those times when I move away from acting out of peace or rest, to recall me. I recognise there are no easy ways in this respect; knowing the truth and picking oneself up to start all over again is the most likely rhythm of learning in this.

One of the strangenesses in the e-text as I received it, was the occasional changing colour of the typeface. I read white on black text most of the time because I tend to be reading these in the evening and I'm resting my eyes somewhat. So the fact that paragraphs, seemingly randomly (sometimes a sentence or two in) became grey or blue was disconcerting and sometimes required me to alter the light levels to see clearly. I imagine this as an artefact of the preparation of the text for publication which probably didn't show up to a proofreader who would have been simply reading in a more conventional way dark type on a pale background.

 

Links related to this review:

Ultimate Rest on Bookshop

Ultimate Rest on the Rethinking God with Tacos Podcast

Ultimate Rest on the Eat Me, Drink Me Podcast

David Hewitt’s Website

#UltimateRest

 

Paul's Gospel may be stranger than you thought

This morning's reading got me thinking.

Galatians 1:11-12 For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

What struck me was that a revelation of Jesus Christ is said here to be the gospel. Now, cross-referencing to the accounts in Acts of Paul's vision of Christ on the Damascus road gives us an intriguing idea of what the gospel might be. Presumably it is this vision that Paul is referring to in this passage, so we need to be able to understand the word "gospel" in such as way as to include what happened with Paul on the Damascus road.

We get a bit more detail, in verses 15-16

But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased ¹⁶to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles

This reinforces the revelation of Christ to Paul aspect of the 'gospel' and adds explicitly a commissioning element. In terms of what we get to see in Acts, this pretty much seems to sum it up.

But let's have a quick look at the passages in question in Acts. First, Acts 9:3ff

...as [Paul] was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. 4 He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ 5 He asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ The reply came, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. 6 But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.’

It seems to me that the basic thing in that revelation-encounter was that Jesus is the Lord and that challenges, implicitly, Paul's course of action in persecuting the Lord's people. The story in Acts 22 is pretty much the same:

While I was on my way and approaching Damascus, about noon a great light from heaven suddenly shone about me.  I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”  I answered, “Who are you, Lord?” Then he said to me, “I am Jesus of Nazareth[b] whom you are persecuting.”  Now those who were with me saw the light but did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me. 

And a bit later in Acts 26 Paul gives more detail (verse 12ff):

I was travelling to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests, when at midday along the road, your Excellency, I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining around me and my companions. When we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It hurts you to kick against the goads.” I asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The Lord answered, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. But get up and stand on your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and testify to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you. I will rescue you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.

This version indicates a couple of further things. One is that Paul knew he was being spiritually goaded towards recognising Jesus as Lord. The other thing is the commissioning of Paul as, in effect, apostle to the gentiles.
I'm intrigued, however, to note that in none of these do we get the kind of gospel that many Christians nowadays would say was essential. There is no cross and resurrection, no explicit call to repentance and faith. There only seems to be an event that makes Paul realise that Jesus really is the Lord and a commission to serve and bear witness.

So, what I'm wrestling with now is how I feel about the idea that 'the gospel' might simply be an encounter with Christ that leads us to recognise Jesus as Lord. I guess that in context I can see that there are implications in the story of Paul's Damascus Road encounter -but in terms of proclamation it is interesting that these are implied contextually, not explicitly stated. The implications I see are the Lordship (deity?) of Christ, the life, death and resurrection of Christ, and the fulfilment of God's purposes in those things and the implication of 'repentance' as a new direction in life is taken up. But the centring of gospel in this instance on life-changing encounter with Christ seems to suggest that all those implications are more about helping people to come to, recognise and respond to the encounter.

Of course, there are also implications about the role of the Holy Spirit (the producer, presumably, of the goads in Paul's life).

I can sense that maybe I'm going to be returning to this later. But I'm thinking that this seems to foreground the idea of evangelism as initial spiritual direction which I've blogged about before (see the penultimate section in this article).

'via Blog this'

Christ-centred creation and prodigality

This excerpt from a talk by Tom Wright resonated with some things I've been thinking about in relation to the nature of creation centred in time and space on Christ. +Tom says:

... if creation comes through the kingdom bringing Jesus, we ought to expect it be like a seed growing secretly. That it would involve seed being sown in a prodigal fashion in which a lot went to waste, apparently, but other seed producing a great crop. We ought to expect that it be like a strange, slow process which might suddenly reach some kind of harvest. We ought to expect that it would involve some kind of overcoming of chaos. Above all, we ought to expect that it would be a work of utter, self-giving love. That the power which made the world, like the power which ultimately rescued the world, would be the power not of brute force, but of radical, outpoured generosity. We ought to expect, in other words, that the creation would not look like an oriental despot deciding to build a palace, and just throwing it up at speed, with his architects and builders cowering before him. 

What I find helpful in this is how our attention is drawn to the prodigality of it all. One of the minor objections from creationists is the wastefulness of the processes that the rest of us believe we discern in the geological records and other related evidences. Linking the debate in the way that +Tom does here; to the parable of the sown seed, helps see a kind of implicit endorsement in Jesus' own teaching of a prodigal creative process in which there is some 'hit and miss' element to it all. It kind of finds in creation a prodigality, which Jesus draws attention to and thereby endorses rather than questions. And while this doesn't add up to saying 'this is the meaning of the parable' it does take Jesus' acceptance of the wastefulness of both the creational type and the parabolic antitype as at least the possibility of seeing that generous endowment in which there is more and to spare as the way things are and develop.
I'm finding that really helpful to think further about.

Getting away from a salesforce approach to evangelism

 For much of the last 15 or 20 years, people like John Drane (but not only him -even I have noted it on this very blog: here, here and, for example, here ) have been saying that in the mission of calling disciples to Christ, the western church has been suffering from a credibility gap at the level of spirituality: for many spiritual seekers, Christians don't seem spiritual enough -there's no mysical dimension apparent. It seems that the RC church has now decided that this is probably correct.

 If the Church does not offer instruction in the spiritual life, believers will not give up their desire for it. Often they will seek it in a non-Christian setting, looking to New Age teachers or Far Eastern religions.

In fact, that quote talks about believers, but I suspect that the thrust of what is being said is that it applies to seekers too. Part of the issue, of course, is that it is Christians ourselves who need to be sensed to have a 'mystical' inner life  in order that seekers might infer that at the heart of our faith is a real encounter with a transcendent other.



Part of the report is also about (re)connecting this dimension of mission with the monastic dimension of church life, noting that such communities are resources for mission in this field.

We hope, too, that
monasteries in the West may regain their historical status as cultural
centers, places of pilgrimage and spiritual direction. Eastern
Christians are well equipped to help the West recover its heritage in
this regard.

It does all point, also, to encouraging and enabling ordinary Christians to value and develop this dimension of faith. I fear that many Evangelical churches, by making a primary goal of evangelism, are actually ending up forming a sales force rather than well-rounded people who have an attractive spirituality which would draw seekers 'naturally'. I note that there is actually little exhortation to share faith in the NT -mostly it happens because Christians' spirituality evokes curiosity and admiration (and the flip side: discomfort and anger by those invested in counter-gospel ways of life).



The problem is that there is a cultural resistance to sales and marketting at a personal level and that the framing, in effect, of the gospel as a product is inimical to the real message. We need to be taking a more oblique path in mission: forming communities of generous and lively spirituality who will be a 'hermeneutic of the gospel' (I think that phrase is owed to Lesslie Newbiggin)

Mysticism, Monasticism, and the New Evangelization | Catholic World Report - Global Church news and views:

A Click-Thru (sic) Culture?

This is a helpful observation from this article, TheOOZE beta | evolving spirituality. � A Click-Thru Culture (by Eric Wright):

"rushing toward the next thing without taking time to enjoy the beauty and presence of what is in front of us. We are looking for something to excite us, catch our attention, thrill us, or appeal to us all in the first 6 seconds! If we don’t find it we declare, “There is nothing here!” and we move on.
We have turned into a click-thru culture."

I think that the habitus that click-through encourages may well be as stated here. What I'm more troubled by is the way the author suggests we respond.
I’m no longer interested in catering to the click-thru crowd. They are a fickle and lazy

group; needy and selfish. So lately I have been asking a new question, “Who am I going to invest my time in?

”
My difficulty is that it seems to exemplify an approach that is unlike that which God takes towards humanity in Christ. While there may be some justification for investing ones time in those who are hungry and willing (that seems to me to be the way that significant chunks of Jesus' ministry are constructed), I'm concerned that effectively writing whole groves of people off a priori seems a bit more Flood than Incarnation. What I mean by that is that in the Flood the approach is to write off all but one family, whereas in the Incarnation the approach is to find a way to presence and communicate even amidst those who are 'yet sinners'. What this may mean for the "click-through crowd" would be to find ways to entice them, intrigue them and to encourage them to linger with images, ideas or whatever that may both help disclose something that leads Godward and to (re-)develop the habits of lingering, contemplating and spending time in slow reflection.

This is not a new problem: spiritual exercise writing and teaching down the ages is full of advice to help people make the same adjustment to reflection, meditation and contemplation. It's just the medium and influence that has changed. I fear that the author may have fallen prey to the old problem of thinking that modern life is throwing up unprecedented challenges. I tend to think that it throws up precedented challenges in new guises. Our task is not to decry the new guises but to spot the precedents and re-work tried and tested responses in appropriate ways, understanding the new and the old helpfully. I would hazard that we will rarely need to come up with a totally new tactic. I would also suggest, contrariwise to this article, that we should be wary of writing off whole and easily-identifiable populations: the gospel seems to me to suggest that there are likely to be receptive people in every group, our issue will be how to connect with them meaningfully.

Barack Obama affirms his Christian faith

It's interesting to see that Obama has decided to be fairly explicit about owning up to a Christian faith. No doubt that will please some, perplex others and enrage others. Pleased will be those, like myself, who think that Christian faith has a somewhat 'progressive' agenda in wanting to be pro-active in helping people. Perplexed will be those who really thought he was Muslim -hopefully this may help them to reappraise the sources of their information for accuracy. Enraged will be the right who will see an obstacle to their attempted hijacking of Christian values and language to serve the agenda of Empire.#

But I'm even more interested in this:

"It was Obama's involvement as a community organiser, 'working with pastors and laypeople, trying to heal the wounds of hurting neighbourhoods', that had first led him to see himself as a Christian."

Not least because it seems to affirm a way of disciple-making that coheres with Raymond Fung's Isaiah Vision and Anne Morisy's Beyond the Good Samaritan: that as we go about trying to make a difference for Good, people want to be a part of it. That's very like calling attention to God's desire for love, peace justice which is under construction in lives near you and inviting people to join in. Ie. "Repent for the Kingdom of God is near". Yes, it is near in works of service and generous empowerment, in lives making Good flow into the bloodstream of life among those least able to grasp it from the System.

Barack Obama affirms his Christianity | World news | The Guardian

on worshipping celebrities -or not

This is worth considering, not least because the 'meme' about idolising and worshipping stars and the media-touched is such a common-place that it is about time we looked at it again. And that's what this article does:
The Other Journal at Mars Hill Graduate School.

"The perplexing thing is that while commentators and the media talk about celebrity worship as a kind of religion, interviews with fans and indeed mourners generally reveal that most have no sense that what they are engaging in is “religious” and that they would reject entirely the idea that the figure they are celebrating is a god. So celebrity worship is ambiguous; it is a kind of religion."

This may, of course, be a reflex of the sense that religion is something very 'other' and formal and to do with obviously 'religious' rituals and actions. So the ability to see the 'heart-enthronment' as at least potentially idolatrous. There really is no understanding which would relate these admiring, imitative, loyal and formational attitudes to celebrity with 'spiritual' or religious themes in most people's minds. This is 'entertainment' not religion. This is a bit of fun, not spirituality.

The separation of spirituality/religion from ... well, other 'stuff' is complete.

But what is happening, really? Well perhaps there's a clue here:

Madonna was able to reveal herself because of the willing cooperation of the media. We know about her because it is hard not to know. Through her self-revelation, she became the product. She commodified intimacy.

The bringing together of something that could be accessed through the regular channels which touched the devices and desires of hearts through culturally relevant and attractive means.

celebrity offers a source for identity and belonging: they are a store of orientating reference points or possible ways of living (or not living). The significance of celebrity culture relates, therefore, directly to questions of identity and the complex interaction between media representations, and to the way that these influence are taken into individual and communal senses of the self.

So it comes down to the way that identification and identity construction takes place in our culture. However, the relation to authority is different from traditional religion as we have often known it -or is it? Is it just that the way that different socially-powerful institutions are able to 'capture' the narratives operating at a popular level? In this case, the media, fashion and entertainment institutions rather than churches, monasteries, courts or guilds. This would be analogous to the way that punk was captured by the media, fashion and entertainment institutions and commoditised. The medieval church institutions captured popular piety and devotion to saints and incorporated them in 'legitimate' Catholic Christianity. Today it is not the churches who seem able to do this but 'cultural industries'. But that's not to say that there aren't connection points to matters of positive theological concern.

There may be recurring notions of fall, redemption, salvation, and so on in celebrity culture, but this does not mean that they are equivalent to Christian doctrine or, indeed, that they replace Christian theology. I want to suggest, however, they are missiologically important. What I mean by this is that they form a part of the theological resources of our culture.

I want to suggest, then, that we want to pay attention to the themes of identity, definitions of good living in order to understand how we could connect with culture. So while we might want to read celebrity as an alternative religion,, that is likely to make our approach oppositional. It would be yet another variant of the knee-jerk Christian response that simply alienates without really properly understanding what is going on or what the consequences are likely to be.

Rather, by noting the issues that people are attempting to address and by observing and understanding how they 'use' celebrity to address them we can work out ways to address those issues in culturally resonant ways or to oppose them, as necessary, in strategic and telling ways.

This article is a contribution to that.

Vicar has 'horrifying' statue of crucifixion removed from church

Well, I had a double-take when I saw the middle of this article: Vicar has 'horrifying' statue of crucifixion removed from church | World news | guardian.co.uk. The words that caused the double take were these: "'The crucifix expressed suffering, torment, pain and anguish. It was a scary image, particularly for children. Parents didn't want to walk past it with their kids, because they found it so horrifying.

'It wasn't a suitable image for the outside of a church wanting to welcome worshippers. In fact, it was a real put-off.

'We're all about hope, encouragement and the joy of the Christian faith. We want to communicate good news, not bad news, so we need a more uplifting and inspiring symbol than execution on a cross.'"

My first reaction was something along the lines of 'but that's the point: that's what the cross is about'. But then it is also worth remembering that Christian symbolism, historically, was late in adopting the cross. It seems only to become fashionable after crucifixion was a regular feature of criminal 'justice'. This would have been, I guess, because of the reasons that the vicar in this case gave: it's a nasty and scary business. Remember the Ichthus symbol was one of the earliest Christian symbols. Remember too that most crosses are symbolic and tidied up compared with crucifixion.
Here's a picture (linked back to the BBC) of the 'offending' sculpture.

I guess it is a bit scary and if you are in a culture which, unlike the medieval, doesn't any longer 'get' the basic image and story, then it may not be the best place to start. Recall that Paul was mistaken once for proclaiming two Gods; Christ and Anastasia (Resurrection), maybe our iconography needs to be more liable to that mistaking than the horror movie version?

So while the Torygraph's commentator may have a point, he doesn't think it through far enough, methinks.

Science Fiction and the Areopagus

Useful little article this: InsideCatholic.com - Science Fiction and the Areopagus: It provides a few pointers at the end to authors, but highlights a reason for giving SF time and attention. From a Christian point of view, it may seem surprising to some, because I suspect that the image of scifi is of varieties of atheist fantasies. However,
"...the astonishing thing is that science fiction and fantasy are absolutely awash in theological speculation. Lots of it is pagan, in the Chestertonian sense. That is, it is an attempt to reach God through the imagination, hampered by the inability to conceive of something truly outside of the created world. The result is a sort of quasi-supernaturalism that acknowledges planes of existence beyond the human, but refuses to entertain the notion of angels and demons."
And the themes that many writers are working with are really important and sometimes a kind of analogical theology. Htt Greenflame.

Speech and the demonic

Now I'm still thinking about the substantive content on this post Demythologizing demons: however, this bit did get my attention as something to look at in due course with regard to the Homo Loquens Coram Deo project.
"Matt. 9:32-33 (cf. Luke 11:14):
While they were going out, a man who was demon-possessed and could not talk was brought to Jesus. And when the demon was driven out, the man who had been mute spoke.
The demon prevents this man from speaking—i.e., from communicating with others. Being incapable of dialogue is a distortion of human relationality, and hence a mark of creation’s bondage to sin. Jesus interrupts this bondage by bringing liberation to this man. The act of exorcism is thus the act of restoring this man to a world of right relations."
I'd broadly agree with this and I suspect that I want to link it to the stuff about the image of the communicative God I blogged about recently. But there is something too about language and full humanity; however, we need to be wary on that front to protect the rights and dignities of those with communicative difficulties. There are also connections here, I think, to corporate humanity ...
Just thinking out loud briefly so I can come back to this.

Violence and the gospel

309 The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Jesus


310 The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Jesus


312 The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Jesus

Thanks to Jon Birch

The Gospel whispers to J.K. Rowling

Interesting musings are going on ... "When C.S. Lewis started out to write The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he didn't have Christianity in mind. 'Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something abut Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tales as an instrument, then collect information about child psychology and decided what age group I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out 'allegories' to embody them,' Lewis once wrote. 'This is all pure moonshine. I couldn't write in that way at all. Everything began with images,' Lewis continued. 'A faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sled, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn't anything Christian about them. That element pushed itself in of its own accord.'
Something similar seems to have happened to J.K. Rowling. She began writing about wizards and quidditch and Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans, and somewhere along the way, Christ began to whisper into the story."
I think, myself that it's probably down to the kind of thing Lewis said about the way that Christ is echoed in pagan mythology; that the reality of the Christ event imprints on the whole of creation (okay so that's my take, but I think it's one that corresponds to Lewis'). That said, when someone writes, as Ms Rowling does, about love, good and evil and does so in truthful ways, there's no avoiding the Christ-echoes, they are indeed part of the deep magic of creation and nothing can avoid them that deals with real reality.
That's the big story. Not a metanarrative, I think; but (pace John Drane in 'What is the New Age saying to the Church?') it is a vital fulcrum of understanding that enables us to lever cultural weight for Good and break open forces of ill-ideology ...
The Gospel According to J.K. Rowling | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction:

Is Your Gospel Robust?

Another heart-lift for me as yet another moderately well-respected theologian (Scot McKnight, here) endorses a set of viewpoints that I put forward about 20 years ago in embryo in my final-year Dip Pastoral Studies dissertation

... the problems with this popular evangelical gospel include:
1. No one in the New Testament really preaches this gospel.
2. This gospel is about one thing: humans gaining access to God’s presence.
3. This gospel creates and individualist Christian life.
4. This gospel sets the tone for the entire evangelical movement.
5. This gospel leads to spiritual formation being entirely about “me and God.”
6. The evangelical gospel has created a need for evangelical monasteries.
7. The evangelical gospels turns the local church into a volunteer society that is unnecessary.
8. The evangelical gospel is rooted in Theism or Deism, but not the Trinity.

And I have to say it's heartening to see him making some recommendations that parallel mine, in another place. Not that my dissertation wasn't flawed, but some of the central concerns, however badly addressed in places, have proved to be of more lasting value for me and for others, it turns out.
"Is Your Gospel Robust? | Out of Ur | Following God's Call in a New World | Conversations hosted by the editors of Leadership journal:

Anger, reason and the Christ

A lot of Christians are vaguely disturbed by the anger of Christ, for example in clearing the Temple. It may often be due to a misunderstanding or more likely a subunderstanding of what anger is and what sin is. And now research on anger seems to suggest some further potential benefits of at least some anger in addition to giving us energy to right wrongs.
"The research found that, surprisingly, anger made participants more, rather than less, rational and analytical in their reactions. The current research, conclude the authors, suggests that angry people can and do process information analytically but are often influenced by more mental shortcuts. Although it is not always the case, anger-induced action is sometimes the result of quite clear-minded and deliberative processing."
So apply that the the cleansing of the Temple ...
ScienceDaily: Anger Can Make You More Rational, Not Less, According To Recent Studies:

Post Modern Ministry in the 21st Century

Thomas Hohstadt writes engagingly and often lays out the crux of the matter. You may like to ... "Take the following test to confirm where you stand. Select which statement in each group best describes your opinion. Then, at the end of the following five groups, we will discover the world in which you live and whether you are working with or against the Lord of History.

A. The Church will be ready for the future if it retains its vision of progress—if it continually improves what it is already doing.
B. The modern idea of progress is an illusion. The Church can no longer move into the future by simply improving itself.
C. Instead of focusing on the death of old thinking, we need to focus on the birth of a newly empowered and profoundly faithful way of thinking."
There are several other multichoice questions to follow. If you're 'on the ball' you'll probably unerringly pick the 'right' answers.!!!
Post Modern Christianity: The Future of the Church and Post Modern Ministry in the 21st Century:

Communication is about love

At the moment I'm really enjoying John Morehead's output. Here's one of the important issues he raises. It grabs my interest because of the confluence of communication and cultur.

As the reader clicks on the photos connected with this outreach we see several individuals from this ministry holding up signs that read "Muhammed Lied.com" as they stand outside a mosque in southern California with beaming smiles on their faces. ... Does anyone seriously think that Muslims will be favorably disposed to considering the message conveyed by these Christian communicators? What message might the Muslims infer from these signs? Can it in any way be viewed positively by Muslims? Is this an appropriate form of cross-cultural communication? And, do these evangelists intend on trying this approach in those parts of the world where Islam is dominant, such as Asia or the Middle East?

It seems to me that it illustrates a failure of a communicative strategy to embody love. Communication is about helping ones conversation partner to understand something. Love is about looking at things from the other's point of view, to some extent, and responding generously, compassionately and with the welfare of the other in mind. Loving communication, then, is about matching up what needs to be 'said' with the other's ability to understand and to take in what is at issue between us. In that perspective, John's questions are spot on.

I fear that the justification for behaving in this way is that Jesus was prepared to speak sharply and perhaps offensively to some Pharisees and Sadducees. I think that this is a hard case for what I have just outlined. Nevertheless, I am reluctant to think that I or anyone else has enough self-understanding and other-understanding in cases like the one above to say that we may simply and easily emulate Jesus in that matter. I believe that Jesus will have uttered those rebukes in love and because they were finely calculated to be the best hope of reaching those people who were, in any case, there physically before him in circumstances where dialogue had presumably been taking place (if I read aright he situation). It was not a contextless, semi-anonymous action action such as propogated by the group John mentions.

I may be reading this, actually I clearly am reading this, through the lenses of previous experience on both sides and an onlooker to similar kinds of actions by Christians. I note, from the comments, that the organisation concerned may not be acting in quite the way that this first appears. However the principles remain, and I am concerned that quite unloving, depersonalised /decontextualised communications are becoming too easily accepted by Christians. My imagining the biblical justification is drawn from personal dialogue with one such Christian who was a friend. So while it's possible that, in the end, these considerations don't apply fully to the situation John outlines, the principles, I think, still apply as a way of assessing whether it is an action that stands up to scrutiny from a Christian point of view.

I would be interested in think collegially some more about the way in which we appropriate this particular example of Christ... over to you, dear reader.
Morehead's Musings: Cross-Cultural Communication: What Can We Learn From an Extreme?

Technorati Tags: Christian, communication, love, gospels, witness, mission

Guilt-felt and the gospel

Steve Hollinghurst is right. Well, I have to say that of this post of his; it's pretty much what I wrote in 1986 as part of a college study on how people came to Christian faith. My suspicion was that, although we preached forgiveness of sins and freedom from guilt, what people actually responded to was not that. In the course of my investigations I came to the conclusion that most people in the west were not coming to faith out of a conviction of sinfulness and so with a real sense of wanting forgiveness. But the problem is that our Evangelical gospel is focused on this idea and so the instinct has been to begin to preach guilt arousal, to create a need for forgiveness which our formula can then be applied to. Rather than actually find out how the gospel might address contemporary concerns, we have opted instead for the advertisers' way of stimulating 'need' for our product. Of course, given what that is, we come over therefore as pretty negative and moralistic in a bad sort of way.

Steve puts it into cultural analytic mode as he writes,

the idea of conversion as an individual decision based on a personal guilty conscience as a true guide is deeply dependent on a modernist view of humanity. this view both views me as an individual and secondly as a positive individual who is, if I can truly connect with myself , an individual whose reason and reaction will indeed be true. What if actually my conscience is false? What if I feel no guilt for that which God might condemn me, or feel guilt for that of which I should feel none? what if taking that into account, and in today's world both those seem to be true, my guilt was not a product of a divinely guided conscience but a product of a lapsed Christendom in which me guilt was induced by past church experience and thus able to be revived by contemporary church preaching? ... OK most people do suffer feelings of guilt, but they are both often different from what Christianity suggests we ought to feel guilty about, and increasingly assuaged by the sentiment 'well I’m only human' which in modernity and especially post modernity is a perfectly good justification (I don't think it is as a Christian by the way). further to this, as the power of Christendom guilt wears off, the preaching of a gospel geared to it leads to a rejection of the gospel, either as a crutch for the weak and guilty, that is people worse than me, or as something that is moralizing and guilt inducing when no guilt is due. The gospel becomes either at best good news for the truly bad (i.e. only a few) or bad news full stop.

Steve's tentative suggestion is

Might the gospel that frees us from sin and death be the gospel that says, actually you can be like Jesus? Might preaching what we could become, rather than seeking to make us feel guilty for what we are, be not only 'good news' for today?

I think he's onto something in the sense that much searching today is about how to become more than we sense or fear ourselves to be. There's an amazing amount of stuff going on in our culture that is about aspiring to be more, to unlock our potential, to develop the godlike within us. Perhaps we should be less frightened of this and look more fully at the idea of divinisation not as a prequel to a deficit view of humanity so much as to inviting us to partner with God in the big-picture and find our place in a potential that is not bought at the expense of others but for the welfare of all ...

A couple of us at our church have recently begun to wonder what outreach would look like if we based it on the idea that a foretaste of heaven would be to help people to explore and discover things about themselves, positively, that liberate their creativity and expand their /our range of abilities. We like the idea of basing a Christian 'message' on human potential not being left solely to heaven to develop but to begin the project in the here-and-now. This came out of a feeling that heaven might be a place where the many possibilities we each have could be explored because there is clearly more to each of us than the opportunities of this life can allow; surely heaven must be a place where such exploration could go on, and on ...

On Earth as in Heaven: a guilty conscience?

Consuming Faith

Consuming Faith: I wonder whether some of my readers wonder where my concern about economic things like the last post comes from. Is this just political activism or is it really something to do with faith? Well, my perspective is fairly close to that in the referenced article written by Tom Beaudoin. So this is my pause for thought by way of comment on what I posted only a few minutes ago.

"when I turned back to scripture to see how Jesus of Nazareth dealt with economics, I was shocked at what I found. Jesus very seldom talks about God's final judgment, about 'heaven' and 'hell,' but when he does, as his way of talking about what is most important in a life of spiritual maturity before God, he does something interesting. He almost always talks about intimacy with God in the next life as bound up with one's economic relationships in this life. He speaks of a wealthy man who ignores a poor man at his gate finding himself later in hell, crying out to the poor man for help. He talks about those who use their resources of time and money to visit prisoners and clothe the naked as going on to a final happiness with God, and those who do not as having failed to love God and live a truly human life. Jesus was not focused on whom one is sleeping with, whether one has properly obeyed religious authorities, or how religious institutions can preserve themselves. He saw economic relationships as ultimate expressions of one's true faith"