USAican RW Christians misunderstand "socialism"

 The other day on Mastodon, I came across an article about left-wing politics and Jesus. It appears to have been written from a Christian-nationalism sort of perspective and, well it seems so far off: it's a straw-man misunderstanding coupled with prejudice.  I feel it deserves comment at least for my own interest. The first para is odd, really, an 'argument' that needs unpacking to see that it is more a pretext for a prejudice, I think. 

"One of the most bizarre arguments for “Jesus was a socialist” comes from people who say, “Jesus healed and fed people for free; therefore, He was a socialist.” When governments can feed people for free by multiplying loaves and fishes, heal people by touch or a word from a government agency, or raise people from the dead, then I’ll become a socialist. The thing of it is, people who want free college and free healthcare and politicians who promise such things believe that government is god and can turn stones into bread. Our nation’s motto is “In God We Trust” which means in practice “In Government We Trust.” As often as they try, governments can’t perform miracles."

There are several things going on in this. First, though, I think that I've not really come across Jesus offering 'free healthcare' as an argument for socialism in the way laid out there. The argument doesn't get made that way; the author is mischaracterising the thinking for the sake of dismissing a label. I think that perhaps the author has seen some people taking issue with right-wing perspectives which seem to argue that there's a Christian moral imperative not to have government providing things like healthcare for free. 

Some rhetorical responses do indeed suggest that the Jesus that right-wingers purport to follow did actually give this away for free at the point of need. It's not an argument for socialised healthcare when used like that, it's a device to indicate that the right winger has a potential incompatibility hidden in their presuppositions. It is to suggest that there may be more discussion to be had and that perhaps the right-winger has missed something about how the values they espouse might actually need more consideration. 

The actual arguments for socialism from a Christian value base lie elsewhere and are more widely drawn. So to dismiss 'socialism' this way fails to deal with the main arguments of Christian Socialists and contributes to a straw man approach which may make supporters feel like they are 'owing the libs' or something, but really fails to convince people who actually do hold the position.

There's also a practical theological issue about the matter of miracles and healthcare (or other things that a government might do). I think my concern about the gesture towards a position outlined in that blog post could be illustrated as a big contribution to problematising the position as stated.

I have known several Christian medical doctors and health workers during my life. They believe the healthcare they offer and the health improvements they bring about by their service and efforts are God's work. They consider that in some way they are continuing the healing work of Jesus albeit by normally non-miraculous means. They are using their God-given talents to bring about a life which is more abundant for those they treat. Is that not God's work? Or does only 'miraculous' healing count? The lack of 'miracle' (and what is that exactly?) to accomplish something does not mean it's not something that God wants. I think that feeding hungry people using logistics  to transport and distribute food from places that have enough to share is godly. I don't dismiss it as a Christian simply because it doesn't involve miraculous multiplication. I don't dismiss God's provision because the money arrives in a bank account as a result of a contract rather than from the mouth of a fish.

Assuming that we are happy to acknowledge that a medic's work, in broad terms at least, is God's work, then the next matter to consider is this. Is it good or not for them to seek to work in such a way that the poorest of their patients are able to access their help? Is it a bad thing for their care to be free at the point of access? Or are we going to be comfortable with situations where only the relatively rich can benefit from good healthcare? As a Christian I can't be comfortable with that latter situation. 

-And by the way that's not, strictly speaking, 'socialism' -many who are not socialist in parts of the world that have systems of healthcare that are free at the point of use nevertheless consider that it is right and proper to have free healthcare, right wingers included. In my own country, even right wingers make arguments about healthcare provision explicitly reassuring their audiences that they think it should be free at the point of delivery. They have even framed it as helping people to participate in the (capitalist) economy.

Back to that article: it is simply not true that people who think that healthcare, education etc should be free at the point of access, believe that the government is God. Nope. Never happens. I know no-one, not one single person, who does. 

Ironically, of course, it can appear that the kind of nationalism espoused by RWers seems to raise questions about idolatry -of nation. (And it's not enough to claim that a nation and its government are enacting God's agenda -because that's a claim that can be made, and has been made, for other nations and forms of government. It's only the start of a discussion not an end).

So what does drive many Christians toward 'socialist' approaches to thinking about public life and government policy?

Well for most it's rooted in considering the outworking of loving others as oneself, loving neighbour. Let's recall that such love is about willing and working towards the best for our neighbours. To be a bit more explicit: loving others as ourselves? -Well, on the whole, I exercise a degree of care towards myself by going to a medical appointment when something is 'up'. I therefore think that loving my neighbour as myself means making sure that they can do the same. (I vote accordingly and I lobby politicians and involve myself in political debate to try to retain that situation and to have it improve if possible; I see that as part of the outworking of Christian discipleship in pursuit of Christian values.) 

I note that this is still not 'socialism' but socialism is one of the political options that it is compatible with. However, a further consideration is a critique of capitalism. Let's say to start with that for Christians on the left, capitalism looks a lot like 'Mammon' and the 'love of money' -which 1 Timother 6:10 reminds us is "a root of all kinds of evil". Left-leaning Christians, then, on the basis of Jesus' and apostolic teaching are decidedly skeptical about letting what appears to be the idolatry of wealth be in the societal driving seat. It's hard to read James 2 and not feel that supporting making the rich richer and further impoverishing the poor is a major incompatibility with Christian discipleship and constitutes giving a pass to the moral hazard wealth clearly is in Christian teaching -don't forget James is merely expounding Jesus's warnings about wealth, selfishness and the value of each person including the poor and marginalised. 

Note also that James 4:1-6 seems to suggest that wealth is, in effect, stealing from the poor. It is the result of power relations that enable the haves to further extract value from the have-nots to their detriment. That passage implies that God considers that even the humblest in society are due the means to live dignified lives. Jesus's teaching and ministry indicate that the poorest are at the heart of God's concern (and incidentally, this fulfills the teaching of the Hebrew scriptures). To maintain an argument for the Christian-ness of capitalism, it has to be be convincingly argued that it both places the poorest and improving their lot at the heart of policy and concern across society and that there are effective and present ways to mitigate the moral hazard relating to wealth accumulation.

Coming back to James ... "Ah but...!" "Well, actually ..." Yes, yes: there is more to be said to close the gap between then and now and the circumstances in view. But let's note that the RW Christian perspectives often need similar further investigation and more careful extrapolation too. I'll not do that here and now. But I have written about related matters and will continue to do so. Suffice to say, for now, that I think that the most natural politics to come away from Jesus' teaching with is a politics that places improving the lot of the poorest at the heart and which is very skeptical about allowing greed and wealth accumulation to be in the driving seat of society. It also adds weight to the observation that 'trickle-down' economics doesn't seem to happen in practice. This is not only an observation of the last 40 years of western governmental policies, it is an observation of several thousand years.

The Great Open Dance -a review

 What grabbed my interest in looking at this book was a bit of promo blurb:

"The Great Open Dance offers a progressive Christian theology that endorses contemporary yearnings for environmental protection, economic justice, racial reconciliation, interreligious peace, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ celebration. Just as importantly, this book provides a theology of progress—an interpretation of Christian faith as ever-changing and ever-advancing into God’s imagination.

Particularly was the idea of developing a theology of progress. In part this relates to something I've been thinking about for a little while (for quick way in, see here). So, what do I make of it? 

Well, from my point of view, there's a lot to like. It's well thought through and careful in explaining. I enjoyed the systematic sort of engagement and the wide range of it. It may fluster some and I raised an inner-eyebrow at starting with an exploration of non-duality and doing so by considering Hindu and Buddhist philosophies. But it is actually a really helpful starting place. I just fear that it means that I'd have to be careful lending or recommending it to some people I know who, I think, would actually really benefit from reading it. -That goes for the under-argued-for universalism about two-thirds of the way through. This is a bit of a shame because I think that Snydor makes a really good case for a biblically faithful, ultimately orthodox re-framing of Christian faith in a way that resonates for the age we're entering. 

I'm excited to see someone wrestling with the implications of emergence and integrating that into discussions of Trinity. I think he does a good job of understanding the frame-space that orthodox teachings about the Trinity are seeking to place around consideration of the concepts and then showing how the 'third way' offered by emergence and non-duality properly understood, is a help in this.

There was an interesting discussion of slavery in the latter part of the book relating Christian attitudes to it to how scripture is handled. I think that this is a key point of reflection (as well as how the inerrantist doctrines are historically contingent and adrift of how Jesus and Paul used scripture). What gave me pause for thought was contrasting the experience and (Christian) response of Frederick Douglas to being enslaved vs the advice of the epistle of Peter. The former literally fought back against brutal dehumanisation, the latter appears to advise patient endurance of it as a salvific road. I thought it interesting that at this point we are not invited to consider Paul's letter to Philemon which seems to set an anti-slavery trajectory whilst being careful of the 'Overton window' of the time (arguably) which might have protected many Christian slaves in less unpleasant circumstances.

This is a stepping stone in the argument towards apparently espousing, at one point, an approach to scripture which, to be frank, I suspect Luther would have characterised as 'a wax nose'. And it felt rather dissonant with the way that Snydor actually uses scripture up to that point. I do agree with a lot of what he says up to that point, but I do feel that some safeguarding of the approach, methodologically, against wax-nosing would have been good. Though, perhaps that's not entirely fair: the main argument is that agapic interpretation should be the keynote -I agree. And by contrast, again I agree, noting that inerrantists also have a canon within a canon -despite protestations to the contrary. There is a brief run through of examples of inconsistency of approach. In practice, most of them also don't propose or support slavery (though Snydor mentions that some, in fact, do think it might be okay) and I'd suggest that a consideration of why most of them would decry slavery today would be worthwhile. And indeed, what kind of hermeneutics would underlie that?

I did like the spirit of the final words of the book:

When this book is forgotten, which it will be, I pray that it will be forgotten because it has been replaced by more loving theologies that are more faithful to our loving God. These theologies will correct every accidental offense I have committed due to my own immersion in a specific place at a specific time with a specific set of blinders. For those theologies, and for their eventual appearance, I thank God, who is forever leading us into the reign of love.

As a final offering, here are some more quotes I particularly liked.

historians report that church leaders have always worried about church decline, church membership has always fluctuated wildly, and attendance has always been spotty. Today is no different

a third of young adults complain, “Christians are too confident they know all the answers.” 9 Increasingly, people want church to be a safe place for spiritual conversation, not imposed dogma, and they want faith to be a sanctuary, not a fortress 

pluralistic nondualism, the belief that reality is composed of real difference harmonized into perfect unity. ... pluralistic nondualism differs from monistic nondualism, which argues that ultimate reality is absolute homogeneity without difference. ... In our view, nondualism means indivisibly united yet internally distinguished. Nondualism discerns the unity in difference that underlies all things. ... perennial philosophy erases difference. If all religions are basically the same, then differences in thought, feeling, and practice are irrelevant. Nondualism, by contrast, finds wealth in difference.... Ramanuja’s personalist panentheism, in which God is a full- fledged person, better serves Christian faith than impersonalist Platonic idealism,... If nondualism is a fundamental ontology of relation, in which the one and the many are perfectly harmonized, then the Christian Trinity is a form of nondualism. That is, the Trinity is not either three or one. The Trinity is both three and one.

Given Christ’s revelation of God as agape, the Christian tradition must justify itself as agapic. Agape need not justify itself as traditional

people want faith to give them more life, and people want faith to make society more just, and people want faith to grant the world more peace.

Love is not the Godhead beyond God, a singular, pure abstraction. Instead, love is the self- forming activity of the triune God, the most salient quality of each divine person, and the disposition of each person toward the other— and toward creation. 

Metaphorically, we could say that quarks function only in communion.

God is empty of any excluding, occluding self. 105 All separation is illusion and God, as all- knowing, is not deluded. As a result of God’s perfect wisdom God feels perfectly, which is to love perfectly. In other words, God feels what should be felt as deeply as it can be felt. 106 Within God there is no capacity for celebrating another’s pain or envying another’s success, because God is perfect. “Perfect” does not mean unchanging, but changing perfectly.

Exclusively male language for a gender transcending God misrepresents the divine nature; hence, it is theologically inaccurate.

The margins have the clearest perspective. The margins see the hypocrisy in hierarchy and realize that “what is prized by humans is an abomination in the sight of God”

Why does Jesus characterize a preaching that explicitly threatens the rich and powerful as “good news”? Perhaps because they (at least some of them, I hedge, because Jesus didn’t qualify his statements) need to be rescued from themselves

Theologically, the crucifixion of Jesus testifies to the unholy within the universe, useless suffering that freedom produces but God abhors. From the gift of freedom, something emerges in creation that is alien to Godself. God did not intend the unholy, but God allows it out of respect for our autonomy and moral consequence. Crucially, God suffers from this demonic fault in reality. God in Christ undergoes alienation from God through crucifixion.

Therefore, the church must seek truth in others, with others, and for others, including other religions, in an attempt to develop a common wisdom that will be validated by the flourishing it creates.

Prayer is a spiritual gift, but other spiritual gifts can become prayer, and prayer alone is never a substitute for action. When Joan Cheever was fined for feeding the homeless in San Antonio, she explained, “This is how I pray. I pray when I cook. I pray when I serve.”  

Links for The Great Open Dance  on Bookshop Jon Paul Sydnor on Google Scholar Jon Paul Sydnor on Facebook Tag #TheGreatOpenDance

About the Author Jon Paul Sydnor is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Emmanuel College, theologian-in-residence at Grace Community Boston, and a podcaster at The Progressive Sacred. He studied at the University of Virginia, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Boston College, where he received his PhD. He practices theology in conversation with other religions, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, whose concept of nondualism has highly influenced the trinitarian theology of this book.

Christian England? Maybe not...

I've just read an interesting blog article from Paul Kingsnorth. I've responded to it elsewhere with regard to its consideration of the idea of the soul of a nation (specificially England).

Here I'd like to pick up a few other matters in it.

I think that I should take issue with this claim. "The 2021 census revealed that, for the first time in a thousand years, most people in England are not Christian"  Well, I think that is simply not correct in any helpful sense. Not because I want to deny that the census revealed that now less than half of the English are Christian but because I think that the idea that for the previous thousand years we/they have been. I actually think that a big part of what the census reveals is that people are now more ... honest? ... about their spiritual allegiances; rather than by reflex putting "CofE" people who would have done so 20... 30... 40 years ago, now put 'no religion'. The figures now, then, are more reflective of where people have actually 'been' spiritually for decades. I tend to think that the figure for numbers of Christians is likely to be closer to the numbers of those reasonably actively affiliating to churches. 

While there are people in those numbers who may be there for more social-status reasons than discipleship, these might be offset by those who are fairly Christian but find churches hard to stomach. I suspect the proportions vary over time. However, there have been times when the label Christian and being seen at church were marks of respectability which sometimes had little to do with any active affilition to Christ and the Good Old Way. And of course, we've only had censuses since 1851.

What I'd want to suggest is that probably for the last thousand years, there has rarely been a time when Christians in the sense of active Christ followers has been above 50% of the English population. To be sure there are times abundant when people have used the label of themselves because they have been baptised, were part of a "Christian" nation and/or thought having an opinion that there is a God made one a Christian. But that's not being a Christian. And at a national level there has indeed been rhetoric claiming Christian allegiance but the practices of government both in relation to the people inside and to the people outside of the nation have been sub-Christian at many, many points. Machiavelli has been more influential in practice than Christ.

I seem to recall that before Wesley started preaching, the spiritual scene was reportedly at a very low ebb. England was Christian in name only. Most people were, it would seem, deists in opinion and many were licentious in behaviour and morals. Including those leading churches since the qualifications for doing so seemed to forget the most specifically Christian details relying instead on family connections and having a degree from Oxford or Cambridge.

Maybe it's actually that for the first time in a thousand years many people have understood that the label "Christian" is not fitted to them. There are many different reasons for that no doubt. Some because the cultural connotations of the label "Christian" are no longer prestigious. Rather many are distancing themselves from much of what has become associated with the label: Trumpism, pedophile abusers, socially maladroit weirdness, inability to be other than dogmatic... For others it is recognising that their spiritual heart is not in it; they may be 'spiritual' but not specifically religious; they respect Jesus but not such as to follow his Way.

A few sentences later in Kingsnorth's article, I find the possible connotations of this sentence quite disturbing but not for the reasons I think Kingsnorth writes them; "By the end of this century, most people living within the nation’s borders will not have ancestors who shaped it" I fear that this framing plays into the hands of nationalists and racists by seeming to collude with the idea that ancestry grants title, somehow. Let's note that we are all immigrants (there were no humans here when the country was covered by ice). My own ancestry on one side is refugees from French religious tyranny, and on the other side I probably have more title than people who could only trace ancestry as far back as Saxon, viking or Norman ancestors. -My point here being that I don't think I have any more or less 'title' to live here than anyone else who call it home.

Though perhaps I do him a disservice since he goes on to write: "the spiritual energy in England today is coming from those who are crossing its borders in such unprecedented numbers. Many of them are Christian; many more are not. Will those traditions ever become English, in the sense in which Ackroyd uses in his book? It’s quite possible." 

I can't speak to Ackroyd's conceptualisation, but I do welcome the acknowledgement that our nation changes over time. If those who make home here from birth or from later in life, work for truth, justice, mercy, fairness and so forth, then that's great.

And then Kingsnorth adds something that is a good critique in my estimation, drawing on an older text: "In the Bible, they call it Mammon. It squats now over England like a wheezing, warty old toad, and we pay it obeisance every day. It is a very old god, and it never dies. And yet nobody has to worship it, and this is the secret and the escape. You can turn back towards the light instead, England." 

Quite: the important thing is not about ancestral title but whether we serve a common good or a mammonist agenda that's important. That's more consonant with God's agenda while exclusivising nationalism is not. I note that the nations are judged, according to the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, for their treatment of Jesus who identifies himself with the poor and marginalised.

At this time, England is doing really badly in that respect. Mammonry has increased inequality (quite noticeably over the last 4 decades), doubled down on demonising the most vulnerable among us and has been actively harming the marginalised and failing to help the exploited. England is surely under judgement but not for selling out so-called "Christian values", rather for painting very unChristian values as virtuous while using them as cover for doing the things that Christ condemns the nations for in that parable.

Fifth-mark mission futuring

Recently I've been thinking something along the lines of "What would Tom Sine say?" Some readers may recall Tom who wrote "The Mustard Seed Conspiracy" in the early 1980s and continued writing books about mission and the projection of trends into the following decades. He wrote about Christian mission in relation to the environment from the early 2000s and is still doing so.

I thought of his approach of Christian missional futuring when I read this article in the Church Times. It reminded me that I'm trying to get my head around what the Churches need to be doing now to prepare for the climate-changed future. I'm thinking in terms of broad headline points and noting the kind of pastoral and missional activity implied and tracing those back to the very near future so that we begin to do now what will be needed later.

So, here I'm trying to 'think out loud' about the kinds of things that we need to pay attention to and the implications. I'm thinking, too, that looking at the kinds of scenarios that emerge as likely with 2C of heating.

Taxonomy of climate changes

It might be good to start with a kind of taxonomy of effects (and if you feel you're well acquainted with them just skip down to the next heading). The first order effects are things like the atmosphere growing warmer on average and the average sea temperatures rising also. Then there are derivative effects from those: more heat in the air means faster movement and greater retention of water vapour. It also means that other things being equal average temperatures at various latitudes will rise.

Third order effects in these cases derive from those knock-on effects. So, habitable zones for different species of plants and animals shift -often faster than plants can grow into new zones. These effects are more chaotic because they interact and create new feedback loops. The kinds of effects that have been concerning people most have been desertification (already evident in the middle east and sahel regions); extension of the range of malaria into what were temperate zones; crop failures and resulting food precarity; areas of the globe that literally cannot support human life; loss of groundwater because aquifers are no longer or inadequately fed having lost their trickle-top-ups from melting snow which may no longer exist on mountains.

Higher sea temperatures means less sea ice which means in turn more liquid water -hence higher sea levels -which have been creeping up already over the last century or so. In turn this means coastlines will change: some are being and others will be inundated; more erosion from higher tides and more powerful weather effects. In addition, like with land-related warming, habitats shift (in some cases faster than species can migrate or adapt). Salination of soils making them unsuitable for previous vegetation and animal life.

So these create a bunch of fourth-order effects among human societies, many of which we are seeing already in more precarious or vulnerable peoples and places. It is these effects that may be civilisation altering. It is these sorts of effects on smaller scales that have played a part in ending previous human civilisations. These effects are migration and/or population loss to disease, inadequate diet and outright starvation, violence and the depredations of stress and diminishing healthcare. These effects interrelate and are complex.

Responding to civilisational crisis

In a quick-and-dirty way I often use the collapse of the Roman empire as a reference point. There/then, as I understand it, some of the kinds of things mentioned just as civilisational challenges came together and resulted in a slow collapse. In Britain the effects were to undermine the infrastructural supports for urban life. These led to population movements with the violence that was engendered or resulting from or by those movements. In turn these changes resulted in new patterns of mission and pastoral care by the churches -giving rise to the Celtic forms of church life more resourced by monastic communities than urban organisational patterns. It's worth noting that the contribution of monastic mission was wide-ranging: from land management through creating, collecting and disseminating knowledge, through works of mercy, healthcare, peacemaking, lawmaking, civil service all the way through to calling and nurturing disciples. In other words, ranging through the five marks of mission and back again.

I think that this is potentially a helpful reference point (and no doubt there are others) for us to consider how to equip churches to be agents of care, hope and even relative flourishing as the slow collapse takes place and as new arrangements for living together develop.

Missional challenges

First of all, right up front, we should be playing an active part -now- in resisting trends, organisations and ways of thinking that make more extreme heating more likely. So it is right that churches are making commitments to zeroing their own carbon footprints and are beginning to divest from climate heating operations in their financial portfolios. We need to make sure that these things happen and don't get kicked into the long grass of day-to-day concerns which have the effect of maintaining a kind of business as usual and distract, in effect, from putting in the work of following through. Let's note also that this will be costly at times (financially, in terms of time and energy too) -but then would that not be a kind of "taking up your cross"? We need to account for such costs in our own heads as a form of mission giving because that's what it is in the bigger picture.

Fifth mark missionaries

It also means, I think, that we recognise that there are those among us whom God is calling to take action for the common good and to support them as "fifth-mark missionaries". There is a cluster of callings in this respect that we need to recognise and support. There are those whose regular and (often) paid work is wrapped up in environmental care. That is relatively uncontroversial, although we might visibly support them more and demonstrate that we value their work. There are those who are called to activism in relation to creation-care: to protest; be arrested; support and care for protesters; to help organise protest. This is possibly more controversial, though it shouldn't be in principle. We are heirs to the activism of anti-slavery activists, chartists, suffagists, health and welfare activists of many kinds. Many of the struggles involved uncomfortable and controversial tactics. We laud people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King jr forgetting that they made many people profoundly uncomfortable -that the discomfort was part of the point because things needed to change. We sometimes blithely talk of the Holy Spirit being sent to "afflict the comfortable". Well, this is precisely the sort of comfort-afflicting that is meant, surely? So at the very least we should recognise they have just cause and pray for them. We might also encourage fellow Christians to support them practically, pastorally (visiting those in prison is mentioned in the gospels, after all) and theologically. This would include public statements of support particularly reinforcing and underlining the imminent dangers of climate crises and reminding us of obligations under international law and how these relate back to core Christian values relating to neighbour love, creation care and solidarity with the poor.

We might also note the concomitant effects of the involvement of Christians and indeed churches in these movements. There is a positive apologetic effect. In the coming decades as the effects of climate change become even more evident and distressing, the church's witness to the truth of what was happening and its involvement in trying to help mitigate and head-off the worst effects will be an important and demonstrable apologetic asset.

Prayer, liturgy: lex orandi, lex credendi

We can help to solidify these things by building into our regular liturgies, prayers relating to the fifth mark of mission and in support of the activities of fifth-mark missionaries. We can help preachers to connect lectionary readings with climate crisis and creation care matters more securely and frequently. We can make the Season of Creation pretty much mandatory. We can strongly encourage eco-church processes to be ordinary in the way that safeguarding processes are now fairly well embedded into ordinary parish life. Supporting climate mitigation projects or climate activism should be as normal as having mission partners that a church supports or encouraging people to be active in a food bank. All the while we keep on saying why it is important to be doing this stuff: keep repeating until we feel like we are cracked records saying it over and over: because only then will it get to seem like it's simply the right thing and that the only real question is 'how?' not 'whether'.

In respect of the longer arc of missionary mitigation, I suggest that we could do with the following sorts of things.

Ministries and vocations

Help people to learn diy food production skills -gardening, window boxes, allotments, mobilising the skills and knowledge of gardeners to help with this. Involve children, open out to the wider community as partners in learning and teaching. In times of food precarity the more people know about growing our own food, the greater our collective food security. In theological and missional terms this sits with a practical theology centred on "Give us today our daily bread" (more in another post, on that one, but it's there in embryo in the relevant Ionesco of my book 'Praying the Pattern'). I would also suggest, relatedly, that there's a need to help people who are beginning to move away from fast food. Bring together people with teaching skills with people with skills around cooking and preparing local food to convene learning communities -use suitably equipped church hall kitchens or offer a house-call method. Have cooking parties.... These become community building events in themselves with all the good missional effects that can come from that.

Learning practical skills to recycle, reuse and repair. In an age of fast fashion and goods which are more expensive to repair than to buy again new, we've got out of the habit of repair and so also of passing on repair skills. However helping people to understand some basics is likely to become increasingly important as price-structures and markets change. There is often stuff on the internet to help but it's also valuable to many people to work in three dimensions and with a friendly coach. We should introduce our congregations to the various recycling networks -free to collect ones like freegle and money-exchange ones as well as donating to or buying from charity shops.

Demolishing strongholds and taking every thought captive to Christ. In climate emergency I would suggest that this includes -as a matter of missional urgency- helping people to become aware of our own collective cognitive biases and how they are weaponised against us and to sow division by propagandists and advertisers. Given that various forms of climate-change denial and delaying action on climate emergency are propagated via media exploiting our cognitive biases, such 'mental fight' is a vital part of equipping the saints and those of good will in the short and longer terms. This actually has very strong links to meditation, confession of sin and the final petition of the Lord's prayer. We should examine afresh our liturgies to enable them to help us to turn cognitive swords into attitudinal ploughshares and not to learn war anymore. We might consider how we use Lent, for example, to connect spiritual disciplines with creation-attentive justice and peace-making and take the mental hygiene dimension as an important strand in it all.

Equip and train peacemaking, non-violence and de-escalation. We have already begun to see rising anger fed by increased stresses and fanned by commercial and political interests exploiting our cognitive environment. Add to that the presence of refugees both local and from further afield and food precarity and infrastructural strains, and we have the makings of interpersonal and inter-communal tensions which become increasingly likely to have flashpoints for violence embedded in them. Jesus's blessing on peacemakers is to be taken fairly literally in such circumstances whatever else you make of it. Wouldn't it be great if the churches had in regular deployment a host of people who were good at listening and enabling others to hear one another, who were able to draw people together to get past differences and construct new futures together, who were skilled in calming tense situations and building relationships and alliances which made for safe, more secure and more prosperous futures? May such peacemakers be raised up and blessed with the fruits of their labours.

Create pastoral structures to support people working through climate grief, anxiety, anger etc. Recent research has been clear that it is likely that many people -probably a significant proportion of those who have become aware of the scientific discoveries and projections regarding climate change- are becoming concerned, anxious and/or fearful of the impacts. One evidence of that is XR and the school climate strikes on Fridays. Alongside these have begun to grow up a variety of mental-health support structures. These range from climate cafes, to circle-group methodologies and climate-attuned therapists. Christians have been involved in these. However, churches, as such, have not been prominent. I suggest that this may need to change. I suggest however, that rather than setting up parallel structures and ministries, churches first identify, support and empower their members who are being called into this and learn from them. Churches more corporately would do well to adopt a servant attitude by making resources available and finding appropriate ways to encourage Christian vocations in climate change pastoral care and to resource those who become involved. In the meantime we should be encouraging ourselves to explore the ways that our traditional insights, spirituality and approaches to care connect with creation-attentive spiritualities so that we can model and offer from a secure base, robust Christian spiritual pathways which support people in their pastoral needs and spiritual growth.

I note, in passing, that the previous paragraphs set an agenda for Christian discipleship and ministerial training. I note too that it is an agenda that needs to be initiated and rolled out as a matter of urgency as the changes to be addressed and responded to are already underway. We don't have decades to get started, we have a small handful of years. One of my own reference points to considering this is Ron Sider's Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. In some ways, I think we need a Rich Christians in Climate Emergency.

Build capacity for community organising. It is likely that many things will become of necessity more local: food, leisure, work and to live well locally will mean actually making good on the nostalgia for good old days when supposedly people knew their neighbours and everyone rallied round to help. Whether or not those days really existed in the way they are not-quite-remembered, it will be important for us to discover together how to pull together and organise to do things together. This kind of activity and offering servant leadership in it is part of the Christian vocation. We would be demonstrating values about the sacredness of life, the importance of power-with rather than power-over because we are all loved by God and share God's image and the importance of working for the common good. These values would be rooted for us in the teaching of Christ but not exclusive to Christian faith; we would be working alongside others of good will. And we need to step up because -be sure- there will be some who would offer less benign and more exploitative leadership.

As I look back on that, I think that there's more to be said, but it gives an outline to be elucidated. More later, perhaps. Each of those paragraphs a chapter ...

Innoculating British Christians against USAmerican rightist ambitions

I just read this:

Franklin Graham invested $10 million of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s money in his 2016 Decision America Tour to each state house in the country. Billed as “nonpartisan” prayer rallies, these gatherings framed the “moral crisis” as a decision between progressive atheist values and God. After the election, Graham called Trump’s victory an answer to prayer. 

The reason I'm concerned is that about 2 years ago, we nearly had a BGEA tour of the UK headed up by Franklin Graham. I was concerned at the time and this has made me more so. I was concerned that Graham was at least as much about networking so-called Christian right personnel with British Evangelicals with a view to creating a bridge-head to amplify an approach to values consonant with the USAmerican right-wing agenda. I wondered whether I was being too 'conspiracy theorist', but now reading this, I'm minded to think it would be precisely that bridgehead-building.

The article goes on to say this:

Today these influences — the Christian and religious nationalist organizations, religious capitalist and prosperity gospel movements, and independent charismatics — have access to the current administration in the form of its “court evangelicals.” The Values Voter Summit has become an important focus point for this coalition and its narrative. Through federal contracts and student aid, Liberty University has become the largest private Christian university in the country 

I'm thinking, having thought over the last 5 years in British politics, and recalling things I've read about the increasing reach of the American right into funding campaigns in Europe and further afield, that this is precisely an aim of Graham's deployment of the BGEA in this way. I think that they see an opportunity to leverage the current situation to build a stable if smaller base of right-wing support using somewhat Christian themes in the way they have in the USA.

As such I think that we need to be moving away from naivety in British Christian, especially evangelical and charismatic circles. We need to be in a position to resist Graham's next overtures. I'm pretty sure they will come once the dust is settling after the pandemic emergency.

So, my question is what do we need to do now to enable British evangelicals in particular to see through the rhetoric to the political agenda? To understand that this isn't the relatively benign BGEA of the 1980s and '90s but rather a vehicle for right-wing agendas which would struggle to answer 'WWJD' with responses that weren't more like responses to 'WWCD' (what would Caesar do?). There are UK evangelicals and charismatics who would covet the 'court evangelical' role, how do we pre-empt that? How do we innoculate against the cunning use of single issues to marginalise more Godly values (check out here for further reflection). It is a characteristic of some of the Pharisaism that Jesus criticised -maybe that's the way to pursue? (WWPD? -what would Pharisees do?)

My hope in this is that it seems that British Evangelicalism has tended to be more focused on justice and mercy than the USAmerican counterpart. I hope I'm not wrong in that, and I hope it is not too shallowly rooted.

This is going to be occupying some of my prayer-time for weeks or months to come.

And for the record, I think that such cynical usage of evangelism and co-option of the good will of those concerned for sharing the Good News of Jesus is despicable. If this is what Mr Graham is doing (and it does look likely given the history) then I think that puts him and those others who do it in the place of those pharisees and sadducees whom Jesus laid into for misleading the poor and the seeking. At the best they may be acting the part of 'useful idiots' at worst ... shudder ...

Source for initiating quotes: Our Demands – Poor People's Campaign:

Cremation, Burial -or what? -Christian eco-propriety in funeral practice

We've been thinking about disposal of human remains lately, particularly our own when eventually it needs to happen: what do we want to do? Mostly our thinking has been around it being ecologically righteous as far as possible, starting with the body itself not polluting or being treated in a way that will hinder the natural recycling that nature has been doing for millions of years with dead bodies. And then also the processes of funeral rites not contributing to pollution or global heating (or at least minimising that impact).

But/And, as Christians, we also want funerals to be consistent with Christian discipleship. So this article when I happened across it, caught my attention. It did so because the article had no consideration of the environmental dimension but rather mainly a -forgive me for the slight disparagement- a narrow individual-salvation concern as shown by this couple of sentences early in the piece.

Some believe that the Bible says you can’t go to Heaven if you’re cremated. This isn’t what the Bible says. There is nothing in the Bible that forbids cremation as a means of disposing a person’s body.

Fair enough as far as it goes: our hope of salvation lies in God's grace and remembrance (both in the sense of knowing us 'timelessly' and of re-making us eschatologically) of us beyond death not in a particular treatment of human remains. A few moments reflection will show up problems with the idea of the physical remains being necessary to ultimate participation in the new creation: many, many people's bodies do cease to exist after enough time. eventually in most conditions even bones' molecules are dissipated into the environment. A theology of reconstruction, if I may characterise it like that, means that after a few hundred or thousand years, there is nothing to reconstruct. It also implies a reconstruction using 'new' material to replace decomposed flesh, so why not simply replace everything? Especially if the new creation's material basis is different to the current material basis? 

Anyway, to return to the main focus: I think that a more wholistic consideration of disposal of our remains should take place; it isn't just about whether we 'go to heaven' or even whether we are being consistent witnesses to Christian teaching. Actually that last clause in the quote includes, in reality, noticing that being good witnesses to Christian perspectives should include -prominently at the moment- doing right and justly by the ecosystem and climate.

With the following quote from the article, however, I see both a positive basis for thinking about corpse-composting and also I find a quibblesome point.

Cremation, however, subtly suggests that our bodies are of no significance. Burial, on the other hand, communicates something far more consistent with the Bible. It affirms not only that the human body has dignity, but also that it has a future. It affirms that death is not the end of the body.

The positive basis is the appraisal of human bodiliness as good and having dignity as well as having a future and those things I definitely affirm. I'm not convinced, however, that cremation really does suggest lack of significance for bodies; I think that's a value judgement that doesn't make sense from 'my' (ecological) perspective -I can see why someone might say that but it lacks force because it only communicates those things if you come from a certain cultural background or with a certain way of looking at life-processes narrowly focused on individuals in an industrial system. 

I'm not convinced that the means by which a body is decomposed do in themselves suggest any such appraisal. Because that's what we are talking about -burial, cremation (or whatever) are all about what processes we entrust a body to for return to the elements. We need to see the bigger picture of molecules and elements returning to the wider ecosphere. What gives a body significance (which is a cultural construct) is how we treat it in terms of 'fare-welling' and how we link that fare-welling to whichever 'bigger picture' of life and cosmos we are beholden to. 

I want to suggest that it is also important to affirm bodiliness by recognising that 'from dust we are created and to dust we shall return' -"dust" being matter, essentially, and the energetic means for its decomposition back to 'dust'. We can do that slowly, by letting bacteria, fungi and biochemical processes work through their life-cycles with the body as raw material. We can do that quickly by oxidising using heat. (And there is another option mentioned below).

More important in terms of Christian ethics and witness is surely making the process most consistent and compatible with the Creator's designs of energy and matter cycles and flows. So, if there's a problem with cremation, it's not really that it disrespects the body or a Christian appraisal of bodiliness. The problem with cremation as I see it, is that it uses methods to accelerate bodily decomposition that are noxious for the environment (ie usually fossil-fuel in the form of methane based gas jets). It may be possible to mitigate that, and to do so would help return to a more positive appraisal of cremation.

As a related side-note here, I would also point out that embalming is a pretty bad thing to do from the perspective of environmental impact. 

And while we're considering less-direct issues of body preservation, we might want to consider how a body is stored pending burial, cremation or whatever. Cold-storage often does have a carbon footprint or dangers around coolants' storage and release. So the title of the article that stimulated my response here might also ask "is it OK for Christians to be embalmed?". I think that embalming is far less good than cremation in the bigger picture.

As a Christian, I believe that we honour our Creator by playing our part in good creation-care practices. And this includes disposal of earthly remains. That is a very body-respecting and material-creation-affirming thing to do. It is good biblical theology to recognise the dust from which we come and to participate well in the systems of life-and-death in which that dust plays its part -to 'tend the garden' with our remains as well as our living effort. The practice of embalming seems to me to be not only dishonouring to the living flow of the ecosystem but also to speak, perhaps, of an overemphasis on appearance and human convenience which is not easily consonant with Christian teaching and virtues. Perhaps that's a harsh thing to say, but maybe we need to be sober about such things rather than simply sentimental and revise our funereal practices in the light of the bigger picture I'm trying to work with in this post.

Personally, I'm looking into Water Cremation to recommend and/or enable for my 'relicts'. It seems to overcome the difficulties associated with conventional cremation and offer a way not to take up lots of rooms with a grave plot. And, as a Christian, I'm trusting in God's recreative promises not the condition of my corpse for a share in the resurrection to Life.

And as a PS -as I've looked at what internet search brings up in relation to the environmental impact of cremation, I've noticed that much of the find is backed by funeral industry with an interest in promoting cremation. One of the effects of this is to not quite compare like with like and be low oncomparative detail, giving the impression that hot-cremating is better than burying. Admittedly this is perhaps true if you take in embalming, plot-maintenance etc. But the simple act of burying a body is less fossil-fuel energetic than firing a body. What needs to happen is to factor-in the ecological impact of the 'extra' acts to corpse-disposal: travel, preservation, storage, containment etc of the body and things like travel by mourners. And these need to be accounted for side-by-side in whichever disposal means is chosen. It's hard to believe, ceteris paribus, that like-for-like accounting would put cremation ahead. The one exception may well be so-called water cremation mentioned above.

What Does the Bible Say About Cremation | Is It OK for Christians to Be Cremated - Beliefnet

Formation and Sleep Ethics

One of the things I have noted in Praying the Pattern and which I will be reworking and expanding (maybe with this research!) in the forthcoming Living our prayer and praying our lives is how choosing bad sleep and rest patterns is choosing to make it more likely that we behave less graciously than we might otherwise. There is research, now, to back that up:

if you don’t get enough sleep, research suggests you are more likely to engage with unethical and deviant behaviour, such as being mean, bullying your fellow employees or falsifying receipts.  -Disrupted sleep article

So, contrary to some medieval asceticism, we should probably not normally be skimping on sleep.
It does, however, make me wonder what the purpose of sleep deprivation regimes was in those medieval regimes. I have the impression (but without researching it further) that it may have had something to do with avoiding sloth; that lying a-bed was seen as sinfully lazy. But I also wonder whether for some at least, there was a sense that we do indeed tend to worse self-censoring and self-checking when we are tired, so the point in that case may have been to push themselves more closely to their limits to make the testing of benevolence etc more real and more frequent, to give more chance to practice.
If that was the case, then I have to say that I wonder whether that is not, in fact, putting God to the test .... more thought needed.

Atonement and The New Perspective: a review

I've loved getting this book into my hands (well, more accurately, onto my screen). It is addressing a missing piece in current thinking about Israel and Christian continuity and discontinuity -and a logical next step. It is written particularly with Evangelical concerns about atonement in mind and is well aware of the history of the doctrine before and into the Reformation and beyond into the Evangelical movements. It is undertaken with critical sympathy and there is a really helpful outline of both the new perspective on Paul and on the main points at issue in the Evangelical conversation about penal substitutionary atonement. This book then brings these things together and explores the implications of NPP for PSA -yes, eventually you do have to get used to those acronyms otherwise it would become tiresome since they are used frequently enough to need shortening.

What I enjoyed was having a tour of the NPP introducing some important voices and basic differentiations of position. There was a helpful laying-out of atonement theories with a very useful reframing of it in relation to biblical evidence. It is approached with sympathy for the Reformed position and offers an alternative approach which actually is related strongly to Reformed core theology.

It was good too that there was discussion of the issue of supercessionism in relation to atonement in a way that takes seriously Evangelical concerns -and explicitly so. It doesn't dodge the difficulties but does a nice job of reframing the debate with extensive examination of the religious background of Paul and reminding us of the inaccuracies of our lazy contemporary readings of first century Jewish and Christian religion. I think that the way that Burnhope plots to take things forward is likely to be productive and helpful. For some who are wedded to PSA, however, it is going to be challenging to have to take seriously that it probably doesn't make sense to hold onto that. A good case is made, however, for a mixed economy and plurality of ways of thinking about the cross, but the covenant-making motif offered here is probably about right by the evidence and by the systematics.

I'm likely to be thinking about this and integrating its insights into my reflection and preaching for some time to come.

(99+) New Title from Stephen Burnhope: Atonement and The New Perspective: The God of Israel, Covenant, and the Cross | Dr Steve Burnhope - Academia.edu:

By way of disclaimer. I received and e-copy of this book for review purposes. In doing so I was in no way obliged to review favourably (or otherwise) simply to review within a reasonable period of receiving a copy.

Link-Love for this Review

Atonement and the New Perspective on Amazon
Stephen Burnhope’s Website
Stephen Burnhope on Twitter
Stephen Burnhope on Facebook

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From the Inside Out -review

This is a nicely written book about mission. It's nicely written in that it's based in personal experience which is well-narrated and gives a good understanding of why the author has grown and evolved in their understanding of mission. It's nicely written too because it's just the right amount of challenging!

I helps us to understand what mission is and, more importantly, helps us to decolonise our thinking about mission. One of the main objectives of the book seems to be to help us to understand the way that mission by western churches for a long time has tended to mirror the imperialism of our host /sending cultures. And, given the writer is USAmerican, 'imperial' in this context includes the USA.

One of the big themes that emerges is one that is really important for us to understand: that when we conceive and execute mission as a delivery of a package of care, aid or message to passive recipients, we get it wrong. Now Kuja is very kind and gives more than due concern for the cultural-cognitive disabilities of those who end up doing 'imperialist mission' (my words not his). This means that people are charitably assumed to be operating according to their lights and the best motives are assumed. In this he is a model of civility in argument that Christians (and others) in our times would do well to note and emulate.

'Imperialist mission' gets it wrong because it assumes that mission is one-way. Kuja challenges us to see that it is two-way; there is mutuality (something we see Paul wrestling with in the first chapter of Romans imho); we have something to bring and to receive. God has things for us to learn whether as recipients or donors, missioners or en-missioned. We might do well to recall the sending of the 12 and the 72 in Luke's gospel: there we see the apostles instructed to receive the hospitality and the "peace" of those among whom they are sent. Enforced mutuality; reversed power dynamics.

I'm certainly considering recommending this book to my students who are being trained in mission. It might well appear on next year's book list. I might even recommend a chapter as an inter-session reading.

By way of disclaimer. I received and e-copy of this book for review purposes. In doing so I was in no way obliged to review favourably (or otherwise) simply to review within a reasonable period of receiving a copy.

From the Inside Out on Amazon
From the Inside Out Book Trailer
Ryan Kuja Website
Ryan Kuja on Facebook
Ryan Kuja on Twitter

Social media tag  #FromTheInsideOut

Ryan Kuja

Life at the end of Us vs Them

This is a book of essays but they share a family theme, so to say. The writer is a good communicator in prose. There is an amiable tone with a nice balance between well-chosen anecdotes and helpful and insightful comment and reflection drawn from the stories. These stories and the reflection on contemporary events through them would serve preachers and teachers well.

What I've enjoyed about reading this is the depth of analysis and the range of thinking-resources drawn upon. Sometimes that can leave a sense of 'where's this going?" but usually just after that, it gets resolved.

I've also enjoyed the masterclass it offers in how to think Girardianly and this has helped me to see more fully the power of Girardian analysis. I still remain a bit skeptical of the sacrificial thesis as '(pre-)history' but seeing the insights worked through the examples given has been really helpful.

Another thing that I've enjoyed has been to become re-acquainted with Ivan Illich's writing. And it's interesting to see how contemporary Illich still feels -even some 15 years after his death and considerably longer since some of his better known work. The thing that comes over as having been learnt from Illich is the humane-ness that we need to cultivate and the alertness to the way that human systems of care can be corrupted by, in effect, their dehumanisation, that is to say the loss of I-Thou from their heart.

I enjoyed in this book, also, the insight into the hinterland of Canadian issues related to their first nations and the genius of this book is how these become windows into how modern society often works -or rather doesn't work. Girard and Illich's insights are used to help us to see and begin to understand the gaps and contradictions and to gently consider how we might live otherwise.

I most value the thoughtfulness and the thought-provokingness of this collection of essays. I have valued too the unfolding example as I have read of taking seriously viewpoints with which we disagree; taking time to understand them argumentatively but most of all humanly. This is worth much in today's world.

And in the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that though I received a copy of the e-book, it was for review purposes. The opinions about it are mine and not produced to order or under any sense of obligation for them to be good or bad.

Link-Love 

Life at the End of Us Versus Them on Amazon
Life at the End of Us Versus Them Website
The Ferment Podcast - "a farmer philosopher and a mystic folkie set out after the yeast of the kingdom."
Marcus Peter Rempel on Facebook
Church Matters Podcast Interview
Englewood Review of Books Interview
Common Word Author Reading

 #UsVsThem Home: 'via Blog this'

Funerals should affirm the reality of death

I think that this is in the same ballpark as a post of mine from a couple of years back.

current practice seems determined to deny both the fact and the solemnity of death. We say “We are sorry for your loss,” and talk about the deceased’s “passing”.

I'd just invite Angela to consider the place of 'customer is always right' capitalism in reinforcing and maintaining this unhealthy situation. And don't get me started on this new euphemism 'passing'! I guess it's derived from 'passed away' but somehow even the 'away' was felt to be too final, so it is cut off in its prime. Passing is the new dying.



Angela Tilby: Funerals should not deny the reality of death: 'via Blog this'

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'