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?

Humour bypass or sack the press officer

How delicious, Matt Stone reveals this unexpected expose of an inability to spot irony.

citing my article as evidence of our terminal decent into heresy. Archbishop Jensen is quoted as saying, "They characterize real Christians as Vulcans but I fail to see the humour in that."

Journeys In Between: Bannished to the Delta Quadrant: Filed in: humour, emerging_church, Sydney, Jensen

Aramaic, Greek and daily life in Jesus's time

This article describes thinking that Aramaic was the sole language of Palestine as an American conceit. I think I'd expand on that to say that it is a native English speaker's conceit, since Brits tend to do it too: we forget how routinely multilingual many cultures have been and are. So it is good to be reminded of the situation in Palestine of the Roman Occupation (emphasis mine).

Aramaic would have been one of the daily spoken languages in first-century Palestine. It would have been commonly used in Jewish households and in the synagogues, for example. But Palestine in the first century was much like the same area of the world today—truly multi-cultural and multi-lingual. Someone walking down the street or in the marketplace in a city such as Jerusalem or Nazareth would have certainly heard Aramaic. But he would also have heard Greek, which was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean world in the first century. He may have heard Persian or Egyptian. He would probably have heard Latin, especially if he passed near some Roman soldiers. He may even have heard some Western European languages, depending on where the Roman soldiers were from. Daily conversations were a smorgasbord of languages.

In fact, given that Jesus hailed from Galilee 'of the gentiles' (so called because of a lot of gentile settlement) he would prabably have a good working knowledge of Koine Greek and, given his likely audience, may well have preached and taught from time to time in Greek -and or had simultaneous interpretation from his Greek-named Disciples.

There is a further issue here too: all this fixation on the Aramaic Jesus, as well as playing into a particular Ecclesiastical polity's interests, and into a particular brand of spirituality's attempts to reframe Christian faith in ways that would not have been recognised by Jesus's earliest followers, is actually potentially a kind of gnosticism, and I don't mean that favourably:

in the past century there has appeared on the religious scene a mindset that understanding Aramaic, because it was the language that Jesus spoke, will give someone special insight into the meaning of the New Testament. This is essentially a gnostic conceit. That is, the gnostics (an elastic term if there ever was one) were of the opinion that there was a secret knowledge that admitted one to truths inaccessible to the unwashed masses. This is wrong.

We forget that gnosticism was elitist, misogynist, body-hating and suspicious of sexuality and that 'orthodox' Christianity eschewed it because it was all of those things and in being so traduced the God who created and 'saw that it was good'.

Aramaic Thoughts with Benjamin Shaw on StudyLight.org: Filed in: Aramaic, Greek, Palestine, language, Jesus

How others see us ...

An interesting remark on what Chinese students see of UK culture when they come here to study.

"There is an emptiness in nightlife - party, party and nothing else. I thought there would be something special in culture - people would speak about plays or stories. I thought it would be a garden of thinking."

It's part of a piece looking at the fact that arguably,

We are in the middle of the biggest educational movement in history. Hundreds of thousands of young people are travelling to be educated abroad. They are led by the Chinese, for whom a foreign education is highly prized. There now are over 50,000 Chinese students in Britain - mostly the children of the elite and the rich - and the numbers studying abroad are predicted to double.

But the criticism is not all one way, as comments by Chinese students reveal, by the by, truths about life back home and its struggles.

The students noted that the British also had the ability to have a good time and relax, while in China people worried incessantly about their children or their parents. Part of the reason for this difference was the success of the British system of welfare and social care, said the students. There were many comments along the lines of "you can feel confident when you are old". These statements hinted at a deeper truth, in that they were all made by women.

This is also a peak into our global future, if we do the thinking needed on the raw material of these opinions with the thought that China is likely to be economically very important in years to come and that we have an aging population and need a younger workforce to pay the taxes to run the welfare ...

Technorati Tags: culture, china, UK, education, students

under-rated, under-appreciated, or under-valued

It's enough to warm the cockles of my heart: a list of "under-rated, under-appreciated, or under-valued" emerging church bloggers. And I made that list! I was just having to admit to myself the other day that my writing is unlikely to win me a wide readership: I suspect I'm far too eclectic and use a challenging range of vocab and draw from a wide range of subject areas to ever be 'popular'. So nice to have a little recognition. Anyway here's what it's about. Htt Matt Stone, The Blind Beggar and ultimately to Brother Maynard for starting it all off.

Brother Maynard has come up with the interesting suggestion of circulating a list of  under-rated, under-appreciated, or under-valued
emerging/missional blogs to help promote them in the wider blogosphere. Below is the list I picked up from The Blind Beggar.

• Emerging Grace



• Robbymac


• Lily


• Nathan Colquhoun


• John Smulo


• Todd Hiestand


• Theopraxis


• Chuck Warnock


• John Lunt


• Webb Kline


• Mark Wilson


• Rick Meigs


• Brother Maynard


• MakDaddy
  
  


• Glenn Hager


• Paul Mayers


• Jamie Swann


• Paul Walker


• Jerry Frear


• Phil Wyman


• Rainer Halonen


• Shannon


• Matt Stone


• Erika Haub


• John Santic


• Colin Lamm


• Julie Clawson


• Phil Johnson


• Andii Bowsher


• John Moorehead


• Paul Fromont & Alan Jamieson


• Steve Hollinghurst

To participate, copy this list into a new post on your own blog, and
add the names you have to the bottom of the list, and encourage others
to do the same. They should be people with under 150 links so we can truly scew the Technorati rankings. When you’ve done that, leave a
comment at Brother Maynard’s blog so he can keep track of who ends up participating.

Incidently, if you want to repro the list, you might want to view the source of the page and scroll down to the relevant bit to do a cut and paste. Certainly Firefox has that facility. Dunno about that other browser (ptui).

Technorati Tags: blogging, emerging-church, missional

I am a mirage that perceives itself

Hmmm, here's something to ponder. On the nature of the soul and the self.

One good prototype is the Escher drawing of two hands sketching each other. A more abstract one is the sentence I am lying. Such loops are, I think anyone would agree, strange. They seem paradoxical and even strike some people as dangerous. I argue that such a strange loop, paradoxical or not, is at the core of each human being. It is an abstract pattern that gives each of us an “I,” or, if you don’t mind the term, a soul.

Seems to me, to fit the Damasio ideas about the way that self consciousness arises/ emerges.
Wired 15.03: PLAY: Filed in: soul, identity, brain, mind, model

Learning is best by working out for ourselves

Informally I discoered this for myself as a teenager reflecting on my own learning. Later I discovered that the educational research was suggesting engagement made for better learning. Now some further evidence to suggest it is true.

"While we know that active engagement is the key to rapid learning," he said, "Meredith's result suggesting that knowledge gained via a child's own inferences is sometimes more powerful and longer lasting than knowledge gained through instruction may have powerful repercussions for how we teach new material. These implications have yet to be explored, but this first result is tantalizing."

It really should have us reviewing the way we are 'delivering education' (note the instructional bias of the terms, which are borrowed from the commercial world and seem to indicate an unhelpful metaphoric underpinning to contemporary educational policy).

And while we're on the subject, I loved what Caroline Ramsey wrote recently,

But, for me, learning is not about moving towards one correct answer, it is not about discarding wrong or less-than-best practices. Learning is about adding repertoires to our human living, refining our living practices in such a way that we, and those we live with, are happy with the outcome of those living practices.

Very much where I am in the matter.
ScienceDaily: Kids Learn Words Best By Working Out Meaning: Filed in: learning, research, psychology, instruction, education, teaching