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Principles, Groucho and theological formation…

February 5, 2009 in Uncategorized by chris | No comments

groucho-marx

Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.

Groucho Marx.

A funny guy, was Groucho.

But it seems to me that for thousands of years men and women have tried to find a platform for living that promised something solid and good and true.

In this way, perhaps we can guarantee a life of prosperity for ourselves and our children.

Perhaps too the sum of our days might then come to mean something. And the Gods above us might cease their indifference, and cause the sun to shine on our ripening corn.

And then perhaps we might live out long lives, and see the flowering of our children’s children…

old-man

So the story of wandering nomadic middle eastern people recorded in the Bible, seeking a code for life- this is not just ancient mythology- but it is the story of who we are too.

We follow their journey into the desert, where the wind blows and the wild animals are. We camp with them at the foot of the mountain, and pray for laws for life to be given to us on tablets of stone, and mediated by men of wisdom and strength.

If we can only learn what is required of us, and follow the code of the road that we travel together with our friends, through bandit country…

But then comes the twistings and turnings in the long road. The failings of our leaders, the fickle following of the flock, the empty promises of a distant God who appears to have forgotten his people.

The impossibility of these laws- which always place goodness beyond the reach of mortal man, and condemn us for what we can never be.

But then into the story steps the man called Jesus.

He walks with us for a while, and stands in the gap between being and becoming that we humans always seem to stumble in.

And though he is not a law-breaker, neither is he enslaved by it.

Everything about him calls us to a deeper level of being- back to core of who we are…

We once again find ourselves to be Children of the Living God.

serving-hands

Which brings me back to the point of my post.

If I am right, and there seems to be a universal desire to find spiritual truth and meaning in our existence, then what parts of our understanding do we bring to this search?

Cognitive behavioural psychologists suggest that there are three main levels to our mindfulness. I wonder if there may be clues within this that might help us to consider how we form our thoughts towards God?

The first level concerns out feeling and our acting- those immediate reactions and responses that seem to pop into our consciousness in an almost automatic way. We react out of understandings and experiences that are driven by core beliefs which will be to a large part hidden from us.

These feelings and actions are fickle and changeable. We can modify them sometimes, but often it seems as if they happen to us and around us, and we have little control.

I know people who approach God (or I should say I have approached God) in this way.

The image we have of God arises from a set of inherited assumptions and half understood yearnings. We reach for him in times of immediate need, and try to shape our actions in line with the behaviour of these others who seem to know him better.

There is something of the child in this. It is good. But it is also incomplete. We are more than just the sum of how we act and feel.

The second level concerns the structure of obligations and rules we tend to apply to ourselves. Once formed, we cling to them tenaciously, and though we can act against them, they still govern our acting and feeling in subtle ways.

Some of these rules are well organised into structured hierarchies- and serve us well. However, these exist alongside other assumptions about ourselves and how we relate to the world which may be less helpful. Assumptions formed out of pain or dysfunction, or through incomplete information.

Such rules and assumptions on which we base actions and feelings are not easily accessible or necessarily understood. The reasons we then give for actions may well relate to hidden experiences and understandings that still become the engine for whole ways of being.

Much of my faith experience seems to have been lived in the shadow of guilt induced by me breaking rules. We Christians are very good at rules, even when they are not written down.

Rules of how to dress, how to speak, how to spend time, how to sing, how to love one another, how to shop, how to speak to God. Many of these rules are good- they have evolved out of the history of our faith community and those who went before us. We pore over scripture and refine or understanding of these laws. Some seem more important than others to different groups and at different times. They may then give priority to those laws, and subordinate the others, and the people who follow them.

And mixed in with this structured law keeping are all the other assumptions- that shape the way we act and feel in less predictable ways. Partial and incomplete understandings that still we concrete into a shape that we call truth…

The third level concerns the core principles which become the building blocks for who we are. It is on these principles that the rules are formed from- and in turn govern our acting and our feeling.

These building block principles are formed early, and then take some shifting. Again, we are unlikely ever to have a full understanding of what these are- we only get clues to them as they arise into our conscious interaction with the world around us.

They concern cherished ideas on which we can stand tall, but also other core beliefs that may be less positive- perhaps based on ideas of our lack of worth and value, taken on as children, and still shaping us as adults.

If faith does not live within us at this level- then what value has it? If our theology does not start with the beautiful principles we see lived out in the stories of Jesus, then what value have the rules we employ and apply, or the acting out and feeling that result from our experience?

These things seem to be the flowers that later the Spirit of God would turn into fruit in our lives.

It is not that the laws or the acting out are wrong necessarily. They may be wonderful. But they may also be missing something of the heart of the matter.

Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness, Gentleness. Self control. Against such there is no law.


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Doing media battles for God- a story from the UK…

January 18, 2009 in Uncategorized by chris | 2 comments

atheism

In the UK, we have had a bit of a media splash. Christians are in the news- itself a rare thing.

Ron Heather, a bus driver from Southampton turned up for work last week, and found himself faced with a vehicle emblazoned with advertising paid for by an Atheistic campaign, with the slogan- ‘There is probably no God, now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ Ron, as a Christian, found this objectionable, and so told his employers that he could not drive the bus. Ron seems to be a good bloke from the little we can see of him, and his dilemma heart felt and honest. Check out the story here.

But the story of the campaign is a fascinating one for many of us. It seems to shine a light on the place of faith and belief in our time and context, and perhaps it may yet enable healthy debate and discussion.

So- what is it all about?

Step forward the first protagonists- atheist campaign.org (It is well worth checking out their website.)

The campaign, interestingly enough, seems to have started as a REACTION to bus campaigns about judgment and sinners burning in lakes of fire run by Christians! Here is some footage from the launch;

Toynbee and Dawkins- the heavy hitters behind this campaign- are interesting figures. One a broadsheet columnist, and intellectual- the other a scientist who has a brilliant but flawed reputation. Neither of them are people who could be thought to have their finger on the pulse of post modern Britain. In fact, Dawkins in particular seems to me to be regarded as a severe and arrogant figure, whose rationalistic determinism is particularly modern.

Then we have the counter reaction from Christian Voice. Here is a quote from their director Stephen Green

‘According to one national newspaper, ’some atheist supporters of the campaign were disappointed that the wording of the adverts did not declare categorically that God does not exist, although there were fears that this could break advertising guidelines.’

‘Well, I believe the ad breaks the Advertising Code anyway, unless the advertisers hold evidence that God probably does not exist.

‘The ASA does not just cover goods and services, it covers all advertising. The advertisers cannot hide behind the ASA’s ‘matters of opinion’ exclusion, because no person or body is named as the author of the statement. It is given as a statement of fact and that means it must be capable of substantiation if it is not to break the rules.

‘There is plenty of evidence for God, from peoples’ personal experience, to the complexity, interdependence, beauty and design of the natural world. But there is scant evidence on the other side, so I think the advertisers are really going to struggle to show their claim is not an exaggeration or inaccurate, as the ASA code puts it.

The Christian evangelist is not concerned by fears that his complaint will lead to atheists complaining about Christian adverts. ‘I am sure many of them have complained about Christian advertising already,’ he said, ‘but a statement such as “The Bible says ‘the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord’” is entirely factual. The Bible does say that. The statement “Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life - no-one comes to the Father but by me,’” to take another example, is a Biblical quote, from the same Bible which is part of our Christian Constitution and upon which witnesses promise to tell the truth in Court. The Bible is, to coin a phrase, our Bible.’

So, the battle is joined over whether you can ‘prove’ God exists, and predictably, for some Christians the proof is to be found in the didactic statements taken from the Bible(the King James version of course)- and so that is enough. For others, this argument is akin to believing in Klingons because we saw them on Star Trek.

Again- it is well worth checking out the Christian voice website. The message given is that Britain is a land that is sliding into a cess pit of sin, promiscuity, perversion and homosexuality. Christian voice casts itself as a lone voice speaking for the truth of God in the middle of a the Godless heathen, who are all heading for the fires of hell, lest they heed the warning.

In reading it I find myself, even as a Christian, alienated and ashamed of what these people have made of the Gospel of Jesus. I find myself disagreeing with both the substance and the tone of the message. It sits at such odds with everything that I understand the Gospel of Jesus to be about.

But what might be the outcome of this little splash of media attention given to we people of faith, and the militant evangelists of atheism?

I have mixed feelings- and feel another list coming on!

  1. As a Christian, I find the atheist slogans upsetting- but think that they have as much right to display them as Christians have to display our evangelical messages.
  2. Some of the Christian slogans make me feel just as uncomfortable!
  3. I wonder whether this is a real opportunity for people to think again about God, and rather than a negative campaign, this might encourage people to ask questions and in fact, draw them closer to God?
  4. This battle seems to belong to an earlier age- a time of Christendom and modernism. It seems to me to engage with a debate about spirituality that most people have no interest in at all. It is as likely to alienate people from Dawkins and his disciples as it is to turn them from God.
  5. Is our role as Christians to ‘defend the faith’ or to ‘defend God’? Is it to set ourselves up as moral arbiters for our society- pointing the finger at the ungodly and the sinful wherever we see it? Or is it rather to let others know our allegiance by the love we show for one another?

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Capitalism and Church as supermarket…

January 14, 2009 in Uncategorized by chris | 1 comment

capitalismrocks

In a recent post on his Missional Tribe blog ‘beyond missional’ Frank Viola asked some questions about the effect of the current financial global crisis on Churches, and indeed the Kingdom of God. You can read his post here.

It has been a regular theme of my pondering, and of course, my blogging! See here and here.

It seems that many Church groups and organisations, dependent as they are on a financial platform that is dependent on  a stable prosperous Western capitalist economy, are beginning to feel the pinch. Church, in this form, is embedded within the dominant economic realities of the day. In it’s organisation at least, it is no different from any other business or institution- it has mortgages, profit and loss, staffing costs and maintenance costs.

Some suggest that the Western world is undergoing a massive shift. Capitalism is reforming, in the face of a crisis as big as it has ever faced before. Some are even asking again whether a system based entirely on expanding the ways in which people can be made to want MORE is sustainable. Particularly as the system also depends on huge inequalities between the consuming countries (in the West) and sweatshops and mines of the South,

Crisis has this way of holding up a mirror through which we can see ourselves from a different perspective. Some Christians are starting to ask again whether this really is the only way to live- and how this reflects our calling as agents of the Kingdom of God.

Perhaps this challenge also falls on our institutions. Has the way that we have done church easily become based on a consumer choice?

Church, becomes a shiny supermarket, at which we buy spirituality- packaged to be portable within our context.

In my country (Scotland) this is less and less relevant, as people simply no longer visit our spiritual supermarkets. For some this is because they have lost their market appeal. I wonder if this is also time for people of faith to stop stacking product, and hoping customers will come to buy. It is time to remember that the church that Jesus loves is built of flesh, and has no steeple…

And to remember again the words of Jesus from Matthew chapter 5, where he calls us to a radically different way of living…

Lest I descend any further into  polemic, I am forced to confess my own dependence on this context- my mortgage, my car, my gadgets. And buildings- they have there uses, particularly in our climate!

But I no longer feel the need to put my resources (money time and energy) to sustaining an earthly institution.

Frank Viola quotes Beuchner;

“I also believe that what goes on in them [support groups] is far closer to what Christ meant his Church to be, and what it originally was, than much of what goes on in most churches I know. These groups have no
buildings or official leadership or money. They have no rummage sales, no altar guilds, no every-member canvases. They have no preachers, no choirs, no liturgy, no real estate. They have no creeds. They have no program. They make you wonder if the best thing that could happen to many a church might not be to have its building burned down and to lose all its money. Then all the people would have left is God and each other.”
~ Frederick Buechner, Quoted on pg. 277 of Reimagining Church.

I have found myself part of such as small group as described above, called aoradh. We meet in houses, or village halls, or pubs. We have no paid staff, and things can be pretty chaotic, as we do not have any leaders either. We look for partnerships and create spaces where we can, seeking to be a community who are faced outwards.

This way of being is strangely credit-crunch proof I find!

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