Can we celebrate an online Eucharist? A Baptist response 2: Some possible objections

I argued in the previous post that an online Eucharist could be a theological possibility for Baptist Christians. I here want to consider and forestall some potential criticisms: The need for ‘physical’ presence Do we need to be physically together to meet around the Lord’s Table? Yes, but let me interrogate what that means. Too much recent writing in this area has worked with a ‘physical’/’virtual’ dichotomy, which makes no sense. Signals in fibre optic cables and electromagnetic waves are physical realities; our shared presence together in an online—virtual—meeting is therefore a mediated physical presence. What it is not is a somatic presence; we are not together bodily. This distinction is important. There may be eucharistic practices that require somatic action; I don’t off-hand know of one, but an insistence that the celebrant must touch every eucharistic wafer for it to be properly consecrated is not very hard to imagine; a rubric that insists that every communicant must make bodily contact with every other communicant as the peace is shared is less plausible, but certainly not beyond conception. But these have not been our practices. We have been unreflectively comfortable with non-somatic physical presence, and so should be comfortable with virtual presence, because it is still physical. Mediation This granted, could we imagine a different distinction, between mediated presence and unmediated presence? Possibly, but: (a) it will not make much difference; (b) it is probably again nonsense; and (c) in any case would be a very odd thing indeed to imagine in the context of the Eucharist. On (a), we have again been demonstrably very relaxed about mediated presence—I do not recall the last time that I preached without a microphone, and for those relying on the induction loop and their hearing aid, any engagement with my sermon was necessarily mediated by technology. I have communicated at, and indeed celebrated, eucharists where some or many of those present could see the celebrant only because of projection onto a screen. Further, mediated relationships at a distance have been normal for the whole history of the church. Consider, for representative example, the medium of the letter. Mark Noll, amongst others, has argued that the Evangelical Revival was shaped, if not totally sustained, by the existence of good trade routes for sharing epistolary testimonies across the North Atlantic; in the fourteenth century, Catherine of Siena had a profound influence on the reform of the medieval church, and on Italian politics, through her letter-writing; and in the first century the letters of Paul, Peter, and John are generally judged to have successfully harnessed the medium for gospel purposes… Unmediated relationship has never been the only practice of the church, and so discussions about the adoption of new media must be comparative judgements—is this new medium better or worse than media we have previously adopted, and in what ways?—rather than complaints that mediated relationship is somehow antithetical to the gospel On (b) we need once again to think about physicality: when I recite the words of institution in a normal Eucharist I create sound waves which reach the ears of the congregation; physical mediation is a condition of all human interaction. If there is something inappropriate about mediation that involves wifi, we will need to give a theological explanation of why sound waves are an acceptable mediation when electromagnetic waves are not; I assert with some confidence that no such explanation is available. On (c): a sacrament is, following Augustine, ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’—sacraments are physical mediations of divine action. It is possible that, precisely at the point where God is mediating His own gifts through physical media, He bans us from using (certain sorts of) physical media, but it is hardly plausible, without a very compelling argument. The shared meal Some have argued that online communion is impossible because the basic reality of communion is a shared meal. There is an easy argument against this, turning on the very visible divergence of most eucharistic celebrations from anything resembling a meal, but I would rather go a different way. Many of us in the past few weeks have become used to taking social occasions into virtual space. I have encouraged my staff to continue their various coffee hours using video conferencing, and I know that other groups in my university have continued regular pub nights in a similar way. If we sit and chat together whilst each drinking a coffee, or indeed a pint, how is what is happening not a shared communal drink? (Consider that, for the pub night, everyone present could easily have ordered something poured out of a different bottle.)...

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Can we celebrate an online Eucharist? A Baptist response 1: A positive argument

For us Baptists, I think that there are two possible ways of asserting that an online/scattered Eucharist is possible: one is obvious but bad, and one less obvious but better; both are completely dependent on distinctives of Baptist ecclesiology.

The first is the suggestion that we can have many household communions at the same time; the second the idea that we might celebrate one communion, even if we are in separate homes as we do.

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Two great Christian resources for International Women’s Day 2018

I spent a good chunk of Thursday (International Women’s Day 2018) at the launch of two excellent resources. One is the Sophia Network Minding The Gap research. This is a survey of 1200+ women in the UK church, asking them about their experiences. There was much hope in the stories uncovered, and much darkness too. My friends at Sophia were kind enough to ask me to respond to the research at the launch (my first time speaking at an event in the House of Lords…); what I said will appear on their blog soon, and I don’t want to pre-empt it here, but I do want to honour them for doing the work so well, and for their ten years now of advocating for gender justice in the UK church. The second is the Project 3:28 Database. This is, simply, a database of female Christian speakers in the UK, created in the hope that it will become big and comprehensive enough that the endlessly tedious, and always weasel, suggestion that ‘we couldn’t find a woman’ to speak at this or that conference will be rendered obsolete. I’m honoured to be able to name the people–Natalie Collins; Hannah Mudge; David Bunce; Vicky Walker–who made this happen as friends, but I also feel a tiny slice of ownership. Natalie collated the stats on Christian conference speakers in the UK in 2o13; on the back of this, a group of us got together about four years ago and asked what we could do to change things. It was one of those tables that it was an utter privilege to have a seat at: I looked around at Natalie, Hannah, Paula Gooder, Elaine Storkey, Wendy Beech-Ward, and Krish Kandiah, and wondered what I had ever done to merit being in that company. We committed to continue to publish the stats year on year, which we have (Natalie has done most of the work), with visible results. Some conferences embraced the implied challenge: Spring Harvest, for example, committed to producing their own data, and to working towards improvement. Others didn’t–I remember the day we received a formal letter from one organisation’s lawyers, the sinking feeling of what that might mean, and then the elation of realising that they were actually scared of our little collective, because we were speaking the truth in public. We dreamt at that first meeting in 2014 of some resource profiling and championing female speakers at conferences; we continued to dream and pray. We were committed to doing it well, or not at all. An astonishingly generous anonymous gift of nearly £5000 pushed us to try to make our dreams a reality; we raised a good chunk more, and Natalie, Hannah, Vicky, and David created the website we now have. We are grateful for the donor who gave thousands, and for the many donors who gave £10. The website is both beautiful and wonderfully functional, and I am hugely impressed with the way my friends have brought it to reality. I have just checked and, three days after launch, there are over 120 gifted female speakers registered. Some–Amy Orr-Ewing; Paula Gooder–are as well known as almost anyone in the UK church; others are much less famous, but are women who have something to say. I hope and pray that it will grow ten-fold or more, that there will be a mighty army of gifted women offering themselves to the UK churches to preach the gospel and to teach the faith. I hope and pray too that event organisers–from the biggest national conference to the most modest local church away day–will use it to expand their imagination of who could come and speak. It’s not perfect. I look at it already and think and pray about questions of intersectionality, about how we prevent this thing, if we can, from being another way of silencing other oppressed groups. We want all women, not just white women, not just able-bodied women, not just straight women… We will have failed if somehow our structures exclude some class of women. East of Eden and longing for the End, however, perfection isn’t available to us. All we have are our best attempts to make things a little better, and the promise that, in the redemption won by Christ and in the transformation brought by the Spirit, our best attempts might be graciously taken up by God and made into something truly significant. Could this be one such? I don’t know. I do know that at the small launch event we were joined by Veronica Zundel. I’d not met Veronica before; I discovered that she had worked back in the day with John Stott, no less, on the...

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The Preacher as Antichrist: a sonnet

The Preacher as Antichrist To seize the flesh and make it word instead, Dissecting lived perfection to display Cold concepts, or trite lessons—mere cliche— I block th’ incarnate Word in printer’s lead, Make husk and dry chaff of the living bread, Turn laughter, tears, and blood, to an essay— Mere cleverness—affront to those who pray. To those who come, desiring to be fed And given hope, is all that can be said A worthless, weak, and cheap call to obey? Alliterated numbered points convey A dreary discourse, dull as it is dead. I look up to the Spirit that me owns, And ask, can life be given to these dry bones?   (Certainly not a theorised criticism of preaching; more a confession that, too often, this is what it feels like I am...

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A ‘Larbert Statement’ (memoirs of a gift of grace)

Yesterday morning I left home early, apologising to a neighbour for the state of one of the children I was leaving with her, and drove to a nondescript dormitory community in central Scotland called Larbert. I had agreed to spend a couple of days there in a confidential meeting with a group of church leaders helping them to talk about sexuality. I traveled with a heavy heart. My ears and mind were full of deadening words and shrill responses that had echoed across the Atlantic the day before. I knew just one of the people I was going to meet—liked and respected him, to be sure—but wondered if I was going into another blue-on-blue battle that would leave us all exhausted, wounded, and discouraged. I prayed as I drove, parked, pushed open a dark wooden door, and walked in. It was an impressive group of people—more than half, I think, were national leaders in one network or another—and an impressive group of contributors—At least four have a significantly higher profile in this space than me. But impressive people can still, perhaps can especially, wound and kill. We disagreed amongst ourselves. Over biblical interpretation, and patterns of leadership, and mission strategy. We told honest stories, questioned each other sharply, defended our convictions stoutly, worshipped, prayed, openly acknowledged how we each had been challenged by what we had shared, and then broke bread. We failed to agree. We succeeded in rekindling each other’s hope. We succeeded in helping each other to increased commitment to Jesus even when we understood his call in different ways. We succeeded in making mission more possible, more imaginable, even when we found the goal of mission less clear. We succeeded in respecting each other’s commitment to Scripture, even when we disagreed about how to read or apply it. I drove home this evening with a lightened heart. I wondered if I could capture what we had shared in some poor pastiche or parody of a position statement; this is my best attempt (it is entirely inadequate): — 1. Orientation Jesus. The first word we need to say. Jesus. The only word we want to say. Jesus. You are the centre. The centre of everything. Of our lives. Of our ministries. Of our mission. Of our communities. Jesus. You are the centre. The centre around which everything else must orbit, endlessly pulled by the gravity of your love. Lord Jesus, we who know your love cannot but love every person we meet with love that flows from yours. We do not say you ‘call’ us to do this; it is as inevitable as a stone falling. Gravity does not ‘call’ the stone. But falling is easy. Loving is hard. In this broken world, Lord Jesus, falling is very easy, and loving well is very hard. — 2. Context Lord Jesus, we few leaders have gathered to talk with and about our LGBT+ sisters, brothers, friends, neighbours, strangers. People you have died for. People you now live for. People you have always loved. People you now love. We assert (we confess, we believe) that the gravity of your love holds them at least as strongly as it hold us. (And we pray: increase the gravity, Lord—pull them (and us) out of orbit to spiral into you.) We confess (we admit, we bewail) that we have failed and struggled to love adequately, to love as you love. (And we pray: enlarge our imaginations, Lord—expand us until our hearts can embrace them (and the rest of us).) We bewail (we contemn, we abjure) any and every suggestion that they are less worthy of your love or our love than we are. (And we pray: increase our contempt—let those who despise or denigrate the least of these always be hateful to us (every one of us).) — 3. Scripture Lord Jesus, we are wrestling with your law revealed in Scripture, and with each other. We love you so much that we cannot, we dare not, step away from your Word. We love you so much that we cannot, we dare not, pretend that we have mastered Your Word. Wrestle with us until the Day breaks, Lord, we pray. Let us never be satisfied with partial or provisional truths. Wound us as we read so that every step we take is shaped by our wrestling with you. Never let us agree, Lord Jesus, because then we might feel safe substituting our agreement for your Scriptures. Keep us wrestling, keep us fighting, keep us focused on your Word (and on you, the Word). But forgive us, Lord Jesus, when we love Scripture so much that we wound each other,...

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Reni Eddo-Lodge on understanding race and white privilege in the UK

I have been involved in several social media conversations over the past couple of weeks which have started with someone in the UK sharing a helpful US perspective on understanding and responding to racism/white supremacy, and have gone on to ask where the equivalent British analyses were. I received Reni Eddo-Lodge’s new book, Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) yesterday lunchtime, and finished reading it before lunch today. It is at least one answer to that question, and a compelling one at that. I want to write a decent summary, but here are the quotations I took down as I read: [On slavery] ’…unlike the situation in America, most British people saw the money without the blood.’ (5) ‘…many Brits lived comfortably off the toil of enslaved black people without being directly involved in the transaction.’ (6) ‘But the recipients of the compensation for the dissolution of a significant money-making industry were not those who had been enslaved. Instead it was the 46,000 British slave-owning citizens who received cheques for their financial losses.’ (6) [On Black British history] ‘But most of my knowledge of black history was American history. This was an inadequate education in a country where increasing generations of black and brown people continue to consider themselves British (including me).’ (9) ‘…until I went actively digging for black British histories, I didn’t know them.’ (54) ‘While the black British story is starved of oxygen, the US struggle against racism is globalised…’ (54-5) [On systemic racism] ‘It seems that the root of the problem of both the under-representation of race and gender is essentially the same, but the solutions proposed for each are radically different.’ (78) ‘Colour-blindness is a childish, stunted analysis of racism.’ (82) ‘Colour-blindness does not accept the legitimacy of structural racism or a history of white dominance.’ (83) ‘In order to dismantle unjust, racist structures, we must see race. We must see who benefits from their race, who is disproportionately impacted by the negative stereotypes about their race, and to who power and privilege is bestowed upon [sic] … Seeing race is essential to changing the system.’ (84) ‘I don’t want to be included. Instead, I want to question who created the standard in the first place. After a lifetime of embodying difference, I have no desire to be equal. I want to deconstruct the structural power of a system that marked me out as different … The onus is not on me to change. Instead, it’s the world around me.’ (184) [On white privilege] ‘How can I define white privilege? It’s so difficult to describe an absence. And white privilege is an absence of the consequences of racism. An absence of structural discrimination, and absence of your race being viewed as a problem first and foremost…’ (86) ‘But white privilege is the fact that if you’re white, your race will almost certainly positively impact your life’s trajectory in some way. And you probably won’t even notice it.’ (87) ‘The idea of white privilege forces white people who aren’t actively racist to confront their own complicity in its continuing existence. White privilege is dull, grinding complacency.’ (87) [On ‘reverse racism’] ‘There is an unattributed definition of racism that defines it as prejudice plus power. Those disadvantaged by racism can certainly be cruel, vindictive and prejudiced … [b]ut there simply aren’t enough black people in positions of power to enact racism against white people…’ (89) [On race and class] ‘We should be re-thinking the image we conjure up when we think of a working-class person. Instead of a white man in a flat cap, it’s a black woman pushing a pram.’ (201) [On ‘urban’] ‘The word “urban” here was coded … [u]rban here, as it is so often used (in music particularly), was code language for “black people live here”.’ (195) [On racism as a white problem] ‘Discussing racism is not the same thing as discussing “black identity”. Discussing racism is about discussing white identity. It’s about white anxiety. It’s about asking why whiteness has this reflexive need to define itself against immigrant bogey monsters in order to feel comfortable, safe, and secure.’ (215) ‘…racism is a white problem. It reveals the anxieties, hypocrisies and double standards of whiteness. It is a problem in the psyche of whiteness that white people must take responsibility to solve. You can only do so much from the outside.’ (219)   I should note that the longest and angriest chapter is on intersectional feminism; I’ve not excerpted that at all...

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