Ordained academics

Geordie asked a question in response to this post which seemed to demand a longer answer. How is a vocation to ordained ministry lived out on the academy? It seems to me that there are two sides to this question: one theological and one existential. On the theological question there are probably two basic ways to jump: one might acknowledge the presence of different orders of ministry within the church, of which an academic role could be one. Calvin included ‘doctors’ alongside ‘pastors’ amongst the ordinary ministers of the church (Inst. IV.3.iv), calling on Eph. 4 as his justification. The Baptist Union of Great Britain is beginning to head in this direction, recognising specialist ministries in evangelism and in youth ministry on its list of accredited pastors. One might, then, offer an account of ministry that included within the basic vocation a call specifically to the study, explication, and defence of the doctrines of the church. Such a vocation might of course be exercised in various places, but a university theology department would seem a particularly hospitable one… The problem with this line would seem to be the movement from ‘doctoral’ ministry to ‘pastoral’ ministry, and vice-versa; is God’s calling mutable? Well, possibly, or God may call some to both roles, to be exercised in different ways at different times. The problem is not insuperable. If, instead, we regard ordination as to a unitary ministry of ‘pastor-teacher’ (as other readers of Eph. 4 find the text affirming), the question needs to be answered a different way. I once argued in connection with ‘sector ministries’ (hospital chaplaincies and the like) that it is the visible practice of every denomination I know to regard other roles (national or regional leadership; translocal charitable or preaching work; chaplaincies; …) as legitimate exercises of a calling to pastoral ministry. (‘Visible practice’ here meaning that even if they don’t admit it, by not excluding ordained ministers who take on such roles, and not re-ordaining them should they return to pastoral ministry, they imply that these roles offer the potential for an adequate fulfilment of their calling and ordination vows.) In a word, my theological answer to Geordie’s question is here: I am able to fulfil my ordination vows, and the vocation God placed on my life, in my current employment. This is a judgement I have made, but it has been guided and confirmed by my church fellowships and denominational officers. An existential answer may have to wait till another...

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An exegetical puzzle in Eph. 5

I have been looking again at Yoder’s Politics of Jesus in preparation for teaching; he writes a chapter on ‘revolutionary submission,’ picking up on the Haustafeln of Eph. 5:21ff., Col. 3:18ff., 1Pet. 2:13ff., &c. He gives cogent reasons for reading these texts as collisions between the radically liberating ethic of Jesus and the patriarchal assumptions of the culture, and so decries both an unthinking assertion of gender equivalence that simply ignores the texts, and a wooden reading that extracts the text from its social context as some timeless normative principle that will guide modern Western egalitarian and nuclear marriages just as effectively as it did the older ones. Yoder’s point was not particularly exegetical, but it, and the memory of some particularly awful sermons on Christian marriage, sent me back to the texts to look more closely. Let me take Eph. 5 as a case study. Read quickly, the text says ‘wives submit to your husbands; husbands love your wives…’ and the debate in Evangelical circles plays on whether we read this as normative, finding different but complementary gender roles in marriage, or whether we take a more Yoderian reading which stresses the astonishing decision to address a wife (and a child, and a slave) as a morally capable being, and so sees a push towards gender equality in the text which is then, unfortunately, tempered by cultural considerations no longer operative. But if we look carefully at the text, it seems to me that both positions are rather obviously wrong. As Yoder points out elsewhere, submission is a basic and universal Christian stance. Christians are to submit themselves to the state (Rom. 13:1; 1Pet 2:13); to each other (Eph. 5:21); to God’s law (Rom 8:7); to God’s righteousness (Rom. 10:3); to God (Jam. 4:7); Christian wives to their husbands (1Pet 3:1); Christian children to their parents (Heb. 12:8); younger Christians to older Christians (1Pet. 5:5); more recent converts to longer-standing converts (1Cor. 16:16)… Equally, love is a basic and universal Christian stance–I won’t give the long list of texts, but ‘love one another’ is a fairly general Christian ethic. In Ephesians, this point is made very obvious, to anyone without an NIV Bible. The text of Eph. 5:21-22 reads Υποστασσόμενοι ἀλλήλοις ἐν φόβω Χριστο (22) αἰ γυναῖκες τοῖς ἰδίοις ἀνδράσιν ὡς τῶ κυρίω (apologies for the lack of iota-subscripts; I’m still struggling with this Greek thing…): ‘Submit to one another out of fear of Christ, wives to your husbands as to the Lord…’ There is some uncertainty over the reading, and most of the (many) variant texts do put a main verb in v.22, but even so, it is a deliberate and conscious echo of the verb in v.21. (The NIV decision to put a major section break, complete with editorial sub-heading, between v.21 and v.22 is merely bizarre, grammatically impossible on the UBS4/NA27 majority reading, and making no sense of the variants.) Again, the entire parenetic section has begun in vv.1-2 with a mutual and general command to live in love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us–language consciously and precisely echoed in v.25, the command to husbands. (Eph. 5:2: καὶ περιπατεῖτε ἐν ἀγάπη καθὼς καὶ ὁ Χριστὸς ἠγάπησεν ἡμᾶς καὶ παρέδωκεν ἑαυτὸν ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν …; Eph. 5:25: Οἱ ἄνδρες ἀγαπᾶτε τὰς γυναῖκας καθὼς καὶ ὁ Χπριστὸς ἠγάπησεν τὴν ἐκκλησίαν καὶ ἑαυτὸν παρέδωκεν ὑπὲρ αὐτης.) The text, then, is a puzzle: every member of the church is to love every other member as Christ first loved, and every member of the church is to submit to every other member. My wife is a member of the same church as I am–a not-uncommon situation, even in Ephesus, or so I presume; we are already under general ethical injunctions here in Ephesians to submit to one another and to love as Christ loved. Why, then, should the same chapter particularise these injunctions on gender lines within the marriage relationship? Obviously, not because somehow she is to be more submissive to me than I am to her, or because I am to be more loving to her than she is to me; the text will not permit such a reading unless we excise Eph. 5:2 and 21 from the chapter. Every Christian relationship is to be marked by both revolutionary submission and by Christ-like love, not just some marked by one of them for reasons of gender. Nor is it some sort of cultural accommodation: the text is deliberately echoing already-established universal ethical commands, binding in all Christian relationships. Every Christian relationship is to be marked by both revolutionary submission and by Christ-like love, not just some marked by one of...

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Evangelicalism divided? (2)

I ended the last post with the promise that I would return to the question in ‘a day or two’. Illness and exam marking intervened, quite dramatically in the latter case, unfortunately. Evangelicalism has never been a uniform movement; has it been a united one? Or has it, at least, been more united than Rob Warner suggests it has become at present? Warner suggests a growing divide between the ‘entrepreneurial Evangelicals,’ representatives of the ‘conversionist-activist’ axis, and the ‘Conservative undertow’, or ‘Calvinistic hegemony’, representatives of the ‘biblicist-crucicentric’ axis. He then, curiously, acknowledges that there is already a new middle (‘the post-conservative emergence’, represented by EA since Calver left; LBC/LST under Tidball; &c.–hardly marginal groups…), but refuses to let this impact his analysis in any way. Let me offer three comments on this, one built on the same ‘participant observer’ methodology that Warner deploys, one drawing on statistical data, and one more orthodoxly historical: Warner’s analysis of a split between the more ‘conservative’ and the more ‘progressive’ wings of the British Evangelical movement seems to me to be overly simple in at least two ways. First, conservative Evangelicalism itself is divided on whether it wants to remain a part of the broader Evangelical movement or not. There are those–curiously, often denominationally Anglican, and so of rather shaky credentials in terms of classical conservative Evangelicalism (with is either solidly Baptistic and congregationalist, or firmly Presbyterian)–who are looking for a purer, narrower, Evangelical movement, one from which the doctrinally questionable have been rigorously excluded. There are also those, more often in my experience Presbyterian, and Welsh or Scots, who, whilst in some ways more ‘conservative’ than the former group, are nonetheless open to a continuing pan-Evangelical dialogue, accepting the presence, if not the views, of some who are much more ‘progressive’ in their beliefs. Now, it may be that this is a case of a centre-periphery historical pattern, and that the ideas now espoused in London will soon be accepted in Edinburgh, and eventually on South Uist. I doubt it, though. David Bebbington has convinced me that such patterns do occur in British Christian history (for the most convincing example, try plotting dates of British revivals on a map, ending with the Hebrides in 1948…), but I am more and more convinced that Scots (& incidentally Welsh) Christianity, not excluding Evangelicalism, is a different beast to the English version, and lives by different rules. Further, without invidiously naming names, if you know the people involved you can trace this debate within the leaderships of organisations and denominations, as well as between those organisations’ current public stances. All of which is to say that the hard split that Warner identifies is much messier than he allows for. Second, having now read Warner’s book, I think the gaping hole in the middle of all his analysis is the lack of any acknowledgement of the rise of Black majority churches as a significant force in English Evangelicalism in the period he surveys. I expect that when the history comes to be adequately written, this will be seen as the single biggest change, transforming Evangelicalism, and the wider religious scene in England. (To take only one example, the notion that Western Europe will continue to secularise is now routinely dismissed almost solely on the basis of the influx and settlement of religiously-serious immigrant communities). And, to put it very bluntly, I think his analysis fails completely to apply to, or to account for, the Black majority churches. In London, this is presently over 50% of the Evangelical community, and growing fairly rapidly. Third, historically, I observe regular divisions in Evangelicalism just as wide, and much more vitriolic, than anything Warner is able to illustrate. Robert Haldane in Geneva; Spurgeon and the ‘Downgrade’; the decision of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christan Union to separate from the Student Christian Movement (then routinely identified as an Evangelical organisation); … Once again, I find Warner erring in thinking the 1950s were normative, when in fact they were very, very odd in the history of the British Evangelical...

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Easter

‘Rise, heart, Thy Lord is risen; sing His praise Without delayes, Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise With Him mayst rise; That, as His death calcinèd thee to dust, His life may make thee gold, and much more, just. Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part With all thy art: The crosse taught all wood to resound His name Who bore the same; His stretchèd sinews taught all strings what key Is best to celebrate this most high day. Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song Pleasant and long; Or, since all musick is but three parts vied And multiplied, O, let Thy blessèd Spirit bare a part, And make up our defects with His sweet art. George...

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