US release of Trinity book

IVP have announced the US edition of my Trinity book here, complete with a new title (The Quest for the Trinity: The Doctrine of God in Scripture, History and Modernity) and cover. Neither title was mine; the US version, with its echo of Schweitzer, is not something I would have dared to choose myself, but the fact that an editor – someone who I know, and whose theological insight I respect greatly – suggested it encouraged me to think that the book is being understood in the way I hoped it might be. Anyway, it should be available in November for any interested American...

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The trouble with ‘normal’: a further note on human sexuality

I have argued before on this blog that one of the problems with contemporary ecclesial debates over human sexuality is the assumption that a Christian sexual ethic should celebrate, and enshrine, ‘normal’ sexuality. It occurs to me in reading some recent public comments from different churches that one of the problems with this is the slipperiness of the word ‘normal’. I think there is a fundamental ambiguity in the word which is not often recognised. It is so elusive that it is even there in the OED definition(!), where 2a (the relevant meaning) offers: ‘Constituting or conforming to a type or standard; regular, usual, typical; ordinary, conventional.’ With fear and trembling – can the OED ever be wrong? – I want here to suggest that, perhaps, that which ‘conforms to a standard’ might be distinctly unusual, and that that which is ‘usual’ might substantially fail to conform to a standard, and so that there is a conflation of two different meanings here, which should be distinguished if we want to think clearly. I distinguish between ‘usual’ meaning ‘(most) commonly occurring’ and ‘normal’ meaning ‘conforming to a standard’ (on the basis that the etymology of ‘normal’ seems to imply a connection to a norm, I retain the word for this sense). Now, we might argue that in a well-ordered (‘normal’?!) world, this distinction would be formal, not real: most or all examples of a given thing do in fact conform to the standard that governs that thing, and so the sets defined by ‘usual’ and ‘normal’ are coterminous, or at least broadly so, even if differently defined. It happens that the world we live in is not well-ordered: it is normal for a (British) banker to adhere to a high level of professional ethics; it is not at all clear that this has been usual, however. (We could make analogous points about politicians, journalists and – lest I be thought to be sniping at others – academics and the clergy also.) So what? Well, just this: this distinction between usual and normal becomes important when we consider recent ecclesial pronouncements on human sexuality. As I have discussed before on this blog, the Roman Catholic Church has employed a ‘natural law’ argument to claim that exclusive, permanent, heterosexual monogamy is normal; in its response to the government consultation down south, the Church of England has argued rather that exclusive, permanent, heterosexual monogamy is usual. These are strikingly different arguments, which nonetheless can easily be conflated given the confusion over the word ‘normal’ with which I began. The Church of England’s submission to the Westminster government’s consultation can be read here [link is to pdf]. Given the public prominence of the CoE, it is not a surprise that it attracted a significant amount of comment, rather too much of it of the ‘I (dis)agree with your conclusions, therefore I (dis)approve of your submission’ variety. The arguments presented may roughly be divided into two groups: there is a series of arguments based on the intrinsic nature of marriage; and there is a series of arguments based on the legal status of marriage in English & Welsh law. (The submission never considers the relationship between marriage as defined in civil law, and marriage as defined theologically, which I tend to think is a weakness.) The legal arguments suggest that the government has failed to understand the present legal status of marriage, and the difficulty of changing it; I am no lawyer, but the submission seems convincing to me on this point. The claims concerning the ‘intrinsic nature of marriage’ (a phrase used, repeatedly, in the submission) start with appeals to norms: ‘derived from the teaching of Christ himself’ (1); ‘derived from the Scriptures and enshrined within its authorised liturgy’ (2). This line is rapidly abandoned, however, and replaced by an account of heterosexual monogamy as usual: in (6) we read of ‘the intrinsic nature of marriage, as enshrined in human institutions since before the advent of either church or state, is the union of a man and a woman’. This phrase might, generously, be heard as an appeal to a creational norm (although I confess to being troubled by a theology that is prepared to postulate a ‘before’ concerning the church…); as we read on, however, the document explicitly asserts that heterosexual monogamy is usual in history, and bases its arguments on this assertion. This is particularly clear in paragraphs 7 and 11. (7) asserts: Throughout history, in the laws of the land and in the Church of England‘s Book of Common Prayer on which the laws concerning marriage are grounded, marriage has been understood to be, always and exclusively, between a woman and a man. This...

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Church Growth in Britain 3: New Churches

Six chapters of the book focus on new churches, three looking specifically at Black Majority Churches, and three more widely. Hugh Osgood gives an excellent overview of the growth of BMCs; Richard Burgess offers an account of one denomination, The Redeemed Christian Church of God; and Amy Duffuor offers an account of a single congregation, Freedom Centre International in Peckham. All three chapters are interesting and valuable in charting the changing experiences of BMCs, and their intentional moves to keep the next generation and to adapt to changing cultural locations of their worshippers. George Lings (who was my vicar for the few months of my life I spent worshipping in an Anglican parish) offers a chapter on ‘Fresh Expressions and Church Planting in the Church of England’. These are big stories: George estimates, very credibly, that a thousand new congregations have started since 1992, either as plants or as fresh expressions, although he acknowledges a certain degree of false branding (in discussing things badged as fresh expressions, ‘the “annual Christmas tree lighting service” is an entry on a recent database that entertains me most and convinces me least.’) There is – properly, in the case of fresh expressions, where service and mission should be as important as attendance – no attempt to estimate the numbers of people attending these events, or how many of them are either also attending normal parish worship, or have left parish worship to join a fresh expression. We might guess at 50 000 people involved in Anglican churches and largely invisible to standard measures, however. David Goodhew’s analysis of new churches in York does give numbers, and they are fascinating. Twenty seven new churches have been founded in York since 1980, with a total attendance of just below 2000 adults and just over 500 under 18s; this can be compared to Gill’s figures (from Empty Church Revisited): mainline adult Sunday attendance decline between 1989 and 2001 was 1683 (741 Anglican; 322 Free Church; 620 Roman Catholic). There is some double-counting in these figures – some of Gill’s Free Churches probably class as ‘new churches’ on Goodhew’s analysis – and the time periods are not directly comparable, but we might be justified in suggesting that new church growth almost cancels out mainline decline in York, at least (Goodhew notes that York enjoys unusually vibrant church life). There are more adults in new churches than in old Free Churches; Goodhew predicts that the new churches will have more worshippers than the Anglican churches across the city very soon. The new churches include some international churches – BMC; Portuguese-speaking; &c. – and also a number of small Eastern Orthodox congregations; the majority, however, and all the larger congregations are non-denominational, or new denominational (Vineyard; New Frontiers; …) new churches in the classic mould. Broadly evangelical and charismatic in theology, appealing strongly to students and staff at the universities, well-organised, and mission-minded. Clive Marsh looks at new churches in Birmingham through the lens of four case studies; here the BMCs are a much more significant part of the new church story than in York; although Marsh does not attempt to offer city-wide statistics, he opines that in Birmingham also ‘the decline of mainline denominations is being offset, if not balanced, by the growth of other churches’. He further suggests that if we factor in other religions, it is almost certain that Birmingham is desecularising. These chapters do not tell a story of the reversal of the national decline in church attendance, but they do tell local stories of vibrant and growing churches, that are significant enough in at least some contexts to challenge the national story quite...

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Child circumcision and religious liberty

The reporting of the recent regional court judgement concerning infant circumcision in Germany has been predictably sensationalist; it is a ruling of a local and low court, binding only in a very limited geographical area, and I assume – albeit as a legal layperson – that it will be overturned fairly quickly. (The European Convention on Human Rights – which will overrule any local law in Germany – does, it is true, place a ‘public health’ exclusion on the right to family life (8.2) and the right to freedom of religious practice (9.2), but (a) ‘public health’ usually means the prevention of communicable diseases or widespread health threats, not protection from individual harm (assuming it is accepted that male circumcision is an instance of individual harm – it has been practiced on grounds of improved genital hygiene) and (b) the religion clause was written in full knowledge of practices of infant circumcision, and there was presumably no intent to outlaw such practices.) Considered in abstract, however, the ruling raises two interesting questions about religious liberty: whether parents should determine a child’s religion; and whether freedom of religion is sufficient justification for practices otherwise considered harmful by the wider culture. Assuming the various press reports of the Cologne case were accurate (which assumption is probably dangerous), the court’s decision explicitly considered the first question, and proposed that the parental decision to have a child circumcised infringed on the child’s right to religious self-determination. Two things might be said about this: first, it demonstrates worrying religious illiteracy on the part of the court; and second, it is a rather quaint and utopian position to adopt. Circumcision does not, in simple point of fact, define a (male) child as Jewish or Muslim. One is Jewish by virtue of birth: the covenant was made with all the children of Israel, and circumcision is an act of obedience to the covenant, not an act of entry into it. Equally, one becomes a Muslim by reciting shahadah (‘There is one God, and Muhammed is his messenger’) wholeheartedly. To the best of my knowledge, the only religious tradition currently popular in Germany – or the UK – that purports to have a practice that defines a child’s religious identity is Christianity: in Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed teaching, baptism is a sacramental act, effecting a change of identity in the one baptised. (Will Willimon has a beautiful illustration, recalling a student who announced angrily ‘I am a baptised Episcopalian; no-one has the right to tell me who I am’ he commented that only one clause of that declaration can be true; the act of infant baptism is precisely the act of the church claiming the right to tell the child who she is.) Were the court to have enjoyed an elementary level of religious literacy, a concern for a child’s right to religious self-determination would have led it to ban (infant) baptism, whilst remaining unconcerned about circumcision. (This is not a polemical Baptist point – see below; it might be a useful bit of Baptist apologetic in contemporary Western culture, however.) Second, the court reportedly operated on the basis that religious neutrality was a possible, even desirable, context in which to raise a child. This harks back to charming 1960s imagined ideas: there is a ‘view from nowhere’, a way of being in which one can remain aloof and uncommitted from any commitment until one is ready to choose sides. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. All practices are committed, and both express and inculcate beliefs. To pray is to be committed, but so is not to pray; to be prevented from worshipping a creator is as much an act of determination as to be constrained to offer worship. This week’s court ruling was doubly predicated on fiction: the fiction that circumcision is religiously determinative; and the fiction that it is possible to raise a child in a way that is not religiously – biased, if not determinative. The boy’s Muslim parents will, by a million conscious and unconscious practices, impart the message to their child(ren), ‘we are Muslims’; Heather and I would impart the message, ‘we Christians, Baptists, evangelicals’ to our daughters even if we tried not to. Of course, in fact we try to; my concern is not that, but instead that my discipleship is sufficiently poor that I unconsciously impart the message ‘but sometimes I don’t really believe that stuff’ as well… Religious neutrality is an unobtainable dream, perhaps utopian; I suspect more likely dystopian (true neutrality would demand a studied refusal to impart any account of ultimate values, and so any moral and ethical commitments…). Either way, it is not...

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