Changing a blog

Welcome to the new home, and the new design, of my blog. When I launched this blog, in 2007, I called it ‘Shored Fragments’. The name comes from a line at the end of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’. I chose it because I loved the poem – I still do – because I loved the name – I still do – and because it captured what I thought I was doing in launching a blog. My original ‘About’ page spelt this out. For years I have been in the habit of typing up brief (500-2000 words) summaries of a thought that has struck me. These got saved on my various computers with filenames like ‘Fragment on Universalism.’ The blog was going to be a place to put them up in public, to invite others to help me to sift and refine them. It would be a collation of fragments that might later grow to something less incomplete. Nearly five years, and well over two hundred posts, on, I still post ‘fragments’ from time to time, but most of the posts on this blog do not fit that original description. Some still do, but they are definitely now the minority. Others are instead signposts – pointing to this or that post or event or publication that I find interesting. More are what I recently described in an email to someone as ‘sniper shots’, but perhaps would now think of as keyhole surgery: reading around a debate that interests me, I see an argument that is vulnerable to a brief, focused, criticism, and I write a post to critique it. These are complete pieces of writing, if short. I also reflect that, over time, I have been intentionally limited in what I post on this blog. I have deliberately restricted what I post here to theology; because of my interests, and because of the nature of the blogging medium, there has been a strong focus on Evangelicalism, and a more occasional but persistent focus on cultural criticism. (The comment about the ‘blogging medium’ is a reflection that blog posts have to accomplish their aim in less than (say) 2000 words; almost none of the thought that led to my Trinity book appeared on this blog because I had nothing of substance to say that was sayable in that space…) I am not going to change the name of the blog; perhaps I am being vainglorious, but it now seems too established to do that. It is time, I think, to change the description of the blog to reflect what it has become, and so with the new location and new design, I have a new account of what I am about on this site. In brief, the blog is an exploration of theology and culture from an Evangelical perspective. Part of this, of course, is a focus on what each of these words mean, with the contests over ‘evangelical’ being – at present – somewhat more prominent in my mind than the...

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Of a troublesome comma in the Creed

The morning office I presently use to structure the first part of my prayers invites me to recite the Apostles’ Creed each day. Famously, the Christological clauses of that Creed begin: I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, he suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried… The comma at the end of the second line has become rather notorious; it is apparently sufficient to summarise the entire earthy ministry of Jesus, and that is regularly held up as an indication of  the weakness of the Creed as a summary of the Christian faith (focused as it is on Jesus); sometimes it is held up as an indication that the traditional formulations of Christian faith, which centred on the Creed, are lacking in a crucial area. I first heard this sort of argument, and began to be suspicious of this troublesome comma, something like twenty years ago from anabaptist friends. These days I hear it more from people interested in what gets called ‘Kingdom theology’: the true Biblical gospel is the claim that Jesus is God’s final culmination of the story of Israel. The creed offers us nothing of Israel, and nothing of the life of Jesus; it is seriously deficient as an expression of the gospel. An an innocent comma is the symbol of that. Twenty years ago I was not in the custom of using an office to structure my prayers, and when I started I used Celtic Daily Prayer, the office of the Northumbria Community, or Celebrating Common Prayer from the Society of St Francis. Neither of these includes a daily recitation of the Creed. It was when, a couple of years back, I switched to wanting an office on my phone (I use ‘The Daily Office’ from Mission St Clare; the iPhone app is free, here) that I began to trip over that comma each day. I began to wonder about the criticisms more seriously, and whether I really wanted to recite these words as part of my daily devotion… (I’m a Baptist. Creeds are optional!) I have come to the conclusion that the Office itself is the justification for the shape of the Creed. Morning Prayer begins with confession and some psalmody, and then proceeds as follows: Old Testament Lesson Canticle (generally from Old Testament) followed by the Gloria Patri New Testament Lesson Canticle (sometimes from New Testament; sometimes from church history) Gospel reading Apostles’ Creed The Lord’s Prayer, petition, intercession, and closing sentences follow. The Creed here is located in the context of participation in Israel’s worship (psalmody and the OT canticle); a hearing of an excerpt from Israel’s story (the OT lesson); and a hearing of events from the life of Jesus (the Gospel reading) – and also of a hearing of the Church’s story and participation in the Church’s worship (NT lesson & canticle); it offers a framing narrative for these stories and for this worship. Its recitation can be understood to be the liturgical claim/explanation ‘You have joined in the worship of Israel and the Church, and heard of their stories; now be reminded that the God to whom Israel and the Church offer worship is properly named as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that the stories you have heard are brief chapters in a larger story that runs from creation to “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting”; You have heard a brief tale of the winsome wonder of Jesus; know that this tale is part of a larger story that runs from birth of a Virgin by the Spirit’s power, through cross, grave, resurrection, and ascension, to a return to judge the living and the dead.’ Of course, if the Creed is abstracted from its proper liturgical context, then it does not serve this framing function, and the criticisms that are made are fair – but it should not be. (Particularly not the Apostles’ Creed, which is not the polemical product of a Council, but – as far as we can tell – a concretisation of the creed used in the liturgy of the Roman church from at least as early as the second century.) So, I continue recite the Creed, in its proper liturgical context, morning by morning with some cheerfulness, and without stumbling over a troublesome...

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Another myth about gender and church leadership

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the regularly-heard assertion that embracing the ministry of women led to a slide into liberalism, and pointed out that there was simply no evidence to back this up. Today someone told me that a certain well-known pastor from Seattle had spoken at a church leaders conference in the UK and insisted that one proof of the rightness of denying preaching and leadership roles to women was that denominations that did were growing and denominations that did not were shrinking. It struck me on hearing this that I had heard the same argument four or five times in the past few weeks – sometimes as a broad assertion, as my phrasing above; sometimes phrased more anecdotally (‘I have encountered very few churches pastored by women that are growing…’), but with the anecdote used to establish a general principle which was then the basis of an argument. In an idle moment this evening, I wondered what the evidence base for such assertions looked like. First, comparing denominations is of little use; they differ on too many variables. Good evidence will come from comparing local congregations which are as similar as possible in all things save the gender of the core leader. Data like this is in fact easily available, for Church of England parishes, and it suggests that the gender of the incumbent (=senior/sole minister in CoE terms) does in fact influence the prospects for church growth slightly but measurably: Churches with female senior/sole pastors grow more often and faster than churches with a man in the role. This data can be found in tabular form in Bob Jackson’s The Road to Growth (Church House Publishing, 2005), p. 44. Jackson was a mission enabler for the Church of England, and did some survey work on various dioceses (and the New Wine network) between 1999 and 2004. 75 of the parishes he considered had a female incumbent for some or all of the time surveyed, and on average they recorded growth of 9%, against 2% for parishes with solely male incumbents. Now, this data is far from perfect: n=75 is not bad, but not very good either; given the dates and the Anglican context one has to consider whether openness to a female incumbent is acting as a proxy for some other variable (Anglo-catholic parishes shrinking badly, e.g.); it would be much more convincing to have data across a range of denominations – and indeed countries; … All that said, this is hard data, as compared to the windy rhetoric or the personal reminiscence of my opening paragraph. As such, it deserves respect at least until other, better, data is available. The evidence, such as we have it, is that churches grow faster with female senior pastors. How does this play into debates over gender and ministry? I am pulled two ways on this: as an evangelical, there is a strongly pragmatic streak to my beliefs about the church: ‘if people get saved, if churches grow, then we should do it – I’ll make the theology work later…’; as a Baptist, I have a conflicting hesitancy about ‘numbers’ arguments: ‘we are called to fidelity, not to success; you can grow easily by compromising with the spirit of the age…’ So, even if the data were compelling in one direction or the other, I would still hesitate to argue from data to ecclesiological principle. That said, I opened this post with the comment that I have heard the assertion that churches led by women do not grow four or five times in recent weeks; each time, it has been offered as a reason to reject the ministry of women. But the assertion is, on the evidence available, simply false – just as the assertion about ‘egalitarianism’ being a slippery slope to liberalism is simply false on the basis of available evidence. The temptation to get polemical here is strong; I will resist, and simply note in general terms that if someone continues to pile up demonstrably false arguments in support of a position, there inevitably comes a point when the reasonable response is to suppose that there are in fact no good arguments to offer, and that the position is based simply on prejudice. Those who believe there is good reason to support the position in question, therefore, should be as hawkish in calling out poor arguments as their opponents...

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Gay relationships in the Bible?

I have been reading the new edition of Jeffrey John’s book, now titled Permanent, Faithful, Stable, Christian Same-sex Marriage,in preparation for writing a couple of pieces on human sexuality. In the course of his discussion, Canon John makes brief reference to the miracle of the healing of the Centurion’s servant in Lk. 7:1-10 // Mt. 8:5-13, and draws on Theissen and others to suggest that ‘[a]ny Jew … would almost certainly have assumed they were gay lovers.’ (p. 14) On this basis, and because ‘the possibility that the relationship was homosexual would not have escaped Jesus, Matthew or Luke’ (15), Canon John argues that ‘it is a real question whether we are intended to see Jesus deliberately including a gay couple here as yet another category of the despised and rejected…’ (15) I had heard this line before, of course, although the argument that it fitted a pattern in the healing miracles of extending grace to the excluded was new to me. It occurred to me, though, that it was not a text commonly considered in the literature on theological accounts of human sexuality, and a quick search confirmed that: Stan Grenz noted that the argument had been made in Welcoming but not Affirming; beyond that, as far as I could determine, silence. The text is not even treated in Robert Gagnon’s compendious The Bible and Homosexual Practice (except for a note about God-fearers amongst the Gentiles, with the intervention of the elders in Luke’s version being held up as evidence.) This story seems to play extensively – along with the relationship of David and Jonathan (which gets a bit more discussion – see both Grenz and Gagnon, or Eugene Rogers, Sexuality & the Christian Body, e.g.) – in ‘semi-popular’ defences of the acceptance of faithful same-sex marriage in the church, at least in my hearing; given that, the silence of serious sources – from any side of the debate – is unfortunate. It does seem clear, however, that neither account will stand up as a Biblical defence of faithful same-sex marriage. This is not because of the silence as to the precise relationship – Grenz’s point about the centurion, and Gagnon’s point about David and Jonathan – but because, even if we were to accept that the relationships were actively sexual, neither gets us anywhere near a picture of ‘faithful same-sex marriage’. Holding up David as an exemplar of any account of sexual ethics seems to me to be rather ambitious, given the details of his career; it is surely really very obvious that he was not someone who experienced exclusively same-sex erotic attraction and who was seeking a faithful and exclusive sexual relationship with another man… As for the centurion, it is very plausible that a Roman centurion would engage in sexual intercourse with his slaves, both male and female; it was a standard way for a slave owner to assert control over his possessions. (There is an extensive literature on this.) Raping a slave to assert ownership and control is some distance from any  ideals of Christian marriage I know of, however. Even if we hypothesise some sort of unusually affectionate relationship (Luke has the slave as ‘precious’ – entimos – to his master), we have to insist that a properly loving relationship can never occur in the context of ownership – we open the door to all sorts of horrific ethical possibilities otherwise. This is not the end of the argument of course – hardly even the beginning (Oliver O’Donovan entitled his book on the debates within the Anglican Communion A Conversation Waiting to Begin…). An intelligent discussion proceeds by testing and weeding out bad arguments, however, and these arguments are just...

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The Los Angeles Theology Conference

If you’ve not already heard, Oliver Crisp and Fred Sanders have organised the first in what promises to be a series of conferences on Christian theology, to be held in LA, CA, 17-18th January, 2013, on the theme of ‘Christology: Ancient and Modern’. The models are avowedly the Wheaton theology conference and the Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference – I am on the organising committee of the EDC – which suggests an intention to engage seriously with classical Christian dogmatics. The choice of plenary speakers only reinforces this impression: George Hunsinger, Katherine Sonderegger, Alan Torrance, Peter Leithart, and Oliver Crisp. This promises to be a significant addition to the presently available contexts for really serious theological discussion. More details available at...

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