‘These are the days of Rebekah’

My friend Natalie Collins was on Twitter tonight bemoaning a youth resource that claimed to cover the whole Biblical story in 32 sessions (!…) but that managed to mention only one woman who appears in the Bible in that survey, that woman being Eve. I don’t know the resource, and Natalie didn’t elaborate, but I’m guessing that Eve was not given a positive write-up. I have three daughters who are in youth and children’s programmes at church; it would be nice to think that the people who write the material they will access were actually working to make sure they are aware of the many positive female role-models there are in Scripture, rather than erasing all women except Eve from the story of God. In this spirit, I offer a parody I started to write a couple of years ago, but never did anything with. If you know modern evangelical songbooks, you may be able to find a tune that this fits quite well… These are the days of Rebekah, Who trusted the word of the Lord. And these are the days of your servant Deborah, Who led forth your people in war.   These are the days of Queen Esther, Who rescued God’s people through faith. And these are the days of your prophet Huldah, Who renewed the temple of praise.   Behold God comes, in tongues of rushing flame Opening daughters’ mouths to prophesy in God’s name So lift your voice, sisters of the Christ Out of Mary’s womb salvation comes.   These are the days of the women Who funded the ministry of Christ. And these are the days of the Magdalene, Who first preached of resurrected Life.   These are the days of Priscilla, Who taught male church leaders the truth, And these are the days of your apostle, Junia, Before whom Paul was just a youth.   Behold God comes, in tongues of rushing flame Opening daughters’ mouths to prophesy in God’s name So lift your voice, sisters of the Christ Out of Mary’s womb salvation...

Read More

‘A love I seemed to lose with my lost saints’: Mission and evangelical identity

This weekend passed was our church mission weekend; it was excellent. It was led by Eddie Arthur of Wycliffe Bible Translators, ably supported by Sue Arthur, Judy and Iska, two of our members who spent seventeen years in Papua New Guinea working with Wycliffe, and continue to be involved in Bible translation from their present home in Fife, and Hilary and Peter, who worked with Wycliffe in South Asia and now work in the UK office, and with whom we also have long-standing links. I have, I think, three reflections as a result that I would like to blog about: one on the place of mission in evangelical identity; one on conversion; and one on the Bible. One of the wonderful things about the weekend was the connections: these are our people; we know them and love them; it happens that one of the couples has a daughter a similar age to our elder two, and they have become friends during visits over the years, and now keep in touch on social media. Because of connections like that, their triumphs are our triumphs: there was an astonishingly moving moment during the weekend when Eddie held up a Kamula New Testament and told the – amazing – story (the Kamula people in Papua New Guinea were, literally, headhunters and cannibals just a generation ago; they asked for the Bible; our church members became involved, created the written language, and translated the NT and portions of the OT; now many of the Kamula are headhunters once more, evangelists to the neighbouring peoples…). Then he looked out at our little church congregation and said ‘You did that – thank you!’ And it wasn’t cheesy or forced; this was, in part, our project, carried forward by our people, who we had sent out, prayed for, and supported through many years. Eddie and the team led the weekend extremely well; it was interactive, fast-moving, very positive and upbeat, informative, encouraging and challenging. I do not, however, suppose we would have held such a weekend without these personal connections – and, for a mainstream evangelical congregation like ours, that is a significant shift from where we would have been a generation ago. I have reflected several times in public on the place of a formal or informal list of ‘saints’ in every Christian tradition: every vibrant Christian spirituality, it seems to me, is deeply formed by a set of stories that convey a vision of what Christlike living might look like in our generation and context. For British evangelicals, the missionary biographies unquestionably fulfilled that role; overseas mission defined us as a movement, and overseas missionaries were our heroes, our ‘childhood saints’. Zealous evangelicals went overseas; the rest of us gobbled up their news hungrily, prayed for them, and gave, often sacrificially, to support them. Even I remember the tail-end of this: the church into which I was converted, just over 25 years ago now, and which sent me to train for ministry, had a chair that had belonged to William Carey in its pulpit; even when we moved here to St Andrews, only ten years ago, retired visiting preachers at this church (we had a pastoral vacancy when we arrived) would recall David Livingstone (there’s a local connection) or another of the authorised list of great missionaries; our children’s church library still holds tattered biographies of Gladys Aylward and the rest. These were the stories we expected would shape our young people’s faith, and inspire the continuation of our own. What changed? Three things, I think. The first was a loss of interest in the idea of conversion; more on that in another post. The second was a measure of success of the missionary enterprise; Henry Venn imagined an African church that was self-led, self-supporting, and self-propogating; his dream came true some generations ago in much of Africa. (He never imagined an African church that was sending missionaries to the UK, but this has been the reality for over a century, as Israel Olofinjana has repeatedly demonstrated – see for one quick survey, his blog here, but see also his various books; in recent years this ‘reverse mission’ has become extraordinarily significant; the expansion of the, Nigerian, Redeemed Christian Church of God across the UK in the last two decades is one of the great untold missionary stories – approaching a thousand churches planted, several with membership in the thousands.) Of course, there are many unreached people across the world still; but in many areas, quite rightly, Western missionaries made themselves redundant. The third, and most significant, is the end of the British Empire. Of course this is a...

Read More

A mother in Israel

I was out preaching at another church this morning; I’d planned the sermon some weeks ago, before I realised it would be Mothering Sunday. This week I’ve struggled again with a commercialised festival that constructs a romanticised picture to celebrate, ignoring the pain this heaps on so many who for whatever reason cannot fit that picture. Pete Greig tweeted a wonderful litany this morning which captured this remarkably well; my response was to tell a story in the ‘children’s talk’ slot that explored a rather different vision of ‘Biblical motherhood’ than is usually offered. The style is visibly, to me, a second-rate Bob Hartman rip-off, but here it is: ‘A mother in Israel’ There are lots of mothers in the Bible. You may have heard of some of them. There’s Eve, right at the beginning, who is called ‘the mother of all living’ There’s Sarah, who laughed when God told her she would become a mother at eighty. There’s Hannah, who prayed for a child and rebuked God’s priest. There’s Mary, of course, who believed God’s word and became the centre of God’s plan. Lots of mothers in the Bible – but there’s one mother who, as far as we know, didn’t have any children. Her name was Deborah – which, for those of us of a certain age, brings to mind a Marc Bolan song, but we’re not going there… Deborah was a prophet, and she led God’s people for years. She ‘held court,’ the Bible says, under a palm tree. Whenever God’s people had a problem they could not solve, they would come to Deborah, and she would tell them what to do. She was wise. She had authority. She was a real leader. But – as far as we know – she didn’t have any children, and so she wasn’t a mother yet.   God’s people had one big problem in Deborah’s day. His name was Sisera. Sisera was the commander of the army of King Jabin of Canaan, and Sisera had nine hundred armoured chariots, and so no-one could fight against Sisera. And for twenty years – twenty years – that’s only one year less than the age of lots of your mothers  – for twenty years Sisera and his chariots had oppressed and abused God’s people. But God had had enough. God needed someone to be a great leader; God needed someone ready to fight; God needed someone brave enough and strong enough to take on Sisera and all his armoured chariots You might have looked for a king. Or a knight. Or a general. Or perhaps a superhero like Batman or Captain America (or even Emmet the lego-man – but we’re not going there…) God looked for a mother. ‘Deborah!’ God said. ‘What do mothers do?’ And Deborah, being wise, and knowing God well, said ‘mothers love and protect their children, Lord, and show them the right way to live.’ And God said ‘You’ve loved my people for years, Deborah, and you’ve showed them the right way to live for years. Now I need you to protect them too.’ So Deborah looked around. Deborah knew all God’s people – she’d been their leader for years – and she called one of them who she knew could do it to put an army together. (His name was Barak, which might sound like a politician you’ve heard of, but we’re not going there either …) ‘God wants to save his people from Sisera, Barak, and you’re the one he’s going to use – get an army together and fight!’ But Barak was scared. He wanted his mummy. ‘I’ll only go if you come with me,’ he said to Deborah. So Barak and Deborah went, and they fought Sisera and his army, and all his chariots. And they won, because God was with them. And Deborah and Barak sang a song to celebrate their victory – a duet like they sing in the Battle rounds on The Voice – but we’re definitely not going there… Their song was a bit like the psalms; it was a song about how God had helped and saved their people. And in that song – it’s in Judges, chapter 5 and verse 7 if you want to look it up, Deborah sang that all God’s people were too scared to fight ‘until I, Deborah, arose, until I arose, a mother in Israel’. So Deborah, although as far as we know she didn’t have any children, was a mother after all, or so the Bible tells us. She was a mother because God called her to love and to protect God’s people, and to show them the...

Read More

Serious thinking does not always lead to the same conclusion

Steve Chalke was kind enough to tweet a link to my piece on his invitation to a global conversation; in the same tweet he linked to a piece by Brian McLaren on the same theme. Brian’s piece was entitled ‘The Biblical cat is out of the fundamentalist bag’, which mostly left me straining to think of mentions of cats in the Bible (I don’t think there are any – several lions of course…); the piece was mostly a series of links to interesting posts elsewhere; at the end, though, McLaren writes: …the real question is this: in the privacy of people’s own hearts, will they (will you, will I?) have the courage to think, rethink, question, and consider the possibility that the conventional view of the Bible is in need of radical rethinking – not to reduce confidence in the Bible, but to discover a wiser, more just, more honest, and more proper confidence? This form of argument (‘if you think seriously about X, you will change your mind’) is remarkably common in both academic and church discourse; it seems to me to have two fundamental problems: first, it is simply false; and second, it is utterly unrealistic (apart from those two issues, I’m completely with it…) I take it that the first point is obvious at some basic logical level: even assuming that my current opinions on the truth or falsity of statements are simply random, and also assuming that serious thought will lead me infallibly to truth, then 50% of my opinions will happen to be right by chance, and thinking hard about them will only confirm them. Therefore, a prediction that ‘if you think hard about X, you will change your mind’ will be true 50% of the time, and so no better than the prediction ‘if you think hard about X you will not change your mind’. On this basis, the argument is only interesting if there is some reason to assume that the accuracy of my current opinions are significantly worse than random – if I have somehow become predisposed to believe falsehood. Now, such a situation is not impossible to imagine; indeed the Marxist idea of ‘false consciousness’ – and the wider concept of ‘ideology’ – suggest positively that this situation obtains around certain subjects in certain contexts (and I accept at least some of these analyses, as it happens). That said, McLaren’s point concerned people in churches who had believed what their pastors taught them; does he think that the several varieties of Christian teaching available in our churches are all so bad that they are significantly less reliable than a random choice of opinions? If not, his argument has no validity. My second argument, that the point is utterly unrealistic, goes like this: I cannot be an expert on everything, so I study what I can, and develop a discriminating trust of authorities on the rest; given this, to ask me to distrust credible authorities and investigate for myself on every issue is unreasonable and impossible. I have (random example) not studied the raw data on climate science; I know that there is a very strong scientific consensus around the truth of global warming, and also that some people deny this; I choose to accept the consensus and to modify my behaviour accordingly; is McLaren suggesting that I should do otherwise until I have become expert enough to examine the raw data? This seems to be the import of his argument, but I suggest – on the basis of the analogy I have given – that this position is not just wrong but actually dangerous. Now, if (like a climate change denier) I thought I had reason to suppose that the authoritative voices were trying to mislead on the issue, I would have good reason to expend the energy to grasp the evidence in order to check each proposed fact – but again, McLaren’s comment here is about local church pastors, essentially – is he really suggesting that across the world (or across the USA) local church pastors are en bloc actively colluding in misinformation? (I mean, America is fertile ground for generating bizarre conspiracy theories, but this one would be right up there with the worst…) I believe not just that I have thought seriously about questions of Biblical authority, but that I have thought more seriously than almost everyone on the planet currently about these issues (there are, perhaps, a few hundred people I would bow to…). On almost every issue, I have concluded that in fact what I was taught as a young unreflective Christian was in fact right – no doubt because...

Read More

A global conversation on the Bible?

I was told some while back that Steve Chalke was writing a piece on the Bible, and invited by someone to give a response; I refused on grounds of friendship – I did a formal response for someone else last time Steve published a position paper, and I don’t want to make it a habit… …when I read Steve’s piece, however, I confess to being puzzled; I’ve now read it more than once, and I remain puzzled. So this is just me, responding as Steve asked us to, not with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, but with a ‘why?’ Because I’m puzzled. On the Oasis site where Steve’s paper is posted it is introduced with the line ‘Steve Chalke calls on the world-wide church to have an open and honest dialogue about how we should understand the bible…’; in the paper, Steve says this directly: ‘I want to encourage a global discussion (for this is a global issue) around the following suggested principles…’ (p.5 of pdf). My puzzlement is simple: I thought we’d been having a global conversation, which looks to me pretty open and honest most of the time, for two millennia or so (I’m not a specialist on patristics, and there may be earlier texts, but the first systematic engagement with the question of hermeneutics I can think of is Irenaeus, ad. haer., written around 180AD; serious text criticism begins with Origen’s Hexapla which was put together about 50 years later – certainly before 240). Steve makes no reference either to the history of this conversation, or to its current contours; does he think that all of us who are engaged in it have together contributed nothing of worth? Or is he actually unaware of it? Take one issue, more or less at random: Steve’s fourth bullet point begins: ‘We do not believe that the Bible is “inerrant” or “infallible” in any popular understanding of these terms.’ (Footnote 15 defines the two words, as it happens wrongly, or at least in a very eccentric way.) Last year’s ETS conference was devoted to the topic of inerrancy and last year’s Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference (which I helped to organise and spoke at) was on the Doctrine of Scripture; recent books directly on the subject include – this is just from memory – Five views on Inerrancy, Greg Beale’s The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism (a robust defence of Chicago inerrancy), Andy McGowan’s Divine Spiration of Scripture (suggesting a European tradition of Biblical authority which is not inerrancy, and which is to be preferred to it), Pete Enns’s Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (arguing for an incarnational model of Biblical authority – something I also tried in my contribution to Lincoln & Paddison, Christology and Scripture), &c., &c., &c. In my 2008 Laing Lecture (later published) I specifically addressed the issue of inerrancy in global perspective, pointing out it is a natively North American concept with little purchase elsewhere; a point Mike Bird made from his Australian perspective in his contribution to the Five Views book. I’ve since written about it from a specifically Baptist perspective in five or six other places. The conversation is happening. The books mentioned offer perspectives from four or five continents; this is a global conversation (I’ve only listed books in English; I could name off the top of my head good books on the subject in  at least six other languages, and I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard to discover many more). They do not agree (sometimes the clue is in the title: Five Views…), but there are a number of broad agreements on either negative points (‘you might be able to say A, B, C, but it is not possible to say X, Y, Z’) or conditional points (‘if you believe F, you have to also believe G;’ ‘if you believe H, you cannot believe J’). I could offer a similar list for every other point Steve proposes for conversation. Steve appears at several moments in his paper to be unaware of this conversation, or of the broad agreements it has reached – at times he proposes something that has been exhaustively explored in the global conversation decades ago, and found to be inadequate (of course such ideas can be revisited, but the usual manners of the conversation are that you discover why they were judged inadequate and show that there is a reason to regard that judgement as wrong or premature when you revisit them…) The response might come that this is an academic conversation, and it is not happening at the level of ordinary church life. This does not ring true to me: to stay with the same examples, the...

Read More
get facebook like button