On English Bible versions

The first thing to say is that, as English speakers, we are blessed with many many extraordinarily good Bible translations; compared to almost anyone else around the world, our riches are embarrassing – in fact, have you considered keeping your old church Bibles and giving the money you would have spent to Wycliffe, Bible Society, or another Bible translation ministry? That said, the decision which Bible version your people will read is a serious one for a minister to take…

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Rutherford House Blog Competition

An announcement from the Research Committee of Rutherford House: The 2013 Rutherford House Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference will take place on September 2-5 (details here); the subject will be ‘The Doctrine of Scripture’. To promote engagement with the topic around and beyond the conference, we are pleased to announce a competition for the best blog post on the topic of the doctrine of Scripture published between now and 31st August; the prize will be six books from Rutherford House, likely to be proceedings of previous conferences, which feature essays by Bruce McCormack, N.T. Wright, Richard Bauckham, John Webster, and others (but we’ll negotiate with anyone who already has a complete set!) Rutherford House will feature links to some entries on its Facebook page to promote discussion and interest in the theme. The winning entry will be chosen by the Rutherford House Research Committee. To enter, simply post on the topic on your blog, and email a link to the post to Steve Holmes (sh80@st-andrews.ac.uk) and Bethany Turner (BTurner@rutherfordhouse.org.uk), making clear it is an entry for the blog...

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Online objects of spiritual significance

Tomorrow I am heading down to London to take part in the (so far excellent – tomorrow might pull the average down) Westminster Faith Debates series. One of the organisers contacted me and the other speakers to introduce us to an artist, a photographer, who is working on a series of portraits of people holding an object that is of spiritual significance to them. Would we like to take part? Yes, I said, and then today thought about what to take… What objects matter to me, spiritually? My initial thoughts could not get very far beyond a Bible. This seemed rather cliched, and I wondered whether just to pull out. I did what every good digital native would do, and crowd-sourced the question on Twitter. A rapid and fascinating exchange ensued with – as is common in at least that corner of Twitter I inhabit – much humour (WWJD bracelet; plain chocolate digestives); much wisdom (‘take one of your daughters’ – YES! but impractical…; ‘the Bible doesn’t matter as an object, it is the teaching it transmits’…); and some surprising realisations (‘take a cross’ // ‘you know what – I don’t actually own a cross, and I’d never consciously noticed that before …’) Helped by friends, I began to think more deeply. A book that has influenced me? Yes – but my good copies of Brother Lawrence and Mother Julian are in the wrong office for me to take either tomorrow now, and actually today I’d pick Phoebe Palmer’s Promise of the Father over either, which I’ve only ever read online – I have no physical copy to take. There is music – Matt Redman’s You Never Let Go was the track Heather and I both had on repeat the weekend she was hospitalised by blood loss following the birth of our third daughter, and I was hearing of the death of my father. But I don’t think I own the CD – I listen to it on iPlayer. Alongside that there are places – I think of several, but one in particular, a place where I have only ever prayed with deep seriousness, on the seashore, always at dawn or dusk. There, echoing Jacob’s own liminal encounter, I have from time to time wrestled with God – and never yet found my prayers unanswered. But I cannot take chunks of Fife coastline with me to a photoshoot in London! I reflected. I threw an idea out, with an explicit hesitation: what about my iPhone? On that screen I read Scripture, more often than not; follow the daily office that structures my prayers; listen to the music that means most to me; and connect to the very friends who were encouraging, entertaining, and challenging me right then. But the phone itself is not a spiritual object for me – it is, in my eyes, beautifully designed, but to lose it would be a financial issue, but not a spiritual one. And so I realised, with the help of friends: the things I value most spiritually are actually virtual objects. They are texts, or even meanings of texts, regardless of the format they come in – I have a beautiful leather-bound Bible, delightful to stroke, but the words are not more – or less – powerful there than read off a screen. They are recorded tunes, but the physical medium of the recording means nothing to me – I can play You Never Let Go from a dozen different devices, or hear/sing it ‘live’ in a congregation, and the personal impact does not change. And they are relationships: does the screen I skype my family on when away from home matter? No – it is replaceable; but the fact of being able to skype my family matters enormously. I value the Bible, not any particular Bible. And ‘the Bible’ is a virtual object: it is a set of data and meta-data, that can be expressed in various physical forms. My smartphone is profoundly important to me spiritually, because by carrying that one object I have access to the virtual objects necessary or helpful for my own practices of devotion; I have contact with friends who I can pray for, or who will pray for me; and I have access to a wealth of resources, audio, video, text, many of which are profoundly meaningful for stages in my journey so far. I am not sure I can explain all that in a one-line caption, and so I am not sure whether a smart phone is the right object. The Bible still says something clearly and powerfully, something that does matter to me profoundly. I will probably take several things with me...

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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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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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