Two great Christian resources for International Women’s Day 2018

I spent a good chunk of Thursday (International Women’s Day 2018) at the launch of two excellent resources. One is the Sophia Network Minding The Gap research. This is a survey of 1200+ women in the UK church, asking them about their experiences. There was much hope in the stories uncovered, and much darkness too. My friends at Sophia were kind enough to ask me to respond to the research at the launch (my first time speaking at an event in the House of Lords…); what I said will appear on their blog soon, and I don’t want to pre-empt it here, but I do want to honour them for doing the work so well, and for their ten years now of advocating for gender justice in the UK church. The second is the Project 3:28 Database. This is, simply, a database of female Christian speakers in the UK, created in the hope that it will become big and comprehensive enough that the endlessly tedious, and always weasel, suggestion that ‘we couldn’t find a woman’ to speak at this or that conference will be rendered obsolete. I’m honoured to be able to name the people–Natalie Collins; Hannah Mudge; David Bunce; Vicky Walker–who made this happen as friends, but I also feel a tiny slice of ownership. Natalie collated the stats on Christian conference speakers in the UK in 2o13; on the back of this, a group of us got together about four years ago and asked what we could do to change things. It was one of those tables that it was an utter privilege to have a seat at: I looked around at Natalie, Hannah, Paula Gooder, Elaine Storkey, Wendy Beech-Ward, and Krish Kandiah, and wondered what I had ever done to merit being in that company. We committed to continue to publish the stats year on year, which we have (Natalie has done most of the work), with visible results. Some conferences embraced the implied challenge: Spring Harvest, for example, committed to producing their own data, and to working towards improvement. Others didn’t–I remember the day we received a formal letter from one organisation’s lawyers, the sinking feeling of what that might mean, and then the elation of realising that they were actually scared of our little collective, because we were speaking the truth in public. We dreamt at that first meeting in 2014 of some resource profiling and championing female speakers at conferences; we continued to dream and pray. We were committed to doing it well, or not at all. An astonishingly generous anonymous gift of nearly £5000 pushed us to try to make our dreams a reality; we raised a good chunk more, and Natalie, Hannah, Vicky, and David created the website we now have. We are grateful for the donor who gave thousands, and for the many donors who gave £10. The website is both beautiful and wonderfully functional, and I am hugely impressed with the way my friends have brought it to reality. I have just checked and, three days after launch, there are over 120 gifted female speakers registered. Some–Amy Orr-Ewing; Paula Gooder–are as well known as almost anyone in the UK church; others are much less famous, but are women who have something to say. I hope and pray that it will grow ten-fold or more, that there will be a mighty army of gifted women offering themselves to the UK churches to preach the gospel and to teach the faith. I hope and pray too that event organisers–from the biggest national conference to the most modest local church away day–will use it to expand their imagination of who could come and speak. It’s not perfect. I look at it already and think and pray about questions of intersectionality, about how we prevent this thing, if we can, from being another way of silencing other oppressed groups. We want all women, not just white women, not just able-bodied women, not just straight women… We will have failed if somehow our structures exclude some class of women. East of Eden and longing for the End, however, perfection isn’t available to us. All we have are our best attempts to make things a little better, and the promise that, in the redemption won by Christ and in the transformation brought by the Spirit, our best attempts might be graciously taken up by God and made into something truly significant. Could this be one such? I don’t know. I do know that at the small launch event we were joined by Veronica Zundel. I’d not met Veronica before; I discovered that she had worked back in the day with John Stott, no less, on the...

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An Evangelical approach to sexual ethics

I am just back from the annual meeting of the American Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) in San Antonio, TX. It is only the second time in my life I have been to the ETS conference, but they offered a slot for us to launch a book, Two Views on Homosexuality, that I’ve contributed to, and I decided quickly that I owed it to the publishers (who have been very generous) and to my fellow contributors (who in the process of arguing our points have become friends) to be there. I don’t suppose that it is a state secret that we were offering the launch around the conferences. If we’d got at slot at AAR/SBL, Wes Hill and I, who argued the conservative side of the question, would have been under fire, and would have looked to Megan DeFranza and Bill Loader, who argued the affirming side, to support us; at ETS it was rather definitely the other way around; Wes & I were—I think ‘denounced’ is the right word, but I will live with ‘challenged’—on the basis that even accepting the possibility that someone may find an affirming doctrine in Scripture was already a fundamental betrayal. I struggle with this because I am, by deep conviction, evangelical. I believe passionately in the core evangelical impulse, that I—not just can, but must—make common cause with all those who preach the necessity of the new birth, regardless of other disagreements. I live in a village where, in 1679, James Sharp, Archbishop of St Andrews and Professor of Theology in my own College, was murdered by those who thought that accepting episcopacy was repugnant to the gospel, and where in retaliation the Anglican establishment murdered six convinced Presbyterians, inhabitants of my village, who had no involvement in the crime, because the established church thought presbyterianism equally repugnant. When, sixty years later Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Anglicans would invite each other into their pulpits because of a shared commitment to the gospel something quite miraculous had happened. What Americans call the Great Awakening and Brits call the Evangelical Revival was a move of the Spirit of God, not just in renewing the gospel of salvation by faith alone, but in breaking down the ecclesial barriers that separated believers in the gospel. I was slow to understand what went on in our session at ETS; the Rottweilers were out in some force, and challenging Megan and Bill on their understanding; OK, I did that sharply enough in the book. But there was repeatedly an extra step stated or implied in the questions, from ‘this is wrong’ to ‘you are not a Christian’. I admit I did not understand where this was coming from. Then someone came up to me at the end, and asked why I had been defending my friends. I began to say some stuff about love and loyalty but he cut across me, ‘They are leading people onto the highway to hell!’ Oh. I’m generally bad in live debate—my mind moves slowly enough that I need time to find an adequate response to challenges. But this one wasn’t hard—I am, as I say, by deep conviction, evangelical. ‘No, I know Megan and Bill, I know that they call people to believe in Jesus. They are leading people on the highway to heaven (even if I presently think that they are fairly seriously wrong on at least one aspect of the nature of that highway).’ The memory troubles me. I do not know who he was—his badge was turned around—but his conviction was clear: teaching false sexual morality was damaging the salvation of the hearers. Maybe I’m sensitive, because of the village I live in, because the blood flowed where I walk, but it matters to me desperately that salvation depends on our embracing of the forgiveness offered in Jesus and on nothing else. Nothing else. ‘Sola fide’ is not an interesting theological slogan for me. It is—literally—gospel truth. Add this or that condition, and you begin to justify the murder of members of my college or inhabitants of my village. More importantly than that, even, you begin to query the salvation of those who have put their faith in Jesus. Sola fide. I have to stand on that. Because the Blood flowed where I walk, and where we all walk. One perfect sacrifice, complete, once for all, offered for all the world, offering renewal to all who will put their faith in Him. And if that means me, in all my failures and confusions, then it also means my friends who affirm same-sex marriage, in all their failures and confusions. If my faithful and affirming friends have...

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Sex, death and marriage

In case anyone is interested, this is the paper I gave at an ETS panel on theological methodology for discussing marriage; many of the arguments have or will appear in print elsewhere, but I’m not going to publish this, so it may as well be here.   And I say to you, that whoever puts away his wife  – except on account of porneia – and marries another woman commits adultery. [His] disciples said to him, ‘If that is the way it is for a man with his wife, it is not a good idea to get married!’ Mt. 19:9-10 (my tr.) This retort from the disciples fascinates me, as does its neglect in recent commentary and ethical reflection. Let me pose my question straightforwardly: can any of us here imagine Christian leaders in our own context responding to a description of a Christian sexual ethic by asserting it is better not to marry? If, as I presume, the answer is no, it might be worth us asking why there is this difference: what did the disciples know that the we don’t, or what do we know that they didn’t? Jesus has been challenged over the famous, if probably apocryphal controversy between R. Shammai and R. Hillel; he responds by citing Genesis, affirming marriage as a creation ordinance intended by God, and so not to be broken by human beings – ‘what God has united, let no-one untie’ (6b). They cite Moses’ stone tablets; he cites their stony hearts – a concession, but it was not so at the Beginning and now at the beginning of the End it will not be so again. Matthew’s Jesus then offers an exception – porneia[1] – and so offers a much more liberal reading than we discover in Mark or Luke; the disciples still however, recoil at the strictness of the interpretation – so hard it would be better not to marry at all. Jesus responds with the strange saying about varieties of eunuchs, and then turns to play with some children. Someone – a rich young ruler, on Luke’s telling – arrives and leaves, sorrowful, and we hear about camels and needles’ eyes, and Peter’s protest about how much he has given up already. There are some textual variants, mostly apparent assimilations to the similar text in Mt. 5:31-32; none of them change the force of the teaching, or the strength of the disciples’ rejection. So how might this be read? Badly, would seem to be the general answer amongst us moderns. Some commentators – France (TNTC) for example – assume the disciples cannot mean what they say: ‘[w]as this a serious suggestion, or were these words spoken with a wry smile which the printed word cannot convey?’ Well, Jesus took it seriously, speaking of Kingdom castration with his next breath. Morris (Pillar) is equally weak: ‘[t]he disciples envisage problems in maintaining the marriage relationship with this hanging over their heads. They probably had no intention of making use of the provision for divorce, but they found it comforting that the provision was there in case of need.’ Hagner (WBC) does a little better, at least acknowledging the plain meaning of the disciples’ objection: ‘[t]he risks … were too great in their estimate’. But the risks of what? He says ‘becoming inseparably linked with an unsatisfactory wife, in whatever way’. Is that really it? ‘Unsatisfactory’? I think we need to recall the strength of the Jewish commitment to marriage at this point, and insist that whatever worries the disciples, it is a bit stronger than this. Hays[2] offers something more plausible: for a man to renounce the right to divorce would be, he comments, ‘startling … within Matthew’s patriarchal cultural context’, but it can, he suggests, be placed alongside renunciation of anger, turning the cheek, loving the enemy, as a principled embrace of powerlessness which is a mark of the Kingdom. Older readers listened to the text more carefully. Calvin makes two fairly characteristic moves in his commentary on the harmony: he blames the devil, and he is surprisingly feminist.[3] For the latter, he criticises the disciples for not thinking about what wives have to endure – all assumed in the day that wives had no right of divorce, of course – ‘why do they not consider how hard is the bondage of wives?’ he asks. And he answers ‘devoted to themselves and their own convenience, they are driven by the feeling of the flesh to disregard others, and to think only of what is advantageous for themselves’. Warming to the theme, he asserts ‘it is a display of base ingratitude that, from the dread or dislike...

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Amy Winehouse and breaking the Golden Rule

Maybe my mind is just less well ordered than most people’s, but for me some the moments of real intellectual breakthrough come when I find myself thinking something that surprises me, and so am forced to analyse that surprising thing to work out why I was thinking it. Whether the thing turns out to be right or wrong, or just complicated, I understand better my own instincts and assumptions as a result. One such happened last week, in an ETS panel session in Atlanta. One of the other panelists, David Gushee, closed an impressive impromptu peroration with an appeal to ‘the golden rule’ – ‘do unto others as you would have them do to you.’ I realised that I was thinking that this principle was wrong. Doubting the golden rule, of course, is one of those ethical positions that you are really not supposed to entertain. If there is a universal ethic, it is this. And Jesus says it, identifying it with the core teaching of the Mosaic law: ‘Do to others what you want them to do to you. This is the meaning of the law of Moses and the teaching of the prophets.’ (Mt 7:12) So I thought a bit about why I was doubting it, or at least David’s application of it. My analysis goes something like this: so stated, the ‘golden rule’ assumes a level of moral awareness that I am sure is not universal, and am not sure is at all common. If our instincts about what we would like others to do to us are bad instincts, the golden rule offers bad advice. More commonly, I suspect, our desires are extremely conflicted, and so the golden rule offers no meaningful guidance at all. I rarely watch movies on planes, but I had watched one on the way to Atlanta. It was the recent biopic about Amy Winehouse, which intersperses clips of her – astonishing – musical performances with the story of her life spiralling out of control, finally to her tragic death. The film portrays her essentially as a victim, thrown into impossible contexts by decisions made by her partner, her manager, or her father. The sympathetic characters were female friends from childhood, who tried to help her. In the middle of a drugs binge they would come and try to encourage her to get clean, whereas her partner would be encouraging her to try something even stronger. Who was doing the thing she wanted to be done to her? The answer is profoundly ambiguous: straightforwardly, she wanted to be high; no doubt there was a part of her that wanted to be clean. According to the portrayal in the film, what she actually needed – whether she ever wanted it or not – was to get out of the celebrity spotlight, because she was unable to cope with it and was using drugs to deal with that inability. ‘Do to others what you want them to do to you’ is not a straightforward piece of advice here… (This is, after all, the woman whose biggest hit was built around the lyric ‘They tried to make me go to rehab; I said no, no, no’…) Now, it would be possible to suggest that, because of her relative youth and her addiction issues, Amy Winehouse was considerably less rational than is normal for human beings; I suspect, however, that this is false. I reflect on my own pastoral experience, and supremely on my own life: there are questions I desperately don’t want people to ask me, whilst at the same time I know that it would do me good to face those same questions. What do I want them to do to me? I don’t know, so I don’t know what I should do to others, if I am following the golden rule. More, I remember moments of genuine intervention, such as when my fellow leaders at a previous church banned me from preaching for several months because they had decided I was neglecting family relationships too much in my desire to serve that fellowship. (We had been going through some tough times; I still don’t regret stepping up to do what I did, but in hindsight I accept that it was unsustainable, and I had reached, or gone someway past, the point where I needed to stop and pass the baton.) Did I want them to step into my life like that? No. Am I now grateful they did? Yes. Do I hope I would have the courage – and love – to do what they did to someone like me in future, despite her not wanting the...

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Again, on conferences and statistics

Ian Paul, who I have never had the pleasure of meeting, but with whom I interact regularly online, posted some reflections occasioned by my blog post on his blog (I think it is better to describe it like that than as a ‘response’). I’m sorry to move back over here rather than responding directly there (not least because his blog is much more professional, much nicer-looking, and (I assume) much more widely read than mine), but this essay just got too long. Before I start, I should say that I respect Ian greatly, that we agree on most subjects (although he belongs to one of those strange sects that sprinkle infants…), and have made common cause together before now. Specifically, given the topic under discussion, Ian has been a committed and effective campaigner for female leadership in the church, and has done much good as such, for which I honour him. If we disagree, it is en famille. Ian’s first comment relates to a passing phrase I used ‘the Christian conference circuit’; I did not mean much by this, save that there are a certain number of (non-congregational) events in the UK to which a Christian speaker might be invited. It is not a closed shop; the ‘gatekeepers’ who invite people to various events are generally publicly identified and (in my – fairly extensive – experience) are always very proactive in seeking out potential new speakers. But, as with any area of life, there’s a learning curve; no-one goes straight to main stage. That was the extent of my reflection. I might blog again about this, as it seems to have touched a nerve with a few people, but for now I just want to stress that I really didn’t mean very much by it. The nub of Ian’s argument turns on some thoughts on parenting. I commented that ‘the hard yards on this road come when, if you have family, your children are young, and it is generally harder for a mother than a father to accept invitations to be away from home,’ and located this ‘generally harder’ in sociology; Ian wants to locate it in biology, or possibly psychology, and so argue that mothers need/want to spend more time with their children, and so will choose, often enough to skew speaker stats, not to do those ‘hard yards’. Now, I think my sociological argument is stronger than Ian’s biological/psychological one, but neither of us are experts there and we’re not going to solve that. So, for the sake of what follows, I will assume his point. Even with it, I suggest that (a) his conclusions do not follow and (b) even if they did there would be a gospel imperative to resist them. I see at least three logical problems. The first is this: Ian’s argument is clearly a degree argument, not an absolute difference argument (a degree argument: women tend to be shorter than men; an absolute difference argument: men have more Y chromosomes than women). A degree argument, even if it applies well to two classes as a whole, may not apply to particular subsets of those two classes. So: female netball internationals in fact tend to be taller than men. Ian applies a general claim about women to the specific subset of female leaders without arguing that the transference is plausible. It seems to me that it is not: his claim is something like ‘in general, maternal instincts will lead women to value their families higher than their professional development’. For his argument to hold, Ian needs to demonstrate that female Christian leaders are not, on average, sufficiently invested in their God-given vocation to nullify this general gender gap he claims to see. (This would not, of course, be to claim that female leaders are less invested in their families than women in general, but that – properly, given their calling by God – they are generally more committed to their ministry than, on average, other women are to their jobs.) Now, I don’t accept that there is a gender difference here, and my suspicion is that the reality, for female and male leaders, in church and without, is actually precisely the reverse. There is some evidence, for what such evidence is worth, that senior leaders in various fields are more, not less, invested in their families than less ‘successful’ people in those fields, and that holds true whether they are male or female. This chimes both with my experience of the senior people I know – in the church and in other fields – and with some Biblical material about the responsibilities of a Christian leader towards his/her children. Female or male, the leaders I respect most are (either single...

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