Abolishing the secular life
In our beginnings, Baptists did away with various traditional distinctions of Christian life. Although practising ordination, we denied it established any set-apart hierarchy within the life of the church; we also rejected the traditional Roman Catholic practice of recognising a particular consecration of certain people, clerical or lay, to ‘religious life’, characterised by the three evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience (in popular parlance, this is the way of life of monks and nuns, although that is to elide a number of important distinctions between (e.g.) sisters and nuns, or monks and friars). This was all narrated as a rejection of priesthood, and of the religious life, and, historically, we generally accepted those characterisations as adequately clear accounts of our particular belief and practice. In recent decades, however, a number of us have habitually resisted the first: we do not reject or abolish the ordained priesthood, as Baptists; Christ has made us together a royal priesthood. So a fine contemporary Baptist slogan insists that our ecclesiology is about ‘abolishing the laity’. (I do not know who coined this phrase, but it seems fairly widely used, and I have cheerfully adopted it as catching something vital of my understanding of Baptist ecclesiology.) The priestly office, of holding God up to the world and holding the world up to God, is one we believe all Christians corporately share. Baptism is an act of ordination (the common UK liturgical practice of baptism – I can speak no wider with any expertise – fits well the definition of ordination offered in BEM, as it happens…); other than (arguably) the catechumenate, there is no order of laity in Baptist ecclesiology. Now, of course, this conclusion is not a claim that baptism and membership of a Baptist church makes someone a priest in the sense that the Roman Catholic Church would understand the word; essentially (in common with other churches of the Reformation) we reject that understanding of priesthood as unhelpful. Rather, it is a heuristic, perhaps apologetic, approximation: ‘if your ecclesiology is based on a clerical-lay distinction, then you will better understand the inner logic of our tradition if you think of us as abolishing the laity, than if you think of us as abolishing the clergy’. As a result of thinking through the arguments of Robert Song’s recent book, Covenant and Calling (which I blogged about here), I have been reflecting on the tradition of the religious life. Song does not mention the religious life at all in his book, but he is attempting to imagine a form of covenanted and fruitful faithfulness that is not marriage, and it seems to me that to think that through clearly there is a need to reflect on the religious life, if only to be clear why whatever is being imagined is not a form of that life. One result of my reflections is a further re-characterisation of Baptist ecclesiology. I do not think our vision abolishes the religious life; rather, if we have to work with the religious-secular distinction, I think a Baptist vision of the church abolishes the secular life. Again, this is a heuristic/apologetic approximation; these are simply not native Baptist categories. Let me work with it for a moment, however. Developed Catholic understanding has, as its first distinction, the existence of the ‘consecrated life’. ‘The state of consecrated life is thus one way of experiencing a “more intimate” consecration, rooted in Baptism and dedicated totally to God. In the consecrated life, Christ’s faithful, moved by the Holy Spirit, propose to follow Christ more nearly, to give themselves to God who is loved above all and, pursuing the perfection of charity in the service of the Kingdom, to signify and proclaim in the Church the glory of the world to come.’ (Catechism 915). The ‘perfection of charity’ here is defined in terms of the three evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience (although the Catechism will later note that the eremitic life, recognised as a valid – perhaps as the basic – form of the consecrated life, does not necessarily involve profession of the evangelical counsels). Within this basic practice, many different forms of consecrated life are acknowledged: hermits; consecrated virgins and widows; secular institutes; apostolic societies; and religious life. The first two are by nature solitary, and so fairly antithetical to Baptist visions of life and holiness; secular institutes are a bit of a historical anomaly, essentially being a way of recreating religious life in post-revolutionary France, where religious orders were for a while banned. The latter two are more interesting: apostolic societies ‘whose members without religious vows pursue the particular apostolic purpose of their society, and lead a life as brothers or sisters in common according to a particular manner...
Read MoreMoral arguments for independence
The Sunday Herald yesterday ran an advertisement carrying the names of thirty-four Church of Scotland ministers committed to a claim that a yes vote in the independence referendum would improve social justice in Scotland. Three individuals were quoted, two of them offering (what could be constructed as) moral arguments in favour of independence. Are they right? My judgement is that one might be, but it relies on an undemonstrated premise if it is; the other is wrong; both judgements depend on some interesting moral reasoning which is worth exploring.
Read MoreWhy it’s WEIRD to be straight
A woman (Christian) I know told me a few weeks ago that she objected to being asked to tick a box on equal opportunities forms that said ‘heterosexual’. Married for over twenty years, she felt that ticking that box implied that she had erotic desires for people other than her husband, people defined by a particular characteristic (being male); this was not her experience of her own sexuality, and she resented being forced to suggest that it was. In the culture I live in this self-narration is deeply counter-cultural; but the culture I live in is weird, or better WEIRD, and that is extraordinarily important. The ‘WEIRD’ acronym was coined by psychologists who realised, rather late in the day some of us might feel, that performing psychological experiments on sample groups who all shared a particular characteristic might distort the results quite badly. Many psychology sample groups are only students, or only people in contact with universities (I receive at least one invitation a week to take part in a psychology study via the university email list); more pointedly, a huge majority (95%+?) of psychological studies have been carried out by Western universities on Western people. Something like 12% of the current population of the planet lives in a classic Western society: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic’ (‘WEIRD’); 88% are not WEIRD, and so are normal. Historically, of course, the situation is even more lopsided: until the nineteenth century, no-one was WEIRD. Now, psychological experiments show that we WEIRD people are, well, weird, in our reaction to all sorts of things. We are, of course, also weird in our construction of cultural norms. In the area of human sexuality, we have constructed a vision which is extremely unusual (this does not mean it is wrong, but it is extremely unusual). Since about 1900 – not much before – we have assumed that all people, or the vast majority of people, are erotically attracted to people of one sex only. Either they are heterosexual, and so attracted to members of the opposite sex, or they are homosexual (gay; lesbian) and attracted to members of the same sex. At some point in the last thirty years we allowed a notion of bisexuality; we pay lip-service, but little more, to transsexuality as well; fundamentally, however, we assume that people (male or female) lust after only males or only females. This is deeply WEIRD. The briefest acquaintance with the anthropology of sexuality (NB, already a WEIRD category…) shows us that most people, in most cultures, across the world and down through history, have not fitted this pattern. Same-sex sexual activity is very common around the world and down through history, and opposite-sex sexual activity is at least common enough to ensure the continuation – indeed explosion – of the human population globally thus far. It is extraordinarily unusual to see these as exclusive options, however; to assume people are straight or gay/lesbian, and therefore can only lust after people of one sex, is WEIRD, not normal. Now, as I said above, being WEIRD does not make something wrong. Democracy is WEIRD; human rights, including rights not to be discriminated against on the basis of sexuality or religion, are WEIRD; universal healthcare is WEIRD; I think all these things are great goods, in each case based on moral intuitions that I think are basically right. It may well be that all across the world, and all down through history, people have been either straight or gay/lesbian, and that cultural norms have imposed patterns of lust on them that were not natural to them; we cannot, and I do not, discount this possibility… …but accepting this possibility already invites us to accept that our patterns of lusting, the shapes and directions of our sexual desires, are culturally malleable. Not, certainly, that individuals have any choice in the matter, but that cultures can create expectactions about patterns of lusting that individuals often successfully internalise. If we accept this possibility, we have to accept also the possibility that our WEIRD sexualities could equally be culturally constructed; if it is WEIRD to be straight, then maybe no-one is born straight, but WEIRD culture somehow inscribes straightness upon them. It seems to me that most moral reasoning I hear – in every direction – assumes the rightness of WEIRD accounts of sexuality. Of course, this is because I live in a WEIRD culture, and so hear the WEIRD voices loudly; if moral reasoning in other cultures looks opaque to us, maybe it is because we have not adequately understood how WEIRD we are. I am not saying WEIRD accounts of sexuality are wrong, but I am saying...
Read MoreBaptists and sexuality
UPDATE: I reaffirm everything I said about BUGB handling this discussion astonishingly well, but I now understand that what I heard to be a change of policy was not…
Read MorePreaching Dinah’s Silence
A few months ago we were preaching the life of Jacob in my local church, and I was given Gen. 35; as I came to prepare, I noticed that our preaching plan skipped over Gen. 34. On one level, no problem: in dealing with big chunks of Scripture we often do that; on another, though, I was uncomfortable. I’ve commented before in public about my concern over preachers – including me – silently passing over the several narratives of sexual violence that Scripture records; in view of this, I did not feel able to pass from Gen. 33 to Gen. 35 and silently ignore Dinah’s experience of rape, and the bizarre and violent events that followed. I read these texts again in my personal devotions this week, recalled struggling with how to preach them, and reflected on how current they are just now. Dinah is raped by Shechem; Jacob, her father, does not care (the text powerfully locates this in part in the disfunction of Jacob’s family: ‘Dinah, the daughter of Leah, whom she had borne to Jacob…’ (1) – the description distances Dinah from Jacob by recalling Jacob’s preference for Rachel over Leah); her brothers, by contrast are incensed. Shechem, the rapist, wants to make things right by marrying her, and his father tries to arrange that. Dinah’s brothers use this desire to construct a trap, and then we are presented with the comically grotesque image of the men of Shechem trying, and of course failing, to fight whilst just-circumcised. Jacob laments the vengeance in the end, because it has disturbed his plans to settle by the city. As I say, my first decision was that I had to face this text; not for the first time in preaching, I found that my insistence on treating a text left me with a problem. How should we – how should I, as a man – preach this strange story? If all Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, &c., how is this God-breathed Scripture in any way useful? Rightly or wrongly I found the clue in Gen.. 33:18-20. Jacob camped in sight of the city, and bought the piece of land where he pitched his tent. It sounds innocent enough, but the cities of Canaan have not had a good press so far in Genesis. Abraham walked away from the cities on the plain, and saw them destroyed by fire because there were not ten righteous people amongst them; Isaac would not take a wife from the people of the land – and was disgusted when Esau did (twice). In Gen. 35:1, when it seems Jacob’s story is getting back on track, it is with God’s command to go to Bethel, a place in the wilderness. Camping in sight of the city was not a good move. And so I read Gen. 34 as a narrative of what happens when God’s people compromise on the holy demand to be separate; that demand can be, and often has been, misread, of course, but it is there and serious; there are cultural patterns that are so distorted that it is impossible to live well within them. Jacob’s compromise, camping in sight of the city, implicates him and his family in cultural patterns that are inevitably destructive. Dinah, tragically, is the one who suffers most from this. For me, the most striking thing about Gen. 34 is Dinah’s silence. She is raped; her father chooses to do nothing (5); her brothers are outraged, and plan revenge; the rapist proposes to marry her; his father seeks to smooth things over. She is raped, and a bunch of men talk about how to deal with it. What did Dinah feel? Was she longing for revenge, prepared to marry Shechem, wanting only to come home quietly? Men speak and argue about her and around her, but her voice is conspicuously silent. The Bible is unremittingly honest about what Yeats called ‘the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’ (‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ – originally in Last Poems (1939), but variously anthologised). Human beings are, and so human culture is, warped, broken, and sinful. By camping in sight of the city, Jacob enters this culture, and he, and his family, become entangled in its warped threads. One of the fundamental breaks in human culture is patriarchy – a part of the first curse (Gen. 3:16), and a seemingly-unremitting distortion of human life ever since. Dinah is raped, and then a bunch of men try to work out how to turn this event to their various advantages; her voice is just ignored. The story has happened ten thousand thousand times through history; as I...
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