Biblical politics
Can the Bible speak usefully and clearly to contemporary political issues? There are enough examples of people who want to insist the answer is yes, and then display a powerful conviction that one or another secular slate of partisan positions is, astonishingly, completely supported by Scripture. (For a very generous review of a particularly unfortunate recent example, that apparently even manages to defend the practice of torture as Biblically sanctioned, see Krish Kandiah’s blog here…) Perhaps there is an alternative way of addressing the question: if we took a good sample of people, and mapped their political beliefs against their practices of Bible reading, would anything significant be observed? A recent sociological study seems to suggest yes, according to an interesting report doing the round on the web. A good source, by the original author, is the Huffington Post here; it references an unpublished study by a postgrad student at Baylor on the relationship between frequency of Bible reading and a whole series of political/social attitudes amongst American Christians, using a data set gathered in 2007. (Apparently – see comment 3 on this post, the original source, I think – the study is presently under journal review.) The data set (the Baylor Religion Survey, which is well-known and credible) ranked people’s practices of Bible reading on an eight-point scale: ranging from opening the Bible never or yearly, through monthly and weekly, to ‘several times a week or more often’. Assuming the reports are right, there are strong positive correlations, visible and statistically significant moving up the scale, on the following points: frequent Bible readers are more likely to believe in the importance of social and economic justice; frequent Bible readers are more likely to believe that using or consuming less is an important part of being a good person; frequent Bible readers are less likely to see a fundamental conflict between science and religion; frequent Bible readers are less likely to approve of same-sex marriage; frequent Bible readers are more likely to be opposed to abortion; frequent Bible readers are more likely to be opposed to both the death penalty, and harsher sentencing policies more generally. The most striking thing about this is that the positions apparently promoted by frequent Bible reading do not align at all with a simple left-right political division: pro-life, but also green; opposition to same-sex marriage, but also commitment to social justice and penal reform. (It is also a set of positions that I would regard as pretty normal amongst British evangelicals – perhaps we all just read the Bible a lot? [if only…]) I am sure that any particular person’s political beliefs are a complex interaction of all sorts of factors, and that the live options they perceive are largely determined by cultural context (consider how easy it is to call oneself ‘socialist’ in Europe compared to the USA); this study suggests, though, that, within a particular culture, personal engagement with the Bible does have a genuine effect on people’s political beliefs. Interesting – I will try to find the original paper and link or reference when it is...
Read MoreEvangelical ecumenicity, networks, and denominations
A good day yesterday at the Scottish Evangelical Theological Society annual meeting, seeing lots of old friends, including our pastor-elect and his wife, speaking on ‘Evangelical doctrine: basis for unity or cause of division?’ and listening to Fred Drummond, of EA Scotland, talking about the various ‘magnets’ for evangelical unity emerging around the country, mostly focused on prayer or mission. (The theme of the conference was ‘Evangelical Ecumenicity: can evangelicals really work together?’) Fred gave a very hopeful account of the Scottish scene, with many emerging missional networks providing real evidence that people are working together, thinking strategically, and praying unitedly much more than has been the case for a generation or so in Scotland. Notably absent from his description and analysis, however, and picked up in the conversation afterwards, was the place of the various Scottish denominations within all this. The overwhelming sense was that those who are truly missionally engaged regard (rightly or wrongly) their denominational structures (in whichever denomination) as bureaucratic, obstructive, and deadening. I reflected afterwards: there is a necessary bureaucracy in denominational structures: property must be owned; child-protection legislation complied with; and pension funds administered. (The list could be expanded, of course.) Denominations do all this for us, and, in the case of UK Baptist denominations, then tend to recede a little into the background. We don’t fund our central denominations enough for them to have the resources to be too proactive/interfering; and a Baptist ecclesiology with the local church meeting as the primary authority means the only effective power of the denomination is soft, the power to influence or inform. A Presbyterian denomination might delay or even derail a proposed church plant (say); a British Baptist denomination just doesn’t have that power. Two thoughts followed: Baptist denominations are thus at least less of a problem for missional congregations; if a Baptist denomination is going to move from being perceived as a problem to being perceived as part of the solution, it will perhaps need to continue doing the necessary bureaucracy well, but more quietly, and then to become a credible and valued missional network itself (or a partner in a series of such networks). After all, the power of Alpha Scotland or the Crieff Fellowship (two of Fred’s examples) is only soft, but people want to align, to involve, to join, because the soft power is perceived as being a (softly) potent aid to mission. I think that the senior people in both BUS and BUGB are well aware of this dynamic, and that the two denominations are trying hard to make this transition; in part I think they (perhaps particularly BUGB) have actually succeeded, but that some or most of the churches have not noticed yet. (When Neil asks ‘what is [the southern] Assembly for?’ the answer is surely in part ‘it is intended to be a major point of encouragement, influence, and information for missional churches, and churches that are trying to transition to being missional’ – an example of BUGB, with more than a nudge from BMS over the years, acting like a voluntary missional network.) Second, however, I reflect that perhaps there is an ideal situation here, a Coleridgean ideal of a union of the opposites of permanence and progression. A church might look in one direction – here its denomination – for certain necessary points of stability and groundedness, and in another – here its missional network – for a fast-moving, evolving, even liquid, organisation that is fluid enough and fleet enough of foot to always be on the pulse of culturally-relevant action (‘Ancient-Future ecclesiastical structures’!). Part of a denomination’s job in the context of genuinely missional churches might be to act as a slight brake, to say from time to time, ‘in your pursuit of relevant and effective mission, remember your deep roots and your communal story, and pause for reflection before you do anything not true to them.’ Now, I am very well aware that the big problem in Scotland – and across the UK – is not the number of churches that are so missional that they need such brakes applied, which might be why missional networks are presently regarded as attractive, and denominations as dull, but imagining how to plan for a better future is not an irrelevant task. (And is a lot more interesting than...
Read MoreThe benefits of smallness
(This is a thought I have offered in conversation to various friends, several of whom seem to have found it helpful and/or convincing. One day I might see if there is actually any evidence to support it, and write a proper paper. For now, it belongs here…) British evangelical institutions seem less ready to separate themselves from each other than their American counterparts, either through internal splits, or through the formation of factions separated by mutual condemnation. Several of my American friends have observed this, and questioned whether there might be a reason. I would love to say that our version of the tradition is more mature or irenic, or better understands the primary gospel demand to maintain the bond of peace, but I fear that none of this is true. Rather, we are just smaller. The point is a rather obvious organisational one: to take an example, my denomination, the Baptist Union of Scotland, can only just support one theological college (‘seminary’ in American terms). So the college needs to be hospitable to charismatic and non-charismatic spiritualities, to ‘conservative’ and ‘open’ evangelicals, and so on. Our leaders, who have generally come through the college, have lived, worshipped, and worked with a variety of people and a variety of traditions. If we were bigger, we might have two colleges, and the potential would be there for the colleges to define themselves against each other on this or that issue, and so denominational leaders might be able to view those on the other side of the divide as ‘the other,’ unknown, feared, and demonised. Of course, other evangelical traditions in Britain are bigger, but a more complex version of the same point holds: the movement as a whole is simply not big enough to permit significant separation, except in isolated and extreme cases. If we are to function beyond our own local fellowship, British evangelicals end up all working together at some level. It happens I find myself on one side of various current debates within British evangelicalism; it also happens that, in every case, there are leaders on the other side who I know well – some I studied with, some I have taught, some I have worked with on this or that committee or conference. Given the size of our movement, this is just inevitable. I suspect that it is because of this, and not because of any different – let alone ‘better’ – moral stance, that we find it easier to disagree without denouncing than our sisters and brothers across the Atlantic. If this happens to be right, does it make any difference? I think of an old friend of mine, someone whose wisdom I value and respect, who in a former role made it a part of his business to get young evangelical leaders together every so often. We needed an excuse, of course – a topic to discuss, or a speaker to listen to, but the real agenda was to build relationships, to make sure that, when they emerged into national leadership, these folk had once or twice eaten quiche together. It’s a long-term investment, but a work like this will, I believe, produce better, more gospel-shaped, disagreements in public ten or twenty years down the...
Read MoreIrish Evangelical response to civil partnerships
Glen posted a link to an interesting document produced by the Evangelical Alliance Ireland (an entirely separate organisation from the Evangelical Alliance UK) in response to the current Irish Civil Partnerships Bill. The EAI’s response is well-summed up in the phrase Glen highlights in his blog post: …as followers of a just and compassionate God we can recognise the justice and fairness of providing some legal protection for the reality of both same-sex and opposite-sex cohabiting relationships. As the rest of the document makes clear, the EAI is not softening its commitment to traditional Christian teaching on marriage at all, but arguing that, in a culture where other patterns of family life are now extremely common, it is a matter of justice that the law should recognise this. I find this heartening. Our culture (in Britain – maybe it’s different in Ireland?) seems increasingly to fail to recognise any distinction between ‘I think this is morally wrong’ and ‘I think this should be illegal’. This attitude seems to have infected much Christian commentary on matters of public policy in this country – we have demanded too often that the law be brought into accord with our moral intuitions, without exception or reserve. Evangelicals have probably been worse at this than most. But the Evangelical Alliance movement was born, in 1845-6, out of a desire to protect and extend liberty of conscience and, whilst undoubtedly it was the liberty of people to be evangelicals in majority Roman Catholic countries (such as Ireland) which mainly concerned them, they understood from the first that they could not deny to others the liberty they demanded for themselves. The intuition (first, I am proud to say, articulated by a Baptist, Thomas Helwys, in 1611) that it is the moral duty of government to maintain a studied neutrality on certain matters, and to offer space and protection for its people to live in the way that they might choose, is a natively evangelical one. (This also, incidentally, explains the concern Glen registers in his post – the desire to provide ‘some legal protection’; a standard problem in modern law concerns whose rights trump whose, and the EAI does not want legal protection for cohabiting couples to extend to the making illegal of the moral witness, and the expression of that witness in appropriate ways, of churches, mosques,...
Read MoreFinally: evangelical theology
This is a slightly embarrassing confession to make, but I have just last week come up with a definition of ‘evangelical theology’ which I find convincing. As I have written articles on the subject for significant reference works, intervened publicly in controversies over evangelical identity, and chaired the theological commission of the Evangelical Alliance for the past couple of years, this might seem slightly late in the day – hence my embarrassment. For reasons some will know, I have had to be thinking about defining the boundaries of evangelicalism once again in recent weeks, and I think that I have seen something new (to me at least) and helpful (to me at least). Perhaps some story would help to explain this. I joined the Evangelical Alliance when I was a student, a recent convert to Christianity via a CICCU mission (if this starts sounding like a re-write of Phil. 3:5, apologies…). A friend was encouraging all of us to join, and I did so without much thought (I think I remember who it was, but he is now quite well known in academic theological circles, and probably not wanting to be reminded of this bit of his past journey). Quite quickly, I went to train for ministry at Spurgeons; for my time there, and for some years afterward, I kept up my Evangelical Alliance membership, but deliberately donated by cheque each year – I was conscious that this was something I wanted to be forced to think through every so often, mainly because I was not sure at the time what ‘evangelical’ meant. I became comfortable owning the label sometime around 2001; this was not, as far as I can see at this distance, any shift on my part, so much as a belief that I did finally understand what the word meant, and was happy that it was a word I could identify with as describing my own spirituality. I choose the word ‘spirituality’ carefully: my conviction then was that evangelicalism was better understood as a cultural reality than as a theological system. The way I prayed, the songs I sang, the way we lived church, unspoken dress codes, patterns of speech, … I realised that I was (and am) evangelical in much the same way as I was (and am) English middle class – while both labels include some broad patterns of belief, most of the decisive things are more about patterns of living than about commitment to certain doctrines or concepts. Since then, studying evangelical identity has been a minor, but repetitive, part of my research agenda. The most generally-accepted definition is the Bebbington quadrilateral of conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism; of these, the latter two suggest, not specific doctrinal commitments, but areas of doctrinal concern; the former two are about spirituality: the narration of spiritual experience and patterns of devoted living. Mark Noll essayed a definition in terms of communities of conversation – an explicitly sociological/cultural account, which is very helpful in understanding some of the hard cases. Tim Larsen has recently (in the Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology) offered a five-fold list, which begins by asserting that an evangelical is ‘an orthodox Protestant’, but moves on to historical location (‘stands in the tradition of the global Christian networks arising from the eighteenth-century revivals…’) and spirituality (‘has a preeminent place for the Bible in her or his Christian life…’) before returning to hover on the boundaries of doctrine and spirituality (‘stresses reconciliation with God through the atoning work of Jesus Christ on the cross … stresses the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of an individual…’) At most, these definitions gesture towards certain theological emphases as being necessary to, but not sufficient for, evangelical identity. A Calvinist is defined by the doctrines she believes; an evangelical not so. Until now, I have been fairly happy with this pattern of definition; now I think I can make an advance and sketch the broad shape of an explicitly evangelical doctrinal commitment. This requires, however, reflection on something a little more complicated than just belief in certain doctrines. Theologies have a certain shape, as well as a certain content. Typically, the unreflective theology of (say) a new undergraduate student in the discipline is rather flat – more-or-less everything is equally important. This is dangerous and brittle; a particular view of church order (say) is just as much to be contended for as sola fide salvation; doubting the historicity of the Jonah narrative is as threatening to faith as doubting the historicity of the resurrection narrative. More mature theologies are shaped differently – they are not flat. Some things are foundational, or...
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