The Bible preserves the church

The church is desperately fragile and vulnerable.  It could be destroyed at any time.  Karl Barth, dwelling on this theme in Church Dogmatics IV/2, reflects on the multiple threats to the church: from the outside, the threat of outright persecution and also the threat of just being ignored; from the inside, the threat of secularisation (where the church becomes alienated from its own basis in Christ) and sacralisation (where the church assimilates to the methods of the world and seeks to glorify itself).  Given it's vulnerability to the world and to its own sin, how is it that the church has not in fact disappeared?

The big answer that Barth gives is that the church is upheld.  But how is it upheld?  Barth's first answer is that the Bible has continued to speak within the church.  The Scriptures "have continually become a living voice and word, and have had and exercised power as such."  (673)  The Bible has, of course, often been submerged beneath church traditions, "or proclaimed only in liturgical sing-song", or contradicted by philosophy and ideology.  "But they have always been the same Scriptures and the community has never been able to discard them."  (674)

So what is it, then, that has upheld the church?  "A mere book then?"  No, says Barth.  The Bible is "a chorus of very different and independent but harmonious voices."  It is "an organism which in its many and varied texts is full of vitality within the community."  The Bible is "something which can speak and make itself heard in spite of all its maltreatment at the hands of the half-blind and arbitrary and officious."

Barth expects the Bible to speak afresh, again and again, recalling the church to itself.  As the chorus of voices which harmoniously witnesses to Christ, the Bible is able to call the church again and again to him.  This cannot be prevented by the church, even when with its traditions and speculations it wants to keep the Bible under control.  Neither, actually, can Christians manufacture this "by their own Bible-lectures and Bible-study or even by the Scripture principle".  Rather, "it is something that Scripture achieves of itself" - and for Barth, that points to the fact that Scripture is the sword of the Spirit (Eph 6:17), the word by which the Spirit works in the church and the world.

This does not mean, of course, that it is a matter of indifference whether churches maintain a reverence for Scripture, or whether they hold the Scripture principle, or whether they strive to keep the Bible central in their common life.  It is critical that the church do this.  But where it is done, the church is nevertheless dependent on the Bible as the Spirit wields that Bible, not its attitude to the Bible or its arrangements concerning the Bible.  "The preservation of the community takes place as it is upheld by this prophetic and apostolic word, or as it is led back as a hearing community to this word."

"And so we can only say to Christians who are troubled about the preservation of the community or the maintaining of its cause that they should discard all general and philosophico-historical considerations... and hear, and hear again, and continually hear this word, being confronted both as individual and united hearers by the fact that the community certainly cannot uphold itself, but that all the same it is fact upheld, being placed in the communion of saints as this continually takes place in the hearing of this word."  (674-5)

Hear, and hear again, and continually hear this word.

Honouring your (venal and corrupt) leaders

The New Testament requires Christians to honour, submit to, and pray for their secular leaders.  These are commands, not options.  But how do you apply them when your leaders are clearly corrupt?  For those of us in the UK, this is obviously not a hypothetical question.

First up, let's think about the apostles' time and ours.  What is different and what is the same?  Well, the leaders of the Roman world were typically corrupt.  They abused their power hugely.  So not very much has changed on that front; we can't pretend that the NT commands are only valid when our leaders are good.  Leaders weren't good when the apostles wrote those commands.  On the other hand, there are differences.  The apostles urged believers to submit to their political leaders, but of course those leaders were autocrats.  Whether you honoured them or not, they were going to do whatever they wanted, and the average person had no means whatsoever to sway their decision making.  For those of us living in modern democracies, there is therefore a difference.  We actually have a responsibility towards our leaders which Peter and Paul did not have: to hold them accountable, and to exercise our suffrage to do that.  That is a real change.

So what does it look like to honour our leaders today, especially when they're just not great?  Here are some thoughts.

1. Honour your leaders by remembering that their authority comes from God.  The Lord Jesus told Pilate - Pilate! - that it was only God who gave Pilate any authority at all.  Our secular leaders are, whether they know it or not, God's servants.  They exercise a fundamental human calling in creation.  We are not called to honour them because they have earned our honour, or because they deserve it, but because they have authority from the Lord.  This does not mean that our secular leaders are above critique; the Prime Minister is not the Lord's Anointed, unable to be touched.  Consider that in his providence God sometimes give bad leaders to a nation; sometimes it is what a nation deserves.  Reflection on that might lead us to prayer for society more widely.  But whatever the reason in God's hidden providence, these people are in power.  Honour them.

2. Honour your leaders enough to critique them well.  In our cynical age, and with the facilitation of social media, it is very easy to respond to bad leadership by being dismissive and sarcastic.  A throwaway tweet, a shared meme.  This is particularly easy in our party political system if the current leadership is not of your tribe.  As citizens in a democracy we should critique our leaders; as Christians, we should do so in a way which properly engages the issues and doesn't just scoff.  It is worth remembering that political leaders have to make difficult choices, often with no obvious right answer.  Honour them enough to pray for them to have wisdom, even as you criticise constructively.

3. Honour your leaders enough to treat them as moral agents.  Take their choices seriously.  Don't assume 'they would do that' because of their ideology or their party.  Don't assume they are trapped in the machinery of government.  Don't just shrug, because we all know politicians are no good.  These are human beings, who are making real moral decisions.  Be shocked and appalled where necessary!  It does not dishonour our leaders to view them as people capable of doing good and evil.  Honour them enough to pray that they would make good choices.

4. Honour your leaders enough to consider their eternal destinies.  We mustn't fall into the trap of thinking of political leaders purely in terms of the impact their choices have on us or on others.  Think about the people in leadership themselves.  They will enter into judgement.  Eternal life is at stake for them.  Particularly where leaders are corrupt, honour them enough to pray that they would repent.  This may also means praying that they would resign, since that would surely be a part of repentance for a political leader.

Today is a depressing day for British politics.  We can still honour our leaders, even if right now that honour looks like criticism and a call for repentance and resignation.

The truth as it is in Jesus

The Lord Jesus says that he is the truth.

It is normally sensible when someone says 'I know the truth' to ask 'the truth about what?'  What aspect of truth have you stumbled across?  What particular truth is it that we're discussing?

We could, I suppose, ask this question of Jesus.  He is making a rather different claim: not merely to know the truth, but to be the truth.  But we could ask: what truth exactly are you?  What subject are we discussing? What particular truth is it that you are claiming to embody?

We could even probably start to sketch an answer to this question.  It is the truth about God.  In claiming to be the truth, Jesus is making a claim to reveal God.  Yes.  But when he makes this claim, it is linked to his claim to be 'the way' and 'the life'.  It is linked to the idea of 'coming to the Father'.  A way joins two points; a life stretches from one time to another.  So when the Lord says he is the truth, we should think in terms of two things.  He is not just embodying the truth about God.  He is embodying the truth about the relationship of God to creation and specifically to humanity.  The Lord Jesus speaks in two ways throughout his ministry.  In one way, he calls people to himself, as if he is their destination; in another way, he points people beyond himself to the Father, as the place where they will find their rest.  He does this because he is the truth of God's relationship with humanity, and vice versa.  He does not teach this truth or show this truth.  He is this truth.  His life is this truth as he obeys the Father, trusts him, and prayerfully depends on him.  This lived life, this life in communion with God, is the truth.

At this point we ought to realise that we've burst through the limits of our question.  What particular truth?  In trying to answer we realise that we've stumbled onto something more: the universal truth.  It is true of creation, because it is true in Jesus, that it exists in relationship to God.  It is true of humanity, because it is true in Jesus, that it exists in dependence on God.

Every particular truth is, in an obvious or concealed way, a species of this truth.

There is no escaping this reality, even in the human absolute of contradiction.  It is possible to live in ignorance of this truth.  It is possible to live against this truth (to one's own destruction).  But the truth cannot be evaded.

Catholicism and Sectarianism

In the Creed, we confess our faith in "one holy catholic and apostolic church".  This phrase is a stumbling block for some, because when they hear the word 'catholic' they immediately think Roman Catholic, and of course they don't believe in the Roman Catholic Church in that sense.  For that reason, the word 'catholic' is sometimes dropped and replaced with 'universal'.  I have no particular problem with that switch, although I would on the whole prefer to retain the word 'catholic' and explain its meaning.  It is true that in the Roman Church, the word 'catholic' is thought to refer to the universal validity of that church which is in communion with the Pope, with its clerical hierarchy and congregations.  To be outside the Roman communion is to be (to some extent; the line has become a little more fuzzy for post-Vatican 2 Roman Catholicism) outside the catholic church.  But I don't think we must, or should, accept the Roman construal of catholicism.  Let me try to offer an alternative.

To believe in the catholic church is to believe that Christ has but one people, one body.  This is the church.  It is one across the centuries, and it is one throughout the world.  It's unity is not direct, but indirect; by which I mean, the members are not joined directly to one another, but are all joined in the one Holy Spirit to Christ.  The catholicism of the church, therefore, does not rest on any human organisational scheme, whether that of Rome or anything else; it rests in a common faith in the Lord Jesus.  This commonality may well be only imperfectly expressed, or even sometimes completely hidden, in this world, but since it is grounded in Christ it cannot be ultimately broken and will be ultimately revealed.

That's how I understand catholicism.  But to get at what it means in practice, it is perhaps more useful to ask what a catholic spirit looks like, and to illustrate that by contrasting it with its opposite, sectarianism.  In essence, the catholic spirit draws the boundaries of the church as broadly as possible, where the sectarian spirit tends toward narrowness.  There are lots of ways in which this plays out.

The catholic sees an essential unity between the church of the past and the church of the present, and looks on the theological and creedal decisions of the past as having (relative) authority within the church.  The sectarian, by contrast, is free to reject the past, and tends to be disparaging of the church in past ages.

The catholic sees their own church as part of a greater whole, and is therefore free to draw upon liturgical and theological resources from around the world, throughout time, and across a broad ecclesial spectrum.  The sectarian tends to make use only of resources from their own particular tradition, or in more extreme cases only things tailor-made for their own congregation and situation.

Again, the catholic sees their own church as part of a greater whole, and therefore wants to bring the particular insights and strengths of their tradition to the rest of the church in service.  The sectarian is happy just doing their own thing.

The catholic can't be content with the divided nature of the church, but seeks a clearer expression of the essential unity of the church.  This will involve entering into controversy - the catholic is not content to see parts of the church affected by theological error.  The sectarian, on the other hand, either adopts a 'live and let live' attitude to churches of different traditions (i.e., indifference), or writes off any church which significantly disagrees with his own position as outside the church altogether.

Examples could be multiplied, but you get the idea.

Be more catholic.

Be courageous

Jesus said to his disciples, shortly before he was betrayed: "You will have suffering in this world.  Be courageous!  I have overcome the world." (John 16:33)

It is striking what he does not say.  It is not: "I have overcome the world, so you won't suffer."  In the context of John's Gospel, that could never be right.  Christ overcomes the world by his own suffering; his glory is revealed at the cross.  How, then, could there be no suffering in the world for Christ's followers?

The point is how we respond to the suffering that must be encountered in the world.  That suffering, I think, includes the temptation which the world throws at the follower of Jesus, and of course the dislocation that comes from not belonging any longer to the world.  The natural human reaction to being in a minority, to not belonging, is fear; that fear may be expressed as a defensive retreat from the world, or as an offensive assault on the world.  Fear can motivate both the closed Christian community that harks back to a (mythical) vanished golden age, and the zealot moral crusader (or even evangelist).  The world as enemy, to be fled from or perhaps attacked.

The world, then, as decidedly not overcome.

Christ has overcome the world.  "The world" in John's Gospel is not so much the created reality in which we live, but the social reality of humanity organised without reference to, or in rebellion against, God and his purposes.  It is the world of Psalm 2, and the desperate (and vain) attempt to throw off God's rule and the rule of his Christ.  It is the world we live in.  Sometimes the world disguises its godlessness (and can indeed put on a good show of religion); sometimes the world displays its true colours.  But always it is the world.

Christ has overcome the world.  This does not mean that the world is done away with.  Of course the world as sinful dominion is ended.  But far from being destroyed, the kingdom of this world becomes the kingdom of God and his Christ.  In his cross and resurrection, the Lord Jesus overcomes the world by establishing the world; he upturns the apparent reality of human existence in order to found human existence again on the basis of his righteousness.  He takes his throne.  The world, then, despite appearances is overcome, to its own great blessing.  The defeat of the world is the world's great victory.

When Christ calls us to courage in the face of suffering in this world, it is simply a call to faith.  This is the victory which has conquered the world: our faith.  Not that faith in and of itself has any power, but faith it is which sees the world as it really is, as overcome.  Faith sees the victory of Jesus, his glory in his suffering on the cross.  Faith sees the world as changed, even though the world itself does not know that it is changed.  Faith therefore enters in to the victory of the Lord.

Fear of the world runs through so much our Christian living.  The simple fear of what folks will think.  Fear for our children - to what depths of godlessness will they be exposed?  Fear of being tainted, fear of being tempted.  Fear, fear, fear.

Be courageous!  He has overcome the world.

Philosophy and Gospel

"Is the philosophical statement 'man is the measure of all things' nearer or further from the metaphysical implications of the gospel than 'human beings are dependent on something greater than themselves'?"

It's an interesting question, the answer to which sheds light on different Christian approaches to philosophy and specifically metaphysics.  It seems to me that for many who are involved in theological retrieval - that is to say, the project to recover for the church the classical theology of history - there is a conviction that ancient philosophy (broadly Platonist or Aristotelian) provides the underpinnings of much Christian theology, such that theological retrieval cannot really go ahead without philosophical retrieval.  There is a sense in which this is obviously true.  If we are reciting the Nicene Creed, we are dealing in categories which derive ultimately from the metaphysical world of late antiquity - we cannot say 'of one being' without to a certain extent entering that world.  Moreover, an implication of this is that it will indeed be crucial for Christian teachers to have a grasp of those classical philosophical terms.  How else could we be sure that when we recite the Creed we mean the same thing as the Fathers who framed it?

However, many push further than this.  It is not merely that a working knowledge of ancient philosophy is vital for a deep understanding of classical theology.  For many, the loss of ancient philosophy as a functional view of the world leads inevitably to a distortion of the gospel.  Modern philosophy, on this reading, is the enemy.  This, it seems to me, is related to a strand of Christian thinking on philosophy which dates back to at least the second century, and sees Greek philosophy as in some sense a preparation for the gospel.  I think we ought to resist that idea.  It introduces a second revelation, to be co-ordinated with Scriptural revelation.  Frankly, I think in some cases the metaphysics of the ancient world is brought to sit in judgement over Scripture - the Biblical storyline bent and twisted to fit within philosophical categories.  But even absent this particular error, I think it's theologically wrong-headed to suggest that classical culture was a 'preparation' in this way.  It cuts across our theology of grace,  I've pondered this a little before.

So, my suggestion - and the thought which led to me being asked the question with which we started - is that the right motive for seeking to understand the philosophical and metaphysical underpinnings of classical theology is so that we can learn to express the same gospel in a very different philosophical climate.  This is not a proposal for metaphysical indifferentism, the idea that Christians should just shrug when it comes to issues of ultimate reality.  The gospel does have metaphysical implications.  My thought, rather, is that we ought to see how our theological forebears allowed the gospel to shape their use of the prevalent philosophical categories; I think we will find that they are basically subversive in their approach.  Take the Nicene Creed again, or perhaps the Chalcedonian definition.  The way in which philosophical concepts - like 'being', 'substance', 'person', 'nature' - are used in these contexts draws on classical philosophy for vocabulary and for conceptual matter, but the final formulation is hardly something which the classical metaphysicians would have endorsed.  Classical metaphysics has been subverted to express the truth of Christian revelation.  And if that was possible then, why not now?

Back to the original question: which is nearest to the metaphysical implications of the gospel, the statement that 'man is the measure of all things', or the statement that 'human beings are dependent on something greater than themselves'?  My answer would be: they're both close, and they're both infinitely far away.  Take the second statement, which my interlocutor of course wants me to endorse as rather closer to gospel thinking.  Unless we are saying clearly and unequivocally that 'something greater' here means 'the Triune God', I don't see how this statement is at all friendly to the gospel.  The Unmoved Mover of Aristotle is an idea utterly hostile to the Christian revelation.  The notion of 'something greater' is not in and of itself at all well placed to service the gospel, or to provide a metaphysical grounding for the Christian doctrine of God.  But on the other hand, we can certainly subvert this notion to express Christian doctrine.  If the prevailing philosophical and cultural climate were theistic in the sense of this statement, it would certainly be worth proclaiming to them that this 'something greater' which they honour despite not knowing what it is has a name, and a face, and he can be known in Jesus Christ.  But once you've filled out the statement with the Triune God is simply doesn't mean the same thing anymore - for the 'something greater' on which human beings depend is found to be the humble baby in the manger and the crucified Saviour.

But still, 'something greater' is better than man as the measure of all things, right?  I don't really see how.  Of course the metaphysics which Protagoras is proposing in this statement is hostile to the idea that there is any unchanging God above humanity.  Protagoras wants all value to flow from humanity.  But in a culture - such as ours! - which is saturated with this sort of unanchored humanism, why not subvert the statement?  For sure, man is the measure of all things, so long as we're talking about the right Man.  And of course, as soon as we've realised that Man is really Jesus Christ, the statement no longer means what it did, and becomes a vehicle for the gospel.

In both cases, there are likely misunderstandings that will emerge, and will have to be worked through.  Hangovers from the philosophical background will distort out theology and need to be carefully worked through.  I would humbly suggest that hangovers from the world of classical philosophical have in fact distorted classical theology, and seeking to express the gospel in different philosophical concepts might help to knock off some of the sharp edges that remain.  We will never get there; our theology will always be an approximation, theologia viatorum.  That's okay.  Better that than to be stuck in a philosophical and theological dead end because we've committed ourselves to metaphysical constructs which are not themselves part of the gospel.

Generation to Generation

Every time I celebrate a birthday these days - and I've just passed a significant milestone ten days ago - I find myself understanding, and appreciating, more and more the biblical talk of 'generations'.  Scripture consistently unfolds this starkly realistic view of human beings as temporary, and expresses this through the rise and fall, the coming and going, of generations.  As one generation fades, another emerges.  As one wave recedes, another takes its place.  It captures the transience of life, for me, better than our individualistic culture is capable of doing.  It is not merely that individuals live and die, but that whole generations come and go, only to be replaced by their children, who will in turn be replaced by their children's children.

One of the things my children have had to do in primary school is draw a family tree; I remember doing the same thing when I was young.  When you're a child, the interesting thing about a family tree is that you can go back as far as you like, or at least as far as you can dig up the information, but you can't go forward.  At the bottom of the family tree, there is you.  At some level it's probably impossible not to think of yourself as the end result, as if everything were leading up to your life.  But I am no longer a child, and the family tree has a layer below me, and in time may well have more layers.  I am not the end result, just a link in the chain.  And one day, if the Lord delays his coming, and if my kids have children (and so on), I'll be one of those names on the family tree, with very little information known; just that, for this child, I was one of the people who led up to them as the new 'end result'.

The Bible authors don't seem to find this coming and going of generations altogether morbid, and the reason surely is that they have identified the great point of continuity.  "Lord," Moses prays, "you have been our refuge in every generation."  Even when one generation has been swept away by violence and judgement, it is still true that "you, Lord, are enthroned forever; your throne endures from generation to generation."  Generations come and go, but God endures.  But this is not merely a point of constancy, but a point of faithfulness.  It is not just that, as time passes, God happens still to be God.  It is that he is God for the next generation, just as he was God for the past generations.  It is his love that endures forever.

The passing of time, for many of us I guess, increases our awareness that there is relatively soon going to be time when we are no longer there.

I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see.

For those with children, the main concern this raises is: will they be okay?  We've nurtured them, tried to care for them, tried to shield them from the worst of this world.  But one day we won't be here.  Our generation passes...  And as I think about that, I think I understand (psychologically, perhaps, rather than theologically) those who baptise their babies.  Wouldn't it be great if we could reify that faithfulness of God from generation to generation, to make sure it applied in this case?  Wouldn't it be great to pin God down?

But the future is unknown to any but God, and we can't pin him down.  All we can do is trust that he has already pinned himself to his promises.  He will be God in the future, the faithful God.  When the family tree moves on, if it does, and I am left somewhere near the top of the page and remote from the living generation, he will be God, from the top to the bottom.  There is a job for me to do - to proclaim his power to a coming generation, to make his faithfulness known.  So that rather than me trying to pin God down, the next generation might be encouraged to pin their hopes and dreams to the faithfulness of God.

Navigating the culture war... Again

You can find my previous thoughts on navigating the culture war here. I've also written some other bits and bobs on the subject if you look.

This morning I've been pondering that one of the most useful courses we can take in the ongoing culture war is to ignore it. I don't think this is a good idea all the time. I think it is, as a rule, a good idea to have some understanding of what is going on in the wider culture, and I think it is often necessary to pick sides. After all, not fighting a war is a good way to lose one.

On that subject, I think the current attempts to say that there really isn't a culture war - that it's all being made up to manufacture outrage or whatever - are deluded at best, disingenuous at worst. It reminds me of Russian tactics in Crimea. Keep denying that an invasion is happening until such time as it is a done deal, because that makes it a good deal harder for anyone to fight back.

Sometimes, however, it is important to just ignore the culture war. It frees you up to do the right thing. To give an example, sadly not hypothetical, wearing culture war lenses can make it difficult to do something as straightforwardly good as deploring racism, out of fear that the other side is weaponising the issue. When everything is read as a move in the culture war, one has to weigh up more than just the rightness or wrongness of an individual action or reaction; one has to think about what might be conceded to the opposition, how one's action or inaction will affect the strategic state of affairs.

So sometimes you just have to forget the culture war. For Christians in particular, our calling is not to be strategic in our thinking but obedient. With our minds held captive by Christ, we enjoy perfect freedom to act (and to refrain from acting) on the left and on the right. 

The present presence of the risen Lord

The Lord Jesus is alive - risen, ascended, enthroned.  As the Living One, he is present in and to his church by the Holy Spirit.  He himself, as the One who is in heaven, is present with us on earth.  This is something which hopefully all Christians would acknowledge, but what do we do with it?  Is the presence of the Lord Jesus of functional importance to us?

One of the themes running through John Webster's collection of essays Word and Church is the constant danger of ignoring or minimising this presence.  As Webster points out, there are plenty of things - theological things! - that threaten to squeeze out the place of the risen Christ.  The church, for example, can easily expand to take his place, and the doctrine of the church can come to supplant the doctrine of the risen Lord Jesus.  When this happens - and we should probably not move too quickly to glance over at Rome here, since it surely happens closer to home than that - the church's sacramental and liturgical life continues, and it continues to talk about the risen Christ, but it becomes increasingly hard to see what difference it would make if Jesus were absent.  Perhaps he just set up the church and then left it to run - a kind of gospel deism.

I suspect that sometimes in evangelical circles the doctrine of Scripture can pose a threat in this way.  It is good that we have a high view of the Bible and its authority, but there is always a danger that the authority of the Bible is cut loose from the authority of the Lord.  In analogy to the danger with the church, might we come to act as if Christ had provided Holy Scripture as a deposit of sacred truth and then basically left us to it?  What difference would it make to our preaching and teaching if he were absent?

We are used to looking back, to see Jesus in his crucifixion and resurrection; we are used to looking forward, straining to see Jesus in his glorious return.  Are we used to looking up, to see Jesus in heaven - and not only to see him there, but to be lifted up in our hearts to be with him there now, because he is with us?

Because the only substitute for the presence of the Lord Jesus which is held out in the New Testament is the presence of the Holy Spirit.  Think about the discourse in the latter chapters of John.  Jesus is going away, but he will send another Counsellor.  And yet it turns out this is no substitution at all - for where the Spirit is, there is Christ himself!  It is his spiritual presence that we're talking about, or his presence by the Spirit.

It all raises questions particularly for our corporate worship (and I think the NT gives us reasons to talk specifically about Christ's presence in the gathered worship of his people).  When the Scriptures are opened and the word is preached, do we have a sense that Christ is presently speaking to us - is it first hand or second (or third) hand?  Is it the viva vox dei that we're hearing as we hear the voice of the reader and the voice of the preacher?  When we gather at the Table, is it the Lord's Supper that we're attending - is he the host?  Is he present, as the one who was crucified and is now risen, to feed us with his own body and blood?  Or is this just a memorial of a thing that happened long ago and far away?

The Lord is here!

Matt and the Magnificat

So Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, has been philandering, unfaithful; and he has been hypocritical to boot, imposing stringent restrictions on the rest of the populace which he felt no pressure to obey himself.  It's all extremely familiar.  I've read a few people suggesting that this is what you get with the Tories; of course it is.  It's also what you get with everyone else.  Betrayal of marriage vows is not a left/right issue, but a sin issue.  And then again, it is human nature to abuse power.  That's why so much of the condemnation of Hancock rings slightly hollow - hypocrites pointing out a man's hypocrisy.  He was in a position to get away with it; that's the main difference between him and us.

There's a great deal that could be said about Hancock's actions and the societal reaction - including pointing out, as many Christians have, that the outrage has all been about social distancing rules being broken, rather than the (rather more important) breaking of marriage vows.  But I've been particularly thinking about the abuse of power, and the way that is addressed by Mary's song, the Magnificat.

He has shown strength with his arm
and has scattered the proud in their conceit,
Casting down the mighty from their thrones
and lifting up the lowly.

This is the virgin Mary's joyful response to the knowledge that the baby she is miraculously bearing is the Messiah, the Holy One of God.  In this baby, God has shown his strength; he has scattered the proud; he has cast down the mighty.  And yet - in Mary's world, throughout Mary's lifetime, the proud and mighty continued to rule, and to abuse their power, and to get away with it.  Just as they have done for the 2000 years since.  They don't seem to have been scattered or cast down.

There is something wonderful here.  God has shown his strength in such a way that the strong in this world cannot see it.  He has scattered the proud in such a way that they, being proud, do not know it.  He has cast down the mighty from their thrones in such a way that from their thrones they continue to scoff.  And yet these things have so certainly happened that Mary sings of them in the past tense, even when the life and work of the baby in her womb has barely begun.

The proud and powerful in this world will always think they can get away with it.  Mary's song testifies to the fact that they have not got away with it.  They are seen, judged, cast down.  The arc of history, as far as I can tell, does not bend toward justice.  But justice nevertheless is done, and will one day be shown to be done.

Freedom Day

This was the oath God swore to our father Abraham:

to set us free from the hands of our enemies,

Free to worship him without fear,

holy and righteous in his sight

all the days of our life.

So, if the Son sets you free, you really will be free.

For freedom Christ set us free.

So the Prime Minister has now made clear that 'Freedom Day' will pass without any significant increase in freedom, and whether you feel that's right or not there surely is some disappointment in having liberty deferred.  The response to Covid has involved a massive restriction on basic liberties, albeit we hope temporarily, and I think it is entirely right and justifiable that people be concerned about what this means for the future relationship between state and citizens.  Liberty is an important human good, and we ought to try to safeguard it.

But what sort of freedom is it that we are looking for?

When we are talking in political terms, we are talking about what Isaiah Berlin called 'negative liberty' - the absence of restraint, the lack of government interference in our lives.  This is a valuable thing.  It allows each person to pursue their own conception of the good life.  (Incidentally, this is also why it must be limited and restrained; competing versions of the good life need some sort of management.  What if my view of the good life involves being able to trample all over your view?  That is why absolute libertarianism is not good.  Liberty has limits, and there needs to be an authority to enforce those limits).

But suppose we had all the liberty we wished.  That still wouldn't tell us what we should do with our lives.  I wonder whether the lack of a vision of 'the good life' actually stands behind much of the quiescent acceptance of restrictions on our liberty at the moment - not knowing what life is for, we don't value the freedom to shape life according to our conceptions.  Negative liberty creates an empty space, a blank canvas.  That's great, but you need to have some idea of what to do with it.

This is why we need the real Freedom Day.  No government can tell us what life is all about.  They can grant or deny negative liberty - they can impinge on our freedoms to a greater or lesser extent - but they never can tell us what the good life is.  Nor can they enable us to pursue the good life, though they may be able to remove some of the things that prevent that pursuit.  Actually, when governments and other human authorities set out a positive view of what the good life is and encourage people to pursue it there is always the danger of tyranny - that people will be 'forced to be free', in the words of Rousseau.  Human beings cannot really set us free, in the sense of bringing us out of slavery to our immediate desires and into the true good life.  Only God can do this.

Freedom Day has already happened.  Christ died so that we might die to the dark forces that enslaved us, including ourselves in our twisted sinful humanity.  He rose so that we might have life, freedom with shape and purpose, a life oriented to the right relationship with God for which we were made.  The joy of it is, just as no human authority could bestow this liberty - the liberty of the children of God - so no human authority can remove it.  Today, if you are a believer in Christ, you are free: free to call on God as your Father, free to worship in Spirit and Truth, free to live as a witness to God's great reality as it is in Christ.

Thank God for Freedom Day.

Not feeling it

One of the most helpful things, for me, in preaching through the Song of Songs is the corrective it gives to some of our undue stress on objectivity over subjectivity, and thinking over feeling.  This is probably, once again, one of those pendulum things - we've reacted to something unhelpful, and swung way too far in the opposite direction.

Let me give an example.  How might we respond to someone who doesn't feel like they are forgiven?  Or doesn't have any sense of Christ's love for them?  Because we're the truth people, we'd probably push in the direction of the objective.  Whether you feel forgiven doesn't change the objective truth that if you are trusting in Christ you are forgiven.  Whether you sense the love of Christ or not has no bearing on the objective truth that he does love you.  This objectivity is grounded in God's revelation, and supremely in the cross and resurrection of Christ.  It's true, regardless of feelings or experience.

That's not the wrong response.  It's half the right response.

It is impossible to read the Song without picking up on the delight and desire which stand at its heart.  That Christ is delightful, and that his people desire him; that remarkably - astonishingly, to the human mind and heart illogically and almost unbelievably - Christ also delights in his people and desires them.  This delight and desire play out in different moods through the Song.  There is pleasant desire, full of anticipation, and there is satiated delight; but there is also painful desire, responding to the absence of the lover, there is delight which is also almost agony because it is delight in the distant lover.  We do well not to flatten this out, or strip it down to make it fit into a theological scheme.  The Christian who has no sense of Christ's love ought not to settle for a bare assertion of objectivity, anymore than the woman in the Song should settle for the fact that she is objectively loved.  Feeling matters.  Reality matters as well as truth.

It seems to me that older Christian writers got this (and I should say at this point what a joy it was to read Julian Hardyman's book Jesus Lover of My Soul when prepping for the Song, which has the same sort of emphasis to it).  They encourage us to pursue Christ, not to be satisfied with a head-knowledge of the truth but to chase after...  After what?  An experience?  Yes, I think so.  And I think that matters because these older authors (and Julian, and I'm sure others) see clearly that the objective truth by itself won't transform us to live joyfully for Christ.  How can I love Christ wholeheartedly, passionately, if I have no sense of his great love for me?  How can I act like someone who is forgiven if I don't have an experience of my conscience being cleansed?

Delight in Christ - the subjective, emotional, experiential sense of his goodness and beauty - is the engine which drives sanctification.  And that is more than just objectivity.

Cultural Christians and Christianised Culture

As the census rolls around again, the usual kerfuffle kicks off around the question asking people about their religion.  And no doubt in the aftermath, as the results are made public, there will be the usual hand-wringing about the decreasing proportion of people in the UK who identify themselves as Christian.  What we are seeing is the continued, and now quite rapid, evaporation of the remaining influence of Christendom; the residual notion of a 'Christian country' is more or less gone, and the default option in the census box-ticking exercise is no longer 'Church of England'.

Christian responses here vary.  For many believers, it is a jolly good thing that nominal Christianity is fast disappearing.  It helps to draw clear lines.  It means that people are no longer kidding themselves that they are Christians when they hold no Christian beliefs and show no signs of personal faith in Christ.  For many Christians, mere cultural Christianity has long been seen as a buffer against the real thing; people are inoculated with a weak form of Christian belief, reduced usually to some naff songs from the 70s and a belief that people ought to love one another in some vague way, via school assemblies, and this makes them less responsive to the real thing.  They think they are already in.  The loss of cultural Christianity clears away one barrier to evangelism, which is that people think they already know our message and are either already onboard (despite their lack of belief, practice, or other commitment) or have already sampled enough to know they don't want to take this ride.  In one sense, fewer people ticking the 'Christian' box(es) on the census just reflects reality, and it's always helpful for people to see reality.

On the other hand, many Christians will see the decline in the numbers of people identifying with Christianity as an almost entirely negative thing.  From this perspective, the decline in nominal Christianity goes along with the decline in respect for ethical norms derived from the Christian gospel.  The loss of a general, even if rather vague, sense of accountability to God is to be bemoaned.  Children are raised in a culture which actively promotes, or worse just assumes, a completely different worldview.  The ignorance of the Scriptures, unimaginable even a couple of generations ago, makes communicating the gospel intelligibly that much more difficult.  The loss of a Christianised culture makes the normalisation of such horrific practices as in utero infanticide inevitable.  It threatens the undermining of values which would be considered important even by non-Christians, who haven't yet read Dominion and so don't know that those values derive from Christianity.

These two responses are not, strictly speaking, incompatible.  However, I reckon people lean heavily one way or the other.  I have flip-flopped, but at the moment I'm coming down on the latter perspective.

In Bonhoeffer's terms, I think those who are glad to see the end of cultural Christianity are thinking in terms of ultimate things - that is to say, salvation and eternal life.  Will a vague nominal Christianity help anyone ultimately?  Nope.  Will church-going as a mere cultural phenomenon in and of itself save souls?  Nope.  A Christian ethic?  Nope.  In ultimate terms, cultural Christianity is useless and possibly worse than useless if it allows people to delude themselves.

But what about penultimate things?  Don't they matter at all?  What Bonhoeffer saw, which I think some of our contemporaries are missing, is that ultimate and penultimate are related, and the relation between them is not entirely one-way.  For those who are pleased at, or at least indifferent to, the end of cultural Christianity, the ethical challenges and cultural issues thrown up by that loss (penultimate problems) and only to be dealt with by evangelism and conversion (ultimate solutions) - you can't, after all, expect non-Christians to live as Christians.  But the traffic doesn't all flow that way.  Making the penultimate suited to the ultimate - trying as much as possible to make the ordinary stuff of life and society conform to God's Kingdom - is the way in which we prepare the way of the Lord.

So what then?  The culture war again?

I used to feel that this was unwise, and we were better off staying out of it.  More recently I've tended to think that we're in it whether we like it or not, and all we can do is try to navigate it well.  I think that many of those Christian leaders I see trying to stay out of the culture war have essentially privatised the faith, and made God's laws the rules for the dwindling Christian club rather than the absolutes which govern and direct a human life well lived.

Most of all, I think the answer is more church, and better church.  Church which carries with it a 'thick' Christian culture, not just an hour of light worship or intellectual stimulation on a Sunday.  (I wonder if there is another dividing line here: between those who see the great need as more action at the edges of the church, in evangelism and mission, and those who see the great need as renewal at the centre of the church, in liturgy and worship).  I think we as Christians need to realise more and more how much we are isolated in our culture; we need to feel less at home here.  For the sake of the culture, we need to repudiate the culture.  For the sake of the world, we need to be those who don't love the world or the things of the world.

Secularism and the Sabbath

I preached on the Fourth Commandment yesterday - you can get the video and audio online if you feel so inclined.  As I prepared the sermon, I was struck by how little I've heard about the Sabbath in recent years, and how truncated a view of Sabbath has been presented in what I have heard.  As far as I recall, most of the teaching I've heard on the Sabbath has gone along these lines: as Christians we're definitely not obliged to keep the Sabbath anymore; but the Commandment is still useful for us, because it enshrines the wisdom of taking time off and rest; so it's not in force as a Commandment per se, but it definitely still holds as a piece of advice (from the Creator, so properly wise advice which you ignore at your peril) about the limits of humanity and how to avoid burnout.

But the Sabbath can't be primarily about the need for human rest, for a couple of reasons.  One is that the model for Sabbath is God's rest.  It is God's rest into which the people are to enter by keeping Sabbath, the rest which we see at the end of the first creation account in Genesis.  God was not weary; God was not in danger of burn out.  Neither, in fact, did God entirely cease his activity (or the creation he had so recently called into being would have collapsed back into nothingness).  If the Sabbath is modelled on God's rest, it cannot be primarily addressing the problem of human exhaustion.  Then again, to make the Sabbath primarily about human rest ignores the positive content of the Sabbath - it was to be a sacred assembly, a day holy to the Lord.  It had positive content, not just negative.  Not just stopping work, but seeking worship.

So here's the thing.  I think we've secularised the Sabbath.  I don't think we should be observing a Jewish Sabbath; I do think the New Testament changes things.  (Listen to the sermon if you're curious to know how).  But what the NT doesn't do is remove the God-centred, worship-centred vision for human life which is presented to Israel.  To enter into God's rest is not merely to cease working; it is to be in God's presence, to worship, to delight in God.  I wonder if we react so much to the Roman emphasis on holy places, holy days etc. that we end up removing part of the biblical emphasis.  I wonder if we might be well advised to desecularise our Sabbath.

True truth

If evangelicals know anything about themselves, it is that they are the truth people.  Evangelicals have fought the good fight against the postmodern assault on the very concept of truth.  They have enlisted cheerfully in the struggle against relativism.  They have contended for the truth in battle after battle.

But I wonder if in the midst of all the battles, we've neglected to fight the war.

I've expressed concern before about the number of evangelicals who responded to the restrictions on public worship by saying that we could not expect HMG to understand the importance of worship.  We, of course, believe that worship is important, but we shouldn't try to make that case to secular authorities; those who don't share our worldview will not be open to persuasion.  Similar arguments are sometimes expressed around ethical issues - of course we as Christians hold that position, but there is no point trying to argue this publicly, and certainly not to attempt to legislate (even in matters of life and death).  It is not to be expected that non-Christians will behave like Christians.

In each case, you seem to end up saying: this is objectively true, but I wouldn't expect anyone to be able to see that, nor would I consider it worthwhile contending for it.  Of course we would contend for it within the church - if there were those in our churches who thought that worship was unimportant, or that abortion was fine, or whatever, we would certainly argue, and we would do so on the grounds of truth.  God's truth is true regardless of our opinions.  But that doesn't seem to hold in the world outside the church.

Stepping back, it seems to me that something has gone wrong with our concept of truth.

We believe in objective truth, but it seems like that objective truth is private, only true for believers.  I understand the logic, I think - given the interconnectedness of truth claims, we are unlikely to persuade people of second order things if they don't share our commitments to high level truths about reality.  Sure.  But when we don't think it's even worth advancing those truth claims, or publicly stating them, what is happening?  Has our 'objective' truth actually become objective truth only within the church, and not in the world at large?

Is the gap between 'we can't expect non-Christians to believe this' and 'I have my truth and you have yours' all that big?

It seems to me they're practically the same.  The upshot of both positions is that I hold my truth claims without any expectation that they will be shared.  I worry that they are psychologically the same.  How long can you hold a belief that this claim is both true and important, and yet not to be advanced universally, without slipping into relativism?  And I can't for the life of me see any ethical difference.  If we allow people to pursue false beliefs about issues of human goodness and flourishing without a protest, because we can't see why we should hold non-Christians to Christian standards, how does our stated belief in objective truth help those who suffer as a result?

If the truth is true, it is true everywhere and for everyone.  If the standards of righteousness and goodness revealed in Scripture are from God, they are universal.  If we won't make the claim, are we really the truth people anymore?

Austere worship

Preaching on the Second and Third Commandments yesterday - no to idols, no to taking the Lord's name in vain - I'm struck by the austerity of Israelite worship.  It must have been striking to the pagans as well.  No images of gods, no gorgeous statues.  Beauty, of course, and craftsmanship on display at the temple.  But no gorgeous shrines scattered throughout the land.  No imaginative myths, no constant development of the cultus.  It is a narrow way, the way of Israelite worship: a way defined by what God has revealed of himself and his will, not open to human interpretation or tweaking or addition.

In our culture of 'I like to think of God as...' there is a need to stress this again.  God has shown us himself.  We have his image - the one and only authorised image - in the Lord Jesus Christ.  We are baptised into his name, the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and our whole lives are to be lived as conscious bearers of that name.  Worship is not an imaginative exercise in that sense, but an exercise in following in the path the Lord has laid out for us.

I don't think this austerity means no beauty.  I am in favour of beautiful church buildings, beautiful liturgies, beautiful hymns.  In fact, I think those things are required, since God has revealed himself to us as beautiful!  But there is always going to be a necessary strain of iconoclasm to Christian worship: as we receive God's word, we are involved in demolishing whatever idols, whatever false conceptions of God, have gained a foothold in our minds and purifying our thoughts of him.  The same should be true in our worship: constantly reforming, to guard us against accretions and idolatries and blasphemies which will always be a threat and to some extent a presence.

It is a narrow way, but it is the way that leads to (because it first leads from) the true God.  If we want a god of our imagining, we can afford to be creative in how we think of him and how we worship him; if we want God, the true self-existent God, we follow his way and ruthlessly reject any paths to left and right.

The principle of sin

The Scriptures give us a number of ways in which sins can be distinguished and classified.  Numbers 15 gives us the distinction between unintentional sin and sinning with a high hand (translated here 'defiantly').  That same distinction crops up throughout the Pentateuch.  Perhaps 'unintentional' is not the most useful translation; it is more like sin which is wandered into, sin which is not deliberately premeditated.  To sin with a high hand, by contrast, is to sin with a knowing disregard for the will of God.  There is sin into which we are almost surprised - in the aftermath we think 'where did that come from?' - and there is sin which is planned, sin which despises the threat of God's judgement.  In Numbers 15, the former is to be dealt with by sacrifice; the latter results in excommunication and perpetual guilt.

Something similar to this distinction is perhaps at work in Psalm 19, where the Psalmist prays to be delivered from 'hidden faults' and kept from 'wilful sins'.  This seems to envisage sins of which the Psalmist is even unaware, which makes sense - sometimes when someone confronts you with your sin, it's the first you consciously knew of it.  (And of course, that doesn't make it any less sin).  Wilful or presumptuous sins, on the other hand, are committed knowing them for what they are, either in defiance of God or on the assumption that his forgiveness will be cheap and easy to obtain.

Psalm 32 gives another distinction - between sin kept secret and sin openly confessed.  The former is destructive and ultimately leads to death, but confession can bring forgiveness and healing.  We don't know when this Psalm of David was composed, but it is interesting to note that the categories introduced here cut across the others - unintentional sin could be hidden and therefore deadly; by contrast, high handed sin could be confessed and forgiven, as with David's terrible sin against Bathsheba.

Some of the Scriptural distinctions between sins are less easy to understand - for example, 1 John 5 introduces a distinction between sin which leads to death (which should not be [or perhaps need not be] prayed for) and sin which does not lead to death, for which a brother or sister can intercede for forgiveness.  Taking the whole of Scripture into account, it is tempting to map this on to the unconfessed/confessed paradigm from Psalm 32 - but that doesn't seem obviously correct to me from the scant context of 1 John.  I'm not sure I know for sure what this means.

Perhaps the most troubling New Testament distinction is between all the sins and blasphemies which can be forgiven, and the blasphemy against the Spirit which will never be forgiven (see Matthew 12 and parallels).  I think we do here have to see the distinction between sin of which one repents and sin in which one (wilfully) persists - with the added burden that this is sin against light, sin in the face of the Holy Ghost.

Outside Holy Scripture there have been various other attempts to distinguish between sins.  The classic division of sins into 'mortal' and 'venial' tries rather too hard to classify wickedness by acts rather than attitudes, and therefore seems to me to miss the target aimed at by the Biblical distinctions.  The well-known confession speaks of sinning 'through weakness, through negligence, through our own deliberate fault', which seems a more helpful classification.

Anyway, the point is: sins are not all the same.

That seems an important point to make in the current climate of evangelicalism, where the egregious sins of prominent leaders are being dragged into the light.  Sins are different.  There are sins into which all people by weakness stumble from time to time, and there are sins which call into question one's salvation.  There are sins into which even leaders can be expected sometimes to fall and yet not be beyond recovery, and there are sins which disqualify from ministry.  There are patterns of 'minor' or unintentional sin which speak to the ongoing need for sanctification, and there are patterns of deliberate sin which indicate gross hypocrisy and an unwillingness to repent and come to Christ for life.  There are sins, and there are sins.

We have to recognise that so that in the face of Christian leaders who turn out to be abusers we don't just shrug our shoulders and say 'hey ho, everyone sins'.  Not like that they don't.

But there is another point which I fear we're in danger of missing, perhaps because we're rightly trying very hard to make the distinctions evident.  There are sins and sins, but all sin is sin.

There is a principle to sin, a heart to it.  The heart of sin is rebellion against the Lord.  The heart of sin is turning away from the gracious Creator to serve other things.  The heart of sin is elevating self to the place rightly occupied by God.  When we see terrible sins - sins committed seemingly with a high hand and without repentance, sins which have hurt so many and brought disgrace to the cause of Christ - when we see those sins, we recoil.  Here is sin in its full ugliness.  Here is sin shown for something like what it is, in its true colours.  Sin is foul and vile.

But without making the mistake of flattening the distinction between sins, without implying that 'this is just like that', we do need to see that the principle which is operative in those great and terrible sins is also at work in the small and 'inoffensive' sins of our everyday.  No, these sins are not like those sins, not in their severity, nor in their consequences for victims, nor in the reactions which they ought to call forth from God's people.  But whilst there are sins and sins, all sin is sin.  The little sinful habits we indulge, the character defects we choose not to curb or rectify, the minor lapses and falls - they are not those sins, but they are of the same species.  This is what sin would like to make of us.  Those great sins are what these little sins would like to be.  They are not the same, but they are energised by the same principle.

Therefore, fight sin.  Therefore, pursue accountability and repentance.  Fear sin; fear it appropriately.  Have a horror of it.  Detest it.  Look what it would do to you if it could.  Get that sin into the light; it will wither and die there.  Better to be shamed now for your sin than to carry it to the Judgement Seat of Christ.

Whoever thinks he stands must be careful not to fall.

Lent 2021

The season of Lent begins today, marking the period leading up to Easter.  Lent is 40 days (plus Sundays, which aren't counted), reflecting the 40 days the Lord Jesus spent in the wilderness after his baptism.  The themes of the season are communicated powerfully in the words spoken to each worshipper at a traditional Ash Wednesday service:

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.

Lent is a time to particularly reflect on our mortality and frailty - we are dust, we are weak, our time is passing.  And Lent is a time to particularly reflect on our sinfulness in the light of our mortality - we will die and stand before Christ, therefore we should repent now.

This year, Lent feels strange.  For starters, at some level I feel like we never really got out of Lent 2020!  Of course we celebrated Easter as well as we were able in the circumstances, but the year since last spring has felt, to me at least, like one long reminder of the Ash Wednesday liturgy: you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  Look how frail we are.  See how limited we are, how vulnerable.  These are not bad things to be reminded of - one of the reasons we observe Lent is to remind ourselves of them - but boy, it's been a long year of reminder.

Are we really going to do Lent all over again?

My suggestion is that Lent 2021 is a good time to lean hard into the second theme of Lent: that we are sinners, that we need to repent, that we are clinging to Christ for forgiveness, that we are dependent on his Spirit to live in faithfulness.  I think there is a danger that in the midst of the pandemic, with its accompanying loss of freedoms and pleasures, we could recognise our frailty and seek God for help, but forget our sinfulness and neglect to seek God for mercy.  What I mean is that the big problem right now seems to be disease, and the big need seems to be deliverance from disease (and the painful precautionary measures taken to prevent the spread of disease).  But Lent could be a good reminder to us that the Big Problem - the problem that is really insurmountable for us as human beings - is sin and guilt.  There are no vaccine programmes or treatments for this one.  Only the Lord in his mercy can help us here.

Customarily, Christians have observed Lent by fasting and self-examination.  Fasting means temporarily giving up something which is good and lawful, in order to pursue that which is better.  Perhaps you want to fast this year - perhaps in particular it would be good to remind ourselves that we can voluntarily give up good things because Christ is our Great Good Thing.  But perhaps this has felt like a year long fast and giving up something else now feels like too much.  I can understand that.  So maybe this is a time for self-examination.  To ask ourselves - and perhaps each other - some hard questions about what we really value, what we're really trusting, where our hope is.  At CCC, our preaching series will take us through the Ten Commandments as a way of helping with that.

All that being said, let's not forget Christian liberty.  None of us is under any obligation to do anything for Lent, except the ongoing and joyful obligations to trust the Lord and love one another.  Maybe the way you need to mark Lent 2021 is by simply allowing yourself to rest in the grace of the Lord Jesus after a hard year.  And that, too, will be a good preparation for celebrating the resurrection at Easter.

Live Not by Lies

The latest book from Rod Dreher is a sequel of sorts to The Benedict Option, and continues the author's attempt to navigate a way forward for orthodox (small o, although Dreher is big O) Christians in contemporary Western culture.  I found The Benedict Option stimulating and helpful; I think Live Not by Lies is a significantly better book, which I'd recommend to anyone - and perhaps especially to those who weren't persuaded by the earlier volume.  This might clinch it for you, or at least clear up some of those areas where you had questions.

The book falls into two parts, with the first part diagnosing the problem and the second proposing particular ways to respond.  The whole is really a reflection on the experience of Christians and other dissidents under Communism, in the USSR and its satellite states.  Dreher points out that various survivors of that context have been sounding the alarm at the direction of Western culture in the last few years, pointing out similarities to the rise of Communism in their youth.  Of course, we know that totalitarianism could never take off here - could it?  Dreher knows that we know that; but he also knows that the people of Eastern Europe knew that before the Communists arrived.  Everyone thinks it couldn't happen here.  Until it does.

Dreher describes the current situation in the West as pre-totalitarian.  He means that the situation is ripe for the rise of totalitarianism, but we aren't there yet.  There is some comparison with Tsarist Russia; there is some interaction with Hannah Arendt.  I found the symptoms of pre-totalitarianism listed by Dreher to be terrifyingly convincing: atomisation and loneliness, the loss of faith in institutions, the desire to transgress, the mania for ideology...  Yep, that's us alright.  The soil is prepared for totalitarian takeover, because the things which cultivate normal, healthy human society - family, community, hierarchy, limits - are so badly eroded.  It's worth noting that Dreher does a good job here, partly through the use of pre-revolutionary Russia, of pointing out that it is often the conservatives in society who have failed to make the case for these things; the liberals have not been forced to argue against the institutions of society, because conservatives have so obviously used those institutions to their own advantage, preventing them from working as they should.

But really, totalitarianism?  Could that happen here?  Well, Dreher isn't expecting state totalitarianism of the USSR type - not in the West, although of course that still exists in China and other places.  Rather, what he fears is 'soft totalitarianism'; what you might call social or cultural totalitarianism.  Where certain opinions cannot be spoken; where the pressure to conform is so great.  I don't find this hard to believe.  When I worked for the University, explicit support of a political position by staff would have been frowned upon; but chatting to people still there it sounds like the pressure to wear the rainbow lanyard and signal approval of a particular position on sexuality and gender has now ramped up.  It's just social and cultural pressure; you won't be fired for not going along.  But does anyone think that makes the pressure any less real?  Chatting in the pub, I quietly express my view that perhaps biological sex might be important; though I know a number of people around the table agree, there are nervous glances and somebody says 'you can't say that'.  You can't, you see, even though legally you can.

If you still think that 'woke' just means concerned for justice, and that political correctness is just politeness, I'd encourage you to read this book.  I think you're being naive, and I think in the long run that naivety is likely to come with a cost.

Having said that, I think the chapter on surveillance capitalism is a little paranoid.  So maybe I'm naive.  And I guess just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

The second half of the book is about how to respond.  The chapters are shot through with extraordinary stories from the Eastern Bloc - stories which illustrate the resistance which Christians were able to offer to Soviet-style totalitarianism.  Many of these are stories of suffering, but Dreher's interviewees repeatedly stress that the appalling suffering was worth it, was even blessed.  Each chapter ends with an application to our own setting, or rather to the encroaching soft totalitarianism which may lie in the future.  An absolute commitment to truth, the value of the family as the primary 'resistance cell' where values can be passed on, the need to have something for which one is prepared to die...  These are things we need to think through.  As Dreher highlights, it was a conscious decision on the part of these dissidents to take a stand; they had already decided before the trial came what they would do.  We must, of course, hope for grace when the moment comes, but we should not just assume that we will be able to stand then if we are not getting ready to stand now.

For those who feared that The Benedict Option was advocating a sort of Christian isolationism, I hope this book will set you straight.  I can see how it could be taken in that direction, but that's not where Dreher is going with it.  His stories of Christian dissidents who remained so open to wider society, even as that society turned against them, or who worked with secularists to stand against the Communist regime, count against that reading.  I think that he is just taking seriously that if you want to engage the culture, in a way which has the potential to be transformative, you need to be doing so from a place that is deeply grounded, from within a community that is committed to truth, from within a deep understanding and practice of your own religion.  My guess is that it is only with those things that Christians can have the courage to be open and to engage.

I wonder somewhat hesitantly about the intersection between Dreher's concerns and the movements for liturgical renewal in the church.  I think there is overlap in strategy at least - renew the centre for the sake of the church's witness to the world.  I think that is worth thinking through further.

The title for this book comes from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  We may not be ready to take a courageous stand for truth, not yet; but at the least we can avoid living as if the lies were true.  "Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies!"  I think Dreher is a helpful guide as we wake up to this responsibility in our own context.

Books about corporate worship

These are the books I've found most helpful on the subject of corporate worship - with the caveat that this is not at all meant to be a list of the best books on the subject, just the ones I've meandered through in my idiosyncratic reading and found helpful.

Peter Leithart's Theopolitan Liturgy is the most recent addition to the list - the only book from my Christmas haul that I've finished reading so far.  It's helpfully slender, and makes a strong biblical case for the importance of corporate, liturgical worship.  Creation and culture exist for worship; in the liturgy, far from using created things and cultural forms in a strange way, we restore them to what they always existed to do.  Reality is liturgical all the way down (you could also consult James Smith on this one), and human life is inevitably shaped by sinful, idolatrous liturgies or by Christian worship.

Alexander Schmemann's book For the Life of the World comes from a very different theological and ecclesiastical context than my own - he was an Orthodox Priest - and consequently there are some things in this book which I find off putting.  But the flipside is that it opens up a very different perspective.  Schmemann more than anyone has taught me to value the sacraments.  I could have learnt that from Calvin, if I'd been paying attention, but perhaps it took someone speaking from slightly further away to get through to me.  The liturgy matters at least in part because sacraments matter.

On the practical side, Hughes Oliphant Old's Leading in Prayer has been invaluable for shaping prayer as a substantial part of corporate worship.  The idea of a service of prayer - of corporate worship as substantially a conversation between the congregation and the Lord - is largely absent in contemporary evangelicalism, as far as I can tell, which adds to the general impression on approaching this book that it belongs to an earlier era.  (The cover design and language trend in the same direction, to be honest).  This book springs from years of pastoral experience, and gives a large number of written prayers which the author has used in worship - not with the idea that they would necessarily be used as printed, but as worked examples.  The whole assumes a more formal structure to worship than I could get away with regularly in my context, but it's nevertheless helpful for thinking about the shape of worship and the nature of public, led prayer.

Karl Barth's Homiletics can stand here for more extensive engagement with Barth's theology of preaching - probably I'd have to include large chunks of Church Dogmatics I/1 and I/2 to get the full effect, as well as some of the essays from The Word of God and Theology.  If Oliphant Old helps with the human side of the dialogue that is corporate worship, Barth has really helped me to see preaching as the other side.  Of course, in preaching a human being stands up and speaks, but what Barth sees so clearly is that the church counts on the fact that the Lord himself is speaking as his word is preached.  Preaching is encounter.  I dare say I could have learnt this from many places, but I actually learnt it from Barth.

I'm sure there are others that I've missed here, but there's a few that I've found useful.

Cultivating the inner life

Last week, Andy Robinson wrote this excellent post, which I encourage you to read in full.  Drawing on Lloyd-Jones and his wartime experience, Andy points out that Christians have resources to endure difficult situations with joy - resources which are not available to others.  However, we often find, and perhaps have found in the last year, that we find it difficult to draw on those resources; our reactions to Covid and lockdown have perhaps not been as different from those of our unbelieving neighbours as we would like.  Andy speculates:

I have a small suspicion that the last few months have flagged up our (my?) neglect of the inner life for the Christian in favour of activism, a reliance on events and so forth.

I wonder.  For me, I think it hasn't been activism that has led to the neglect of the inner life (a charge which I will make no attempt to evade), but an over-reaction to a way of thinking about the life of faith which is deeply individualistic, perhaps even introspective.  The evangelicalism of my student years laid great emphasis on the quiet time, individual prayer, one-man-and-his-Bible religion.  Over the years I've come to think that actually public worship, the sacraments, and the community of the church are the main helps in the spiritual life, and that personal piety ought to derive from the corporate life of worship.  That is to say, the church comes first, and the individual second; preaching first, private reading second; the Eucharist first, private spiritual nourishment second; the Lord's Prayer in the sanctuary first, private prayer second.

Look, I'm not about to recant my journey over the last couple of decades.  I'm confident that the Scriptures teach and display this order to the spiritual life.  I think it's right.

But, as is often the case, I've probably swung the pendulum too far the other way.  Just because something is second, does that make it unimportant?  Surely not!  The relative deprivation that we've endured when it comes to public worship and church community over the last year has really highlighted what should have been obvious all along: personal prayer, personal Scripture reading, personal spiritual disciplines matter.  They matter hugely.  We are called to live out of the resources offered to us in Christ - which means first and foremost, by the gift of the Holy Spirit.  And that requires the word, it requires prayer.

I am glad that quite a few years ago now I took the decision that I was going to say Morning Prayer every day.  I do that now pretty much automatically, so much a part of my routine that I can't really face the day without it.  But that discipline of reading and prayer is so valuable.  I don't make as much of it as I could and should, but it is there.  I am grateful that the Lord got me into that habit before this time struck.  If you're not in the habit of regular reading and prayer, can I commend it to you?  For me, the liturgical form of Morning Prayer helps me to get started before the coffee has kicked in and I can think independently about what I should be praying!

A word about the attitude with which we ought to approach our reading and prayer.  A great hindrance to this cultivation of the inner life, it seems to me, is that we are taught by the culture of the world that rest means passivity (which is to say, for the most part, television), and we are often taught by the culture of the church that Scripture reading in particular means activity (which is to say, for the most part, a comprehension exercise).  One of the things I love about the Morning Prayer service is that there is simply too much Scripture for it to turn into a Bible study.  It is, in fact, a model of receptivity rather than passivity or activity.  Just to receive the words, just to hear the Lord; that is enough.  There will be times for grappling with meanings and chasing down applications; but first thing in the morning is probably not that time.  Cultivating the inner life, for me at least, has meant primarily cultivating the open ear.

Anyone else got thoughts on how we balance the corporate and individual when it comes to the spiritual life?  Tips for devotional reading or prayer that might help us?

Don't grumble

 This morning the Lord has been gently rebuking me from 1 Corinthians 10:10:

And don't grumble as some of them did, and were killed by the destroyer.

The context is the apostle Paul's reflection on the history of Israel as a type of Christian experience.  The Israelites were (typologically) baptised at the Red Sea; they ate (typologically) spiritual food in the manna and drank (typologically) spiritual drink from the rock.  They were fully initiated, and fully provided for - "nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them,  since they were struck down in the wilderness."

In the context of Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians, the primary application is to avoid idolatry and immorality.  And yet in the midst of the warnings against idol worship and moral laxity is this verse about grumbling.  Don't grumble; the grumblers were destroyed.

But how can I avoid grumbling in circumstances like these?

Well, "God is faithful".  He will not allow more temptation than you can bear.  He will provide a way out (v 13) - not, to be sure, from the circumstances, but from the temptation to sin which comes with the circumstances.  The Israelites were in the wilderness, and no doubt felt they had plenty to complain about.  But their grumbling was their destruction.  Because in the midst of the wilderness, God was their faithful provider, if only they had opened their eyes to see it.  Sure, they wandered in a desert; but in that desert, the Rock followed them and provided them with drink - and that Rock was Christ.  An intriguing identification, which there is no need to explore here.  The point is that though I wander through a seemingly interminable lockdown, the Rock follows me; there is living water constantly on tap.

Stop grumbling, Daniel.  The Lord is at hand.

Heresy

It is interesting to see how the Covid situation has resurrected the concept of heresy in a secular guise.  I see increasingly strong reactions against anyone who suggests a different interpretation of the information from that offered through official channels.  Indeed, even to question whether HMG's current course of action is wise and humane is enough to get you told that you have blood on your hands - irrespective of whether you have been carefully keeping to the regulations personally!  Why is this?  Because ideas have consequences.  In this case, it is felt that certain ideas will lead to people taking actions which will result in more people losing their lives.

I am not going to dive into the debates around lockdown (not again, anyway).  Rather I wanted to flag that this is a useful illustration of the theological notion of heresy.  Heresy is not just wrong opinion, but the advancement of ideas which are likely to have devastating consequences for individuals and for the church.  Primarily, heresy encourages people to trust wrongly: to put their trust in things that cannot bear that trust, or not to trust those things which they ought to trust.  The Arian heresy encourages people to trust a creature rather than the Creator for salvation.  The Pelagian heresy encourages people to put confidence in their own abilities rather than in God's grace.  And there are consequences.  Only God is able to bear our confidence; only he is trustworthy.  To put the weight of our need on anything else is deadly, eternally deadly, because it prevents us from seeking salvation in the one place where it is available - in God through Christ.

So just as misinformation about Covid could lead to people acting in a way that endangers themselves and others, so misinformation about God could lead to people trusting or failing to trust in a way that imperils themselves and others eternally.

I think the Covid situation does also highlight one of the dangers of the concept of the heresy.  Some of the anti-sceptical folks have reached the point where there are things which are doubtless true, but which may not be said for fear of consequences.  For example, I read an article over the weekend which castigated the lockdown sceptics for talking about the adverse effects of lockdown on mental health.  There was no suggestion that lockdown is not bad for mental health - I don't think that would be plausible - but that whether it is bad or not, one ought not to say so, because of the potential consequences.

In theological circles, sometimes it becomes impossible to ask valid questions, or to explore genuine issues, because they are very quickly linked to heresy.  The heresy flag is waved early in order to halt discussion.  That is not helpful.  There has to be space, even within the most tightly confessional circles, for investigation of theological issues; there has to always be the possibility that even the definition of heresy has to change under the pressure of renewed reading of Scripture.

Crisis?

The word 'crisis' has been thrown around a lot in the last year, including by yours truly.  But what is a crisis?  A crisis is really a moment of decision, a moment when circumstances and pressures and potential outcomes load this decision with more than ordinary significance.  The crisis is not really the moment to be doing any deep thinking; rather it is the moment that your foundations are exposed and your past thinking (or lack thereof) is brought into the light.  Often the crisis is the moment when the world is shown - and perhaps you are shown - that you don't believe or value the things you seemed to believe or value.  The crisis is the moment when the rubber hits the road.  The crisis is also the point at which a direction is determined, or perhaps the point at which it might be possible to change direction.  The crisis is the moment you look back to when asking the question 'how did we get here?'

2020 surely did present us with a crisis on lots of levels.  Societally, for example, it raised the question of what (and who!) we really value.  But I, and others, have been mainly thinking about the crisis in the church.  The situation in which the Government outlawed corporate worship seemed to ask deep questions of us: how much do we value worship, preaching, the sacraments?  To what extent ought we to go along with the presuppositions of a government and society which are non- and to an extent anti-Christian?  How should we respond?

It sure seemed like a crisis.

And yet in recent weeks I've been wondering if it was.  The thing is, there is definitely part of me that really wants a crisis.  A crisis is awful, in terms of the pressure, and this particular crisis had the potential to put me and others in a really awkward place.  But on the other hand, the crisis is decisive.  Having discerned what seems to be the right decision, you count the cost and you take it.  The crisis, you hope, sets you on the right road.  It is the crossroads at which, if you choose wisely, you will determine your arrival at the right destination.  Then again, there is something individually satisfying about responding to a crisis.  Perhaps it's just me, but there is an attraction to the last stand, the forlorn hope, the death-or-glory charge.

And there are other reasons to be on the lookout for the crisis.  I've done a fair bit of work on Bonhoeffer and the German church of the 1930s, and one of the things you notice is that because many people refused to contemplate the possibility that this might be the crisis, the time when it was necessary to take a stand, the church as a whole ended up sleepwalking into complicity with, and sometimes active support for, Nazism.  It ought to be an established rule of discourse that nothing else is quite like 1930s Germany, but still.  You don't want to miss the moment.  Many of those moments didn't look so serious to lots of people as they did to someone like Bonhoeffer, and the church as a whole was unwilling to elevate them to the level of crisis.  And yet in retrospect all of those small and seemingly insignificant decisions paved the way for a betrayal of the church's being and mission.

For those of you who are impatient with those of us who tend to see a crisis everywhere: please consider that we just really, really don't want to miss the crucial stand that we are called to make.  No doubt we sometimes over-analyse the issue and make it more significant than it really is.  If we're annoying you, just think of us as canaries in the mine; maybe we're hypersensitive, but it might be helpful to have someone hypersensitive down here with you.

But was it - and to the extent that it continues, is it - a crisis?  Re-reading Impossible People by Os Guinness I've been reminded of his description of our cultural issues: it's less like the boy with his finger in the dyke, and more like a mudslide.  That is to say, everything is on the move.  A heroic stand won't work here.  There are myriad ways in which we could betray the Lord every day, myriad little crises.  Maybe everything is a crisis.  The point is: I wonder whether I've been looking for one big decision, when it actually comes down to lots of little decisions.  Not one bold act of defiance of the world, but the resolution to keep on believing unpopular things, to keep on living for things that the majority think are myths, to keep on pursuing a vision of life which is shaped by invisible realities.

2020 in review

This is just my personal reflection on some of the themes that have characterised 2020 for me.  It's obviously been a big year.  A lot has changed.  I think mostly the extreme situation has put a spotlight on things that were already there, and has probably accelerated some cultural trends inside and outside the church.  I imagine different people will have picked up on different things; it has certainly been true that whilst we have all externally gone through the same situation this year, our actual experience of that situation has been very different indeed.

So here are the themes that I'm taking away to think about.

Safetyism

I'm guessing all of us as individuals tend to structure our ethical views around one or two dominant values.  The same is no doubt true of communities and societies.  The values which lie at the heart of our ethics flow out of, and probably also inform, the stories that we tell about the world, the examples that we admire, and the aspirations that we hold.  What 2020 has revealed - and I think it was already true - is that safety is the major value of our culture.  Safety is multi-dimensional and complex in the way that it gets applied.  It can mean 'safety in my identity', which is to say that I must be able to autonomously construct my sense of who I am without reference to, or critique or question from, anyone else.  By boiling it down to the most basic meaning - physical safety - I think 2020 has just shown how utterly dominant safety is in our thinking.  'Stay safe' has become the most common sign-off.  A life without risk seems to be the ideal.  I wonder how and when this particular vision of human flourishing gripped us?  Suffice to say, I find it stifling and grim.

The coercive power of the state

For me, 2020 represented my first real experience of the coercive power of the state.  I've never really wanted to do anything illegal in the past.  This year the state has intruded itself massively into family and community life, making both nigh on impossible.  The state has closed churches.  The state has criminalised normal social interactions.  It's all been quite a shock.  When I've attempted to raise concerns about this, I've often been shot down: the motives behind all this are good, it's about saving lives, etc.  Aside from the fact that some of this line of argument reflects the safetyism noted above, I do find it all a bit naive.  The point is that if the state can do this now, it can do it whenever.  There will always be an emergency to justify this.  And the more safety becomes our main value, the more justifiable it will seem.  And the minority who object will be painted as dangerous, and silenced.  Even if you think this lockdown has been justified - and I think some measures have been, but not all by a long shot - you ought to be concerned for liberty.  I really do call it naivety if you're not.

Church government questions

I've always been an independent in church government matters.  That is to say, I think Scripture lays down a normative scheme for the running of a church, by elders within a local church who are approved by and answerable to that local congregation.  In 2020, a number of things have made me rethink this.  The Timmis affair seems to demonstrate how easily a dominant personality can hold sway over an eldership and a congregation.  The lack of formal structures facilitated this dominance in this case.  If independency is broadly right - and I still think it is - how are we to mitigate the risk here?  I think stronger, and formal, links between congregations are going to be crucial.  I think we probably need to build up proper local associations.  Pastors from different churches should feel like colleagues.  Coupled to this concern, the pandemic has raised questions of who is authorised to represent the churches at a regional or national level.  I've regularly felt more in line with Presbyterians and even Roman Catholics than those who have been speaking for Independent churches.  It is probably the nature of our very loose groupings - held together only by a wafer thin confession of basic evangelical truths - that we would struggle to put forward anyone who could speak for the whole slate.  What's to be done?  Not sure on this one at this stage!

Being physical

The experience of trying to do church on Zoom has been miserable.  I hate it.  I know most people hate Zoom, but it's more than just the extremely negative experience.  It's that it doesn't work.  Worship and community are physical things.  The sacraments prove that.  And the sacraments are not incidental to Christian worship but central and vital.  (Incidentally, I wrote a thing early in the pandemic arguing for the possibility of online communion.  I think that piece was theologically correct and would stand by it, and yet we only attempted it once.  Why?  Because as I said then, this could never be normative; only, in a sense, parasitical on our real physical gatherings.  And so I judged it to be unwise to get used to doing it this way).  I've been thinking that for evangelicals we've been so used to thinking of the faith as something that happens mostly in the mind - at the level of ideas and worldviews and doctrines - or perhaps in the heart - at the level of desires and affections - that we have forgotten that it is also something that involves the body.  To sit, to stand, to sing, to deliver the amen, to light candles, to lift hands, to eat and drink, to hug...  All this is not incidental but integral to worship, because the body is integral to human being.  I also wonder how much we depend on a model of discipleship that is 100% top down - i.e., from the head/thinking - when bodily actions and physical habits are just as capable of adjusting our thinking as vice versa.  To put it another way: having a correct eucharistic doctrine is important for shaping your faith, but taking the eucharist is much more important.

Against the tide

I've never personally felt more out of step with the generality of society than I have in 2020.  No doubt some of that is just down to me being an awkward so-and-so, and probably in a good deal of it I'm wrong.  That's okay.  I've tried not to let my personal dismay at everything overflow too much into my ministry, but it has made me think: shouldn't I feel like this more often?  The crisis of the year has made me examine things like my beliefs about death, and the potential for idolatry in my life, in a way that I don't normally have to do.  When I thought about it, I found I didn't agree with the world around me (or much of the church); but how often do I think about it?  I suspect I go with the flow much more than I should.

Perspectives

When the dust settles on this crisis, we will all have had really different experiences.  One of the things I keep having to remind myself is that my experience of this year - having known nobody first-hand who has been seriously ill with Covid, let alone died, and very few people second-hand - is very different from those who are grieving losses.  My view is inevitably different from that of a doctor slogging away in terrible conditions.  How we deal with those differences is going to be important.  The culture in general tends to prioritise experience over objectivity; but I know that my reaction to that can be to prioritise the abstract over the personal.  Neither is helpful.  Integration will have to happen, and hopefully some of that will occur as we swap stories in the pub or cafe over the summer.

Perseverance

At various points in the year I've had useful chats with people who have pointed out that quite often the goal of the Christian life according to the NT is just to keep going.  Endure.  Persevere to the end.  That's it.  It's not a grand project, which is good because all our grand projects rather fell apart this year.  If we can keep going, keep trusting, keep our eyes up on the Lord Jesus: that's enough.  That's everything!  The whole ball game, as I believe they say.  And most of us are still on the race track, still headed to the finish line.  And that will do.  Thank you, Jesus.