Church and World

Off the back of my reflections on the Pope's recent encyclical (part 1 and part 2), I've been thinking a bit about the relationship between the church and the world, and how that relationship might be construed theologically.  I noted in those reflections that the stance of the encylical is very much openness to the world, and a recognition that the church is itself a historical factor and one of the drivers of history.  In my view, this stance sometimes trips over into the church becoming only a historical factor, stripped of its eschatological qualities, and to a certain extent losing its distinctness from the world - for example, when the concept of 'catholicity', which the creed applies to the church as the church, seems to be extended to embrace all of humanity without distinction.  To caricature, the Roman approach to the church-world relationship appears to be to situate the church very firmly within the world, as part of the world, and to locate it as a historical phenomenon; the institution founded by Christ, visibly persisting through history via its structures and organisations, influencing history in such a way that Christ's kingdom is increasingly spread across and throughout the world.

Sean MacEntee, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By contrast, and again with something of a caricature for the sake of making that contrast, the view amongst many evangelicals is that the earthly, historical form of the church is largely irrelevant, or at least to be downplayed (hence the indifference often seen to questions of church government, liturgy, etc. - or at least, theological indifference; these are often viewed as merely pragmatic questions).  The impact of the church in world history is also downplayed (to an extent), perhaps seen as totally mixed in its outcomes and anyway as irrelevant to the real being and mission of the church.  I think that is because there is still in the background of much evangelical thinking a model in which the gospel really only glances off the edge of human history, scooping off a few believers for better things but basically leaving the world untouched.

You can see the difference in outcome between these two very clearly.  The Pope sees the church building the kingdom of God, and transforming history from the inside; he therefore addresses - not only the church but also - the world as a whole, expecting it to listen and to change.  For many evangelical leaders, the world is not addressed at all, except insofar as it is called to stop being the world and become the church, and societal transformation is not expected.  I have, in fact, heard senior evangelicals express a preference for a secular state over a 'nominally' Christian one, and have often heard that we must not seek to 'legislate Christian morality'.

I can't help feeling that both approaches are wrong, and for a corrective I turn, naturally, to the Church Dogmatics, and especially IV/3, from p 681.  I won't make many detailed references to the section, and I haven't always followed the line of thought there, but its very much in the background of the following.

First of all, the church certainly is a historical factor, and its history and role in the world matters; but this is not the heart of what the church is.  The church can't be defined by anything visible in its history, because the church lives from its connection to Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit.  This is what I mean when I talk about the 'eschatological qualities' of the church.  The church is already the new creation, even in the midst of the old, but not as if some historical process had been initiated by Christ which would gradually transmute the old world into the new.  No, the church has its reality as new creation directly from Christ by the Spirit, because new creation always comes straight from heaven.  The church is a historical factor, but the new creation is not; it is always a breaking in to history from above.  However, that breaking in is not ahistorical, but is the revelation of the true meaning of history in Jesus Christ.  In Christ, the situtation of humanity as a whole is radically changed - the gospel doesn not strike the old creation a glancing blow, but puts sinful humanity to death at the cross - but that is only known in the sphere of the church.

The church then exists in the world but does not have its being from any factors in the world, not even its own insitutions, history, or culture.

The church also exists for the world.  It is sent into the world as the fellowship of those who really know the world - as the world cannot really know itself.  The church knows the world, not only in the depths of its rebellion (the world must always deny this knowledge), but also as the world for which Christ died, the world which God so loved that he gave his one and only Son.  The church is for the world because in a sense the church is the world knowing itself.

The church is for the world in that it stands in solidarity with the world.  This does not mean conformity to the world - that would be to compromise the church's spiritual foundation - but a real being with the world in all the pains and struggles and strivings for better things.  (Barth suggests, incidentally, that being overly concerned with maintaining the purity of the church and thus separating from the world, refusing this solidarity, is fundamentally a conformity to the world - for when does the world not want to show itself to be righteous by comparison with 'these sinners'?)

And the church is for the world because, knowing the situation of the world in its depths but also the hope given to the world in the resurrection of Christ, the church goes to the world with good news, and dares to hope for the world even when the world has despaired of itself.

The church which knows itself to be distinct from the world, because it knows itself to belong to Christ and to live by his Spirit, is the church which will also commit itself to the world.

One interesting way in which I think this perspective might play out is that it could make the concerns raised in the Pope's encyclical actionable, in a way that I'm not sure they are otherwise.  The Pope addresses the world as if the world was the church, and expects change which he is never going to see; the world is not listening.  The evangelical pastor doesn't bother with the world, and therefore doesn't address even the church on topics which seem worldly.  What if instead we saw the church as genuinely the provisional representation of the new humanity in Christ, and therefore thought seriously about what it means to be human - for example, how human beings might respond to the challenge of AI - and then committed to living as a church community in a way that reflected that vision for humanity?  We could hope for societal change in a wider sense, but we could express our hope by being the humanity we would like to see, because we believe it is humanity as it is in Christ.

On AI in particular, I think there is too much money to be made for the world to listen to the Pope.  But the church might decide - I'll put my cards on the table and say that I think it should decide - that until a genuinely human-centred way of using AI has been developed the church will be an oasis, a place where AI is excluded as far as possible, despite whatever practical inconveniences this causes.  And in this way, we might bear witness to the reality of human life.

Magnifica Humanitas (2)

 See part 1 for thoughts on methodology and stance.

The content of Magnifica Humanitas has been reported in terms of a critique of AI; actually I think it is rather broader, and therefore actually more helpful, than that.  The encyclical is concerned with the spread of "technological paradigm" for understanding human life, "the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions." (92) The point - and here I am reminded of Jacques Ellul - is that technology "is not simply a tool", but shapes our way of thinking about reality. (92) Can human beings be regarded as ends rather than merely means in a world which is radically shaped by the technological paradigm?  "When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion." (112) That, I think, is really the problem which the encyclical addresses (and it is worth noting that this is not a specifically Christian question; framing it in terms of means and ends, as the encylical does, sounds rather Kantian).  Insofar as AI tends to supercharge the technological paradigm, it has to be particularly considered as a potentially problematic development.

On AI in particular, the encyclical lays out some helpful groundwork.  Nobody, not even the human developers, really have an exhaustive knowledge of how AI works. (98) It is important to stress that AI is not intelligence in the way that this word can be applied to human beings - rather, AI systems "merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence". (99)  This strikes me as a particularly important point, because the way that popular AI interfaces work is precisely to mask themselves as human or human-like - that is why you can have 'chat' with ChatGPT. We ought to resist this.  We should also acknowledge that AI tends to concentrate power in the hands of a few, especially as it turns out those who already have power, and this requires action to regulate and direct.

Another key insight of the encyclical relates to limitations.  In a society overcome by the technological paradigm, human limitation is bad and is something to be transcended wherever possible.  (The encyclical links at this point to the transhumanist and posthumanist agendas, which are rightly identified as anti-human - see 115-117).  There is some slightly confused stuff, in my humble opinion, about the relationship between limitation and suffering here - I think based on the lack of a clear distinction between humanity as created, as fallen, and as redeemed - but the basic point that limitation and even suffering open us to relationship with God and other human beings is well made. (122) For the Pope, there is a way to transcend nature, and that way is called grace. (127-128) I personally think this is the wrong way to think about both nature and grace, despite its long pedigree in the church, and I think again that a clear discussion of fallenness would have offered a better way to think about it.  But I take the point that the calling of God's kingdom on our lives is to be more human, not less.

Chapter Four of Magnifica Humanitas sets out to apply this train of thought in particular ways, under the heading of "Safeguarding Humanity".  It touches on the need to combat disinfomation (which "did not begin with AI, yet today it finds a powerful amplifier in AI" - 132), the need to safeguard the value and dignity of work (which is much more than just the problem of jobs lost to AI; it is also about ensuring that work is a human and humanising activity and not just slotting human beings in as part of the machine - 149), and the need to protect freedom when AI and other technologies potentially (and sometimes already actually) lead to greater social control.  "At the root of these problems lies a technocratic and post-human mentality that tends to regard the human person as an object to be manipulated or a resource to be optimized." (172)

Finally, Chapter Five considers conflict, and the danger of human decision making being removed from decisions about conflict - as well as the way in which technology and the technological paradigm encourages conflict.  This is a helpful warning.

All in all, the encyclical is not completely negative about AI or technology, not by a long shot.  I saw one article claim that Magnifica Humanitas made AI 'another Babel'; it doesn't.  Rather, the argument is that human beings are able to build either Babel or Jerusalem, and what we do with AI and other technologies will in part decide which it is that we are working on.  What we have here is a thorough-going work of Christian humanism, and the appeal is simply to ensure that our technology is serving human beings and not vice versa.  It is a pushback against the neo-Darwinian right, with its demands for ever growing efficiency and transcendence of human limits.  In so far as it sounds those warnings, this is a very positive contribution.

Magnifica Humanitas (1)

The Pope has recently issued an encylical, Magnifica Humanitas, which has been widely reported as dealing with issues of artificial intelligence - though I think it is actually has a somewhat broader theme, around technology and the technical society.  I don't often read papal encyclicals, although I have dabbled in one or two, but this is a topic I'm interested in and the Pope's intervention seems to have got some traction, so I thought I'd dive in and offer some reactions.  This post is mostly about method and stance; a second post will get into the details of the content a little more.  References in brackets are to the paragraph numbers in the encyclical.

Naturally, I'm approaching this from a Protestant and evangelical perspective, and so it is likely that many of my reflections on theological method will boil down to 'well, this is Roman Catholicism'.  This is most apparent to me in the theological method - in the first two sections of the encyclical, which look at the historical development of the Social Doctrine of the Church and the fundamental principles of that Doctrine, there is precious little Biblical content.  Indeed, although we are told that it is "only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear" (1 - citing the 2nd Vatican Council; see also 49, where there is a little more flesh put on these bare bones) it seems to me that this statement does not have much operative force in the rest of the document.  It becomes clear that the 'mystery of humanity' does not mean something about humanity which is only true in Christ - as, for example, that fallen humanity is redeemed - but something that is common to human nature which is only seen fully in Christ.  It is about "the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ" (15) and not about the grandeur bestowed upon us by and in Christ.  I think this is methodologically important, because it undergirds the regular appeal to the "common good" throughout the encyclical.  There is nothing inherently wrong in an appeal to a shared human nature - a human nature which is revealed in Christ - but it does seem to me quite a lot of weight is put on the shared nature and very little on Christ.  I wonder if there is actually anything in the positive teaching of the document for which the incarnation is a crucial foundation.

To my mind, this lack of Biblical and Christological reference paints a particular picture, of a church locked in conversation with itself.  One misses altogether the sense of a people addressed from above.  (In fact, the idea of the gospel coming "from above" - admittedly in this context mainly with a human imposition of the truth in view - is expressly repudiated in favour of the truth which "grows over time within the concrete interweaving of lives, communities and cultures." [25])  We are told that "this faith-based interpretation of history has never been interrupted" (45) - but I can't help wondering whether it wouldn't have been better if it had been interrupted, by the Word of God!  The Church pictured in the encyclical is open to dialogue with the world around it, but gives no indication of being open to the Word.  One consequence of this is that the overall impression given, when it comes to turning to the world, is that what is offered is simply the deliberations of a particular sub-section of humanity, which - drawing on ancient wells of wisdom and centuries of accumulated reflection - offers to its fellow human beings some proposals for ordering life and society.  But where is the 'thus says the Lord' in all this?  And without it, what authorises this sub-section to speak?  And what can compel the rest of us to listen?

This seems to me to overflow into the approach to history.  So we can read that under the guidance of the Spirit "the People of God come to recognize in cultural and social transformations both the signs of the presence of Christ, who comes and guides history toward its fulfilment, and those aberrations that obscure his face." (22) To be sure, this spiritual discernment is to involve interpreting the times "in the light of God's word" (22), but I can't help feeling that the specificity of the incarnation has gone missing here.  The history of Christ in his birth, life, death and resurrection seems to have been dissolved into Christ in history.

Openness to the world defines the stance of this document, which is what you would expect given the method (or perhaps the influence flows in the other direction).  A huge contrast with the evangelicalism with which I am familiar is that for the Pope the Church is a historical factor, one amongst many in driving the history of the world. (19) This has positive and negative aspects, I think.  Negatively, there is a huge amount of talk in this document about the responsibility of the church to build the kingdom of God - the two building sites (Babel and Jerusalem) which run through the encyclical form the basis of a call to be careful how we build.  (An appeal which could, of course, go back to the Apostle Paul - except that the Apostle is clear that what is being built is the church - the encyclical seems to be talking much more broadly than this; see 229).  There is a lack of eschatology in this document, and what there is seems to me to rely on the progressive growth of the kingdom through the activity of the church and its allies.  There is a lack of crisis, of the judgement on the world, which seems to me to characterise the NT message.  On the other hand, positively, the idea that the church might have something to say to society is a welcome corrective to some evangelical thinking which essentially sees the world as something to be escaped from into the church.  To put it another way, if the encyclical seems to present the church as standing in absolute continuity with humanity, with no sense of the rupture of the new creation, evangelicalism sometimes sees the church as standing in complete discontinuity with humanity, as a sect escaping the doomed world rather than as the provisional representation of the new humanity to be revealed at the eschaton.

More to follow...

Everything is dying

The lectionary took me into Luke 8 this morning, and the account of the raising of Jairus's daughter.  I was struck again, as I have been before, by the drama of the story: the urgent pleading from Jairus which surely any parent can imagine; the nightmare delay as Jesus looks around for a sick woman who has touched him in the midst of the crowd; the messenger with his news of death and despair; the outrageous call from Jesus to believe in the face of death that all will be well; the mourners, whose wailing turns to mocking laughter when Jesus declares that the girl is not dead in spite of the clear evidence; the direct address to the corpse, calling life back in; and even the little detail that she was given something to eat.

But what I really took away from this morning was this: how we need the God of the resurrection.

It is, perhaps, a sign of my temperament that even in the midst of spring, with the evidence of new life all around, I still find myself thinking about the fact that everything is dying.  It is a fact, after all.  I don't mean this in the sense of the more alarmist ecologists of our culture - though I suspect those people might be worth listening to, at least a bit, and sometimes what passes for alarmism is just realism coming into contact with a lethargic and dismissive culture.  No, I don't mean that, I just mean the simple fact: everything that lives dies, and as far as we know the universe as a whole is also on track for (a very slow) death.

This is why gods who are bound up with the creation are no good to us.  Gods who exists within the cycle of life and death - which is in fact not a cycle, but a spiral downwards - won't suit our need.  Even gods of healing alone are not enough.

We need a God who can enable us to look death in the face and to hear his voice saying: do not be afraid; only believe.  And we need a God who has demonstrated that even at the utter end of everything - even in death - he is able to reach out a hand and recall us to life.

We need the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God of the resurrection.

Neglect of the ascension

A late thought for Ascension Day...

I have wondered lately whether the neglect of the ascension in evangelical circles might not be responsible for other striking gaps in evangelical thinking.  The thought is not entirely processed yet, so here it is in what is probably the form of caricature, with more chewing over needed before I can add the necessary nuance.

Evangelicals stress the once-and-for-all nature of the work of Christ; we are right to do so, there is a Scriptural mandate for this, and indeed the doctrine of the ascension potentially helps us here.  The emphasis therefore falls on what Jesus has done.  No complaints about this.  But do we have enough to say about what Jesus is doing?  The ascension teaches us that the Jesus who lived and walked on earth lives now in heaven, as the exact person he was.  But does it mean very much for us that he lives now, over and above the admittedly very important fact that it demonstrates the success and acceptance of what he did in his earthly ministry?

I wonder whether the right emphasis on the 'once-for-all-ness', the completeness, makes it difficult for us to see and understand the ongoing work of Christ.  Take, for example, the eucharist.  The evangelical emphasis on the completed work - which is, let me say again, absolutely right - can easily mean that the eucharist is only a backward-looking ordinance; it directs our attention to something that happened, 2000 years ago.  It does do this, of course ('on the night he was betrayed...' is a pretty clear historical marker), but is there another aspect that is neglected?  With a proper emphasis on the ascension, might we not be able to see and understand a vertical dimension, a relationship in the eating and drinking to the Lord Jesus who lives and is with us in the here and now?

Mutatis mutandis, similar points could be made about our worship (is it just about the horizontal ministering the word to one another?) and our preaching (is it just commentary on the biblical witness - Bible teaching! - or is God speaking here and now as the Scripture is expounded to show Christ?)

The ascension can help to deliver us from our fear that any talk about things really happening in the here and now detracts from the completed, once-for-all work.  That fear is not unjustified.  An emphasis on receiving Christ in the eucharist, for example, can indeed slide into making that reception a work, in the sense of something that must be added to Christ's work.  But the ascension reminds us that the Christ who went up and now lives and ministers to us is the same person who suffered and rose; there is no conflict between his completed work then and there and his application of that work here and now.  It is all him, and insofar as we maintain the focus on him we are safe.

My sense is that we need a greater emphasis on the ascension, and the fact that the head of the church is now in heaven, and is now ministering to us and through us, out of the great fulness of his once-for-all completed work.

On the connection between theology and sin

When a teacher or Christian leader falls into sin, or is revealed to have sinned, it is reasonable to look at their expressed theology and ask whether there is anything in it that might have led them to be vulnerable.  It is not reasonable - because it is simply logically fallacious - to move directly from 'this person sinned' to 'therefore their theology must be wrong'.  That is just incorrect.  A person can have good theology, in the sense that what they think and say is orthodox and biblical, and still sin.  We all know that, I hope.

There is a discussion to be had over the best way to understand the relationship between sin and temptation, and whether there is perhaps a category for disordered desire that is best understood as neither sin nor temptation, but the result of sinfulness in a different way.  That we all have such disordered desires is evident to anyone who is not self-deceived.  It is not at all evident, to me at least, that there is an obvious and orthodox way to understand and talk about these desires, though there are certainly some ways that are obviously heretical.  It would be foolish in the extreme to judge any serious attempt to understand and express these things purely on the basis of any one exponent's sin.  Let me say it again, this sort of ad hominem argument is fallacious.

That doesn't mean that there isn't a conversation to be had about whether there is a better way to understand and express our fallen state, with all its attendant guilt.  There almost certainly is.  Nor is it to rule out of court the question of whether ideas and beliefs have consequences; of course they do, and so it is sensible to carefully and cautiously ask whether there is a connection between a person's theology and their sin.  But that can't be presumed, and rarely is it as self-evident as some people seem to make out.

I wonder sometimes (and now is one of those times) whether the way some Christians write and speak about others, particularly others who have fallen into sin, is not in itself expressive of disordered desire - not, of course, in the sexual realm.  The good desire to be right twisted into the wrong desire for others to be shown to be wrong.  The joy in seeing people we disagree with cast down.  I am not pointing fingers at anyone in particular.  I am just dismayed by tone; perhaps I am really just dismayed by the internet.

Anyway, all this is apropos of nothing in particular.  Just be careful out there, okay?

Questions about public prayer

The current furore over public prayer in the UK seems to me to expose some of the key misunderstandings about religion prevalent in our society.  Without intending to get into the substantive issue at all, it seems worth noting these two assumptions:

1. There is a category called 'religion', and all the different belief systems, communities, and movements which can be thus categorised are basically the same.  Differences can be noted, of course, and nobody is saying that all religions are literally identical.  But that they can be classed together and therefore should be treated the same seems to be a pretty deep assumption.  Everyone accepts some limitations on this - but I suspect would usually deal with this by re-classifying some movements as 'not religious', or not proper religions (cults, perhaps?).
2. Religion is essentially a private matter, and even when it is invited into the public sphere it is expected to remain a private matter.  The public sphere is assumed to be a neutral, secular space, into which people can bring their private faith so long as they accept that it will then be withdrawn without having altered the character of the public sphere at all.

It is worth interrogating both of these assumptions.  Pertinent to the current debate, for example, it might be worth asking whether there is a difference between inviting into the public sphere a religious group which is inherently territorial and expansionist versus a group which focusses its political ambitions on a community which is not co-extensive with any state or territory.  I'm not saying you definitely shouldn't invite the first group; I'm just saying that prayer from these two groups would have different content and different connotations, and would have different implications for the nature of the public sphere.

It would also be worth considering whether the kind of benign secularism which governs the idea of the neutral public sphere is workable in practice.  What if that sort of pluralism was actually - as I would suggest it certainly was - the historical outworking of a particular belief system?  In other words, what if it never was value neutral at all, and what if attempting to make it value neutral actually leaves it more vulnerable?  And all this is assuming that a neutral public sphere is even a desirable thing, which I think needs some argumentation.

Finally, just to note that I've seen some Christian figures voicing a commitment to religious pluralism in the public sphere which I can't help thinking is theologically and politically naive.  Maybe it is just that I haven't seen the working behind their conclusions.  At the very least, I'd say we'd be wise to tread very carefully here.

Mr Beaver on AI

"But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, or used to be human once and isn't now, or ought to be human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet."

Thus Mr Beaver to the Pevensie children.  He is speaking, of course, about the White Witch, who falsely claims human descent.

Now, in Narnia it is fine not to be human.  Aslan is not human.  ("Aslan a man!  Certainly not." - also Mr Beaver.)  The problem is anything masquerading as human, or trying to take a role which belongs to human beings.

Anyway, you can draw your own conclusions, but I tend to think that Mr Beaver is on to something and that he could have been talking about technology as much as witches.

Being angry biblically

I don't know about you, but recently I've been feeling angry.  I am not at all unfamiliar with anger as an emotion, but something about the present moment seems to stir up anger in a way which is particularly difficult to deal with.  Most recently, it has been mainly the news from across the Atlantic that has made me angry - not just the terrible events themselves, but the appalling arrogance and self-satisfaction of those driving them.  It makes me angry.  And I've realised that my feeling of anger is compounded by a sense of helplessness.  Often when I am angry about things, I can do something about them.  I can have a conversation with the person who has angered me, I can remove myself from a situation.  Here I can't do either of those things.  I don't have the ear of, say, the President of the United States, but I am obliged to live in a world over which he has a huge influence.  And I am angry about that, and angry about the people (including, and perhaps especially, those who invoke the name of Christ) who enable that.  Helplessly, hopelessly, angry.

As an aside, and in case you think this is unduly politically one-sided (though for myself I think sometimes one-sidedness is called for), here are some other things from across the political spectrum that have made me feel similarly angry recently: the deliberate erosion of the idea of the sanctity of human life by British politicians; the crass materialism which drives our politics; the confusion over sex and gender which has been deliberately inculcated to forward an individualistic and antinomian agenda; the critical underfunding of services in the UK to the point of collapse...  The list goes on.  I'm quite angry.

And this is where I think some of those dark and slightly awkward passages from the Psalms are pretty helpful.  You know the sort.

Punish them, God;
let them fall by their own schemes.
Drive them out because of their many crimes,
for they rebel against you.

God, if only you would kill the wicked
–you bloodthirsty men, stay away from me –
who invoke you deceitfully.
Your enemies swear by you falsely.
Lord, don’t I hate those who hate you,
and detest those who rebel against you?
I hate them with extreme hatred;
I consider them my enemies.

The examples could be multiplied.  What are these angry passages doing in the Bible?  Well, surely one thing they're doing is reminding me - and you, if you feel at all like I do - that the situation is neither helpless nor hopeless.  When we are angry, we can voice our anger in prayer to God - and these passages remind us that we don't have to first moderate that emotion, clear it up, tone it down.  No, here is full on anger, but it is anger brought into the presence of God.  Anger that implores him to do something about people and situations I can do nothing about.

The very violence of these verses is, I think, helpful.  God, if only you would kill the wicked.  I can't, and I shouldn't.  But you can, O Lord - vengeance is yours, you will repay.  And of course it is safe to make this appeal to God, in a way it would not be safe to make it to anyone else.  He knows what is right, and he will do what is right.  Only he can judge who are the wicked who must die; only he can ensure that the arrogant rebels receive what they deserve.  If I call down curses on an innocent head in my anger, he is able to turn those curses into blessings, and indeed to correct my perception if I am open to that.  In my anger, I commit myself and the world for which I am concerned to God.

Of course these Psalms aren't here for every moment of pique and fit of rage I might experience.  But when there is real anger, with real cause, here are prayers I can pray.

Cutting room floor, 18th Jan 26

Yesterday I preached from Colossians 1:15-23, an absolutely glorious passage and one in which you could easily spend multiple weeks without exhausting everything it has to say about the Lord Jesus Christ.  Here are a few issues and topics I would have liked to spend more time on that didn't make it into the sermon.

The firstborn over creation - verse 15

That's the way our church Bible (NIV) translates this phrase, in line with various other English translations (e.g., CSB).  I was aware, though, that people using other translations (e.g., ESV) might be reading 'firstborn of creation'.  Both legitimate translations.  Sometimes verses like this will be picked up by movements which subscribe to heretical views of Christ - for example, Jehovah's Witnesses, who hold something very like the ancient Arian heresy.  In this view, the Son of God is a created being, albeit the first and most highly exalted creature.  'Firstborn of creation' certainly sounds like it leans that way!  However, the very next verse makes it clear that every created thing was created in, through and for the Son - placing him very clearly with God the Father as the Creator.  Some of our English translations try to avoid the confusion by translating 'over creation'; this is not an attempt to be deceptive, but reflects the background to Paul's use of this title in, for example, Psalm 89:27, where the Davidic King of Israel is given the title of God's firstborn to reflect his rule as the greatest of the kings of the earth.  To be the firstborn of creation is indeed to be supreme over creation - not as the greatest creature but as the great Creator.

All the fullness - verse 19

All God's fullness dwelt in Christ - that, of course, makes sense, since Christ himself was the eternal Son of God.  But doesn't God dwell fully in every believer by the Holy Spirit?  Yes, he does - but not in this way.  In Christ, we see the personal union of human and divine nature; he is truly God in the flesh.  And in fact his humanity has no independent existence - it is not like there was a human being called Jesus, who was subsequently indwelt or taken over by the Son of God.  No, the fullness of God dwelt in Christ in an utterly unique way, such that his whole life was the life of the eternal Son lived out in our flesh.  On top of that, Christ in his human nature received the Spirit without measure, whereas believers, it seems, can be filled to a greater or lesser extent by the Spirit.  (It is hard to explain exactly what that can mean, since the Spirit can not be split up into parts, or be partially present; perhaps we should think of it in terms of the human experience?)  Moreover, our being filled with the Spirit is dependent on his fullness - he is the original and the ongoing power of our fullness.

The interplay between the universal and the particular

Christ is supreme over all creation (universal), but he is specifically head of his church (particular).  In Christ all things are reconciled to God, in heaven and on earth (universal), but to continue to enjoy that reconciliation in their own lives the Colossians believers must persevere in their trust in Christ (particular).  It seems very important to me that we not underemphasise one or the other of these angles.  If we lay all our stress on the universal, we might end up denying the importance of the church, and we may well end up teaching that everyone will be saved no matter what - a viewpoint which is at odds with the general perspective of Scripture.  If, on the other hand, we only talk about the particular, we run the risk of becoming quite narrow, missing the doctrine of creation (or at least missing its link to the gospel in Christ), and only valuing 'churchy' activities; we might also make the gospel quite individualistic, as if everything in the end depended on our decision.  We need to say both that Christ is universally Lord and reconciler, and that he is particularly Lord in his church and invites particular faith.

News and reflections at the close of 2025

Personal news

The big personal news at the end of 2025 is, on the one hand, that I think I'm very close to submitting my PhD Thesis, and on the other hand that from next week I will be serving part-time as an Associate Pastor at Magdalen Road Church here in Oxford.  I am enormously grateful to those who have helped me through this long period of study and writing, and also to the elders and congregation at Magdalen Road who have given me the opportunity to dip my toe back into the water of pastoral ministry.  Looking forward to that opportunity has also stirred up lots of reflections on the close of my last period of pastoral ministry, and I realise that when I wrote my reflections on that at the time I hadn't really grasped how deeply traumatic it had been.  Prayers appreciated as we as a family move into this new season.

Church reflections

One interesting phenomenon that seems to have ramped up in the last year is the influx into the church of people from the political/cultural 'right', at least some of whom seem to have become convinced that Christianity is an essential component of Western civilisation, and therefore a potential bulwark against what they see as the decline of that civilisation.  This mirrors the trickle of more liberal minded folk into the church over the last few years, who seemed themselves to have realised that only the Christian message could provide a philosophical ground and foundation for the liberal values they hold dear.  Both sides are right, of course, in the sense that the particular shape of Western civilisation and the liberal values of the early Twenty-first Century do owe a great deal to Christianity.  Both sides are wrong, though, in imagining that it will be possible to turn to Christianity purely to bolster social values or a political agenda.  As Lewis has one of his characters put it, one might as well try to use the staircase to heaven as a shortcut to the local chemists.

As for the church, she will just have to accept newcomers with a patient testimony to the reality of life in Christ, and a patient rebuke to those elements of ideology on left and right which are incompatible with that life.  The church needs to stand on her own ground, and speak clearly and even handedly to right and to left.

I wonder whether this means we will see more of the culture wars playing out inside churches, and I worry for what that might look like.  I think evangelicalism, on the whole, has no coherent theological vision for society and for political engagement, and in fact many evangelical leaders give the impression that the best we can hope for is a sort of benign, neutral secularism in the public sphere.  This is unlikely to satisfy culture warriors on either side, but more importantly seems theologically rather vapid.

Perhaps some of the responses to the news that there will be a UK version of The Gospel Coalition already reflect elements of this culture war.  Certainly the write up in Evangelical Times, which reflects the more conservative strand of the evangelical world, is extremely negative.  Personally, I think that write up scandalously misrepresents the people who are mentioned in it, and I wonder whether from the author's perspective it is possible to engage thoughtfully with the modern world without being accused of social liberalism.  On the other hand, I tend to think TGCUK is a bad idea; I am not sure we need more umbrella organisations, which seem to me to be a classic evangelical response to our lack of a distinct vision for catholicity.

Social reflections

Outside the church, political life in 2025 just became more fractured and depressing.  Government seems incapable of delivering.  Populist parties on left and right are growing, both equally disturbing to my mind, and it does indeed seem that the centre cannot hold.  Because I lean slightly right, I am particularly alarmed by the rise of non-conservative right wingers, and by the way some are embracing them simply to enjoy the sight of the liberal consensus taking a beating.  We should be wary of what might end up replacing that liberal consensus.

It seems pretty evident already that local services are failing, for lack of will or resource, and I wonder how local churches - already stretched pretty thin - might be able to fill some of the gaps.  We may need to review our programmes of activities, and ask ourselves more rigorously how our resources can be best used to testify to the reality of the world renewed in Christ.  Middle class evangelicalism might need to specifically ask about our ability and willingness to serve the poorest.

Goodbye to 2025

One of the questions I come back to again and again is that of time.  I agree with Augustine that time is an extremely difficult thing to understand.  As another present slips into the past, I continue to be very grateful that in Christ God has made himself a partaker of our time, and has shown himself able to gather up all the times of our lives to share in his own eternal life.  So, goodbye to 2025, but of course not quite goodbye; rather this year is laid down in the archives, to form part of the strangely glorious whole which for now we can only vaguely imagine.

The transparent Spirit

A belated Pentecost thought, courtesy of T.F. Torrance - quotes are all from "Theology in Reconstruction", 253-258.

The office of the Holy Spirit in the Church is not to call attention to himself apart from Christ but to focus all attention on Christ, to glorify him, to bear witness to his deity, to testify to his mind and will, and in him and through him to lead us to the Father.  He is God the Spirit by whom we know God, for he is God the Spirit by whom God bears witness to himself.  Transparence and self-effacement thus belongs to the very nature and office of the Holy Spirit, as the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of the Son, who is known only as the Father is known through the Son and the Son is known in the Father, and who together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified as himself very God.

It is worth tugging at some of the threads in this quote to make sure we've understood them.  Note that the Spirit is worshipped and glorified because he is himself God, true and full God; but he is not worshipped in the attention that we pay to him, but the attention that we pay by him to the Son, to Jesus Christ as he leads us to the Father.  The Spirit is known, and known as God; but he is not known in himself, but only as he himself makes known the Father and the Son.  Torrance summarises this by referring to the Spirit's transparence.  He doesn't mean to imply by this any sort of insubstantiality, as if the Spirit could be 'seen through' because of his weightlessness and lack of solidity.  We are dealing with the almighty, personal God when we are dealing with the Holy Spirit.  The point is simply that the divine office of the Spirit as he is revealed to us in the Gospel is to make Christ known, and through and in him the Father.  His almighty power is shown, not in itself, but in showing us the almighty power of the Father and the Son.

What really strikes me about the way that Torrance utilises this concept is that he sees the transparence of the Spirit as in some sense a transferrable quality.  In thinking and speaking of God, we utilise human forms and concepts, which in themselves "are quite opaque as far as their reference to God himself is concerned."  We simply don't have the ability to stretch our language up to God.  "This is where the transparency of the Spirit comes in, for to be genuine our witness must be shot through and through with the uncreated light of God's self-revelation."  We need the Spirit to make our words transparent to God's reality, to make them bearers of God's own light - something we can't do by ourselves.

Torrance extends this description of the transparency of the Spirit to Scripture - the perspicuity of the Scriptures means the fact that the Spirit causes the biblical witness to be transparent to divine reality - and baptism - in which we are meant to look "through the rite to Christ and his Gospel... Without Sacramental transparence Baptism becomes blind and meaningless."

We need - desperately need - the work of the Holy Spirit to make anything that we do with reference to God genuinely valuable and meaningful.

We recall too that this transparence comes from the Holy Spirit, from his own self-effacing nature and office in hiding himself, as it were, behind the Face of the Father in the Son and behind the Heart of the Son in the Father, yet revealing the one Triune God by letting his eternal light shine through himself to us.

A Bonhoeffer index

Dietrich Bonhoeffer has been incredibly influential on my thinking about a range of topics, especially how to do Christian ethics.  On the 80th anniversary of his death, here is a list of things I've written about him:

• Thoughts on the decline of nominal or cultural Christianity, processed with the help of Bonhoeffer's distinction between ultimate and penultimate things.
• Thoughts on divine mandates, and the different spheres of human life, prompted by the Covid-19 crisis.
• A brief thought on ethics as obedience to God, and the implications for church fellowship.
• An exploration of two key concepts from Bonhoeffer - nature and vicarious representation.
• Thoughts on the famous contrast between cheap and costly grace,
• Learning to pray, drawing on Bonhoeffer's work on the Psalms.
• A series of posts working through Bonhoeffer's (sadly unfinished) Ethics:
• Part 1 - Christ, Reality and Good
• Part 2 - Ethics as Formation
• Part 3 - Heritage and Decay
• Part 4 - Guilt, Justification, Renewal
• Part 5 - Ultimate and Penultimate Things
• Part 6 - Natural Life
• Part 7 - History and Good (1)
• Part 8 - History and Good (2)
• Part 9 - God's Love and the Disintegration of the World
• Part 10 - Church and World I
• Part 11 - On the Possibility of the Church's Message to the World
• Part 12 - The "Ethical" and the "Christian" as a Topic
• Part 13 - The Concrete Commandment and the Divine Mandates
• A brief application of Bonhoeffer to the question of abortion.
• Some critical thoughts on Bonhoeffer's understanding of the church. This was ten years ago, and I'm not sure now that I agree with myself!
• An appreciation of Bonhoeffer's emphasis on corporate, common prayer in the church.
• Thoughts on how the gospel addresses people who are good.
• A reflection on confession of guilt as the precursor to good ethical thinking.

There are a couple of others which I haven't linked, but which you can find if you look; they deal with my reading of Metaxas's biography of Bonhoeffer, which I liked at the time but feel more ambivalent about now.

A three-way fight

I spent some very profitable time last week discussing the work of Charles Taylor with people who are much more qualified to speak about him than I am.  For those who don't know, Taylor is primarily famous for his enormous book A Secular Age, in which he tries to answer one question: how have we moved from a point in 1500 when atheism was more or less inconceivable, to a point in 2000 where belief in God is enormously contested?  What changed in society and the intellectual world of the West to make atheism a live option, not just for isolated individuals, but for the mainstream of Western people?  The book is exhaustive, and exhausting, in its run through the history of the Western world in search of the answer(s) to this question - if you haven't read it and want a way in I'd strongly recommend James Smith's book How (Not) To Be Secular as a good introduction and guide before you dive in.

One particular part of Taylor's analysis struck me as having renewed importance in our current cultural moment.  Taylor suggests that there are not two great forces in our culture - the religious and the irreligious, say - but three: "There are secular humanists, there are neo-Nietzscheans, and there are those who acknowledge some good beyond life." (636)  By 'secular humanists', Taylor means those who restrict meaning purely to the 'immanent frame' - i.e., nothing transcendent, nothing spiritual that exists above and beyond our human conceptualism of the world - and yet remain optimistic about the power of humanity to shape its own existence to benign ends, and are invested in the project of human improvement.  Broadly, this would align politically with secular progressives.  Then there are the religious, or at least those who look beyond the world as we see it for meaning and direction; they are typically also progressive in some sense, in that they believe in the capacity for things to get better, even if the end goal of that 'better' is not found within the horizons of this world.  They will, of course, debate with the secular humanists as to what 'good' means, but they agree that there is good and that it is worth pursuing.

The third group Taylor calls 'neo-Nietzscheans', or "the immanent counter-Enlightenment". (636)  This group denies the progressive tendency in both other camps; there is no 'good' per se which can be pursued, and humanity as such is not reformable.  All we can do is harness the evil tendencies of humanity to something which will benefit the species.  Various species of political Darwinism belong here, and we might point to particular figures who represent this tendency - Andrew Tate, Tommy Robinson, and to an extent Donald Trump spring to mind.

Taylor's point is that this is a genuine three-way fight.  The secular humanists and the neo-Nietzscheans are agreed, against the religious, that there is no transcendent source of meaning or ethics, and that decisions have to be made purely on the basis of what we can see around us.  But on the other hand the religious often find themselves agreeing with the secular humanists when it comes to pursuing some good intention within the world.  (We might suggest that this is particularly the case in the contemporary West, where the supposedly neutral and universal values which secular humanism considers itself to be pursuing are heavily inflected with historic Christian thought).

But there is a third alliance which often pops up, for "neo-Nietzscheans and acknowledgers of transcendence are together in their absence of surprise at the continued disappointments of secular humanism, together also in the sense that its vision of life lacks a dimension." (637)  Both the immanent counter-Enlightenment and the religious see secular humanism as in a sense naive, and doomed to fail on its own terms.  They both want, for very different reasons, to shake the liberal consensus just to demonstrate that it is without foundation.

At the moment, I think the neo-Nietzscheans are on the march, and secular progressivism is in retreat across the West.  And I think we, by which I mean 'acknowledgers of transcendence' and specifically Christians, need to be careful.  Let's not rejoice too much at the woes of secular humanism.  Let's take care not to line up with the neo-Nietzscheans and think that we can turn our momentary agreement into a lasting alliance.  In the end, there is a lot in secular humanism with which we are in profound agreement; indeed, I would argue that there is a lot in secular humanism that actually belongs to us.  And I think that the forces of the immanent counter-Enlightenment will be very happy to turn their guns on us at the first opportunity.

Thoughts on New Year's Day

Liturgically, New Year's Day is the eighth day of Christmas, and therefore observed (where such things are still observed) as the festival of the Naming and Circumcision of Jesus.  I find that provides rich themes for reflection and contemplation as one year turns over into the next.

For starters, the Lord was given the name 'Jesus' - meaning God Saves - because he would save his people from their sins.  This invites two lines of reflection.  First at the level of salvation history, the coming of Jesus is the faithfulness of God to his covenant people.  The stories which accompany the presentation of Christ at the temple reflect the longing of faithful Israelites for the promised salvation of God.  Simeon sees in this child God's salvation, the rescue and therefore the glory of Israel, the revelation to the world of God's good purposes to and through his chosen people.  Anna speaks of the redemption of Jerusalem, no longer as a distant hope but as a present reality.  It is good at the beginning of a new year to be reminded that God's faithfulness to his purposes and his people runs like a golden thread through each and every year, even when that thread is sometimes hidden from view.  His faithfulness to Israel meant the forgiveness of Israel's sins; and that faithfulness is ongoing.

And then at the personal level, how good it is when reflecting on the last year, with all its many sins and failings, to be reminded that Jesus is God's salvation.  He is the one who is able to deliver us from our sins and the consequences of our sins - and he will deliver us.  That is his very name.

There is also the circumcision, which perhaps seems obscure but to my mind conjures up similar reflections.  Circumcision was the sign of the ancient covenant with Israel, and so when Jesus is circumcised we see God's faithfulness to a promise made to Abraham hundred of years before.  We are reminded again of his constancy through the turning years.  But then again, the circumcision of Jesus is not just the continuation of that covenant, but its fulfilment - in him, the covenant sign becomes a present reality, or perhaps we ought to say that he is the reality which always lay under the covenant sign and gave it life and power.  His circumcision is God's faithfulness to the old, but just as that faithfulness it is also the putting off of every old thing, so that it points to Christ's cross, on which the old man is put to death - not for Christ, but for us, who are circumcised in him.  In Christ, the old is really old and done away with, and the new year can open with a sense of real newness, just as every day is a day of fresh mercy and therefore new creation.

The years go on.  Jesus is the same - yesterday, today, and forever.  Always the one who saved his people from their sins, and will save his people.  Always the one who kept faith, and made us faithful in him.  Always the one who decides and judges what is really old and has to go, and always the one who brings in the genuinely new.

Happy new year!

Christ the Psalmist

Two great Psalms in my reading for Morning Prayer today - Psalms 25 and 26.  Great Psalms in isolation, but curiously contradictory when you read them side by side.

King David Playing the Harp
(Gerard van Honthorst, 1622)

Notice first of all that these are both presented as 'Psalms of David'; whatever exactly we think about the originality or significance of the headings to the Psalms, we are certainly being encouraged to read these together in some sense.  We can't say that these Psalms belong to different traditions, or represent different theological viewpoints, or belong at very different points in the history of revelation and redemption.  The Psalms seem to originate together and belong together.  And yet...

In Psalm 25 we have confessions of sin, pleas for forgiveness, expressions of dependence on God's mercy:

Do not remember the sins of my youth
or the acts of my rebellion...

Lord, for the sake of your name,
forgive my iniquity, for it is immense.

Consider my affliction and trouble
and forgive all my sins. 

 But then in Psalm 26 we have a rather different mood:

Vindicate me, Lord,
because I have lived with integrity...

I wash my hands in innocence
and go around your altar, Lord...

How do we hold together the frank admission of 'immense' guilt with the confident appeal to one's own innocence and integrity?  How do we join up what is essentially an appeal to God to forget David's behaviour (because it was sinful) with the appeal to God to remember David's behaviour (because it was righteous)?

There are of course a number of simple ways we might get around it.  If we take the Psalms primarily as expressions of human psychology, perhaps in connection especially with the life of faith, then it's not difficult to think of times from our own experience when we felt especially sinful and other times when we felt basically innocent.  Perhaps it's just that these two Psalms are given to us so that we can pray appropriately in the light of those different feelings.

Or we can construe a scale of relative righteousness - we could argue that David knows of course that in God's sight he is sinful, but compared to the enemies who oppress and harass him (and these enemies are prominent in Psalm 26) he is innocent.  Or we can imagine a situation in which David, without denying his essential guilt, could be maintaining his innocence in this particular case.  He hasn't done this one thing of which he is accused, and so he can appeal to God on the basis of this innocence.

Any or all of those things may have a grain of truth to them, but the deeper, and more Christian, reading of these Psalms is as expressions of the truth as it is in Christ Jesus.  Maybe David wrote these Psalms, but they belong nonetheless to Christ.  The Lord Jesus in his life took up the guilt and sin of humanity and made it his own; he identified with sinful humanity in his baptism, and he carried that identity through as far as the cross.  He can confess on our behalf the immense iniquity which we carry - indeed, he confesses it to such an extent that we no longer carry it.  But on the other hand, the Lord Jesus never sinned.  He, and he alone, could truly wash his hands in innocence.  The guilt which he bore, he bore guiltlessly.  The iniquity which he confessed, he confessed from a position of total integrity.  Jesus sings both Psalms.

And because he sings both Psalms, I can sing both Psalms.  Lord, forgive my iniquity, for it is immense.  In innocence I go around your altar and proclaim thanksgiving.  In Christ I sing.

Apocalyptic news

Because US elections always happen around this time of year, the lectionary always has me reading the book of Daniel in the mornings.  I strongly recommend reading Daniel before reading the news; and then maybe reading it again after the news if you need to.  Daniel is a book of apocalyptic, which does not mean that it is all dramatic and disastrous - that wouldn't make it very much different from the BBC news website (or whatever other news source you're currently using).  Daniel is apocalyptic because it peels back the surface level of the apparent churn of human events to show the deeper spiritual significance of what is going on.  It doesn't deny the reality of the human level - as if history is just an illusion, or a mere mask for something else - but it gives a revealed insight into what is going on from the divine perspective, which is often very much at odds with the human perspective.

Perhaps the key revelation in Daniel is this: whilst there is constant flux in human affairs, and no human state has the stability and permanence to which it pretends, there is a divine plan which lies beneath everything and which will be brought to light as the meaning of it all.  So in chapter 2 this morning we were being reminded that kingdoms - even Nebuchadnezzar's apparently unmovable kingdom - will come to an end, the Most High is overseeing the succession of human states with the intention of bringing to eternal dominance the Kingdom of his own Son.  There is a lot going on at the human level, but when God desires he brings the whole thing - not just an individual kingdom but the whole succession, the whole constant movement of human rise and fall - crashing down, to be replaced by an unshakeable Rock.

I've been mulling some applications.  Firstly, it's so important to remember with Daniel that it is God who "changes the times and seasons; he removes kings and establishes kings."  I think we can be prone to imagining a sort of 'providence of the gaps', where the Lord is in charge of things we can't quite explain or quantify, but where there is a process, an ordered system which we can understand, for getting something done, God is an unnecessary hypothesis.  In an ordered democratic system, surely voters and not the Most High choose the leaders.  But the biblical vision of providence is much more thoroughgoing than this.  Nothing falls outside of God's control, even things which are eminently within our control.

Second, knowledge of providence does not blunt the horrors of history.  Consider that the whole book of Daniel happens within the context of exile, a result of brutal invasion and destruction.  The kings featured are not good characters.  They are brutal imperialists.  Even in chapter 2, Daniel and his friends live under the threat of a capricious death sentence.  Everything is bad.  And yet...  I think we need to be willing to face how bad things are (although a reading of Daniel does helpfully remind us that things could be and have been much worse), and still say 'and yet...' without flinching.  God is in control.  That he allows these things, these terrible things, may be incomprehensible to us, but he has shown us that he is good, and he is after all the God of the cross and resurrection, in that order.

Third, I think it is helpful to admit a very high degree of uncertainty when we're thinking about reading human history.  There is no manifest and obvious storyline to human history, and although it is probably inevitable that we will try to frame events within a plot that makes sense to us, we have to admit that we don't really know what is going on.  Even for Christians, who 'know' the big storyline, we need to be cautious about assigning particular events in 'secular' history a role in that story.  After all, when God establishes his everlasting kingdom that doesn't come from within the churn of human history, but from without, and takes down the whole human statue.

Tell Her Story

I've just finished reading Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church by Nijay K. Gupta.  I really liked some aspects of it, and found some others seriously lacking.  The following is not a full review by any means (though by your leave I'll label it as a review), but just a series of thoughts and reflections.  I would welcome push-back if you've read it and liked it more (or less) than I did!

Things that I liked:

The survey of women in the Greco-Roman world (chapter 3) is great at showing that there was significant variety to the experiences of women in the first century.  It is certainly not true that first century women were universally restricted to the house, or that they never had roles outside the domestic sphere.  If in your imagination the background to the New Testament is a world of very rigid gender roles, I think it's helpful to see that things were more varied than that.

One line of argumentation that I've never heard deployed in person, but have witnessed on the internet and therefore gather is current in American Evangelicalism, is the idea that "women can't perform such and such a role in ministry because they are too..." (10) - fill in the blank as you please.  This sort of argument, based on the (demonstrably false) idea that there are immutable traits which mark out all women (and all men) is never advanced in Scripture, and this book takes it apart rather well.

Highlighting the role of women in the narrative of salvation history - whether that's a character like Deborah in the Old Testament (ch 1), the women who encountered and often accompanied the Lord Jesus (ch 4), or the women named by Paul as co-workers (chs 5-9) has the potential to enrich our understanding of God's work.  There will also certainly be points at which meditating on these women and their stories will point to changes that need to be made in the thinking and practice of the church today.

Things that I found frustrating:

The chapter on Genesis 1-3 is seriously underdeveloped, given the importance of the contents for this whole discussion - and placing it after the portrait and discussion of Deborah seems a little tendentious to me.

Much of the proposed reconstruction of women's lives and ministries in this book is very speculative, and involves more reading between the lines than I think responsible exegesis can support.  I lost track of the number of times we were told that we couldn't be certain of something, but then that same something was used to develop the argument as if it were certain (or the other way around; we are told that "it is more certain" that Euodia and/or Syntyche held the title of episkopos or diakonos (104), but then later we find it is only "quite possible" - and even then no particular evidence is offered in support (106).  Was Phoebe tasked with reading the letter to the Romans publicly?  We don't know (124), but we're asked to imagine it anyway.  The three chapters on Phoebe, Prisca and Junia seem to me to be trying to do far too much with the scraps of relevant text that we have, and consequently I can't see them convincing anyone who didn't already want to be convinced.

There seems to be some indecision or confusion at one key point in the book's argument, relating to offices in the early church.  Gupta endorses Wayne Meeks' conclusion that "Acts and the Pauline letters make no mention of formal offices in the early Pauline congregations." (81)  The rest of this chapter, however, discusses the nature of the diakonos, episkopos, and presbyteros in some detail.  These are described as 'roles' rather than 'offices', but I'm not sure I see the difference.  This becomes of great importance when a central plank of the complementarian position is that women did not serve as overseers or elders in the early congregations.  (As an aside, I appreciated Gupta's clear evidence that women did serve as deacons - although this was somewhat undermined by the vagueness about whether this was a formal office or not - and also his insistence that 'deacon' was a leadership position, with significant authority and responsibility).  I think Meeks' conclusion is completely unsustainable, and overall the presentation here seems to fall into a slightly 19th century way of contrasting an informal, charismatic early church with 'early catholicism' emerging (to the church's detriment?) a little later.  Given Titus 1 and other passages, I think it is clear that the appointment of elders was a central part of the Pauline mission, and that these elders were genuine office holders.

There also seems to be confusion about the extent to which the apostles were able to break from their own sociological background.  So we are told that "I don't think it is the case that the apostles blindly followed 'culture' when it comes to sexual anthropology" (49), but the chapter on the household codes assumes that the authors of these texts couldn't have imagined a more egalitarian setup, and so were limited by their cultural horizons (195).  I'm not sure the latter perspective fits comfortably with the inspiration of Scripture.  It's a shame, because there's a lot in the reading of the household codes here which seems evidently correct to me.  There's a similar confusion going on about householders hosting church - they must have been elders, because sociologically it would have been impossible for them to play host and not be church leaders.  But sociologically, the criteria for eldership would have been largely different from those laid down by Paul, who is obviously not thinking in sociological but theological terms here.

Other thoughts and reflections:

The particular arguments and scenarios that this book is written against are not ones that occur directly in the context I know best, and I believe it is very important that complementarians distance themselves from the extreme forms of patriarchy that are, apparently, being endorsed in parts of the church.  (One is sometimes tempted to think cutting off all cross-Atlantic communication might be a blessing, to be honest).  I will say that careless language, and perhaps behind it careless thought, can sometimes give the impression that we hold positions we do not in fact hold, or at least are not consistent with our deepest convictions.

If the key question is 'ought women ordinarily to serve as elders in churches?', I don't think this book successfully proves the affirmative, and I don't think it is correct to insist that the burden of proof lies with the other side (91 and other places).  The reason, it seems to me, that Gupta thinks the burden of proof lies with the complementarian camp is that he doesn't offer any sort of theological anthropology in this book.  The Scriptures do tell us some things doctrinally about the nature of humanity, and specifically the nature of humanity as gendered, which are absent from this discussion, and which to my mind swing the burden of proof back the other way.

If it is correct that elders ought ordinarily to be men - and I haven't given any argument for that here, I know, but I think it's true - then one thing that is clear from this book is that ministry, including Word ministry, authority, and responsibility must not be limited to the elders.  The diaconate should be open to women, and should not be restricted to administrative tasks.  There should be leadership and ministry opportunities for women at every level in the church, notwithstanding the restriction of the eldership.  There is a dangerous tendency in some churches I know towards an increased focus on the elders as ministers - such that they do all the teaching, almost all the leading, etc. - which when combined with a male-only eldership ends up denying complementarianism and falls over into outright patriarchalism.  I think we also need to think hard about how the elders hear female voices, and what it looks like for there to be Mothers as well as Fathers in the church.

For those about to lead worship

Jesus Christ is our worship, the essence of it and the whole of it, and we may worship God in Spirit and in Truth only as we are made partakers of his worship.

Thus T.F. Torrance, in Theology in Reconstruction, 249.

Torrance's point has at least a two-fold application.  Firstly, we cannot make an acceptable offering to God by ourselves.  All our worship is soiled by our sinfulness, and inadequate as a response to God's greatness and his grace.  We cannot possibly come of ourselves to appear before God and honour him.  Remember Nadab and Abihu?  Outside of Christ, our very worship of God deserves and attracts his wrath.  So if you're about to lead worship, please remember that you cannot do it - that you depend on Christ to pour out the Spirit so that what you do might be real, genuine, acceptable.  Worship is not within your powers, and leading others in worship is something that should make you tremble.

But second, an acceptable offering to God has been made, in our human nature, by our Brother the Lord Jesus Christ.  Because he appears in heaven before God, as our great High Priest, there is human worship which is sinless and holy, and which genuinely honours the Father.  And because that worship exists, we can come to worship - not as if we were offering something alongside Christ's offering, but as we are joined to him by the Spirit in faith our own inadequate worship is clothed in his great act of worship, and made to participate in it.  There is nothing for us to add, because he has done it all; but we may participate, because he has gone ahead of us.  So if you're about to lead worship, remember that what that means is directing people to Christ, who is the real worship leader, and resting in him and his perfect worship yourself as you lead others in doing so.

The joyful voice of the creature

In Church Dogmatics III/1, Barth discusses 'creation as justification'. Creation is good, really good, because it is good in God's sight. But why is that so? Barth is clear that we do not find the goodness, the rightness - the justification - of creation in our experience of the world, not even our good experience:

Created order has what we may call its brighter side. But its justification by its Creator and His self-disclosure is not bound up with this brighter side. It is not connected with the fact that the sun shines, that there are blossoms and fruits, pleasing shapes, colours and sounds, realities and groups of realities which preserve and foster life, purposeful relationships and order, intelligible and serviceable elements and powers, which enlighten the created mind of man, speak to his heart, and in some way correspond with his will for life and foster it.

This brighter side of creation is not enough to justify the creature, to render it really good. After all, we acknowledge in referring to a brighter side that there is a darker side, which might push us to exactly the opposite conclusion. But this not mean that the beauty and order of creation is meaningless. It simply means that its meaning can only be really understood, and placed on a secure foundation in our knowledge, in the light of God's revelation, the covenant brought to fulfillment in Jesus Christ:

An affirmative judgement on creation has its foundation and rightful place. The recognition of its direct and immanent goodness is demanded from the man whom the Creator in His revelation has confronted with Himself. 

Note that it is really the immanent goodness of creation which is to be recognised here. The beauty and order that we see in creation really do speak of its goodness in God's sight. Creation speaks goodness in itself, and thus witnesses to God's goodness all the time; this voice, however, is only heard and heard rightly when God is known in Christ, and the covenant is known as the meaning of creation. 

The joyful voice of the creature rings out where the self-revelation of God has been apprehended.

Quotes from CD III/1, 370-1.