Theology Everywhere

by Catherine Bird.

This is the fourth of our series of articles through the year from Spectrum, on the theme ‘Darkness and Light are both alike to Thee’. This month the article is by Catherine Bird.

Darkness has had a rather incredible journey throughout time, shifting like the sands in terms of how it is perceived and understood.

But as humanity developed and evolved, a deep seated and intuitive understanding of the balance of nature also emerged and there wasn’t from the beginning of humankind and civilisation this understanding of light as good and dark as bad, things were much more interconnected – in a way that really goes against our modern dualistic association of light with goodness and dark with evil – that’s an association that is not really very widely reflected in what is known of many ancient cultures.  But at various points in the history of Christianity, Darkness has been variously upheld as either a genuine pathway to divine encounter or as a symbol of heresy and evil.

In the Hebrew Bible, in the book of Genesis, darkness is the fundamental state – God draws light from darkness. We might ask, if darkness was so terrible, why didn’t God at that point decide to get rid of darkness? But God keeps the darkness, as much of it as the light, 50-50 wherever we are in the world, and God saw that it was good. And many Creation myths share this as a common narrative, darkness as a pure state from within which beautiful things emerge.

The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament is actually replete with poetic and positive, dark related images which offer a vision of God residing in the darkness.  Stories which have God using the cover of darkness as a means of liberation and enlightenment, loads of events which take place in the darkness and offer hopeful and positive narratives of transformation and Divine encounter.

One of the best known and most frequently quoted dark related images in the Old Testament is that to be found in Psalm 139.

In the context of a treatise about God’s omnipresence and omniscience, we read in verses 11 and 12, ‘if I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.’

The writer here is describing the impossibility of hiding from God’s presence, and I do not read this Psalm as saying that darkness does not exist for God, or that light is supreme. Rather that darkness is not a place in which God is, or can ever be, absent. It is a place of growth, spiritual formation and sanctuary, a place in which God meets us at our most vulnerable.

Similarly in the New Testament, nany wonderful things happen under the cover of darkness.  Even in John’s gospel, which loves the light good/dark bed metaphor, even there, we meet Nicodemus, the learned teacher and scholar who comes to Jesus after sundown to seek answers and to expand his mind. The night apparently serves Nicodemus well, setting him off on a journey in which we see him let go of a purely rational way of thinking and embrace the more mystical path of Jesus. 

The inconsistency between metaphor and reality in John’s and to a lesser extent the other gospels, seems to pass the writers by actually! In the darkness of night an epiphany and a conversation of potential life changing significance take place; resurrection breaks through and the Glory of God is revealed. Yet still, in the midst of these things, darkness continues to be used as a term to describe malevolence and the absence of God.

For Reflection

• Think about Scripture – where in the Bible is darkness used positively, either as a metaphor or as a device?

by Ian Howarth.

For those of us leading worship over the Advent and Christmas period there is always a tension between the liturgical calendar and the rhythm of Christmas celebrations in our society. We are very conscious of it in Advent, wondering when whether we should start singing Christmas carols, when the readings focus on John the Baptist and Mary when people have already gone to community carol events. But there is also a tension in the post-Christmas period, which I sense particularly this year.

Liturgically, Christmas Day is the start of period of celebration, including Epiphany and going on until Candelmas. In practice, people tend to take time off from church after Christmas and return for a Covenant service at the beginning of the year, which can often take priority over Epiphany. I would indeed want to affirm the centrality of the Covenant service in our Methodist tradition but are there dangers in playing down the theological significance of the incarnation and reducing Christmas to carols and nativity.

Emotionally, it is always hard to keep the feeling of celebration going post-Christmas. It feels odd singing carols after Christmas day, and many of us are tired and need a rest. This year, with the rise of Omicron and the uncertainty around it, and with the deep tiredness many are feeling it is more difficult than ever.

However, it might be more important than ever for us to reflect on the meaning of the coming of Jesus into the world as God incarnate; to move on from stories of the baby in the manger to a deeper understanding of what it means to recognise Jesus as Emmanuel ‘God with us.’

As people have struggled to come to terms with the effect of the pandemic on their lives and on their churches, a struggle that will be exacerbated by the developments of recent weeks, a question that arises for many is: ‘Where is God in this?’

In January 2020, two months before lockdown, we held a retreat on the Psalms with the poet and theologian Carla Grosch-Miller, who reminded us that many of the Psalms were a response to the trauma of exile, and were asking that very question: ‘Where is God in this?’ The questions: ‘How long, O Lord?’ ‘Will you hide yourself forever?’ or simply ‘Why….?’ Punctuate such psalms.

Such psalms have been a rich and helpful resource through the corporate traumas of the past twenty months, enabling a sharing of the deep questions about our current situation in prayer and worship.

But the implication of traditional understandings of salvation history is that the hard questions asked in these psalms find an answer in the incarnation, in the coming of Jesus. However, in the Christmas season as we affirm that God has come in Christ, we have to acknowledge that we are still asking questions of God like ‘How long?’ and ‘Why?’

One way of holding that together is to push the issue into the future and see the resolution in the second coming of Jesus at the eschaton. However, that seems to me to be a denial of what are trying to say about the incarnation. Namely, that God comes into the world in Jesus because this world matters to God. Any eschatology that sees salvation as an escape from this world rather than an engagement with it in a renewed way, calls into question the meaning of the incarnation.

However, that means that any incarnational theology has to articulate what it means for God to have come into the world in Jesus, and how that affects our understanding of those situations that seem to deny God’s presence, whether that be the pandemic, the threat of climate change, or challenging aspects of our personal circumstances.

If the incarnation is a demonstration that this world matters to God, then the realities of our questions and requests do not go away with the coming of Jesus. The Christmas stories are written to remind us that Jesus comes into those realities, homeless, fleeing from political oppression, and so on. It is by entering into the world as it was and is, with all its joys and sorrows, that God shares in our humanity. In Jesus, God is not immune from the challenges we face.

As we celebrate the coming of Jesus in this Christmas period, if we have any awareness of the wider world we have to recognise it cannot be a celebration of a God who has come to provide all the answers. However, it can be a thanksgiving for a God who travels with us, and offers a way for that journey in Jesus; a way that takes the questions this world poses seriously and helps us address them through a renewed vision that the coming of Jesus offers us. A vision of transformation that comes through our understanding of the life, death and resurrection, the teaching and example of Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us.

by Philip Sudworth.

We all owe our lives, and the lives of those we’ve loved, to the existence of death. If there were no death, none of us would have been born; Earth would have been full up long ago. If the story of Adam and Eve were literally true, our first parents actually did our generation a great favour. But is that particular creation story really about humanity being banned from Paradise or about a wrathful God sentencing humanity to a life with difficulties, pain and death? If we suggest that a boy starving to death in sub-Saharan Africa or a girl dying from cancer in a local hospice are reaping God’s anger against Adam’s disobedience, what kind of a God are we proclaiming? 

An alternative understanding sees the story as more about the implications of growing knowledge and insights, both as a human race and as individuals. Young children have their needs met and, in their innocence, happily run around naked. We grow out of the of childhood, towards self-consciousness, self-reliance and responsibility.  The need to earn our own living and provide for our families is a natural development. Growing self-awareness and socialisation bring an awareness of good and evil, together with a conscience, a sense of shame, and of justice. As we transition into independence, we take responsibility for our actions and mistakes. Self-awareness means we understand life brings danger, suffering, grief, and death. 

Traditional Christianity suggests that Eden provided for all human needs and was safe. It was how the world was meant to be; it’s how the world will be when Jesus returns. Yet life can lack a sense of purpose, unless there’s some challenge. Is paradise really the absence of danger, suffering and death? Without danger there’s no courage; without shortages, no generosity; without struggle, no achievement; without hurt, no compassion; without uncertainty, no hope or faith. Without the deep feelings that can lead to grief, we’d never be able to enjoy the intimate love of those with whom we’ve shared joy, fun and companionship. Without freedom to act wrongly, there’s no virtue. If everything were perfect, there’d be no possibility for development, progress or vision.  Without death, there’d be no future generations. Perhaps the world isn’t “fallen” through humanity’s fault, but the original intention of God. Such a worldmay be a necessary condition for spiritual development. John Keats wrote, ‘Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul.’

This causes problems for traditional understandings of Adam’s sin, the inherited sinfulness of humanity, and the need for an act of atonement. Consequently, many Christians insist on the historicity of Genesis despite the genomic evidence, despite contradictions of observable science, despite discrepancies within Genesis and despite other differing creation accounts in the bible. Others take a hybrid position, acknowledging that Genesis 1 is poetry rather than science, but still insisting that Adam’s disobedience brought death and pain into the world. It took the Catholic church 300 years to acknowledge that Galileo was right. How long will it take the modern church to reconcile Christianity and evolution? Or to acknowledge openly that the small 3-tier cosmos of the bible is a pre-scientific image, which bears no relation to an expanding universe which is 93 billion light years across and contains 125 billion galaxies?

In the 13th century, John Duns Scotus maintained that the incarnation of Jesus wasn’t a response to a problem but was always the intended plan. Franciscans have understood that Jesus didn’t come to complete a divine transaction that would enable God to forgive humans; he came to change the way humans thought about God.  It was always a matter of love and freedom rather than divine justice. This fits the view that true love and forgiveness cannot be conditional on anything that is thought, said or done. We can’t earn grace; it is a gift. Repentance rituals are perhaps helpful for those who harbor a sense of guilt and sinfulness and find that such rituals help them to put the past behind them and mark a transition to a new start. To suggest, however, that those rituals or a set of beliefs are essential, and that God cannot forgive people until they have jumped through those hoops is not only to place barriers between individuals and God; it diminishes God. We end up with a God that is too small for the present age.

by David Clough.

Whatever international action happens as a result of the inconclusive COP26 conference, it is clear that carbon emissions from human activity are changing the world’s climate in ways that are already displacing many people from the places that have been their home and will soon displace many more. Islands are being inundated. Changes to weather patterns are disrupting the growing of food crops and the grazing of animals, as well as increasing the incidence of wildfires and storms. Christians should grieve and lament the devastation caused to human communities and other living creatures as a result of culpable inaction from industrialised nations over decades. We should be angered by the injustice that the heaviest costs of climate change are falling on those who have least responsibility for causing the problem. We should be driven by these emotions to continue to make the case for urgent concerted international action to avoid making the crisis still worse.

But Christians should also prepare themselves for the political consequences of this environmental crisis. The UNHCR reported 82.4 million displaced people at the end of 2020, one in 95 of the global population. The climate crisis was one of the factors that led to the civil war in Syria. The crisis continues to provoke conflict and increase the numbers of displaced people, refugees, and asylum seekers. This presents a new international challenge. Industrialised nations need to decide either to recognise their responsibility to support people displaced by the climate crisis or to ignore these pressing humanitarian needs and instead invest in stronger borders to attempt to insulate themselves from the global disruption. There is a serious risk that some politicians will see opportunities in rushing directly from denial and inaction in relation to the causes of the climate crisis to making the case for prioritizing national self-interest rather than recognizing international responsibilities. In the UK, a clear direction of travel is evident in the government setting aside longstanding commitments concerning the international aid budget, its proposed new Nationality and Borders bill, and inadequate responses from ministers to the rising numbers of asylum seekers drowning in the Channel as a result of the lack of legal routes to claim asylum in the UK.

For many Christians, the implications of their faith for the question of the obligations of the most wealthy nations to care for those in need is clear. Jesus’ injunction to love one’s neighbour and the parables of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:25–37) and the Last Judgement (Mt 25:31–46) are obvious reference points. But Christians in the US voted disproportionately for Trump in the context of promises of an implausible wall along the Mexican border. In the UK, most members of the Church of England voted for Brexit in the context of a campaign affirming the priority of national self-interest. So those hoping that Christian churches might help generate political support for international cooperation to help people displaced as a result of the climate crisis have work to do.

One sign of the challenge ahead is a recent article in the journal Studies in Christian Ethics by Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Christ Church, Oxford. ‘Whatever Happened to the Canaanites? Principles of a Christian Ethic of Mass Immigration’ makes a Christian ethical case for prioritising national self-interest above providing for the needy beyond a nation’s borders. Its argument relies on a tendentious framing of the issue and on false oppositions. The key current issue for the UK and many other countries is ethical and legal responsibilities to those seeking asylum; the article misdirects attention towards fears about ‘mass migration’ and completely open borders. The article will not convince many Christian ethicists that it presents a plausible reading of biblical and theological traditions on this topic. The problem is that it does not need to convince anyone: it just needs to provide a theological fig-leaf for those who have already decided that prioritising the pursuit of narrow national self-interest is politically expedient. It is therefore more important than ever to make the case that unjust and uncompassionate policies on international aid, the reception of asylum seekers, and immigration, are contrary to Christian ethics.

If you are a Christian convinced that churches should be supporting hospitality to asylum seekers, aid for refugees, and justice for those displaced by the climate crisis, it is time to get ready to join the debate. Reading up on the important work of the ecumenical Joint Public Issues Team on asylum and migration is a great place to start.

by Andrew Stobart.

As we approach the celebration of Christmas, we might encounter a now-familiar slogan: ‘Jesus is the reason for the season.’ Like all slogans, it does its job. It’s short, memorable, and encapsulates a message that is both descriptively positive (Jesus is the reason for the season) and appropriately polemical (Jesus is the reason, not someone or something else).

Roll back seventeen hundred years, and the Church had another slogan that aided its celebration of the incarnation: ‘begotten not made.’ Written into the Nicene Creed, this slogan became an expression of orthodoxy, directing Christian believers to affirm an essential truth about their Saviour, while also denying a disastrous heresy. We still use this slogan today, in the Creed that we share, and in one of our most popular carols (the line ‘begotten not created’ in ‘O come, all ye faithful’). However, unlike ‘Jesus is the reason for the season’, ‘begotten not made’ is a slogan that requires us to limber up our theological muscles and do some serious reflection. It’s thus an appropriate focus for us this Advent.

First things first: ‘begotten not made’ is a slogan about Jesus Christ, and so is part of the Christian reflection that we call Christology. While we may not use that term very much, we cannot long escape the substance of Christology if we are serious about being Christian disciples. Christian discipleship is inherently personal, in that the contours of the life of discipleship are not formed from generalised principles, or vague intuitions, but rather are put in place by the person of Jesus Christ. The whole business of the Church – whether in worship or in mission – is brought about by the activity of and under direction from the risen and ascended Son of God, who is now appropriately worshipped as true God, with the Father and the Spirit.

Quite what this means is precisely the task of Christology. And it’s also the background to the slogan ‘begotten not made’. Followers of the infamous theologian Arius in the late third and early fourth century had sought to get their heads around the place of Jesus in the Church. Surely, they thought, there can only be one true God, original and unchangeable. Jesus, they said, insofar as he is a ‘second’ to the Father, must be as close to divine as you can get without actually being fully divine. They had their own slogan: ‘there was a time when He was not’, referring to Jesus, and making what they felt was the obvious point that the Son of God did indeed have a beginning. Since the divine has no beginning, and the Son (in their understanding) had a beginning, the Son is not fully divine, but rather the first among all of the Father’s creatures.

So far so logical. But discipleship, remember, does not proceed on the basis of vague logical principles, but rather follows the reality of the person of Jesus Christ. And, as critics of Arius and his followers pointed out, Arian Christology tended to diminish the Church’s authentic worship of Jesus as Lord and God – how could it possibly be right to worship a creature, even if that creature was the very first and very best?

Against Arius, the slogan went, Jesus is ‘begotten not made’. To understand this, we need to see the two terms for what they are – representations of two different kinds of being. The second, ‘made’, describes the relationship between the Creator and the creation. The Creator makes; the creation is made. This is, essentially, the kind of relationship that Arius envisaged between the Son and the Father. But the slogan (and the creed, and thus the Church) says, this is precisely what the relationship between the Son and the Father is not.

Instead, the relationship is described as ‘begotten’. The pairing in mind here is the pairing of the ‘unbegotten’ on the one hand and the ‘begotten’ on the other. The ‘unbegotten’ is the original source and fount of all life – life that appears from nowhere, because it simply is. The ‘begotten’ is that life which is dependent on another; in this instance, the ‘begotten’ is dependent on the ‘unbegotten’. The Father is unbegotten, the Son is begotten. Crucially, being ‘begotten’ in this context does not indicate a beginning point, but simply a dependency, which the theological tradition calls the ‘eternal generation’ of the Son. The Father lives in and of himself; the Son lives in and from the Father. Both (with the Spirit also) are eternal.

So, we say and sing this Christmas, the Son of God is ‘begotten not made’. So what? Well, as noted above, a slogan is descriptively positive and appropriately polemical. What is descriptively positive about ‘begotten not made’? The credal slogan affirms that the Son’s dependency upon and obedience to the Father – his begotten-ness – properly belongs to his divinity. As the doctrine of the Trinity says much more fully, the Christian God is not a static, uneventful eternal principle, but a lively, giving-and-receiving community of Father, Son and Spirit. There is no other God before or behind this One. When we affirm that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that he is ‘begotten not made’, we celebrate that love is not just from God, but that love is in God, for God is love.

And what is appropriately polemical? No matter what might have been the case in previous generations of the Church, today we have little problem in seeing Christ as ‘one of us’. That affirmation is full of significance for us. But we must not forget that while Jesus Christ is indeed ‘one of us’, he is also, as the Son of God, ‘not made’. The historical event of the incarnation is not, for Jesus, a beginning, but rather a disclosure for us and for our salvation of his eternal begotten-ness.  Wonder of wonders, God is not caught unawares in Bethlehem. The whole story of salvation, including manger and cross and tomb, is what Jesus willingly chooses, not just from within creation, but also as creation’s Lord!

We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ…begotten not made. O come, let us adore him!

by Sheryl Anderson.

For a long time now I have been very exercised by the notion of forgiveness. It seems to be a word that Christians use freely without giving much thought to what exactly it means. It is one of those concepts that everyone thinks they understand until asked to explain, and then it becomes clear that actually it is a slippery term that it hard to define and of which it is difficult to give a proper account. What is forgiveness and what does it mean to forgive?

One of the things we like to teach our children, when they get into conflict with others (often siblings) is to say sorry and make friends. I am sure you remember that from your own childhood, or with brothers and sisters, or at school? Mostly children co-operate with this, and will sulkily and grumpily say “sorry” – sometimes complaining that it wasn’t their fault or the other person started it!

Christians often seem to think that it is an imperative for us to forgive others, and many Christians pray every day the Lord’s Prayer which contains the line, Forgive us our sins (trespasses) as we forgive those who sin (trespass) against us, as though we are in some sort of bargain with God, which means God can only forgive us if we are forgiving of others. Therefore we have to say sorry and make up…like we were taught as children.

The philosopher Richard Swinburne, in his book Responsibility and Atonement[i] argues that forgiveness follows when someone has properly atoned for the wrong that they have done you. According to Swinburne atonement involves four stages; penitence (recognising that you have wronged someone), apology (saying sorry for doing the wrong), reparation (doing what you can to put the wrong right), penance (going beyond merely putting the wrong right – offering compensation). Swinburne indicates that once someone has fulfilled these requirements, forgiveness should inevitably follow.

However, in real life serious wrongs are very difficult to put right. Personal wrongs – killing someone (deliberately or accidentally), sexual abuse or rape, exploiting someone’s vulnerability – can result in psychological damage that is not easily repaired. Similarly, collective wrongs – the death of 6 million Jews (and others) in the Holocaust; genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia, or Darfur; the effect of warfare on a population; the torture, persecution and oppression of blacks by whites in South Africa – these acts often have consequences that continue for generations.

In Country of my Skull[ii], Antjie Krog relates a story told by Father Mxolisi Mpambani during a lunch time panel discussion at the University of Cape Town.

“Once there were two boys, Tom and Bernard. Tom lived right opposite Bernard. One day Tom stole Bernard’s bicycle and every day Bernard saw Tom cycling to school on it. After a year Tom went up to Bernard, stretched out his hand and said, ‘Let us reconcile and put the past behind us.’

Bernard looked at Tom’s hand. ‘And what about the bicycle?’

‘No,’ said Tom, ‘I’m not talking about the bicycle – I’m talking about reconciliation.’”

She then goes on to make the point that traditionally the Western Church says you must forgive, because God forgave you for killing God’s Son. With the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Archbishop Desmond Tutu translated this for the post-apartheid situation in South Africa. ‘You can only be human in a humane society. If you live with hatred and revenge in your heart you dehumanize not only yourself but your community. Perhaps reparation is not essential for reconciliation and forgiveness.

It seems to me that forgiveness cannot happen outside of a relationship, for it is a performative act. To forgive one must be willing to endure the consequences of someone else’s wrong and overcome resentment. To achieve this one has to consider the breach in the relationship a greater evil than the injury caused, and this is not always the case. In some instances reconciliation is neither sensible not healthy. Survivors of sexual abuse, for example, can find themselves re-victimised by the pressure to forgive that comes from those who assume that if the perpetrator says sorry then forgiveness must follow. In these circumstances, perhaps it is enough to ask God to forgive the one who has wronged us, which is actually what Jesus did.

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[i] Swinburne, Richard, Responsibility and Atonement, Oxford University Press, 1989

[ii] Kroge, Antjie, Country of my Skull, Jonathan Cape, 1998 pp 109-110

by Ben Pugh.

I have just started writing a little devotional book about the attributes of God, and meditating on who he is has already, I think, opened my eyes to some things that were opaque before.

One observation is about idolatry. I am hardly the first to point this out, but, if there is a god that we worship in wealthy Western countries more than any other, it is greed. We don’t call it that, of course. We reify it as ‘the Economy’: this huge thing that must be continually placated, and onto whose altars we must sacrifice the poor and the natural world. The effect of this is plain to see. Like all the false gods of the Hebrew Bible, this idolatry blinds us to the obvious.

Take some of the most recent big issues: social justice, for instance. Being fair to each other is basic. Why haven’t we learned that yet? The answer, to some degree at least, is that we did once know about fairness. When we all lived in close-knit communities, fairness to one another was axiomatic. Things were far from perfect but a basic level of decency towards one another did not need to be codified in legislation or inspected against a set of criteria by someone holding a clipboard. In a community where everyone knows everyone, if you are not a fair-dealing person, the community will deal with you accordingly. And good behaviour towards one another was confirmed Sunday by Sunday by the messages heard from the pulpit. But then came the massification of culture and the massification of greed along with it. We forgot how to be fair.

Or, take the environment. When we relied on nature, with all its awesome unpredictability, we knew we had to work with it. We had no choice. We felt keenly the fact that we are part of nature. If we wanted to feed our family, we had to treat it well. Then, we bowed down to profit and forgot that all the things we make and sell are the products of nature’s bounty. So here, too, we are faced with the humiliating reality of having to learn all over again something that used to be obvious. What we were talking about at Glasgow is truly complex but, on another level, it is ridiculously basic, a mere starting point for living on planet earth. Our idolatry has dealt us a dose of collective amnesia. Our greed has made us forget how to look after the earth.

The biblical writers were ever conscious of how the allure of other gods could make Israel forget, so they never tired of restating this one simple truth: God is the only God. God’s singular entitlement to our devotion is undergirded by his self-existence, expressed programmatically in the all-important ‘I AM’ moment of Exodus 3:14. He will always be what he will always be: underived, the first cause, himself uncaused; entirely independent in thought, will and action.

It is probably no exaggeration to say that this moment of revelation to Moses kicks off a story within the story of the whole Hebrew Bible. From this moment, the underlying story it tells, and the theme it constantly returns to is, ‘Will the people of God worship the God-who-is or will they go after gods-who-are-not?’ The exodus story is a story of triumph over the gods of Egypt, not the people of Egypt, or even Pharaoh necessarily. The Ten Commands begin with: ‘you shall have no other gods before me’(Ex.20:3). The story of the wilderness wanderings is a story of faithfulness to God and the covenant He had just inaugurated through Moses, versus the allure of other loyalties tugging at the people’s hearts. The conquest and settlement of Canaan is a story about a generation that had no memory of the great wonders that the God of Israel had performed, and which now faced the shock of a sedentary existence in which the skills of agriculture must be learned. They noted that the natives worshipped Baal to make the land fertile, so they did the same. The story of the monarchy is a story of monarchs who did what was right in the sight of the Lord by honouring and obeying him and monarchs who went after other gods and led Israel in the same idolatry. The prophets are all aghast at how completely their own people had bowed down to useless gods of wood and stone. In the New Testament too, the spectre of idolatry has not gone away. John warns against it (1John 5:21); Paul warns against it (1Cor.10:14), and the main argument of Romans begins with the assertion that humanity’s primary problem is the fact that we have worshipped the creature rather than the Creator (Rom.1:18-23).

Are we following the God who really is God, or are we walking in the ways of gods that can be seen – and even controlled? There is no neutral, worship-free ground where we can stand. From the divine viewpoint, we were created to worship, and we are, therefore, all engaged in it. The starting point for remedying greed and every other idol is the same as it was for Israel. It is to give honour to the God who is God: ‘Hear O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord alone’ (Deut.6:4). Will we be part of humanity’s ancient worship disorder, or will we be part of the answer?

by Elaine Lindridge, mam and minister

‘Why use the sexist term ‘mam’ to describe what you think you’re doing?‘

This was asked of me recently when I was explaining some of my hopes for our District Pioneer Hub. Never shy of conflict I quickly responded with,

‘Why not? We’ve been using masculine terms for years,
maybe it’s time to redress the balance.’

Plus I’m not a man – although I was once called ‘Father’ by someone who was obviously confused to see a woman in a dog collar and didn’t have a clue how to address me!

When I had children there was no debate about what I would be called, I was always ‘mam’. As a proud Geordie it’s a term I don’t want to lose, but more than that, it always reminds me of the many mams who’ve gone before me. Not all of them had physically birthed new lives, but they most certainly had taught me what it means to be mam and to fill that much needed role of nurturing others. The term often carries with it not just an understanding of the role but an acceptance of parts of my region’s culture that has often favoured matriarchal traditions.

Generally speaking today, the role of mam differs little to that of most mothers. So what is it about mothering that can influence good practice, and in particular, what might a theology and practice based on mothering look like with regards to the oversight of pioneers? Perhaps a spiritual mam could employ some of the same skills that a biological mam uses in rearing children.

So what does mam do? The list is huge, but for the purposes of thinking about a spiritual mam looking after pioneers, the following are worth considering;

– she builds a home

– she offers safe space to grow

– she cleans up

– she teaches

– she cares

– she feeds

– she educates

– she plays

– she nurtures

– she ensures rest is taken

– she builds confidence

These speak to me of meeting some of the basic needs of a child and they are not too distant from the needs of pioneers. Pioneers too need somewhere to call home – a place where they feel safe enough to ‘be’ without having to constantly justify their existence. In that safe place they have the opportunity to question, learn and express doubt – all essential requisites for spiritual growth and development. Any mam will tell you that they need to make sure bedtime is adhered to in order for the child to have the much needed sleep they need to function without getting too grumpy and unreasonable! In a similar way, many in ministry need constant reminders to take time off, to rest and recuperate on a weekly basis. Food is obviously essential, and eating together is a deep way of expressing both our connectivity with God and one another. When a child makes mistakes, care is needed to ensure they know what went wrong and they learn from it. How often is that true for pioneers? As church, we’ve not been great at allowing room for failure and yet surely it is the place where we learn most. There is something very maternal about crafting an environment that allows (no, encourages!) risk taking and then gives the safe arms in which to learn from mistakes and failure. This safe place is also needed when hurt is experienced and the pioneer needs help. Like a child who falls and scuffs their knees, great love can be shown in helping them to stand again, get dusted down, dry the tears and say, ‘off you go again, you’ll be fine.’ Doing so instils confidence and nurtures growth. Mams sometimes need to give their children a little push to try something new – whether that be tasting a funny green vegetable or moving from the toddler park to the big kids park. That same encouragement is needed by pioneers – the gentle yet firm push to keep trying and to develop new skills as God leads them into new places. Followed by positive reinforcement after each new, brave and wobbly step is taken.

All of this happens best in community. Some pioneers may feel unsure of themselves – many are not even keen to use the term pioneer to describe who they are and what they do. Meeting with others who have comparable experiences and are committed to one another can be one of the most wonderful places to be. Security comes from knowing you are accepted to such a degree that it is indeed safe, and expected, that you will grow, learn, fail, laugh and cry.

I cannot help but think of Susannah Wesley who is often referred to as the ‘Mother of Methodism’ (I don’t think John & Charles called her mam but who knows?). Susannah understood how important it was to provide a stable home for her children. Not only that, but she made sure each received a good education in the home. She devoted specific time to each of her children at a designated point each week – that essential one-to-one time was something Susannah scheduled long before the modern parenting manuals thought to suggest it.

In writing all of this I have discovered something new about being mam. To put it bluntly, God is my mam. It is God who does all of these things for me;

– God builds a home

– God offers me a safe space to grow

– God cleans me up

– God teaches me

– God cares

– God feeds me

– God educates

– God plays (oh yes!)

– God nurtures

– God reminds me to rest

– God builds confidence

Thanks mam 😊

                                                         

by Ed Mackenzie.

It’s a familiar maxim today that all theology is contextual. In other words, our ideas about God and God’s relationship with humanity are always constructed in relationship to the wider cultural, religious and social context in which we exist. This does not mean, of course, that there is nothing stable or foundational in Christian discourse; there is indeed a ‘faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints’ (Jude 1:3, NRSV) which the church is commissioned to proclaim. But the different contexts in which we find ourselves does mean that we are always wrestling with the relationship between the coherence of Christian faith and its contingent expression in our own contexts.[i]

Just as theology is contextual, so too is discipleship. While the New Testament points to a specific shape to discipleship, it also gives us a vast array of images and motifs, instructions and examples to guide us in the way of Jesus. It recognises too that different people will be called in different ways to follow Jesus.

We can see this dynamic played out in Paul’s instructions to the early Christians in Colossae. For Paul, there are certain values and ‘fruits’ that all Christians are called to pursue. But at the same time, Paul recognises that how we live out our discipleship may look different depending on our situation.

To begin with the ‘coherent’ features of discipleship, Paul calls all Christians to reject the life of sin (Col 3:5-9) and to embrace the way of Christ(Col 3:12-14). We ‘put to death’ the values of our old self, such as impurity, greed and evil speech, and ‘put on’ the values of Christ, such as kindness, patience, and – above all – love.

Paul’s vision of discipleship here points to a ‘double-movement’ that is found throughout the whole of the New Testament: to be a disciple is always to turn from sin and turn to Christ. Such a double movement is not just a ‘one-off’ decision but needs to characterise our lives as a whole. As Martin Luther put it in the first of his 95 theses, ‘When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said “Repent”, He called for the entire life of believers to be one of penitence.’[ii]

For Paul as well, discipleship involves growing closer to Christ through community (Col 3:12-17). The way of Christ emerges as we relate to one another, and so Paul calls all believers to let the ‘word of Christ’ dwell within their lives and their communities. All within the church are called to encourage each other and learn together to do all for the sake of Jesus.

But Paul in Colossians also recognises that our own contexts – where we find ourselves in life – will shape our discipleship too. This becomes especially clear in Paul’s instructions for Christian households (Col 3:18 – 4:1). While all within the household are to orientate themselves to the ‘Lord’, those in different circumstances will live out their calling in different kinds of ways. The calling of parents will differ from that of children, for instance.

While the household code raises interpretive challenges for today, perhaps especially in its treatment of slavery, it nonetheless shows that Paul was attentive to context when calling people to follow Jesus. What it means to live to the Lord will be expressed in different ways depending on our circumstances in life. God knows our contexts and want us to follow Jesus in and through them.

It’s for this reason that a focus on discipleship rightly explores what is essential for all who follow Jesus and what is helpful for different ages and stages. Following Jesus for a child will look different from an adolescent, and different still for someone in work or someone in retirement. As we journey with Jesus together in faith, we can encourage one another both in what we share and in the specific challenges and choices our lives bring us. This is part of what it means, in Paul’s words, to ‘teach and admonish one another in all wisdom’ (Col 3:16b).

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[i] I am drawing this language from J. C. Beker. Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980).

[ii] Cited in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, ed. J. Dillenberger (New York: Anchor Books, 1962), p. 490.

by George Bailey.

Last week I was thinking about the epistemological frameworks which underlie practical research into the life of the church and Christian faith. This was informed amongst other things by reading Andrew Root’s book Christopraxis: a Practical Theology of the Cross (2014) – a theological methodology for practical theology based initially on Root’s research in youth ministry. At the weekend, I then took a group of young people to the Methodist Church’s children and youth assembly, 3Generate…

Root is one amongst several theologians arguing for a theological critique of the social constructionism which is dominant in the social sciences, prevalent in popular culture, and which can make a significant difference to several theological fields. The basic idea of social constructionism is that all knowledge is socially constructed. At one level this makes a lot of sense – we learn a shared language and associated understanding through social relationships. However, what does this mean for a faith perspective? How far does the theory go – are we unable to know any thing real? Can we only know our socially constructed version of reality? This could leave us in an infinite regress like a painter painting a picture of themselves painting a picture of themselves – in every painting within the painting there is an easel upon which you can see another picture of the painter and the easel. Is the only knowledge we can hold about God, ourselves and the world in some way socially constructed and not necessarily related to any actual reality?

Critical realism is an alternative framework with foundations in the natural sciences. For any science, in the broad meaning of that term – the deliberate human effort to know about reality – strong social constructionism is a problem because it can remove any concept of objective reality; all there is to know about are human attempts to talk about knowledge. Both the natural sciences and theology (the human effort to know about and talk about God) might need to argue for the existence of reality outside of our socially constructed knowing and for the recognition of a way that this reality interacts with our experience. Reality is really there and really knowable, but as soon as it interacts with our social constructions (that is, as soon as we experience it, and therefore interpret it, and so can think and talk about it) it is filtered through social constructions which always need to be critically analysed – hence ‘critical realism’. For Christian faith, this helpfully encompasses the way that although we live within socially constructed ways of understanding God, the world and ourselves, God is also a reality entirely outside of us and of our knowledge, and God can break into that social construction – we can experience God, and this is a new voice in our social construction which interacts with and develops our knowledge. How we interpret this experience is variable and sometimes conflicted, but it is nevertheless potentially a real experience of a real God which has a causal effect on our knowledge and action.

Root is keen to maintain as well that this experience of God is both individually interacted with and also communally the subject of social interpretation and knowledge formation. To reduce this only to individual subjective experience risks the extremes of some evangelical theologies which resist communal hermeneutic analysis. To only consider communal interpretation risks a move too far towards strong social constructionism akin to some liberal or post-liberal theologies which resist the possibility of direct experience of God affecting our understanding.

With this recent reading of Root’s version of critical realism in my mind, I arrived at 3Generate. Here the social construction of Christian faith is very apparent, and an analysis of that social construction is an inherent part of the ministry practiced by the organisers and youth group leaders. A large Christian youth event includes within it the desire of the faith community to help its young people inhabit the same conceptual space as the church. The language of faith and Christian discipleship is to be handed on carefully; yet what version of this socially constructed faith is to be shared? To what extent are the young people to be introduced not just into the broad terms of the communal language of faith but also to the tensions and conflicts that exist within that broad community? A further question is being negotiated within the event as to what extent the young people might receive the tradition of the Christian community, and to what extent can they by joining the community also shape and change it?

To stop there though could leave the youth event functioning within a purely social constructionist view of reality. The theme of 3Generate this year has been ‘In Tune’: how are we in tune with God? A critical realist epistemology is necessary to allow this expectation that young people (and old!) can have subjective experience of God which co-exists within a reasonable, and I would argue necessary, degree of social constructionist analysis. These issues are usually (hopefully) present in any local church’s life of worship, discipleship, mission and fellowship, but they can also often be left unspoken or lie hidden under the accepted way that things operate. As young people at 3Generate actively debate the way that they can experience God, and also how their voice might be formed and heard by the rest of the church, for me it is very clear that we all need to work harder at analysing our social constructions of knowledge, our subjective experiences of God, and how they are brought together in a critical realist epistemological framework to form a coherent and developing account of Christian faith.