Theology Everywhere

by David Clough.

Inequality is lethal. That’s the conclusion of a recent report by Michael Marmot and colleagues. It asks why the UK had one of the highest mortality rates from COVID-19 in the world, and concludes that a key reason is pre-pandemic inequalities that left particular groups of people vulnerable. We were not all in this together: you were much more likely to die from COVID-19 if you had a previous health condition; lived in a deprived area; lived in poor or overcrowded housing; had a high-risk job; or were Black, Asian, or from another ethnic minority.

In the past, Christian thinkers have disagreed about whether inequality as such is a bad thing. Some have seen the practice of the early church where everyone sold what they owned and gave according to need (Acts 2:44–5; 4:32–34) as an endorsement of socialism or communism. Others have claimed that Christianity affirms the individual economic liberty of capitalism. But these disagreements seem quaintly irrelevant when confronting the extraordinary economic inequalities that confront us today.

At a global level, we tolerate increasing levels of extreme wealth inequality. Oxfam reports that the richest 1 per cent of the world’s population own more than twice as much as 6.9 billion other people. Just 22 of the world’s richest men have more wealth than all the women in Africa put together. This inequality has grown rapidly since the 1980s. The reason for this is not mysterious: we give assent to economic systems that redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich and allow these gains to accumulate. This results in the scandal that some enjoy obscene affluence while others suffer from malnutrition. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the richest have increased their wealth further: billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter between April and July 2020.

Inequality is growing within the UK, too, where the richest 10% of the population own 44% of the wealth, while the poorest 50% own just 9%. This impacts not just standard of living, but health and life expectancy. People in more deprived areas have shorter lives and spend more of them in ill-health. No wonder they were disproportionately vulnerable to the current COVID-19 pandemic. The Joint Public Issues Team (JPIT) have identified poverty and inequality as a key priority, and have reported on the impacts of Universal Credit, benefit sanctions, food banks, and poor housing.

One key academic contribution to the debate about inequality was the 2009 book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson. It argued that societies as a whole do better when there is less inequality: there is more mutual trust, less anxiety and illness, and less excessive consumption. The findings of the book are very likely to be confirmed in relation to the relative performance of countries responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Private property is hard to justify theologically. I still recall a childhood walk in the company of my grandfather, Rev. J. Leonard Clough, who represented the Primitive Methodist Hartley College at the Uniting Conference of 1932. Walking through a wood not far from our house, we were challenged by someone who told us we were on private property. My grandfather roared the opening of Psalm 24: ‘The earth is the Lord’s!’. He was agreeing with early Christian theologians who held that God was the only proper owner of land, that the goods of the earth were for the common good, and private property was a consequence of the fall. The 13th century theologian Thomas Aquinas, who does not have the reputation of a radical, agreed and argued that taking goods from the rich that were not being used for the common good to meet urgent human need was not theft. The only final theological justification for private property is that it serves the common good. Where there is both abundant wealth and urgent unmet human need, nationally and internationally, it is clear that it is not serving this purpose. There is then a strong argument for redistributing surplus wealth to provide the poor, reversing the current direction of flow.

The question that follows is how Christians can help to shape policy on taxation, public services, and benefits that address the lethal effects of the inequalities we confront. The work of JPIT and Oxfam are important in raising awareness of these issues nationally and internationally, respectively, but their work needs much wider reception among the churches to enable change.

by Josie Smith.

It seems that many people have been doing so since about September, with an added anxiety this year about whether or not it could happen normally.

I recall a few years ago walking through a local garden centre in early November with our then minister in pursuit of a quick lunch in their café.  It would have been difficult to find gardening gloves, secateurs or planters, let alone rakes, watering cans and wheelbarrows among the tier upon tier of Christmas-themed objects, twinkly lights, life-sized nodding illuminated fibreglass reindeer and artificial trees.

The minister mused ‘There are twelve days of Christmas, and none of them is in November.’

I remembered this in October this year, in the garden centre again during a lull in the lockdown.   They were busy setting up the Christmas display, with newly-built wooden partitions and shelves making a sort of maze to negotiate, arrows indicating permitted direction, signs on the floor at two-metre intervals, and sanitizer on the counter.   (I recalled a cartoon I saw once, inspired by this sort of premature celebration, with the caption ‘But she hasn’t even told Joseph she’s pregnant yet!’)

The papers and the broadcast media have been speculating since September about what Christmas would look like this year.  On the 19^th November in the ‘i’ newspaper Gaby Hinsliff wrote ‘Demanding a Christmas suspension of pandemic hostilities, as if the virus could be trusted to do the decent thing and respect a religious holiday, sounds horribly like an attempt to maintain the illusion that we’re in charge – when the truth is that the virus is sliding back into the driving seat.’   This year has been like no other (though the Black Death and later manifestations of the Plague had none of our medical knowledge or pharmaceutical resources so were much worse to live through or more likely die in) and attitudes range from those who want a ‘normal’ Christmas, whatever that is, to those who say that as other faiths were not able to celebrate their festivals ‘normally’ why should we?

We are almost at the end of the season of Advent, the time of waiting.   What are we waiting for?   What’s Christmas about, really?    Do you ‘love it or hate it’ as though it were Marmite?    When I was a little girl, long ago before the explosion in consumerism, I quite liked (some of) the presents, though when everyone decided to give me boxes of handkies one year I was disappointed.   All I wanted was a kitten.   But the routine demands – that I perform for the visiting relatives, which I am sure they disliked as much as I did, that I dress up in a red dressing-gown and pretend to be Father Christmas, and then, after tea in my great-aunt’s icy dining room, that I help to wash up (my brother being excused on account of being a boy) – made me determine never to subject my children to such expectations.  

Doing Christmas Differently edited by Nicola Slee and Rosie Miles (Wild Goose, 2006) is a compilation arising from the thoughts and experience of a group of eight single people who could not, or would not, be part of an idealised, but often fraught, traditional ‘family’ Christmas.   They met for a week at Holland House, Cropthorne, to create a way of marking Christmas that went against the grain of mainstream social custom.   One anonymous piece, late on Christmas Eve, is from someone planning to spend the day alone, from choice.    Well-intentioned friends and family had pressed invitations, but had met with cheerful refusal.    The day would be spent with the cat, the radio and TV, good food and drink, and a nice warm bed at the end.    It concludes ‘I have seized the day, Jesus!   Happy birthday, God!’  

It’s all right to be different.

For some weeks, the mechanics of the 25^th December, and the days before and after, were left to us to interpret, and now new stricter restristions are disrupting the plans many people had recently made.   Many of us have distant family members we can’t meet – and many of us don’t want to take our foot off the brakes in any case, knowing that mixing will inevitably increase the risk of more illness in January.

But as we reach Christmas on Friday, may you enjoy whatever it is you are able to do.   We welcome again, as we do every year, the eternal God, gift-wrapped as a human baby. Pandemic or no, God is with us.  That’s what Christmas is about.

by Andrew Stobart.

‘After all we’ve been through this year, we deserve our Christmas!’ The lady on the news was from a town not too far away; the strength of her feeling is echoed by many and is reflected in the efforts being taken to relax lockdown restrictions in time for the festivities. This is the Christmas that we need; or, as she put it, that we deserve.

The trouble is – for her, and for us – Christmas is precisely not what we deserve. Our economies and social calendars – even in the church – might have become so reliant on this annual celebration that we find it hard, twenty centuries later, to grasp what was straightforwardly obvious to the favoured few who were privy to the birth of Christ. As they were drawn into the divine arc of incarnation, those first witnesses of God’s ‘grace upon grace’ (John 1:16) understood it as the very definition of mercy.

So Mary, in responding to God’s implanted Word, sings with amazement that God has chosen her as an instrument in the fulfilment of his promised ‘mercy’ (Luke 1:50, 54). When old Elizabeth gives birth to John, the neighbourhood erupts with joy that God had shown her ‘mercy’ (Luke 1:58). And father Zechariah, full of God’s Spirit, speaks of the deep significance of these astonishing events: ‘Thus God has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors…by the tender mercy of God, the dawn from on high will break upon us.’ (Luke 1:72, 78)

Christ comes, in other words, not because we deserve it – no more us now than them then – but because God is merciful. This is foundational to the Christian story.

And yet, I note, the term ‘mercy’ has all but dropped from our theological lexicon. You won’t find it in the index of many books of theology, and while we use it in our prayers of intercession (Lord, have mercy), frequent repetition does not equate with understanding. Maybe I speak only for myself, but I feel I have preached and prayed and counselled much and often about grace, but very little about mercy. It is perhaps time to do something about this.

So what can be said about mercy? A few thoughts:

First, mercy is not so much a divine attribute as it is a divine activity. Or, perhaps better, we ‘attribute’ mercy to God (saying, ‘God is merciful’) only because God first performs mercy. In saying this, I of course give away my conviction that we understand God’s identity only by way of God’s exertions, which locates me some way along the theological trajectory of Barth, Jenson and others. It is far less interesting, in my view, to say ‘God is merciful’ than it is to say ‘God shows mercy’. While Mary, Zechariah and others may have confessed God’s merciful nature many times in worship, the event of incarnation revealed God’s mercy to them as a transformative encounter. The birth of John, the foetus growing in Mary’s womb – these are the merciful God at work, in specific, if quite astonishing, ways.

Christmas is not so much the declaration of an eternal truth about God (though it is, retrospectively, possible to say that the God who acts to incarnate in Christ must always have been just so); it is, rather, the celebration of a particular, unique, energetic exertion of God, to perform mercy and so to keep his promises. In short, mercy is not a characteristic simply possessed by God, but rather achieved, and supremely so in Christ. In giving himself to us in Christ, God’s mercy is ‘done’.

Secondly, mercy is the contextualisation of grace.I grew up with the definitions of grace as ‘God giving us what we don’t deserve’ and mercy as ‘God not giving us what we do deserve’. Understood this way, it’s obvious why we might prefer to talk about grace. Grace is gift – the free, superabundant extravagance of a God who loves without measure. Grace affirms us as recipients of divine favour. Mercy, on the other hand, in this definition, feels rather less positive, even if it is entirely accurate. We really ought to have been excluded from God’s favour, but by God’s mercy, we are not.

The trouble with these definitions is that they draw far too sharp a distinction between grace and mercy, as if they are different aspects of God’s activity. We would do better, I suggest, to see mercy as the character that grace has, given that grace is being shown to us. Grace – the abundant overflow of God in life-giving relationship – can only ever be experienced by us as mercy, because no matter how close we think we have come to God, it is always, only and ever the case that we have a place in Christ at all because of God’s choice to be faithful to his promise, rather than any faltering movement on our part.

Christmas is therefore not just gift; it is mercy. While Jesus is born a tiny, innocent baby, there is nothing naive about incarnation. While the Son’s eyes may be closed in the manger, the Father’s eyes are wide-open. This baby, this birth, is not a divine miscalculation about the willingness of humanity to enter into a deal. It was Mercy that was born that night – because the humiliation of the Lord of the universe in nappies is as nothing compared to the next necessary episode in the performance of grace: the sinless Son of God bearing the sin of the world to its tomb in his broken, crucified body. That is not what he deserved; neither is he what we deserved. But it is what happened. It is what God did, for us and for the world. It is mercy.

Charles Wesley, as ever, sums it so well, in an almost forgotten Christmas hymn:

O Mercy Divine,
How couldst Thou incline,
My God, to become such an infant as mine?

‘We deserve our Christmas’? Lord, have mercy.

by Sheryl Anderson.

It has always struck me as odd that the cycle of the Christian year begins with Advent. Surely, Christmas, or Epiphany, or Easter Day would be a more suitable time? Scholars are divided as to the exact origins of the season of Advent. It appears to be a western invention, but there are also eastern traditions analogous to the western themes associated with the incarnation – the coming of God among us in human form.

There is evidence of the observance of Advent as early as the fourth and fifth centuries in Gaul and Spain, largely through fasting, prayer and meditation. The season was not observed in Rome until the sixth century, but it took some time before (under a variety of influences) Advent gained its dual character of a penitential time of preparation for Christmas and of looking forward to the second coming of Christ. Consequently, although Advent may denote the beginning of the Christian year, when and why this started is shrouded in mystery. This seemed to me to be somewhat ironic, and caused me to reflect on why and how the way we begin ‘things’ matters.

The start of Advent also marks the shift in the Revised Common Lectionary. In 2020 we move from Year A to Year B readings, the most noticeable difference being that the Gospel readings come primarily from Mark. On the second Sunday of Advent the beginning of Mark is the set text.

How the different Gospel writers start their accounts of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is significant. The Gospel of Matthew begins with the words ‘Biblos geneseos Jesou Christou…,’ which can be understood as a bit of pun – ‘The book of the Genesis of Jesus Messiah.’ As the Torah begins with Genesis, then this book will too. The Gospel of Luke begins with a prologue, introducing what follows to, the ‘most excellent Theophilus’. The honorific language here is the language of patronage, so the work that follows is being written for a benefactor and a social superior. The Gospel of John also begins with a prologue. The opening Greek words ‘ἐν ἀρχῇ’ (In the beginning) would be recognisable to all readers of the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures as the opening words of the Book of Genesis. It appears that all these different ‘beginnings’ are significant. If you are going to tell the greatest story ever told, then how you begin matters.

However, beginning Advent with the Gospel of Mark is singularly unhelpful, because none of our Christmas stories come from Mark. There are no references to Jesus’ conception or family background, no birth narratives, no childhood incidents. If we are looking for ways to begin getting into the Christmas spirit, then Mark is useless.

Nevertheless, Mark’s beginning has the same purpose as all the other Gospel writers. He wants to establish right from the start credibility and authority for the account to follow. His opening line – ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’ – form the title of the work. The Greek word euangelion, translated as good news or gospel, is perhaps better rendered here as ‘proclamation’. At the time Mark was writing, public proclamations often announced news intended to be understood as of benefit to the populace; a new ruler granting an amnesty, a ruler’s victory in war, the birth of a royal child, and the like. In the Greek version of the Hebrew scripture, the term euangelion referred to God’s intervention on behalf of God’s people. Thus, Mark’s opening words announce ‘the good message of Jesus Messiah,’ and immediately raises for any 1^st Century Mediterranean reader the question of Jesus’ authority to claim such a title. In that society public authority was derived from one’s status or honour rating. That rating in turn, was usually dependent upon the standing of one’s family, particularly one’s father. Unlike Matthew and Luke, Mark provides no genealogy for Jesus; instead he openly identifies Jesus as ‘Son of God,’ giving him both status and authority. In the beginning, the reader may not be entirely convinced by these claims, but hopefully will be sufficiently intrigued to continue with the narrative.

Then Mark does a clever thing. He quotes the Hebrew scriptures, notably selected verses from Malachi 3 and Isaiah 40. In oral societies, honour and esteem is given to writers and speakers who can recite the tradition, especially if they can do so imaginatively and persuasively. Using this device Mark both establishes his own authority and supports his case. By verse four we are hooked.

Most James Bond films begin with the hero engaged in some dramatic battle against impossible odds. In the course of the first five minutes anyone unfamiliar with the genre will learn everything they need to know about the character of the hero. The Gospel of Mark begins a bit like that. We are in for a treat!

by Ben Pugh.

Sociologists of religion often seem unable to break free of an understanding of secularity as the absence of something. They proceed on the assumption that diminishing recourse to supernatural means entails the subtraction of a social behaviour – going to church – and their task, therefore, is to account for this subtraction. Philosophers tend to ask a different question: what has been added that makes belief in God seem so superfluous? What ideology, what belief system is this? It is in these philosophical reflections that I find the most help as I look out across a culture that, by and large, remains resolutely indifferent to faith.

The more I look at what secularity is the more I am struck by how utterly dependent it is for its existence on dualisms. It survives by declaring that there is a division between two realms. The one it carves out for itself as the ‘secular;’ the other realm it leaves all around the edges and calls it the ‘religious.’ It thrives by being able to police this boundary. Blur the boundary between the sacred and the secular, between faith and reason, between nature and grace, or, worse still, launch a forceful invasion of the realm of the secular, in the manner of Islamic extremism, and secularity suddenly gets a new lease of life. It sets to work developing new bureaucratic systems such as the Prevent strategy which exist to keep the secular realm sanitised of religious delusion.

Once I unmask secularism as a coherent belief system I might feel that I have it licked, and I sneer at it. But then I soon feel powerless: it is so utterly pervasive, and so a degree of frustration sets in. But lately I am thinking it might be better to approach the secular world in a spirit of repentance. And I think the need for this humility becomes apparent when we look at history.

The high Middle Ages saw the Church reach the very peak of its power: it was as powerful then as secularism is today. But the more the Church’s power became threatened, the more violent it became. The crusades against the Muslims were soon followed by the internal crusade against heresy: the Inquisitions. Then the Reformation happened. This might have brought to an end such terror, but it actually resulted in further violence: the Wars of Religion. These wars were ended at the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and were really the last straw for those who longed for a more tolerant society.  Religion’s association, in the European mind, with violence and contention runs very deep. After Westphalia, rational, secular government was hailed as the bringer of peace, and religion was put into what one historian has described as a “punishment corner,” ^[i] which is where it still is. The stage was set for secularism to take over the roles of Christendom piece by piece with a set of like-for-like replacements which kept God out of peoples’ thinking.

Meanwhile, long before the Peace of Westphalia, some subtle theological shifts had been taking place. First, William of Ockham’s philosophy led to the separating out of all earthly tangible things from heavenly transcendent things. He encouraged the notion that this earthly zone was the proper sphere of secular government while the mysteries of theology and religion were the business of the Church alone. Other theological developments gave us an all-powerful, overwhelmingly wilful deity who was utterly sovereign and inscrutable, a God removed from intimate involvement with his world, making deism, agnosticism and then atheism look more possible. Despite the efforts of Aquinas, the worlds of faith and reason had split asunder within Christianity itself.  

Over the following centuries, the Enlightenment project finished the job. Tragically, the push of Enlightenment naturalism was accompanied by the pull of supernaturalist Christian counter-cultures that preached the importance of true faith, of being holy and separate, or of being able to offer the dramatic counter-claim of supernatural gifts and signs and wonders. ‘Such a dualism,’ said Henri de Lubac, ‘just when it imagined that it was most successfully opposing the negations of naturalism, was most strongly influenced by it, and the transcendence in which it hoped to preserve the supernatural with such jealous care was, in fact, a banishment.’[ii]

Both of these factors: political and theological; deliberate and unintended, perhaps give some clarity to the unique situation we have in the West where religion is privatized. And, perhaps now more than ever there is a wide consensus that the convictions of religious people are best kept as a strictly private affair. It is assumed, in any case, that the true destiny of historic Christian morality is today’s tolerant, humanistic utopia governed by secular reason.

And so, I am wondering if the first step in reaching out is to recognise that, even though parts of this story I have told may involve forms of Christianity with which we would not personally identify, it is Christianity itself that is largely to blame for secularism’s triumph. Maybe our reluctance to say ‘sorry’ to our culture is precisely because it is always somebody else’s Christianity that is culpable, not ours.

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[i] William T. Cavanaugh, “’A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House:’ The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” in Modern Theology, vol.11, issue 4, Oct 1995, 410.

[ii] Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, trans. Lancelot C. Sheppard and Elizabeth Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 313–314

by Elaine Lindridge.

I was sitting in park recently, trying to keep warm on a bench whilst reading my book. The unmistakable ‘clip-clop, clip-clop’ noise made me look up and notice two horses with their riders approaching. Apparently they too were out for their daily stroll. Ten minutes later I heard them again as they returned from the end of the park – only this time they had company! A young girl, I would guess around 9 years old, joyously running behind them with her younger friend trying to keep up. She turned to her friend and shouted,  ‘I want to go horse riding so I’m just going to hop on’. Her enthusiasm made me smile – as did her belief that she could just catch up, hop on and become a horse-rider.

Back to my book, I zoned out the activities of the park in order to read. I was reading Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again by Rachel Held Evans. An excellent book in which Rachel does not shy away from the texts that have caused her to struggle. She shares some of her big questions and her journey back to an appreciation of the scriptures. I was particularly enjoying chapter 6 which asks ‘what is the good news?’ Rachel writes,

              ‘To the Galilean children who annoyed the disciples by asking Jesus for a         blessing, the good news is that Jesus is the kind of king who laughs at     their jokes and tousles their hair’.

A few minutes later, I saw the little girl walking back through the park.  I’d seen that she’d managed to catch up with the horse riders and she’d been talking with them. I’ll never know why she chose to approach me…there were plenty of other people around. Despite the fact that I hadn’t waved or even smiled she walked up and with a big smile on her face she simply stated, ’I’m going horse-riding tomorrow’.

I smiled and couldn’t help but think about Matthew 18:1-5

              … the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like  little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

At times, this passage has been used to encourage people to believe and not doubt or question their faith. In the same book, Rachel Held Evans has something to say about this;

              “I’ve often said that those who say having a childlike faith means not asking        questions haven’t met too many children.” 

As a 13 year old who was new to faith and new to church, I distinctly remember being rebuked when I came with all my questions. Fortunately a wonderful, older woman called Joyce took me under her wing and shared her answers alongside her own questions too.

To see this girl in the park with enough innocent conviction to believe that she could simply hop on a horse and become a rider was totally refreshing. Whilst I hadn’t even entertained the notion that she might be allowed to go horse-riding, her abundance of honestly, boldness and natural faith spilled out of her as she ran after the riders and presented them with her request.

In recent times my faith has been lacking. I’ve had far more questions than answers, and at times I’ve been afraid to even address those questions never mind look for any answers. How will we as a church cope as this pandemic continues? What will be left? How is my calling changing? What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus when you can’t go anywhere? How do I share faith and demonstrate the love of God when I don’t see anyone beyond my household? What next? How will our Methodist structures cope under the strain? Should our structures cope or is it time for them to implode?

These are just some of my questions – please don’t judge me for my lack of faith. But in the dead of night when it is dark and still and sleep has hidden itself, questions circulate like a vulture and consume my thoughts. Perhaps you experience this too and could list the questions you dare not address.

So I am very happy to be reminded that it’s good to question. Like children perhaps we can come boldly before God and be honest about our uncertainties, doubts and unanswerable (at least for now) questions. It’s okay to humbly acknowledge, ‘we just don’t know’ and live with unresolved questions because God is still faithful, especially in times of uncertainty. But if we’re going to be like children then let’s also come before God with exuberance, innocence and expectant faith.

Oh Lord help me to be like the little girl – to expect, have faith, and received.

by Jonathan Pye.

In Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, Fermina says, ‘nothing is more difficult than love.’[i] Márquez somewhat bleakly characterises unrequited love as a kind of disease often fatal to those people infected by it – love in a time of often fatal disease has unmistakable resonances for us in this time of global pandemic.

Over the past months, when most of us have, by necessity, spent more time in our homes than out and about, one of the (few!) positives is that I have had more time to read those things that would otherwise have had to wait. One such is Pope Francis’ latest encyclical, Fratelli Tutti[ii] – a document of some 43,000 words. While it focusses on contemporary social and economic problems, in this time of Covid-19 (which Francis sees as exposing the failure of the world to work together during the crisis) its breadth is truly exhausting – immigration, racism, social inequality, economic deprivation, international co-operation and relationships, individualism, the free-market and the common good, inter-religious dialogue.

What holds these themes together can be seen in the encyclical’s sub-title: ‘on fraternity and social friendship’[iii]. Its central message is a call for greater solidarity between people and nations, and especially with the most vulnerable in society. Whilst I do not propose to summarise the encyclical, I want to select a few passages and to apply them to our current situation, admittedly in an undoubtedly nuanced way.

The notion of ‘neighbour’, a word which Francis uses frequently, especially with reference to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, is an important thread that runs through the encyclical. What it means to relate to our neighbour, especially when the neighbour is perceived as ‘other’ to us, has been a key theme of our relationships both locally and nationally.

An example of this is the longstanding divide between North and South, which is in reality a divide between rich and poor, the socially advantaged and the socially disadvantaged, with its deleterious effects on education, health and life expectancy, which has in the current crisis become even more starkly delineated. It is seen in the damaging political disagreements between central government (based in the South) and many in local leadership (based in the North) which led, at least in some cases of regional ‘tiering’, to lockdowns in Northern cities and communities being imposed with no dialogue and often little notice. In such circumstances Francis’ statements that, ‘Destroying self-esteem is an easy way to dominate others…’[iv] and ‘the best way to dominate and gain control over people is to spread despair and discouragement, even under the guise of defending certain values’ [v] resonate poignantly.

And if such people ‘push back’ then we need to remember that, ‘often, the more vulnerable members of society are the victims of unfair generalizations’ [vi] and that such reactions arise out of a long history of scorn and social exclusion.Francis makes it clear that even when the ideas themselves may be good or well-intentioned, they are likely to be rejectedif they are ‘presented in a cultural garb that is not [peoples’] own and with which they cannot identify.’[vii]  Indeed, Francis goes so far as to liken the radical individualism and lack of social cohesion which consciously or unconsciously underpins such insensitive attitudes themselves to, ‘a virus that is extremely difficult to eliminate’.[viii]

In the end, for Francis, everything depends on our ability to see the need for a change of heart, attitudes and lifestyles (what the New Testament characterises as metanoia) and the recognition that all people are our sisters and brothers, demonstrated, not least politically, in the exercise of self-giving love.

Having begun with a quote from Márquez’s novel, I end with another – words spoken by Florentino that distil the prolixity of Fratelli Tutti to a sentence: ‘Think of love,’ she says, ‘as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself.’[ix]

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[i] Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera. (Penguin Modern Classics, 2007).

[ii] http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html October 3rd 2020.

[iii] The title of the encyclical has attracted some criticism for its gendered language of ‘fraternity’, unfairly perhaps, because the title is a direct quotation from St Francis of Assisi and because, in the body of the text, Pope Francis speaks throughout of ‘all brothers and sisters’.

[iv] Fratelli Tutti, 52.

[v] Ibid., 15.

[vi] Ibid., 234.

[vii] Ibid., 219.

[viii] Ibid., 105.

[ix] Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera. (Penguin Modern Classics, 2007).

This is the second of our series of articles through the year from Spectrum, each taking a theme from the book of Acts…

by Tony Buglass.

Acts 10.1-33; 15.1-35

The church may either be inclusive of different types of people, or it may try to make everyone conform, excluding anyone ‘different’.  Following Jesus involves a journey, but that creates a tension between ‘God is leading us into new ways of living and believing’ and ‘we’ve always done it this way!’

The disciples were Aramaic-speaking Torah-observant Jews.  After Pentecost, the church began as Hebraic Torah-observant Messianic Jews with their own assembly, but also worshipping in the Temple. As the faith spread, it included not only converts from Pharisaic Judaism, more conservative regarding the Law, but Hellenistic Jews, who were generally more liberal.  The community into which the faith was spreading was mixed.

This was the mixed ground over which the Christian faith spread, adapting as it went.  Terms like ‘Messiah’ or ‘Christ’, which made sense to Jews, were meaningless to Gentiles; words like ‘Lord’ made sense to both, so one of the first major creedal statements was ‘Jesus is Lord’ (1 Cor.12:3).

There were cultural tensions from the start as the faith spread into more diverse communities.  The persecution under Saul of Tarsus scattered believers into Samaria and Galilee.  Peter and John touring the area met God at work in cultures far removed from their own. Both Peter and Cornelius had visions, leading them in the right direction.  Cornelius was a God-fearer, a Gentile who worshipped with the Jews, but not prepared to undergo circumcision.  Peter had just seen God at work among Gentiles, so felt able to accept the hospitality of Simon the tanner, an unclean trade which no ‘good Jew’ would normally accept.  His vision was triggered by hunger, and probably a memory of Jesus’ words about ‘unclean food’ (Mt.15:11).  He thus felt able to enter the house of a Gentile, which a Jew would see as making him unclean.  The scene was thus set for an outpouring of the Spirit and the experience of God working beyond the hitherto accepted boundaries.

Not all could accept the new understandings.  Conservative Jewish Christians insisted that Gentiles coming into the faith must be circumcised.  The Council of Jerusalem took place under the presidency of James in about 50AD: the claim that all should be brought under the Law in that way was answered by the experience of Peter with Cornelius, and of Paul and Barnabas seeing God at work in the Gentile community of Antioch.  The conclusion was compromise: Gentiles need not be circumcised, but certain laws should be observed.  Some are general ethics and morality, while those concerning blood and sacrifice would avoid alienating the Jews. They in turn were expected to accept the uncircumcised as fellow-believers.  The compromise was in time overtaken by events: the church became more Gentile as it spread, and the Jewish community less willing to accept believers in Jesus as Messiah.  Diversity happened, sometimes leading to schism, sometimes contained within the different traditions.  So it has continued, to the present day.

Questions:                                                                                                                                     

1. There is a tension between “we’ve always done it this way’ and “God is leading us into new ways”. How far can a church change without losing its original vision?

2. Ecumenical relations have come a long way in the last few generations. How far is it possible to accept one another and work together while disagreeing on what we believe?

3. “There are some churches where LGBT people are welcome, and some where they aren’t.  As long as there’s somewhere in the church where everyone is welcome, that’s all right.”  So said an LGBT member of their experience of the church.  Is it possible for the church to contain such opposing views, and still live together as one fellowship?

by Tom Greggs.

We live in an age in which our identities shape so much of our engagement with the world. Even covid-19 seems to differentiate in relation to identity with certain groups being more liable to contract it in a dangerous way than others—groups, indeed, not based on any medical conditions but on other factors of identity (such as gender and race) or else in terms of material wealth and social privilege.

The fight for personal privileging at the expense of the other is as old as humanity itself.[i] Indeed, the fall narrative indicates a horizontal fall (in relation to the self-preservation of the individual over and against the other) even before a vertical one: humans fall in relation to each other before they fall (narrativally) in relation to God. Humans become ashamed of each other (Gen 3:8-10) and they divert blame from each other (Gen 3:12,14). They become prepared to sacrifice the other for the sake of their own privilege: ‘It wasn’t me, God, but Eve – the woman you gave me,’ says Adam, while Eve diverts the blame to another creature in the garden (the serpent).

In salvation, through Christ and the ongoing work of the Spirit, we are put right with one another as well as with God. Rather than privileging each of themselves, the early church was called to hold all things in common, and to privilege the widow and the orphan (Acts 2:44-45, 4:34-35; 1 Tim 5:3; Jas 1:27 cf. Deut 10:18, 15:4; Ps 146:9). And in salvation we are told the differences we have are rendered subservient to the most profound identity we share in Christ (Gal 3:28).

In baptism, we lose our old identities of privilege and hierarchy, and discover who we are in relation to one another in Jesus. To deny this on any side or to fail to uphold it in any way is to deny the gospel, to deny our baptism, to deny who we are in Christ and who the Spirit is making us in redemption. Indeed, it is not just the case that there is no longer ‘slave’ in Christ, but there is also no longer ‘free’ (Gal. 3:28): to be in Christ abolishes that way of being ‘free’ that requires somebody else to be a slave. To be in Christ abolishes, we might say, a competitive polity of privilege.

We need to rethink in radical ways what it is to find a fundamental identity in Christ which undermines social, material and relational injustice, transforming not only the sense of who we are, but the very practice of our humanity in the communities of which we are a part. This is not a psychological fulfilment of inclusion but a practical and living practice of belonging: we belong fundamentally to Christ in whom the privileged find themselves often outcasts and the outcasts find themselves privileged.

Put personally, I am not foundationally male or white or from a working-class background, any more than I am foundationally a person with black hair (in fact, it’s greying). No! I may well be shaped inevitably by all these identities, but I am foundationally and fundamentally made in the image of God, a participant in Christ, a child of God, a human who shares Christ’s humanity, a Christian baptised by water and the Spirit. All other markers count as nothing in relation to this high calling and high identity: at best, these identities subsist in the identity I have in Christ. This asymmetry of the fundamental and the subsistent should shape my theology and my method, but more profoundly my life, my ethics, my discipleship. It is not the privileging, then, of those like me (whoever that ‘me’ is!) which is should be my concern in my dealings with society, but the reality of encountering the gospel and its absolute claim on my life through the resurrected Jesus and the power of the Spirit. This absolute claim involves a transformation of my patterns of life and behaviour, my sense of who I am, and my desire for a piece of the privilege pie.

It is not only our identities which we must consider in relation to these matters, but also issues which are more broadly social and economic: social sin and evil, including structural injustice, poverty and vast material inequality. Scripture does not consider justice to be about fighting for a piece of the privilege pie for me or those like ‘me’. Instead, Scripture repeatedly talks prophetically about issues of justice, of righting injustice, and of finding God in the outcast, the least and the last. Meanwhile, those who presume their place of privilege and fight for it (as the Pharisees and Sadducees did – Mt 23:6; Lk 11:43) find themselves in a very precarious place. The Prophets resound with calls for justice and care for the poor and the needy. In comparison even to liturgical worship, the God of Hebrews (of the Hapirus, the slaves) calls forth for justice, and it is God’s call we should heed in our divided world, especially at this time of crisis, as we hear Christ encounter us as the Great Prophet echoing the words of His predecessors:

I hate, I despise your festivals,

    and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,

    I will not accept them;

and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals

    I will not look upon.

Take away from me the noise of your songs;

    I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

But let justice roll down like waters,

    and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. (Amos 5:21-4)

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[i] I have discussed this in other places at length before: most notably, my overly large Dogmatic Ecclesiology Vol 1: The Priestly Catholicity of the Church, but also my more digestible The Breadth of Salvation and even on this forum before.

by Raj Bharat Patta.

The recent announcement of the 2020 Nobel Peace prize to the World Food Programme (WFP), is a wakeup call to the world to recognise the grave reality of the global food crisis. Millions of people today suffer from or face the threat of hunger. The Norwegian Nobel Committee (NNC) praised the WFP, “for its push for international solidarity and for multilateral cooperation, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.” In 2019, the WFP provided assistance to close to 100 million people in 88 countries who are victims of acute food insecurity and hunger. Especially in the face of the global pandemic this year, the WFP has demonstrated an impressive ability to intensify its efforts to address hunger, starvation, violence and conflict. WFP has stated, “Until the day we have a medical vaccine, food is the best vaccine against chaos.” In awarding this peace prize to WFP, the NNC has also exposed the intrinsic link between hunger and armed conflict and explained this link as “a vicious circle.” It further said, “war and conflict can cause food insecurity and hunger, just as hunger and food insecurity can cause latent conflicts to flare up and trigger the use of violence. We will never achieve the goal of zero hunger unless we also put an end to war and armed conflict.”

As the world this year is taken over by the global pandemic, WFP receiving this award under the category of peace has some theological significance. Firstly, we need to recognise that hunger is the deeper translation of conflict. Secondly, it is time to acknowledge that ‘hunger triggers violence, and violence leads to hunger.’ Thirdly, it is food that has the strength to fight against the present chaos.

It is reported by the UN that 690 million people in the world are undernourished, which is about 8.9% of the world population in 2019. In the UK it is reported that 8.4 million people are struggling to afford to eat. 4.7 million of these people live in severely food insecure homes. This means that their food intake is greatly reduced and children regularly experience physical sensations of hunger, explains Fairshare, an organisation in UK fighting hunger and tackling food waste. Children from Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic group communities in UK are more likely to be in poverty: about 46% compared to 26% of the rest of the communities. India is one of the world’s largest food producers, yet ironically, the country is also home to the largest population of hungry people and one-third of the world’s malnourished children. It is also reported that hunger could kill more people than the COVID pandemic in 2020, pushing another 132 million people into hunger than projected for 2020. Not to forget the number of children going hungry during holidays in UK has been rising. Covid has exposed that today we live in a world filled with inequalities, including between who can get food and who cannot.

What do all these numbers show? Hunger is a reality in our localities, and it raises an alarm to know that there are many people who are going hungry every day in our communities.

Our new context has forced churches to find new ways to celebrate harvest this year, but the new context has also highlighted the significance of hunger as we give thanks. Harvest should remind us that we are called to build bridges by sharing our fruits, harvest, gifts and care with those on the edges and address this conflict called hunger. As a faith community, we need to ensure there are sufficient local food programmes providing food for the poor, the stranger, the migrant and the refugee. Building bridges of peace is God’s activity in Jesus, and the divine invites us to join with Jesus in building peace bridges with those on the edges.

Harvest demands a preference, a provision and a practice of sharing food with the poor and hungry. Harvest calls for a just compassion. Harvest should challenge us to ensure that there should be food for all. Food serves as an important factor in community building, and harvest demands an unequivocal pledge and commitment in addressing hunger and food insecurity.

In the context of climate change, celebrating harvest invites us to pledge to care for our planet overcoming all those ‘dominion’ narratives against the creation. As churches we are called to be with our local communities in challenging poverty and in making our government accountable for ensuring the welfare of all people and not just the few. With nearly 6 million people in UK struggling to pay their household bills during this period, the call for #resetthedebt is a campaign which as a church we must join in with. In my reimagining of church, I envision churches to be hubs serving food for all, addressing poverty, tackling hunger, sharing our resources.