In The Times Geoffrey Rowell writes about his recent visit to a Russian monastery at Solovki in Belief which resurrects hope from the wreckage of despair. An extract:
At the heart of the Christian understanding of God is the faith that the God who allows human beings made in his image the freedom that is necessary for them to love, is the one who in love enters into the darkness and evil that such freedom also permits. Crucfixion/Resurrection is the deep inner rhythm of the life in Christ which is at the heart of the Church. Solovki which seemed annihilated and crushed by the tortures of the gulag is now a place of resurrection, of hope born out of an incredible despair.
Somewhere this resurrection faith, to which Solovki is a standing witness, touches the terrible darkness and evil of Beslan, a very ordinary Ossetian town which I passed through once on a journey from Georgia. Innocent children, teachers, families broken-hearted and grieving, caught in a web of evil and destruction — the scenes we have witnessed will haunt all of us.
There are no easy answers to this problem of evil, no way to live in the face of it, except the way of that deep conversion which is repentance, a turning away from darkness and evil, to the resurrection life of new creation. The cost and victory of God’s love in the Cross of Christ, which next Tuesday the Church will celebrate on Holy Cross Day, is where we see the God who stands alongside us, and enters into our human suffering, in a gulag in the White Sea or in a school gymnasium in Beslan. “Out of the deep have I called to you, O Lord — Lord, hear my voice!” “If I go down to Hell, you are there also.” “Nothing can separate us from the love of God” for, as the Russian church sings on Easter night: “Christ is risen! and the demons are fallen.”
It is this faith alone which is the source of our hope, and the kindling of our love. Without this there is only the continual rekindling of a cycle of hatred and violence, creating that web or axis of evil which can only divide and destroy. Easter faith and resurrection life point us to that goal of our human life together, which is shalom, the deepest peace and communion, the life of the city of God, which is by grace God’s gift to us.
In the Telegraph Christopher Howse writes about how Getting out of hell isn’t easy.
In the Guardian Rabbi Tony Bayfield comments that Religion is a bloody disgrace which is subtitled The Abrahamic family of faiths is now frighteningly dysfunctional.
Related to this is the article in The Times by Simon Rocker on efforts to encourage a more constructive Muslim-Jewish dialogue in Britain: Fraternity eases the religious and political divide.
In Friday’s Church Times Giles Fraser wrote this:
It’s the Psychology of survival a biblical reason for obsession with sex
Update
I missed this yesterday:
Guardian Martyn Percy on Harvest Festivals A harvest of the spirit
In the Guardian Madeleine Bunting - a former Religious Affairs correspondent - writes about Cummins & Co (We can no longer ignore Islamophobia, or the racism that fuels it)
The background to this is explained here or here.
Also, Colin Sedgwick writes that Evangelicals are strict, not stupid.
Locusts and wild honey are discussed by Christopher Howse in his weekly Telegraph column Sacred mysteries.
The Times has Stephen Plant writing in the Credo column that Christians were late converts to the joys of democracy. This is in the context of the Olympics in Athens and the Republican Convention in New York City.
In a recent Church Times issue Bill Countryman wrote an op-ed column about What holds the Church together? from a Californian perspective.
Here’s an extract:
Anglicans in the US aren’t as divided as they seem…
…Disestablishment means loss of status. No follower of Jesus can automatically assume that that would be a bad thing. But it would change the context of the Church. The C of E would have to find new terms for saying what it is. American Episcopalians have spent a couple of centuries on this task. Our sense of self is that we are the one traditional Christian alternative to the Puritan legacy of theocratic rigidity in the United States.
That legacy has shaped most American assumptions about religion, including the assumption that “real” Christianity is always legalistic and oppressive. There are liberal alternatives to this legacy, but Episcopalians are something else — the one expression of historic Christianity that has continuously resisted the temptation to know the mind of God better than God does.
Since we don’t profess to know the whole mind of God, it makes it easier to remain in communion with one another, even though we disagree on many things. Theologically, we are divided; just like the C of E. There is no single official theological stance, but we live with that by staying in conversation.
This is why we will survive our current conflicts, and be the stronger for them: for we are living out our identity. Again and again, the mean-spiritedness of right-wing American Evangelicalism has turned out to be our single most potent tool of evangelism. There are signs that the American public is once again tiring of its theocratic program, notably in its refusal to get behind the campaign for an amendment to the federal constitution foreclosing gay marriage….
A week ago in the Telegraph Christopher Howse wrote what he thought about Lay Presidency in Sydney. The column is titled The all-clear for DIY at the altar.
Some letters on this subject are also appearing in the Church Times. Here are last week’s contributions: Lay presidency vote would undermine Sydney including this by Judith Maltby:
There are not many things one can say with such certainty, but lay presidency is clearly a departure from Anglican tradition and doctrine, and an ecumenical impediment far greater than is supposed by the ordination of women.
Does this mean, therefore, that alternative episcopal oversight from orthodox bishops will be provided for those faithful and traditional Anglicans in Sydney who are opposed to such a significant departure from orthodox Anglicanism, and, indeed from Catholic Christianity understood in its most inclusive sense?
The paper recently issued by Reform and first published here is at last available on Reform’s own website. You can read it here.
The press release is also available here.
The reports and editorial comment on all this in the Church Times generated a whole clutch of letters in the CT issue of 6 August, which can now be read at
Is Reform defending the faith, or getting above itself?
I particularly liked Fr Kevin Scully’s criticism of the media for using “conservative” to describe the positions taken by Reform. He said:
The agenda here seems as conservative as placing Oliver Cromwell in charge of church statuary. Perhaps a more judicious use of language by newsmongers, if not by those who admit their own divisive agendas, would help us all.
From today’s Telegraph a column by Christopher Howse about that Vatican letter on the role of women: Eve is Adam’s ‘vital’ helper and another column by Niall Ferguson which contrasts American and British work customs: The atheist sloth ethic, or why Europeans don’t believe in work.
Over in the Guardian earlier this week, Martin Wainwright wrote about Christians in Turkey, In the language of Jesus and today the Vicar of Soham, Tim Alban Jones writes God stopped at Soham.
In The Times Theo Hobson writes: Europe both fears and envies the certainties of Islam and there is a very interesting article about National Health Service chaplains: Spiritual aid in sickness and in health by Jack Shamash.
Some excerpts from Theo Hobson’s article:
OUGHT we to fear an expansionist Islam? There has recently been a fresh rash of scare comment in the press, suggesting that Islam is the new spectre haunting Western civilisation: by tolerating this enemy in our midst, we are sleepwalking to cultural oblivion.
Of course no such fear is warranted. The Islamic-related terrorist threat is real, but it does not amount to a concerted political threat. Even if bin Laden struck again on the scale of September 11, it would lead him no nearer to the overthrow of the West. In global terms, there is no Islamic state or alliance of states that constitutes a threat to the West.
And in European terms, the Islamic minority is weak. Muslims are not storming the citadels of business or culture. They are, for the most part, surviving on low-wage jobs. Yes, the minority is expanding – from almost nothing a generation ago to about three per cent of the average European country’s population. But there is no reason to fear that the minority will continue to expand until it dominates.
But the problem is the ideology, some will say. Unlike Hindus or Jews, Muslims want to see their religion overtake European society. This is an expansionist religion. But so is Christianity: don’t Christians hope that Islamic nations will come to accept the lordship of Jesus Christ?
Islamophobia does not have a rational basis. Yet it affects intelligent people who are not generally racist; its roots are deep and complex. Could it be that Islamophobia is based in a sort of envy? For Islam painfully reminds us of what we lack. It highlights our lack of faith in our common values. We envy the unitary vision of Islam, its fusion of politics and religion.
…Is there a solution to the old duality of post-Christian, semi-secularised Europe? We cannot reinstate pre-secular Christian culture, and we cannot assert secularism as a coherent unifying ideology, without creating something horrible. So we need to patch up the marriage between our Christian and secular identities. We need to reaffirm the inner affinity between Christianity and secularism. The key work to be done is not so much political, or cultural, as theological. The “spectre ” of Islam may be providential: the spur to a new era of Christian-secular relations, the forging of a coherent European identity.
Bishop Geoffrey Rowell writes in The Times that There’s nothing wrong in kneeling before a loving God. Part of what he says:
Kneeling to say your prayers was one of the most characteristic postures of earlier generations of Christians. Many novels and memoirs speak of the courage of those who, in barracks or school dormitories, showed their faith by kneeling to pray. A. A. Milne’s Christopher Robin famously kneels at the foot of the bed to say his prayers.
Kneeling, however, is not exactly in fashion in churches today. There may be a dazzling display of beautifully worked tapestry kneelers, a testimony to the talents of the congregation, but more often than not, even in cathedrals, the instruction will be “kneel or sit”, and most will sit.
At one level it seems trivial, but something has been lost here. We are bodily beings, and “body language” is something we all recognise. Newspapers carry articles analysing the nervous scratching of the nose, the twisting of a ring, the tugging at a cuff, to judge whether the politician or celebrity is at ease. We welcome close friends with an embrace. We do not convey our love and affection to another by sitting and telepathising intently at them. When Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss, it was a deep undermining of the love, loyalty and affection that greeting with a kiss conveys.
You really need to read the whole article.
Ruth Gledhill attended a service at The Royal Foundation of Saint Katherine
for the At Your Service column. The sermon she writes about can be found here.
Over in the Guardian, Giles Fraser writes again about Rethinking Sentencing in The price of punishment and Karen Armstrong writes about the need for collective responsibility in Kill the scapegoat.
In the Independent there is a review of Stephen Bates’ book by Paul Vallely. But it is accessible only to subscribers :-(
Christopher Howse writes in the Telegraph about Westminster Abbey, Don’t embrace the corpses
If Americans wander around in baseball caps, eating, at least they don’t embrace the corpses. It has been estimated that 4,000 are buried in the Abbey, and I have gained a new appreciation even of the sepulchral architecture from the wonderful new book by Richard Jenkyns. It is called Westminster Abbey (Profile Books, £15.99) and the author is Oxford’s Professor of the Classical Tradition, whatever that is. If Dr Jenkyns is an example of it, I’m all for it.
In The Times Roderick Strange uses the feast of the Birthday of St John the Baptist, the forerunner of Jesus, to write about the power of God.
God is not some kind of Superman with special powers
At its root, all unaware, there is a presumption about the nature of divine power. God, we say, is all-powerful. If God is a God of love, why does He not exercise His power to prevent such tragedies? I would if I could, but I can’t. My power is limited. But God’s is not. If He exists, why doesn’t He act? But the flaw in this question lies in supposing that God’s power is just like ours, only greater.
I do not pretend to know what divine power is like, but I am confident that, whatever else, it is not simply an excess of human power. When we call God all-powerful, we do not mean that God is Superman, merely possessing the extra muscle to do what we cannot.
We may wonder why a different world was not created where such disasters never occurred, but that is a distraction. Creating is not the same as physical making. And we have to make sense of the world in which we actually live, not a world formed by our fantasies of perfection.
Geoffrey Rowell writes in The Times about Holy places on a path that leads to the love of God. He starts from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets and Little Gidding. Some of what he says:
Holy places are significant, for they are places which have a power to point beyond themselves, and challenge us, and raise questions about meaning, and purpose, and what the life we have been given is for and how we are to use it. They are always, of course, ambiguous.
God cannot be imprisoned in holy places, any more than the mystery of God can be pinned down in words and concepts. Yet places where prayer has been valid, the places of witness to the faith and of martyrdom, are powerful. They naturally become places of pilgrimage, for they are “thin” places, places where men and women are conscious of the intersection of the timeless with time.
Christianity is a religion of incarnation, in which the Word of God becomes flesh, embedded and embodied in the world. Yet this world which God chooses to know from the inside is a world which in its created reality already points to his presence.
Through that same Word all things were made. Incarnation is the fulfilment of creation. It is from that reality that the sacramental power of place derives, just as the sacraments which incorporate us into God’s new creation, the water of baptism and the bread and wine of the Eucharist are the very stuff of creation.
Faith is distorted whenever an abstract idea replaces the God whose overflowing love holds all things in life and reaches out in self-giving. The disengaged, remote first cause of Deism is a negation of the God revealed in Jesus Christ as creator, redeemer and sanctifier, whose life we are called to share. It is that God who can find us in holy places, be they cathedrals or simple, village churches, desert monasteries or islands such as Iona. They call us out of the stress, muddle and conflict of our lives “to be still — to let go — and know that I am God.”
In the Guardian Jonathan Bartley writes that God goes to Brussels. An extract:
It is a safe bet that among the one in six Euro-electors who voted to “take their country back from Brussels” there were quite a few churchgoers. Why should the opinions of the man or woman in the pew be distinguishable from anyone else’s - even when it comes to the question of whether God should get a name check in the preamble to the EU constitution?
Nonetheless, there is a strong argument that the very concept of a European community is essentially a Christian one, with its roots deep in the biblical narrative. The story of the Tower of Babel suggests that the existence of separate nations can be seen as a consequence of sin. Humankind had concentrated power in one place in a challenge to divine power, so God confounded them with a sudden diversity of language, and they scattered and divided.
On the Day of Pentecost, however - when the church was born - those divisions of language disappeared as everyone heard the disciples speaking in their own tongue. A new community came into being, whose identity centres on citizenship of a kingdom that takes precedence over every nation and state. Now, as Paul said, “there is neither Jew nor Greek”. A key word the New Testament writers apply to the church is ekklesia , a secular term that suggests a political community.
Christians have since fallen into the error of aligning their religion with national loyalties. Secular leaders, too, have used Christianity to establish a coherent national culture. But Christian eschatology - the perspective that considers the ultimate destiny of the world - challenges such thinking. Rather than looking back to an imagined golden age when religion was central to the national psyche, the Christian vision of the future involves nothing less than the abolition of the nation state.
Christopher Howse writes about a Lucky strike on a building site.
Christopher Howse in the Telegraph writes concerning False concerns about Muslims
There are far fewer Muslims in Britain than you might think. Indeed, everything about religion in English daily life is quite different from our impressions. Or so a new Home Office study suggests.
Roderick Strange, writes in The Times about Pentecost, If we receive the Spirit, we can overcome the Darkness
I remember [the Canadian Jesuit, David] Stanley remarking in relation to Pentecost that there was no nostalgia in the New Testament. He referred to the way people, nowadays, will sometimes say how much they would like to have seen Jesus during His public ministry. They believe that it would have strengthened their faith if they knew what He had looked like, if they had heard the sound of His voice, if they had seen how He walked. They look back to the public ministry of the Christ as to a golden age. How unlucky are we to have missed it?
At first, the point may seem obvious, but, Stanley observed, it is a view which is utterly foreign to the New Testament. There is no trace of it there. Nobody is looking back. Thomas, it is true, wanted to be able to put his finger into the wounded hands and his hand into Jesus’s side, but that was not nostalgia. He wanted proof to conquer his doubt. So why was there no nostalgia?
It is because, Stanley explained, the public ministry of Jesus for the writers of the New Testament was not the golden age. For them that began with this outpouring of the Holy Spirit. That was the start of the golden age. It runs from Pentecost to the Second Coming of Jesus. Why look back? This is the golden age. We are living in it now.
In the Guardian Tom Wright also writes about Pentecost: The spirit of the age
But also, Tom Wright is interviewed at length by John Allen in the National Catholic Reporter which you can read here (thanks Tim). All Lambeth Commission watchers should study the full text of this interview carefully. A few excerpts are also embedded in this column.
In The Times Geoffrey Rowell writes about why Christian values must always face judgment and scrutiny. Starting from Tertullian’s question “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” he goes on to discuss the relationship Christianity should have with Culture today. He concludes:
Christians have therefore a twofold responsibility. They are called to find God in the undergrowth, the unexpected places of contemporary culture, and to welcome all who are explorers and searchers and seekers. But there can never be an uncritical endorsement of culture. Whether it be the rhetoric of multiculturalism and political correctness, or the pick-anmix individualism that makes subjective choice the measure of truth, or the popular cults of celebrities or consumerism, these are as much under the judgment of the God of sacrificial love as the ideology of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia.
Likewise, the Church is always under judgment, for its compromises, its human weakness, and its failure to live out more plainly the deep compassion of Christ. But the saving grace is that at the heart of the Church’s life is the penitent knowledge of its weakness and failure and of the healing that can transfigure and transform it. The saints have always known themselves to be sinners in need of redemption, and have rejoiced in the love and grace which comes down to the lowest part of their need.
Christians live always as those looking up to the Ascended Christ, to the love that reigns victorious, and as those who know that love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit He has given to us. To live by that knowledge and vision is to live for that Christian culture and society, in which values, choices and judgments are shaped by likeness to Christ.
The Times also has an interesting report by Greg Watts on Theatre Ministry. Celebrating the theatre of faith.
Christopher Howse in the Telegraph discusses some religious books in A better bowl of cherries.
I failed to report earlier that last Monday the Telegraph also carried a news story about the Church of England that did not refer to sexuality. Church of England finds fertile ground in France.
The New York Times has a column by Peter Steinfels that is headed A Thorny Issue Begets Much Reading. This is occasioned by the US republication of The Way Forward? Christian Voices on Homosexuality and the Church. Below is some of what Steinfels has to say:
Despite the inevitable unevenness of any collection like this, and a disappointing sense that the evangelical authors of the St. Andrew Day’s Statement have not quite engaged their critics, “The Way Forward?” operates at a level far above the usual battling about a handful of biblical passages and the usual volleying of stereotypes and sentimentalities. Yet to read these essays is almost to despair.
For one thing, simply by way of contrast, they bring to mind how rarely it is acknowledged that the current debates about homosexuality involve matters that remain unsettled, matters about which serious thinking is still required and about which more than one side may have points worth considering. The prevailing attitudes are quite different: Either resistance to revising the traditional Christian teaching (or the traditional legal arrangements) can only be the fruit of bigotry or uninformed fundamentalism; or the demand for change must spring from accommodation to a permissive culture or surrender to relativism, individualism, hedonism, etc., etc.
But still more daunting is the fact that these theological essays are in fact genuinely theological. The St. Andrew’s Day Statement begins its brief exposition of underlying principles with the straightforward declaration, “Jesus Christ is the one word of God. He came in human flesh, died for our sins, and was raised for our justification.” And the essays, even where they attend to empirical and cultural issues, make God and God’s self-revelation, whether in Scripture, creation or tradition, the framework for their judgments.
This is not, in other words, psychology or sociology or political philosophy presented in a religious wrapper. It is theology. It is a theological exploration of a theological question. And who, in the sound-bite-driven state of religion no less than of secular culture, actually has the patience, the appetite or the resources for that?
In the Guardian Giles Fraser writes about Luther, love and Gloria Gaynor. His remarks will be familiar to those who have read his recent University Sermon.
In the Telegraph Christopher Howse writes about Lancelot Andrewes The insides of a private diary.
In The Times Jonathan Sacks writes that The family is where we find passion, affection and companionship.
Also, Ruth Gledhill writes about her experience attending the Ship of Fools cyberchurch. Ruth’s article is here. Here is a quote:
It was an extraordinary experience, resembling a real church service and yet at the same time being completely different, akin to one of the “out of the body” dreams I used to have. Sitting in front of a computer screen, I quickly identified with the yellow-haired onscreen avatar, a sort of ecclesiastical Lara Croft that had been designed for me by the “creator”, Darrell of specialmoves, who was also in church.
Besides raising my arms and yodelling “Hallelujah!” I could kneel, cross myself, stand up and sit down, walk around, get up into the pulpit, heckle the bishop during his sermon and wander down to the crypt to chat and scrutinise the noticeboards.
The preacher was the Bishop of London, the Right Rev Richard Chartres, who had been vested a bit too lowly for his liking.
Bishop Chartres is a princely, patriarchal figure who seems to hail from an earlier age. His nickname in ecumenical circles is “quiverful”, a psalmic reference to the four children he has with his wife Caroline. In real life, he is a man of steel ? the steel nib of a fountain pen.
The full text of his sermon can be read here.
AN Wilson has a review of Edward Norman’s book in The Tablet.
Anglican Difficulties: a new syllabus of errors
Snarling at the hand that fed him
The Guardian has Counting the cost of giving by John Newbury who asks Why should we give to those we do not know?
In his weekly Telegraph column, Christopher Howse discusses A prize for the best blasphemy.
The Times Credo column is by Stephen Plant, A dead church should not hold the living Church to ransom in which he discusses the threat of closure for a church building; some extracts:
THE local church I attend is threatened with closure. The property is in good order, the bank balance in credit, and there are no plans to build a ring road through its car park. But the congregation has simply shrunk to the extent that there are not enough people to do the work to keep it open or to fill the front rows at Sunday worship.
My church is situated in a densely populated area short on public buildings; it should be capable of sustaining the kind of community church its building is perfect for. Even if closure in these circumstances is the sensible thing to do, it will be difficult to see it as a shining gospel success.
I take seriously the sense of obligation to those whose energies and faith have been bound up in this local church. But a dead church cannot be allowed to hold the living Church to ransom. When I think it through I find that if we are to give my local church one last chance it must not be as a way to keep its past alive, but because of the fragile possibility that it might have a future as a community of faith and as a centre of service to its local community.
In the Church Times Giles Fraser asks
Does the brutality of Iraq make all forces like Saddam?
As bad as each other?
As usual British newspapers carry faith-related columns on a Saturday.
The Independent has Faith & Reason: Muslim terrorists embrace a very secular heresy by a Muslim chaplain at Cambridge University, Abdal Hakim Murad.
The Telegraph has Christopher Howse discussing Bats, We’re bats to put up with it
The Guardian has May Day, money and morality by David Haslam.
The Times has Roderick Strange discussing Vocations, It is a risky business to have a commitment to something.
Geoffrey Rowell in The Times
Let us liberate ourselves from the dark, demonic powers of evil. Here is an extract:
If the memory of the crusades is still a distorting one in the context of Christian-Muslim relations, the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade still haunts memories and attitudes in the relationship of the Christian East to the Christian West, and colours the suspicion of many Orthodox Christians towards Christians of the West. Both Catholics and Pentecostals can be seen in very different ways as representative of the ancient aggression of the Latin West.
Eastern Christianity, which has never had the experience of either the Reformation or the Enlightenment has, at its best, a deep awareness of the cosmic dimension of redemption, and a sacramental understanding of the world. The Easter Liturgy, so central to Orthodox worship, proclaims Christ?s victory over death and His liberation of humanity from the imprisonment of the dark, demonic powers of evil. We are called into a new creation and a transfiguration of our life by the grace of Christ.
The healing of memories is necessary if the different traditions of the Christian churches are to find their true unity in Christ. We cannot ignore history, and we must learn to understand the histories of other traditions and communities. In so far as it is possible for a later generation to be penitent for what earlier generations did, Christians in the West need to remember that events can have a terrible afterlife and so be ready to acknowledge the scars and fault lines that have resulted from what happened in Constantinople 800 years ago this month.
If the risen Christ appeared to His disciples still bearing the wounds of His passion, but transfigured, we can surely believe that the wounds of history may by humility, penitence and grace be transfigured in the same way. The peace of the world and the unity of its peoples depend in the end on this Easter reality.
Judith Maltby in the Guardian
What women want reflects on the progress still to be made in the CofE:
…Officially, Anglicans continue to constrain the ministry of women clergy. Terms like “provisionality” and “in reception” are used of our orders, and the church endorses employment discrimination on the basis of sex that it would condemn in any secular employer. In the midst of all this, women priests must not, of course, give anything other than complete loyalty and commitment back to the church.
We continue to exclude women from the church’s most authoritative body, the House of Bishops, although it is clear that we are not awash with talent in the episcopate. Tellingly, Canon Jeffrey John’s welcome appointment as dean of St Albans has been characterised as “compensation” for a bishopric, whereas a deanery is the highest office to which a woman may be called in the Church of England.
Most disastrously, however, we provide “flying bishops”, with “untainted hands”, for those who cannot tolerate sacramental contact with a bishop who ordains women. What does this provision reveal about what the Church of England, as an institution, thinks of women as a source of pollution? How, too, is this model being applied to other issues of conscience? Those who object to the “bishops of choice” model as a way of dealing with disputes over sexuality must ask themselves why it is bearable, or desirable, in dealing with the debate over gender. I, for one, would like to see a bit more anger from my own “liberal side” about the treatment of women, as well as of gay men.
Why do women priests put up with it? Opponents like to see us as fuelled by something rather wicked called “secular feminism”, which, I suppose, means owning property and having the vote. But on the contrary, the vocations of the vast majority of women priests have been fed from deep within the life of the church. A doctoral study of the 1994 ordinations revealed that the single largest group defined themselves as evangelical, something worth remembering as the word has become, to many, synonymous with “reactionary”.
Christopher Howse in the Telegraph
What’s all this about Rapture?
It sounds like science fiction, doesn’t it? Indeed, a bestselling series of 10 novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B Jenkins, starting with Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days (1995), has sold in almost Harry Potter-ish millions.
Yet the Left Behind publishing phenomenon reflects the remarkable fact that many - perhaps eight million - in the United States really believe The Rapture is coming, probably soon. Makes sense, they say, what with this terrible world violence and Israel surrounded by hostile nations.
Guardian For God’s sake The strong influence of the Christian right on US policy will only increase if George Bush wins a second term, says Philip James
The influence of the Christian right on the Bush White House is self-evident. As well as George Bush, cabinet members Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft and Don Evans all consider themselves to be born again.
The administration is acutely aware of the power of the Christian voting block in the US. Gallup surveys consistently count 46% of the population as being self-described born again Christians, the bulk of whom live in middle America.
It is a stunning statistic, and one that escapes the attention of the chattering classes who populate the much less devout coastal strips.
Many of these churchgoers voted for Bush in 2000, and Carl Rove is determined that all of them should do the same this year. The latest data should put a spring in his step - Bush’s job approval among grassroots Christian social conservatives hovers between 92% and 96%.
The Times At your service visits St Nicholas, Brighton.
Labyrinths are to be found in religious traditions all over the world. Many take the form of a large circle, with a single path leading you through the four quadrants to the centre. They became an established part of the Catholic Church during the crusades, when pilgrimage to the Holy Land was dangerous, and people needed another way of honouring their vows.
By coincidence, I just visited Amiens Cathedral, which has a genuine medieval labyrinth built into the tiling of the floor of the nave.
From British newspapers Saturday:
Guardian David Bryant Taking the sin out of sex
Telegraph two doses of Christopher Howse An Easter week anthology: Rorate coeli and Madonna, with strings attached
The Times Jonathan Sacks ‘Never again’ - but will we ever learn the lessons of history?
Madeleine Bunting, who was once the Religious Affairs correspondent of the paper, has an opinion column in the Guardian entitled In death there is life. Part of it:
Western secular societies and Islamists regard themselves as polar opposites. They are both wrong.
For Christians, Easter is not just a bloody crucifixion (any inadequacy of imagination on the gory details now finds ample remedy in Mel Gibson’s rendition), but the resurrection - the monumental act of redemption for all humankind. Hence, from the violence comes a message of astonishing optimism.
For all the faults of the church institutions (and there are many) that perpetuate this faith, it seems to me that this is a strikingly hopeful and honest account of human experience. In contrast, western secular culture has relegated death and suffering to the role of entertainment - it’s on celluloid that we love death - or it has been tidied away as subject to the last remaining taboos. In an age of gleaming white smiles from every billboard, who finds it easy to acknowledge or to understand their suffering?
All of this comes close to sounding like nonsense (though they might be too polite to say so) to a large proportion of people in Europe in what historians of religion now call the “spiritual icebelt”. This is the only part of the globe in which secularisation has dug deep and lasting roots since the second world war. Social theorists complacently assumed for several decades that secularisation was inevitable and irreversible all over the globe. The conclusion that many drew was that there was no point trying to understand religion, because it was a belief system that would wither on the vine. The result is a widespread ignorance and lack of understanding of the religious imagination, and it is usually accompanied by the secularist’s unexamined faith in their own beliefs; for example, an astonishingly naive belief in human beings’ rationality.
Today in the Observer, Will Hutton has a column titled
Heed not the fanatics
Only by rebutting fundamentalism in all its forms can we stop ourselves being plunged into a new Dark Age
Today, more than two million Protestants and Catholics will attend church to celebrate Easter, a resilient band but millions fewer than just 50 years ago. The great fathers of sociology - Weber, Marx, Durkheim - all believed that industrialisation, wealth and democracy would lead to the development of a massively secular society. Religion and its myths, the linchpin of dirt-poor traditional society, would evaporate before detraditionalising modernity.
They were right about Europe but wrong about almost everywhere else. Protestant evangelism in the United States and Islamic fundamentalism are the two fastest-growing religions on the planet; even Hindu and Buddhist fundamentalism are on the increase. Only Europe has moved in the direction the classic sociologists predicted. A mere third of Europeans report that they think that life is worth living because God exists. In the US, 61 per cent do, a proportion matched, although we don’t have reliable evidence, within Islam. In those broad religiously inclined majorities, fundamentalists find it easier to recruit.
But why? Why is rich Europe secular and rich America religious? And are there any clues in the answer to that riddle to the rise in religious fundamentalism, one of the most pernicious and hateful phenomena in human association, ranking with political fundamentalism of Right and Left in its destructive and poisonous influence.
Whether it is the perpetrators of the Madrid atrocity or Franklin Graham, evangelical son of evangelist Billy Graham, calling Islam a ‘wicked religion’, fervent fundamentalist religiosity breeds violence, intolerance and sexism. The sacred texts of Christianity and Islam may plead love, mutual respect and peace; their fundamentalist followers observe these doctrines in the breach.
Update
Doug LeBlanc has commented on Hutton’s article, here at GetReligion. This is part of a series of posts there all titled Creeping Fundamentalism. This one is the first that ventures outside America for its source material. From a European perspective, Hutton’s comments about American Christian fundamentalism seem quite mild to me, but evidently it looks different from over there.
Saturday’s columns from the London newspapers:
Independent Tom Wright
Faith & Reason: Take care to avoid the Easter trap set by modernity
Guardian Martyn Percy
Easter facts and fictions
The Times Alan Webster
Hope, compassion and creativity are everyday resurrections
Telegraph Christopher Howse
Return journey into the grave
AN Wilson
Three reasons to stay an Anglican, for all its follies
The Guardian prints a column by Giles Fraser The dry eyes of deep grief
and Stephen Bates reports that Churches take ritual of Passion on to the streets.
The Times has an editorial The Passion. Two excerpts from this appear below.
Extreme sacrifice and extremism
Given the suffering which so many endured during the 20th century’s age of extremes, the ebbing of faith in certainties might seem to be a welcome development. And for many contemplating what has been done in the name of religion in Iraq this Holy Week, the influence of a highly politicised form of faith must seem almost wholly malign. If this is what mankind does in the grip of religious fervour, then many will yearn for a world without such passion.
On this day, however, we are called to remember a passion of a different kind, and the extremes to which one man was driven because of faith, and draw a very different message. The Easter narrative helps us to understand that what the world needs is not a retreat from faith, and religion’s moral codes, but an approach towards the mystery of creation marked by the humility of Jesus and infused by the sympathy that He showed to all mankind.
The journey to Calvary that Jesus made was, however, for them as much as anyone. He confronted the ultimate extreme - a painful death and the cries of the world jeering in His ears - to prove that compassion can triumph over calculation, and that sacrifice can redeem sin. He required a faith that might be considered so strong as to be extreme. But His quiet adherence to the principle of love, and the willingness to sacrifice His interests for others, and then His Resurrection, completed a symbolic but real journey, and began a new phase of human spirituality.
The extremists who challenge our peace this Easter come not as Jesus did, to redeem, but as His tormentors did, to uphold an arid purity and proclaim a vengeful power. Their faith is a political religion, like fascism or Marxism, their vision is exclusive and self-indulgent, and their hands are clenched round a gun. The faith of Jesus was of a very different kind: His outstretched hands on the Cross were there to embrace all mankind. If the world is to overcome the dark passion of those whose hate drives them to violent extremes, it can only be helped by contemplating the message of compassion from the One who went to the ultimate extreme for love.
Pierre Whalon wrote another essay at AO on Thought, Love, and Bishops. This discusses at length some of the theological issues arising from the New Hampshire consecration. Recommended reading and not susceptible to short quotes here.
It has drawn comment from conservatives, see here, and also here.
Meanwhile John Heidt, who was once in Cheltenham but is now in Fort Worth, wrote this open letter to the American bishops, which analyses the reasons for conservatives among them not participating fully in the ECUSA House of Bishops meetings. It also is recommended reading.
Again conservative comment can be found here.
Theo Hobson writes in The Times about the Church of England under the headline Is the Pope a Tory? Some extracts:
Until quite recently the Church of England was sometimes called “the Tory party at prayer”. Today this could hardly be further from the truth: the Church looks more like the Lib Dems at prayer. As for the Tory party, it now chooses to pray elsewhere.
For more than a decade, the most prominent religious voices in the party have been Roman Catholic rather than Anglican.
A generation ago, the Tories’ Roman tendency would have scarcely been credible. Tories were Anglicans, almost to a man: Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Hogg, Powell, Heath. To understand this shift in the Tories’ religious allegiance we must consider the party’s disenchantment with the Church of England as well as its attraction to Rome.
The Tories were the party of the monarchy and the established Church: they sought to protect these institutions from the reforming zeal of the Whigs, to defend the common national faith. This remained the case well into the 20th century - until the 1950s, in fact. Then came the 1960s: dramatic secularisation effectively ended the Church’s traditional role of the nation’s moral guardian. In effect, the Church was semi-disestablished by 1980. As its identity became less national, it became more radical. It moved away from its Tory image, and it often pursued a global agenda (poverty, disarmament), at the expense of what the Right called the national interest.
The Tories’ resentment at liberal Anglicanism is still going strong. There was a good example in The Sunday Telegraph a few months ago: a leading article called Rowan Williams “An Unworthy Archbishop”, for daring to criticise the treatment of suspected terrorists. Tory orthodoxy still entails the claim that the Church of England is a failed guardian of the national soul, which is safer in Tory hands. And, for many Tories, in Roman Catholic hands.
But what about Rome’s old image as essentially unpatriotic? During the second half of the 1990s this evaporated with startling speed. The Queen herself began to demonstrate her openness to the old religion: she attended a service at Westminster Cathedral in 1995, and later invited Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor to officiate at Windsor. It became commonplace for her to treat Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism with equal respect - this was especially evident in her Christmas broadcast of 2000, in which she paid homage to the Pope.
The Credo column is by Maurice Glasman and is Religion without reason results in violence and injustice.
In the Guardian, Rob Marshall writes about The true meaning of Lent.
In the Independent, the Editor of the Church Times, Paul Handley writes about Passiontide.
Faith & Reason: Forget Mel Gibson, the Passion is to be found in Rwanda.
In the Telegraph, Christopher Howse plugs his new book: The comfort of misly globules.
The Guardian has an article Taxing questions for the Church which is actually about Taxation.
The Times has a Lenten meditation Lent is a season for penitence - so do not sin any more.
ENS has published a detailed survey covering many of the reactions to the proposal made by ECUSA bishops for delegated oversight.
Conservative responses mixed on Camp Allen oversight plan.
This report does not however include the most recent NACDP statement Convocation Deans Respond to House of Bishops Plan.
The House of Bishops has failed the Church by its new process for Delegated Episcopal Pastoral Oversight (DEPO). The bishops had the opportunity to act sacrificially and lovingly to reach out to orthodox Episcopal congregations and parishioners. Instead, they have offered DEPO, a cumbersome bureaucratic process controlled by the very overseers from whom relief is sought. It inadequately deals with episcopal pastoral care and fails entirely to address such issues as ordination, the calling of clergy, church planting, finances or property. Under DEPO, the power and prerogatives of the bishops are paramount, while genuine concern for parishioners is lost. It shows that the House of Bishops is not serious about reform which would respond to the concerns of the Primates.
We know that our Network bishops who were present worked valiantly for a better outcome from the House of Bishops meeting just concluded. Nevertheless, the great majority of the bishops have made clear by the terms of the plan for DEPO that the rejection of biblical authority and the endorsement of sexual intimacy outside of marriage are now the settled teaching of our Church; all that remains is to regulate the speed with which this new teaching is imposed on orthodox Episcopalians.
The Anglican Communion Network is committed to living under the authority of Holy Scripture and in true unity with the vast majority of the world-wide Anglicans. We serve in partnership with the Primates, who have written, “we offer our support and the full weight of our ministries and offices to those who are gathering” in the Network.
This does not sound like a body looking for a negotiated settlement.
Reference is sometimes made to the English Episcopal Ministry Act of Synod 1993 as a model for the American or Canadian situation. But this Act does not remove a petitioning parish from the jurisdiction of its diocesan bishop, and is dependent on his agreement for its application. So I think it is unlikely to be acceptable to NACDP.
Where the English model differs from the American proposal is in its de facto compulsion. Every bishop in the Church of England has agreed to abide by it, and, as far as I know, no properly submitted parish petition for “appropriate episcopal duties in the parish” to be carried out by another bishop in accordance with the Act has ever been refused. It seem that NACDP believes that some American bishops are even now unwilling to offer any form of “DEPO”. If this is true, then only a General Convention (next scheduled for 2006) could compel them to do so. From a British perspective, this perceived inflexibility of diocesan bishops just seems very strange.
Nevertheless, I find it very surprising indeed that no-one among the conservatives has published any draft of an alternative oversight proposal that might be acceptable to them. With no such document in circulation it is easy for others to accuse the Network leaders of insincerity in their statements about wanting to remain within ECUSA, as opposed to forming a North American equivalent of the FiF-proposed but as yet non-existent CofE Third Province.
Footnote
Since writing the above, the AAC has published Setting the Record Straight: What Really Happened at the House of Bishops which raises the temperature yet again.
Geoffrey Rowell writes in the Times, Our fantasies and fears can beget terrible consequences. Here is a portion:
To flourish as human beings we need to be delivered from the fears and fantasies which threaten to overwhelm us, and which can distort and destroy our humanity. The Christian teachers of spiritual wisdom point us insistently to the God whose perfect love casts out fear.
In the Gospels Jesus stills a storm on the Lake of Galilee, when the disciples are overcome with fear that the boat will capsize and they will drown. The old mythology of the chaos monster of the deep echoes in this story, but Jesus shows Himself as Lord of the wind and the sea. Immediately after this story there is another, of a man possessed by a multitude of demons, and again, just as the wind and sea are stilled with a word of peace, so the inner chaos and conflict of the possessed man is overcome by a word of peace and deliverance.
The biblical writers insist that there is one fear which is both necessary and not destructive. It is that “fear of the Lord” that is the beginning of wisdom. But what is meant by this “fear” is something akin to awe, and reverence, and wonder. It is a fear, the great Byzantine saint, Maximos the Confessor, tells us which is “linked with love and constantly produces reverence in the soul”. This awesome wonder is at the heart of the prayer of adoration in which we come before God in our need and seeking His grace, that we may be rooted and grounded in love, a love which meets our deepest needs and so dispels the fears and terrors of the night, of whatever kind.
In the Telegraph Christopher Howse’s column is about the Templeton Prize winner, When science met spirituality.
George Ellis is a 64-year-old Quaker who lives in South Africa, and he tussled in the 1970s with the apartheid government, drawing attention to the injustices done to squatters in the Western Cape. He has not won the prize for this, but for his work on cosmology and religion.
Dr Ellis has outstanding qualifications to speak about the science of cosmology, being a professor of applied mathematics who has co-authored a book with Stephen Hawking (The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, 1973).
Mark Vernon writes in the Guardian about Resources for living.
On one level, it is no surprise that corporations are bad at coping with existential crises, or, indeed, the deep desires and longings that can lie behind love affairs. There are also positive signs that organisations can make space for their human assets to genuinely care for themselves, such as the option of a four-day week.
But beware. When the company says it wants you to flourish, it can only have your goodwill at heart to the extent that it maximises your creative output, your commercial surplus value. Life is to be found elsewhere.
Another delayed Church Times article:
Not all extra-marital sex is the same by Duncan Dormor.
The Church should recognise cohabitation as a step towards marriage, he says, in an article published before the General Synod debate on the York diocesan synod motion. See report on that debate here.
After some delay I have been able to extract this op-ed article from the Church Times archive.
Mark Hill a distinguished English church lawyer, wrote this back in February:
We can work out what we are - The Eames Commission is a great opportunity
THE Anglican Communion teeters on the brink - not of imminent collapse, but of reinvigoration. Far from being the dysfunctional legacy of a misguided imperialist past, the Communion is a vital body, animated by a shared ecclesiological inheritance.
There was a documentary radio programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning, about Church of England clergy. Four priests, representing a wide range of traditions within the church, talked to Gavin Esler.
Servants of the People
will be repeated tonight at 9.30 p.m. London time.
The programme is available on the internet here using Real Audio. I suspect this link will last only one week.
I thought this programme was the best PR for the CofE that I have heard in some time.
From the Church Times of 20 February:
Don’t rob asylum-seekers of legal rights and sustenance, says Synod
Church urged to help in fight against AIDS
New weekday lectionary discussed
Finance
Marriage is best, but others need rights, too, says Synod
ARCIC asked to revisit papal infallibility and jurisdiction
Draft Church of England (Miscellaneous Provisions) Measure
Broad welcome for new safeguards for clergy
Farewells
And from last week’s Church Times opinion columns
This is no way to disagree Giles Fraser writes about the recent General Synod debate on sexuality.
From the Guardian
Silence on sex is no answer Marilyn McCord Adams
The most serious threat to the Anglican communion is not cross-cultural substantive differences about sexual norms, serious as these are, but the spirit in which the debate is conducted. Late 19th- and early 20th-century English theologians did not fear to let sharp theological disagreements coexist, and allow experiments to run their course until time proved whether or not the Lord would prosper them.
By contrast, in the present controversies, some show a tendency to slide from explicit professions of biblical infallibility into implicit confidence in the inerrancy of their own methods and interpretations. Some wish to take to themselves quasi-papal authority to determine doctrine and discipline, and to excommunicate those who refuse to conform.
Ten years on, opponents are in the minority Stephen Bates (published last Thursday)
US Anglicans ‘naive’ about gay bishop Bates interviews Griswold
From The Times
Light and love are at the centre of both Islam and Christianity Bruce Dear
Christian and Islamic traditions contain a network of overlapping insights that can create a space for mutual comprehension. This is not to say that the two religions are the “same”, in some politically-correct sense. Each has unique and incompatible claims. However, there is irrefutably an architecture of shared ideas which can help to open dialogue. This dialogue cannot share out oil, land or power more fairly; but it can help to dispel the crudest prejudice which demonises all Christians or all Muslims.
Ruth Gledhill reports on the service to dedicate the new ACO offices and spoke to Archbishop Malango:
In the congregation was Archbishop Bernard Malango, Primate of the province of Central Africa and one of those most opposed to Bishop Robinson’s elevation. “A split is inevitable,” he told me afterwards.
The split over gays is roughly defined as one between North and South. The warring factions can share Communion, it seems, but not much else. Some can not even bring themselves to share Communion. The week-long committee meeting that preceded this service was boycotted by the Primate of Nigeria, Dr Peter Akinola, because of the presence of Bishop Griswold.
From the Telegraph
Who’s in charge of leaking tub? Christopher Howse writes more about Edward Norman
Self-knowledge is the key to this spiritual spring time
Geoffrey Rowell writes in the Times about Lent as a spring time
(Australians and others in the Southern Hemisphere just pass on this :-)
The scourging of the Shi’ites
Christopher Howse writes in the Telegraph about the parallels between certain Muslim and Christian rituals
Arousing passion and interest in Jesus’s death Telegraph leader
Mike Wooldridge of the BBC writes about Cathedrals fall on hard times
In the Guardian Giles Fraser writes about the forthcoming Mel Gibson film in
Crucified by empire.
In the Telegraph Christopher Howse writes about DIY Sundays and fishless Fridays
which refers to an article in last week’s Tablet by Eamon Duffy, Fasting - our lost rite.
In The Times, Alan Webster, once Dean of St Paul’s, writes about his grandson, Today the young are drawn by choice to a changing faith.
Nick Wyke writes about How art and religion are enjoying a renewed partnership in A new vision of divine inspiration.
Ruth Gledhill describes a café-style church at the Church of the Ascension in Balham, South London, in At Your Service.
The Guardian has published an edited extract, Imitations of Christ from Rowan Williams’s introduction to the guidebook accompanying Presence: Images of Christ for the Third Millennium , a series of exhibitions organised by Biblelands to mark its 150th anniversary.
And David Haslam writes about the World Social Forum 2004 in Mumbai, Glimpsing the new world orders.
In the Telegraph, Christopher Howse writes about What is a soul without a body?.
The Times has We have to face the fact: we must remember our future by Stephen Plant in its Credo slot.