This weekend Rowan Williams visits Rome again, this time for the inauguration of the new pope. Earlier reports were incorrect, and he is in fact the second modern archbishop to attend such an event. The first was Donald Coggan in 1978.
Meanwhile, some more commentary on the new pope from British newspapers this week:
In the Guardian:
Stephen Bates Back to the future with Joseph Ratzinger
Andrew Brown The last pope from Europe
Julian Baggini Grey matters
Mark Lawson Holier than thou
In The Times:
Stephen Plant Prophecies and the challenges that follow
…Yet, writing in 1995, that modern-day Cassandra, the liberal historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, already foresaw Benedict’s election (or that of someone very like him) and with it the challenge he must now take up: “The effect (of Christian fundamentalism) will be mitigated if the Catholic Church — the world’s biggest and most widespread communion — keeps up what may become a unique commitment to moral absolutism in defence of human dignity, individual freedom, social justice and the sanctity of life. Yet the tempters who are always cajoling the Pope to compromise will probably triumph — not when the present pontiff dies, because the long life in office of John Paul II has strengthened the moral fibre of the cardinalate, but in the next pontificate after that.”
The first part of Fernández-Armesto’s prophecy is likely to be unpopular with anyone who cannot tell the difference between intolerance and the steadfast defence of absolute truth, or who are liable to mistake moral and theological precision for the ruthless maintenance of tradition. In this camp is pretty much everyone, Catholic and Protestant, agnostic and atheist, who thinks that the Vatican’s consistent anti-modernism is a terrible hindrance to human progress. But the second part of Fernández-Armesto’s prophecy will upset those who believe that because the Church has resisted modernity in the past it can go on doing so in the future…
Daniel Johnson The best man for the job
As usual, the BBC got the story all wrong. The task for the new Pope is not to take sides between liberals and conservatives. Nor was that the choice the cardinals faced in this extraordinarily rapid conclave. All cardinals are, by definition, conservative.
No, the great issue for Pope Benedict XVI is the one that he set out in his remarkable sermon at the preconclave Mass in St Peter’s. Does he wish to lead the Church down the primrose path of secularism, following the Christian heartlands of Europe in their descent into moral relativism, or does he intend to turn towards the new missionary Church of Latin America, Africa and Asia, to reaffirm the faith of Christ, the faith of St Peter, the faith of John Paul II? That is the real choice.
What the fight against communism was for John Paul II, the fight against rampant secularism will be for Benedict XVI. And all those anti-papist commentators who protested at the attention given to John Paul II’s illness, death and funeral will be gnashing their teeth once battle commences.
…Pope Ratzinger will be even more controversial than his predecessor. He began life under the Weimar Republic, which collapsed because it took moral relativism to extremes and succumbed to the secular ideologies of Left and Right.
…Where I do expect movement during the Ratzinger pontificate is on ecumenical relations with the Orthodox and perhaps also Protestant churches. The last Pope opened up this Pandora’s box, bringing several of the smaller Eastern churches back into the Catholic fold. If the battle against the intolerance of secularism is to be won, Benedict XVI will have to find a way of reaching out to his fellow Christians to make common cause…
Richard Owen Myths, challenges and censure: Pope Benedict XVI gets to work
…Setting out his vision for his papacy as he celebrated his first Mass as pontiff in the Sistine Chapel, Pope Benedict told the cardinals who elected him on Tuesday that he would reach out to other religions such as Islam — provided that there was “reciprocity” — and continue to implement the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
In gold and white vestments, seated before Michelangelo’s Last Judgment and speaking in Latin, the man who once dismissed other Christian churches as improper said that his primary task was to work to reunify all Christians and that sentiment alone was not enough.
“Concrete acts that enter souls and move consciences are needed,” he said. He wanted “an open and sincere dialogue” with other religions and would do everything to promote the ecumenical cause, a reference not only to Anglicans but also to Orthodox Christians…
In the Telegraph:
Charles Moore Pope Benedict has a sense of history
Christopher Howse The Pope and Luther agree
In the Independent:
Catherine Pepinster A German Pope chosen to save Europe
Newspapers writing about the Pope:
Leader in the Guardian Pole of Poles
Leader in The Times Power of faith
Leader in the Telegraph Christianity in a Godless age
Christopher Howse The Victorian way of death
Jonathan Sacks John Paul’s blow against a virus of the soul
The Tablet has an article by the Italian commentator Marco Politi
A man ill at ease in his own century
More Tablet articles here
In The Times Bishop Basil of Sergievo writes the Credo column: His presence in Man can make gods of us all.
Richard Chartres writes in the Guardian about Bonhoeffer: a martyr for our collective soul.
Two views on the Pope: in the Independent Catherine Pepinster editor of the Tablet asks Do we really need this spectacle of the dying? and in the Telegraph Christopher Howse has Warm embrace for Sister Death.
The Guardian also has Colin Morris on Jerry Springer – the Opera in Jerry’s last judgment.
Another Times column discusses the forthcoming memorial service for Gypsies: Shunned victims of the ‘forgotten Holocaust’.
Keith Ward writes in the Tablet about Resurrection and Science in The quantum leap.
The Church Times editorial this week reminds us about Jim Callaghan’s gift to the Church of England, but last week’s Easter leader. should also not be missed.
1 CommentTwo columns from Saturday’s The Times
Geoffrey Rowell on Story which transforms both living and dying
…The Christian Church dares to proclaim that here, in this life and this death, we encounter God, the source and the sustainer of all life and being, emptying Himself, coming down to the lowest part of our need. Today, Holy Saturday, is the most paradoxical day of the Christian year, a day when indeed God is dead. In love He chooses freely to know our dying, and Christian devotion and imagination speak of Christ descending to the place of the departed, shattering the imprisoning gates and chains and bars of Hades. Tomorrow, Easter Day, the nothingness of today explodes into a fullness of life, which is a new creation, blowing history open. The horizon of our human life is no longer death, but risen life in Christ.
This is the overarching story, “the one story only which will prove worth your telling”; for it is the story of the God who made us, and loved us, and in thirsting love has re-made us. Easter is indeed about the resurrection of Christ — which is neither a descent from or denial of the cross, nor a resurrection of relics, but a new creation, a transfiguration of human life and history. Easter touches us with eternal life, and the Lord who breathes on His disciples on the first Easter evening, is the Lord who is still the Lord and Giver of life, making of His Church an Easter people. This indeed is a love and a life which will never let us down and will never let us go, an overarching story which transforms both our living and our dying. “Christ is risen and the demons” — the dark, imprisoning powers of every kind — “are indeed fallen!”
Richard Harries on From cold, rolled stone to blood-streaked man
…The Christian West gradually lost its earlier reluctance to depict Jesus rising from the tomb. And there have been some very remarkable depictions, not least Piero della Francesca’s mural in the town museum in Sansepolcro. Aldous Huxley described it, without qualification, as “the best picture in the world”. For him it expressed the humanist ideal. He saw in the Christ figure, with its beautiful, muscled body, like a Greek athlete, a Resurrection of classical reality. More haunting than this is the resurrected Christ by Bramantino, now in Madrid. This Christ, still partially swathed in his white winding sheet and bathed in moonlight, has an unearthly pallor, except for the wounds and eyes, bloodshot with tears, staring directly at the viewer. This is a Christ that still bears the marks of death. By contrast, as Huxley observed, Piero’s Christ looks all set to live a fully human life on the human stage.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, 20th-century Christian art was dominated by depictions of Christ tortured on the cross. There is of course the sheer difficulty of depicting the resurrected Christ in a way that is not crass and literalistic. No less significant is our scepticism about any suggestion of a happy ending. Iris Murdoch once wrote that “all that consoles is fake” summing up the attitude of a culture soaked in Freud. Some of the most successful depictions focus on the relationship of the risen Christ with one of His followers, as in Graham Sutherland’s Noli Me Tangere in Chichester Cathedral. Equally good is the supper at Emmaus by Ceri Richards, above the altar at St Edmund Hall in Oxford. It is a fine picture, and avoids over-literalism by having Christ at the table against the background of a great cross of yellow light, emerging from it but not fully tangible. One of the disciples looks startled, the other slow and sceptical…
The Guardian on Saturday had Geza Vermes give his view of the passion chronology in Death in the afternoon.
In the Telegraph Christopher Howse had Embracing in a watery grave.
Paul Handley wrote in the Independent about The Christian gift is to convert despair into humour
1 Comment…The oddness of today takes on a greater significance if we adopt the argument of those who say that, in essence, we live permanently in Holy Saturday. We are sinful, and yet saved; saved, yet sinful. The act that rescued us from evil has taken place, and yet evil persists, and we are caught up in it. On a spiritual level (whatever that is), we must confront our complicity in the murder of Christ. The biblical record suggests that Jesus allowed himself to hope that death was not inevitable. After all, a palm-waving crowd had cheered him into Jerusalem when he arrived to confront the religious authorities. We have seen plenty of examples from Eastern Europe in recent months of the power that can be wielded by an unarmed opposition leader if he has the active support of the masses. But, although the orange-waving crowds took courage from each other, the decision to camp out in a draughty square had to be taken by each frightened individual. And this is us. We are not, as a rule, the psychopaths who bang in the nails; we are members of the crowd of followers who stand around and watch the tragedy unfold.
Our sins aren’t even bold, or Faustian. We are simply the ones who melt away; who, when Jesus is taken, suddenly find other things that need our attention. Freedom Square, the Martyrs’ Square are empty, when all that was needed to turn tragedy to triumph was our presence.
Living in Holy Saturday is to live with this raw knowledge of ourselves. We work hard, partly to distract ourselves, partly because we feel the need to atone. And yet, as we work, a miracle is happening, has happened (tenses have little meaning here). The more we know ourselves, the more we know ourselves to be forgiven. The Christian gift is this: to turn despair into humour. In classical theatre, the technical definition of a tragedy is a drama in which the hero dies. If he doesn’t, then it’s a comedy. Because the resurrection has happened/will happen, we are living in a unique, divine comedy. Instead of being depressed about our failings, we are invited to see them as absurd, comic; and to laugh at ourselves is to accept forgiveness…
Rowan Williams expresses his opinion on abortion today in the Sunday Times: People are starting to realise we can’t go on as we are and a related news story is Williams calls for abortion review.
There is also a BBC report about this Williams urges debate on abortion. The original article begins:
For a large majority of Christians — not only Roman Catholics, and including this writer — it is impossible to regard abortion as anything other than the deliberate termination of a human life. Whatever other issues enter into the often anguished decisions concerning particular cases, they want this dimension to be taken seriously.
Equally, though, for a large majority of Christians this is a view which they know they have to persuade others about, and recognise is not taken for granted in our society. The idea that raising the issues here is the first step towards a theocratic tyranny or a capitulation to some neanderthal Christian right is alarmist nonsense.
One of the confusions that has arisen in the past week is the idea that we are somehow going to be swept up into a British rerun of the US election of 2004, with a moral conservative panic dictating votes. It’s far from clear that this is what happened in America; and even if it were, we are a long way from any comparable situation here…
Last Friday in the Guardian Giles Fraser and William Whyte wrote Don’t hand religion to the right.
For decades, the political class on this side of the Atlantic has prided itself on the absence of religious culture wars. The obsession with abortion, gay marriage and obscenity, the alliance between the secular and religious right – these are peculiarly American pathologies. It couldn’t happen here. After all, we’re just not religious enough.
Except it does seem to be happening here. In making abortion an election issue, Michael Howard has prompted the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, pointedly to warn against assuming “that Catholics would be more in support of the Labour party”. Elsewhere, the Christian right targets the BBC, and the Church of England is being colonised by homophobic evangelicals with broad smiles and loads of PR savvy. No wonder the cogs are whirring at Conservative central office on how best to exploit the voting power of religion…
The Observer today has a Focus: The religious right feature which includes this article by Jamie Doward and Gaby Hinsliff Who would Jesus vote for? with the strapline:
As abortion and religious censorship move up the pre-election agenda, evangelical pressure groups are seizing the chance to exercise increasing influence over mainstream British politics
Related news story Blair seeks the Christian vote
And yesterday the Independent carried a report about Tony Blair, Blair: ‘Within my milieu, being gay was not a problem’ and an accompanying news story First the grey vote, now the gay vote which includes this:
4 CommentsThe Prime Minister insists there is no conflict between his religious views and his pro-gay stance. Urging the Church of England to resolve its differences over homosexual bishops, he says many people in the Church share his view that the fundamental Christian principle is one of equality. “But there are those that passionately disagree,” he says.
Kendall Harmon whose blog is at titusonenine has the Face to Faith column today’s Guardian: Anglicanism at the crossroads.
The original version of this is rather longer and can be read here. I recommend this longer version to understand more accurately what Kendall thinks about this. I noted particularly his last paragraph as originally written:
“There are… limits to diversity,” says the Windsor Report, and the Anglican Communion has reached them in the current crisis. “These limits are defined by truth and charity” (TWR 86) which together with courageous leadership can enable the honest facing of the depth of the problem with the awesome sacrifice needed by all to enable a solution. The future of the third largest Christian family in the world is at stake.
Theo Hobson has had two major articles published this week. Theo is author of Against Establishment: an Anglican polemic and Anarchy, Church and Utopia: Rowan Williams on Church (published next month); both published by Darton Longman and Todd.
Get off your knees, Dr Williams was in The Times on Tuesday.
Awkward partners was in The Tablet today.
The Times article included this:
[The Church of England] …desperately needs to interest people in its version of Christianity; but establishment is a major turn-off. Before 2002, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, would have agreed with this analysis. Being Welsh, he had never had to pledge allegiance to the Queen, and he looked upon the establishment of the Church of England with scepticism. In 2000 he said: “I think that the notion of the monarch as supreme governor has outlived its usefulness. I believe increasingly that the Church has to earn the right to be heard by the social world. Establishment is just one of those things that make it slightly harder.”In 2002, when he began to be talked about as a contender for Canterbury, these remarks were dug up, and he hastily issued a press release in an attempt to re-bury them. “This is a matter which is quite clearly not at the top of the agenda for the Church of England,” he assured us. It is a shame that Dr Williams has not been more open about his doubts. For they are longstanding, and central to his theology. As long ago as 1998 he gave warning against any idea of “the Church’s guardianship of the Christian character of a nation . . . which so easily becomes the Church’s endorsement of the de facto structures and constraints of the life of a sovereign state.”
Upon his appointment to Canterbury, he shoved his disestablishing sympathies into the closet. Surely he should reach out to those with similar feelings — young, confused Anglicans especially — and tell them it’s OK. It’s OK to feel slightly nauseated by grand occasions of state, to feel that royalist pageantry stifles the spirit of Jesus Christ; and the occasional republican fantasy is nothing to be ashamed of.
Instead, he seems to have taken fright at the weakness of the Church. Maybe one cannot afford to be too honest, when Christian values are so precarious in this culture. Maybe an honest discussion of establishment would make the institution look muddled, weak and inward-looking. Better to look tough and united. Better to keep one’s core constituency on board, and make pleasant noises about the rich national legacy of the Christian monarchy. If in doubt, play the holy heritage card — it will always please the millions of lukewarm, middle-class Anglicans.
And there is another reason to keep deferring the disestablishment debate. The argument about homosexual ordination has shown the Church to be a very shaky marriage between the poles of liberal Catholics and conservative Evangelicals. This frail coalition might collapse without establishment. So it is a genuinely dangerous topic in the present climate.
Christopher Howse in the Telegraph writes about women’s ordination under the title Dressing up in clerical clothes.
4 CommentsToday the Guardian has this editorial column: Dr Williams’ dilemma
Also this column by Zoe Williams God’s constructive dismissal
Also The Times had this opinion column by Theo Hobson Get off your knees, Dr Williams and tomorrow it will have this column by Mark Hart I confess. I believe in free trade.
If this is all too much for you, then turn with relief to this Lent Face to Faith column by Judith Maltby: Summon all the dust to rise.
0 CommentsIn The Times today Geoffrey Rowell has a Lenten meditation based on a recent visit to Majorca and participating in a local pilgrimage there. Journey reveals signs of the new life of spring. He concludes:
When I was young I remember a teacher demonstrating the way in which disordered iron filings on a piece of paper arranged themselves in a pattern once a magnet was placed beneath them. In the same way, if we but open our lives to it, the magnetic love of God can order our disordered love, “setting our feet upon a rock and ordering our going”, as the psalmist put it. And what that love of God is we see and know in the Cross of Christ, the “very book of charity laid open before us”, and in his Easter victory. Lent is the springtime of the soul because it leads to Easter, and Easter leads to Pentecost and the love of God poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
It is this for which we were made. It is this for which the world is made — so its beauty points us to God, the source of all beauty. The transfiguring grace of the Holy Spirit enlightens our eyes so that the source of all our seeing is rinsed and cleansed to know the “dearest freshness deep down things”.
There is repentance needed here also, for the world is so often made ugly, disfigured and polluted and its resources wasted by our greed and destruction. Sin, although inescapably personal, has social and corporate dimensions and consequences. We need both to see and to choose aright in caring for the world which God made and which he saw was good. As John Keble put it in words we could use as a Lenten prayer:
Thou who hast given me eyes to see
And love this sight so fair,
Give me a heart to find out Thee
And read Thee everywhere.And in so reading, to pray that we may be given that right judgment in all things — in the ordering of our love, the shaping of our lives, and our care for creation — which is the gift and grace of the life-giving Spirit of God.
In the Guardian Paul Oestreicher writes from Dresden about the anniversary of the RAF bombing: Spirit of the white rose.
To come to this city as it remembers the burning pyres of February 1945, on behalf of its twin city Coventry, is to come with mixed emotions. These are even more complex for me. As a child who fled Hitler, I remember my grandmother – a victim of the real Holocaust. In an address to the people of Dresden, representing Coventry cathedral, I shall remind people of Coventry’s provost who, six weeks after the blitz of 1940, preached a sermon in the ruins of his cathedral in which he rejected all thoughts of revenge. He declared that when the war was over he would work with those who had been enemies “to build a kinder, more Christ-like kind of world”. The people of Coventry at that time shook their heads. It didn’t fit in with a world in which popular opinion had it that the only good Hun was a dead Hun.
Christopher Howse in the Telegraph writes about Why they can’t wed in church and Lord Carey writes in the same paper: Royal ‘I do’ poses fewer problems than ‘I don’t’.
0 CommentsSteve Parish writes in the Guardian about women bishops: All her own work:
We’ve had Anglican women bishops for many years, but the “mother” church will have to wait. The report, Women Bishops in the Church of England? goes to the general synod this month to start a process that, even with a fair wind, will take five years of debate, consultation, legislation and parliamentary approval before royal assent could be given to such ordinations.
There’s time to look afresh at fundamental issues, as the report claims that it “takes nothing for granted”. That’s not strictly true. It does assume that Junia – described, with Andronicus, as “prominent among the apostles” in Paul’s letter to the Romans – was female. So outrageous was that to many commentators (even today) that they argued that it must be a textual error for the masculine “Junias”. Or it is argued that the translation should mean that Junia was “well-known to the apostles” – but not one of them.
Christopher Howse writes in the Telegraph about an event that has not yet happened, in The death of the Pope.
Robert Fox writes in The Tablet about Iraq, The long march continues.
So also does Jonathan Sacks in The Times, True faith speaks in the voice of reason.
In the American journal Commonweal, an American RC priest writes about the expected statement from the Vatican about homosexuals in the priesthood, A Gay Priest Speaks Out.
2 CommentsFirst, from the Church Times, Giles Fraser wrote this week about the Windsor Report and human rights, in Curb the will of the majority.
One of the oft-made criticisms of the report is that it begins to introduce a curia-type of centralisation into Anglicanism. Yet, as Aidan O’Neill says, the Church of Rome offsets the power of the Vatican by emphasising the place of conscience. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger puts it: “Over the Pope as the expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority, there stands one’s own conscience, which must be obeyed above all else, even if necessary against the requirements of ecclesiastical authority.”
The Windsor report acknowledges no equivalent checks and balances to safeguard individuals against the will of its newly imagined ecclesiastical authority. That makes it a very dangerous document.
He went on to develop this theme in a note published by InclusiveChurch entitled Rights and Wrongs which comments on the document A Response to the Windsor Report, and included in GS 1570:
In a report out this week, members of the Church of England House of Bishops Theological Group and the Faith and Order Advisory Group have argued that “any commonly agreed standard of faith is bound to be difficult for those who disagree with it. However, a necessary part of Christian discipleship is learning to accept the constraints of living within a community that makes decisions that we may not agree with. A necessary part of the baptismal vocation involves dying to self.”
This is a shameless piece of doublethink. For Bishops Hind and Nazir-Ali, dying to self apparently only applies if you are in the minority. Furthermore, it suggests that the principled resistance to homophobia is, in fact, a form of selfishness – unchristian even. They go on to suggest “discipline to be exercised in cases where there is an explicit rejection of the report’s recommendations”. No space is offered to those who reject institutional homophobia in an act of principled dissent. No wonder people are worried as to what sort of thing the Anglican Communion is becoming.
The paper by Aidan O’Neill which is referred to can be found on The Tablet website and is titled Rights, responsibilities and religious bodies.
In today’s Guardian there is an article by Diarmaid MacCulloch about contemporary politics, The end of days: a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Telegraph continues that theme with Christopher Howse writing about Tony Blair in To kneel or not to kneel.
The Credo column in The Times is by Roderick Strange Those we have loved and lost reveal the way. However, more interesting is Matthew Parris who writes about Ruth Kelly and Opus Dei: Why Ruth Kelly’s faith and her politics cannot be separated. In particular he says:
0 CommentsIt was disappointing, then, when Ms Kelly denied that she had ruled herself out of any ministerial job on religious grounds. Instead she is anchoring her position in the time-honoured — and thoroughly dubious — assertion that she knows how to distinguish between faith and politics. Ms Kelly insisted in an interview with the Daily Mirror that her faith was a private matter which had nothing to do with her job. “I have a private spiritual life and I have a faith. It is a private spiritual life and I don’t think it is relevant to my job,” she said.
What? That is wholly inconsistent not just with the whole drift of Opus Dei’s work, but with Christ’s teaching. Of course one’s faith, and the moral code anchored in it, is relevant to one’s job. It is impossible to read the Gospels in any other way.
Geoffrey Rowell writes in The Times weekly Credo column that In silence and stillness we can seek God. Here’s a portion:
The wisdom of the great Christian teachers of prayer — echoing that found in other religious traditions — places a high value on the discipline of silence, quietening the incessant babbling of outward and inner chatter to allow a settling into a deep and attentive stillness, rooted in a Godgiven inner peace.
Seraphim of Sarov, the 19th-century Russian saint, taught: “Keep your heart in peace and a multitude around you will be saved.” Centuries earlier St Benedict urged his monks: “Diligently cultivate silence at all times,” and, in a vivid image, Diadochus, the 5th-century bishop of Photiki in Greece, cautioned that just as “When the door of the steam bath is continually left open, the heat inside rapidly escapes,” so the desire to say many things through the door of speech dissipates the remembrance of God: “Timely silence then is precious, for it is nothing less than the mother of the wisest thoughts.”
In the biblical story of Elijah on Mount Horeb, the prophet stands in the entrance of his cave, and finds the presence of God to be not in fire, storm and earthquake, with all their terrible physical power of destruction, but in “a still, small voice” — which, literally translated, is “the sound of thin silence”. It is this which awes Elijah so that he wraps his face in his cloak. And the psalmist writes: “Be still — let go — and know that I am God.” Silence and stillness, which require discipline, enable us to be attentive, to listen, not for some external voice, but, as we open ourselves to the presence of God, to that life which is at the source of our being.
Christopher Howse devotes his weekly Telegraph column Sacred mysteries to considering Why should young Muslims tolerate it? which refers to what Mr David Bell, the chief inspector of schools, has been saying.
The weekly Guardian column Face to Faith is devoted this week to a consideration by Catherine Pepinster editor of The Tablet of the question Is Opus Dei at work in Blair’s government?
Michael Brown in the Yorkshire Post writes about the demise of the Mirfield Commem Day in Alas, no more ‘miracles’, whatever the weather
0 CommentsChristopher Howse writes in the Telegraph about Rowan Williams visiting Westminster Cathedral yesterday: Williams harks back to Anselm. (The BBC also carries a report on this visit, Archbishops pray for tsunami dead.)
In the Guardian the godslot is written by John Newbury The Christian centre cannot hold.
The Bishop of Colombo in Sri Lanka, Duleep de Chickera writes in The Times about the tsunami disaster: Our solidarity after the tsunami shows the way to a lasting peace. Part of this reads:
“What have you to say about the kingdom of God?” ( “now” clearly implied) was the question fired at me by a Buddhist from a leading local NGO as soon as I sat down next to him at a lecture in Colombo. This forthright (theological) question centres on God in the tsunami. For the churches of South Asia, steeped in poverty — and within living memory of dominant colonial Christianity — the “vulnerable God” theory is relevant.
A powerful dominant God is distasteful and alien to the poor and powerless. Much more, the “vulnerable God” theory flows very much from the text as well. The incarnation clearly conveys a God of love who deliberately takes on vulnerability to identify and save.
As waves ravaged humans, the vulnerability of this creator God of both waves and humans was sensed in the deafening silence. God is love and the freedom that love confers imposes inherent restrictions on controls on all creation. Human relationships, between parent and child or among spouses, bears this out. So the loving, liberator, parent God who was not in the wind, earthquake and fire was certainly not in the tsunami.
The vulnerable God however is not a passive God. This distinction is essential for faith to be kept. To borrow a phrase from Bishop Geoffrey Rowell’s recent pastoral letter to his diocese, this God is an insider. In Christ God took human form to stand with humans in our suffering and loss. The incarnation is historical fact as well as a telescope into the ways of the same God in past and future history. As God was in the historical incarnation, so God has been with those who suffer grief and loss. This God invites God’s people to do and become likewise.
The usually gentle waves of the sea are soothing to tired Asian feet that stand in poverty and bear an immense burden. The vulnerable servant Lord touched and washed feet. This was more than an act of humility. This was an enacted parable highlighting that relevant ministry begins from where people are placed — where they stand — and addresses suffering.
Large killer waves destroy all within their path. Dominance, whether in our theologies about God, leadership, aid or attitudes, is anti-Christ and counter productive to peace, justice and reconciliation. The way forward for all, South Asians who grieve as well as the world at large, is mutually to touch and wash each other’s feet.
Also in The Times Michael Binyon writes about The struggle to keep the faith in Bethlehem.
0 CommentsTwo items of interest relating to the articles following the tragedy.
First, the letters column of the Sunday Telegraph on 9 January was full of reactions to the newspaper’s handling of the RW article.
Second, the Independent on Monday, had this review of how the religious press had covered the Asian tragedy.
This describes how the Church Times was able to scoop most of its competition, because it did not – like most religious weeklies – combine any issues over the holiday season:
0 CommentsThe Anglican Church Times, which publishes a day later than the majority of the religious weeklies, was even sharper. An enterprising reporter’s calls to Sri Lanka on 28 December meant that when editor Paul Handley returned to work the following morning, he was able to throw out much of what had been prepared previously and run prominently in his 31 December issue Rachel Harden’s story about how churches had become sanctuary for some of the homeless.
Handley was ahead of everyone else in the field by also running, in the same issue, an editorial on the religious implications of the catastrophe. “Christian belief needs to embrace phenomena of this kind, and hold fast to faith in the God of compassion, even when the world seems to have destruction built into it.”
Paul Handley, editor of the Church Times, writes in today’s Independent under the title Faith & Reason: Where was God on Boxing Day? With the drowned – and the saved.
Charles Moore writes in the Telegraph about Why God is to be found in the terror of the tsunami
(he says in passing that “Dr Williams’s piece has been unfairly maligned: most of it seemed to me true and subtle”)
Christopher Howse in the same paper asks Will cathedrals pay the price? which discusses cathedral admission charges and is in effect a review article about this book by Trevor Beeson.
In the Guardian Giles Fraser writes that God is not the puppet master.
The Times carries an article by Michael Bourdeaux concerning the Ukraine: Independent churches win new respect
And Jonathan Sacks writes that God asks us not to understand but to heal.
Update
Not from the papers, but from the BBC, the Joan Bakewell interview of Tom Wright is now available as a transcript.
The Spectator magazine has this feature article about Rowan Williams, written by AN Wilson:
Holy sage
(and continued on page 2). The entire article should be read, but here is one quotation:
0 CommentsIn spite of what some Christians today believe, the future of Christianity does not depend upon what a few bigots on the one hand, and a few homosexual enthusiasts and their friends on the other, believe about same-sex unions. It really does not.
The loudest critics come from some little enclave within the Church — whether ‘high’ or ‘low’ — where they are so busy with their church hobby and so smugly certain of their own rectitude that they have managed to overlook a rather obvious fact. Their churches, such as Holy Trinity Brompton or St Helen’s Bishopsgate might be full to the rafters on Sunday mornings, but the numbers who enjoy their particular form of holy club are a tiny minority of the population of this planet. Rowan Williams is sufficiently intelligent and normal to be aware that in the West, being religious these days is, outside America, very distinctly odd, and trying to defend Christianity against the whole ethos of materialism and scientific rationalism which most intelligent people take for granted is a more than intellectual task. We might very well be living in Christianity’s last days. Many of us who go to church do so a little wistfully, knowing that, unlike Rowan Williams, we do not believe in the ways which our ancestors did. ‘Our prayers so languid and our faith so dim’ is one of the few lines of a hymn which we could sing with gusto. ‘Fightings within and fears without’ might be another.
Tom Wright has written in a local newspaper the Northern Echo about Cracking the Christmas code
Giles Fraser has written in the Guardian that Empires prefer a baby and the cross to the adult Jesus
and Stephen Bates ( with a little help from Jim Rosenthal) has profiled Saint Nicholas
Bishop, legend, saint, fairy story, retail therapist, and film star … How did a pile of bones in an Italian basilica become the soft drink-swigging patron saint of brides, and our last remaining link with the original meaning of Christmas?
John Bell writes in the Independent
At Christmas we can dream and imagine how the future should be
But this year, I sense a new affection displacing seasonal cynicism. I don’t believe that the fascination with Christmas is simply a reminiscence project, a season dip into sentimentality or (depending on the carol concert) banality. Rather, I suspect that in the retelling and rehearing of the Christmas narratives, there is some latent yet profound hope stirred within us. Increasingly the skies above us are associated with dread as much as beauty. This is the result of being exposed to almost weekly conjectures about the state of the ozone layer or the discharging of carbon dioxide. Might it not be that deep in our hearts we want to believe that the air above us is a place for angel-song and celestial harmony, and that somehow ecology has to do with cosmic praise as well as freedom from pollution?
The Telegraph leader column is titled The disarming paradox of the child Emmanuel
In The Times Geza Vermes asks When you strip away all the pious fiction, what is left of the real Jesus? He says in part:
The ingredients of Jesus’s religion were enthusiasm, urgency, compassion and love. He cherished children, the sick and the despised. In his eyes, the return of a stray lamb to the sheepfold, the repentance of a tax collector or a harlot, caused more joy in heaven than the prosaic virtue of 99 just men.
Because of His healings, many saw in Jesus the Messiah, triumphant over Rome and establisher of everlasting peace. Yet he had no political ambition. Rumours that He might be the Christ were nevertheless spreading and contributed to His downfall. His tragic end was precipitated by an unpremeditated act in the Temple. The noisy business transacted by the merchants of sacrificial animals and the moneychangers so outraged the rural holy man that He overturned their tables and violently expelled them. He thus created a fracas in the sanctuary of the overcrowded city before Passover and alerted the priests.
So the Temple authorities, the official guardians of peace, saw in Jesus a potential threat to order. They had to intervene promptly. Nevertheless even in those circumstances, the Jewish leadership preferred to pass the ultimate responsibility to the cruel Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who condemned Jesus to death. He was crucified before Passover probably in AD30 because in the eyes of officialdom, Roman and Jewish, He had done the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Just as the New Testament had prefaced the biography of Jesus by the joyful prologue of the Nativity, it also appended an epilogue to the tragedy of the Cross, the glorious hymn of the Resurrection. Indeed, Jesus had made such a profound impact on His apostles that they attributed to the power of His name the continued success of their charismatic activity. So Jesus rose from the dead in the hearts of His disciples and He lives on as long as the Christian Church endures.
Also in The Times Simon Jenkins writes about stained glass in Marvel at Heaven’s doorway and there is a leader entitled Have faith which ends:
5 CommentsToday, perhaps, faith comes less easily to most than it once did. There is more competition for attention and, in the West, we seem to have more power to choose and a greater range of choices. What does it say about human nature that so many choices impoverish the spirit?
The case for appreciating what a religious dimension can bring has, of course, been made more difficult in a world scarred by fundamentalist violence and blinkered zealotry. But it was just such a world into which Jesus was born. And His message has endured, while the fanatics of His time have become history’s footnotes. It is paradoxical indeed that a message of love, which survived centuries of hate, is now in danger of being lost through mere indifference and self-absorption. Our culture would lose so much if what we owe to faith became forgotten. That is why we are glad to say to all our readers, whatever their beliefs, that we firmly hope the spirit of Christmas is with them.
Update Sunday
Richard Harries writes in the Observer that We should not fear religion
Religion is now a major player on the world stage in a way that was scarcely conceivable 30 years ago. In both the Islamic world and the Bush White House religion is impinging on public policy. In the 1960s sociologists believed that the world was in the grip of an irreversible process of secularisation – though they could not account for the United States, at once the most modern and one of the most religious countries in the world.
Now sociologists are drawn to the opposite conclusion: the more modern the world gets the more religious it becomes. It has been well said that whereas the major conflicts of the twentieth century were ideological, those of the twenty-first century will be to do with identity in which religion is a key element. Globalisation draws people out of their village communities, where they had an assured place and identity, into sprawling urban areas making goods for the Western market. There, gravitating to the mosque or church, they find their identity in relation to their religion…
Today Saturday, David Hope writes in the Guardian about Christmas celebrated in styles
One of the first things I did, having been enthroned in early December as Archbishop of York in York Minster, was to attend the nativity play in the primary school of my home village, Bishopthorpe. The contrast could not have been greater…
…In contrast to the grandeur of the Minster I have usually sought to visit a parish church in the diocese for midnight mass – sometimes a church without a vicar or indeed a church that would not in the normal course of events expect the Archbishop.
Next year it will be a parish church – St Margaret’s Ilkley and that will be very different again. But then, while it has been an enormous privilege to have been able to experience the sheer beauty and wonder of Christmas celebrated in the way I have described, the place and manner of the celebration of Christ’s birth is in the end of little relevance.
For the one single fact which underlies and which is fundamental to any Christian celebration, however grand or humble the setting, is the stupendous fact of God coming to us and among us in Jesus Christ.
For in the stable we witness what the poet Christopher Smart described as the “magnitude of meekness”, the hospitality of the God who welcomes any and all who seek – the God who is constantly inviting us to work with him in His loving purposes for the establishing of His kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven – a kingdom of righteousness, justice and peace for the peoples of the entire world.
In The Times Geoffrey Rowell writes about The meaning at the very heart of Christmas. An extract:
0 CommentsFor Christians every Sunday is a feast of the Resurrection, and every Christian festival is always an Easter festival — and that includes Christmas. The Annunciation of Gabriel to Mary, the village girl of Nazareth, that she is to become the bearer of the Son of God, is a moment of new creation. So too is the birth at Bethlehem, and that is all fulfilled in the new life which bursts from the grave at Easter, a life in which through his life-giving Spirit we share. So the Christmas collect speaks both of the birth at Bethlehem, and of our new birth — of our being made God’s children by adoption and grace by the same life-giving Spirit which overshadowed the Blessed Virgin at the Incarnation. Christ went, as Bishop Lancelot Andrewes liked to say, “to the very ground-sill of our nature”. The God who comes among us is a God who empties Himself, pours himself out in love, comes down to the lowest part of our need, framed, formed, and fashioned as an unborn child, and then weak, helpless and dependent in the muck and mire of the manger, whose pricking straw is seen by St Bernard as foreshadowing the piercing nails of the Cross.
Christmas celebrates and challenges. At its heart is the overwhelming mystery of a God who stoops to us in the most amazing humility, revealing and disclosing Himself in the most human language, that of a human life. St John speaks of “the Word made flesh”, the Logos, or Divine Reason by which all things were ordered being made in our likeness. In that we behold the glory of God, and see and know what God is like, what is the source and origin of all that is, and the end and goal of our human life. That love “so amazing, so divine” is the truth we celebrate at Christmas.
‘Bush is back’ — Brian Draper at LICC writes about this week’s news from the USA.
Bush is back. And many Christians are rejoicing. The president’s thinking is driven both by a theology of personal morality, and the conviction that he and his country can act globally and unilaterally, on God’s behalf, for good.
Yet any Christian who worries — as many do — about the past and future consequences of this combination is now faced with a choice.
Either they surrender to the sense of disempowerment that swept both coasts of America and much of the world on Wednesday. Or, more positively, they seize the opportunity to ensure that practical theology is not monopolised by the Religious Right for the next four years.
Continue reading at LICC to see Draper’s response to President Bush’s re-election.
2 CommentsThinking Anglicans writer Tom Ambrose gives his first thoughts on the Windsor Report:
Reading the foreword to the report, I feel that a greater sense of perspective is needed. The Church has always faced controversy, and to single out the issue of the ordination of women as the only point of disagreement prior to issues about homosexuality is singularly unfortunate. The great hymn ‘The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord’ was written at a time of particularly bitter disagreement in the 19th century, when a split in the church seemed almost inevitable. The arguments of those days were more closely related to doctrine than any of the current problems.
The report acknowledges that the teaching of the church is based on scripture, tradition and reason. We cannot take these in isolation, and assume that the passages in the Bible which refer to homosexual activity can simply be quoted as being incontrovertible and uncontroversial. To do that would be to lapse into fundamentalism.
There are still Christians today who might think that looking for Noah’s Ark is a legitimate way of ‘proving’ scripture. Some attempt to demonstrate, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that the world was made in six days. Some people deny that evolution could take place. Their motivation is largely to demonstrate the inerrancy of scripture, and hence its right to be regarded as the only test for Christian belief and teaching.
The issues about creation are not trivial. They underlie all that we understand about God’s work, and hence have a bearing on issues regarding our redemption. Reading the scriptures in isolation is not enough, for insights are available to us today which were not known in biblical times.
Views on homosexuality have changed massively in recent years. When I was an undergraduate, a fellow student was sent down after being convicted of having sex with another man. Today, discrimination against homosexual people is outlawed in most European countries (though the churches have asked to opt out!)
But we are not going to assume that there will be uniformity across the globe in the way that societies regard what they may see as sexual offences. Where people can be put to death for adultery, sexual activity between people of the same sex will always be frowned upon.
In Britain, we expect people of all faiths to observe the law which says marriages must be monogamous. In other countries, it may be permitted for men to take more than one wife. Similarly, in countries where homosexual activity is frowned upon, it would not be understood if Christians campaigned for greater tolerance. The reaction would be as uncomprehending as the reaction might be here if Muslims demanded the right to polygamy.
In such a world, there is no going back on the decision to consecrate Gene Robinson in the USA, and no going forward in Uganda or Pakistan to the acceptance of gay clergy. The responses from ECUSA and from other parts of the Anglican Communion have underlined this. It would be naïve to assume that a consensus can be achieved. In all of this, the one redeeming feature may be that it accepts that there are differences of opinion which are genuinely held by Christian people.
5 CommentsThinking Anglicans writer David Walker offers a first view on the Windsor Report.
Twenty four hours into reading and reflecting on the Windsor Report I guess I feel ready to give it a small but heartfelt cheer.
I say small, not because it doesn’t agree completely with my own position — I wouldn’t expect it to — but because its publication means once again that some of my fellow Christians will experience its words as licensing a rejection of their deepest selves and beliefs. No matter how lightly we tread, we are treading on people’s souls, and that should always be done with both reluctance and genuine sadness.
But I am cheered.
I’m cheered firstly because a group as diverse as the Commission has been able to sign up, unanimously, to a report that offers a middle way between papal centralism and unfettered localism. I pray that the members of the Commission will each now take responsibility for holding those whose views they represent to the process it sets out.
I’m cheered because homosexuality is recognised as only one presenting problem. The Report notes that the work of engaging with it as an issue is still at an early stage. Rather than seek to answer the questions posed by sexuality (which was never its brief) Windsor maps out structures that will be (must be) equally important in holding any other local church to account should it seek to develop in ways that are both novel and unacceptable to the wider Communion. It is particularly timely in setting a context in which the response to any moves towards Lay Presidency at the Eucharist must be formed. I pray however that the Report will in itself forestall any such moves.
I’m cheered because the Report works hard to be even handed in the criticism it offers to those who have offended the wider Communion — whether it be through participating in a consecration, authorising a public rite or usurping another province or bishop’s proper authority. There is one small lapse in the logic in this respect. All are called to express their regret; all are called to desist from repeating the offending action; but curiously only the first two appear to be invited to withdraw from unspecified church councils until they do so. In practice this may be a moot point if expressions of regret come quickly and from all sides. I pray that they will do so.
I’m cheered because there is the opportunity for Anglicans of all types to spend the next few years working on what unites us rather than divides us. Formulating a Covenant and bolstering our Instruments of Unity may not be as exciting for the media as a battle over sexuality, but it’s where I would much rather be.
Where division occurs, the Report is clear that we go forward by using our time-honoured structures. The provision for those who feel alienated from their parent diocese or province is to be worked at together across the divisions. Any extended oversight is to be a last resort, and is described as “conditional”, “temporary” and “delegated”” — much closer to the Resolution C route familiar and largely accepted (or at least tolerated) in England than a formal separation. In particular the proposals set out by ECUSA are commended as “entirely reasonable”. All of this would seem directly applicable to the present Church of England debate about the ordination of Women to the Episcopate. Indeed it would be contradictory were the C of E to endorse Windsor but follow a very different route over this specific issue.
Finally, I am glad to note that the Report retains its even-handedness over dissent. The proposals offered are just as applicable to a liberal minority in a conservative diocese or province as they are to a conservative minority in a more liberal setting. There can be no monopoly over conscientious dissent, and the Report leaves us with a framework that will continue to allow the prophetic tradition to operate within the church in whichever direction the Spirit may take it.
A cheer then, not of triumph for one cause or another in a deeply divided debate, but for a way forward that uses Anglican structures and polity to address an Anglican problem. And that offers us all a way of remaining authentically Anglican.
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