The Lord Will Come And Not Be Slow

The Lord will come and not be slow,
his footsteps cannot err;
before him righteousness shall go,
his royal harbinger.
Truth from the earth, like to a flower,
shall bud and blossom then;
and justice, from her heavenly bower,
look down on mortal men.

Surely to such as do him fear
salvation is at hand!
And glory shall ere long appear
to dwell within our land.
Rise, God, judge thou the earth in might,
this wicked earth redress;
for thou art he who shalt by right
the nations all possess.

The nations all whom thou hast made
shall come, and all shall frame
to bow them low before thee, Lord,
and glorify thy Name.
For great thou art, and wonders great
by thy strong hand are done:
thou in thy everlasting seat
remainest God alone.

- John Milton, 1648. Based of Psalms 85 and 86. Book of Common Praise (Australian Supplement).

Public Meeting Friday VI

This week hebel brings you 2004's Phillip Jensen:

The Intolerant God - Arts Faculty Based Evangelism

With Christmas and CMS Summer School coming up - this will be the last PM Friday for the next month.

Public Meeting Friday V

The talks this Friday are vintage 2008. Ian Smith, Vice Principal and Academic Dean of the Presbyterian Theological Centre gave three talks of Abraham , the Father of Faiths (an attempt to tie in with WYD). Enjoy:

Abraham, Father of Faiths: The Lord Calls (Genesis 12-13)

Abraham, Father of Faiths: The Lord Justifies (Genesis 15)

Abraham, Father of Faiths: The Lord Provides (Genesis 22)

What Matt Does When He's Bored

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Public Meeting Friday IV

Continuing from last week, today's Public Meeting Friday are the three talks that finished of Think Weeks in the first semester of 2006. Are speakers are Andrew Katay (Christianity and Philosophy), Chris Forbes (Christianity and History) and Gordon Cheng (Christianity and Politics).

Christianity and Philosophy: Synthesis, Antitheses or...

Christianity and History: Does the Historical Jesus Have a Leg to Stand on? Complete with slides.

Christianity and Politics: Turning the World Up-side Down

The Katay and Chris Forbes talks are particularly good - some of my favourites.

Fear Not...But Sanctify Christ in Your Heart

Speaking on 1 Peter 3 (particularly verses 14-15) Andrew Katay read out this quote from John Chrysostom on fear on Sunday:

"The waters have risen and severe storms are upon us, but we do not fear drowning, for we stand firmly upon a rock. Let the sea rage, it cannot break the rock. Let the waves rise, they cannot sink the boat of Jesus. What are we to fear? Death? Life to me means Christ, and death is gain. Exile? ‘The earth and its fullness belong to the Lord. The confiscation of goods? We brought nothing into this world, and we shall surely take nothing from it. I have only contempt for the world’s threats, I find its blessings laughable. I have no fear of poverty, no desire for wealth. I am not afraid of death nor do I long to live, except for your good. I concentrate therefore on the present situation, and I urge you, my friends, to have confidence...If Christ is with me, whom shall I fear? Though the waves and the sea and the anger of princes are roused against me, they are less to me than a spider’s web. Indeed, unless you, my brothers, had detained me, I would have left this very day. For I always say “Lord, your will be done”; not what this fellow or that would have me do, but what you want me to do. That is my strong tower, my immovable rock, my staff that never gives way. If God wants something, let it be done! If he wants me to stay here, I am grateful. But wherever he wants me to be, I am no less grateful."

Fields White For Harvest

Bill Dumbrell has released a new book: Fields white for harvest - An exposition of Mark, Matthew, Luke-Acts.

According to Moore Books: "Veteran Australian biblical scholar Dr William Dumbrell has applied his profound understanding of the Old Testament to the Synoptic Gospels, and the result is a one-volume commentary that gets right to the heart of Jesus' identity and message.

William J. Dumbrell (Th.D., Harvard University) was for many years Vice-Principal of Moore Theological College, Sydney where he also lectured in Old Testament. He also lectured at Regent College in Vancouver, and Trinity Theological College in Singapore. He is the author of many fine books that follow some significant biblical themes from Genesis to Revelation such as Covenant and Creation, The End of the Beginning, The Search for Order, The New Covenant and The Faith of Israel. He has also written commentaries on Galatians, Romans, and the Gospel of John in the New Covenant Commentary Series. He still teaches at several Sydney colleges and at Macquarie University, Sydney.-Editorial Review."

Church is...

"...a communion of holy men and works, in that it submits to sole rule by Jesus Christ, in whom it is founded, that it also aims to live solely in the fulfillment of its service as ambassador, that it recognizes its goal solely in its hope, which is its limit." - Barth

H/T Michael for this idea. I'm going to tag Byron and Justin and suggest they find another, one sentence quote by someone like Barth or Bruggermann on what the church is.

Gunton on the Knowability of God

I've been reading On Rowan Williams - Critical Essays (edited by Matheson Russell) and several of the authors talk about Williams 'Negative Theology.' Below is how Colin Gunton finishes Act and Being, the book that introduced me to the ideas (and problems) of negative theology.

"The Man Jesus of Nazarath, crucified, risen and seated at the right hand of God in his humanity, is, to use an expression of Karl Barth's, albiet in a rather different way, the knowability God on our side. IInstead, therefore, of speaking of God's unknowability - a pagan fotm of unbelief - we should speak rather of his incognito. The Son of God comes as one who ' had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was depised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and familiar with our suffering.' (Isa. 53.2-3) We cannot evade that narrow road along which we must pass if we are to know the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And yet we must gloss Isaiah's poem, for tgis man who had 'nothing in his appearance' that we should desire him, is in fact the beauty and majesty of God in action. In that incognito we trully find the attributes of our God, for there is God in action, in the richness of his utter simplicity." - Colin Gunton, Act and Being, pp. 157-158, 2002.

Public Meeting Friday III

This week's Public Meeting Friday comes from 2006. I've selected two talks that were of a two week 'Opportunity Week' in Semester 1 - Think Week - in which the university campus was challenged to think about what Christianity had to say about Philosophy, History, Philosophy, Pluralism and Islam. It is the last two topics that I've picked for listening this week. John Dickson is the speaker, and both talks were given to around 250 students each. The audience for the Islam talk was made up of a large number of Muslim students, and the lecture theatre felt very tense to begin with - but John was very gracious in his representation of Islam, which, if anything, gave him an air of credibility.

So, without further adieu, here is Dr John Dickson:

• Christianity and Islam: Points of Agreement, Point of Tension
• Christianity and World Religions: Why Pluralism delivers Less Than it Promises
  

Belonging to the State

"In the accounts of the Christian martyrs, especially from the Second Century, one repeatedly comes up against one particular moment when Christians are challenged as to whether they will take part in religious veneration of the Emperor. It is the crucial question. The martyrs are the people who say they cannot. But in some of the accounts of martyrdom, there is a little bit more to it than that.One text, which comes from North Africa, in the mid-Second Century, depicts the Christians being tried in court as saying that they were perfectly prepared to pray for the Emperor, but not to him. One of them says, 'We pray for the Emperor. We pay our taxes.' In other words, this Christian was saying, we regard ourselves as loyal to the state and we take part in the processes that make the state work and, what is more, we pray for the good of the state; what we will not do is regard the state as sacred in itself.

This was seen, quite rightly, as an extremely subversive idea. It suggested that individuals, even slaves, could negotiate their relationships with the state, in some degree: they were not obliged to regard it as holy; there was another realm in which decisions might be taken and values and priorities fixed. That tension is reflected in the language that the Church used about itself.The early Christian community called itself an Ecclesia, using for itself the word normally used for an assembly of citizens in an ancient city, the assembly that reflected on public matters and took decisions together, so that, in effect, when the martyrs appear before their Roman judges, they stand for a citizens' assembly over against a Holy Empire.

Although that does not instantly create a new kind of Christian politics, it does create a very unsettling element within Roman society. Here are people claiming that, in some area of their lives, they belong outside the holy boundaries of the state and the Empire.Therefore the state begins to be seen not as a sacred comprehensive system, but as a mechanism for getting things done. The martyrs I referred to a few minutes ago promised to pay their taxes, because that makes society work, but that is the level at which their loyalty is engaged. Their deepest belonging is with the community who are citizens of some other kingdom." - Rowan Williams, Early Christianity & Today: Some Shared Questions, 2008 Gresham College Lecture.

What would it look like today for Christians to assert their identity as being outside the State whilst at the same time sustaining the State? And surely this would differ from country to country: The French Christian struggling under the weight of rigid secularism would have different issues to an American and America's 'Manifest Destiny' or a Chinese Christian where everything is suppressed for the glory of the state, or a Christian in a Muslim country where the whole state is under sharia law. And what if you were a Japanese Christian and had to sing a national anthem that praised the Emperor as a god? Pray for those around the world who live out the reality of this question every day.

Politics of Faith II: A Vision for Australia

In a previous post, we turned back to Kevin Rudd's 2006 article on Bonhoeffer and the rule of the church in politics. In brief, Rudd understands this to be:

'The function of the church in all these areas of social, economic and security policy is to speak directly to the state: to give power to the powerless, voice to those who have none, and to point to the great silences in our national discourse...'

Rudd continues by giving voice to what Australian politics might look like if Bonhoeffer's principles were followed:

'A Christian perspective on contemporary policy debates may not prevail. It must nonetheless be argued. And once heard, it must be weighed, together with other arguments from different philosophical traditions, in a fully contestable secular polity. A Christian perspective, informed by a social gospel or Christian socialist tradition, should not be rejected contemptuously by secular politicians as if these views are an unwelcome intrusion into the political sphere. If the churches are barred from participating in the great debates about the values that ultimately underpin our
society, our economy and our polity, then we have reached a very strange place indeed.

Some have argued that Bonhoeffer provides a guide for Christian action “in extremis”, but not for the workaday problems of “normal” political life. Stanley Hauerwas, Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University, argues, though, that this fails to comprehend Bonhoeffer’s broader teaching on the importance of truth in politics. In fact, it accepts the “assumption that truth and politics, particularly in democratic regimes in which compromise is the primary end of the political process, do not mix”.'

Rudd has the former Howard Government clearly in his sights. In describing the churches voice on issues such as Australian values, climate change, industrial relations and global poverty, Rudd not only describes Bonhoeffer as the archetypal Christian Socialist, he uses Bonhoeffer's thesis of speaking truth to government to strongly criticize the then administration:

'Mr Howard’s politics are in the main about concealing the substantive truth of his policy program because when fully exposed to the light of public debate, their essential truth is revealed: a redistribution of power from the weak to the strong.'

Rudd concludes that the pragmatic goal of the Howard policies was to:

'...retain his incumbency at all costs, distracting the body politic from the reality of his faltering program for government. The substance of that program now makes for a less robust political message as he moves into his second decade in oμce: rising interest rates, declining housing affordability, slowing productivity growth, an Americanised industrial-relations system, a regressive consumption tax,
the skyrocketing costs of university education and the steady undermining of universal health insurance. Add to these the escalating failure of the Iraq war and the deteriorating security in our immediate region, complicated by our distraction in Iraq – all compounded by a failure to tell the public the truth on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Iraqi prisoner abuse and the $300-million wheat-for-weapons scandal.'

One may wonder how often the Rudd Government has distracting the body politic from the reality of his faltering program for government. Rudd's vision is for an Australia that is a 'light on a hill' (attributed to Chifley), which is to be a global leader on climate change, the Millennium Goals, and international law:

'The time has well and truly come for a vision for Australia not limited by the narrowest of definitions of our national self-interest. Instead, we need to be guided by a new principle that encompasses not only what Australia can do for itself, but also what Australia can do for the world.'

And Rudd concludes that the church must not climb into bed with the conservative political establishment. Instead, it must take up the challenge of Bonhoeffer, robustly speaking the truth to the state.

The role of the church is not to agree that deceptions of this magnitude [War on Iraq, AWA, Children Overboard, etc.] are normal. If Christians conclude that such deceptions are the stock-in-trade of the Kingdom of the State in Luther’s Two Kingdoms doctrine (and hence of no relevance to the Kingdom of the Gospel), then we will end up with a polity entirely estranged from truth. When the prime minister states that migrants should have a better grasp of the English language, while at the same time removing major funding from the program that enables them to learn English, this represents a significant prostitution of the truth. Therefore, if the church is concerned about the truth – not the politics – of social inclusion, then in Bonhoeffer’s tradition of fearlessly speaking the truth to the state, it should say so.

Sinai and Pentecost

So, I have a question about Pentecost.

I've heard that the feast of Pentecost was a festival that was associated with the giving of the Torah (see New Testament and the People of God). Under the New Covenant, the people of God are given the Spirit, who does what the Torah was supposed to do but couldn't - bring life and 'write the law of God on peoples hearts'.

In Exodus, just as Moses is given the Torah, Israel falls into idolatry, worshiping a graven image. Israel was about to receive the God's good Torah that was meant to bring life and through Israel draw the nations to YHWH. Instead:

And when Moses saw that the people had broken loose (for Aaron had let them break loose, to the derision of their enemies), then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, “Who is on the Lord's side? Come to me.” And all the sons of Levi gathered around him. And he said to them, “Thus says the Lord God of Israel, ‘Put your sword on your side each of you, and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill his brother and his companion and his neighbor.’” And the sons of Levi did according to the word of Moses. And that day about three thousand men of the people fell. And Moses said, “Today you have been ordained for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of his son and of his brother, so that he might bestow a blessing upon you this day.” - Exodus 32.30-34.

3000 people die. Then in Acts, on the day when the Spirit is sent to the people of God at Pentecost, and instead of death, the Spirit brings life, particularly through the baptism of 3000 people:

Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. - Acts 2.37-41.

Is it right to draw this connection?

Public Meeting Friday II

Parables that Shock
Last week was the launch of Public Meeting Friday on hebel when I post up the link to old EU Public Meeting talks. We started of with Andrew Katay speaking on Colossians.

This week, let me take you back to the second semester of 2003, when the EU had just launched its third Public Meeting on Thursdays. Justin Moffatt is our guest speaker (he was around when PMs went from being once to twice a week) and he unpacks the parables from Matthew 13-20ish.

1. Parables That Shock: The Parables of the Soils
2. Parables That Shock: The Forgiveness-Forgetting Servant
3. Parables That Shock: Grace Before, During and After Lunch
   

Human Rights and Telling the Truth

If you missed Lateline last night, than Tony Jones' interview with Geoffrey Robertson on the current state of human rights is worth reading (you might even be able to watch the interview). Robertson has this to say on the challenges facing President-elect Obama:

"I think Obama and Obama's people - he's got some of his leading people are human rights advocates, in a past life, and undoubtedly want to reclaim the moral high ground that has been so tragically lost by the Bush administration in the last eight years. But - and they do. And they will have to deal with questions like the admissibility of evidence obtained by waterboarding and indeed the problem of inflicting the death penalty. The ludicrous thing about inflicting the death penalty on people who pray for it every day. I mean, there's nothing that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and co. want rather than in their own mind a fast track to paradise by being executed by the Americans. So, this is really - the death penalty is really rather what the Briar Patch was to Brer Rabbit. And hopefully these considerations will be taken on board. But they are some of the problems that the Obama administration with all its goodwill and all its determination to retain or regain the moral leadership of the world will have to grapple."

This is one of the reasons I feel excitement for an incoming Obama administration in Washington. Although I have serious concerns about Obama (voiced best by Byron), for me it is the prospect of having a President who will uphold the rule of law, not support torture and not obliterate centuries worth of development in human rights and international law. It is the hope of abandoning policies that lead to Abu Gharib, Guantanamo Bay and the covert transport of prisioners around the world.

What the church much continue to do all the more urgently in the coming years is to bear witness to the government the Lordship of Jesus. Although speaking about the situation here in Australia, Andrew Errington summarizes this point quite well:

"The second way we help governments be good is different, but crucial: we help our governments stay on the right track by holding fast to the true Gospel and so bearing witness in our society.

The great danger that confronts the church is that it will sell out to government, that it will stop preaching the true Gospel and start preaching a Gospel that fits better with our society, that’s a little less challenging. Because the Gospel never sits very comfortably with those in authority: it is the message that Jesus Christ is Lord and no one else, that the Kingdom of God matters more than any other kingdom, and that no earthly society is ultimate. This is always going to be a confronting message, especially for those in authority. Yet it is a message that desperately needs to be heard; because the alternative is something truly terrible: the demonic social order we see in Revelation 13. A government that fails to realise that there is a higher authority will end up becoming an idol. In Australia, I think we run little risk of making individual politicians into idols (thankfully). But I do think we run a risk of making “Australia” into a kind of idol. Just think about the rioting that happened at Cronulla a couple of years ago, with people waving flags and talking about defending our country and the Australian way of life, and most awfully, “Christian values”. This was, I believe, an example of a kind of nationalism which is actually idolatry. When we start treating people badly in the name of “Australia” (or any other community), we know we’ve got a big problem. The church must help our society and our governments stay on the right track by holding fast to the true Gospel, by keeping on preaching that Jesus alone is King, that our citizenship is in heaven, and that therefore “Australia” can never be the Kingdom of God." - Andrew Erringon, Jesus and Government.

Introducing Public Meeting Friday

So, it seems that everybody has a gimmick these days on their blog. Moffatt has Art on Friday, and Dead Flies has New Essays For Wednesday, Prayer Monday and the Blogging Fathers. In this spirit, therefore, Fridays on Hebel will now become Public Meeting Friday, when I post up the link to old EU Public Meeting talks (which are very close to my heart, being a previous PM Senior Student, and my wife being in her second term as the PM Senior Student).

To kick us off, let us tune in to some talks that were quite formative for me. This is Andrew Katay in 2005 at the end of Semester 2 giving five talks on Colossians - Living the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Living the Lordship of Jesus Christ: Receiving Christ as Lord

Living the Lordship of Jesus Christ: The Lord we Have received

Living the Lordship of Jesus Christ: Jesus Lord Over...

Living the Lordship of Jesus Christ: Living the Lordship of Jesus (1)

Living the Lordship of Jesus Christ: Living the Lordship of Jesus (2)

Politics of Faith

In an article that helped bring the current Australian Prime Minister to national attention in late 2006, Kevin Rudd has this to say about Deitrich Bonhoeffer, politics and Christianity:

"Bonhoeffer’s seminal work, his Ethics, was not collated and published until after his execution. Its final essay is entitled ‘What Is Meant by “Telling the Truth”’, and it represents a call to the German Church to assume a prophetic role in speaking out in defence of the defenceless in the face of a hostile state. For Bonhoeffer, 'Obedience to God’s will may be a religious experience but it is not an ethical one until it issues in actions that can be socially valued.' He railed at a Church for whom Christianity was “a metaphysical abstraction to be spoken of only at the edges of life”, and in which clergy blackmailed their people with hellish consequences for those whose sins the clergy were adept at sniffing out, all the while ignoring the real evil beyond their cathedrals and churches. 'The Church stands,' he argued, “not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village.'

In his Letters from Prison, he wrote, reflecting in part on the deportation of the Jews, that 'We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the reviled – in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.' Bonhoeffer’s political theology is therefore one of a dissenting church that speaks truth to the state, and does so by giving voice to the voiceless. Its domain is the village, not the interior life of the chapel. Its core principle is to stand in defence of the defenceless or, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, of those who are 'below'." - Faith in Politics, The Monthly, October 2006.

Rudd argues that Bonhoeffer went about this mission of 'speaking truth to the state' by causing dissent, primarily through the Confessing Church and the issues it protested. The goal was to “jam the spoke of the state … to protect the state from itself” (The Church and the Jewish Question). Rudd argues that Bonhoeffer:

"...was a man of action who wrote prophetically in 1937 that “when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” For Bonhoeffer, whatever the personal cost, there was no moral alternative other than to fight the Nazi state with whatever weapons were at his disposal,"

and concludes that:

"Bonhoeffer’s was a muscular Christianity. He became the Thomas More of European Protestantism because he understood the cost of discipleship, and lived it. Both Bonhoeffer and More were truly men for all seasons."

November 24 will be one year since Rudd's election victory over John Howard. So how Kevin 07 shaped up after twelve months in office? Has he taken up the cause of the defenceless? And as leader of the state, has he taken being told truth well? Is he the type of leader who allows the church to fulfill it's vocation to 'stand at the center of the village'? Or is he another crass politician who panders to religion when it is convinent and then shuts it away in a corner?

The Life of Jesus

CPX have posted a sneak peek of their upcoming documentary 'The Life of Jesus', the followup to The Christ Files. Check it out:


Life of Jesus Highlights 03 from CPX on Vimeo.

Free Money For New Lives

From within the student body of Moore College, a plan has emerged to express care for the poor of the earth - in this case, the unborn and their mothers. On December 8^th 2008, all families who receive Family Tax Benefit A will be given $1000 per child in order to ‘boost the economy’. It is proposed that half of this ‘free money’ be used ‘for new lives’!

Visit the website to find out how you can be involved.

YOU: An Introduction

Michael Jensen has released a book - YOU: An introduction. In his exploration of some of the different facets of the human condition (You are alive; You are free; You are a child), we soon discover that the question of who we are is essentially bound up with the question of who Jesus is.

YOU: An Introduction is a book about being a human. It is not as easy as it looks, being a human person. Each chapter addresses a different facet of human life – being a child, owning stuff, being male and female, having and being a body, dying, death and what comes after. What is like to be one of these things in the contemporary world? And what does the Bible say about this, especially in the light of the life of the best human who ever lived? A unique feature of the book is that it contains comments, questions and discussion that came from originally blogging the material – comments which take the argument in often unexpected directions.

YOU: An Introduction is a book that will be of interest to anyone – and it should challenge them/you, whether they are Christian or not, about what having a human life means.

You can read the introduction/first chapter and buy the book from here.

A Place For Government?

Andrew Errington, commenting on Romans 13.1-7 argues that the role of government is to to maintain order and justice within society through judgment. He says:

"A number of things must be noticed. First, Paul is very clear that “there is no authority except that which God has established.” Governments are given by God. Whatever process this happens through – election, monarchical succession, revolution – God is the one who raises up authority. Second, government is given by God for our good. Government is God’s “servant”, or “minister” (diakonos). Governing authorities are God’s ministers “for our good”! Third, government has a particular job. They are to punish wrongdoing and to praise those who do good; the task of government is to maintain justice by giving judgments. For this purpose the authority “bears the sword” – it can enforce its judgments. In this way political authority defends our good. Therefore, our basic attitude to government should be one of submission, rather than resistance. This involves paying taxes and giving what is due. But this submission is not slavery; it doesn’t just come from fear of possible punishment, but also from conscience – the conviction that this is the right thing to do – from a recognition that authority really is given to us by God for our good. As the passage in 1 Peter makes clear, we submit to authority freely.

The most important thing to note here is that the role given to government is very limited. Many have argued against the supposed “quietism” of these passages; but these passages actually do something radical: they limit the role of government to the practice of judgment. Typically, rulers want to do a lot more than simply maintain justice in society. Governments, paradigmatically the Roman Emperor of Paul’s day, can want to be seen as saviours, the solution to all our problems, the focus of our hopes, and can get big ideas about bringing civilisation and life – just think of Hitler or Stalin, or Pol Pot or Mao Tse Tung. To tell these rulers that they’ve actually just got this little role of giving judgment to play is very powerful. Paul’s political theory is based on his recognition that there is only one Saviour, only one who can bring life and hope: Jesus Christ; and so governments in this age have only a small role left to play." - Andrew Errington, Jesus and Government.

The world is now under the Lordship of Jesus, and all rulers will hand their power over to him. There is however, still a place for government currently under Jesus' lordship. Government under Christ’s Lordship is pushed back, called to humbly perform the task of judgment until Jesus returns and human society finds its perfection.

Let Barack Be Barack

We've elected as president someone who is empirical, cautious, conservative with a small "c", yet unusually sure of his own judgment when he makes it, which is often slowly. He's sure to disappoint those of his supporters who believe he can raise the dead, turn water into wine, and walk on water. But he has rescued the White House from the besotted rationalists of PNAC with their Platonist designs on the world, and restored it to the realm of common reason. It's a measure of the madness of the last eight years that, for this seemingly modest contribution to the nation's welfare (and not just this nation's), grown men and women wept in gratitude on Tuesday night.
- Jonathan Raban , 'He tried his best to veil it, but Obama is an intellectual'.

Election Day

This brilliant analysis from The New Yorker editors is worth reading:

It has been an epic campaign for the American Presidency and one which has been scrutinised at close quarters by the US's finest writers on the New Yorker magazine - the country's leading journal of politics and culture. Here, in their leader column ahead of the election, the editors of the magazine offer a brilliant analysis of the choice facing America, deconstruct the strengths and weaknesses of the candidates and finish with a powerful endorsement of Barack Obama as the man best suited to answer the grave challenges facing the next President.

And so is this post from Byron. And this is how the election looks right now.

The Church is Bigger Than You Think II: Jesus is the Church

“[W]here Jesus is, there is the Church; the Church as the assembly of those who are finding their relationships, their lives transfigured by the presence of Jesus. Church is the event of Jesus’ presence with its effect of gathering people around him and making them see one another differently as they see Him. The church is the immediate affect of Jesus. And hence St Paul can write about the new creation which happens when people are drawn into fellowship, drawn into relationship with the risen Jesus and encourages us therefore to think that the church itself is the beginning of the new creation.

It is not an institution designed to further a programme, not an association of people who happen to have the same ideas, but the beginning of God’s reclaiming of the territory of human life and not just human life either, God’s reclaiming of creation as his own and God pouring into creation of his saving and transfiguring power so that the world, human and non human will once again show radiantly who and what he is as God…The church is what happens when Jesus is there, there received and recognised.

- Rowan Williams, keynote address Mission Shaped Church Conference, June 2004.

Jesus in himself constitutes the church. Church is not what we do. It is where Jesus is present. Not that he is bodily present with us. However, Jesus is present with us now both Verbally and Spiritually:

"In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory." Ephesians 1.13-14. See also the 'in Christ' language in 1.3-12 and 2.12-16.

Jesus Christ is the Church - made present through the Word and Spirit. It is in him that we find our identity as the church: chosen in Christ, adopted God's children through Christ, redemption through his blood, knowledge of the mystery of God's will (for Jews and Gentiles), and obtaining an inheritance. So that in Jesus the church (the covenantal family of Jews and Gentiles) is now one new humanity. We are one body, with many parts, but connected to the one whole, which is the body of Christ.

Our church assembly is important. But we are all connected to each other and united together in Christ by faith. And where is, there is the church.

Part I

The Gospel and the Happiness Paradox

You may like to check out this article by John Ortberg (author of 'If You Want to Walk on Water, You've Got to Get out of the Boat'; source of all good sermon illustrations) talking about 'The Gospel and the Happiness Paradox'.

Discipleship or obedience is not something we have to cajole people into by obligation or gratitude ("after all, Jesus died for you; the least you can do is deny yourself happiness for a while on earth"), it is simply the process of learning to enter into the good, with-God life. The gospel becomes social as well as personal—not because individuals don't matter, but because to be "saved" means (among other things) to be delivered from the chronic selfishness that contributes to the world's hurt and to my misery.

To Those Who Are Near and Those Who Are Far

Ephesians 2.

It's pretty good being a Gentile who has become a Christian. Having once been dead in my trespasses and in the sins that I once walked in, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. What is true of Jesus is also true of me.

This is by grace, and not by my works, because I am after all God's workmanship.

And now? Jesus has ended the enmity that existed between Jews and Gentiles, having killed that enmity on the cross and made peace between those who were far off and those who were near. So that now, Israel's story is now my story. Israel's hope and polis (commonwealth) are also now my hope and polis. The covenant for Israel is also for me in Christ Jesus. No longer a sojourner or a house guest, I'm know a fellow citizen and part of the household itself. And where as 2000 years ago I would have been excluded from the temple in Jerusalem, stuck in the Court of the Gentiles, I am now apart of the temple, and a dwelling place for the Spirit of God.

And it's pretty good for Jewish Christians too. The purpose and story of Israel has found it's climax in Jesus Christ, and they too can find their identity not in the works of the law but in Christ Jesus.

For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.

No longer Jew or Gentile, we are the new humanity, and the great family promised to Abraham long ago. How great is God's grace and the richness of his mercy!

'Jesus is my Boyfriend'

I've found something that Rowan Williams and Mark Driscoll (from the very little that I've read) agree on. Williams, that a good deal of twentieth century theology has been characterised by bewilderment and agnosticism about the figure of Jesus, sitting next to a hugely popular devotional 'idiom' that s uncomplicatedly focused on the worship of Jesus.

"The late twentieth century has witnessed an extraordinary explosion of devotional song, whose popularity seems to cross an unprecedented range of cultural and linguistic boundaries; in a way curiously reminiscent of the Middle Ages, there is now an international language for worship - not literally a single tongue, but a strongly unified style. Its roots are evangelical and charismatic, but it has conquered great tracks of the Roman Catholic world as well. Some of it, perhaps much of it, has a solid theological basis, and can be strongly evocative of the paradoxes of 'meekness and majesty' (to allude to the refrain of a well-known example); much of it is utterly unadorned and often deeply moving adoration of Jesus. But there is a disquieting element in a good deal of this literature.; it is not just that devotion to Jesus can often be expressed in a way that detaches it from the Trinitarian dynamic of the New Testament, it is also that the erotic idiom of medieval and Counter-Reformation spirituality can reappear with fewer checks and nuances than in early centuries. Jesus as object of loving devotion can slip into Jesus as fantasy partner in a dream of emotional fulfillment. To avoid sentimental solipism, there needs to be either a strong and self-critical theological environment or (which is often the same thing in other guises) a clear orientation to the world's needs and the action of Chris in the whole social and material environment."

Similarly, in The Radical Reformission, Driscoll talks about being a members of churches (pre Mars Hill) where the minister was a manly man (i.e. a former NFL star), who taught the Bible 'verse by verse' and didn't make Driscoll view Jesus like a life long prom date.

Can you think of any songs that have the problem Williams speaks of? Or can you think of any songs that meet the standards of the Archbishop? Write and let me know.

'Jesus is God' According to Early Christians

John Dickson and the film crew from The Life of Jesus have gained rare access to an archaeological find that cements historical evidence early Christians worshiped Jesus as divine. It is a prayer hall in Meggido dating back to the third or even second century. According to John Dickson:

“The inscriptions on the mosaic floor are remarkable, one of them names a benefactor called Gaianus who is described as a centurion. Another mentions a woman called Akeptous who ‘…offered this table in memorial of the God Jesus Christ’.”

You can find more information here and here.

Resurrecting the Gospel

I'm writing an article for AFES Salt Magazine on 'Resurrecting the gospel – why the resurrection lies at the heart of the gospel (1 Corinthians 15; the resurrection = the centre of the gospel formula of preaching in Acts)'.

What do you think I should say?

"Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel..."


Kudos for naming where the photo was taken.

The Christian Historian

This is a bit long, but i think it is worth reading:

Church history is a moral matter but…it becomes fully so only within a wider theological context. The Christian engaging with the past has even stronger reasons for doing so as part of a maturation in critical and self-aware perception than the secular student, though there are important analogies even within the secular framework. A central aspect of where the Christian begins, the sense of identity that is there at the start of any storytelling enterprise, is the belief that the modern believer is involved with and in a community of believers extended in time and space, whose relation to each other is significantly more than just one of vague geographical connection and temporal succession. In theological shorthand, the modern believer sees herself of himself as a member of the Body of Christ.

Who I am as a Christian is something which, in theological terms, I could only answer fully in the impossible supposition that I could see and grasp how all other Christian lives had shaped mine and, more specifically, shaped it towards the likeness of Christ. I don’t and can’t know the dimensions of this; but if I have read St Paul in I Corinthians carefully I should at least be thinking of my identity as a believer in terms of a whole immeasurable exchange of gifts, known and unknown, by which particular lives are built up, an exchange no less vital and important for being frequently an exchange between living and dead. There are no hermetic seals between who I am as a Christian and the life of a believer in, say, twelfth century Iraq – any more than between myself and a believer in twenty-first-century Congo, Arkansas, or Vanuatu. I do not know, theologically speaking, where my debts begin and end. What any one believing life makes possible for others (and for which particular others) is not there for inspection. How my progress towards the specific and unique likeness of Christ that is my calling is assisted by any other Christian life is always going to be obscure.

…Despite the popular postmodernist talk about how we are ‘spoken by’ language rather than speaking it, we worry about our boundaries; we do not like having them unpatrolled in the way that a robust theology of Christ’s Body might suggest. But the truth is that, for anything resembling Orthodox Christian belief, any believer’s identity will be bound up with just this incalculable assortment of strangers and their various strangenesses.

Hence the Christian believer approaching the Christian past does so first in the consciousness that he or she is engaging with fellow participants in prayer and Eucharist, fellow readers of the same Scripture; people in whom the same activity is going on, the activity of sanctifying grace. This is not in itself the conclusion (they are so much like us that they must be the same really), but the implication of the Christian’s basic belief that we are called into a fellowship held together not by human bonds but by association with Christ. Particular bits of historical research may make it harder or easier to put flesh on this fundamental conviction, but the only thing that could simply unseat it is a refusal of the underlying theology of the Church to which we are committed by practicing the sacraments and reading the Bible. If you see Christianity simply as an enterprise if the human spirit within history, the challenge of understanding the past is going to be difficult, less radical. For the historian who has theological convictions, that challenge is to discern as last something of what is truly known of Christ in the agents of the past.

- Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past? 2005.

The 'C' Word

"When theology confronts the Word of God and its witnesses, its place is very concretely in the community, not somewhere in empty space. The word "community," rather than "Church," is used advisedly, for from a theological point of view it is best to avoid the word "Church" as much as possible, if not altogether. At all events, this overshadowed and overburdened word should be immediately and consistently interpreted by the word "community." what may on occasion also be "Church" is, as Luther liked to say, "Christianity" (understood as a nation rather than as a system of beliefs). It is the commonwealth gathered, founded, and ordered by the Word of God, the "communion of the saints." These are the men who were encountered by the Word and so moved by it that they could not withdraw themselves from its message and call. Instead they became able, willing, and ready to receive it as secondary witnesses, offering themselves, their lives, thought, and speech to the Word of God. The Word cries out for belief, for this acceptance in recognition, trust, and obedience. And since faith is not an end in itself, this cry of the Word means that it demands to be proclaimed to the world to which it is directed from the outset."

- Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Chapter 4 (italics original).

I like what Barth says about the Word of God. But i want to know why Barth discourages the use of the word "Church", theologically at least. Any ideas why?

Incidentally, my own church has just renamed itself as a community.

100 Years in the North

This year not only marks the apology by Kevin Rudd to the Aboriginal people of Australia. It also marks a centennary of work by CMS (the Church Missionary Socitey) in Arnhem Land and Northern Australia. This work arose out off the Anglican Churches response to wholesle murder of Aboriginal people by pastoralists in the 'Top End' at the start of the 20th century. Watch the video, watch out for celebration events this year, and if you are interested in finding out more, you can by the John Harris book (author of One Blood) 'We Wish We'd Done More' from CMS.

The Transfiguration

I like Sufjan Stevens. He is a really rad song writer and artist, and at times a little eccentric. I saw his show in January, it was rocking and performed really well. His lyrics are ace, and played to beautiful music. Sufjan is an American Indy artist who sings abouts lots of things. his current project is to release an album for each of the 50 states of America. But often sings about Christian themes in a most beautiful way.

Here is his rendition of the transfiguration:


When he took the three disciples
to the mountainside to pray,
his countenance was modified, his clothing was aflame.
Two men appeared: Moses and Elijah came;
they were at his side.
The prophecy, the legislation spoke of whenever he would die.

Then there came a word
of what he should accomplish on the day.
Then Peter spoke, to make of them a tabernacle place.
A cloud appeared in glory as an accolade.
They fell on the ground.
A voice arrived, the voice of God,
the face of God, covered in a cloud.

What he said to them,
the voice of God: the most beloved son.
Consider what he says to you, consider what's to come.
The prophecy was put to death,
was put to death, and so will the Son.
And keep your word, disguise the vision till the time has come.

Lost in the cloud, a voice: Have no fear! We draw near!
Lost in the cloud, a sign: Son of man! Turn your ear!
Lost in the cloud, a voice: Lamb of God! We draw near!
Lost in the cloud, a sign: Son of man! Son of God!

Seven Swans, 2004.

Bauckham on the Biblical Narritive

Richard Bauckham's first point aspect of Biblical Narrative is that it is temporal.

"The temporal movement of the biblical narrative runs all the way from creation to the eschatological future. It runs from the old to then new, constantly reconstructing the past in memory and constructing the future in expectation. Within this movement mission is movement into the new future of God. It is the movement of the people of God whose identity is found in the narrative of the past but also in their being turned by that narrative towards the coming of God's kingdom in the future. The possibilities the narrative opens up for them, when they find themselves in it, are those God gives as they live towards God's future. Temporally, then, mission is movement into the ever-new future." Bible and Mission - Christian Witness in a Postmodern World.

Bauckahm argues that from Genesis 12 to Revelation the narrative is in transition from 'a particular past' towards the universal future. This is seen definitively in the gospel - the life death and resurrection of Jesus, the coming of God's kingdom and the opening up of the future for God's creation. For Bauckham then, "Mission is the movement that takes place between Jesus' own sending by his Father and the future coming of Jesus in the kingdom of his Father."

Vox Populi Vox Dei

given all the uproar over Rowan William's "sharia lecture" you may find this lecture given last night at the London Economics School (for the 'Yes Minister' fans) by Tom Wright very interesting.

A while between drinks

It has been a while since I posted. Since my last post, I've:

• survived CMS Summer School.
• got married (and picked up Church Dogmatics vol 1.1 and 1.2 as wedding presents!).
• been to Fiji and witnessed poverty, third world Christians, South Pacific Apartheid and survived a tropical cyclone.

I've also read a great book by Richard Bauckham. It is a small book entitled "Bible and Mission - Christian Witness in a Postmodern World". Bauckham's aim in the book isn't so much to provide another rational on why the church should do mission. Instead Bauckham sets out to provide a hermeneutic for the type of mission he thinks the church should be doing in a post-modern, post "911" world. I am very excited by the book. Bauckham talks about meta-narratives, the post modern suspicion of them, the dominate meta-narratives of today (which he labels as Islamism and Western Globalism) and what the Christian response should be. It has been a joy to read a book like this that is written by such a renowned New Testament scholar and theologian as Bauckham is. So I thought I'd post some quotes from the book:

"This book's proposal of a hermeneutic for the kingdom of God involves...a focus on one prominent aspect of the narrative shape of the biblical story: its movement from the particular to the universal. As I have also briefly suggested, this direction of the biblical story corresponds to the biblical God, who is the God of the one people Israel and the one human being Jesus Christ, and is also the Creator and LORD of all things. We can better appreciate this universality and particularity of God himself when we recognize that this biblical God's own identity is itself a narrative identity. It is a particular identity God gives himself in the particular story of Israel and Jesus, and it is an identity which itself drives the narrative towards the universal realization of God's kingdom in all creation. God identifies himself as the God of Abraham, Israel and Jesus in order to be the God of all people and the Lord of all things. Moreover, in the narrative world of the Bible the people of God is also given its identity in this movement from the particular to the universal, an identity whose God-given dynamic we commonly sum up in the word 'mission'. God, God's people and God's world are related to each other primarily in a narrative that mediates constantly the particular and the universal."

- Bauckham, Bible and Mission, pp. 12-13, italics original.

Bauckham then proceeds to outline three aspects in the biblical narrative of the movement from the particular to the universal. But I will outline these in the next post. But it was great for me to really understand this particular and universal (the one, the three, and many) concept that kept popping up in books I was reading last year.

It is great to think that: "God, God's people and God's world are related to each other primarily in a narrative that mediates constantly the particular and the universal" is evidenced now in the unity and diversity (to found amongst the church around the world (I first stumbled across the idea of 'unity and diversity' by reading papers written for the SUEU by Andrew Errington). Stay tuned for more.