hebel

Sober Words

2012-01-25T23:48:00.002+11:00

"The English evangelicals who arranged for Richard Johnson to be chaplain to the first fleet had envisaged the distant new settlement as a place from which the Christian gospel would emanate. Such a thought was hardly likely to have occupied the attention of the first settlers with the exception, perhaps of Johnson himself. It was no doubt far from the mind of the Christians among the convicts, transported across the world against their will.

Yet, however unwittingly, however imperfectly, however inadequately, they did carry the knowledge of Christ to these shores. But the Christian settlers were few and their light was feeble. It is one of the great tragedies of the recent history if Australia that true Christianity was for so long so very difficult to discern in the life of this outpost of a distant nation which called itself Christan." - John Harris, One Blood.

HGP Relfections II

2012-01-25T23:15:00.000+11:00

I recently completed a ministry traineeship at Sydney University with the EU Grads Fund and the Sydney University Evangelical Union. Over the next couple of days I'll be posting some of my reflections on the past two years.

Love the Church

"And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church..."

Over dinner at a conference I recently attended I heard a theological college graduand explain his decision to head into full time student ministry in 2012. He said he wanted to be involved in a ministry where he could pastor people, teach the bible and especially see people transformed by the Spirit of Christ and grow in their faith. And as far as he could see, there was no opportunity at all for this to happen in church-based ministry. Hence his move into student ministry.

It was a conversation that made me quite sad. If Ephesians one is right and the church really is the Jesus' body, than the church is something to be loved, and not despised. Jesus is the head, the church is his body, made up of his people, and so you love his church. And I don't just mean your local congregation you meet with on Sunday. I'm talking about the one true holy catholic and apostolic church, the church that God works through to make his wisdom known to the world (Ephesians 3.1-10), and the church that Jesus died for (Ephesians 5).

One of my peculiarities is that I've spent the past five years working parachurch organizations: three years with CMS and two years with the EU Grads Fund/Sydney University Evangelical Union. During my traineeship I've had time to reflect on both organizations and something that has impressed me about both organizations is that they know who they are. They understand that they are not churches, but as parachurch groups they exist to serve the church. Not every parachurch organization remembers this.

For a long time now I've been impressed by how the SUEU and the EUGF have sought to be a blessing to the church. The students in the EU are exhorted and encouraged to not only belong to, but to also thoughtfully serve their local church. The training they receive as students will hopefully equip them to serve not only during their time at uni, but also for the rest of their lives. And vision of the EUGF is to see hundreds and thousands of Sydney Uni graduates flood the church ready to serve wherever they find themselves. It's all about helping the church be the church.

Love the church, because it's Jesus church.

HGP Reflections

2012-01-18T23:56:00.002+11:00

I recently completed a ministry traineeship at Sydney University with the EU Grads Fund and the Sydney University Evangelical Union. Over the next couple of days I'll be posting some of my reflections on the past two years.

Jesus is Building his Church

"...I will build my church, and the gates of hades shall not prevail against it."

Jesus promises to build his church. And he does - in two ways. Sometimes it is like the mustard seed in Mark 4. This tiny, most insignificant of seeds, grows into a tree that is so large that there is room for all the birds of the air to nest in its branches (a reference back to Jeremiah and Ezekiel for the Gentiles coming to nest in Israel). Jesus grows his church as more and more people are brought from death to life. And praise be to God, during my two years we saw over 40 university students put their faith in the risen and reigning Lord Jesus.

Jesus builds his church in both size and breadth. He also grows his church in depth. His church grows as people understand him more and more and live out the implications of knowing him. One of the joys of my two years at Sydney University was being apart if people's lives and helping them in submitting every aspect of their life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. This may have been in helping students develop a "Biblical worldview" and be shaped by a Christian mind. This sometimes looked like helping students think through how the should think or feel about different things. And sometimes this looked like helping students repent of various deeds and take a different course of action. And though it all people were growing in their faith and conviction.

Jesus is building his church. He's on for church growth; and we should be too. Not even death will overcome his church. Jesus builds his church.

A Sign of God's Purpose

2011-10-10T22:29:00.006+11:00

An excerpt from a most excellent sermon Archbishop Rowan Williams gave on Sunday in Harare, Zimbawe. Worth checking out:

"This Eucharist is the sign of God's purpose for all of us; it is a feast in which all are fed with Christ's new life, in which there is no distinction of race, tribe or party. In this community there can be no place for violence or for retaliation: we stand together, sinners in need of grace, proclaiming to the world that there is room at God's table for all people equally. What the Church has to say to the society around it, whether here or in Britain, is not to advance a political programme but to point to the fact of this new creation, this fellowship of justice and joy, this universal feast... The message we want to send from this Eucharistic celebration is that we do not have to live like that – in terror, in bloodshed. God has given us another way. He has opened a door of possibility that no-one can shut. He has announced that he will welcome all to the marriage feast of his Son – and so we see that all, even our bitterest enemies, still have a place in his peace if they will only turn and be saved. Did you hear what St Paul said in today's epistle? 'Fill your minds with those things that are good and that deserve praise: things that are noble, right, pure, lovely and honourable.' We need to feed ourselves and most especially to feed our young people with such things, to hold before us that great new possibility opened up by God for our minds to be transformed, to be excited not by the false thrills of violence and bloody conflict, by the overheated language of party conflict, but by the hope of joy and reconciliation." - Rowan Williams

A Rant: The Homogeneous Unit Principle

2011-10-10T22:21:00.001+11:00

A rant placed here mainly for my own benefit:

Like attracts like, right? So if you are wanting to reach Transylvanian lumberjacks with the gospel, the most effective way to do it is to start a church for Transylvanian lumberjacks. After all, there are plenty of parachurch organisations that operate on this principle and they seem to have a fruitful ministry in reaching their particular group. So this ministry tactic is naturally transferable to churches?

No! In this instance we can not allow ourselves to be guided by pragmatism. This is a danger we must be on our guard against because it is a denial of the gospel. The church is the place that welcomes everyone: Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, the rich, the socially excluded, even the Transylvanian lumberjack. But the vision of the New Testament is that they are welcomed into God's church together:

"May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God's truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, 'Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles, and sing to your name.'" Romans 15. 5-9

And again:

"This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel." Ephesians 3.6

As the church proclaims Jesus, the Holy Spirit brings different types of people together to form the church, God's new humanity (cf. Ephesians 2.11 ff.). Churches modelled on the homogenous unit principle deny this reality. And yet God uses this reality to declare to the world the wisdom of his plan to unite all things - even Jews and Gentiles - under Christ (Eph.3.10). It is through this that God ends hostility and brings peace to his creation.

Churches modeled on the homogenous unit principle reinforce to the world the exclusions and segmentations the world has created. We are in danger of denying the power of God to bring peace to the world.

A Clear and Present Faith

2011-07-15T18:47:00.005+10:00

The old man looked the missionary in the eye: “You keep telling us about how sinful we are and how we need to change, but no one ever says this to the white people who steal our land, our wives and our daughters. No one says this to the men who are killing us..."

I’ve been on holidays for the past fortnight, which has given me the opportunity to read One Blood: John Harris’ seminal work on the history between Indigenous Australians and Christianity. Even twenty years after publication, this is still a magnificent book. I’m not finished yet, but already there has already been a lot to give thanks for, as well as a lot of stories that have made me want to weep and pray for Jesus’ return.

Here is Harris’ assessment of the first 100 years of Christian witness in Australia:

The missionaries often confused conversion to European civilisation with conversion to the gospel of Jesus Christ. They attempted to conform Indigenous Australians to a life of European-style peasant farming and other symbols of European civilisation. This made them slow to recognise signs of genuine regeneration and maturity.
The rhetoric of the Europeans and the Colonial Government made it difficult to distinguish Christianity from the culture around it. It was hard for Indigenous Australians to discern the Christianity preached by the missionaries in the lives of the Europeans who brought death, disease, dispossession, prostitution and alcoholism to their land.
The church forgot to preach the whole gospel. They were very strong on preaching sin and judgment to a people seen by the wider colonial society to be savage and barbaric. But it was rarely accompanied by the hope the gospel of Jesus Christ brings. After the shock being disposed from the land and seeing their culture break down under the European invasion, this message of hope and justice may have been what they needed to hear. It was actually when missionaries in Victoria started to preach the whole gospel that they saw fruit from their labour.
These were accompanied with a lack of interest for Christian work amongst Indigenous Australians that swept through the wider church in Australia and Europe.

The church also played a positive role during this time. Harris points out that it was almost exclusively only the Christians in colonial society who saw Indigenous Australians as humans. Harris recounts some moving testimonies from some Aboriginals in eastern Victoria who said that without the church missions, their people wouldn’t exist today. But overall this all contributes to tragedy of Australia since 1788.

Reading One Blood has reminded me of the need for the church to stand out from its culture and be distinguished and shaped by the gospel of Jesus. Harris writes:

“It is one of the tragedies of the recent history of Australia that true Christianity was for so long so very difficult to discern in the life of this outpost of a distant nation which called itself Christian.”

This reminded me of a quote from Tim Foster that I’ve used before on hebel. I heard it again a few days before I started reading One Blood. Reflecting on the challenge of the Sermon on the Mount for the church, Foster argues:

"The expression of these values (the Sermon on the Mount) by the church is essential to its successful engagement in mission. Just as Torah-obedience was essential for the success of Israel’s mission to the nations, ‘the church’s oddness is essential to its faithfulness.’ The logic of the Sermon on the Mount is that the disciples serve the world by demonstrating that a new society is breaking-in which offers an alternative communal existence shaped by the character and purposes of God.

Because the world is so deeply immerse in the prevailing order "the only way for the world to know it is being redeemed is for the church to point to the Redeemer by being a redeemed people." The anticipated outcome is that others will ‘See your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven’ (Matt.5.16). Just as apostasy destroyed Israel’s capacity to mission, accommodation to the values of them world poses the greatest of dangers to the church, diluting its capacity to bear witness to radical nature of the new order." - Tim Foster, A Vision for the Mission and the Message of the Australian Church After Christendom.

The challenge, now as always, is for the church to be the church. I hope to post again soon with some stories from One Blood.

20 Centuries in 20 Posts Part IV

2011-07-12T16:12:00.005+10:00

The Unimpressive Church
Intro | Part I | Part II | Part III | Appendix

The student of ecclesiastical history may often be left with the impression that for three hundred years the story of the church was solely the story of leaders and scholars. The kind of men you’d find being represented in an icon; men like Polycarp and Irenaeus, or Tertullian and Origen. It is easy to tell the story of the leaders of the church. They were the men (for they were mostly men) who took the gospel to new parts of the world, who continued to freshly articulate the significance of Jesus to life and thought, who defended the faith, who taught God’s word, and who would sometimes lose their lives for Jesus’ sake. They were impressive people, and it’s easy to think that by understanding their story you have understood the whole.

Yet that does not give us the full picture. By the third century (200-300AD) there were hundreds of thousands and even millions of Christians spread throughout the Roman world, the Persian empire, in Armenia (the first official Christian state), Arabia, Ethiopia and India. And by focusing on the bishops and scholars can leave us with an all too grand picture of what the early church looked like (particularly when compared to more familiar church history).

The dominant feature of the early church is how utterly unimpressive it was. This might seem strange, given the rapid speed with which Christianity spread around the known world. But as the Apostle Paul reminded the Corinthian church: “not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth”. The church was distinctively ordinary. Although there were Christians from all sections of society, a high proportion of Christians came from what we might call a humble background. And this made the church scandalously ordinary, as men AND women from every class and status would welcome one another. When its critics looked at the church, what they saw was the basest kinds of humans sordidly meeting together for their ‘love feasts’ (an early name for the Eucharist). You can feel this scandal in the writing of Celsus, a second century critic of the church who wrote that it is:

“...only foolish and low individuals, and persons devoid of perception, and slaves, and women, and children, of whom the teachers of the divine word wish to make converts”.

The church became contemptuously known for holding slaves and women in high regard. For this it was seen to be unravelling the very fabrics of society. Inside the church slaves could hold positions of leadership, i.e. deacons, presbyters; even outrageously leading their owners if they too were Christian. And in the Roman world as more and more people became to Christian, they abandoned the ancient gods – the very same gods who ensured the peace and prosperity of the empire. This is one reason why we see such a vitriolic reaction against Christians during the reign of Emperor Diocletian at the end of the third and into the fourth century.

Not only was Christianity unimpressive, it was also dangerously subversive to order and security of the world. But who were the early Christians?

It is no understatement to describe Christianity as an urban movement. The church was so heavily represented in the cities of the Mediterranean, that the word for people who lived in rural areas came to be used to describe anyone who was not a Christian. We know it today in English as pagan.

By the third century an increasing number of new Christians came from a non- Jewish background. It was not typically through the mass conversions we often imagine; people became Christian as their family and friends witnessed to them in both word and deed. New believers would be welcomed into the “family of believers” each year at Easter. They would continue to meet together each Sunday to celebrate the Lord’s Day. And excluded to the margins of society and under the threat of death, the church continued to live by its convictions. The second century Epistle to Diognetus described the early Christians in this way:

For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, no the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity... But inhabiting the Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives... To sum up all in one word - what the soul is to the body, that are Christians in the world.

As unimpressive as the church was, there was something radically impressive about it as well. According to academics like Rodney Stark and David Bentley Hart, this has to do with the Christian concept of humanity. The church understood itself to be a new humanity. They were a family, the “brethren”, established by Jesus to welcome everyone. So that is what they did. In the words of Hart, the church gave a face to the faceless, welcoming those who technically had no identity in society. Slaves were welcomed and able to participate in the church. Furthermore, the church welcomed and valued women. Throughout the empire, there were a higher proportion of men to women. The affects of female infanticide and abortions that often resulted in the death of the women created this gender imbalance. However, it appears that there was an opposite gender imbalance in the church, with more women than man. The church was the sole community in the empire that condemned these practices and gave women the dignity due to them being created in God’s image.

The church was also known for acting on this conviction outside the Christian community, caring for the poor and sick and the well being of their cities. They became so well know for it that the last “pagan” Emperor Julian, in the fourth century, lamented that:

“These impious Galileans [Christians] not only feed their own poor, but ours also; welcoming them into their agapae [love feasts], they attract them, as children are attracted, with cakes.”

The church proclaimed the gospel of Jesus in both word and deed. This was particularly seen in two epidemics between 250AD and 350AD that devastated the eastern half of the empire. 10,000’s of people died, and whilst the rich and elite “pagans” fled the cities, it was the Christians who stayed and cared for the sick and dying:

“[During the great epidemic] most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves... Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ... Many, in nursing the curing others, transferred their death to themselves and died in their stead... The [pagans] behaved in the very opposite way. At the first onset of the disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled even from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead." - Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria , circa 260AD.

These were the early Christians. They lived out the gospel in their lives and in their actions. And unlike a lot of Christians today, they didn’t have any hang-ups about what proportion the needed to that they in. They just did it; even if it cost them their lives. In the face of terrible persecution (which we haven’t covered in this post), social exclusion, and death, they lived out the gospel, welcoming everyone who claimed allegiance to Jesus. This was the terribly ordinary, unimpressive church. Not many of them were wise; not many of them were powerful. “But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (1 Cor 1.27).

For Further Reading:

David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, 2009. Winner of the prestigious Michael Ramsay Prize for 2011, Atheist Delusions offers great insight on the early church and the world around it.
Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity, 1997.
Rodney Stark, Cities of God, 2006.
Henry Chadwick, The Penguin History of the Church: The Early Church, (revised edition), 1993.

20 Centuries in 20 Posts: Appendix

2011-07-10T13:26:00.002+10:00

Sorry it's been a while since there was any activity on this blog. I was at the EU's Annual Conference, and then Alison and I were on holidays down the south coast. The next post in the church history series: 20 Centuries in 20 Posts will be posted later this week. But until then you might like to check out this video that was made for annual conference by Ben Duffin; Church History in Five Minutes:

20 Centuries in 20 Posts Part III

2011-06-20T23:47:00.010+10:00

Making Sense of a Hostile World
Intro | Part I | Part II

“Jesus had fulfilled Israel’s vocation to be a light to the nations; now the nations must be brought into allegiance to him. It was time for the nations to join in God’s promises Abraham.”

In the previous post in this series, we briefly sketched out why the Jewish worldview is important for understanding the early church. It made sense of how the early church understood Jesus (the risen promised King of Israel), and why they launched on an ambitious and frantic mission to proclaim his lordship throughout the Roman Empire, and even beyond imperial borders.

This all made sense with a Jewish worldview. But as the end of the first century approached and the first generation of church leaders died, would we see the worldview of the church begin to morph away from the Jewish-ness of the church’s foundation? This is a question commonly poised in church history – and the assumed answer is often a definitive yes. After all there were more and more gentile converts coming into the church; and in 136 AD Roman armies crushed the last great Jewish rebellion against the Empire (the Bar Kokhba revolt AD 132-136), thereby drawing to a close the world of second temple Judaism. The second century church would belong to the gentiles.

Except that I’m not sure that is quite what happened. From the available evidence it seems as though the church’s mission was still focused on both Jews and Gentiles. And in fact large numbers of Jewish converts were still being well into the third century. Furthermore, as the church dealt with several crises during the second century, it did so in a thoroughly Jewish way. Don’t misunderstand me, the church’s worldview was thoroughly shaped on and around Jesus Christ; it was a distinguishably Christian worldview when contrasted to the rest of Judaism. But it was still Jewish: God was the creator of the world. In response to evil he called Abraham and made promises about his descendants (Israel). Jesus was the climax of this story. And it was this story that enabled the church to negotiate an aggressive and often hostile world around them.

As the apostles died, leadership of the church for the next two generations passed to a group that we know as the apostolic fathers. These men were active from the end of the first century through to the around 150AD, and had been taught and served alongside the apostles. We have the writings of the several of the apostolic fathers, such as Clement of Rome (who wrote an epistle to the Corinthian Church around 90AD), Polycarp of Smyrna (who was martyred in155AD) and Ignatius of Antioch (who wrote several letters to churches in Asia and the church leader Polycarp as he travelled from Antioch to Rome to be martyred in 110AD). There are other apostolic fathers such as Papias, who wrote quite extensively but, except for a few fragments that have survived in other works, are now lost to us. And we have some anonymous documents such as the Didache and the Shepherd of Hermas.

Following the apostolic fathers the middle of the second century was dominated by a group of men we know as the apologists such as Tertullian (the first Christian to write extensively in Latin) and Justin Martyr who wrote quite extensively in defence of Christianity against “pagan” elites”, and often write appeals to the emperors requesting an end to persecution. By the end of the century the church is being lead by a diverse range of bishops and leaders i.e. Irenaeus, Melito of Sardis, and Clement of Alexandria (who taught in the church’s first Catechetical school and started to integrate Greek philosophy with Christianity). Throughout the second century Christianity was focused on the urban areas of Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Asia and the surrounding provinces (Turkey), Greece, Italy, and Mesopotamia. The church had also started to grow throughout Carthage/North Africa and Gaul.

Martyrdom and the Gnostic's
Although there had been sporadic localised persecution throughout the first century, by 125AD it became Imperial policy to punish Christians. Largely focused on the church’s leadership, the persecution of the second century was still quite sporadic compared to the large scale martyrdom's of the late third and early fourth centuries. Yet the example of second century martyrs was still so powerful for the church in strengthening the resolve of the flock and winning new believers that Tertullian could write:

“The more you mow us down, the more we grow. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”

The Christians were prepared to die for their faith. Ignatius of Antioch even wrote ahead to the Roman Church to ask them not to intervene:

“I am writing to all the Churches and I enjoin all that I am dying willingly for God's sake, if only you do not prevent it. I beg you; do not do me an untimely kindness. Allow me to be eaten by the beasts, which are my way of reaching to God. I am God's wheat, and I am to be ground by the teeth of wild beasts, so that I may become the pure bread of Christ.”

The response by the church to persecution and death made complete sense within a Jewish worldview. The believed that God had been a good world, a world which would, in spite of sin and evil, be restored and freed from these things. The believed that God had power over death, and specifically that they would be given resurrection bodies just like Jesus. God had the power to restore their bodies and free it from sin, even if they were devoured by lions or reduced to ashes. Like the Jewish martyrs in 2 Maccabees 7, the second century martyrs responded to an evil empire by clinging to the promise of resurrection.

What makes this most interesting for the study of early church history is that during the second century Gnosticism arose and began to trouble the church. So around 180AD Irenaeus wrote his famous five volume Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies or On the Detection and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So Called) which described and contrasted Gnostic belief against apostolic Christian belief, warning believers of the false teachings. Not a monochrome belief, Gnosticism was “a syncretistic, trans-religious theosophy that drew from Christian, Jewish, Greek, Syrian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Persian sources, often simultaneously” (David B. Hart). In contrast to Christianity, it commonly held that the created matter was a result of a fall within the divine world, the result of a lesser being that God. And whereas Christianity believed that the world belong to Jesus, who would restore the world at the resurrection of the dead, Gnosticism taught a salvation/escape from the world for a select few “spiritual” people.

There has been a movement over the past 100 years to portray the Gnostic's as the genuine Christians persecuted by the empire and vilified by the catholic church. And yet surprisingly it is hard to find any evidence for this. Perhaps though it is not all that surprising, as NT Wright explains: "Which Roman emperor would persecute anyone for reading the Gospel of Thomas [since it so closely reflected Greek thinking]?....It should be clear that the talk about a spiritual ‘resurrection’ in the sense used by [the Gnostic writings] could not be anything other than a late, drastic modification of Christian language." It was the radical doctrine of the resurrection that brought the wrath of the Roman Empire down not on Gnosticism, but on Christianity.

Authority
As the life of Jesus and the Apostles faded out of the church’s living memory, it was confronted with a new issue of authority. From around 100AD the Apostolic Fathers Clement and Ignatius began to empahaise the important role of the local bishop as a source of unity and order:

"Wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be; as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church." Ignatius, Letter to the Smyrnaeans.

However by the middle of the scond century the church had begun to wrestle with the question of scriptural authority. The Apostles had left the church a collection of writings that bore their authority – gospels, epistles and revelations that were written by the apostles or people closely associated with the apostles. But there was no uniform agreement on what works actually constituted the apostolic witness. The works of Clement and Ignatius reference or allude to almost all the books of the New Testament as we now have it, as well as the Old Testament, but there was no actual list. And not every church had access to this apostolic collection.

What spurred the church into action was the Pontian Bishop Marcion of Sinope (c. 85-160AD), who made his way from Pontus to Rome in 142AD. It was at this point that he caused a massive disturbance in the Roman church, publishing the first Christian Canon. Marcion refused to accept the Old Testament as scripture, arguing that its Jewish-ness was incompatible with the teaching of Jesus. He understood that God the Father of Christ and the God of Israel were different, which lead him to publish a truncated New Testament canon. Marcion’s canon was composed exclusively of just Luke (the Evangelikon) and ten of Paul’s letters (the Apostolikon), both of which were purged of references of Jesus' relationship with Israel.

Marcion was excommunicated from the Roman church in 144AD. The church’s response was to define the canon. The process began with the affirmation of the fourfold gospel canon of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (the Tetramorph); gospels received from the Apostles or their close associates. The other gospel which emerged later, such as Thomas, differed from the Tetramorph in two important ways. Firstly, they were not Jewish and disdained a connection to Israel. Secondly, they were not gospels; rather than being a narrative of events they were for the most part a collection of sayings. Again the criterion for the epistles was evidence of apostolic association (the letter had to authored by an apostle or shown to have been written by a close colleague – which led to the exclusion of works such as The Shepherd of Hermas and the Didache which had sometimes been considered the equivalent of scripture). The process of clarifying the canon continued during the later half of the second century; the earliest evidence we have of this is a damaged and thus incomplete, bad Latin translation of the Muratorian Canon from the late 200’s:

“The third book of the Gospel is that according to Luke… The fourth… is that of John… the acts of all the apostles… As for the Epistles of Paul… To the Corinthians first, to the Ephesians second, to the Philippians third, to the Colossians fourth, to the Galatians fifth, to the Thessalonians sixth, to the Romans seventh… once more to the Corinthians and to the Thessalonians… one to Philemon, one to Titus, and two to Timothy… to the Laodiceans, [and] another to the Alexandrians, [both] forged in Paul's name to [further] the heresy of Marcion… the epistle of Jude and two of the above-mentioned (or, bearing the name of) John… and [the book of] Wisdom… We receive only the apocalypses of John and Peter, though some of us are not willing that the latter be read in church. But Hermas wrote the Shepherd very recently… And therefore it ought indeed to be read; but it cannot be read publicly to the people in church.”

The Canon was formalised in the third and fourth centuries at various Synods and Ecumenical Councils around the Mediterranean world. Yet what these councils did was to formalise a canon that was already largely agreed upon and in place by 200AD. Marcion would not be the first time that heresy would push the church towards clarity.

Reflections
As we’ve seen, the first and second century churches life and praxis was grounded in the story of Israel and Jesus. 20 Centuries later, is this the case for you and your church?

I always find the writing of the apostolic fathers and second century church to be encouraging and uplifting. Take for example Melito of Sardis homily on the Passover, written around 160AD:

"This is the one who like a lamb was carried off and like a sheep was sacrificed. He redeemed us from slavery to the cosmos as from the land of Egypt and loosed us from slavery to the devil as from the hand of Pharaoh. And he sealed us from our souls with his own Spirit and the lambs of our body with the his own blood. This is the one who covered death with his shame and made a mourner of the devil, just as Moses did Pharaoh. This is the one who struck lawlessness a blow and made injustice childless, as Moses did Egypt. This is the one who rescued us from slavery into liberty, from darkness into light, from death into life, from a tyranny into an eternal kingdom (and made us a new priesthood and a peculiar, eternal people)."

I can think of nothing better than to recommend that you acquaint with our brothers and sisters from this time by reading what they wrote themselves. Most of their writings are available on line, and I’ll mention them under the recommend reading below.

Recommend Reading

Early Christian Writings, translated by Maxwell Stamforth, edited Betty Radice, Penguin Books, 1968.
The Christological Controversy, translated and edited by Richard A. Norris, Fortress Press, 1980.
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Richard Bauckham, Eerdmans, 2008.
Judas and the Gospel of Jesus, NT Wright, SPCK, 2006.
The Early Church – Revised Edition, Henry Chadwick, Penguin Books, 1993.

Superficial Small Groups

2011-06-02T19:03:00.004+10:00

In the spirit of "What if Starbucks was like church?" and "Sunday's Coming", here is a video of what our small groups ~~should~~ shouldn't look like: Shallow Small Group Bible Study

20 Centuries in 20 Posts Part II

2011-05-11T22:03:00.003+10:00

Coming to Terms With Jesus
Intro | Part I

How do you explain the rapid spread of Christianity? Within the world of academia, litres of ink are spent trying to explain, understand and justify this phenomenon. In articulating the enormity of what took place, Tom Wright writes:

“The single most striking thing about early Christianity is the speed of its growth. In A.D. 25 there is no such thing as Christianity; merely a young hermit in the Judean wilderness, and his somewhat younger cousin who dreams dreams and sees visions. By A.D. 125 the Roman emperor has established an official policy in relation to the punishment of Christians…”

Christianity exploded into the Greco-Roman world. What had started in Jerusalem had, within 100 years spread as far as southern France, Ethiopia and possibly even India. This is quite remarkable, given what we said about Jesus in the previous post. Jesus saw himself as the pinnacle of God and Israel’s story, limiting his ministry almost exclusively to Israel. What he offered, and what he embodied, was a new way forward for Israel. So how did we end up with the church? Although the church’s praxis in 125AD bore some continuity with Israel, the church’s shape and life was also looked quite different from Israel.

Various reasons have been suggested to explain this. For instance, was this the work of the Apostle Paul, distilling Jesus’ call to Israel into a more palatable message for non-Jews? Or perhaps the fourth century ‘pagan’ Roman Emperor Julian was right when he argued the church grew because of their love and hospitality:

“These impious Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours also; welcoming them into their agape, they attract them, as children are attracted, with cakes.”

There’s some truth in this, and we’ll explore Julian’s raison d’être for the growth of the church more in a future post. However, I want to suggest that the answer lies in a major shift in the worldview of the Apostles and the early church. They came from a Jewish background, and held a worldview consistent with first century Judaism. Yet for some reason their worldview had totally changed. I want to suggest that the resurrection of Jesus was a complete shift in the first century Jewish worldview.

That the early Christians believed in the resurrection is unsurprising – it was part of the standard Jewish worldview. However, what stood at the periphery of the Jewish worldview was now front and centre of the Christian hope. The conviction of the early church was that the resurrection had happened, not at the end of history as the Jewish worldview believed, but now in the middle of history. The resurrection of Jesus changed everything. We can trace what this meant for the early church in Paul’s letter to the Roman church (see Romans 1.1-6). The resurrection of Jesus declared that he was the Son of God, the Messiah; the true descendant of David and hence Israel’s true King.

The resurrection showed that Jesus was Israel-in-person, Israel’s representative, the one in whom Israel’s destiny had reached its climax. He was Israel’s King – raised from the dead. And if he was Israel’s King, then the Psalms and the prophets insisted he was also the world’s true Lord:

“Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations.” Romans 1.5-6

This is why Christianity developed new practices and symbols apart from Judaism. The early Christians understood that Israel’s story had come to fruition in Jesus. The old symbols of God’s people would have to find new meaning in him. So the church started meeting on Sunday’s to celebrate his resurrection. They broke bread and drank wine together to commemorate his death and remind each other that they belonged together in him. The prayed and sang to him, because the story of Israel and the world was now focused around Jesus. And they were now on a mission. Jesus had fulfilled Israel’s vocation to be a light to the nations; now the nations must be brought into allegiance to him. It was time for the nations to join in God’s promises Abraham.

“For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God's truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy.” Romans 15.8-9

This raised questions about the continuing connection between the church and Israel, and the place of the law and Israel’s symbols in the life of the church. The early Christians only started to answer this question as they came to terms with who Jesus is and what that means for the world. The church grew first and fore mostly because they understood themselves to be on mission. Jesus has been raised, and he is the King, of both Jews and Gentiles.

________
I feel that it’s all too easy for us to underestimate how big an issue this was for the early church. Yet this was the major issue in the first century church, that the gentiles could be “fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus”. We do ourselves a disservice when we screen this issue out of our reading of the New Testament.

My other reflection on this post is that mission and theology need to be more closely held together than is often case today. From what I’ve seen, the two ‘disciplines’ are often at arm’s length of each other. Yet, in one sense, it was because of theological reflection that the early church launched into mission. I wonder what would happen if our missionaries, church planters, evangelists etc. spent more time talking to theologians, and vice versa because the theological reflection in Acts often happened after the Holy Spirit took the initiative to bring gentiles to Christ.

For Further Reading:

NT Wright: The Resurrection of the Son of God, 2003. RSG is a tour de force. Read this if you want to understand more fully how the resurrection of Jesus changed the worldview of the Apostles and the early church. If 800+ pages isn't your cup of tea, try Wright's Surprised by Hope, 2008.
James Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 2003 and Beginning from Jerusalem, 2008. I've only just managed to look through these. Massive and magnificent!
Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity, 1997. Stark isn't a historian by training, and is a little bit sketchy when he moves away from history. Nevertheless, this is a important book. Helpful to have a sociologist's perspective.

20 Centuries in 20 Posts Part I

2011-04-30T12:46:00.005+10:00

20 Centuries in 20 Posts Part I: The Genesis of Church History

Church history matters because the Church matters. It was with such a grandiose statement that I launched the ambitious 20 centuries in 20 posts project. History has always played an important role in the Christian story. From the writers of the Gospel narratives and Acts, through Eusebius and Bede down to today, reflecting on and understanding the past has played an important role in Christianity. And this is because of a distinctly Christian understanding of the past. Church history matters because history itself matters. Central to the Christian worldview is not a timeless, sapiential philosophy; what is central is the conviction that God acts and has made himself known in our space/time universe. And God has ultimately does this in Jesus Christ.

The Christian story begins starts with the in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. This is where most church histories will start their narrative. Yet there is something wrong about this, both historically and theologically. Jesus did not just walk in out of nowhere and start proclaiming the Kingdom of God (Mark 1.1-15); he had a context, and saw himself as part of the long story of God’s dealings with Israel. I think that liberal theologian Marcus Borg is on to something when he says:

“We commonly think of Jesus as the founder of Christianity. But strictly speaking, this is not historically true. Instead, his concern was the renewal of Israel.” - Marcus Borg, Jesus: A New Vision, p. 125

To do church history well, I suggest that we need to integrate Israel into our narrative, as some historians have started to do. When we do this, it helps us as Christians to read the Old Testament and what the New Testament says about God’s covenant. It helps you understand the first 200 years of Christianity – which was largely a Jewish movement for the first two centuries of its existence – and in particular the context and issues the apostles write about in the New Testament. But most importantly, grounding Christian history in Israel’s history helps we make sense of Jesus, and what he was doing. He saw himself as the climax of a story that involved Adam and Eve, Abraham and the patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, David/Solomon and the kings down to Zedekiah, and the aftermath of exile. It’s by understanding God’s history with Israel and by plotting Jesus on the map of his own particular context – Second Temple Judaism – that we can understand how Jesus interpreted his mission. Briefly, this is what his mission looked like:

Jesus focused exclusively on Israel: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” Matt 15.24, and “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel" Matt 10.5. Except for three exceptions, Jesus ministered only to Israelites, because his mission was to restore the lost in Israel and renew the nation.

Jesus announced the nearness of the kingdom: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the gospel!” Mark 1.15. The Kingdom of God is where God's climatic authority is known and done on earth as in heaven (see Isaiah 40).

Jesus performed acts of power: "But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you" Matt 12.28. Jesus enforced the Kingdom through his miracles. He taught that the Roman occupiers weren't Israel’s real enemy, but the spiritual forces that had enslaved the nation in darkness and sin (see Mark 3.23-28).

Jesus called and sent twelve: “You are those who have stayed with me in my trials, and I assign to you, as my Father assigned to me, a kingdom, that we may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel" Luke 22.28-30. Jesus gathers twelve Apostles, a parallel of the twelve tribes of Israel. These twelve are connected to Jesus, and through him the renewal of Israel that they longed for would happen.

Jesus ate with sinners and outcasts: "And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, said to his disciples, 'Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?' And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, 'Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.'" (Mark 2.16-17). Jesus welcomed the lost of Israel, those generally despised and referred to as "sinners", whilst exposing the hypocrisy of Israel’s leaders.

Jesus announced God's grace (especially for the destitute): “Blessed are we who are poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God." (Luke 6.20).

Jesus taught a new way of living as God's people: “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful” Luke 6.35-36).

Jesus saw himself as the pinnacle of God and Israel’s story. So what he offered, and what he embodied, was a new way forward for Israel; a profound movement of renewal of Israel in the light of the coming climax of God's dealing with his people. We need to understand this to understand Jesus. Without Israel there is no Jesus.

Church history matters only because history matters. At the heart of Christianity is history: that God promised a Middle Eastern shepherd that through him his family and indeed the whole world would be blessed. At the heart of Christianity is an event that is interpreted as fulfilling that promise: that Jesus, the Jewish King, was killed for the sins the people; that he was raised from the dead, and now reigns as the Lord over all, the first-born of the new creation. This is church history; this is the gospel.

For Further Reading:

Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, 2009. MacCulloch is an eminent church historian, and his epic book/BBC series helpfully locates the church's history in Israel's history.
NT Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 1996. Wright offers rigorous scholarship, reconstructing the worldview of Second Temple Judaism, making sense of Jesus' aims and self-understanding within that world. A great piece of historical scholarship. Simply put, this book changed my life.

Why People Leave Church

2011-04-28T23:40:00.003+10:00

"If I don't worry about the one that strays and gets lost, even the one that is strong will think it is rather fun to stray and get lost. I do indeed desire outward gains, but I am more afraid of inner losses." - Augustine

Between 1998-2007 two British academics research why people leave church. The surveyed 800 former church goers in Ireland and the United Kingdom, and intensely interviewed around 20 people. The 200 question survey examined the reasons why people leave church. Here's a selection of the results:

Matters of Belief and Unbelief	Percentage
I doubted or questioned my faith	43
I lost my faith	32
Church had lost its meaning for me	49
I felt God had let me down	10
I could not reconcile my own suffering with my belief in God	14
I could not reconcile others' suffering with my belief in God	29
I became aware of alternative ways of thinking or living	53
So many people fight each other in the name of religion	66
I felt nobody in the church would understand my doubts	16
The church did not allow people to discuss or disagree with its views	25
A questioning faith did not seem acceptable to the church	29
I changed - it wasn't the church's fault that I dropped off	64
I got out of the habit of going to church	69
I believed that you did not need to go church to be a Christian	75
I was disillusioned by church-goers' attitudes to women	24
I was disillusioned by church-goers' attitudes to homosexuals	24
I was disillusioned by church-goers' abuse of power	28
The church failed to connect with the rest of my life	46

Although you need to read this within the British and Irish context, the results are still quite interesting. The two academics, Leslie Francis and Philip Richter, published the results in the book Gone for Good? The book includes detailed analysis of the different reasons people had for leaving church. They also offered pastoral advice on how to care for former church goers, and outlined the circumstance under which people would return to church. For many of the people surveyed who indicated that they might return to church would do so if somebody listened to their concerns.

In response to their research, Francis and Richter offer a new church model as the solution. I'm not sure that I understand their multiplex model yet. However, this is still a very helpful book in understand why people leave church and how to practically care for them once they do.

Guest Post: Easter Eggs - Homemade and Fair Trade

2011-04-23T14:26:00.003+10:00

A Guest Post by Alison Moffitt. In the spirit of celebrating Easter. Originally posted here.

A few months ago I made the very difficult decision to stop buying chocolate bars and blocks that weren't fairly traded. Now that Easter has rolled around I've found it really hard to find any appropriate Easter eggs! Apparently it's not just me - fair trade eggs are hard to find! I've been thinking outside the box, though, so instead of store bought Cadbury Easter eggs, this year our family are going to receive... home made Cadbury Easter eggs!

Home Made, Fair Trade Easter Eggs: A Tutorial

Materials and Ingredients

Small or medium egg chocolate moulds I found some at Spotlight for about $3.00 but you can probably also find them at confectioner's stores, some craft stores or online
A Pyrex or metal mixing bowl
A small saucepan
Copious amounts of fair trade chocolate, broken into small pieces - you want about twice as much as your moulds can hold. Australians: try Cadbury Dairy Milk or Green and Black Mayan Gold
Foil
Optional: large delicious nuts or Turkish delight (e.g. macadamias, almonds)

Making the Eggs
1. Melting down your chocolate.
Boil a little bit of water in your saucepan and leave it at a rolling boil. Put half your chocolate in the mixing bowl and balance it on the saucepan. Stir until chocolate is melted and smooth.
My friend in the States has something called a "double boiler". I have no idea what it is but apparently it melts chocolate like this without the danger of balancing two bowls of boiling liquid on top of each other. I guess you could use one of those if you have one!

2. Filling the moulds.
Spoon the melted chocolate into your mould. Tap the mould on the bench top to get rid of air bubbles and smooth the back of the chocolate.

3. OPTIONAL STEP!
Put a nut or a piece of Turkish Delight in the middle of the egg so that half of it is sticking out the back. This will help your egg hold together when you make the other half. However it may also compromise the fair-traded-ness of your egg depending on where these ingredients have come from!

4. Waiting.
Transfer your eggs to the fridge and wait for them to solidify.

5. Making the rest of the egg.
Pop the half-eggs out of the mold and then melt down the rest of the your chocolate. Fill the moulds as before. Carefully line up your solidified egg-halves over the melted egg halves in the mould and press down gently to join the two. Rush the filled moulds into the fridge!

6. Finishing.
Once the second halves are solid your eggs are ready to wrap. Gently shake the eggs free from the mould. Wrap them in foil. If you are so inclined, decorate your eggs with ribbon.

Ta Da! These chocolate eggs will charm your loved ones with their homemade quirkiness and are more ethical than the ones for sale in the supermarket. Double win!

Dedicated to my friend Bron: it is impossible to be friends with her without trying to consume food more ethically!

New Testament for Everyone

2011-04-22T19:24:00.005+10:00

I was searching Tom Wright's website this evening for an update on when volume four in Wright's Christian Origins and the Question of God would be published. It looks like a published date has been set for 2012.

But 2011 will still be a busy year for the good scholar-bishop, with several new books being released this year - including a whole translation of the New Testament. Wright's books being released this year include:

Simply Jesus. London: SPCK.
The Kingdom New Testament (this was provisionally known as The New Testament for Everyone). London: SPCK. This is Wright's full translation of the NT taken from the various Everyone volumes.
Revelation for Everyone. London: SPCK.
Early Christian Letters for Everyone. London: SPCK.
Scripture and the Authority of God, second edition with two substantial new chapters. London: SPCK.

Wright's first book, Small Faith, Great God has been re-released - an interesting as he once commented that this would be a very different book to what he would write now.

Now I'm just waiting for Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Bring on 2012!

You should also check out Wright's Can We Believe in the Resurrection on ABC Religion.

Celebrating Easter

2011-04-21T16:28:00.002+10:00

So how can we learn to live as wide-awake people, as Easter people? ...I have come to believe that many churches simply throw Easter away year by year; and I want to plead that we rethink how we do it so as to help each other, as a church and as individuals, to live what we profess...

But my biggest problem starts on Easter Monday. I regard it as absurd and unjustifiable that we should spend forty days keeping Lent, pondering what it means, preaching about self-denial, being at least a little gloomy, and then bringing it all to a peak with Holy Week, which in turn climaxes in Maundy Thursday and Good Friday . . . and then, after a rather odd Holy Saturday, we have a single day of celebration.

All right, the Sundays after Easter still lie within the Easter season. We still have Easter readings and hymns during them. But Easter week itself ought not to be the time when all the clergy sigh with relief and go on holiday. It ought to be an eight-day festival, with champagne served after morning prayer or even before., with lots of alleluias and extra hymns and spectacular anthems. Is it any wonder people find it hard to believe in the resurrection of Jesus if we don’t throw our hats in the air? Is it any wonder we find it hard to live the resurrection if we don’t do it exuberantly in our liturgies? Is it any wonder the world doesn’t take much notice if Easter is celebrated as simply the one-day happy ending tacked on to forty days of fasting and gloom? It’s long overdue that we took a hard look at how we keep Easter in church, at home, in our personal lives, right through the system. And if it means rethinking some cherished habits, well, maybe it’s time to wake up. That always comes as a surprise.

And while we’re about it, we might write some more good Easter hymns and take care to choose the many good ones already written that celebrate what Easter really is rather than treating it as simply our ticket to a blissful life hereafter. Interestingly, most of the good Easter hymns turn out to be from the early church and most of the bad ones form the nineteenth century. But we should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways: in art, literature, children’s games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts, anything that comes to mind. This is our greatest festival. Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don’t have a New Testament; you don’t have a Christianity; as Paul says, you are still in your sins. We shouldn’t allow the secular world, with its schedules and habits and parareligious events, its cute Easter bunnies, to blow us off course. This is our greatest day. We should put the flags out.

In particular, if Lent is a time to give things up, Easter ought to be a time to take things up. Champagne for breakfast again—well, of course. Christian holiness was never meant to be merely negative. Of course you have to weed the garden from time to time; sometimes the ground ivy may need serious digging before you can get it out. That’s Lent for you. But you don’t want simply to turn the garden back into a neat bed of blank earth. Easter is the time to sow new seeds and to plant out a few cuttings. If Calvary means putting to death things in your life that need killing off if you are to flourish as a Christian and as a truly human being, then Easter should mean planting, watering, and training up things in your life (personal and corporate) that ought to be blossoming , filling the garden with color and perfume, and in due course bearing fruit. The forty days of the Easter season, until the ascension, ought to be a time to balance out Lent by taking something up , some new task or venture, something wholesome and fruitful and outgoing and self-giving. You may be able to do it only for six weeks, just as you may be able to go without beer or tobacco only for the six weeks of Lent. But if you really make a start on it, it might give you a sniff of new possibilities, new hopes, new ventures you never dreamed of. It might bring something of Easter into your innermost life. It might help you wake up in a whole new way. And that’s what Easter is all about. - NT Wright

Jesus Stands Over the Church

2011-04-20T20:01:00.004+10:00

“There is at Easter no Christ who simply seals our righteousness and innocence, no guarantor of our status, and so no ideological cross. Jesus is alive, he is there to be encountered again, and so his personal identity remains; which means that his cross is his, not ours, part of the history of a person who obstinately stands over against us and will not be painlessly assimilated into our own memories.” – Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, pp. 71-72.

Again, h/t Michael

New Series: 20 Centuries in 20 Posts

2011-04-18T22:39:00.006+10:00

An Introduction
We are on the cusp of three third millennia since Jesus Christ walked the face of this earth. Time has marched on, and what once was has been separated from us by the years and centuries that have past.

Yet the past continues to beckon us. The Christian claim is that in this particular person the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. We believe that through his life, death and resurrection we can know God. Although separated by time and space, the past calls us because to this one man every tongue will confess that he is Lord.

We also believe that God is at work now in the community that arose in response to him. We believe that the church is the new humanity in embryo, the people of the ascended and reigning Christ Jesus.

A central part of the Christian confession has been the “catholic and apostolic church.” Yet from my own experience we struggle with the church. For many in the Western tradition, the church is a tool, a resource. Rather than being the body of Christ, the bulwark of truth, the family of faith, the church is like a loose collection of Jesus’ Facebook friends. So it comes as no surprise that within my own context that we also struggle in being able to tell the story of the church. A large number of Church history books are published every year – most of them focused on retelling particular segments from the church’s life. But I suggest that we find it difficult in being able to coherently (and interestingly) tell the 20 centuries of church history.

Church history matters because the church matters. So in the coming weeks hebel will attempt to grasp the bull by the horns and tell 20 centuries of church history in 20 posts. Church history is far more diverse and complex than what I’ll be able to do. 20 Centuries in 20 Posts is not an attempt to be the definitive guide to church history; instead I intend it as a means to provoke further study and reflection.

What I aim to do in 20 Centuries in 20 Posts is to tell the narrative of the church’s life in a way that takes seriously our belief in the “catholic and apostolic church”. So much church history that is published is western in focus; it assumes the move from Palestine to the Vatican and St Paul’s was a natural historical progression. 20 Centuries in 20 Posts will attempt to tell the church’s story giving due regards to the major branches of the church: Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant/Reformed. I want to tell history that is coherent as well as accessible and interesting. I will assume no prior knowledge, but I will leave you to do further research for yourself. And I want to be generous and gracious in my interactions with the past, knowing that it’s not historical facts and figures I’m dealing with but brothers and sisters in the Lord.

According to Rowan Williams the purpose of historical study is to question and also be questioned by the past.

“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.” - Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past?

As we shall see, the Christian past belongs to the Christian present.

Resurrection and Renewal

2011-04-18T22:17:00.002+10:00

“In proclaiming the resurrection of Christ, the apostles proclaimed also the resurrection of mankind in Christ; and in proclaiming the resurrection of mankind, they proclaimed the renewal of all creation with him. The resurrection of Christ in isolation from mankind would not be a gospel message. The resurrection of mankind apart from creation would be a gospel of a sort, but of a purely Gnostic and world denying sort which is far from the gospel that the apostles actually preached” - O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, p. 31

h/t Michael

Distorted

2011-04-08T13:58:00.003+10:00

"Cauvin is known not only for the doctrine of predestination but also the doctrine of 'total depravity,' a phrase so forbidding one hesitates to ponder it. In Genevan French dépraver is clearly still near its Latin root, which means 'to warp' or 'to distort'. The word does not have the lurid overtones it has for us. Jérôme Bolsec was banished for, among other things, having déprave plusieurs passages de l'Éscriture pour sosutenir ceste faulse et perverse doctrine - the doctrine that predestination would make God a tyrant like Jupiter. This is Cauvin's characteristic use of the word, to refer to distortion of the meaning of a text. Corruption, in the French of the period, can mean 'exhaustion' or 'brokenness', or it can be used just as we use it now when we speak of the corruption of a text. In Cauvin's mind, the mirror is by far the dominant metaphor for perception and also for Creation, do distortion would be a natural extension of the metaphor..." - Marilynne Robinson , The Death of Adam

Living Without Answers

2011-04-04T22:32:00.002+10:00

This is from Hannah's Child by Stanley Hauerwas. He's reflecting on the course of his life, and here in particular his first wife's mental illness, and the expectation that as a theologian he'd be able to explain it.

"I have learned over the years as a Christian theologian that none of us should try to answer such questions. Our humanity demands that we ask them, but if we are wise we should then remain silent. ..When Christianity is assumed to be an "answer" that makes the world intelligible, it reflects an accommodated church committed to assuring Christians that the way things are is the way they have to be.

Such answers cannot help but turn Christianity into an explanation. For me, learning to be a Christian has meant learning to live without answers. Indeed, to learn to live in this way is what makes being a Christian so wonderful. Faith is but a name for learning how to go on without knowing the answers. That is to put the matter too simply, but at least such a claim might suggest why I find that being a Christian makes life so damned interesting" Hannah's Child, pp. 207-8.

Speaking of Hipsters

2011-03-22T20:11:00.002+11:00

For a while now I've wanted to do something that comments on the 'oh so cool' zeitgeist amongst the Christian circles I move in. You know what I mean: watching any TV show written by Aaron Sorkin, listening to the music you'll find on Triple J (i.e. Arcade Fire, Sufjan, Cloud Control, The National), reading books by Tim Keller, Marilynne Robinson and Tom Wright, iPhone loving, caffeine, beer, wine and cheese appreciating (sometimes pipe smoking) hipsters.Or what you might describe as my life.

Well, although I had dreamt of capturing this in a very classy sketch, I never got round to it. And then Christianity Today beat me to it. Back in September 2010 they published a list of stuff Hipster Christians like to accompany their article Hipster Faith. Seeking to be counter-cultural in a culture that would describe itself as Christian (i.e. the US), Hipster Christians:

"seek to break out of the Christian subculture. The clothes and customs they shed are nothing less than the evangelical establishment itself, formed through decades of attempts at cool Christianity. Today's Christian hipsters retain their faith, but they want it to be compatible with, not contrary to, secular hipster counterculture. Their mission is to rebrand Christianity to be, if not completely void of its own brand altogether, at least cobranded and allied with the things that it had previously set itself in opposition to: art, academics, liberal politics, fashion, and so on. As a result of its intentional melding of Christian and secular, hipster Christianity often feels a bit like a stealth operation. One cannot easily decipher the Christian elements of a Christian hipster, not because they aren't there, but because they aren't in the foreground as much as, say, the "can't miss it" sartorial expressions (lumberjack beards, vintage dresses, flask as accessory) that traditionally signify hip. You're telling me that indie folk singer is a Calvinist?...That guy with the Poseidon tattoo I saw at the hookah bar last night is a Presbyterian pastor? Who knew?"

Having read through the list of things hipster Christians like and noticing that quite a lot of things a like make the list, I guess that makes me a hipster Christian. Maybe. Because I'm not sure how much is lost in translation from America to Australia. So maybe while I listen to The Suburbs and watch Jed Barlett, I won't have too much to worry about after all. But I think that the warning from CT is one that I and the circles I move in need to hear and don't get to caught up in being hip and cool:

"Isn't Christianity supposed to be distinguishable and set apart from the world? Christian hipsters are rebelling against a mainstream Christianity that they see as too indistinguishable from secular mainstream culture (i.e., consumerist, numbers-driven, Fox News—watching, immigrant-hating, SUV-driving), but their corrective may not turn out much better. Some hipster Christianity is as indistinguishable from its secular hipster counterpart as yesterday's megachurch Christianity was indistinguishable from secular soccer-mom suburbia."

Is there much point in being hip when the one I serve humbled himself and became a slave?

Cautionary Ideas for the Academic Year V

2011-03-14T21:13:00.005+11:00

With the start of the new academic year this week at Sydney University, hebel will be publishing some quotes over the coming days about the current state of academia and the place of Christians within it. Following yesterday's post on the formation of the Christian mind comes Stanley Hauerwas' critique that Christians have failed in both understanding what time it is and how to make sense of the world we live in:

“Just to the extent Christians have confused our time, church time, with state time we have failed to provide an alternative to a world, and the knowledges that are constitutive of that world, which is increasingly unable to make sense of itself.”

Can you imagine a world that makes sense of the current time?

As much as we need Christians in academia to make sense of the times (which Matheson Russell described as the time of the Eucharist - of redemption and forward looking to new creation), Hauerwas also has this to say about the search for truth in a secular univeristy:

“Christians can never fear what we have to learn from honest investigation of the world, even if such investigations are undertaken by those who have no identification as Christians… [W]ork done by non-Christians may well reflect a more determined Christian perspective than that done by Christians.”

Does knowing what time it is mean that we have nothing to fear from the university?

Cautionary Ideas for the Academic Year IV

2011-03-13T22:39:00.003+11:00

With the start of the new academic year this week at Sydney University, hebel will be publishing some quotes over the coming days about the current state of academia and the place of Christians within it. Here is an old quote from Harry Blamires, who was tutored by C.S. Lewis at Oxford, on developing a Christian mind.

"There is no longer a Christian mind. There is still, of course, a Christian ethic, a Christian practice, and a Christian spirituality. As a moral being, the modern Christian subscribes to a code other than that of the non-Christian. As a member of the church, he understands obligations and observations ignored by the non-Christian. As a spiritual being, in prayer and meditation, he strives to cultivate a dimension of life unexplored by the non-Christian. But as a thinking being, the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization. He accepts religion - its morality, its worship, its spiritual culture; but he rejects the religious view of life, the view which sets all earthly issues within the context of the eternal view which relates all human problems - social, political, cultural - the doctrinal foundations of the Christian Faith, the view which sees all things here below in terms of God's supremacy and earth's transitoriness, in terms of Heaven and Hell.

...To think secularly is to think within a frame of reference bounded by the limits of our life here on earth: it is to keep one's calculations rooted in this-worldly criteria. To think christianly is to accept all things with the mind as related, directly or indirectly, to man's eternal destiny as the redeemed and chosen child of God." Harry Blamires, 'The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian think?', 1963, pp. 3-4, 44.

h/t Trevor Cairney

Cautionary Ideas for the Academic Year III

2011-03-09T19:17:00.003+11:00

With the start of the new academic year this week at Sydney University, hebel will be publishing some quotes over the coming days about the current state of academia and the place of Christians within it. Here's a quote which I'd like to know i. whether or not you agree with it, and ii. if so, how you might solve the problem.

“We need to acknowledge that conservative evangelical Christians, as a cultural group, often have difficulty assimilating to the culture of secular colleges and universities. Such difficulties are faced by many groups… It seems to me, however, that conservative evangelical Christians represent a special case in this regard. In the other cases, we are dealing with people who have historically been excluded from academe and are therefore simply unfamiliar with its culture and expectations – a relatively straightforward problem to solve… In the case of conservative evangelical Christianity, however, we are dealing with a group whose leaders have encouraged its members to define themselves over against the secular world and particularly secular academe.” - Adam Kotsko 'Christians in Academe: a Reply' 2010

h/t Caitlin

Cautionary Ideas for the Academic Year II

2011-03-03T08:25:00.002+11:00

With the start of the new academic year this week at Sydney University, hebel will be publishing some quotes over the coming days about the current state of academia and the place of Christians within it. Here is Mark Noll's response to the question posed in the first Cautionary Ideas for the Academic Year:

I actually think it's fatal for long-term Christian thinking and fatal for the long-term health of Christianity per se to live under different basic commitments in professional life and church life. To say that I adopt the rules of the game for academic life Monday to Friday, and the rules of church life on Sunday, that's a real problem.
However, what's required for many domains of learning, and I would include biblical studies, is the serious use of the mind while the spirit is fully cast in a Christian foundation. That can be a difficult challenge where much of the formal thinking about something has been dominated by non-Christian influences for some time, as would be the case in biblical study at research universities.
But the way forward is not to split the personality. The way forward would be following the path charted out by the really significant Christian philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, who have urged more professional abilities, but also more courage in letting Christian foundations dictate how those professional abilities are put to use. I am filled with admiration for people like Robert Adams, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Alvin Plantinga, who have been thoroughly elite and thoroughly professional, but also foundationally Christian in how they put to use their professional wisdom. That, I think, is the model. They have not divided themselves into an academic part and a believer part.

Thoughts?

Cautionary Ideas for the Academic Year

2011-03-02T21:09:00.005+11:00

With the start of the new academic year this week at Sydney University, hebel will be publishing some quotes over the coming days about the current state of academia and the place of Christians within it. To start us off is a question Timothy Dalrymple posed historian Mark Noll in a recent interview. Noll's answer will be published soon.

In Between Faith and Criticism, you say, "a history of evangelical biblical scholarship must heed both the professional community in which scholars willingly adopt a mien of intellectual neutrality, and the community of belief, in which the same scholars embrace a childlike faith."

In my own graduate education, I sometimes heard believing professors and historians say that, "As a historian I believe X, because I am required to operate according to a certain methodology. But as an individual believer, I believe Y." The question is: Is that a stable arrangement? Over the long haul, the more that one practices a methodological naturalism, or something of that sort, will one eventually come not only to practice naturalism as a methodological matter but to accept it as a metaphysical matter? Is it practical to bifurcate ourselves as scholars into one part that draws conclusions according to rigorous methodological criteria and another part that confesses a different set of beliefs?

Thoughts? h/t Caitlin

270/24 and Other Numbers in 2011

2011-02-21T18:58:00.005+11:00

Each year, the International Bulletin of Missionary Research releases an update on the status of global Christianity. They've just released the 2011 Status of Global Mission report, which has some really interesting findings. It's a valuable report because it compares "Christianity’s circumstances to those of other faiths, and assaying how Christianity’s various expressions are faring when measured against the recent (and not-so-recent) past." And as one blogger put it, "The report is unfailingly interesting, sometimes jarring, and occasionally provocative." Here's what they found (which is a summary of George Weigel's article at First Things):

The Status of Global Mission report researched the frequency of Christian martyrdom. The SGM defined martyrdom as “believers in Christ who have lost their lives, prematurely, in situations of witness, as a result of human hostility.” SGM estimated that on average there are 270 new Christian martyrs every 24 hours over the past decade, such that “the number of martyrs [in the period 2000-2010] was approximately 1 million.”
By mid 2011 there will be 2,306,609,000 people who see themselves alinged with Christianity in some description. These 2.3 billion Christians can be divided into six “ecclesiastical megablocks”: 1,160,880,000 Catholics; 426,450,000 Protestants; 271,316,000 Orthodox; 87,520,000 Anglicans; 378,281,000 “Independents” (i.e., those separated from or unaffiliated with historic denominational Christianity); and 35,539,000 “marginal Christians” (i.e., those professing off-brand Trinitarian theology, dubious Christology, or a supplementary written revelation beyond the Bible).
As of mid-2011, there will be an average of 80,000 new Christians per day (of whom 31,000 will be Catholics) and 79,000 new Muslims per day, but 300 fewer atheists every 24 hours.
Africa has been the most stunning area of Christian growth over the past century. There were 8.7 million African Christians in 1900 (primarily in Egypt, Ethiopia and South Africa); there are 475 million African Christians today and their numbers are projected to reach 670 million by 2025.
There were 1,600 Christian denominations in 1900; there were 18,800 in 1970; and there are 42,000 today.
$545 billion is given to Christian causes annually, which comes out to $1.5 billion per day.

Lessons from Lesslie Newbigin

2011-02-10T18:40:00.003+11:00

"If one looks at the world scene from a missionary point of view, surely the most striking fact is that, while in great areas of Asia and Africa the Church is growing, often growing rapidly, in the lands which were once called Christendom it is in decline.Surely there can be no more crucial question for the world mission of the Church… Can there be an effective missionary encounter with this culture – this so powerful, persuasive, and confident culture which (at least until very recently) simply regarded itself as “the coming world civilization” (Newbigin, 1985).

If you're interested in things like:

evangelical epistemological humility (similar to Mike and Steve)
the gospel not as timeless metaphysical truths but as story
the gospel as history
the expansive impact of the gospel
the necessary role of the church in mission

Then you should read Krish Kandiah's homage to legendary missiologist Lesslie Newbigin. It's quite an exciting read, which you'll find here.

Saying No To The HUP

2011-02-05T17:39:00.008+11:00

No, it's not a new disease or government initiative known only by abbreviation. The Homogenous Unit Principle - or the HUP amongst it's hipster friends - is the missiological idea that "people like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic or class barriers" (McGavran and Wagner 1970). And to a certain extent, it works. So as you look around the contemporary church scene, you'll find a church for almost every social and cultural group in Australia. Armed with pragmatic, 'missional' ecclesiology, churches have been started that minister to artisans, entertainers, etc. "Homogenous churches are those in which all the members are from a similar social, ethnic or cultural background. People prefer to associate with people like themselves – ‘I like people like me’. And so we should create homogenous churches to be effective in reaching people" (Tim Chester).

The only problem with the HUP is that's questionable just how biblical actually is. According to Tim Chester:

"The main criticism of the homogenous unit principle is that it denies the reconciling nature of the gospel and the church. It weakens the demands of Christian discipleship and it leaves the church vulnerable to partiality in ethnic or social conflict. It has been said that ‘the homogenous unit principles is fine in practice, but not in theory’!"

A central picture in New Testament of the church is of Jews and Gentiles with one voice glorifying the the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (cf. Romans 15). In Christ two peoples become one; Christian Jews and Gentiles become one new people of God, part of the one body of Christ. So then "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (cf. Galatians 3.28-29). Or again in 1 Corinthians "For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit" (1 Cor. 12.13). And according to Ephesians 3, it is the unity of the church "across barriers that have hitherto divided humankind is the sure sign to the powers that their time is up, that they are not masters of the world and that Jesus is" (NT Wright). The very fact that "Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free" (Colossians 3.11) can praise God together in and of itself declares that Jesus Christ is Lord.

So this year, at Sydney Uni in the eu postgrads & staff faculty, we've said no to the HUP. Campus life is already segmented enough as it: between arts and science, staff and students, academics and support staff. According to Alasdair MacIntyre this results in:

“the graduates of the best research universities tend to become narrowly focused professionals, immensely and even obsessively hard working, disturbingly competitive and intent on success as it is measured within their own specialized professional sphere, often genuinely excellent at what they do; who read little worthwhile that is not relevant to their work..." (MacIntyre 1999).

Instead of organizing our groups by schools and faculties, this year our small groups, prayer groups and reading groups will be organised by broad geographical terms, i.e. Darlington, Fisher, Manning, etc. So in 2011 we're making the English and Physics postgrads sit down and read the Bible - together. We are convinced that they have great things to offer each other, and by talking to each other they'll become more rounded academics. But more importantly, we are convicted that the gospel tears down whatever barriers people place between themselves. We are convicted that what defines as people isn't our academic disciplines (and the expectations these entail) but our identity in Christ. And we are far more united than the academy would have us believe.

We don't do this to ignore the different academic disciplines. The Physics postgrads will still need to support and talk to each other as the live out the Christian life in their school. We're not intending to force people to blandly assimilate. Rather, as we acknowledge the wealth of diversity across eu postgrads and staff, we realise that their is more that unites us than divides us. "...[F]or the same Lords is Lord of all" (Romans 10.12).

So it begins...II

2011-01-18T22:32:00.002+11:00

You may have missed it. Amidst the hustle and bustle of Christmas, the Australian Church Record released issue 1901. And inside the ACR published two more editorials with advice for the next election for the Archbishop of Sydney. In 2013. Peter Bolt comments that:

"Rumour has it that groups of interested parties have begun gathering to discuss the next Archbishop, and shopping lists are being compiled."

Which isn't very surprising. There's been a buzz about the election for a couple of years now. According to the ACR, 'it has the potential to mark a turning-point in the story of Sydney Anglicanism.' What is remarkable is the openness with which these discussions are taking place, following the lead of the ACR when they first laid the issue before the public in May 2010.

The focus of the two editorials might be summarised as "It's Time." Time for generational change. Time to pass the leadership of the diocese from the baby boomers onto which ever generation comes next. With this call for change comes a warning that the next archbishop must be present in the diocese now. The election of someone from outside the Diocese of Sydney will stand, argues Peter Bolt, not only as a rejection of the past 30 years the diocese trajectory but also as a symbol of the failure of the Baby Boomer leadership to provide training and prepare for the changeover of leadership.

"If the leadership of the last 30 years has failed to train someone who can act as Archbishop for the next generation, then that ‘leadership’ has failed abysmally."

Strong words from Peter Bolt. And we can only expect more over the next two years. Even Peter Jensen's Presidential address at CMS Summer School last week felt as though he was starting to establish his legacy - expect a post on this in the future. Do you agree with Bolt's assessment about the Baby Boomers? And is he missing anything from his Archbishops shopping list (which you'll find here)?

The ‘Desacralisation’ Of Politics

2011-01-18T08:33:00.003+11:00

"But secular authorities are no longer in the fullest sense mediators of the rule of God. They mediate his judgments only. The power that they exercise in defeating their enemies, the national possessions they safeguard, these are now rendered irrelevant by Christ’s triumph. This is what might properly be meant by that misleading expression, the ‘desacralisation’ of politics by the Gospel. No government has a right to exist, no nation has a right to defend itself. Such claims are overwhelmed by the immediate claim of the Kingdom. There remains simply the rump of political authority which cannot be dispensed with yet, the exercise of judgment." - Oliver O'Donovan

Through Christ's life, death, resurrection and ascension he has been given all power and authority in heaven and earth. And if he has all power and authority, than our governments have been stripped of their power; they have been reduced to providing justice (Romans 13). To do anything else would be a dangerously idolatrous encroachment on Christ's rule.

The Mediator of Faith

2010-12-31T08:30:00.002+11:00

Here Marilynne Robinson talks about the role of theology in forming peoples minds and lives.

"Theology has been the mediator of the primary literature of faith since antiquity. The writers of the psalms, the prophets, the Apostle Paul all interpret core belief--that God is One, the Creator of heaven and earth, and that he has made humankind in his image. Augustine, Chrysostom, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin each gave intellectual, social and artistic form to modes of Christian life which without them are hardly to be imagined. Lately the practice of this ancient tradition has receded into the academy and learned the idiom of specialization, leaving religion increasingly vulnerable to the charge, and the fact, of vacuousness." - Marilynne Robinson

So Hot Right Now...

2010-12-29T15:28:00.002+11:00

No, not another post about global warming. Here are the top books borrowed from the Moore College Library in the past three months. Data available here.

Global Warming - What Global Warming?

2010-12-28T11:19:00.003+11:00

Colder summers and winters disprove global warming right? Wrong, as Byron explains here. And this is why climate change in Europe is affecting your summer in Australia:

Count Down to Christmas: 1

2010-12-24T14:41:00.003+11:00

It's time for the last Sufjan Christmas Carol. Less than 60 seconds, Sufjan is merely teasing us with his rendition of Hark! The Herald Angel Sings; however Alison has commented several times over the past few weeks that this is her favourite carol, so here it is:

1. Hark! The Herald Angel Sings (follow the countdown here)

If you've enjoyed Sufjan's Christmas carols, you can buy over 40 over his Christmas carols here for just US$15 (+S&H).

To Live a Christ-formed life...

2010-12-23T12:21:00.001+11:00

...is to flourish as a human being, argues Miroslav Volf.

Count Down to Christmas: 4, 3 and 2

2010-12-23T11:40:00.002+11:00

OK, I fell a couple of days behind with Tuesday being my last day of work for the year. And yesterday the internet was abuzz with news of Songs for Christmas VI. Anyway, with only a few days left until the Feast of the Incarnation, join hebel in counting down the days with songs from Sufjan Steven's Christmas album. Today is a triple threat - enjoy!

4. Angels We Have Heard On High (Follow the count down here)

3. All The Friendly Animals (Follow the count down here)

2. The Child With The Star On His Head (Follow the count down here)

Count Down to Christmas: 5

2010-12-20T18:25:00.000+11:00

With 5 days left until the Feast of the Incarnation, join hebel in counting down the days with songs from Sufjan Steven's Christmas album. Today's installment is a personal favourite.

5. O Come O Come Emmanuel (Follow the count down here)

Count Down to Christmas: 6

2010-12-19T09:57:00.001+11:00

With 6 days left until the Feast of the Incarnation, join hebel in counting down the days with songs from Sufjan Steven's Christmas album.

6. I Saw Three Ships (Follow the count down here)

Count Down to Christmas: 7

2010-12-18T09:38:00.002+11:00

With 7 days left until the Feast of the Incarnation, join hebel in counting down the days with songs from Sufjan Steven's Christmas album. A week out, today's song is a Sufjan original. And the YouTube clip is actually worth watching.

7. Put The Lights on The Tree (Follow the count down here)

The REAL Facebook World

2010-12-17T16:20:00.003+11:00

On Wednesday I posted a map showing the connections of Facebook friends around the world. Whilst facebook's coverage seemed quite extensive, there where lots of areas that weren't lit up. You might assume that there is no people in there - no Facebook no people right? I'm pretty sure Africa and Asia have substantial numbers of people. So here is another map that sets Facebook's spread in context. What you get is a view of where social networks other than Facebook like Orkut and RenRen lead the market:

h/t Alison

Count Down to Christmas: 8

2010-12-17T08:01:00.001+11:00

With 8 days left until the Feast of the Incarnation, join hebel in counting down the days with songs from Sufjan Steven's Christmas album.

8. What Child is This Anyway? (Follow the count down here)

Advent: A Haiku

2010-12-16T14:52:00.003+11:00

This haiku was written by Richard Bauckham to complement an Advent Calendar. The sequence is that of the twenty-four biblical books in the Hebrew Bible. These verses are haiku in form (5-7-5 syllables), but not content.

Day 1 - Genesis
After paradise
not even Lot's wife looks back.
Memory turns round.

Day 2 - Exodus
The bones of Joseph
in their gilt sarcophagus
travel night and day.

Day 3 - Leviticus
If she is too poor
to afford a sheep, she may
offer two pigeons.

Day 4 - Numbers
Dawn in my distance,
the wise watchers will see him,
star of their searching.

Day 5 - Deuteronomy
Moses from Pisgah
overviews all. It is not
space but time he lacks.

Day 6 - Joshua
Going over Jordan
Joshua above all sees
that the ark goes first.

Day 7 - Judges
Said the trees to the
bramble, 'Come, be our ruler!'
'Wait!' said the mustard.

Day 8 - Samuel
Hannah, drunk as an
apostle at Pentecost,
magnifies the Lord.

Day 9 - Kings
She came with riddles.
His more than answers more than
took her breath away.

Day 10 - Isaiah
In the wilderness
a voice cries for centuries
seeking an echo.

Day 11 - Jeremiah
Rachel refuses
to be comforted - even
when we turn the page.

Day 12 - Ezekiel
In the end it is
all in the name of the city:
The Lord is there.
Day 13 - The Twelve Prophets
Then, as before, will
Bethlehem bear the shepherd
of the scattered sheep.

Day 14 - Psalms
If there were glory
only, praise like the last psalms,
would that be the end?
Day 15 - Proverbs
Too clever by half
are the foolish. The wise know
the folly of God

Day 16 - Job
God answered Job but
not his question. Maybe he
will do that again.

Day 17 - Song of Solomon
Yes, he will haste like
a gazelle. Nothing is more
impatient than love.

Day 18 - Ruth
Tough old Naomi
bounces a child on her knee -
her wild hope come home.

Day 19 - Lamentations
Jerusalem hurls
her desperate hopes against
God's forgetfulness.

Day 20 - Ecclesiastes
Whatever God does
and whoever else may be
who knows? The wise wait.

Day 21 - Esther
Probability
counts for nothing when Esther's
G-d is in the plot.

Day 22 - Daniel
Nebuchadnezzar
dreams of the doom of despots
and the wide world wakes.

Day 23 - Ezra-Nehemiah
After the exile
returnees did not look back
more than could be helped.

Day 24 - Chronicles
Adam, Seth, Enoch,
Noah, Abraham, David,
Zerubbabel ...

Count Down to Christmas: 9

2010-12-16T03:57:00.000+11:00

With 9 days left until the Feast of the Incarnation, join hebel in counting down the days with songs from Sufjan Steven's Christmas album.

9. Lo! How a Rose E'er Blooming (Follow the count down here)

Count Down to Christmas: 10

2010-12-15T10:22:00.000+11:00

With 10 days left until the Feast of the Incarnation, join hebel in counting down the days with songs from Sufjan Steven's Christmas album.

10. O Holy Night (Follow the count down here)

The Facebook World

2010-12-15T10:15:00.004+11:00

From Visualizing Friendships; h/t KrishK

To The Nations

2010-12-15T09:20:00.002+11:00

"Jesus told his apostles to disciple all the nations. The way his words are often translated, “to make disciples of all nations”, allows for a misconception to arise. It is the nations that are to be discipled, baptized and taught, not merely individuals out of the nations. The gospel will heal the nations and in the book of Revelation the nations shall walk in the light of the glory of God and bring their treasures to the heavenly Jerusalem (Rev 21:24, 26; 22:2). This glorious result of the exaltation of the Messiah had been prophesied in the Old Testament (Isa 11:10, 12; 25:7; 49:6, 7; 52:15). All the nations, that is the peoples and their cultures, are to be Christianized by the knowledge of the triune God. Christ’s commission to his followers is to baptize the nations, to bring them under his leadership, as their Lord and their teacher." - D B Knox, D.Broughton Knox Selected Works Volume II - Church and Ministry; ed. K. Birkett p.277-282. h/t Michael

History is Precedent and Permission

2010-12-14T09:53:00.003+11:00

"...[L]acking curiosity and the habit of study and any general grasp of history, we have entered a period of nostalgia and reaction. We want the past back, though we have no idea what it was. Things do not go so well for us as they once did. We feel we have lost our way. Most of us know that religion was once very important to our national life, and believe, whether we ourselves are religious or not, that we were much the better for its influence. Many of us know that Calvinism was a very important tradition among us. Yet all we know about John Calvin was that he was an eighteenth-century Scotsman, a prude and obscurantist with a buckle on his hat, possibly a burner of witches, certainly the very spirit of capitalism. Our ignorant parody of history affirms our ignorant parody of religious or 'traditional' values. This matters, because history is precedent and permission, and in this important instance, as in many others, we have lost plain accuracy, not to speak of complexity, substance, and human inflection. We want to return to the past, and we have made our past a demonology and not a human narrative." - Marilynne Robinson, Marguerite de Navarre, The Death of Adam, p. 206.

The Righteousness of God: NIV 2010

2010-12-03T08:29:00.003+11:00

Catching up with the rest of Bible translation on on Romans 1.17:

You could translate "δικαιοσύνη γὰρ θεοῦ ἐν αὐτῷ" as "a righteousness of God"...but only if Paul had a 16th century worldview.

Screen shots: 1. NIV 2010, 1984 & TNIV; 2. Greek; 3. NRSV; 4. ESV.

At the Margins of Morality

2010-12-01T16:59:00.002+11:00

"The Church exists today as resident aliens, an adventurous colony in a society of unbelief."
- Hauerwas & Willimon, Resident Aliens, 1989, p. 49.

"The church in the West may have to get used to the idea that its own centre in God, from which it goes out to others in proclamation and compassion, is actually a position of social and cultural marginality. This may improve its witness to the Christ who was himself usually also found at the margins." - Bauckham, Mission as Hermeneutic, 2010, p. 7.

Chris recently blogged about Christianity being at the margins of society. As western society continues to sojourn further and further away from Christendom, the Church is decreasingly at the centre of society. The Church's social and political powerless position not only mirrors the first three centuries of Christian history; it also may help the Church be faithful to it's life and mission.

This is not an easy process for the Church. Not that it should be - we do follow a crucified Messiah. But of interest to me recently has been the way public perception has shifted when it comes to the Church and morality. Whereas once the Church was seen as a moral guardian of society (and it's members were mock for being wowsers and holy), it is now seen as an immoral, corrupting force on society. The Church - and Christians more generally - are seen to have started wars, indoctrinated children, thwarted intellectual progress and destroyed cultures the world over. The Church has constantly been on the back foot for at least the past 50 years over issues of sexuality; in debates in Australia and around the world, it is the Christians are portrayed as immoral and out of touch.

For the early church it was their refusal to observe their civic duties that landed them in hot water (sometimes literally). Like our brothers and sisters 2000 years ago, we find ourselves at the margins of morality. And like them, we are disciples of the same crucified and resurrected Lord. But what will it look like for us to cling to him in our own position of "social and cultural marginality"?

Photo: Alison Moffitt

Why Karl Barth?

2010-11-27T00:38:00.007+11:00

So my box set of Church Dogmatics arrived this week - appropriately on my birthday.

There is a lot to admire about Karl Barth and his massive, unfinished project. I recently had the joyful experience of explaining who Barth was to someone in Manning Bar who had never heard of him. He was a theologian who called his readers to focus on Jesus. His opposition to liberalism, Nazism, and Cold War's partianship was because of what Barth knew God had done in and through Jesus Christ. When asked by a reporter how he would summarise his work after all his years of study, Barth replied "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so."

Maybe I should have shown them this video:

The impact of Barth's scholarship during and after his life time has been far reaching. Yet far more influential than the volumes of his writing was his commitment to the gospel. After Barth died in 1968, the translators of Church Dogmatics into English - TF Torrance and GW Bromiley - made reference to this in their preface to CD IV.4:

"When the proofs of this book were still in our hands, new came in that Karl Barth was dead. God took him to his rest in the early hours of December 10, 1968, the great Church Father of Evangelical Christendom, the one genuine Doctor of the universal Church the modern era has known. It is in the Church Dogmatics above all that we must look for the grandeur of this humble servant of Jesus Christ, for the work he was given to accomplish in it will endure to bless the word for many centuries to come. Only Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas and Calvin have performed comparable service in the past, in the search for a unified and comprehensive basis for all theology in the grace of God.

The Church Dogmatics represents an immense struggle for the understanding of the eternal Word of God and its rational articulation in the modern world in which the thought-forms of man are obediently and pliantly yielded to the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ according to the Holy Scriptures."

If this has whet your appetite, you might like to check out the highlight package of Church Dogmatics at Faith and Theology: Church Dogmatics in a Week. And remember to love God and keep your pipe lit.

The Brain Drain?

2010-11-24T09:02:00.007+11:00

In case you missed it, Southern Cross (the Sydney Anglican mag) ran a two page feature this month on higher education and the Wesley Institute. Bryan Cowling argued that the newly envisioned Wesley Institute might help fill the gap of "well-informed Christian educators in the university". What Cowling imagines for the university is very similar to what I've come to see this year as I've served alongside Christian academics at Sydney University:

"We need lots of intelligent, mature articulate Christian philosophers of education who are equally skilled and knowledgeable in their academic discipline as in applied biblical doctrine and theology. We need hundreds of these academics in our public universities and colleges to nurture the next generation of visionary educational leaders (you could say the same about about each of the gatekeeping, public-policy shaping professions)." - Bryan Cowling, The Hole in Higher Education, Southern Cross: November 2010, pp 28-29.

As I've argued elsewhere, the university offers a unique opportunity to affect the world. I do have some misgivings about Cowling's conclusion (which you might like to ask me about in the comments), but I'm genuinely glad that I'm not alone in praying that the hearts and minds of academics would be shaped by Christ.

However, there is one sentiment in particular that I do find concerning. After calling for hundred of thought-out academics in the university, Cowling goes on to argue:

"There needs to be career paths in public universities and colleges in this country if we are to avoid losing our best Christian minds to leadership positions in other countries."

Lose our best Christian minds to other countries? I find this to be unbelievably short-sighted and parochial. Instead of worrying about a brain drain, we should be encouraging our best Christian minds to use their opportunity in the academic to leave. For eu postgrads and staff, our vision is that when Christian academics finish at Sydney University, they'll go other universities in less reached and less resourced parts of Australia in the world. Our vision is that they'll be people who - with all the energy that God powerfully works within them (Col 1.29) - will be shaping peoples lives in Christ. They'll be academics who can engage and speak the gospel into public policy and discourse. They'll be academics who know how to support campus ministry. And if they find themselves in a university where there is none, then they'll know how to start it.

Hording our academic minds is not the right response to the "marginalising of respectable Christian thinking in Australian society."* Taking every thought captive to obey Christ can't stop at the Australian coastline.

__
*Is marginalisation the problem? For more thoughts on marginalisation see this from Chris.

Guest Post: High Culture

2010-11-17T16:26:00.005+11:00

By Alison Moffitt. Also available here.

Within the last week, Matt and I have done three particularly cultured things:

We saw Bell Shakespeare's performance of Twelfth Night at the Opera House.
We visited Sculpture by the Sea.
We went to the Opera House again to see the Australian Ballet's Edge of Night.

Sculpture by the sea was alright, but the events at the Opera House really took the cake. Twelfth Night made me laugh until I cried, multiple times. And, amazingly, so did the ballet! The final piece, Molto Vivace, was a hilarious parody of traditional ballet set to some of Handel's most beautiful and upbeat string music. I was in stitches as an extremely tall ballerina entered the stage in the middle of the piece (obviously sitting on another person's shoulders, who was hidden under her enormous skirt) and demanded to be romanced by her male partner. I nearly fell off my chair laughing when she slipped away leaving her partner dancing with her torso-less skirt.

What a great week it was, but it has also got Matt and I thinking a lot about how consumerist high culture is. It's a hidden thing - when I think of consumerism, I think of things like Coke and Barbie dolls and ipods. But Shakespeare plays, ballet and other arts are products for consumption too, especially when they are marketed as an essential experience for the upper middle class.

I find great pleasure in these kinds of performances - dance and music performances especially. I love watching and interpreting and I love being moved by it all. I love crying when things are beautiful. I have cried at the beauty of a live performance of Handel's Zadok the Priest and I have bawled my eyes out watching the Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet ballet. But sometimes I feel almost guilty that I experience these kinds of moments so frequently. Seeing a beautiful performance is one thing, but it's never that alone. It's a night out in a glittering city - lit by thousands of fossil fuel burning lights. It's an overpriced meal beforehand, served up by underpaid kitchen hands and waitstaff. We eat food that has travelled thousands of kilometres to sit on my plate. Are the farmers who produced this food in foreign countries getting paid enough to take their family to see Shakespeare? Is this foreign food depriving local farmers of a decent income? Can local farmers take their families to the Opera House? The curtain goes up and the stage lights turn on. Who says that this form of dancing is the highest form of dancing? What about dancing from other cultures? Would this many people pay this much money to see dancing from a different culture?

These high culture nights always seem to go the same way for me: the indulgence of a good meal, the elation of an indescribable performance and then the gnawing sensation as I leave the theatre: how sustainable is this thing that I have just done?

Even with these sobering thoughts, I don't think I want to stop going and enjoying these things. But I definitely don't want to stop thinking of the bigger ethical picture behind it all. At the moment, feeling the weight of each performance I see makes me appreciate these moments as a blessing. Maybe for now it is just a case of being thankful that I get to enjoy these things now, to acknowledge that they are not essential experiences to be a human (not even an upper-middle class human!) and to remember that they are not to be taken for granted.

Twelfth Night photo from Bell Shakespeare, Molto Vivace photo from the Australian Ballet.

Christians Flee Iraq

2010-11-16T17:01:00.000+11:00

From ABC News.

A Model Academic

2010-11-14T23:36:00.002+11:00

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a lot of things. A martyr. A resistance fighter. The hero of a fallen leader. He is an inspiring writer who cared about Christ and his church. Yet for all this, we rarely see Bonhoeffer as a model academic. Unless of course you are Marilynne Robinson.

Robinson's Bonhoeffer is more than this of course. But to understand Bonhoeffer you need to understand him as an academic. Earning a doctorate in theology by the age of 21, Bonhoeffer started to lecture in the University of Berlin by the time he was 22. He would go onto to teach in some of Germany's finest academic institutions of the time. And yet, unlike so many other academic contemproaries, Bonhoeffer understand the danger posed by Hitler's National Socialism. As a Christian in academia, Bonhoeffer was prepared to let his beliefs shape every part of his life, even if it lead him to the hangman's noose. Having read Robinson's homage to Bonhoeffer in The Death of Adam, I want to suggest three reasons why Bonhoeffer stands out as a model academic.

Christ at the Centre. The central focus point of Bonhoeffer's academic career, and indeed his life, was the Lordship of Jesus. He is the one with full authority. He is the one who is to be obeyed and trusted - in life and in death. It was his commitment to Christ at the centre that lead Bonhoeffer to shape everything around this reality. It was this reality that prevented Bonhoeffer from submitting to any other authority.
Religionless Christianity. I have to admit that although I've heard this phrase thrown around quite a bit, it's baffled me. Until I realized what it actually means. Often used as an excuse to stop 'stuffy, anachronistic liturgy' etc. Bonhoeffer used this phrase to challenge his culture. In a nation where everyone and everything assumed Christianity, Bonhoeffer used his place as an academic - in the university and the seminary - to call the assumed a priori of god in German society hypocrisy. His vocation as a scholar was to call Germany to denounce the Fuhrer and follow the true lord.
Christ at Gethsemane. These two points made Bonhoeffer an academic who was well thought-out and integrated in his faith and study, and willing to let this shape his dialogue with the world.
"By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world - watching with Christ in Gethsemane...How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray, when we share in God's suffering through a life of this kind?"
The scion of German aristocracy and one of the greatest minds of his generation, Bonhoeffer could have stayed quiet in the ivory tower of academia. He could of, but he didn't, because Christ went to Gethsemane. He would be an integrated scholar who would get involved in the world's mess. As a disciple of Christ, Bonhoeffer would stay true to his convictions. "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."

A brilliant mind, Bonhoeffer lived and died for what he believed in. He loved the world like his master did, and was prepared to speak up and act against injustice. And he did all this without going flaky on what lay at the centre of his life. Bonhoeffer has been an inspiration to me for over seven years now. And Robinson's reading of him has only solidified this for me. I look forward to carrying on part of his legacy in the postgrad ministry at Sydney University.

Peter Adam: When Sorry Isn't Sorry

2010-11-08T08:00:00.003+11:00

Here a short interview calling Melbourne Anglicans to be a prophetic voice to Australia and why sorry isn't sorry without restitution. H/T Stephen Gardner.

History? Richard Hays on (Barth and) Wright

2010-11-03T15:59:00.004+11:00

Jeremy Begbie on Theology and the Arts

2010-11-02T16:55:00.002+11:00

He's a flipping genius!

Book Review: Worldviews

2010-11-02T09:26:00.002+11:00

CMS-NSW recently released the second edition of their e-journal, Landscape. This edition includes some fascinating articles, including this video that I've mentioned earlier. There's also a review that I've written of Paul Hiebert's Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change. You'll find it here.

Barth IV.1: The Scenic Tour

2010-10-29T22:10:00.003+11:00

I've been in a reading group for the past few months. We're reading the thoroughly beautiful Church Dogmatics IV.1 by uber theologian Karl Barth. Despite the patchiness of my attendance and the density of ideas that Barth manages to fit onto one page, it's been quite enjoyable. Here are some highlights:

“The subject-matter, origin and content of the message received and proclaimed by the Christian community is at its heart the free act of the faithfulness of God in which He takes the lost cause of man, who has denied Him as Creator and in so doing ruined himself as creature, and makes it His own in Jesus Christ, carrying it through to its goal and in that way maintaining and manifesting His own glory in the world”. - Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1, p. 3.

"In His Godhead, as the eternal Son of the Father, as the eternal Word, Jesus Christ never ceased to be transcendent, free, and sovereign. He did not stand in need of exaltation, nor was He capable of it. But He did as man – it is here again that we come up against that which is not self-evident in Jesus Christ. The special thing, the new thing about the exaltation of Jesus Christ is that One who is bound as we are is free, who is tempted as we are is without sin, who is a sufferer as we are is able to minister to Himself and others, who is a victim to death is alive even though He was dead, who is a servant (the servant of all servants) is the Lord. This is the secret of His humanity which is revealed in His resurrection and ascension and therefore shown retrospectively by the Evangelists to be the secret of His whole life and death. It is not simply that He is the Son of God at the right hand of the Father, the Kyrios, the Lord of His community and the Lord of the cosmos, the bearer and executor of divine authority in the Church and the world, but that He is all this as a man – as a man like we are, but a man exalted in the power of His deity. This is what makes Him the Mediator between God and man, and the One who fulfils the covenant. - Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1, p. 135.

Story Telling: An Exercise

2010-10-26T22:46:00.003+11:00

"Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching."

This will require at least 8 people. From then you you will need multiples of 4.

Number people off 1, 2, 3, 4. Then break up Mark 1.1-34 amongst the four groups this way:

Mark 1.1-8
Mark 1.9-15
Mark 1.16-28
Mark 29-34

Each person will need a pen and an A4 piece of paper - divide the paper into eight even boxes. Then each group needs to draw their section of Mark 1 (story board style) in no more than the eight boxes. Once you've done this, start telling your group's part of Mark 1 within the group (using your pictures if needed). Do this a couple of times, helping each other tell the story that is:

clear (i.e. finding more suitable words/phrases for words/phrases the average person in your culture wouldn't understand; summarise names and places if needed, etc.)
accurate (you can't guess the meaning to embellish the story)
interesting (make use of body language, etc.)

OK, you're no ready to tell the story without looking at your pictures or your bible. Swap the groups around so that there is now someone from groups 1, 2, 3 and 4 in each group. Go ahead and tell the story to each other with pausing or stopping.

_________
How did you feel about hearing the bible this way? According to one set of figures, two thirds of the world are aural learners. Is this going to be an effective way to teach them the Bible? There are a basic set of of discussion questions you can use with this method (which are discussed in pairs before being shared with the whole), e.g. What did you like about the story/first impressions from the story? What questions does the story raise for you? What does the story tell us about God? What does the story tell us about humans? What are you going to change next week because of this story?

h/t To the SMBC graduate (who I can't name for security reasons) who taught this method of Bible teaching at staff equip yesterday.

Christian Academia: Books

2010-10-23T17:32:00.003+11:00

Working alongside the eu postgrads this year, I've read a couple of books to help me understand the challenges and opportunities of Christian academia. What I've found is that they has been several books published in the last 20 years about the place of Christian academics. But for the most past they seem to be largely isolated from each other. Furthermore, most of the books are American and are written for the American context (i.e. having secular and faith-based universities). Here are some of the books I've found helpful:

The Two Tasks of The Christian Scholar, ed. William Lane Craig & Paul M. Gould, 2007. Published as a festschrift to Charles Malik, The Two Tasks has some interesting papers by Lane Craig and others. But the cash value in this book is Malik's The Two Tasks, an address he gave in 1980. It was this address which reignited a vision for university in the American evangelical scene.

Finding God at Harvard, ed. Kelly Monroe Kullberg, 2007. A celebration of the ministry of the Veritas Forum at Harvard, FG@H is a collection of short essays and testimonies from Christians in the Harvard community. Contributors include Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Charles Malik and others. A great insight into one of the most interesting ministries to post grads and staff in the US.

The State of the University, Stanley Hauerwas, 2006. A collection of Hauerwas' thoughts on the university and Christianity. Although the essay's become repetitive in the middle, Hauerwas has some gold in this book, and I appreciate the way he pushes back against the usual American angst about the university. There are also some beautiful chapters about tradition and institutions, and Rowan Williams.

Shining Like Stars, Lindsay Brown, 2006. Although not specifically about Christian academics, Brown has some inspiring stories about the Christians working in the university.

Until Justice & Peace Embrace, Nicholas Wolterstorff, 1983. This book is also not specifically about academia. However Wolterstorff has some insightful things to say to Christian post grads and scholars, and I know some people who have found him helpful.

Christian Academia? Matheson Russell, 2010. Originally a talk given at the Post Grad day at AnCon this year, it was later republished in VERITAS. This article lays out what the university is and how it fits into the Christian worldview.

10 Things We Wish Someone Had Told Us When We Started Graduate School, Anna Blanch, Goanna Tree, updated 2010. Helpful advice from a Christian academic.

There is also several American and British websites with some resources on them. And Kelly Monroe Kullberg has another book, Finding God Beyond Harvard, which I'd like to read at some point. Oh, there are also some theologians like O'Donovan and McGrath who have things to say about academia in several places.

Know of any other books which have something to say about the university? I'd love to know. And at some point I should share some ideas I've had about university and the doctrine of creation...

The Thing I Was Eager To Do

2010-10-20T20:18:00.002+11:00

"...and when James and Cephas and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given to me, they gave the right hand of fellowship to Barnabas and me, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. Only, they asked us to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do." Galatians 2.9-10

"So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith." Galatians 6.10

At the EU Public Meeting today (which have been excellent over the past few weeks - make sure you download Rowan's Isaiah series) the following figures were mentioned:

13% of Christians live in absolute poverty. That equates to over 200 million people living on less than $90US a year.
Christians receive 50% of the worlds annual income, but spend over 90% of it on themselves.

Whilst you chew over those figures, let me remind that back in September I briefly pondered about Paul's collection for the Jerusalem saints and mission. Church unity is highly important to Paul. He went to great lengths to preserve it; even collecting money from churches around the Mediterranean was designed to represent the unity of the church under Christ. So maybe today the church in the west could in a very practical way display its unity with the church universal by releasing 200 million brothers and sisters from debt.

The Periphery of Intellectual Existence

2010-10-14T17:11:00.005+11:00

Is there such a theology of the university? Or does the university fit into the Christian worldview? One of the things I've found myself doing this year as I work alongside the EU's Post Grad faculty is to read books that try to answer these questions. As I've prayed and dreamed about where this growing ministry might go in the future, there have been a number of books I've found helpful in imagining the vocation of Christian academia.

Admittedly, most of these books are American. They appear to be written out of some American angst in solving the dilemma of having both Christian and secular universities.

One name has repeatedly popped up this year: Charles Habib Malik. A former President of the UN General Assembly, Malik was himself a giant in the mid to late 20th's public forum. Malik was a brilliant thinker who studied under Heidegger and Whitehead; he also possessed a generous orthodoxy in loving and welcoming Catholics and Protestants as well as other Orthodox Christians. Amongst contemporary Christians he perhaps most famous for this quote:

"The University is a clear-cut fulcrum with which to move the world. The problem
here is for the church to realize that no greater service can it render both
itself and the cause of the gospel than to try to recapture the universities for
Christ, on whom they were all originally founded. More potently than by any
other means, change the university and you change the world."

I've recently been reading Malik. Like most of what I've read about Christian scholarly witness, what I've found in Malik is a love for the God and Father of Christ Jesus that is displayed in part through a love for the university, and more generally for knowledge and learning. He had a great vision for the university as a place that is captured for Christ. He prayed for a university that would use it's wisdom that would serve Jesus. Malik believed that it would be Evangelicals who had the most opportunity to make this happen. Here is his charge to them:

The problem is not only to win souls but to save minds. If you win the
whole world and lose the mind of the world, you will soon discover that you have
not won the world. Indeed it may turn out that you have actually lost the
world.In order to create and excel intellectually, must you sacrifice or neglect
Jesus? In order to give your life to Jesus, must you sacrifice or neglect
learning and research? Is your self-giving to scholarship and learning
essentially incompatible with your self-giving to the scholarship and learning
essentially incompatible with your self-giving to Jesus Christ? These are the
ultimate questions, and I beg you to beware of thinking that they admit of glib
answers. I warn you: the right answer could be the most disturbing
....
People are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money
or serving the church or preaching the gospel. They have no idea of the infinite
value of spending years of leisure in conversing with the greatest minds and
souls of the past, and thereby ripening and sharpening and enlarging their
powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is
abdicated and vacated to the enemy. Who among evangelicals can stand up to the
great secular or naturalistic or atheistic scholars on their own terms of
scholarship and research? Who among the evangelical scholars is quoted as a
normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or
psychology or sociology or politics? ...For the sake of greater effectiveness in
witnessing to Jesus Christ himself, as well as for their own sakes, the
evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible
intellectual existence.

Malik offers a caution against the anti-intellectualism that had the potential to characterise evangelicalism in the 20th century. And if we truly believe in lives transformed by Christ, we need to seek not just the conversion of souls, but the conversion minds, hearts and hands (on which see here). As I reflect on what this might look like for EU's Post Grads, my hope is that they will bring every part of their lives under the Lordship of Christ. In him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. My hope is that they will be the best post grads in the university, because they're using their intellect to serve Jesus and his church and his world; because they're engaging with other academics from across the university; because they want take every thought captive to obey Christ.

A Critical Conversation

2010-10-08T12:29:00.002+11:00

This video is from the latest Landscape journal from CMS. Listen to (my boss) Rowan Kemp talk to some missionaries about the nature, needs and challenges of student ministry in Europe.

A critical conversation from CMS NSW on Vimeo.

October is...

2010-10-07T17:04:00.002+11:00

Mental Health Month. According to a Commenwealth Government survey in 2007, one in every five Australians experienced some form of mental illness. This is a relevant issue to all segments of our society. And ANGLICARE are encouraging churches to do something about. Besides calling on the state and federal governments to improve their mental health services, ANGLICARE is providing resources and the encouragment for churches to welcome and support Australians with mental health.

So far ANGLICARE have provided general information and a fact sheet about mental health, a specific fact sheet and advice for churches, and prayers to use in church for people in mental health. There will also be more information and a motion at the Sydney Anglican Synod in the next fortnight.

"As Christians the reality of mental illness is something we can not ignore.Its prevalence means that it is likely we will know of a friend, loved one or someone sitting next to us at church that has been affected by mental illness. We are also likely to be affected ourselves. If we are to continue to uphold biblically-minded mission, we must bring God’s Word to bare upon the realities that confront us." - Peter Kell, CEO ANGLICARE Sydney

ANGLICARE was also involved in a story that was shown on the 7:30 report last night. Highlighting ANGLICARE's program for young carers, you should check out the transcript here.

For Labour Day

2010-10-04T11:49:00.003+11:00

I am very thankful to have come from a university ministry and a church that has a positive theology of work. Earlier this year I posted a definition of work from some EU training papers. More recently at a church weekend away, we were told that work - in and of itself - is good. Work is an opportunity to please the master - not just in evangelism - but in the way we work, because we are "servants of Christ" (cf. Ephesians 6 and Colossians 3-4).

I know that for others this hasn't been the case: work is what the semi-Christians do; it's what you do to pay for gospel ministry; work is only valuable as an opportunity to do evangelism. As a protestant Christian, this is disturbing. My tradition has long valued work; there are numerous quotes from Luther and Calvin that support a positive theology of work. My tradition was at the forefront of workers rights and the movement for the eight hour day in the 19th and 20th centuries. So why have most of our churches forgotten what to say about work from a Christian worldview?

"I had a long discussion with a young pastor early this summer who was championing a strong Hauerwasian view, and it became clear that he had nothing constructive or encouraging to say to me as a professional or to any of the businesspeople or professionals in his church about our vocations in the world. The absence of any theological reflection on his part about work and vocation reflected the old dualism that has been at the heart of modernity and Christianity’s capitulation to it. It also rendered him mute to those looking for wisdom about how to live their lives in the world outside the church." - James Davison Hunter

$190

2010-10-01T18:03:00.003+10:00

$190 - For $190 the 14 volume Church Dogmatics by Karl Barth could belong to you (as long as the Australian Dollar stays at $0.969 US Dollars). This is a bargain - the magnum opus of one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. Usually $995 US, this is a 90% discount. And it's Karl Barth. How many other theologians have appeared on a stamp, annoyed Hitler and on the cover of Time Magazine? And the word on the street is that they look hot.

So should I buy it? Well...maybe. I have this in the back of my mind. And I want to know how on earth they can sell it so cheaply? Is someone being poorly paid so that the publishers can afford to give such a massive discount? Or have the earth's resources been cheaply devoured to supply my cravings?

Who knew Church Dogmatics could inspire so many ethical questions in the mind of a Gen Y Australian?

Concerning the Collection for the Saints

2010-09-30T17:54:00.003+10:00

"Now concerning the collection for the saints: you should follow the directions I gave to the churches of Galatia. ²On the first day of every week, each of you is to put aside and save whatever extra you earn, so that collections need not be taken when I come. ³And when I arrive, I will send any whom you approve with letters to take your gift to Jerusalem. ⁴If it seems advisable that I should go also, they will accompany me." - 1 Corinthians 16.1 ff

I've been pondering over this issue for a few weeks now. The Apostle Paul seems to spend an incredible amount of time organising the collection from amongst the Gentile churches for the saints in Jerusalem. He organises the churches in Macedonia and Asia to join in; he has to remind the Corinthians (at least) twice to support the cause; it's even one of the possible causes for Paul writing to the Roman church.

So why don't we hear more about it in our public and private teaching from of the Bible. It was clearly important to Paul and his approach to mission - so what can we learn from it?

I'd love to hear your thoughts. The first thing that comes to my mind is the value of unity. The collection is highly symbolic for Paul as the Gentiles, who now share with the Jews the blessing of the Messiah, support and share in the trials of their Jewish brothers and sisters. To have organised this collection from the churches across the Eastern Mediterranean was have been quite time-consuming for Paul (i.e. the main form of transport was your two feet). He goes to great lengths to strengthen the unity of the new Jew plus Gentile community. In an age where we take unity for granted, Paul's efforts are a well aimed rebuke to our laissez-faire attitude on church unity.

The Value of Being Integrated

2010-09-24T16:41:00.003+10:00

Working in Christian ministry at a university, I'm becoming increasingly convinced of the importance of being integrated in your faith. There is a real depth and maturity in Christians who do this. Part of this involves connecting what you believe with your actions. Chris has posted a quote on this that I also find challenging and exciting.

[T]here is no question in my mind that Christians would be considered even more odd than they are today by virtue of what they believe and the morality by which they live, and yet because they are fully engaged in each sphere of life as individuals and communities of character, they would serve as a credible and creditable conscience of the overlapping communities they inhabit. Odd, to be sure, but no one would deny that they do extraordinary good in the world. Neither would anyone doubt that they serve the cities and communities in which they live very well." - James Davison Hunter, The Other Journal.

You can read more here.

Also, this isn't really connected, but I think it is worth reading anyway: The Problem of Joy: A Review of Sufjan Stevens’s All Delighted People EP

The Descaralization of Humanity

2010-09-22T21:59:00.003+10:00

"For old Adam, that near-angel whose name means Earth, Darwinists have substituted a creature who shares essental attributes with whatever beast has been recently observed behaving shabbily in the state of nature. Genesis tries to describe human exceptionalism, and Darwinism tries to discount it. Since Malthus, to go back no farther, the impulse has been vigorously present to descralise humankind by making it appropriately the prey of unmitigated struggle. This descaralization - fully as absolute with respect to predator as to prey - has required the disengagement of conscience, among other things. It has required the grand-scale disparagement of the traits that distinguish us from the animals - and the Darwinists take the darkest possible view of animals. What has been rejected is the complexity of the Genesis account, in favour of a simplicity so extreme it cannot - by design, perhaps - deal with that second term in the Biblical view of humankind, our destiny, that is, the consequences of our actions. It is an impressive insight, in a narrative so very ancient as the Genesis account of the Fall, that the fate of Adam is presented as the fate of the whole living world. I have heard people comfort themselves with the thought of the perdurability of cockroaches, a fact which does not confute the general truth of the view that our species is very apt to put an end to life on this planet." - Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam

Does this make us distinct, exceptional? We who were created a little lower than the angels are able to end all life on earth.

Socioeconomic Snake Handling

2010-09-21T23:05:00.004+10:00

I've started reading Marilynne Robinson's The Death of Adam. Robinson, who is a brilliant writer, has produced this collection of essays as a lament over decline in humanism and history. what is particularly concerning to her is the way history is taught now, such that we can throw round words like Calvinism or Darwinism without ever looking at a word Calvin or Darwin wrote. In response, Robinson takes us back to the original texts - texts which she claims to have foundational documents to contemporary American identity. I've read the first chapter, on Darwinism, and particularly appreciated Robinson's approach. She doesn't take issue with the science of evolution, but offers a sustained critique of the philosophy or ideology of Darwinism.

'What magic is there about the word "modern" that makes us assume what we think has no effect on what we do? Bryan wrote, "Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future." This being true, how could a cult of war recruit many thousands of intelligent people? And how can we now, when the fragility of the planet is every day more obvious, be giving ourselves over to an ethic of competition and self-seeking, a sort of socioeconomic snake handling, where faith in a theory makes us contemptuous of very obvious perils? And where does this theory get its seemingly unlimited power over our moral imaginations, when it can rationalize stealing candy from babies - or, a more contemporary illustration, stealing medical care or schooling from babies - as readily as any bolder act? Why does it have the stature of science and the chic of iconoclasm and the vigor of novelty when it is, pace Nietzsche, only mythified, respectablized resentment, with a long, dark history behind it?'

Robinson understands Darwinism as part of the larger picture. It's part of the enlightenment project of progress. It is a dehumanising idea, which, when taken and applied to politics or economics is destructive. It has enslaved to humanity to economic selfishness and ecological tragedy as we seek to exploit and take advantage of the world and each other. How much of the world has been destroyed in the name of progress?

Man in Black

2010-09-21T20:45:00.000+10:00

This is Life - Wrap Up

2010-09-11T21:37:00.002+10:00

Mission finished at Sydney Uni last week after three weeks of talking, listening, interacting and presenting the gospel to the campus. How did it go? By God's grace, 11 people became Christian. Scores of people are now being followed up. Thousands of dollars worth of Bibles and apologetic books were given away. If you're one of my supporters, you'll hear more about mission in my next prayer letter (or in the Grads Fund's next newsletter).

Krish Kandiah was one of the speakers the EU flew out from the UK for This is Life. He's posted his reflections on This is Life - worth checking out here.

In other news, I've joined two reading groups. Right now I'm reading The Death of Adam by Marilynne Robinson; and Karl Barth Church Dogmatics 4.1. I'm hoping to post some champagne quotes from these books over the coming months.

This is Life - Week 6 Video

2010-09-03T17:59:00.000+10:00

This is Life - Week 5 Video

2010-08-30T20:18:00.000+10:00

Here's the video from the second week of This is Life.

Follow Those Links

2010-08-26T20:30:00.004+10:00

Some things around the Internet that I'm reading and pondering...

Worthy of Worship

2010-08-25T18:28:00.002+10:00

"If God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make a final end to violence—that God would not be worthy of worship…. The only means of prohibiting all recourse to violence by ourselves is to insist that violence is legitimate only it comes from God… My thesis that the practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many… in the West…. [But] it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human non-violence [results from the belief in] God’s refusal to judge. In a sun-scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die… [with] other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind." - Miroslav Volf

This is Life - Week 4 Video

2010-08-24T21:37:00.002+10:00

Sorry the posting has been irregular recently. As some of you know, I've been caught up in the EU's three week mission 'This is Life'. Here's a video that will give you a taste of how the first week has gone.

What Australian Politics Looks Like

2010-08-21T17:25:00.002+10:00

Make sure you turn the translator on...

If Only Australian Politics Was Like This...

2010-08-19T23:03:00.000+10:00

My Country, Your Country

2010-08-07T13:23:00.003+10:00

As we approach the first anniversary of Peter Adam's Australia: Whose Land? lecture, Alison has coincidentally finished her three part series: My Country, Your Country. It's worth checking out, particulary for the final post in the series. Here's an excert:

One quote made me stop in my tracks. It was a woman talking about how she had never really understood who she was because she had never been able to be with her own family in their own place. I wanted to be sick on the spot. Only fifteen minutes beforehand, I had been lost in my own memories of family, and the place that my family felt it belonged to. At what cost were these memories created!? Which Aborignal people were removed from Ebeneezer so that white people could farm? Which indigenous families were torn apart so that I could grow up safely with my own?

Under John Howard, people said that the stolen generation was not this generation's fault. Maybe that is true. I personally can't take any direct responsiblity for destoying countless Aborignal families.

But I was blind to the way that I personally have benefitted from the pain that many many others have suffered. That afternoon at Reconciliation Place, I realised. I am truly sorry.

You'll find the series here:

Feast of the Transfiguration

2010-08-06T23:35:00.001+10:00

Guest Post: Getting Social Policy Back on the Election Agenda

2010-07-29T17:16:00.004+10:00

By Alison Moffitt. Also available here.

The Policy Unit released a report yesterday that is getting tons of coverage, which is very exciting for us. Nothing like a political media release in the middle of an election campaign. Unfortunately the kinds of issues it raises are not issues that the pollies are engaging with this time around. None of them have talked extensively about social policy or looking after marginalised, until Julia Gillard's announcement today about a new disability insurance scheme.

The report we released focused on three groups in society who are particularly vulnerable:

people who access Emergency Relief (food, clothing, bills assistance etc);
African refugees, many of whom struggle to settle because of housing problems; and
ageing parent carers, that is, older people who are looking after adult children with disabilities. Many of these parents are ageing and developing their own health issues, which makes their caring responsibilities even harder.

So many outlets have run with the story. It's been rad. The best two I have seen so far are:

This article from the Sydney Morning Herald (If you don't read anything else, make sure you read this one.)
The news story put together by ABC TV, which aired at midday today and hopefully will be on air on tonight's news too. (My colleagues and I are in it!)

Other places to pick up the story include Channel 7, 2UE radio, ABC radio and Sydney Anglican Media.

If you can, please check out the report. These are very important issues to think about, especially if you live in Australia. You can find it here. There is a link to download the report at the bottom of the page.

Why My Vote Is Still Up For Grabs: V/V addendum

2010-07-29T07:03:00.000+10:00

From John Dickson in today's SMH:

"Christians should be willing to change voting patterns after Christian reflection on particular policies. A believer who cannot imagine voting for the ''other side'' has either determined that only one party aligns with the will of God or, more likely, is more attached to their cultural context than to the wisdom of Scripture.

Voting patterns, of believers or otherwise, are sometimes based on little more than family heritage or geography. This is unreflective and sub-Christian.

Equally inadequate is voting for a candidate simply because he or she is a Christian. This is religious favouritism. Having Christians in Parliament is no guarantee - or even indicator - that our nation will be marked by peace, justice, compassion and truth." - In political realm, birds of a feather don't necessarily flock together

Why My Vote Is Still Up For Grabs: V/V

2010-07-28T20:08:00.004+10:00

Maybe a more accurate title for this series would be 'My Electoral Angst'. What I've learnt from this is political theology is more complicated than I've been reducing it to in these recent posts (and thanks for the comments that have reminded me of this). I'm no where near clearer after this series about how I will vote for, but I think that voicing my angst has been really helpful for me - so thanks for putting up with that.

On reflection, I'm feeling OK about still not knowing who to vote for.Voting is not the sum total of my political involvement either as a citizen of a western liberal democracy or of the Kingdom of God.

However, voting is an important of my political life as a citizen of Australia. So let me share with you these wise words from Anglicare Sydney:

"The challenges being faced by the most marginalised people in Australia are absent from the policy announcements of the major parties. Anyone who cares about the plight of those at the edges of our society should be concerned about this. If you call Jesus Lord, then you in particular should share this concern...Make your vote count for more than your own interests. In Australia, we all have the opportunity to vote. But let’s make sure we also live in a nation where everybody counts."

Today Anglicare Sydney launched the 2010 State of Sydney Report:

"[T]he 2010 State of Sydney Report that is likely to be quite unpopular. Unpopular because it is being released at a time when the nation’s eyes are focused on an election campaign that is racing to capture the safe middle ground. But a failure to talk about important issues does not make them go away. The State of Sydney Report finds that single parents, Indigenous Australians, those with a disability and people in public housing still experience significant social exclusion in Sydney."

Let me finish with a story. A few years ago at uni the campus was in the midst of campaigning for the union elections. This is always a heated affair, with chalking, posters, leaflets, t-shirts, lecture shouts; it dominates campus life for a few weeks. Some of my friends suggested that one way to respond to all the hype around the election would be to put up posters campaigning for Jesus: 'Vote one Jesus'. They didn't do it, and I'm just as glad now and I was then that they didn't. Jesus doesn't need to stand for election, he's been raised to the dead and sits at the right hand of his Father. He doesn't need to campaign, he's shares in the rule of the entire cosmos.

"Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, 'The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.'” - Revelation 11.15

Why My Vote Is Still Up For Grabs: IV/V a

2010-07-22T23:40:00.003+10:00

An Excursive

So a couple of weeks ago Alison and I were in Canberra. It so happened that we were in town for 'Constitution Day' - the 110th anniversary of Queen Victoria given the Royal Assent to the Australian Constitution. So we made our way to the National Archives to see the original constitution from 1900. Have studied the legal and historical ramifications of this document in high school and at university, I knew that this was an important document. But I have to say that it was fairly underwhelming...the Queen's signature was barely legible. The highlight of the exhibition was a copy of Edmund Barton's draft constitution from one of the 1890's Constitutional Conventions (Edmund Barton was the first Prime Minister). Barton had obviously relieved himself from boredom at several points during the conference. His copy was filled with doodles and portraits he had drawn to amuse himself.

Anyway, see the founding document of the Commonwealth of Australia did get me thinking: What would you change about the constitution? [Read about it here]. What would you add? What would you remove? What would you completely redesign? For me, the most pressing issue would be Australian federalism.

"It is ridiculous for Australian federalism to limp on in this lop-sided state - with all the real power in Canberra. The priority now is to move towards a total reframing of Commonwealth-state powers to reflect contemporary realities and sensible allocation of resources and responsibilities." - Andrew Lynch

For the past few decades the States have become increasingly superfluous, yet frustratingly necessary because of their constitutional rights. One of the things that encouraged me about Kevin Rudd in 2007 was his promise of a new Federalism. Would breaking Australia into several regions (a fusion of state and local government) be the way forward?

Thoughts?

Why My Vote Is Still Up For Grabs: IV/V

2010-07-22T22:55:00.004+10:00

"Recent events demonstrate that liberal democracy can itself devolve into a mode of tyranny. Due to a pervasive indifference to truth, as opposed to majority opinion, the manipulation of opinion and the exploitation of fear more often than not win the day. Thus increasingly, liberal politics revolves around supposedly guarding against alien elements: the terrorist, the refugee, the person of another race, the foreigner, the criminal, and so on. Populism seems more and more to be an inevitable drift of unqualified liberal democracy. Consequently, the purported defence of liberal democracy itself is often used in order to justify the suspension of democratic decision-making and civil liberties. And so, somewhat paradoxically, it is liberalism that tends to suspend those values of liberality - fair trial, right to a defence, assumed innocence, habeas corpus, a measure of free speech and free enquiry, good treatment of the convicted - which it has taken over, but which as a matter of historical record it did not invent." - John Milbank, How Democracy Devolves into Tyranny.

Milbank's critique of contemporary democracy, that "[p]opulism seems more and more to be an inevitable drift of unqualified liberal democracy" captures my frustration with the political process in Australia. Maybe it's because I'm a Western, Gen Y male who has overindulged on The West Wing, but the race to the bottom the politicians contest each election drives me crazy.

So I could give up on democracy altogether, and refuse to vote. Given the apparent flaws in modern politics, that would be the easy road. Indeed, Oliver O'Donovan describes democracy as fictional:

"'Democracy ' as we use the term is strictly a fiction, because the idea that we all govern by electing those who do govern is a fiction."

Giving up would be easy (for the record, this isn't O'Donovan's position). But it is too dualistic for me. It would be falling into the trap of withdrawing from politics and so withdrawing from the world altogether. So I'm sensing that the way forward, at least with this dilemma, is to hold on tightly to the conviction that the church's task is to be the church; transformation will come as the Christ, the head of the body, transforms Christians and restores his creation. Lord willing this is where this series will conclude tomorrow.

"Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen." - Ephesians 3.20-21

How to Listen to the World

2010-07-21T12:40:00.001+10:00

H/T Byron.

Why My Vote Is Still Up For Grabs: III/V

2010-07-21T08:21:00.004+10:00

"In our idolization of modern secular democracy we have imagined that, provided our leaders attain power by a popular vote, that’s all that matters, and that the only possible critique is to vote them out again next time round. The early Christians, and their Jewish contemporaries, weren’t particularly concerned with how people in power came to be in power; they were extremely concerned with speaking the truth to power, with calling the principalities and powers to account and reminding them that they hold power as a trust from the God who made the world and before whom they must stand to explain themselves." - Tom Wright

It is weird to feel powerless. With the modern rhetoric of 'Australia decides' etc., I've been brought up to believe that I can directly affect how Australia is governed.

I am still feeling the bitter aftertaste of the Kevin Rudd spill. But living in the second safest Labor seat in the country, it's hard to see how I vote can make a difference.

It is weird to feel powerless; and then again it's not so weird. Not that being a Christian isn't about power: "For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power." But it is the power of a crucified messiah that I'm used to. It is the power to control and subject people to crucifixion that we have rejected.

And so I take it then that elections are important, but they aren't the end of the world. What is more important is the continued speaking of truth to those who hold power in trust from God.

So how does this help me decide who to vote for?

Why My Vote Is Still Up For Grabs: II/V

2010-07-20T17:20:00.003+10:00

"The church gives a the interpretive skills, a truthful understanding whereby we first see the world for what it is. People often complain that the political agenda of conservative Christians looks suspiciously like the political agenda of conservative secularists-the Republican party on its knees. And it seems inconceivable that an agency of any mainline, Protestant denomination should espouse some social position unlike that of the most liberal Democrats. The church is the dull exponent of conventional secular political ideas with a vaguely religious tint. Political theologies, whether of the left or of the right, want to maintain Christendom, wherein the church justifies itself as a helpful, if sometimes complaining prop for the state...The church does not exist to ask what needs doing to keep the world running smoothly and then to motivate our people to go do it. The church is not to be judged by how useful we are as a 'supportive institution' and our clergy as members of a 'helping profession'. The church has its own reason for being, hid within its own mandate and not in the world. We are not chartered by the Emperor." - Hauerwas & Willimon, Resident Aliens, pp.38-39.

What Hauerwas and Willimon are critiquing is the idea that one political party is automatically more Christian or more biblical than others. No political group should be automatically entitled to my vote, because my loyalty isn't to a certain political persuasion, but to our Lord Jesus Christ.

Why My Vote Is Still Up For Grabs: I/V

2010-07-19T17:35:00.006+10:00

"We argue that the political task of the church is to be the church rather than to transform the world. One reason why it is not enough to say that our that our first task is to make the world better is that we Christians have no other means of accurately understanding the world and rightly interpreting the world except by way of the church . Big words like 'peace' and 'justice', slogans the church adopts under the presumption that, even if people do not know what 'Jesus Christ is Lord' means, they will know what peace and justice means, are words awaiting content. The church really does not know what these words mean apart from from the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. After all, Pilate permitted the killing of Jesus in order to secure peace and justice (Roman style) in Judea. It is Jesus' story that gives content to our faith, judges any institutional embodiment of our faith, and teaches us to be suspicious of any political slogan that does not need God to make itself credible." - Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens, p. 38.

UPDATE: Ok, despite Hauerwas and Willimon overstating their critique of empire, as Byron as pointed out in the comments, I still find this quote helpful. I find it helpful as it reminds me that the church's hope for change should not and and need not be dependent on who is in goverment.

The risk is, as Chris alluded to, that the church will simply withdraw from the world altogether. But what I hope will become clearer in further posts is that isn't the case. A person who is being transformed by Christ will be a person who longs and prays for the world too to be transformed. And a person who is being transformed by Christ will be a person who know's where that transformation comes from: not Labor, Liberal or The Greens; but the Lord Jesus Christ.

Honeymoon de Julia

2010-07-18T23:01:00.001+10:00

h/t ABC The Drum

A Regional Refugee Processing Centre in...?

2010-07-15T14:08:00.003+10:00

For the past fortnight public discourse in Australia has been dominated by the location of a potential regional processing centre for refugees. The Federal Government proposed Timor-Leste as their preferred location (a somewhat surprising move, least of all to the Timorese Government); the Opposition has promoted Nauru, home of the Howard Government's Pacific Solution.

But I would like to propose a third location for a regional processing centre: Canberra.

As one of the G20 nations, Australia is uniquely placed within our region to host a facility like this, much more so than either Timor-Leste or Nauru. Canberra is also an attractive location because of the Federal Government's executive power in the ACT.

Building a regional processing centre in Canberra would make an excellent contribution to other Government policies. Particularly what I have in mind is the Nation Building program that is currently underway. Canberra's refugee centre would clearly fulfill the goal of the economic stimulus plan: boost local infrastructure and support jobs. This is a win for Australia and the Federal Government. By building in Canberra, we would be supporting the local economy and saving "Aussie jobs" from being moved overseas.

And as a temporary site until the centre is constructed, the Government could use The Lodge. I've heard that's going to be empty until after the next election...

Death in America

2010-07-14T18:02:00.004+10:00

According to Stanley Hauerwas, Protestantism in America is dying. Uniquely, America is the "exemplification of constructive Protestant social thought"; the first country where Protestantism did not need to define itself against Roman Catholicism. Bonhoeffer described this as "Protestantism without Reformation."

Which is why Hauerwas believes we are now witnessing the death of American Protestantism. Protestantism has been closely linked to the American national identity, "For Americans, faith in God is indistinguishable from loyalty to their country." This has project has been very successful - too successful according to Hauerwas, so that it is dying of it's own success.

"More Americans may go to church than their counterparts in Europe, but the churches to which they go do little to challenge the secular presumptions that form their lives or the lives of the churches to which they go. For the church is assumed to exist to reinforce the presumption that those that go to church have done so freely. The church's primary function, therefore, is to legitimate and sustain the presumption that America represents what all people would want to be if they had the benefit of American education and money...It is impossible to avoid the fact that American Christianity is far less than it should have been just to the extent that the church has failed to make clear that America's god is not the God that Christians worship. We are now facing the end of Protestantism. America's god is dying. Hopefully, that will leave the church in America in a position where it has nothing to lose. And when you have nothing to lose, all you have left is the truth. So I am hopeful that God may yet make the church faithful - even in America." - Stanley Hauerwas, The Death of America's God

Hauerwas is very pessimistic about the affect of American synthesis between evangelical Protestantism, republican political ideology and commonsense moral reasoning. I'm not sure if this is what will come to pass, but there would be ramifications not only for American Christians, but for the church universal. America has been a powerhouse for Christianity for several decades now. Most missionaries around the world come from the US. Many resources (academic and popular) are produced in the US. Would a demise in American Christianity adversly affect world wide Christianity? Or would it provide the church in the Global South with the opportunity to step-up, and as Hauerwas hopes, grow the American church in faithfulness?

Thoughts?

Where did this rank Australia amongst the world's nations taking in refugees?

2010-07-13T12:15:00.005+10:00

Here is an extract from Clarke and Dawe 's take on asylum seekers. You can read the transcript or watch it here.

BRYAN DAWE: Well we might leave that one and move on I think. What percentage of the world's asylum seekers applications were made last year to Australia?

JOHN CLARKE: 98 per cent.

BRYAN DAWE: No that is incorrect.

JOHN CLARKE: 87 per cent?

BRYAN DAWE: No it was 0.5 of one per cent, Iggy.

JOHN CLARKE: Gee

BRYAN DAWE: Where did this rank Australia amongst the world's nations taking in refugees?

JOHN CLARKE: First!

BRYAN DAWE: No, think about this Iggy, half of one per cent of the applications made in the world were made in applications to come Australia. So where did that rank us amongst world nations?

JOHN CLARKE: Yeah, Second!

BRYAN DAWE: No, 33rd

JOHN CLARKE: Oh well a lot of countries are richer, you know, the rich countries can take lots of migrants.

BRYAN DAWE: No, no, Iggy if you take the GDP into account we're actually 70th. OK, what percentage of Australia's immigrants come by boat?

JOHN CLARKE: Oh about 98 per cent

BRYAN DAWE: No, down a bit

JOHN CLARKE: 83 per cent

BRYAN DAWE: Down a fair bit.

JOHN CLARKE: 66 per cent.

BRYAN DAWE: No down from 2 per cent

JOHN CLARKE: About 50 per cent.

BRYAN DAWE: No. I think this next question could help you Iggy. How do most people who emigrate to Australia arrive?

JOHN CLARKE: Oh they come in boats, sort of really small boats with a quite a high front.

BRYAN DAWE: No, the vast majority arrive by plane.

JOHN CLARKE: No they don't they come in boats I've seen them on television they're in little boats with quite a high front, they're sort of low in the water.

BRYAN DAWE: Hey Iggy have you ever seen an aeroplane on television?

JOHN CLARKE: Well, yeah I've been on an aeroplane.

BRYAN DAWE: And when was that Iggy?

JOHN CLARKE: When I came to Australia.

BRYAN DAWE: Correct!

JOHN CLARKE: Oh good I've got one right.

BRYAN DAWE: Which group has the highest rate of success in establishing that they are genuine immigrants: the ones who come on planes or the ones who come in boats?

JOHN CLARKE: The ones who come in planes.

BRYAN DAWE: No the ones who come here on boats.

JOHN CLARKE: Oh do they? I did well then.

BRYAN DAWE: You did very well. Final question Iggy. What's the point of moving the big processing centre for the boatpeople from Christmas Island to East Timor?

JOHN CLARKE: I've got no idea.

BRYAN DAWE: Correct and after that round you are still living in a country which was invaded in the first place and in which you've overstayed your visa.

JOHN CLARKE: Yeah well we won't be having any more of that will we?

BRYAN DAWE: No.

JOHN CLARKE: Not now I'm here.

H/T Byron Pictures: (1) From the ABC 7.30 report website; (2) www.syndesmos.net

On Scarcity and Generosity

2010-07-13T08:34:00.003+10:00

"Greed presumes and perpetuates a world of scarcity and want - a world in which there is never "enough." But a world shaped by scarcity is a world that cannot trust that God has given all that we need. Greed, in other words, prohibits faith. But the inverse is also true. For it is in the Christian celebration of the Eucharist that we have the prismatic act that makes possible our recognition that God has given us everything we need. The Eucharist not only is the proclamation of abundance, but it is the enactment of abundance. In the Eucharist we discover that we cannot use Christ up. In the Eucharist we discover that the more the body and blood of Christ is shared, the more there is to be shared. The Eucharist, therefore, is the way the Christian Church learns to understand why generosity rather than greed can and must shape our economic relations." - Stanley Hauerwas, Can Greed Be Good? from the newly launched ABC religion website.

On the Need for Science to be Human

2010-07-08T16:46:00.003+10:00

"Science needs to remain human in that sense, to be self-aware of itself as human science, aware of incompleteness, aware of the joy of non-fulfilment. And at that level at least, science is bound to be operating with an image of humanity itself as a life form attuned to truth and to growth. Metaphysics, perhaps, or even worse, faith; and yet it is hard to see how the real life of the scientific enterprise can be sustained without that image of what is properly and joyfully and fulfillingly human. Recognised or not, the resonance of this with the life of faith is worth noting. Faith, our Christian faith, presupposes that we are indeed as human beings attuned to truth and to growth, made by a God whose love has designed us for joy, and discovering that this directedness towards joy mysteriously comes alive when we look into the living truth, the living wisdom, of the face of a Christ who drives us back again and again to question ourselves so that we stay alive."

- Rowan Williams, A Homily for the 350th Anniversary of the Royal Society.

Matt's Tip on Buying Books

2010-07-06T19:58:00.004+10:00

Regular readers of hebel will know that I have a lot of books. There are several reasons for this: I was a nerd in my first years of uni, gifts, the Internet, freebies (such as one church giving me Calvin's The Institutes because he didn't write about flag waving...).

I enjoy reading books because they help me grow in my love and knowledge of God. Reading has helped me grow as a child of God as I've i. engaged with brothers and sisters today and from the past; and ii. tried to imitate Bereans in Acts 17 "examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so."

I've been working on my collection of books for several years now. This post is about sharing a new tip for buying books. But before I get there, a word of warning: beware consumerism. Just because you're buying books - even Christian books - doesn't absolve you from the dangers of consumerism. Be careful how/why you buy (cf. this).
So, here is my tip: If you're buying books online, check out Booko. Booko is an Australian site that tries to find the best price for books and DVDs. You just search for the book you're after e.g. Jesus and the God of Israel by Richard Bauckham. Booko will then list the various place where you could buy this book online, and their price (including delivery):

You then click on the outlet you want and...well, it's as easy as that. Jesus and the God of Israel came in at just over $30 on my perpetual favourite, Book Depository. The same book is $44.95 at Moore Books and $47.95 at Koorong.

So, that's my tip to save yourself money when you buy books online. Of course, it doesn't always work. When I searched for John Stott's Cross of Christ, Moore Books was almost 50% cheaper than the cheapest outlet Booko could find. And of course, nothing actually compares to the sensory experience of walking into Moore Books, Berkelouw, Kinokuniya or Goulds: the sight, touch and smell of books. Which is, incidentally, why I've haven't switched to soft books.

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. - Anna Quindlen

h/t dirving for recommending Booko. Update: I just noticed that Steve has also blogged about this recently.