Blessings and warm fuzzies

I’m never quite sure whether professional niceness is an art-form or a neurosis for us who are Anglican priests. One of the many downsides to it is the way it regularly intrudes the wrong kind of bonhomie or feel-good factor stuff into the liturgy. So excuse me while I have a quick rant.

A particular bugbear of mine seems to crop up with ghastly regularity. It’s that form of blessing where clergy intone “the blessing of God almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, be with you and remain with you and those whom you love, now and always. Amen.”

The words in bold are those I struggle with. Blessing, it always seems to me, when not directed at God, is about those who are (or that which is) immediately present and the focus of the action.

In this case, as part of the dismissal rite, a blessing is focused on the dispersing of the community from being gathered in worship to living lives which will try to bear witness to God, and serve him in daily living.

“Those whom we love” have hopefully been included in our prayers and intentions during the liturgy. But the point of the dismissal is to send us into a world in which we are called to treat anyone in need as a neighbour to love, bless those who persecute us, and love our enemies.

Including a cosy reference to families and friends to make people feel that the vicar really cares about them works badly against that intention.

So can we please go back to treating the blessing as a promise of God’s presence with his people as they try to serve him, and not the liturgical equivalent of shaking the vicar’s hand at the door as a warm fuzzy to show he or she really cares.

Thank you.

Disciple is just another word

It’s become very fashionable to use the language of “disciples” and “discipleship” to encourage commitment. I think it was David Watson (God be good to him) who really got the trend going. 

And I’ve got nothing against it as one term among others. Well, I should think not, I hear an imaginary interlocutor (possibly you, dear reader) mutter. How could anyone object to such a biblical term?

I don’t. What I do object to is the seeming assumption it is a better term than any other for real Christians. You see, it’s one of the often uncommented-on aspects of the language that it’s not used in the New Testament outside of the gospels and Acts. Paul doesn’t say “disciple” even once.

Perhaps – just perhaps – it was too attached to the idea of an immediate personal following, a class, a school, of a particular teacher easily to make the transition from those who followed Jesus in the flesh to a more generic use. Perhaps it was too clearly about being “a learner”, “a pupil” or “a student” to work as a more generic term for Christians in all contexts.

Whatever the reason, that absence of the word from the letters should at least give us pause in using it as anything more than one useful term among others. I’m all for emphasising life-long learning as a Christian calling, I’m not even averse to making people think by speaking of guru Jesus.

I just think there are more ways to think and speak about being a Christian, many of which may be just as valuable.

Valete, discipuli.

Will you please stop witnessing at people?

I saw a tweet in the week reflecting something said at a conference, to the effect that 95% of church was focussed on worship and well-being and only 5% on witness. This rant is not about what was said at a conference I wasn’t at, nor a speech I didn’t hear, nor the intention of the tweeter in relaying it. But the way I read that tweet has set me off.

As an intransitive verb, witness is a pretty awful piece of religious jargon. “Have you been out witnessing?” “Yes, I’ve witnessed to lots of people today.” But not only is it the sort of Christianese which sets my teeth on edge, I think it turns the language of the New Testament upside down.

As no doubt people will be reminded through this time between the feasts of Ascension and Pentecost, Jesus is narrated as saying things like: 

Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day,  and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things (Luke 24:46-48)
You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8)

A witness is first and foremost something a person becomes by virtue of what they have seen, heard, experienced or known. That is the way we use the language in typical everyday usage, but it is also the way the New Testament uses the language.  Very often there is an underlying sense of being on trial: sometimes metaphorical, sometimes actual. Witnessing is not some kind of separate activity done to others. People give evidence because they have witnessed – witnessed someone or something. The verb is transitive: witnesses see things, hear people, are present at events.

And that brings me back to the tweet that made me go pop. Christians are witnesses. Period. The choice is whether they are good witnesses or bad ones, whether they purvey mainly secondhand and hearsay testimony, or their own experience and knowledge.

One of the features of the early church that countered accusations of superstition and immorality seems to have been their reputation for charity and pastoral care. Despite the fractious disputes that divided Arian from Nicene Christian through the fourth century, it was the generosity and care of the Church even for those who were not its members that Julian the Apostate tried (with little success) to encourage pagans to emulate. Care for the well-being of others was, to put it no more highly, something that gave Christian witnesses credibility when they talked about the love and benevolence of God.

The author of 1 Peter tells his listeners:

Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. (1 Peter 3:15-16)

It is the communal and ethical life of the church which is the primary evidence Christians have to offer in support of the story they tell. The early Christians were not expected to run round grabbing passers-by and selling them a story; they were expected to live a life, and answer questions when people noticed how they lived it. 

A good witness is a real person, not a religious activity.

Inventing the mythical Jesus

Let’s say we want to reform a religion in a new direction. We look for a founder who we can claim fits the kind of profile everyone is expecting. This leader, this messiah, is most likely to be a successful warrior, a general who wins battles of God’s own side. We can’t find one, so we invent a purely imaginary figure instead. Then we explain how he was a total disaster, unable to raise an army, deserted by his followers, and executed by the enemy.

Now, having invented this Jesus guy out of whole cloth, let’s make him related to someone who’s quite well known and respected in our day. Let’s identify this man known to be a faithful and observant Jew as the brother of our messiah. Of course he won’t complain that we’re using his invented messiah brother to justify not observing the law. Even better, let’s tell stories about how this Jesus was at odds with his family while he was alive, but they’ve all come round to be his supporters now. They’ll never dare contradict that.

OK, next let’s root all our stories about him in the recent past, when there are plenty of other people around now who were still around then. People have such poor memories, they’ll all believe they met him anyway.

And of course, we all want to be trusted as the keepers of the flame, this new and super-truthful religion. Let’s portray ourselves as useless, imbecilic cowards who never ever got the point. 15 years ago he was a great teacher who couldn’t even teach his longest standing pupils to understand him. 15 years ago he trained us in his leadership skills so well that we ran away and he got killed. What, you were there and you don’t remember him? What a poor memory you’ve got. Oh you admit it! Good, I thought for a minute you were going to call me a liar.

If we portray ourselves as unlettered fishermen, and pretend to speak with thick Galilean accents, then no-one will guess that we’ve done loads of research on ancient myths of dying and rising gods, and decided to borrow the best bits for our invented superhero. That way we can get ourselves out of the hole we’ve dug by creating a failed messiah as our leader, a defeated warrior as our hero and an executed criminal as our moral exemplar.

Then let’s all die horribly without letting the cat out of the bag. I know that’s a pretty drastic way to persuade people we haven’t made it all up, but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

That’s what I call a cunning plan. And I bet you no-one will spot that’s what we actually did for nearly 2,000 years. And then people will point and laugh and sneer at them and call them mythicists, ‘cos we are just so historically plausible.

Oh yes.

Scripture, sacrament and models of inspiration

My blogging is so patchy at the moment that I’m well behind the curve. However, I’m grateful that James McGrath has drawn my attention to Steve Douglas’s post about Jamie Smith’s review of Pete Enns’ book. Not enough links yet? Try reading Daniel Kirk’s critique of the same review as well.

There are all sorts of views expressed intelligently and carefully between these contributors, which between them do more to identify the problem rather than offer a solution to the problem of what the writings canonised by one or another faith or denomination have to do with a (postulated) divine communicator.

On the one hand, the idea that there is an objective, historical meaning the author intended which is clearly accessible to the skilled interpreter is one I simply can’t own: the interpreter has a more active role. On the other hand, the idea that any interpretation of the text is equally valid seems to me as unsustainable as the idea that there is a single and unique exact interpretation. Interpreters are constrained by their texts.

An incarnational analogy (in this unique human expression there is a uniquely divine expression), a methodological atheism (this text only means whatever the human author intended it to mean) and a post-modern reading (this text is entirely open to the reader’s determination) are equally problematic. How can we hold historical realism and theological vision together in a way that gives “verbum dei” more than an optimistically imaginative and fideist reality?

I wonder if a sacramental model has something to offer here? In celebrating the sacraments, the church (the community gathered together in some historic continuity) meets around certain actions identifying the contemporary presence of the same deity as the historic texts name. The performance of the sacraments includes narrative, invocation and attentiveness, in bringing the temporal and physical world into conjunction with the eternal and spiritual world. The two are held in a mutually explanatory tension.

I wonder if that offers a model for scripture. Meaning cannot be collapsed into historical or authorial intent. Neither can it be about the explicatory virtuosity of the interpreter. God is heard in the communal practices of the group that meets in order to hear God. The word of God is discovered in those who prayerfully receive the story of how God has spoken to previous would-be listeners and followers.

The nature of scripture as something more than the words of its individual human story-tellers, editors and narrators depends on both the nature of texts freed from their historical authors, and on those who read scripture as a coherent and canonical whole in order to discern and hear a voice that comes from beyond the text.

Hearing the voice of God can’t be separated from the variety of practices that condition us to listen for and to the word of God. Sacrament requires scholarly historical rooting and prayerful present attentiveness, so “this” may be seen as “that”, and when someone proclaims “Verbum Domini”, “Deo gratias” is the most appropriate response.