Painting Fakes

So everyone, here's the gist of tomorrow's sermon. Readings are 1 Corinthians 1:1-9 and Romans 12:1-13. But first, a story about Mohandas Gandhi.  In the 1930s and 1940s if you wanted to do anything in the Indian independence movement it was important to have Gandhi's blessing. So when Shriman Narayan returned to India from England in the early 1930s with a PhD in Economics and a head full of schemes for economic reform, he went to visit Gandhi in his ashram.  He explained his ideas and plans and asked Gandhi for his blessing.  Gandhi, however, said that first he wanted Narayan to clean the ashram toilets. This was not a pleasant job. The toilets were not water closets they were latrines, and cleaning them involved a shovel and bucket. Narayan had probably never done it before. Traditional Hindu society has a strict caste system. Higher caste people, like Gandhi and Narayan, do important things like running the government and trading. Lower castes do less important t

Speaking of nice people who give me books , a little while ago Alex gave me a copy of The Evangelical Universalist by Gregory MacDonald.  Alex himself is a passionate universalist who gets a thankyou in the book's preface and is very active on the Evangelical Universalist forum , which is well worth a look.  For myself, becoming a universalist was a fairly painless part of my gradual detachment from orthodox Evangelicalism.  At some point I realised I no longer believed that a loving God would condemn people to eternal torture, and when I realised that this viewpoint was called "universalism" I adopted the label for myself. For others the transition is much harder.  I've written previously about Rachel Held Evans' spiritual crisis , precipitated by the idea that innocent non-Christian victims of the Taliban would go straight to hell.  For someone like Evans, passionately empathetic and completely immersed in Christian fundamentalism, such a realisation can be

And now for something completely different...Soren Kierkegaard was an early/mid 19th century Danish theologian, famous as one of the founding figures of what came to be called existentialism before this philosophical school became associated with atheism in the 20th century.  Kierkegaard trained in theology and toyed with the idea of becoming a pastor in the State Church of Denmark, finally deciding not to follow through.  He also toyed with marriage before breaking off the engagement.  In the end he lived most of his life on the proceeds of an inheritance from his father, acting as a theological and intellectual gadfly, at odds with his church and his society.  Over his life he published a number of theological works  Many were published under fanciful pseudonyms that seemed designed to suggest he was not fully committed to their content, that they were coats he tried on to see how they looked.  The Sickness unto Death is published under the name Anti-Climacus, "edited by So

For over 50 years, up until his death in 2011, John Stott was a leader of the worldwide Evangelical movement.  He was a key author of the Lausanne Covenant on World Evangelisation in 1974 (he was chair of the drafting committee) and central to the subsequent spin-offs and supplementary statements. Stott was an ever-present eminence in my youth, an evangelical authority who was assumed to be right until he could be positively proven to be wrong.  You would be hard put to find such proof - his writings are careful and considered, marshalling evidence before laying out a modest, logical conclusion.  His sermons - to which we listened on cassette tapes - were masterpieces of the art of condensing complex subject matter into four alliterative points for easy recall.  He was not so much an original theologian as a gifted teacher, able to explain complex concepts in simple lay terms. He was a good role model for young evangelicals.  He didn't despise learning but nor did he flaunt it.

So, after years of discussion we are to have not merely a Royal Commission into the Catholic Church's response to sexual abuse in its ranks, but into abuse in all institutions.  Poor Nicola Roxon gets the unenviable task of designing a set of terms of reference for this behemoth. An Irish judicial inquiry into the same issue took 9 years.  We can expect a lot more on this story before it is over and a lot more people will end up with red faces. I don't envy Roxon her task.  Our society includes a lot of institutions.  The Catholic Church has been in the news a lot recently and there are many harrowing tales of abuse by priests.  Still the government is right, this is not only a Catholic problem.  Only a few years ago, claims of abuse in the Anglican church in Brisbane revealed similar horror stories, and similar lack of comprehension by senior church leaders.  Former Archbishop Peter Hollingworth lost his job as Governor-General as a result of his astonishingly insensiti

When I was writing about John Shelby Spong's Jesus for the Non-Religious I concluded that he had misread the mood of the times, and that "the growing churches of our time are not the intellectual, post-theistic churches of the likes of Spong and his fellow progressives. They are the booming fundamentalist megachurches of the pentecostal movement, and the bastions of conservative Catholicism promoted by John Paul II and his followers." Then I read Christine Wicker's The Fall of the Evangelical Nation.  Wicker is a religious affairs reporter who spent 17 years writing for the Dallas Morning News, during which she wrote this book.  It was published in 2008, conceived in the wake of George W Bush's re-election as US President supposedly on the votes of evangelical Christians who made up 25% of the US population. These figures are Wicker's first target.  Using data published by evangelical churches themselves, she finds that the true number of active evangeli

Having had a rave about the seeming inhumanity of one of our favourite worship songs, perhaps now is as good a time as any to post my review of Rachel Held Evans' Evolving in Monkey Town.   I enjoy Evans' blog , with its combination of deep compassion and theological challenge, and wanted to read more. In many ways Evans' spiritual journey has been like my own, from fundamentalism to a more liberal view of Christianity.  However, she was more deeply immersed in fundamentalism than I was, and has taken 20 fewer years to travel the path.  Perhaps this shows that she's smarter than me - she certainly writes better! Evans grew up in Dayton, Tennessee, venue of the infamous "Scopes Monkey Trial" in 1925 in which school teacher John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution in his science class, contrary to Tennessee statute.  She went to fundamentalist Christian schools before attending Bryan University, named after William Jennings Bryan, the

Being something of a heretic myself, in a modest sort of way, I was interested to read Alister McGrath's Heresy.   McGrath is currently a theology professor at Kings College, London and has a glittering academic carreer, representing the educated face of moderate orthodox Christianity in the UK and beyond.  I've enjoyed a couple of his previous books - The Twilight of Atheism   provides a handy, accessible summary of the trajectory of atheist ideas in modern Western thought, while The Dawkins Delusion provides a pithy response to Richard Dawkins The God Delusion . Here he's moved on from atheism, which challenges the church from without, to heresy, which provides a challenge from within.  He is at pains to stress that heretics ancient and modern are not outsiders attacking the church, they are insiders trying to reform it, generally with the best of intentions.  So what is it that distinguishes heresy from orthodoxy?  There is a thread of thinking in 20th and 21st cent

Speaking of the Fall , my relaxing holiday reading this Saturnalia , has been AJ Mackinnon's lovely travel story The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow .  Mackinnon tells the story of his journey through the waterways of Europe, from Wales to the Black Sea, in a 10 ft sailing dinghy.  It's glorious fun, with the odd hair-raising incident to keep the adrenaline going.  Like to try crossing the English Channel in a dinghy?  Without any larger craft accompanying?  Like to be accosted by pirates in remote Bulgaria?  Like to be stuck in Serbia as NATO is about to begin bombing? Apart from the comedy and high farce, one of his most persistent themes is the kindness of strangers.  Just when he is about to despair, his boat is ready to fall to pieces, he is starving and out of cash in a Visa-less country, or some other disaster strikes, some complete stranger steps up with carpentry tools and expertise, good home cooked food, a towrope, a place of shelter, a kind word or gesture.  Acros

It being Christmas, I've been thinking about Saturnalia, of course, and this led me to remember a fascinating passage in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People.   Writing in 601 AD, Pope Gregory sends Abbot Mellitus to help out Augustine, the first Roman missionary to the Anglo-Saxons in Britain.  Among various instructions, he says this: When, therefore, Almighty God shall bring you to the most reverend Bishop Augustine, our brother, tell him what I have, upon mature deliberation on the affair of the English, determined upon, viz., that the temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed. For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that

Courtesy of my friend Kay I've been reading a book by Gregory Jenks called The Once and Future Bible: An Introduction to the Bible for Religious Progressives.   Jenks is Academic Dean of St Francis Theological College, the Anglican seminary here in Brisbane.  He is also strongly connected with the "progressive" Christian movement in the USA as a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar  and a friend of the radical former Episcopalian bishop John Shelby Spong , to whom he refers as a kind of mentor. Despite his association with Spong, Jenks is very much his own person.  Spong's comparable book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, is combative and quixotic, leaping unpredictably between mainstream scholarship like the source theory of the Gospels, and fringe ideas like the notion of the Apostle Paul as a repressed gay man.  By contrast, Jenks is calm and sober, providing a concise lay person's summary of what he sees as the current state of Biblical scholarship.  Yet he i

For some reason I woke up this morning thinking about a facebook discussion I was part of a while ago over Divided , an American documentary film which argues that "modern youth ministry is contrary to Scripture".  The argument got a little heated (not from me, I was polite).  This morning I woke up thinking about the broader context for it. The message of Divided is that youth ministry, as in having a youth group as part of your church, is wrong because it divides families.  Proper ministry is ministry to the whole family, together.  Various Bible verses are quoted out of context to support this view and selective stories about youth groups are used to show they corrupt young people and lead to poor outcomes. So from my description you can already see what I think.  My parents had grown up going to church and had no interest in going back.  At the age of 14 my school friend invited me to a church youth group and I was introduced to both Christianity and to a group of lov

Christians have a recurring problem over suffering.  Apart from the fact that they actually suffer, which is a problem everyone has, the Christian-specific problem is this: Christians traditionally believe in three things. God is all-powerful, both knowing and being in control of everything that happens in the universe. God is perfectly loving, desiring nothing but good for his/her children and creation. Humans have free will and are able to decide the direction of their own lives, including being able to reject God and to make mistakes. The problem is that these things are logically incompatible, and nothing brings this incompatibility into focus more than suffering.  If God is both loving and all-powerful, why does he allow suffering in the world?  There are two common answers.  One is that the suffering is a result of our misuse of our freewill.  This, however, calls into question either God's power (could God not have designed things so that our freewill need not lead to