The Importance of Sincere Atheism

Atheism is to Christianity what Baldness is to hairdressing — a poor substitute, you may feel, but an important “absolute zero” calibration for the thermometer. Ben Myers is an Australian theologian from Sydney, who has researched the writings of Samuel Becket. As the Global Atheist Convention opens in Melbourne he offers some fascinating theological reflection.

Ben points out that Karl Barth used to begin his courses with the atheism of Feuerbach, because he believed that until you had journeyed beyond the “God” constructed by Bourgeois conformists in their blindness and blandness, with their easy certainties, you could not begin to journey towards the Real Thing. Ben goes on to suggest:

The real test of the Convention will be its willingness to resist easy certainties, its capacity to accommodate vigorous difference and debate (I nearly said to accommodate doubt). I’ve attended many theology conferences, and most of the time you’d be hard pressed to find two people in the room who actually agree with each other. Unquestioning agreement and lack of argumentativeness are always sure signs that a tradition has stagnated. The purpose of a conference or convention is not to celebrate our sameness, but to join together in a shared project of intellectual inquisitiveness and exploration. The Atheist Convention will be a worthwhile event if it creates a space for this kind of inquisitiveness, if divergent views are seen not as departures from the party line but as opportunities for argument and discussion, if the mood is one of questioning and exploration rather than certainty and collective self-affirmation.

Above all, the Convention will be a success if it cultivates serious reflection and resists the cheap allure of slogans and marketing gimmickry. I wonder what Samuel Beckett would have thought of an atheism so easy and so confident that it can fit on the front of a T-shirt or the side of a bus. Atheism as a lifestyle choice – an atheism you can believe in. Frankly, I suspect Beckett would sooner have believed in God.

Reflecting on my own teenage struggles in coming to faith, it took me a while to learn it was actually possible to doubt doubt itself — to achieve radical free thought, if you like. That’s the zone in which God’s reality first began reallly to dawn on me, rather than a Charismatic meeting or similar. I’m not saying there's any partcular virtue in that. It’s just the way the penny dropped for me. Perhaps, as Barth suggested, faith needs the astringent of taking atheism seriously (as it has since the Book of Job), to prevent itself from mushing down into mental idolatry. If so, genuine dialogue between sincere atheists and Christians could genuinely have as much to offer Christians as atheists.

silos, scapegoats and straitjackets

Maybe there’s just too much information out there. A lot of discourse these days, even, sadly, Christian discourse, goes on in silos within which everything makes perfect sense, but in a way that’s utterly incompatible with the people in the next silo. Simplistically binary thinking is a powerful force. I am thus fascinated by scapegoat behaviour, from the idiocies of the UK right wing press on asylum seekers to René Girard’s magisterial analysis of its centrality in culture and religion.

I wonder about the way labels are used sometimes, even among Christians, for name-calling, aka soft scapegoating. The words “Liberal” and “Fundamentalist” are now no longer usable outside the playground. A while ago I took a vow not to call people names they don't own for themselves. One Southern Baptist I met in the middle east once pointed out to me “where two or three are gathered together, a chicken’s gonna die.” Actually that last comment is about something slightly different, but it's a powerful line.

In this context I was fascinated by a recent comment from Richard Rohr's daily email:

Christianity is the only religion in the world that worships a scapegoat figure as God. It’s really quite amazing that we worship a visible victim rather than an apparent victor. (Catholic art never hid the scandal here!)

In worshiping the scapegoat, we should gradually learn to stop scapegoating, because we could be utterly wrong, just as “church” and state, high priest and king, Jerusalem and Rome, the highest levels of power were utterly wrong in the death of Jesus. He was the one that many of us call the most perfect man who ever lived, and yet they all missed the point. That should give us some healthy humility about how wrong power can be, and how wrong all of us can be.

If the highest levels of power can be that wrong, then be most careful whom you decide to hate, kill, exclude, and diminish. Power and authority are not always good guides, if we are to judge by much of human history. For many, if not most people, any authority takes away all of their anxiety, and often their own responsibility to form a mature conscience themselves.

PS — Plea (probably fruitless) to the playground: Please let us not do to the term “Orthodox” what has been done to “Liberal” and “Fundamentalist.” It is the chosen designation of those who live within the original expression of Christianity, an ancient, vibrant and resonant tradition. It deserves more noble use than as readymix filling for other people’s custard pies.

Nights in Brown Cardboard

Our eldest daughter Catherine and her boyfriend Tim are going to spend a night out on 23 April in the Madejski stadium in Reading. They are raising sponsorship for the Reading Single Homeless project — donate (Just Giving) here. RSHP provides affordable accommodation and support for people who, having experienced homelessness, are vulnerable and socially excluded.

It’s similar work to that done by Padstones, a charity of which I’m president that provides intermediate accommodation for young singles in South Bucks. Their centres are fully staffed so as to provide not just a roof over your head when things have gone wrong, but freinds and the stability of a community as you get set up for the future. Average stay is under a year, but the need is increasingly acute.

Churches have been at the forefront of raising awareness on homelessness. In Wycombe, along with the English Churches Housing Group hostel, the old tea warehouse, local congregations take turns to run a Wycombe Winter Night Shelter of their own using their resources and premises, organised by the Revd Paul Willis. I was struck earlier this year by this report from St Stephen’s Soundwell, in Bristol, about their sleepout last November. It’s very much a “Go Ye and Do Likewise” job, say I:

As with all the charities I am involved with working in this area, there have been grants and other sources of aid, but the backbone of the activity is voluntary fundraising. As we contemplate reduced future government spending, it’s very important that this kind of work doesn’t lose out to the billions spent on management consultants (no offence) and causes like idiotic jumbo computer systems for the NHS. The latest score there is that a big order that was placed in 1999 at a cost of £1BN to be delivered by 2005. It’s still not fully delivered and is currently set to cost £4BN. Thus the money goes, private contractors and consultants rake in the cash, and the poor starve on the streets. It’s hard to put a kind construction on this reality, really, even in election year...

Discipleship starts with 10 Questions

Google Brian McClaren’s name, and you don’t have to read many of the 237,000 links that pop up to see that his work inspires, annoys, stimulates and challenges people all over the world. In an age when any Christian who thinks about the circumstances, opportunities and frustrations around our life knows damn well we need realism, a firm grasp of tradition as a springboard for fresh thinking and action, that is what he offers as a resource for mission.

Those whose anxiety or paranoia drive them take desperate refuge in conventionality and institutionalism will thus find him annoying, judging him to be less Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant, whichever they are, than themselves. And, as is ever the case, from their own self-referential points of view they will be entirely correct. The truth is, in fact, he is engaged in the brave enterprise of pioneering how to be more of all three of those things than those who think tradition is a matter of increasingly shrill conformity to type rather than a living stream.

Brian Claren’s new book, A New Kind of Christianity, Ten Questions that are transforming the Faith, gathers up and recapitulates the great themes he has been exploring for many years. In it, he prefers to talk about “discipleship,” a word he points out occurs 262 times in the Bible, rather than “Christianity,” a term unknown to Scripture, except for 3 instances of the noun “Christian”. For those who use labels as mapping pins instead of flick-knives or shibboleths, his challenge to the Pharisees is radically Protestant, generously Orthodox and profoundly Catholic.

It is radically Protestant because he centres his thesis, ruthlessly, on a historical rather than institutional Jesus. He points out how many take their concept of Jesus mediated through lenses supplied by the theoligical giants of the past, Luther, Aquinas, Augustine, and friends. That’s a choice you can make, but what makes those theologians themselves giants is their radical Christocentricity. Unless their work points you to Jesus, they are wasting your time. Which Jesus? Well, Jesus seen in the light of the tradition from which he came, within which the gospels are at pains to locate him, represented by the Hebrew Scriptures.

The Bible is, he suggests, best read as a narrative in its own terms, rather than a compendium of soundbites to reinforce a priori dogmas. Thus our shallow infatuation with the unchanging first Cause Greaco-Roman god of the philosophers who cannot do change is a poor substitute for the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and Moses who is ever in dialogue with his people, working through their lives in weal and woe, giving them compassion and hope, and weaving his love as a golden thread through the warp and weft of their story. This book begins with Scritpure and takes it utterly seriously as the living, active Word of God, constantly to judge and reform the Church. Its intent is to be more, not less, Evangelical than conventional Biblicism.

Thus, in Radical Protestant mode, this book throws down afresh Luther’s challenge from 1517:

Out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following propositions will be discussed... in the Name our Lord Jesus Christ: (1) Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam agite, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance...

This traslates for McClaren as a suggestion that Jesus our Lord

“when he said Poenitentiam agite willed that the whole history of the Christian faith should be repentance, rethinking and quest.”

This idea is not less red-bloodedly Protestant and Christocentric than conventional Evangelicalism. It’s more of both, in spades.

The label “Orthodox” can being appropriated, ludicrously, as a synonym for “Conventional.” Real orthodoxy, even in the merely denominational sense of the term, is far from that. Although you may say Orthodox Christians have a funny way of showing this aspect of their faith, its first principle is to be is radically plugged into a living tradition, with a dynamic view of the Holy Spirit. Checkbox conformity to type is very much less than that.

This book expresses generous Orthodoxy, to use the title of another of Brian McClaren’s books, because it emphatically does not substitute modern thought for tradition — something it will be doubtless accused of doing by people who know very little about either. McClaren ain’t no Jack Spong. His working materials are the ancient creeds and practices of Christianity. These he uses as bricks with which to construct a building rather than smash windows or construct coshes. To continue the building metaphor, this is not a new building, but a tithe barn conversion in which the materials of the old structure have been lovingly taken down and cleaned to give them another 500 years of life, rather than disposed of.

Finally, this book is profoundly Catholic. Those who think Catholic is just a label for a denomination will disagree. For McClaren Catholic is the great mark of the Church in the creeds. Catholicity is not secured by trading in your brain at the door and doing what the Pope commands, a silly concept that the Pope himself rejects by his very Christocentricity, but by being baptised. Catholicity is an inherent mark of the Church, and the Church is not a club or an institution, but the whole company of Christ. McClaren’s book is radically and thoroughly trans-denominationalist in its Ecclesiolgy.

This book’s Catholicism is a spirit, temper and extension inherent in baptism, not an institutional mechanism for exclusion. It is not based on Roman Imperialism, but the Holy Spirit, enabling us to embrace the whole work of Christ in other people’s lives for what it is. True Catholic instinct for him is not measured or secured by what the Italians call romanità, but by capacity for extension and comprehension in the sprit of Edwin Markham’s famous tag:

He drew a circle that shut me out
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout
But love and I had the wit to win;
We drew a circle that took him in

Some will think this book less Catholic than their own attachment to the RC denomination, and if that’s what catholicity is they wil be right from their own point of view. Most readers will find it, in a broader sense, more Catholic.

Ten questions? Here goes...

1. What is the overarching story line of the Bible?
   
   
2. How should the Bible be understood?
   
   
3. Is God violent?
   
   
4. Who is Jesus and why is he important?
   
   
5. What is the Gospel?
   
   
6. What do we do about the Church?
   
   
7. Can we find a way to address human sexuality without fighting about it?
   
   
8. Can we find a better way of viewing the future?
   
   
9. How should followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions?
   
   
10. How can we translate our quest into action?
    

You may find his answers disturbing, but I challenge any who care about following Jesus today not to profit from asking these questions. However you answer them, they supply an agenda for anyone wanting to follow Jesus honestly and authentically. Read this Book.

Much Ado About Nothing

Enlightenment as I discover from Reading’s favourite son, the effervescent and incisive Charlie Brooker, how news stories have to be presented on UK TV:

Back, perhaps, to matters of greater moment tomorrow.

What is Pioneer Ministry?

I have been drawn into various conversations this past month about pioneer ministry. I want precision about what it is, because otherwise it just becomes a sexy moniker for anything creative, alternative and generally involving young people. Someone's suggested to me, for example, that helping set up a monthly service in a village hall is “pioneer ministry,” or running a youth group, or recruiting a new missional community of 20-somethings and resourcing them for ministry. That last one obviously is — but what about the others? What is pioneer ministry?

Inspired by Vincent Donovan’s book Christianity Rediscovered, I’ve had an idea. Fr Donovan was a 1960’s RC missionary in Kenya who went out to sell the locals his faith, and experienced some degree of honest frustration and discomfort before he realised he could more fruitfully work from the other end. In other words if he got under the skin of Masai Culture, taking its sociology and culture as a gift of God not an obstruction to the gospel, people would find their own way of being authentically Masai Catholic Christians instead of copies of Liverpuddlian RC’s. The result of this was to fulfil his original mission brief, but from the other end to the one he had anticipted, and to produce a new and authentic strand in Catholic faith, to enrich it from a new culture.

So, the essential distinctive for a pioneer minister, I reckon, is:

a willingness and ability to go live in another sociology, listen to it and struggle to understand what it is about and how Christ is reflected in it, then work from within it to develop a community of discipleship that is authentic to it, but also to the Way of Christ.

Imagine I was 95, and discovered that the other residents of my sheltered housing scheme were brought up in a pattern of Christendom Christiantiy which had not worked for them and rendered them deeply unable to access what was good in it because they were so blocked by what had broken down and changes int he context. I work out what, positively their culture is, and what it tells me of Christ who is greater than any culture but reflected in all. I then work out a way of life that does justice to both historic Christianity, as an authentic development, and also their culture. I’m 95, but I’m a pioneer...

So the qualities required of a pioneer minisuter would be profound rootedness in the substance but not necessarily the form of historic Christianity, plus a willingness and activity to live within another sociology, plus discernment, plus the willingness to build community, plus an ability to articulate what has been learnt and interpret it back tot he rest of the Church. It’s a tall order — very much more than just being a real trendy geezer. The joy and strength of Christianity has been its capacity to enculturate and adapt whilst retaining its golden heart. “Stop the World I want to get off” is an expression of fear not faith. We need more than that. As cultures interface, develop and fracture only to re-form, the Church needs real pioneers!

1962: Death in Venice (California)

1962. In year of the Bay of Pigs and Marilyn Monroe’s death, George is an English professor of English at a slightly crummy West Coast school.

Like many English gay men of his generation George is fastidious, slightly waspish, up tight, and seriouly crippled inside. Having grown up in a society where his homosexuality was illegal, he has developed a rigid carapace of outward perfection behind which to try and live some kind of real life.

On the surface George has been rigidly correct. His only chance of finding love has required him to play the conventions of a kind of coded gay freemasonry. Let out on the West Coast, being English is half the game, and George managed to land Jim, a handsome young naval officer, as a lover. All went reasonably swimmingly with Jim. Sadly Jim has died in a James Dean style auto smash, and behind George’s carapce life is now a bloody great void. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps on the petty pace of George’s grief bound life, from day to day. He feels he’s drowing in slow motion, and as Marilyn used to say, something’s gotta give.

Time, perhaps, for a last fling with George’s pathetic old excuse for a girlfriend Charley, faultlessly rendered by Julianne Moore. Charley is genuinely friendly, bubbly even, but well past her sell-by date. They have been friends since way back in London, fumbled under the sheets even, but she has been running on empty for years, even before her crappy marriage broke up, and is desperate for love. Everyone, including herself, knows she is wasting her time really, but can’t admit it.

And there friends, is 90% of the plot of Tom Ford’s A Single Man. It is a dense and beautifully crafted exploration of what life was like for Christopher Isherwood’s generation of gay men, and the performance of Colin Firth’s life. As usual he gets his shirt off underwater, but if you’ve been thinking of him as an amiable accessory for chick flicks, now is the time to think again.

Being George requires an extended feat of doing almost nothing externally, whilst being fully charged and fit to burst inside all the time. It is a brilliant job, beautifully executed, combining depth with poignancy and a quality the British seldom even recognise that the French call tendresse. This emotional charge is absolutely essential because otherwise, such has been the sea change in societal attitudes since 1962 that, unlike the original readers of Isherwood’s novel, most viewers under 40 will have absolutely no idea what all the fuss was about. This may be why some critics see the film as shallow. Why doesn’t George, they wonder, just get on with being gay? In its historical context, however, this film is anything but shallow.

So it is that a film by a fashion designer with almost no plot becomes a major work of art. It deserves a perfect ten.

What Grace is Not...

I’m gutted to hear of the tragic resignation of Margot Käßmann as Bishop of Hannover and Chair of the EKD Ratsvorsitzende, following a drink driving incident when she jumped a red light. Bishop Nick Baines’ account here, and DW press roundup (in English) here. The local TV headline was “Bearer of Hope explains her resignation.”

As leader of the Protestant Church in Germany, Käßmann has engaged passionately and intelligently with culture and society, and won much respect at home and abroad. The respect is undimmed by her resignation, indeed the journalists at her resignation press conference applauded her for her honesty, sense of responsibility, and dignity. We can only accept her decision, I suppose.

Still it leads me to ask, in Lent, what is grace, and what is it not?

When I worked in a prison I had to reflect for the first time in my life, if I’m honest, on how grace really worked among people who had often done criminal, some would say evil things. The colour, contrast and volume were certainly higher in prison, but amidst much that expressed the worst side of what we call human nature, I did also see some clear and present demonstrations of the Grace of God powerfully redeeming people and turning their lives around.

20 years ago, only the Chaplaincy and uniformed staff worked Saturdays, so the reception board that morning was always busy and somewhat mob-handed, with a crowd from Isleworth Crown Court the day before. Amongst them would be middle class prisoners, often with fraud or drink driving convictions, who had been bailed on remand and told they would never be imprisoned, and had honestly not believed they would be, until they found themselves in prison the night before.

Sometimes, in the night, I still recall these prisoners’ bewilderment, anxiety, embarrassment, rage and distress. It was no part of my job to pretend they had not done what was criminal, wrong and foolish. But neither was it my job to add to their shame or distress. Being deprived of your liberty is the punishment, not cruelty or disrespect whilst you are inside

Quite apart from the humiliation and pain of the moment, often careers or relationships were kicked into touch by the conviction. I was in absolutely no doubt what Jesus would do, and tried, stumbingly, to do likewise. So did the screws, in that sometimes hard but essentially humane world that is gone of Ronnie Barker Porridge.

So how real is Grace? Is it like borrowing money from a bank, where you only get it if you’re rich enough not to need it? Assuming Jesus being ironic when he talked of “righteous persons who have no need of repentance,” we may assume the idea is that the sick need the doctor not those glowing with health.

How do the sick receive the doctor’s help? And when Jesus implied hating someone was as bad as murdering them, lusting was as bad as adultery, was that “as bad as” or “as good as” or... both? And so what?

Over to you.