Creation ex (almost) Nihilo

One thing we can do in Modern Britain is go to the pictures and watch Creation, the new Charles Darwin biopic, an experience allegedly denied to American audiences by distributors running scared from the religious right. As for me, I find the theory of evolution to be not only a good framework for understanding biological origins, but also a stimulus to excellent creative theology, from that of Frederick Temple (Archishop of Canterbury from 1896-1902) to Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), both of whom took it as a primary theological inspiration. Me Evolutionist.

Thus Lucy and I joined nine others in a High Wycombe cinema (Low numbers, given that it’s 2-4-1 night Tuesdays) for last night’s showing of Creation. I went with high hopes, having enjoyed Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s wonderful Darwin biography last year. John Collee is a script writer whose work I particularly enjoy, ever since his terrific Paper Mask back in the eighties. So far, so good.

This is lavish BBC style costume drama, spiced by some wacky psychadelic bouts of gastroenteritis, with abundant flashes backwards and forwards. Poor old Darwin’s tummy necessitated a lot of crazy lurching around like clubbers do on Saturday nights, with some hallucinations on the side — exploding slugs, stuffed birds flying, pickled babies winking, that sort of thing. Pretty standard stuff, really.

Charles Darwin was a decent family man, a sensitive Whig Squire, who studied nature, was very upset when his daughter died, and wrote a clever book. The visuals and design were sometimes gorgeous, and characters likeable enough, especially Jenny the Orangutan. Mrs Darwin managed to teach herself how to play the Piano to Paderewsky standard whilst waiting for something interesting to happen. That’s the story and I’m afraid it ain’t no King Lear.

If you are a real Darwin nut, this could be a worthy night out. For everyone else, the lovely cinematography and nice performances do not make up for the basic lack of plot. Two of the eleven people in our local fleapit nodded off. Perhaps the ultimate reason US audiences may have to wait until this movie reaches public TV is not so much skulduggery by the religious right as the fact that this is, regrettably, a dull film rather overawed by its subject, too ponderous and laboured to be rescued entirely by some genuinely lovely, inventive visuals and capable acting...
Unless that is, as some have suggested about Richard Dawkins’ TV series on the joy of atheism, the whole thing was actually got up by the religious right to discredit Darwin and all his works. Perish the thought. Two stars out of five.

Church Establishment and Freedom

It’s interesting to see Denmark extolled by a thoughtful commentator as the freest country in Europe, most open to humane debate, with the world’s most atheist-friendly culture. Many believe you can’t pass go in becoming a free society until you have separated church and state. So how do they handle religion in Denmark? I turned to wikipedia:

The Danish National Church, Church of Denmark or Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark (Danish: Den Danske Folkekirke or Folkekirken, meaning '(The Danish) National Church' or 'People's Church') is a state church and is the largest Christian church in Denmark, including Greenland. It is a Lutheran body and is officially supported by the government, but membership is voluntary. The Queen heads the Church, with the Minister for Ecclesiastical Affairs, currently Birthe Rønn Hornbech, as the highest administrative authority of the Church. The Danish parliament, Folketinget, is the supreme legislative authority for the church. 82.1% of the population of Denmark and 90% of the ethnic Danes are members of the National Church.

So here’s a jolly paradox: Some of the freest and most open societies in the world do Church according to this Nordic pattern. Various surprising conclusions follow:

1. There is an third way, although everyone laughs at it — an alternative to coercive theocracy, or the modernist option of simply privatising religion. None of us, surely, can be naive enough to think that just because it is private, the coercive might of US preachers is not power. The challenge for the US model is that privatised consumerist religion, far more accountable to its shareholders than the public, actually does rather well — a problem for atheists, but also for Christians who happen to believe, on gospel grounds, that the Church should be in the public service game, not the power game...
   
   
2. Establishment nobbles the internal dynamics of a Church. If the legal bit is entirely publicly accountable, laid down by law, the small amount of cracking the whip that must be done is handled by lawyers, not clergy. This fact, limiting to some clergy no doubt, creates a broad space for the vast majority of them, most of the time, to get on in a generally disinterested way with the work of their calling, reading the Bible, praying, preaching, networking, exploring the richness of mystery, building local community, rather than playing power games, nobbling politicians, or suing the pants off each other about who owns the buildings. Illogical, but I’ve seen it done.
   
   
3. Mature, implicit established Churches have a great opportunity to be blessedly free of paranoia. This creates a generous open space for learning, theological expression and creativity, along with all public discourse. The basic idea is that God’s truth can be trusted to look after itself. This benefits atheists, along with everyone else. Everyone, pragmatically, is free to believe whatever they find convincing, generally without the power dynamics of denominational corporate strategy and manipulation. The result is messy and sometimes illogical, but seldom abusive. Sure it is anomalous, to those who take denominationalism very seriously, that Queen Elizabeth is Anglican in England and Presbyterian in Scotland. Yet it keeps them all in their place, doesn't it, without threatening the identity of any of them, perhaps. Nobody is forced to believe anything. They don't have to be, in the way people have been compelled in formally atheist societies like the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Enver Hoxha’s Albania, Honecker’s East Germany...
   
   
4. A non-Imperialistic Monarchy and Church, however laughable, has facilitated not only Britain’s retreat from Empire without collapse, but Sweden’s, and Denmark’s. Far from suppressing political freedom and security, such an order of church and state has generally underpinned it. With generally pragmatic and responsive established Churches, neither the UK nor the nordic countries have had a religious war in hundreds of years. As the US Empire crumbles, it’s interesting to see how much US religion operates in an increasingly shrill mode rather than asserting context, tradition and stability.
   

It may well be the days of this whole Northern European way of doing Church are numbered. If this is the case, there will loss as well as gain for everyone involved. I am not convinced that fewer Denmarks and more Irans, or Texases, is the answer. I’m sure some would love it, and it’s the way the culture’s going no doubt, but in a week bishops have been excoriated for uttering opinions about supermarkets, there’s something makes me queasy about the Church of England as the religious equivalent of Tesco’s.

People of the Book? Really?

Diarmaid MacCulloch’s new History of Christianity: the first Three Thousand years arrived in the post last Thursday. This is not a skimmer, and it certainly deserves a good day out to read it properly. This reading challenges our customary English-speaking Rome-Centric interpretation of Church history that has tended to ignore the lives of the majority of Christians, who actually lived in the East and had nothing to do with Rome or the partcular issues that marked out Western Christianity. For that reason alone the book is worth a read, let alone for its elegance, good humour, sure-footedness and clarity. Dipping in at a few points around which I have specialist knowledge, MacCulloch came up trumps every time. Overviews require profound understanding and broad reach, and in those terms this book is a phenomenal achievement.

MacCulloch locates the Bible historically in the Christian tradition, in a way that is true to the actual contents of the Bible. This challenges the slick and unreflective use of the adjective “Biblical” as a synonym for “Customary morality wot I like” that we sometimes encounter:

The Bible thus embodies not a tradition but many traditions. Self-styled “Traditionalists” often forget that the nature of tradition is not that of a humanly manufactured mechanical or architectural structure with a constant outline and form, but rather that of a plant, pulsing with life and continually changing shape while keeping the same ultimate identity. The Bible’s authority for Christians lies in the fact that they have a special relationship with it that can never be altered, like the relatinship of parent and child. This does not deny relationships with other books which may be both deep and long-lasting, and it does not necessarily make the parental relationship easy or pleasant. It is simply of a different kind, and can never be abrogated. Once we see this, much modern neurosis about the authority of the Bible can be laid aside. Maybe the Bible can be taken seriously rather than literally...

All the world faiths which have known long-term success have shown a remarkable capacity to mutate, and Christianity is no exception, which is why one underlying message of this history is its sheer variety. Many Christians do not like being reminded of Christianity’s capacity to develop, particularly those who are in charge of the various religious institutions which call themselves Churches, but that is the reality and has been from the beginning.

I am very much looking forward to the attendant TV series, but above all to some hours reading this book properly this autumn...

Wendig! Schnell!

Not really a Motorhead, but on this day of German Elections, I was still bemused to learn (h/t Jane Stranz) that the fashion for Ossi-Chic retro now includes a jazzed-up Eco-Trabant, much loved 60’s/70’s symbol of East German Industrial Might and Dynamism. The Trabi, you will remember, wasn’t too bad for mileage, but spewed out such filth that roadside greenery almost visibly wilted as it went by. Among other unusual features, to refuel it you lifted the hood, poured 6·5l of petrol past the hot engine, then mixed in the two stroke oil by hand. Wendig! Schnell!

Trabant! The Car for modern man! Star of the Crap Division of the 1968 motor show, and big enough for four adults wearing (compulsory) Safety Hard Hats and fireproof overalls. Dear old jokes celebrate the Trabant’s lightweight construction, contrary to legend actually recycled cotton-based industrial waste (“Duroplast”) rather than cardboard. It was certainly a deathtrap in crash tests.

In the DDR glory days it took 15 years to supply one from Zwickau, giving rise to a strange bit of reverse-engineered Capitalism — Second hand Trabis could be considerably pricier than new on the “bird-in-the-hand” principle. Average life-span was 28 years. So from order to obsolescence was actually 43 years, almost as long as the existence of the DDR!


So if you can’t afford a new BMW mini, in a couple of years’ time you might care to try a new Electric Trabant, with a solar cell roof and 100 mile plug-in range, if anyone can be found to underwrite its production costs. Proof that what goes around comes around... but you’ll need to be, er, wendig & schnell.

Saw God. She’s Black...

at London’s Garrick Theatre she is, anyway. The Mysteries —Yiimimangaliso are the medieval Chester Mystery plays recast exuberantly in five languages into a carnivalistic but intense couple of hours by Isango Portobello, from South Africa.

This was the theatrical experience of the year — a riot of colour, movement, and joy, with an intense burn — real flames, real joy, and some strange and original play on sound, enhanced by occasional random undergrond trains rumbling deep below the theatre.

The Mysteries from Portobello Pictures on Vimeo.

The company contains an impressive mixed array of old and young actors. The stories are all the more powerful for being allowed to stand up for themselves.

Small touches of genius abound, from poor ol’ Noah’s problems getting Mrs Noah aboard the ark, to the risen Christ, disguised as a gardener, reinstating Peter in the garden by throwing him his shovel.

Of course all there’s time for is to scratch the surface of the original cycle, but it’s brilliantly done. It’s joyous, uplifting and playful — even warmer and more engaging than the National Theatre Mysteries a few years ago, with God on a forklift truck. Sell your shirt for a ticket, before it’s too late.

Taking a Global View

Interesting times, reviewing with archdeaconry colleagues basic stats for Bucks parishes, 2003-8. The figures are wildly variable, depending on who returned forms in any year and who didn’t. No surprises there, then.

The bad news is that flakiness about data collection makes it much less useful than it could be. The good news is that most places in which people talk decline are holding their own, or exhibiting steady organic growth. There are some clear examples of decline as well, along with one or two growth hotspots.

Interesting ranges like “small rural churches” and “Slough” exhibited surprisingly steady and heathy patterns across the range, of which the parishes themselves are probably entirely unaware.

So, we all need to get the act together about figures. The message for now is that the truth out there is probably more varied and less spooky than people may feel. Fleet Street don’t know Diddly-Squat.

The task of interpreting global statistics, indeed the very thought that bishops or archdeacons might ever have to look at and interpret such culturally alien things as mere figures, puts me in mind of a marvellous poem by May Swenson (1913-1989), first published in 1963:

Southbound On The Freeway
A tourist came in from Orbitville,
parked in the air, and said:

The creatures of this star
are made of metal and glass.

Through the transparent parts
you can see their guts.

Their feet are round and roll
on diagrams — or long

measuring tapes, dark
with white lines.

They have four eyes.
The two in the back are red.

Sometimes you can see a five-eyed
one, with a red eye turning

on the top of his head.
He must be special —

the others respect him,
and go slow,

when he passes, winding,
among them from behind.

They all hiss as they glide,
like inches, down the marked

tapes. Those soft shapes,
shadowy inside

the hard bodies — are they
their guts or their brains?

Labels, tins, and stale sauce

Are we all going nuts, in a world of labels, factions and namecalling? Tim’s Post-Christian Blog surveys the wraths and sorrows of current US Political discourse, as revealed in some of the idiotic polarized scare tactics over healthcare this year. This could be a perfectly rational debate about how to tackle a pragmatic necessity that everybody knows has been a costly mess for years. Instead people with wide flaring nostrils shout past each other. You can’t, suggests Tim, have civilisation without a certain degree of civility.

And nearer home, in gentler mode, Church Mouse questions our increasing need to find the right pigeonholes for others. Do Anglicans really need a whole complex alphabetti spaghetti of acronyms, factional descriptors and sub-species?

Why?

We're starting to build a two dimensional model. Along one axis we have the liberal – conservative dimension, along the other the Anglo-Catholic – evangelical dimension.

Unfortunately, the complexity of this has led to the use of numerous other labels to fill in some of the gaps, or to describe particular intersections on these two axes. Step forward the charismatics, the liberal evangelicals and the open evangelicals. Take a bow orthodox Anglicans, confessing Anglicans, affirming Anglicans and inclusive Anglicans, and apologies to any mouse has left out.

Mouse quotes, illuminatingly, a Guardian interview with Nicky Gumbel, leader of Alpha and prominent Christian Evangelist:

This may sound pernickety but I wouldn't describe myself as an evangelical. These are labels, which I don't think are helpful. If I was going to use any label it would be Christian, and if you push me any further I'd say I'm an Anglican – that's the family of the church that I belong to. There's nothing wrong with any of the other labels, but if you have any of them I want them all. If you're going to say, 'I'm Catholic, liberal, evangelical … ' let's have them all. But I wouldn't want to isolate one of those. Personally I think labels are terribly unhelpful because they enable you to dismiss things.

It’s up to us how we choose to label ourselves, and others, and what significance we attach to them. Four thoughts strike me:

1. In days gone by the Church of England, like all Western Christianity, was probably, to use a marketing term, over-branded. Sub-species identifiers gave some shape to a complex rambling bundle of institutions, colour coding them with the quaint simplistic language of “Churchmanship.” The term, in itself, is a subtle hint that women always were probably rather more grown up about this stuff.
   
   
2. There is a world of difference between the kinds of labels people use to describe, themselves, what they are trying to achieve, and name-calling. Nicky Gumbel makes a very wise point about the power of the names we stick on others to absolve us from engaging with them. Take the most basic label of the lot. If someone says to someone else “You remind me so much of Jesus that I’m going to call you a Christian” that is immensely cool. However, if I say of myself, “I (as opposed to all these other people) remind me so much of Jesus that I’m gong to call myself a Christian,” it’s almost impossible to resist the tsunami of pride, ego and folly that follow directly from the whole exercise. Do this on a corporate level, and you end up with a tangle of astroturf organisations that take themselves far too seriously having largely taken leave of God. Clichéd words reveal clichéd thought, and soon we are all idiots.
   
   
3. There’s a basic principle in St Paul’s writings that what proceeds from faith is faith. That’s something we all need for this journey. By implication what proceeds from fear, ego and political indoor games is, er, fear, ego and political indoor games. Someone said of Zwingli that he was a great campaigner and lousy theologian. By their fruits ye shall know them. That’s what the man said.
   
   
4. This is a missional no-brainer. However pleased with themselves partisanship may make partisans feel, the punters can see through ithe sillinesst from a mile off. The world is full of self-important screwed-up Mr Angry factions. People on the threshold of faith are longing for better possibilities and, quaintly, surprisingly often, look to the Church to model them. They have no desire to join yet another sect. And the idea that any denomination or faction has some kind of franchise on being a real Christian actually obscures the key notion that the Church actually is supposed to be the bridgehead expression of a new humanity God is pulling together in Christ. The most “successful” factions win the battle but lose the war. The Devil has a good laugh, and the show rolls on.
   

So I’m rather with the Mouse. Let’s try consigning the labels to the fiery pit for a while, and see what happens if we entertain the daring notion that ths enterprise is all about Jesus Christ, not human ego, vanity and insecurity?

Mission old and new in St Albans

Joy at the weekend to join over 2,000 in the Abbey to welcome Alan Smith, new Bishop of St Albans, my new episcopal next door neighbour. The sun shined as we all packed into St Albans Cathedral, site of the earliest Christian martyrdom in England.

One local paper caught Saturday’s celebration nicely. Thousands of joyful people celebrating together is of zero interest to most English media, who have their own agendas to pursue, but it is an amazing enterprise and tremendously moving to be part of such a thing. Jeffrey John and colleagues did the whole do proud — no mean achievement. It was an icon of the civil society that we take for granted, in the same way as we tend to assume all the wiring in our homes is there and works, without anyone having to pay any attention to it. In a way that's the whole idea, but it’s fascinating to see it all laid out in one place.

Bishop Alan spoke of the Church as a community of ordinary people, stirred by a willingnes to go deeper into God to do extraordinary things that make for a life based on generosity and care. It is this that transforms communities and makes disciples. It isn’t about institutions and empire building, but personal renewal and hope — discovering a different resource for life. At the end of the service balloons were released in prayer and blessing for the City and counties of the diocese. With no sudden release of helium indoors, we did not get to hear 2,000 people sounding like Mickey Mouse, but then you can’t have everything...

Good news in Gerrards Cross

Delighted to be in Gerrard's Cross for their 150th anniversary celebrations yesterday. It’s one of our very few large UK churches that have broken through what one could call the 400 barrier, with two or three times that number of regulars. It remains very much a parish Church, serving its locality more than hoovering in people from far and wide.

The Crown jewels of St James’ parish, are

1. enabling servant leadership at all levels, rather than fat controller indoor games. Martin Williams, ministry team and lay leaders are very mutual and focussed.
   
2. passion to foster people in varying styles of discipleship, traditional, Charismatic, Conservative and open (to use current jargon). The characteristic virtues of these expressions of faith become cumulative and shared, rather than being played off against each other, wittingly or unwittingly.
   
3. Commitment to clear and charitable attitudes that are good news across the board. Evangelical values are very much more important than -isms — politics or labels.
   
4. A general culture of excellence in all things. People work as hard, and in as focussed a way, as a commercial concern would at its operation.
   

Using Ephesians 3, we explored the uncertainties of the world around, in 1859 as much as today, and what it means to be called by a faithful God to be rooted and grounded in love.

The height, depth and breadth of that reality inspires not optimism, but a firm hope. Just for the record, and because some asked, the Credit Cruncher of 1859 I quoted was a gentleman called D. Morier Evans, and this was what he learnt from the string of financial crises in his day:

Each separate panic has its own distinctive features, but all have resembled each other in occurring immediately after a period of apparent prosperity, the hollowness of which it has exposed.

So, what goes around comes around. It’s a standing invitation not to take ourselves, or the news of the moment too seriously, and to fix our hearts where true joys are to be found.

Floating the Brixton Pound

Tesco’s et al work by hoovering up as much money as they can out of a community, often having closed half the local shops along the way. About 10% goes back in. They pay a small local workforce, often not very exciting wages, but the lion's share is retained or siphoned out to shareholders. They operate on a scale that enables them to hammer their suppliers hard on price, and to finance in-store offers, whilst also providing finance for to extend the empire, by screwing up of fresh communities. “Unto him that hath shall more be given...” comes to mind.

The Brixton Pound challenges this seemingly inexorable logic. Using it, people’s everyday shopping decisions work harder to enrich their neighbours. The scheme hopes to draw some of the power back from Lord Tesco and chums into the hands of the local consumer. Along the way, the premium the BP puts on local suppliers helps reduce environmental footprint and builds genuine diversity across the country.

That’s the theory anyway. Such schemes have been tried in market towns, but this is the first time it’s been done in a major urban centre. If the BP works, it will take us back to the way things were a couple of hundred years ago, when the banks issuing notes were usually local family businesses gathering farmers’ profits at harvest to give them back out on market days when it was needed.

The Brixton pound is an attempt to limit the seemingly inexorable power of big business over ordinary people’s lives. It may also, of course, limit the benefits of big business in ordinary people’s lives (potentially less choice and higher prices?). The balance of power around this decision, however, will, just for a change, lie not with Lord Tesco and his chums, but with people themselves. Either they will use the Brixton pound, or won’t, in their everyday lives. Check back in a couple of years, and see.

PS: Kudos and h/t to photographer Arn, from Finland, for his fabulous thin cat Sparkle.

Taking the Long View?

Panning in and out can make things look different. Take, for example, current fear that we are saddling our children and grandchildren with public debt on an unprecedented scale. Here’s a graph from the Telegraph, entirely accurate, portraying the problem of balooning public debt as a percentage of GDP: Dire times, you may say, and a real problem for us all.

But, you may wonder, what about the bigger picture? As public sector requirement has risen down the years, we’ve always funded it by borrowing. We never did, for example, save up in a Jam Jar until the nation could afford, say, an army and navy for the Napoleonic Wars. How does our present apocalyptic orgy of public debt sit within a historical range?

OK. Here is UK Public Debt as a percentage of GDP going back to, er, 1700. Hmm. Lies, damned lies and statistics, you may say. But it does indicate that statistics need to be placed in context.
By all means let’s not saddle our grandchildren with unnecessary debt — but let’s try and do so on rational grounds.

Bishops roles in context

Studying, on S Cyprian’s Day, what bishops are for with colleagues, there’s a clear four fold pragmatic model emerging. Bishops seem to have four kinds of role:

• Priest — signifier — drawing people to a wider purpose in God, beyond themselves, mediating, feeding the good esate of the Christian community
  
  
• Prophet — disturber — raising expectancy, reframing perceptions, challenging assumptions
  
  
• Apostolic Leader — transformer — encouraging shifts in understanding and practice
  
  
• Theologian — reflector — attending to the moment, interpreting and applying in a bigger context
  

So far so good. I wondered, however, about the more than individual perspective on all this. Since I first came across them years ago when working on Edward White Benson’s biography of Cyprian, I have been very struck by these words of the North African 3rd Century saint:

Quam unitatem tenere firmiter et vindicare debemus maxime episcopi, qui in ecclesia praesidimus, ut episcopatum quoque ipsum unum atque indivisum probemus. Episcopatus unus est cuius a singulis in solidum pars tenetur
(Bishops who preside in Church should firmly to hold and assert this unity that we may also prove the episcopate one and undivided... The episcopate is one, of which each part is held by the individual for the whole)

For Benson this assertion expressed the purpose of episcopal minstry. What are the the gifts, qualities and habits that make someone a good steward of their share in something, the whole of which they bear on behalf of the whole, but locally?

Sleepwalking over a cliff?

Exploring the state of society with colleagues in Oxford, David Marquand gave a presentation describing the drift from a market economy to a market society. This has produced an increasingly problematic order in which a myriad of individual choices has brought about, not the promised land, but a state of affairs nobody actually wanted. The decay of civil society and rampant inequality produce what he called this paradox of choice. The aggregate of small scale desirables is large scale breakdown. We become trapped in our own choices. Meanwhile, central government stuffs the books with new statutes, limitations, controls and defensiveness, and communties die. He signed iff with a slightly dread warning from John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty:

The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it... A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands -- even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished...

Just logging other interesting quotes I’ve heard on this event that say anything potentially significant about the Church’s calling in our present fragmented and often despairing context, I also noticed this, from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Binary Follies and missional drift

There are two kinds of people: people who divide others into two kinds of people, and people who don’t. Sometimes it’s wise to distinguish between others, but often not. Usually it’s helpful to remember that any one of us has it in us to be several things at once.

Which brings me to Bishop Stephen Cottrell’s great sermon at yesterday’s Racial Justice Sunday celebration in Oxford. St James tells us about pure wisdom, and that the harvest of true righteousness is sown in peace, for/by those who make peace. So he roots our divisions in our pride, frustrations and faithlessness, and calls on us, double-minded people, to wash our hands and cleanse our hearts.

Jesus told the story of two boys, one of whom refused to do as his father asked, but ended up doing it anyway, as against his brother, who said he would obey but never did, nor even really intended to. We will be surprised in heaven by all sorts of people getting there ahead of us.

Classic bourgeois hypocrisy is all about striving officiously to appear respectable, but another, possibly more pernicious form of double-mindedness is dividing up and compartmentalising the whole world, in ways that tend put ourselves perpetually in the right.

Looking at our grasp of St Paul’s great revelation of unity in Christ in Galatians 3 — all One in Christ, neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female — is not entirely encouraging. It took the best part of 100 years of bitter disputes to bring words and public deeds into alignment over Greeks and Jews, 1800 over slaves and free, and among Anglicans, we still seem to be a tad confused over male and female...

I notice, myself, another intrguing way of indulging this ugly side of human nature; making up novel denominational, racial or religious reasons not to engage with others, producing a technical but narrow conformity to our own particular interpretion of Galatians 3, or whatever.
Who’s driving the narrowness? God, or the limited way we see ourselves and others, and our reluctance to engage?

This all leads me to surmise that if ever we do decide to give practical Christanity a go, there are all sorts of people out there who would love to see it put into practice, much more than they can bear all the fear, excuses, bickering and other symptoms of doublemindedness they are picking up now.