UCCF is not dull

A very amusing tribute to theologian Wayne Grudem, in the style of Grease...

http://thebluefish.org/2008/02/my-karaoke-heroes-aka-south-west-relay.html

Some delightful book plugs inspired by various TV memes and bods buzzing around in 2008...

http://www.uccf.org.uk/media/top-10-books.htm

Kirk on resurrection in Christianity Today

A splendid article I need to mull on later, and work out how to pass on all its good points when people ask me tricky questions, which happens from time to time!

maybe Orthodoxy is everything... ;-)

Searching online for David Thomas' discussion of the dating of Paul of Antioch's Letter to a Muslim Friend (as you do), I stumbled upon this blog, which opened a window onto modern Orthodox Christian experience.

Most interesting indeed, and one to return to when I have two-and-a-half hours spare (possibly in July) is this lecture by a real scholar, Roman Catholic professor Sidney Griffith. His breadth of learning and ability to synthesize and interpret the complexity of Middle Eastern Christian history in its fragmentary and repeatedly politicized context is outstanding. I've read most of his publications, and if I had time I'd read them all!

nostalgia and productive chat

We had Tim Keller from Redeemer Presbyterian in Cambridge last week to speak at Great St Mary's the Corn Exchange for "Passion for Life". Saturday (which I didn't hear) was the Reason for God; Sunday (which I did) was Counterfeit Gods. Each evening was loosely based on key ideas from his two best-selling books. By all accounts the Sunday one was better - I certainly found it stimulating, and it contributed greatly to the conversation started between Dave and Dave months ago, which I joined in the Panton Arms shortly before we wandered up to hear Keller.

What a great chat that was - stimulating and intimate, the history of philosophy, the perspective of faith, music, searching, questioning, formulating, reformulating, just what our brains were made for. Looking forward to continuing. Probably have to read some Schopenhauer, now...

It really took me back to the panelled rooms of Downing College at the end ofthe last century, staying up all night with green tea and my agnostic best friend and best man, whiling away the hours on everything - not to mention back to the studying itself, a historical whip-round political thought and ethics from Plato to Nietzsche (in amongst more prosaic [and poetic for that matter] stuff on medieval social history or Renaissance literature).

And that got me thinking about another friend who stayed up all night patiently trying to explain chemistry to me (in those days I was still under the impression that A-level chemistry was "true" and was pleased with myself for having done some science as well as all the arty-farty business), while writing beautiful fractals on the computer. We managed to discuss Reformed theology and the Christian life quite a bit, too, and it was great to see him again at my 30th in the summer after a gap of many years.

Praise the Lord for such wonderful experiences, and for keeping me following him since then. What a wonderful world, what wonderful creatures, what a wonderful Creator.

 O LORD, our Lord, 
  how majestic is your name in all the earth! 
  You have set your glory 
  above the heavens. 

 From the lips of children and infants 
  you have ordained praise
  because of your enemies, 
  to silence the foe and the avenger. 

 When I consider your heavens, 
  the work of your fingers, 
  the moon and the stars, 
  which you have set in place, 

 what is man that you are mindful of him, 
  the son of man that you care for him? 

 You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings [c] 
  and crowned him with glory and honor. 

 You made him ruler over the works of your hands; 
  you put everything under his feet: 

 all flocks and herds, 
  and the beasts of the field, 

 the birds of the air, 
  and the fish of the sea, 
  all that swim the paths of the seas. 

 O LORD, our Lord, 
  how majestic is your name in all the earth!

horrific interlude

From a blog I just stumbled upon by the swashbuckling Dan Philips, of pyromaniac fame. When people can write and have a good eye it's a joy to spend time grazing. 

Among many great pieces, here are some useful throughts from DP and from his comment-adders on the question of horror as a genre.

Funny how none of them seems to like Frank Peretti. I really do like him, but perhaps because I read his books as a teenager, insulated then from any charismatic or noe-pentecostal connotations which might be irking these hard reformed types. I also have a cassette version of This Present Darkness read by the author, and I think it's great! He didn't simply tack some cod theology onto the end of a Stephen King imitation there, let me tell you.

more sadness

Aslam weaves together throughts and ideas, some of them inside his characters' heads, some outside, and sometimes you can't tell. The chilling hold of superstition over the lives of Russian Christians intrudes into Lara's mind, pp.307-08...

       A blue rectangle of the ceiling stands revealed wherever a book is missing above her. They look like openings onto the afternoon sky. It was to prevent a haunting that in certain parts of Russia a dead body was carried to the church through an open window, or even through a specially cut hole in the roof. The idea was to confuse the dead person's spirit, making it more difficult for the ghost to find its way back home.

      Earlier David had received a call to say that the Jalalabad police have found the head of Bihzad at last, flung into a drainage ditch in the bombing. The young man who thought he was on his way to paradise. To commemorate the baptism of Christ in the River Jordan, the Tsar - accompanied by the entire court and the leading churchmen - would emerge from the Hermitage on 6 January every year, descend the steps of the Jordan Staircase, and walk out onto the frozen Neva. A whole would have been cut through the ice, and Tsar and Metropolitan would bless the water. Children were then baptised in the icy river. What amazed the visitors from other lands was the reaction of the parents if ever a child slipped from the numbed hands of the holy men, never to be seen again. They refused to grieve because the child had gone to heaven.

This suggests a belief system packed with half truths, leaving me rueing once again the many blind alleys and false turns made by the church over the centuries.

On another note, the links implied here between the political theology, thanatology and popular practice of Christendom (in its 'Third Rome' incarnation in Moscow) and those of Islam is suggestive. Reminds me of Leithart's stimulating "Mirror of Christendom" essay.

Art and the artiness of being

was the subject of a little email conversation I had recently with a distinguished evangelical pastor ;-) in South Leicestershire, no less... ;-)

After our NTI seminar on aesthetics back in April, he asked...

I also wanted to (if you have time) continue a little conversation about art that you began on Friday when you asked the question "on what grounds should we judge art?"

I think you asked it when I was madly defending Shrek 2 for its cinematic purpose, and you rightly asked "well, if you're defending Shrek 2, how can\ we judge something as bad art?"

Here's what Rookmaaker says:

"Some people feel we ought to define the principle of art solely by the aesthetic. Is this not the core of art? Is not this its true meaning? ...Personally I have many doubts about this...The strange thing is that artists, almost without exception, do strive to express something in their art, and only rarely are happy with the aesthetic element alone. To me, this is one of the proofs that any theory that goes too much in this direction is out of touch with real artistic practice... Another question often raised is this. Should art be criticized on two levels, one aesthetic, the other moral? I think not. First, the term 'moral' is too narrow. It is better to speak of content, or expression, or portrayal of reality..."

Of course his argument goes deeper than this, but I was wondering what you thought were the right grounds on which to judge art.

And I replied in a not-terribly-theorized fashion, along the lines of...

On the question of art, I like Rookmaaker's point there, and think that
we should have (at least?) two ways of judging art simultaneously, the
aesthetic and the moral. On aesthetic grounds there's lots of argument
to be had over what the right standards are to use, of course! And on
moral grounds, I like what HR says about not merely attending to
'content' or 'morality', but on a broader spectrum of things. I wonder [and only the Lord knows what I intended to write here - I unaccountably broke off this sentence!]

Another question worth thinking about is how the art is used, and how it
can be used. It seems to me that we need to look at this because from
the viewer/listener's point of view that is he prime consideration. We
can discuss the morality of art in the abstrct all we like, and talk
about, e.g., camera angles, cinematography, etc, but is it possible to
watch 'Hostel' (to pick a random example) in any other way than either
relish or prurience towards its goriness? If not, then in neither case
is the attitude worth having, and I'm not sure that any amount of 'good'
film-making can justify it being used as art.

So, I think I'm advocating a full-orbed hermeneutic of art - descriptive
(moral check on content), structuralist (the aesthetic, what the work
is), and reader-response (how it is used). Maybe with a combination of
all three measures we can arrive at a total score for each work of art!?
However, it must score above/below a certain threshold on each one to be
worth it.

What do you think? Perhaps we need some more examples...

And then I tried out this approach on Serenity.

FIlms at L'Abri

Two years ago we went to this film festival at L'Abri in Hampshire. PG kindly drove us there and back in his teeny old car and we had a whale of a time listening to Lionel Richie (an education for me).

The films were...

Breaking and Entering
East of Eden
The Story of the Weeping Camel
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape
Little Miss Sunshine
The Seventh Seal

The conversations were great (I stayed up for hours chatting with a Danish graphic designer working in Japan - just like being an undergrad at Cambridge all over again, except slightly less pretentious), the food was great, and although Ellis Potter's contention that "art = purposeful human activity" was slightly irritating, albeit nicely delivered, a good time was had by all.

We missed last year - just too busy - but this October we will be heading down to the Manor House again. The menu is...

Gran Torino

Mon Oncle

Persopolis

Kitchen Stories

Three Colours Blue

Tsotsi

Man on Wire

And although I have seen two of those already, I shall cope!

A Christian Evaluation of Serenity (2005)

Having posted before on this great film, I thought I'd share the extended version, which I recently wrote up for NTI...

Background

Serenity is a feature film developed from a cult sci-fi series called Firefly, broadcast by Fox in 2002. Disappointed at the axing of the series after only 14 episodes, fans and the scriptwriter-director (Joss Wheedon, of Buffy and Angel fame) lobbied the industry for funding to a least get a film made, if not more episodes of Firefly. The New York Times verdict on the original series was, ‘A very funny, very hip, very terrific sci-fi show’, which is about right, and in my opinion the film is even better. Serenity works perfectly well as a stand-alone story, though it is enriched if you are familiar with Firefly, so I shall confine my analysis to the film, with occasional reference to the world described and explored in more detail by the earlier series. This world exists hundreds of years in the future, when ‘Earth that was’ has been abandoned by the voracious and fecund human race, who have colonised many other worlds. Their galactic culture is a neat blend of American and Chinese – the more rural settings often look like the Wild West, as do some of the weapons and costumes, and the dialect English they speak is redolent of 19th century America; however, the urban settings are like the seedier parts of Hong Kong and the characters usually swear in Chinese! The writing is all in letters and pictograms. There are no aliens!

Plot Summary
This is the 100-word version: for a fuller summary see the Appendix. Better still, stop reading this and watch the film so you can enjoy the unfolding story as it was intended!

Lead by charismatic rogue Captain Mal Reynolds the crew of Serenity, a smuggling ship, stumble across a massive state cover-up concerning population pacification technology, the murder of millions, and the creation of human monsters. The key to the mystery is locked away in the memory of a traumatised teenage girl (a fugitive, with her brother, on Serenity) who has been psychologically conditioned to turn her into a weapon with the right trigger. Pursued by a sinister and ruthless Parliamentary Operative, after various adventures, battles and tragedies, the crew overcome self-interest and succeed in broadcasting the information at great personal cost.

Aesthetic 
The script is successful at a macro level, with the plot developing through tension and resolution, propelled by various contingent and necessary motors. The challenge of introducing those who have never seen Firefly is overcome nicely. Occasionally there are clunky moments are a lot of information is shared with us through a conversation (e.g. 6 minutes in when the Operative discusses Simon and River with the doctor responsible for her conditioning) but in most cases we learn what background we need through odd phrases and through action. A fairly conventional meta-story (a rag-tag bunch uncover a conspiracy and through adversity being largely thrust upon them discover the courage to sacrifice for a greater good) with several stock characters (muscle-for-brains, repressed rich boy, cool British villain) is enlivened through cinematic and directorial splicing techniques on display from the start. Serenity opens with a narrator over documentary footage explaining human history since the exodus from ‘Earth that was’, which is revealed to be the voice of a teacher in a gazebo-like garden classroom of 12-year-olds, which is shown to be a flashback-dream in the mind of crazed River, strapped into a sinister lab chair just before she is rescued, a dramatic sequence which itself turns out to be a holographic recording of said rescue as viewed by the Operative on their tail. Russian dolls eat your heart out!

The script is even more successful at the micro level, as Wheedon manages to bring out his characters with their flaws and their humour through a convincing dialect version of English. The language has enough grace and charm to conjure up centuries past where eloquence was valued more highly, while still being comprehensible to modern viewers. Combined with effective set design and sparing use of quality CGI Wheedon projects a world that grabs the audience. Nothing is too grand or too clean. Making a virtue out of the necessity of budgetary constraints, there is general celebration of parvus pulcher est, which is also an important theme within the world of the film.

The cast perform extremely well. Each of the characters is rendered consistently and the actors are completely believable while more than coping with a demanding script that ranges from flippant to deep grief and is peppered with cod-Chinese curses. I was engaged by their relationships and moved by their struggles and tragedies. The stock characters are given their own flavour through great facial expressions, quirkiness and costume idiosyncrasies.

Serenity pays homage to a great many other films from a variety of genres, notably Westerns and spacebound science fiction. Labouring the intertextual links would be wearing so I’ll mention just a handful. The use of the Universal Studios logo in the first scene recalls Waterworld, another futuristic human survival story (considerably more expensive and less successful!) River and Simon’s escape through a lift shaft into the belly of a spaceship honours Star Wars (episodes IV and V). Mal Reynolds is Han Solo, only better (“Heresy!” I hear you cry). The climactic and claustrophobic desperate rearguard battle with its high attrition is both Zulu and Aliens and more… This film is an artistic gem and a lovely example of how to work within a tradition but with originality.

Moral
A great many themes are picked up by Serenity in passing, many of which can be celebrated by Christians (in modified form), several of which cannot. Eccentricity and individuality in community is a major concern of the film. The crew have to deal with their differences and learn to recognise that fellowship is more important than ego or point-scoring, something they are not always successful at. Heroism expressed in sacrifice, not for the sake of glory but for the sake of others, is a clear theme; the crew, particularly Mal, learns that self-interest or feigned amorality as regards politics will not suffice in a fallen world if justice is to be done, even in a limited historical sense. 

There is a right suspicion of empire and human power, which chimes in with the Bible’s perspective, as does the recognition that people are in no way perfect. An optimistic/utopian belief in human ability to engineer goodness actually drives the plot. The explicit clash between this belief and the liberalism of the ‘Independents’ (neither blind obedience to the state nor chemicals can solve the human condition) occurs in a powerful piece of dialogue before the final act. Against a background of the slaughter of the innocents, Mal confronts the Operative on video phone about their respective motivations…

O: You should have taken my offer, or did you think that none of this was your fault?
M: I don’t murder children.
O: I do – if I have to.
M: Why? Do you even know why they send you?’ 
O: It’s not my place to ask. I believe in something greater than myself. A better world. A world without sin.
M: So me and mine gotta lay down so you can live in your better world?
O: I’m not going to live there. There’s no place for me there any more than there is for you. Malcolm, I’m a monster. What I do is evil, I have no illusions about it, but it must be done.

As Mal stirs the crew to embark on a probably suicidal mission to broadcast the suppressed data he says of the state, 

They will try again… [t]hey’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people better. And I don’t hold to that. So no more runnin’. I aim to misbehave.

What Serenity lacks, however, is any answer as to how people are to be made better – by implication a celebration of diversity and resistance will be OK, but this is a serious aporia in the worldview. 

In its opposition to tyranny, Serenity also displays abhorrence of cover-up. The crew struggle, as we all would, with the cost to them of exposing the truth, but there is no doubt as to the morality of what they settle on. Mr Universe’s motto, ‘they can’t stop the signal’ displays a faith in exposure and in final justice, the idea that someone, somewhere is watching crimes and that the truth will out. CCTV and other technology along with independent-minded vigilance provide the all-seeing eye here, but Christians know that someone more reliable will provide ultimate justice.

 Several of the undercurrents or explicit messages of the film are less susceptible of a Christian embrace. While we can be grateful for a film in which the ‘Christian’ characters are neither pushovers nor hypocrites, the Christian faith of this galaxy is pretty bland, and the crew are happy to exploit this religiosity, carrying out their payroll heist during ‘Sunday worship’. The character of the Shepherd, representative of a deeper religious commitment, is ultimately called upon by Wheedon to be the mouthpiece for a kind of content-less will to transcend the self – as he urges Mal, with his dying breath, to fight on, he says ‘I don’t care what you believe, just believe it’. The clash between the Operative, ‘the kind of man who believes hard’ and Mal is ultimately a clash between the adherents of political philosophies who prove willing to die for their beliefs. But which belief is right? And is the morality of belief really to be reduced to the strength of feeling in the believing subject? Serenity appears to suggest this at the emotional climax, while of course undermining it in the case of the Operative and his beliefs.

 To put it another way, the gospel according to Serenity is that salvation can be had through cunning, decency and fighting for freedom with a strong dose of ‘belief’. Salvation is needed because people are not perfect but especially because big governments are tyrannical. The ‘fall’ was the formation of the central planetary Alliance at some point in the past. The moment of regeneration, as it were, comes with the enlightenment of knowledge – so long as we have unmediated access to information about everything (‘the signal’) we can deal with the evil. The major idols of the film are personal liberty and self-determination.

 Furthermore, while it may seem a little moralistic to bring it up, the crew are a bunch of crooks! Our heroes make their living from crime, and to argue that their hearts of gold make up for this is to veer towards Gnosticism on the one hand ('what you do doesn’t matter, it’s who you are'; as if such things could be separated) or anarchism on the other (power is bad, authority is bound to be worse than independence). Serenity thankfully does not endorse a revenge ethic – the one moment where revenge briefly captures the grieving Zoë, she becomes reckless and endangers her companions – but, rather, a libertarian and pro-prole approach to society. Petty crime and prostitution are OK, so long as it’s only the rich that are made to pay. 

To conclude this section I want to consider Serenity’s take on two old chestnuts, sex and violence. The film stands in an ambivalent relationship to the interplay of these most misunderstood of human activities. Final answers on whether certain levels of violence in a film are gratuitous or whether particular costumes/scenes constitute soft porn (or a prelude to it) are not easy to settle on. In a general sense as regards film I am not entirely happy with my current stance of feeling slightly uncomfortable while trying not to be puritannical, but neither general flight nor general embrace are satisfactory. 

There is a lot of violence in Serenity, but with two exceptions our heroes only use it defensively. Their spaceship is not armed. Male strongman stereotypes are in some ways upset: although physically brave Mal is in fact an expert at getting beaten up; hard-case Jayne is knocked out twice by River; the Operative is a martial arts expert but clearly of a very cool Oriental variety in contrast to the generally less effective and more blustery ‘Western’ style fighting. Across gender lines, the upsetting occurs in a surprisingly conventional way. Ex-military Zoë is an Amazon figure (something of a trope in science fiction) who is in fact happily married and demurely dressed; River, effectively invincible in combat, conjures up Artemis – a (teenage) warrior maiden who really is a maiden. But better than Artemis, she is clothed and not the object of anyone’s desire. The action scenes featuring River in fact cast a shadow on efficient martial arts even as we marvel at the physical skill of the ‘dance’. The first time she uses violence it is on a room full of innocent people – a dark parody of the typical cinematic bar-room brawl. Serenity thus just manages not to revel in violence and furthermore succeeds in dissociating its violence from sexuality – no mean feat amid the genre expectations of ensemble sci-fi/fantasy not designed for kids. There are relatively reasonable standards of modesty in female dress, and only occasional lewd jokes. Prostitution is treated as a fact of life in the film, and barely mentioned – whereas in the original series it was seen as somehow a noble career choice (perhaps one reason why Fox axed Firefly was its willingness to discuss the hypocrisies surrounding prostitution in modern society without condemning the prostitute).

Use value
An important measure of whether or not a work of art is “good” is what it can be used for. An aesthetic (structuralist or technical) analysis is only part of the picture of assessing artistic value. A moral analysis adds more but the morality of the art does not exist in a static or abstract fashion – it is blended by the artist(s) and is appropriated by the audience. So we need a third approach to the artwork in order to answer the question of its value.

Serenity can be used as entertainment. There is nothing wrong with diversion and entertainment in themselves (although in fact there is no such thing as entertainment-in-itself, we are always entertained in and by something), and along with the quality of the story what Wheedon asks us to enjoy is largely positive – heroism, sacrifice, humour, mocking the proud, valuing eccentricity, anger at oppression, and so on.

 Serenity can also be used as a way in for analysing culture and commending the gospel. I would suggest that the following questions could be asked of non-Christian co-viewers who are interested in exploring the film more deeply.

(1) What is meaningful “faith”? Can it simply be, or must it be in something or someone?

(2) Is there any hope for the future (personal and species) other than quick wits and whatever resistance we can muster to oppression?

(3) Is the centralized state really our biggest problem? Is the Operative right to suggest that sin is the problem? Given the flaws in his solution,

(4) How then shall we be made “better”?

(5) What is “the signal” in the real world (e.g. supposedly unmediated access to information, or divine revelation)? Can anything stop the signal? Do we need the signal?

Religious dialogue

In a fascinating book edited by N. Vaporis [Orthodox Christians and Muslims, (Brookline: Holy Cross, 1986)] the papers from a 1985 symposium held in the USA are presented. The twelve main papers, on various historical and theological topics, are all interesting. I expect to blog on one or two in weeks to come...

The foreword from Archbishop Iakonos makes a plea for ‘common understanding as to the role religion can play in a terribly turbulent society’ in which ‘men and women everywhere are looking for peace, security and humanitarian coexistence’ (p.2). He suggests that (presumably) in the 1970s and 80s at least ‘Christians are seeking unity, while Muslims are witnessing a worldwide resurgence’ (p.1) and this means there is a great need for each to approach the other. All very nice and well put, and as it’s only a brief welcome message it seems a shame to be picky, but there is a fundamental asymmetry in the relationship that needs to be flagged up. Both officially and unofficially, any attempt by a Christian to ‘convert’ (however construed) a Muslim, or any perceived criticism of Muhammed (etc) is a pretext for hostility – not merely intellectual but also physical. Let alone what happens to Muslims who do choose to leave Islam. When the very structure of the faith is set up to suppress discussion at particular points and to employ coercion to the point of death against those who demur, then ‘dialogue’ and ‘common understanding’ are severely hampered.

We should also note that the blasphemy and apostasy laws of Islam, whether or not the state happens to endorse them in various territories, cut the aggrieved moral high ground out from under those Muslims who wish to complain about proselytism, or who wish to demonstrate or assert openness to dialogue now or in some mythical glorious Islamic past. If the threat of death or ostracism against any who wish to identify with a different religion remains in the formal and popular teaching of Islam, we can dispense with the high horses and be honest about what the situation is. The nations of the earth rage against the LORD and his annointed one. Sometimes they pretend not to, but they do. This is not really a complaint about persecution, horrible and damaging though that is (and after all, many countries and systems now and in the past have persecuted Muslims), but a plea for honesty about the full-orbed nature of religio-political communities. For as long as peaceful Christian (or other) evangelism among Muslims is considered an affront and worthy of harsh response the potential gains for dialogue will come at the cost of half-truths, turning blind eyes and certain types of intelletual dishonesty – and the benefits will largely be felt by the academic and politial elites anyway.

Another day I’ll make the same complaint about the supposed ‘tolerance’ of secular pluralism

Flame-loving fans of Spurgeon

No mention of the Prince of Preachers could go past without a pointer to these SUPERB bloggers on pyromaniacs. Clear thinking and writing, always provocative and full of passion.

Spurgeon's significance today

The contemporary significance of Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1843-1892)

‘Spurgeon towered among nonconformists’ (1). He provides today’s evangelicals with proof that fidelity to Scripture and unfashionably strong evangelistic preaching need not produce an irrelevant or disengaged Christian church. His public stand for conservative evangelicalism inspired fellow Baptists – and also many from other denominations – to greater zeal and piety and a more active witness. Given the many differences between the 1850s and the 2000s, perhaps his greatest significance, if only we had the will and courage to grasp it, is in his character, showing us who a Christian leader needs to be.

“Prince of Preachers” is how he is generally remembered. Certainly his preaching was exceptionally powerful, in substance and in manner. He loved the doctrines of grace, clearly urged repentance and faith on all his hearers, and was a great orator. But, aware of the dangers of preaching anything more than Christ, and alert to the power of rhetoric and mannerism, he toned down this last aspect of his preaching in his later years, certainly from 1875 (2). There was no diminution in numbers who came to hear him, in invitations to preach elsewhere, nor in conversions. His ability to communicate with people from all walks of life is a rare gift, and one worth cultivating today, even if his commanding pulpit style is no longer be appropriate to our broader culture and most subcultures.

By Spurgeon’s example many other Baptists were inspired to be much more evangelistic in their sermons and church life, including some whose hypercalvinism or unnecessarily strict approach to fellowship and “the world” had stymied their outreach. His training of new preachers, evangelists and leaders was tireless – starting small, giving lectures in his home and chapel, this work grew to a college from which hundreds graduated to go and revitalize urban and village ministries and to plant new congregations. He was greatly moved by the suffering of the poor, undertaking many visits to the sick during various epidemics of Victorian London, at great personal cost. He established almshouses for widows and a large orphanage for boys, consisting of a street of houses rather than the factory-like buildings of many other such efforts (to which one for girls was later added, modelled on a quadrangle). Often these mercy ministries ran short of funds and Spurgeon poured his own money into them. Many children were saved through the Christian ethos and teaching of the orphanages, and some went into preaching and teaching ministries themselves when they grew up. Spurgeon spent much of his “spare” time there and was loved by all the kids. This example of personal involvement, entrepreneurship and organisational leadership, is key – along the lines of what some in the emerging church have suggested about missional church, though one difference now is that in this state-dominated age there is perhaps slightly less room for charities of immediate relief attached to churches in the UK (3). 

In 1887 Spurgeon ‘propelled Baptists into the Down-grade controversy, the most notorious of a series of general scares about the way evangelical doctrines were going’ (4). By standing firm in the face of creeping decay of liberal teaching he provided a beacon to alert many who were indifferent, and a bulwark of evangelicalism against the encroachments of false teaching. For reasons of conscience he (and the Metropolitan Tabernacle) left the Baptist Union, and some other churches followed suit. Although Spurgeon did not doubt the faith of most in the Union he could not countenance fellowship with a wider body that included many who denied essential Christian doctrine (5). This had the knock-on effect of drawing many Baptists away from the Congregationalists who were the mainstream Nonconformists of the later 19th century (6). Today most Congregationalists have joined the URC, a denomination in decline and not known for its commitment to evangelicalism. Baptists en masse are not exactly thriving, but one legacy of Spurgeon’s controversies is plenty of independent baptistic churches that continue to embrace biblical Christianity.

Spurgeon could be imperious or offhand, and he took the virtue of hard work and self-denial to dangerous extremes, but there is much worth copying in his character. Though they are out of fashion in the world and in parts of the evangelical church today, dilligence, love of learning, perseverance, generosity, and commitment to prayer will never go out of business. Dallimore’s rather quaint biography is brimming with vignettes about Spurgeon’s daily activities, habits and character. He worked very hard at his schooling and immersed himself in the Bible and works of great Christian leaders such that he could quote at will from Scripture and many Puritans. He endured tremendous opposition in the press, Christian and secular, much of it based on falsehoods and exaggeration, and he either held his tongue/pen or responded with truth without personal rancour. His health was not good for the second half of his life and he was in agony with incurable gout for decades, yet he did not give up his pastoral responsibilities. That kind of patience in the face of various types of suffering is a powerful example to today’s budding leaders, who, if they’re anything like me, might be tempted to idle hours in front of a computer or moan about minor ailments rather than apply themselves to hard work and finding joy in the Lord even in the midst of real distress. He took no salary from the Metropolitan Tabernacle, but provided for himself and his family only by the income from his books and sermons; one-off gifts to him personally he usually passed straight on to the work of the training college or orphanage. He made no plans for retirement! He was not given to long periods of prayer, but would readily pray about anything and anyone that crossed his path, and the prayers he spoke to lead groups were apparently more inspiring than his sermons.

Finally, in the exploitative and war-torn world of 2008, Spurgeon’s strong criticism of slavery and of political violence are a challenge to contemporary evangelicals the world over. Despite the financial losses he suffered as a result he was open in his hatred of slavery in the USA and wrote against it, earning much hostility in the Southern States (7). He was a lover of peace. Preaching to 20,000 people at Crystal Palace in 1857 he attacked militarism and the British violence in India on the grounds that the gospel should make wars cease to the ends of the earth. In 1870 his anti-war preaching was no less strong (8). He won grudging respect from unbelievers who had initially scorned him because of his personal integrity. A true witness to the transforming power of the gospel in every area of his life.

NOTES

(1)  Clyde Binfield, So Down To Prayers: Studies in English Nonconformity, 1780-1920 (London: J.M. Dent, 1977), p.26.
(2)  Arnold Dallimore, Spurgeon: A New Biography (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1985 [1984]), pp.163-64.
(3)  For example, Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church (Peabody: Hendrikson, 2003), pp.135-37. They make many good suggestions concerning and observations of missional church activities, but, oddly, direct mercy ministries are not among them.
(4)  Binfield, So Down To Prayers, p.6.
(5)  Dallimore, Spurgeon, pp.204-10, gives detail on this process of withdrawal, the restrained manner of Spurgeon and the unjust criticism he received when he was too much of a gentleman to use confidential letters to vindicate himself.
(6)  Binfield, So down to Prayers, p.26.
(7)  Dallimore, Spurgeon, pp.96-7.
(8)  David W. Smith, ‘A Victorian prophet without honour: Edward Miall and the critique of nineteenth-century British Christianity’, in Tales of Two Cities: Christianity and Politics, ed. Stephen Clark (Leicester: IVP, 2005), pp.152-83 (p.162, fn.21).

Is there meaning in this text?

It’s a great book, but Kevin Vanhoozer does take a few swipes at ‘fundamentalism’ in order to distance himself from it, and some of these swipes are not really fair…

A ‘recent Potifical Commission document’ claims that sola scriptura is a distinguishing characteristic of fundamentalist interpretation (424).

Vanhoozer, who wants to hold onto a version of sola scriptura, then criticises fundamentalists for…

• craving ‘objective certainty’ (424)
• encouraging ‘individuals to interpret the Bible for themselves’ (424)
• assuming that truth = correspondence to historical fact (424-5)
• uncritically privilege the interpretive community to which they belong, which is a natural result of being sure that they, and only they are right . Ironically they sound like Stanley Fish in this, he who radically claims that meaning is entirely in the hands of the present interpretive community (425)

Number 1, fair enough. Let’s be more provisional and humble about some of the things on the fringe of our noetic structure, and let’s dispense with modernistic categories, or at least with the pretence that those categories are categorical.

Number 3, Vanhoozer over-presses in his passing comments on inerrancy. Implying that belief in inerrancy means that one must take all biblical ‘narratives as accurate historical and scientific records’ (425) suggests that he hasn’t read the Chicago Statement in Biblical Inerrancy! It also suggests that he is playing fast and loose with some big words (accurate, historical, scientific) which may only be there for padding, if what he really means is “I don’t believe Methuselah was 969 when he died.”

Number 2, it all depends on what you mean (!) by ‘for themselves’. Since uniquely personal interpretation, unconditioned by others, is pretty much impossible, and since authority structures in history have monopolised the reading of texts for dubious political ends, encouraging individuals to have a go is probably no bad thing. Inevitably that’s going to happen in a community, against a background of expectation and possible thoughts, shaped by others’ input, childhood experiences, whatever. Such a process (the power of the interpretive community operating on the reader) is what he criticises them for swallowing in the final point, so it’s hardly fair to blame the poor fundamentalists for both!

Number 4, true enough, fundamentalist interpretation thinks that it is right and no one else is. And if fundamentalists miss the community hermeneutic angle then they have been blind. But isn’t thinking you’re right a hallmark of life itself!? The anti-fundamentalists are also trying to persuade us of the truth of their interpretations (even if only to assert that all are true – and if that’s so, why not the fundamentalists’ one as well!?). What’s the essential difference? Fundamentalism’s methodology represents one way of attempting to guarantee the text’s perlocutionary effects. Fundamentalists do what Vanhoozer later praises as good ‘Spiritual Constraints’ on interpretation (437-8), which include obedience, discipleship and a recognition of holiness as more important than hermeneutical method. Just look at any weeny Fundamentalist church website and you’ll see plenty of exhortation to those things! hey are very fond of insisting that the text must be obeyed and that membership of the fundamentalist community is necessary…

‘Interpretation both requires wisdom and contributes to it’. Isn’t Vanhoozer being rather fundamentalist in insisting that his method (wisdom and cultivation of interpretive virtues against a background of critical realism) is what is needed to get the right meaning? He just disagrees on what wisdom looks like, and on what the meaning is in certain places (which I suspect is the real issue). To be fair, the ‘fundamentalists’ he quotes don’t play up the role of wisdom, they do seem to expect the meaning to come straight off the page. But the bottom line is that his criticisms of fundamentalism only seem to apply to some of those who call themselves fundamentalists. Plus, general guilt-by-association attacks on dispensationalism and separatism hardly scratch textual fundamentalism as an attitude because they don’t get to heart of the matter.

For a brief, provocative case that Scripture is not inerrant in the Chicago sense (because the writer finds this an incoherent and silly position) see this article on the Kuyper Foundation website. These guys are not ‘fundamentalists’ but they do espouse some beliefs about theology and politics that go way beyond the loudest 'fundamentalist' (and I suspect that Vanhoozer would not approve!)

Ellul fun

In the dying days of my work for the county council I had begun to read several things by Jacques Ellul – his books and some crit by other keenos. Ellul was an academic, an expert in medieval law, and a rare breed – a prominent French Protestant in a country that thinks of religion as dodgy and anything not Catholic as a weird cult! He was also something like an anarchist, in the technical sense.

Many of his works are online…
http://www.jesusradicals.com/library/ellul.php

And there is a ton of fodder here, too (the CD of back issues is very cheap)…
http://www.ellul.org/forum.htm

What is going on?

In the world, and in my head...

Another old bit of paper swept away at the moving of a bookcase amid general shedding of bumph was some thoughts I had during the Cambridge Papers discussion of Colin Chapman’s response to Islamism and Islamic terrorism. Mostly fairly ignorant questions, they deserve some thought, and probably some attempts at answering by good, old-fashioned research one day!

What do all these ‘moderate Muslims’ [to use the categories of others, for a moment] want? We can distinguish bombers, we can spot those who call for violence, we can distinguish those who push for rigorous application of sharia… but what do ‘moderates’ want? And why should we [whoever they are] build bridges with them? 

What is their political goal, and to what extent does it involve gaining coercive powers over non-believers? [This really seems like the $64,000 question. Having read some very interesting essays on Islamic theology of law recently by meaty scholars such as Noth, Becker, Morony and Edelby I feel slightly closer to understanding this, at least in theory!]

Are there any Christians who want to capture the state? And what do they want to do with it?

How do postmillennial reconstructionists fit with Islam? What about postmillennialims in general?

Should the question of Islamism spur us to try to understand what the church’s relation to organised idolatries and false (eschatological) communities is? See Peter Leithart’s wonderfully provocative essay, Mirror of Christendom, on this.

Suffering victors… Muslims tend to measure triumph by expressions of power (as Colin Chapman pointed out, anger at the Crusades was fuelled by the fact they they lost so many battles to the barbarian Franks) but Christians don’t have to do that. Islam misses victory-in-suffering, but we have because our Lord has it. We don’t need to vindicate ourselves now, but Muslims do. [Or is that not quite accurate?]

Muslims have a good understanding of how to rule: Christians don’t. We know how to be in a minority, and how to be oppressed quietly, but they don’t! 

A similar sentiment was expressed by the Syrian John bar Penkaye in the 8th century…

He promotes a particular view of the past which seems to say that Christians are better off if they are ruled by non-Christians, that Christians are ruined by peace and quiet and by the interference of Christian rulers in Church affairs. (p.16)

Michael G. Morony, ‘History and Identity in the Syrian Churches’, in J.J. van Ginkel, H.L. Murre-van den Berg & T.M. van Lint, eds, Redefining Christian Identity: Cultural Interaction in the Middle East Since the Rise of Islam (Leuven: Peeters, 2005) pp.1-33.

Herbert, Fish and the economy

Stanley Fish, whom I remember from undergraduate days as being a very entertaining if somewhat exasperating literary critic has written a great piece on the New York Times website. He is a keen observer of things Christian, for all the post-ironic deconstructionalist aura he carries around!

Forced or induced?

For all the criticisms levelled today by the victim-mentality apologists of Hinduism and Islam in India and Turkey (to name just a couple of places) – you know, the old ‘Western missionaries just exploit the poor, buying converts, indicing conversion with bribes, etc’ claims – it is remarkable to find this practice institutionalised in early Turkish Islam. Just one example among many…

One-fifth of the income from an eighteen-room khan at Yenibağche (outside Konya) was set aside to defray the yearly expenses for converts to Islam. I was to provide for the teaching of the Koran and prayers, the performance of circumcision, provision of shoes, clothes, and food to Christians, Jews, and pagans who apostasized to Islam. The wakf’s revenues came from three villages (two of which, Saradjik and Arkĭthanĭ-Arkĭt, were Christian), a number of shops, and a khan.

[Speros Vryonis, Jr, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (Berkley: University of California Press, 1971), p.353.]

Notice the particularly cheeky method of getting Christians to directly subsidize (as well as indirectly through ongoing punitive taxes and confiscations by the authorities who would then endow the Islamic institutions across Anatolia) conversions from their faith.

defining your terms

It's quite easy to for evangelical Christians to think and talk about 'real Christians'. We usually know who is one and who isnt', right? Obviously, anyone who doesn’t agree with my type of evangelicalism isn’t a real Christian. Which is good, because other people (not me, obviously) do silly and unChristian things and I don't want to be tainted by association with ‘Christians’ who do those bad things. They’re not actually, really Christians.

Even if this manouevre is not strictly honest it does have a noble purpose, from time to time, that goes beyond me. It is a defensive mechanism for maintaining God’s honour in the world. But evangelicals (despite being some of the most sensitive and uptight believers in their soteric exclusivism) are not the only ones who do it…

‘A historical critique of the Oriental Church does not mean anything for us, because the Oriental Church does not conceive itself to be a gathering of men but as an Orthodoxy. This means that that which lies outside the truth of Christ or doxology does not belong to the Body of Christ’.

(Metropolitan George Khodre of Mount Lebanon, ‘The Church as the Privileged Witness of God’, in Ion Bria, ed., Martyria/Mission: The Witness of the Orthodox Churches Today (Genva: WCC, 1980), pp.30-37 [p.31]).

Which is a neat way of getting round the problem!

"Pictures"

…of the Pentecostal-Charismatic variety…

“The Lord has given me a picture of three flowerbeds, with different colours of flowers. And I took one of each and planted them in the same pot. We’re all here today from different churches, but God is saying to us that we should make the effort to mix and have good fellowship: we’re all His flowers, whatever the colour of our petals.”

To those schooled in broadly cessationist theology and praxis, these pictures can sound a bit weird or even a threat to a high view of Scripture. And maybe on occasion they are. Whatever. I am more interested right now in being the nth observer to note that the cessationist and the charismatic may both be able to accommodate the same phenomena with a step or two towards each other.

So long as all are agreed on the priority of Christ and Scripture as God’s communication to his people, in terms of ‘ontological’ ranking and in terms of authority and purchase upon us, then let me offer a cessationist reading of the phenomena (with help from AMGD).

The ‘picture’ could be read simply as an illustration of a teaching point. But that could be to read it the wrong way round, as a typical (charitable) cessationist might do. Instead, the ‘point’, as it were, only emerges from the ‘picture’, which is normally a moving picture of some sort. The form – a short narrative – is important, and is an imaginative way of sharing truth. Not that we have to imagine that the ‘truth’ bit was thought up first, and then the ‘picture’ arrived. Why not see it as a teaching (mini-)gift that enables the speaker to do more than point+illustration. Jesus’ parables are more than point+illustration, after all, and our conservative homiletics (usually weak on relevant and punchy ‘application’) could learn a lot about the power of story.

Just a picture I had, anyway

Writing Christian history

Also not easy. You get to wear your biases on your sleeves, depending on your audience. (So, is this history for Christians or is is history about Christians for the academy?) But commenting theologically on particular history is pretty tough. It tends either towards the banal (the quasi-baptismal sprinkling of pieties on top of broad brush-strokes) or to the apocalyptic-demagogic (myopic tub-thumping from the vantage point of the hobby horse). An example of my failure to stay atop the two stools, or to find another good launching point, can be found amid the NTI papers.

However, when the historian in question can write really well, and I mean really well, then it can be pulled off. Think of accessible scholarly works… Stephen Neill, The History of Christian Missions (Penguin, 1964) is a great example of this, as is Henry Chadwick’s The Early Church. Back in them days they know how to write. Polite but determined swashbuckling. Due to my deplorable ignorance of the field I hesitate to generalize and there could be a hundred fabulous examples out there that I’ve never heard of, but recently only one book has really grabbed me. Jonathan Fuller’s Cross Currents: the Story of the Muslim and Christian Encounter in the Philippines (OMF, 2005) has much smaller ambitions than either of those classic works but is a delight. Passionate, scrupulous and vivid. [Sadly, it doesn't look available except in the Philippines at the moment :-( ]