Dr Barth and Dr Seuss

As you might have seen from my status updates combining CBeebies and CBBC with the Barth/Brunner debate is proving to be something of an experience. I nurse a poorly child whilst reading for an essay on point of contact, natural theology and revelation.

...thus was very relieved to find that I am not the first to ponder the combination of cartoon non-sense with theological endeavour. Ben Myers has beaten me to it with this poem reflecting on the compatibility of these two famous doctors.

Are your books of any use?

Are they? Are they, Dr Seuss?

Rhymes divine, but logic flimsy:

aren’t your works mere idle whimsy?

Cat in Hat, Things One and Two -

do they speak of what is true?

True, my friend? You ask what’s true?

True is what’s revealed to you.

Logic is not here or there.

Logic won’t go anywhere.

Sometimes what you read won’t fit.

Sometimes that’s the point of it.

Look, here’s Karl. Now gather round:

he will show you what he’s found.

Word is spoken (can you guess?):

God’s big No and bigger Yes.

Yes, I like the Son of Man!

Yes, I choose him, says I Am.

Seuss and Barth and Barth and Seuss:

sauce for gander, sauce for goose.

Thus a simple children’s rhyme

holds a truth to last all time.

Jesus loves me, this I know,

for the Bible tells me so.

Who’d have thought that Fox in Socks

might be neo-orthodox?

Author Ben Myers June 2008

The Gender Agenda reflections part 1

With a declaration that if you are looking for an unbiased review, this is not a book review in the true sense of the word, I can not help but come to the reading of this book with my egalitarian head on, this means in short that I believe that men and women are complementary but that women and men can lead and preach.

I have finally got around to joining AWESOME and ever grateful for people who do not think as I do, I am glad to see that both of these women are on the leadership team of Awesome.


Reviewing the Genda Agenda

This book has quite an opening and if we think that as women to be ordained into the church as ministers, we have struggled with opposition to some extent, Lis Goddard's experience must have been emotionally, theologically and spiritually very challenging - it was very close to home indeed for her!

I wonder if we begin reading this book wondering if in its conclusion, women in the priesthood will win out, we are reeled in by Clare's 'wondering if at some stage I might go forward to the priesthood.' (p.20) There is suspense created but only temporarily for Clare Hendry is quite certain about where she stands.

GENESIS

They begin at the beginning and Clare's belief in Adam's ascendency and Eve's helper status seems a bit uncritical but I recognise it as standard complementarian thinking. 'Helpmeet' as helper is rather crude I always think and there is not enough logic to Clare's idea that helper suggests subordinate but also refers to God who helps human leaders. I think about 'ezer kenegdo' at this point and how when it is attributed to God, he is never subordinate to his people, he is their rescuer. As Allison Young explains 'Kenegdo is a Hebrew preposition and adverb meaning “corresponding to” or “face to face,” so it is best understood as meaning that Eve was a fitting partner for Adam, for she was like him.' Dr. Susan Hyatt in "In the Spirit We're Equal" defines the Hebrew to mean "one who is the same as the other and who surrounds, protects, aids, helps, supports," with no indication of a secondary position. But subordination and equality co-exist in complementarian thinking and I hope the book is going to show me how this might work.

Lis doesn't pick up on 'Ezer kenegdo' until she tackles 'Adamah', reading the word like Goldingay, who says:
Apparently the God-likeness of humanity is only present in the combination of male and female. Certainly humanity itself is only present in this combination. Adam - in this context - is not male; it is a word like ‘mankind’ or ‘humanity’ orhomo sapiens. It is then further defined as ‘male and female’. There is about humanity both a unity and a plurality. Genesis 1, then, immediately subverts the suggestion that the male is the ‘natural’ human being, the female being a deviant type. Only man and woman together make real humanity.

Lis then picks up on the illogicality of Clare's thinking about subordination in the Ezer Kedegdo language after this.

Clare wants to root Genesis in Ephesians 5 to make sense of it, Lis is more keen to take it on its own terms. Lis is unconvinced by the split that Clare places in understanding male leadership to be the model for the home and the church but not the world beyond. It does seem strange that Clare should introduce the idea at this stage where I think it does little to make her Genesis study convincing. 

THE FALL

Lis's reading of the Fall is that the curse (male headship) should be redeemed, is redeemed in Christ, being the implication. She reads that curse as man's domination of women and Clare doesn't disagree but understands the curse as being man inappropriately handling this role and woman rebelling against his natural and good leading. Clare would use Headship rather than domination but understands that the world testifies to its exploitation being a problem. In their readings of the Fall we are in important territory and the place where complementarians and egalitarians decide the foundations for the rest of the way in which they exegete the other problem passages. I am glad that they both ask us to pray and confess for the ways in which our relationships are not what they should be and yet Christians will be unsure until they have decided whether either Lis or Clare's is the more convincing argument, quite the extent to which they should be penitent. 

WOMEN IN THE OLD TESTAMENT

The two women seem more at odds in their discussion of women in the Old Testament. Lis finds some of Clare's points 'bizarre' but apologises for this charge afterwards. I sensed the women's slight fatigue with one another in this part of the book. Clare's response is gracious as she considers how they are nevertheless united in wanting to see women fulfil their potential in God. 

MARY

Clare and Lis both write beautifully on Mary and there are some real gems here and a candid admittance of the stumbling block to discussion for evangelicals keen to distance themselves from 'Mariology'.

ANOTHER MARY

She who disappoints Martha is read in a similar way to Kenneth Bailey and NT Wright by Lis. Kenneth Bailey describes how Mary is 'seated with the men and...the traditional cultural separation between men and women no longer applies.' (BAILEY, K.E., Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes. Cultural Studies in the Gospels, p.193-194.) Tom Wright describes how you would do this 'in order to be a teacher, a rabbi yourself.' (WRIGHT, N.T., Women's Service in the Church, p.4)

...and so we move on to other female leaders in the church and what Jesus modelled in his ministry in terms of his relationships with women.


But I must break now and put down the Hendry/Goddard debate and return to the Barth/Brunner one.

I'll be back soon.

Everybody Welcome Bob Jackson

Everybody Welcome

Bob Jackson (Venerable Rev) is behind this new resource for churches who want to improve welcome and sustain hospitality. Surely we all want to welcome and integrate people? This is one of the most important ways in which we grow the Christian church. Trust me - Bob has done the maths - he shows us on the white board that if we successfully welcome new comers the church will grow.

Having a mystery worshipper is advocated - if there is a panel of mystery worshippers in your diocese you will soon find out if having taken your church through this course has been fruitful.

There is the idea that if you make two or three friends in the first few weeks you are more likely to pursue your relationship with a church.

People want to belong before they will believe these days. The belief comes after the belonging rather more often.

What's your experience?

Just a bit of a weird poem really....

So if 'I' meets 'thou'
How do I know how?
And if Messy is the way
Then how do we know when we stray?
And if the music's too loud
In what way is it proud?
And when the bread bits fall down
JC won't lose his crown!
The colours keep changing behind the wooden cross
And that page in Common Worship is not where we wos!

So it's all got confusing
Not sure if I'm losing
Or is weakness a good thing when in it you're strong?
Or are there just a lot of things about which I am wrong?
My Hookers and Harnacks. My Brunners and Barth.
My Eighteenth century is awakening but I'm falling apart.
Some theological tangles they're sure to sort.
The lecturers are lecturing, the students are taught.
And my alephs and sigmas are all coming to naught.

Which expressions are Fresh and how do we reinvent the old?
And is the postmodern church being infected with mould?
And our Bishops aren't in office cos of what they have said.
And the Synod are meeting whilst we're tucked up in bed.
And the prayers are so early and earnestly felt.
And some words in my essays are awkwardly spelt.
So they'll spit us out the other end, battered and bruised
For theological college ain't one to be cruised.
They'll take you apart and you'll slowly reassemble
Into something quite other you're not sure you resemble
But it's raw and it's real and it's all there is really
So hang in there and you'll find it's the church you love dearly.

Theology out of disagreement: Karl Barth

Just been reading this about Karl Barth by John D Godsey (VOL. 7, NO. 1. SPRING 1987. QUARTERLY REVIEW. "Barth and Bonhoeffer: The Basic Difference. "). 

He [Barth] moved from relative obscurity to become the recognized leader of a new theological movement that firmly opposed the nineteenth-century liberal tradition, and step by step he carved out his own theological alternative: from the dialectical fireworks of Romans to the first systematic attempt of Christian Dogmatics and, finally, with a boost from Anselm's understanding of the rationality of faith, to the full flowering of his Church Dogmatics. 

I think that it is really interesting that most of our theology is borne out of disagreements and when I look at my own blog, I find that many of my posts are motivated by my wanting to address and wrestle with views that are different from my own. It's with gratitude that I reflect on our God who celebrates this amazing diversity in the unity that we have in Jesus Christ. I guess what we have to do is disagree with one another, as we fathom his mysteries, with as much grace and intelligence as we can muster.

Similarly intrigued or inspired by the writings of Karl Barth? This looks to be a very promising blog just begun by a research student in the Church Dogmatics. Check out Michael Leyden's

Theologisches Nachdenken...

What is church? Messy Church.

David Ould asks in response to my post on 'Messy' Church, what is church?

Well, as theological students at St John's, it is what we are always asking ourselves as we seek to engage with different expressions of church within the Anglican communion and reflect on the ecclesiology we find there.

I have done a little bit of thinking on this and I remember being struck by Rowan Williams' reflections on what constitutes church.

[the church] is essentially missionary in its nature, seeking to transform the human world by communicating to it in word and act a truthfulness that exposes the deepest human fears and evasions and makes possible the kind of human existence that can pass beyond these fears to a new liberty.1

I guess what Messy Church is actually capable of doing, is taking that fear, a fear of church - and then turning that on its head.

It proclaims itself to be 'church' and the 'messy' conveys not just the activities in which families will involve themselves, which can be literally messy (paint and glue based), but also the messiness of having to confront one another in activities which many families are now struggling to engage in together: crafts to which perhaps one family member is far more predisposed than another and yet all will work together, board games which have been eclipsed by information technology activities and passive entertainment in front of the wide-screen television. In a world in which children are encouraged to develop their own specific talents and finances are invested to stimulate these, do our children and their parents self-sacrifice and engage together in activities that as individuals they would not usually choose?

At messy church the messiness of human relationships is confronted. Where liturgical church shapes divine and human encounter, the liquid liturgy of messy church has frayed edges. The divine encounter is also repackaged. There is the meal, shared with family and strangers, perhaps indicative of the original agape. There is a simple shape to the event and the language is de-churched and an application of the gospel message suggested in the fifteen minute service.

Messy church also relies heavily on the contributions of others, who are all at different stages in their own Christian journey, who lead the activities exploring the theme. It is a place where the gospel is offered as it is worked out by people who are busy in the world during the week. Rowan Williams describes how 'If confidence predominates, mission becomes a kind of corporate egotism, the effort to bring the world under the dominion of a system administered by an institution possessed of exclusive rights'2. I think the often ad-hoc feel of Messy Church empowers, in so much as it is not a service one attends that is conducted by 'professionals', it is a coming together in which one participates and offers whatever one has for the benefit of everyone.

Maintaining humility and distinctiveness - a 'this is church, even if it is messy' status, is difficult and will need to be navigated carefully: how not to create another expression to which some will feel an outsider status and yet also to communicate the foundation upon which it is all taking place: the good news of Jesus Christ, requires prayer.

The Church will always wrestle with whether what it is doing is truly church and church's distinctives need to be thought about carefully. The Mission-shaped Church: church planting and fresh expressions of church in a changing context sought to do this. If other churches propagate the idea that next door's Messy church is not church, then they are actually propagating too a culture of exclusion that is antithetical to the inclusive culture of Messy Church. Rowan Williams warns against this in his book 'Why Study the Past?'. We are to be very hesitant about forcing our definitions of church upon others without giving them a chance to work out what they are about for themselves. If they are professing Jesus is Lord, we should lend to them his patience.


In Messy Church, the scriptures are explored in the short service and through the activities that draw out an idea from Jesus' teaching, many will ask whether it is still church without the sacraments? What is the significance of the meal? Rowan Williams, in his 'Advent Letter' explains how,


... the first and great priority of each local Christian community is to communicate the Good News. When we are able to recognise biblical faithfulness and authentic ministry in one another, the relation of communion pledges us to support each other's efforts to win people for Christ and to serve the world in his Name. Communion thus means the sharing of resources and skills in order to enable one another to proclaim and serve in this way.3

Bubbling over from our gratitude that we meet with the Risen Christ and are being changed by his revelation should be a desire to have others meet too with the Lord of life. If the church proclaims Jesus' mission, which is to draw all people to himself, then Messy Church can be seen as one way in which he is doing this. There are few Messy churches offering the sacraments but liturgy can shape the meal, even if it is only in a clapped and acted out sharing of the grace or a prayer so that the food shared with kin and stranger does take on a deeper significance.
Williams describes how,

It may be part of the Church’s task in some places to develop ...corporate symbolic actions which do not so deeply presuppose the kind of symbolic identification involved in the Eucharist, yet still open up some of the resource of Christian imagination to the uncommitted.4

Games and eating together develop bonds and it sets people in a community of consolidation against the world's agenda of competition. This in itself will strike enough of a contrast to those occasions when families come together in days when even a child's birthday party has become an occasion of one-up-man-ship as parents compete to host something more original than the parties they have attended before.

Williams talks in “Doing the Works of God” of Christians seeking to challenge       'all ways in which human beings enshrine separation from each other and superiority to each other.'

Perhaps 'Messy Church' can feel confident about its humility. It seems to me that it is exploring what Williams describes is mission that,


... is not first of all communicating information or persuading people to adopt your point of view. The mission of Jesus is his concrete reality: God’s purpose is satisfied when the lost and lawless come into a specific relationship with him, especially at table) and are thus brought into the people of God. There is no mission that is not this sort of involvement.5

Check out a Messy Church near you and tell me what you think. Click link and you will locate one in your area.

1 Williams, On Christian Theology 

2 Williams, “Doing the Works of God” in A Ray of Darkness, 231
3 Williams 'Advent Letter'.
4 Williams, Resurrection, 61-62
5 Williams, “Doing the Works of God” in A Ray of Darkness, 222

A Barthian subordination to Scripture

Subordination . . . cannot mean that we have to allow our ideas, thoughts and
convictions to be supplanted, so to speak, by those of the prophets and apostles, or that we have to speak the language of Canaan instead of our own tongue. In that case we should not have subordinated ourselves to them, but at most adorned ourselves with their feathers. In that case nothing would have been done in the interpretation of their words, for we should merely have repeated them parrot-like. Subordination, if it is to be sincere, must concern the purpose and meaning indicated in the ideas, thoughts, and convictions of the prophets and apostles, that is, the testimony which . . . they wish to bear. To this testimony of their words we must subordinate ourselves— and this is the essential form of scriptural exegesis (Barth 1956: 718)

I like this view of exegesis. It might save us from a dangerous fundamentalism (in the newer sense of the word 'fundamental', negative connotations remaining. It encourages an intelligent grappling and struggle with scripture, a humility in contrast to an over-sure knowing. Thank you Barth.

Face to face...

This is very beautiful:



Someone has said that man’s most ultimate and deepest loss is the lost face of God. By the same token, when God would reveal himself to his people as Redeemer, he instructs Moses to pronounce upon them the following benediction:
       
The Lord bless thee and keep thee: The Lord make his face to shine upon thee, And be gracious unto thee: The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace  (Num. 6: 23 f.).


In this context, Emil Brunner, in a beautiful figure, compares God in the act of revelation to “a tall man, (who) stoops down to a little child and lowers Himself upon His knee, so that the child may look into His face” (Offenbarung and Vernunft, Zurich, 1941, p. 413). For the same reason, he also feels, the Bible, when it would represent the final revelation of God to man, that consummation of personal meeting, speaks of a seeing “face to face” (ibid., p. 185).



This is indeed the end of all revelation, to see the face of God. But this final disclosure, this eschatological revelation, has already broken in upon man in the person of Jesus Christ, “...in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Col. 2:9). God, in himself, is the invisible One, whom no one at anytime has seen or can see; but he has shined in our [p.57] hearts, Paul tells us, to give the light of the knowledge of his glory in the face of Jesus Christ (II Con 4:6). “He that hath seen me,” said Jesus, “hath seen the Father” (John 14:8, 9). Because God is personal, the final revelation of himself is a person.

Paul K. Jewett, “Special Revelation as Historical and Personal,” Carl F.H. Henry, ed., Revelation and the Bible. Contemporary Evangelical Thought. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1958 / London: The Tyndale Press, 1959. pp.45-57.

Is Messy Church - Church?

Messy Church
It is a half-way meeting point between the church and local people?
Is it a stepping-stone for the non-churched to church?
It is church? What is church? Emmm - ecclesiology definitions?
Do people hope attendees will 'graduate' to Sunday church or to Alpha, Christianity Explored etc?
Can this work? Are they available at 10:30 on a Sunday? Can they adapt from 'Messy' culture to defined shape/liturgy?
Do they sense the ownership on a Sunday that they have experienced on a Saturday or mid-week or do they feel dis-empowered?
Are people concerned that this is just a way to get them to attend church 'real'?

Surely, we are to develop messy church as church in its own right, rather than as a precursor to Sunday church?
Develop and disciple people there, link on to other events, small groups etc.
It is not a bridge but it is church in another style.

Is it a Fresh expression of church, in effect?
It is outward-focussed.
It is another congregation - there will be messy overspill into other aspects of church life.

Is it a related but fully-functioning church with its own leadership team and festivals and gatherings and even its own 'Mass'. Where can it go? The possibilities are endless and very exciting! Discipling can go on. Encounters with Jesus are happening!

It is indeed post-modern, it will start where people are at. It will look at where God is already at work in their lives. What does discipleship and nurturing look like in this context?

In Lichfield, they are working out where they might take Messy Church, pulling on the energies and expertise of current Messy Church workers and theologians.

Messy church is constantly evolving. The Holy Spirit is in this. Can we keep up? What's next for children who out-grow the crafts - what might Messy Youth look like? How is it all financed? What about timings/food etc?

Still working my way through the Barth, Brunner debate but finding such jewels

It is not the right human thoughts about God which form the content of the Bible, but the right divine thoughts about men. The Bible tells us not how we should talk with God but what he says to us; not how we find the way to him, but how he has sought and found the way to us; not the right relation in which we must place ourselves to him, but the covenant which he has made with all who are Abraham’s spiritual children and which he has sealed once and for all in Jesus Christ. It is this, which is within the Bible. The world of God is within the Bible.


Karl Barth. 

Nature and grace again

Barth and Brunner

College is facilitating my blogging.

So I continue to converse with my conservative evangelical brothers and sisters in ways which are always fruitful, for me, anyway. Like 'iron sharpening iron', I seem to grow from these kinds of dialogues. I have had reason to consider often the debate between nature and grace. I have looked at Hooker and his influence on the beast that we understand as Anglicanism. He was revered just the other week as we remembered him for his contribution as we prayed the daily office in the morning. It would seem for him that there is something inherent within 'man' by which he can know something of God, that there is in his nature a 'lawe of natural reason'.

Calvin or at least polarised versions of his methodology seem to wrestle with this, finding nothing in man but a depravity since the fall.

Barth, it would seem, with his Christology from above, understands knowledge of God as an act of pure revelation from the Holy Spirit and Brunner, once a missionary in Japan writes that:

"The relationship between God and man can never be described in terms of the sole efficacy of God, because God's creation of man posits from the beginning a relationship of mutality. This means, and it is God's will, that the divine actions with regard to man always respect man's subjectivity. Also God's acts of grace are not a manipulation of man, but an intercourse with him. This intercourse is the opposite of manipulation, because through it God's Word of love changes man's defiance into voluntary obedience. . . . God is always concerned that man, even as a sinner, be not overwhelmed, but addressed as a subject. The decisive fact behind the concept of Anknüpfung is that God always approaches man by addressing him" (Brunner, Der Mensch im Widerspruch, p. 553). 


My own experiences in working alongside those without Christian faith, finds me praying that God might do his thing and lead people towards him by his Spirit but I look also for 'a point of contact', now whether I am understanding the theory that has developed around this term fully, I am hoping to set right, well, to develop, anyway.

So I now begin three weeks of study (deadline pressing) on 'point of contact' theory and particularly the positions taken by Karl Barth and Emil Brunner. As I engaged with David Ould over in Sydney on the nature of God's grace and our nature, I hoped to be in a better position to answer his questions regarding my position on this issue. I hope that once I have spent a little more time considering these things, I might be able to hazard a guess as to what such thinking might do for modern missiological praxis. I have some suspicions about what I hope to have confirmed but as with any of these things, i am open to suggestions and critiques.


Any books, blogs or articles you can recommend would be greatly appreciated.

The Chandlers are free

Common grace and mission. God's church.

So there has been some reaction to my idea that God is at work in the world, which is what I am trying to articulate.

I wrote a recent essay, reflecting on my experiences in working with secular organisations, over the summer, that whilst people might not proclaim the faith, they do exhibit the behaviours of a compassionate God by his common grace and 'do something that promotes the agenda of [God],...and magnify the emphasis on God’s sovereignty and grace.' (Spina, The Faith of the Outsider, 10).


I can not help but think that God is at work in the lives of those who do not acknowledge him, after all he loved us before the foundation of the world, long before we ever knew to love him in return. If we are going to reach people in mission, if God is going to reach people in mission, is it really that we are to begin with the utter depravity that exists in humanity (Calvinism?)? I am trying to think about 'point of contact' theory. Barth knows that we have to acknowledge our own sinfulness and Schleiermacher, for all his heresies, acknowledge too our utter dependence on God and repentance and turning to Christ is at the heart of our 'coming home', but common grace is evident surely in this world?

Am I perhaps simply discovering (as if I didn't already know) that they are never going to make a Calvinist out of me?

Does this mean I am more of an Arminian?

(http://www.etsjets.org/files/JETS-PDFs/12/12-3/12-3-pp143-149_JETS.pdf)

Is prevenient grace what I am looking at?

Today at St John's we were looking at Newbigin and his ideas of the prevenience of the Spirit, some of us were prompted to say (emm,me) "Yes, listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches", for it seems to be saying women should be ordained and consecrated.

Tim is helpful on the slight clanger I made sweeping nuance and particularity aside to say that society has recognised women's leading and perhaps speaks prophetically to the church. Tim points out that society too has also crushed women in their leading, in the days of the early church

Here's Tim Goodbody in full:

"...it is playing into the hands of those like him (+Edward) (see comments here) to say things like "society got there first", especially since scripture and the early church testify to women in leadership, a situation which was (short version) squashed with the advent of the Christian Empire post Constantine. Arguably then society is responsible for the erosion of the role of women in Christian leadership. A liberal approach would say that "society got there first" and is a good reason to admit women to all 3 orders, but that is firstly to ignore plenty of Biblical material affirming women's Christian leadership and secondly to mistake leadership per se as being the same thing as Christian leadership."


I have always made my case from scripture but I am also learning that the world can be in receipt of God's grace and demonstrate it, (if we believe in God's prevenient grace working in the world), (if I am correctly understanding what prevenient grace and common grace are). I have been experimenting with my thinking lately, trying to see where God is at work beyond the church, in the church 'invisible'.

Contemporary Anglican communion.
Is the church ready to see what God might be doing, in his transforming his church by liberating women into leadership roles? We have just lost 5 PEVs. Do they think that they are leaving a disobedient church who is not listening to the Spirit? Or in the consecration and the ordination of women, is the Spirit going ahead and the church catching up, as John Taylor would seem to advocate in the 'Go-between God'. We are being led into the truths that have always been there in scripture by the Spirit. Scripture and Spirit can never be posited against one another - this would be very dodgy pneumatology.

A prevenient Spirit?
Prevenient grace?
God's common grace?

Calvinism? Arminianism? Hermeneutics? God's people? His plan for his Church?

Oh well, there's a few rambling reactions and thoughts for you.

All going on in one way or another here too

I will attend a theological college that teaches about radical justice and post-colonialism and inclusivity...

I really like this. It amuses me, especially his offer of the church secretary post. I like the way she asserts her point-of-view, even if it is in a rather unnerving, monotone voice.

Very weird but rather pertinent.

Not competing with Church Mouse...

...no, just a completely 'not what you are used to post' - the advantages of God giving you a baby daughter on your 30th birthday include your enjoyment of all her future birthday presents. I introduce Barth the hamster.