Norwich Central Baptist Church

2012-01-10T04:44:00.000-08:00

HERALDRY AT NCBC: PART2

(Click to enlarge)

In the second part of this series I want to look at the middle window of the triad of lancet openings at the north end of NCBC’s nave. The dominating motif of this window, although at first sight a little difficult to see, is the depiction of a grapevine whose main branch runs centrally for the full length of the window. Two other branches sprout from the base of the vine and wend their way round the perimeter. Adorning the vine branches are bunches of grapes, leaves and spiraling tendrils.

The vine is, of course, a Biblical metaphor for the church, and it has undoubtedly been used consciously by the creators of the window. The rambling untidy grape vine provides an excellent allegory for the sprawling population of the ekklesia, a religious movement who form a striving tangled chaotic body of variegated traditions, a community with very fuzzy boundaries.

John 15:1-6 sketches an extraordinarily compelling metaphor of Christ as the true vine and his ekklesia as the vine’s branches, organically linked to the life in Him. The vine is a beautiful if untidy example of flora, but beautiful though it may be the Vinedresser (God) is primarily looking for it to produce the fruit of the vine, namely, the bunches of grapes we can see in our stained glass window (see Matt 7:16-20,Luke 6:44, Luke 13:5-9, Gal 5:22)

Interestingly, the central branch hangs with unripe green grapes whereas the perimeter vines hang with ripe purple grapes. My interpretation of this contrast between ripe and unripe fruit is that it carriers a challenging almost self-deprecating message: The central vine represents the ekkelsia at NCBC who are being summoned to look to the ripening of their own fruit and not to that of unidentified surrounding churches whose fruit is shown, for comparison, to be already ripe.

The Biblical passages I have quoted contain stark and terrifying warnings about the consequences of not bearing fruit and subsequently being cut off. I myself have very general ideas about just what constitutes the fruit God is looking for (see Gal 5:22). I do not I accept that this fruit is confined to a particular sectarian realization of Christianity. But no matter how general that fruit may be the warnings in scripture about failure to bring forth this fruit is extremely disquieting. And yet imagine a world without the fruits mentioned in Gal 5:22 – that is without love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness – it would be hell. Without this fruit the consequences are indeed as grave as the Bible suggests.

The picture of the vine helps us to contemplate the profound truth of dependency: Everything about us is dependent upon a myriad conditionalities as supplied by providence – we cannot claim our lives to be logical truisms; we can only lay claim to life being a conditional truism. Should any of the relevant conditions be cut off, then our existence is called into question.

In what I take to be master stroke the creators of the window have sharply reminded us of our existential dependency. The base of the vine is shown as if it has been cut, forcefully reminding us that we cannot take our physical and moral life for granted; we are the subject of numerous providences anyone of which if removed from the equation of life would bring our physical and moral life to an end.

Our greatest fear is loss of the fruit of the harvest (see Matt 3:10, Luke 3:9). The Biblical passages may be disquieting, but if they where anything less than highly provocative they would lose their gravitas, a gravitas that is so badly needed to keep our minds focused on what is of eternal value.

In the next part I will be looking at the coats of arms and other paraphernalia that adorn the central vine.

2011-12-12T10:09:00.000-08:00

HERALDRY AT NCBC: PART 1.

The Mystery of NCBC's Stained Glass

In this series I want to take a closer look at the stained glass heraldry in the window at the north end of NCBC’s “nave” (See picture above). These windows, I assume, were added when the church was built circa 1952.

As I have remarked before, the church congregation of 1952 thought of themselves as pillars of society (and at that time still were); this fact, I submit, is reflected in the stained glass motifs of the window above, as we shall see. Since 1952 Christian culture has undergone huge shifts, especially during the 1960s when Christian fundamentalism and a vigorous secular liberalism separated out in the centrifuge of rapid change. The 60 year gap since these motifs were installed is effectively a much longer time span than it would be in periods when change was sluggish.

It is no surprise, then, that as far as NCBC’s Joe and Josephine Pugh are concerned the meaning of these windows and above all the rationale that motivated them is all but lost in the mists of time; to most people they are just a pretty pattern of colours. In fact Christian fundamentalists who have shrunk their epistemic horizon and purged their world of all that they don’t want to understand, would very likely underrate the spirituality of the peoples that built the impressive edifice which now hosts NCBC.

What, then, did these windows mean in 1952? Perhaps there are documents somewhere revealing just what motivated the 1952 builders to install these windows and just how they thought about then. To be honest ~~I’m too lazy~~ I lack the time to go on a long paper chase with no guarantee of a successful find at the end of it. In any case the ambient weltanshauug and mores of a culture often don’t get recorded as at the time they seem too self evident and axiomatic to need it. Also, the people of the day may be unable to consciously articulate the reason for the appeal of certain motifs; for them they just feel right. Thus, the historian has to embark on the hazardous business of trying to read between the lines of history in order to reconstruct the deeper rationale that motivated the lives of distant ancestors.

So, as is my usual practice when the pressure is on to come up with answers, I will simply have to give it my best shot. I’m not going to spend and inordinate amount of time on the subject, but I will simply express where my understanding is at the moment. I will decode the meaning of the window as best I can with the help of some heraldry web sites and my knowledge of history such as it is. Some of my conclusions may be fanciful and with about as much chance of being right as the interpretations of pre-historians when they are faced with something as distant in time and culturally enigmatic as Silbury hill ... for me it so often feels like that. In fact I’m reminded of the cautionary tale of H. G. Wells’ Time Traveler who found himself in an alien world and with little to go on he attempted to make sense of what he saw:

As I stood there in the gathering dark I thought that in this simple explanation I had mastered the problem of the world – mastered the whole secret of these delicious people…. Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough –as most wrong theories are! (The Time Machine, Chapter: “The Sunset of Mankind”)

..so at least there is the bonus of being in the middle of what feels like a scientific romance with all the sense of adventure and mystery that goes with it.

2011-07-26T03:23:00.000-07:00

A BAPTIST CATHEDRAL

A visit to Silver road Baptist church, Norwich, revealed a classic non-conformist pattern: After the repeal of the Test Act in 1828, non-conformists quickly became recognised and respected pillars of English society. They started building churches that made use of time honoured establishment church architectural details and they erected monumments celebrating the life of those in their midst who were well placed in society. This practice seems to have lasted up until the 1950s: However, at Silver road it is the first time I have seen the use of Romanesque rather than Gothic (or classical) details in a non-conformist building. Perhaps they were attempting to go one better and create the ambiance of the cathedrals, many of which are old enough to preserve details as early as the 12th century. These baptists no longer saw themselves as remnant upstarts or new kids on the block, but part of the broad swathe that Christianity cuts through history. Today's marginalised evangelical churches would never dream of aping these prestigious styles.

Romanesque windows on a pseudo transept.

Left: A façade with the unmistakable air of a Romanesque cathedral and a hint of Gothic Chartres thrown in for good measure.

Right: Celebrating civic links.

2011-06-04T12:14:00.000-07:00

ACADEMICS: BEYOND OUR KEN

Something is Eating Ham

In this Network Norwich & Norfolk article James Knight continues to development his theme of there being a connection between New Wave Atheism and Christian Fundamentalism. Almost to order Beyond Our Ken Ham publishes this post on his blog. Ken’s post provides both evidence for James’ thesis and YEC antipathy toward academia, a matter that was the subject of my last NCBC blog post.

Anyway, here is my comment to James article:

Hi James,

Once again I think you are onto something here, re: the connection between gnu atheism and Fundamentalism.

Unless you have already seen it, you might be interested in this link to Ken Ham’s Young Earth Creationist blog:

http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2011/06/01/i-agree-with-the-atheists/

Here Ken actually says he agrees, yes, *agrees*, with atheists and instead rails against “compromising” Christian academics who in the main believe in an old Earth. He goes on to say “What a sad day when the atheists understand Christianity better than so many Christians do”. What he means of course is that the atheists he is referring to understand his version of Christianity! They certainly would understand it better if many of them are ex-YECs. Simplifying a bit: One might claim that gnu-atheists are YECs with the signs reversed; at the very least there definitely is a connection between YEC fundamentalism and gnu atheism.

In the blog post Ken talks about Christian academics who “clearly compromise God’s word with man’s fallible beliefs about evolution, millions of years etc”. And yet he seems utterly unaware of man’s fallible interpretations of the Bible. Ken says “It is so obvious from Scripture that God created a literal Adam and Eve”. What he means here is that in spite of what they may say YECs give lip service to the question of interpretation and meaning. For Ken, meaning extraction is unproblematic and obvious and thus his words effectively become God’s Words. No surprise, then, that at the end of the article Ken can accuse Christian academics of heinous sin: He accuses them of attacking Jesus Christ and telling them they “need to fall on their knees before a Holy God and repent of their attack on the Word”. If one’s Biblical hermeneutic leads one to closely identify one’s own words with God’s words it is no surprise that one is then going to believe in the Divine authority of one’s own opinions. Consequently, Ken starts speaking as if he is God’s judge on Earth with the authority to impugn the consciences of Christian academics.

On the whole it all goes to show just how much Ken and his followers have isolated themselves from mainstream Christianity and in particular Christian academics.

I’ve been thinking about just what characteristic sufficiently defines the "fundamentalist" mind set. I'm coming to the opinion it is something like this: The common trait of fundamentalists is that they all closely identify their words with God's words (Of which my previous comment on Ken Ham gives an example). A fundamentalist, then, is someone who believes in the Divine authority of his own opinions.

2011-05-28T10:41:00.000-07:00

ESTABLISHMENT SCIENCE vs. YOUNG EARTH CREATIONISM AT NCBC

When I first clapped eyes on this stained glass heraldry at NCBC I never guessed that it may be providing a big clue about fundamentalist resurgence since the 60s

On Sunday (22nd May) we had two excellent presentations on the creation and science question, one from an establishment academic and the other from a career scientist. The views they expressed were sympathetic to the established science account of origins. However, they expressed these views with a very Biblical fear and trembling and with an exemplary blend of commitment and understanding.

The event was largely a response to the talk we had in March from a Young Earth Creationist. Toward the end of his talk this speaker was very clear about the spiritual virtues of YEC and the demerits of not agreeing with it. The recommended book “Deluded by Darwinism” said it all. How is it that we have arrived at a juncture where the Christian fundamentalist is so polarized against establishment science that he or she sees it as a symptom of gross spiritual failure not only on the part of secular society but also of Christians who hold the established view?

If this post I wrote in December 09 is anything to go by then it seems that there was a time in our church when the YEC view wasn’t even on the horizon. In the linked post I reported on a church magazine article dated Christmas 1939 and written by the then Minister of the church the Rev. Gilbert Laws. The article is a reflection on man’s position in the cosmos. The most notable thing about it is that it displays no consciousness whatever of a dichotomy between established science and the fundamentalist account of origins. In fact Laws writes as if YEC doesn’t even exist; he takes for granted the science of the day and gives no cognizance of any issue between scientific cosmogony and Genesis. Laws’ assumed brief was to cope with the latest science by making Christian sense of it but without contradicting it.

Gilbert Laws was the minister of a church whose prestige and influence had increased steadily from the start of the industrial revolution. In fact since the repeal of the Test Act of 1828 Laws could look back on a church whose members included MPs, Sheriffs, and successful business grandees. By the early 1950s the Baptist church on Duke Street was still a respected pillar of society. Today visible manifestation of this history of civic involvement is evidenced by the stained glass heraldry in the north window of the church, heraldry celebrating civic connections. Moreover, after the bombing of 1943 the 1952 rebuild brought together a nonconformist classicism with established church gothic styles. It replaced an 1811 Regency styled “classical temple”, a style harking back to the days of a-vant-garde nonconformity. All this says a lot about how the church thought of itself in the years immediately following the war. They were patricians in a society in which they believed. In one sense they were that society

What then has happened between then and now? The quick answer to that question is: “The Nineteen Sixties”. The sixties downturn in church attendance and the move away from traditional patrician values was accompanied by a resurgence of a recrudescent fundamentalism. That fundamentalism was often accompanied by a literal interpretation of Genesis, a view well expressed by the fathers of contemporary YEC John Whitcomb and Henry Morris in their 1961 publication “The Genesis Flood”.

The slip and slide of the church as it shifted from an establishment position to the margins of society made it more attractive to unintellectual dissenters than it did to pillars of society. In particular scientific cosmogony, as is evident even from Gilbert Laws' sermon, left mankind with a rather puzzling picture of reality; science’s analytical elementalism looked more profane than it did sacred. The average Joe Pugh who was fervent about his Christian faith, unintellectual and profoundly ignorant of science, could make little sense of scientific results. His church now had less stake in society but he was too conservative to become a radical political defector and agitator, and so he became a protestor against the academic establishment. Joe Pugh’s cosmological tastes had the touch and feel of Kincaidian kitsch rather than the dispassionate universe depicted by JM Turner. Joe Pugh looked for a vision of the universe that had a sentimental ambiance and the cozy warmth of the living room. In contrast J M Turner’s presents a disinterested world of fuzzy ill defined boundaries, and potentially threatening to boot. Unlike Gilbert Laws Joe Pugh wasn’t going to cope with establishment science; rather he was going to rebel against it. In its place Pugh wanted something that domesticated and sanctified an apparently impersonal and profane looking cosmos. YEC was the perfect deal for him. YEC was used as a badge of identification that sent out messages that were the very opposite of the heraldry we see at NCBC.

For Christian fundamentalists YEC was exploited as a reactionary tribal marker that was an affront to established science. It was a form of theological punk; a safety pin and garbage bag “science” that told academia, loud an clear, that they were no longer being listened to. That the neo-fundmentalist’s identity was bound up with YEC meant that they were not going to be neither here nor there about their account of creation. They had far too much at stake for that. Rather, they were going to get uptight about it, especially with Christians who didn't assent to it. For to them it was “faith test” material. Like the heraldry we find at NCBC YEC was a statement about what these people stood for – therefore Christians weren’t supposed to prevaricate about it and a Christian couldn’t believe in an old Earth without being thought of as compromising. “Old Earth or Young Earth” was no theoretical nuance that could be discussed coolly; agreeing to differ has never been an option with fundamentalists.

Today Joe Pugh’s strong belief in literalism is self affirming – the harder he believes it the truer it seems to become – especially if he is surrounded by a heroic sacred and remnant community that are all doing the same. Anyone who doesn't affirm this belief will at best be looked at askance and at worst be considered apostate. And so we find ourselves in this polarized position today, a position where language like “Deluded by Darwinism” is de rigueur amongst YECs, thus upping the ante and feeding the process of polarization.

Polarisation passion feeds. Passion polarisation breeds. Polarisation is passion's cause, for crusade and holy wars.

The fundamentalist's kitsch view of the cosmos has only one blot on the horizon: Science.

2011-05-03T11:22:00.000-07:00

SPIRITUAL SPIN FAILS TO DECEIVE

Fideists would have us going round in circles

James Moar, who attends NCBC, has sent me an email. In writing this email he is showing great intellectual integrity as he very succinctly and cogently sums up some deep challenges to Christian culture. He has given me permission to publish it here:

Hi Tim,

I'm having real issues with Christianity at the moment, mostly centred around how a world with God in it would be different from a world without God. Note that I'm not fussed about answered or unanswered prayer here, just about God's demonstrable action, something that is insisted on throughout the Bible. God does several things which are done (to quote a repeating line in Ezekiel) "so that they may know that I am YHWH". But where are these now? Incidentally, the notion that God has apparently done lots of things so that people may believe somewhat rubbishes the idea of epistemic distance. Why bring the Israelites out of Egypt to display his power if he's not prepared to display it in other ways?

There are many accounts of "answers to prayer" that have spectacular odds if they're coincidences, but consider how many prayers are made and suddenly the odds of any given one receiving some sort of answer by blind chance is much less. It's the same for general "miracles" that are highly improbable; given the amount of Christians worldwide, the odds of some of them experiencing coincidences go down a fair bit. We just ignore all the unanswered stuff (or the umiraculous stuff) because the "miraculous" draws our attention and allows us to make a story out of it.

To give a concrete example, Casanova considered himself to be watched over by some sort of divine provenance because he always seemed to get out of the scrapes he was in. But consider the amount of people who tried to live his sort of lifestyle, and the odds of one getting through it to the extent he did become much less surprising. In the same way, there was a philosopher who looked a painting of Zeus worshippers who prayed and survived a shipwreck. His response was "where is the painting of those who prayed and drowned?" We seem to blind ourselves to the true odds of something purely to give it an explanation other than chance.

So where is God in the middle of all this? My question is, as "miracles" seem arbitrary at times, so is there really anything driving them? Have we just plucked the successes from a huge experimental population and called it miraculous?

Also, people's response in "worship" at church seems somewhat artificial; people are a lot more "worshipful (handwaving, tongues etc) with songs and situations that they know. Also, those who pray out loud in services do it a lot. all this makes me think "learned behaviour" rather than the movement of the Spirit or a true connection with God. Which again leaves me wondering where God is during it all.

Any thoughts? I'm beginning to think that Christianity is just a package of group behaviours and narrative weaving based on a narrow selection of anecdotes.

Thanks,

James

I have had some contact with James, both by email and in person. I am not going to publish any outcome of our discussions until I feel that a hiatus has been arrived at. But let me just publish my provisional response to James before I got down to anything more serious:

You have laid out some serious challenges here. I hope nobody is going foist on you a "counselling" diagnosis by suggesting that you have some deep spiritual problem that needs "exorcising" and thus makes this a pretext for bypassing issues that are not just yours alone but should be questions others ought to be asking as well. I'm all for a self critical faith. Anyway, this is just to say that we can think through these things together, because you have made some very good points there. They must be taken seriously and not fobbed off as just "head knowledge affairs" that are inferior to "esoteric" spiritual knowledge of God.

What I had in mind as I wrote that first response was the fact that esoteric spiritual knowledge is often claimed to be the sacred way to rise above the sort of “profane” intellectual challenge James raises so compellingly. Having seen the way the “Jesus is in my heart” ethos is so often (ab)used to not only provide an excuse for a fideist bypass to difficult questions, but also as the thin end of a gnostic, elitist and authoritarian wedge, I deeply suspect the authenticity of much Christianity that is sells its self from a platform of a “head vs. heart” paradigm. This paradigm is often supplemented by a fundamentalist reading of the Bible, giving rise to a toxic blend of gnosto-legalism.

The created order does not have clumsy welded joins; the empirical and the analytical cannot be separated from the spiritual any more that it is possible to separate the Bible from its cosmic context: The Bible is itself an empirical object and it is so integrated with its context that Bible and cosmos form part of a seamless body of revelation. As my friend Jim Harries puts it “Meaning = Text + Context”.

2011-03-01T15:00:00.000-08:00

ODE TO SECTARIANISM

For Classix Nouveaux fans here is what claims to be a rare low budget original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAiKC1FEc-A&feature=related

Another broken dream, they say all the time

Sorry if I can't be as you'd like to find

If we could only see

Things as they're meant to be

But we believe in dreams

Satisfaction - is it a dream

No distraction - is it a dream

No more fighting - is it a dream

No backbiting - is it a dream

Promises broken, it's an imperfect world

Harsh words are spoken though they weren't meant to hurt

If we could only see

Things as they're meant to be

But no, it's just a dream

See also here and here.

2011-03-01T06:34:00.000-08:00

YET ANOTHER CHRISTIAN SECT

Coming out of church last Sunday I found a small booklet carefully folded into the door handle of my car. All the cars in the church car park had been similarly provided for. It turned out to be a tract from yet another Christian splinter group. That such a group treats a mainstream Baptist church as a mission field is a fairly sure sign that this group is likely to think of its self as a spiritually superior and holy remnant. A proliferation of this kind of sectarianism has, needless to say, been a feature of Christianity for at least as far back as the reformation. But who were these latest sectarians? Were they from the Strict and Particular Baptist sect who are housed in very small building over the road? Not likely I thought as their misrepresentation of predestination tends to suppress proactive evangelistic efforts. In fact the tract contained none of the buzz words and hobby horses that I’m familiar with given my acquaintance with the exclusive sect/cult world. I could therefore see no obvious connections with any of the Christian sects I know about.

However I did eventually manage to trace a connection to a religious web site which I will not link to here. All I want to do now is to make some general comments about the phenomenon we have here. The sect appear to have no obviously glaring Christian unorthodoxies. Whenever that is the case of an exclusive Christian sect the next question to ask is what particular distinctive hobby horses have they supplemented to the faith in order to define their group identity? This sort of sect will take a perfectly good doctrine, over interpret it with some fine tuned meanings, thus perverting its significance and loading it with the sect’s proprietary understandings. This reinterpretation is crucial to the dynamic of the sect, for their distinctiveness in this matter helps give them a sense of spiritual superiority and a group identity. But above all it gives them a raison d’être and mission in life as they then have in their hands a measure that can be used to faith test other Christian groups, check they are up to standard, sort out the sheep from the goats and proselytise the goats. The sect’s self image as the privileged faithful remnant is thus reinforced.

So how do these principles manifest themselves with my anonymous “car park” sect? What particular hobby horse do they use to pin a charge of spiritual inferiority on other Christians? Now, any Christian worth his or her salt understands in their inner most being that Jesus is Lord and thus honours Him accordingly with their life. However, this particular sect succeeds in evacuating the meaning of this doctrine by turning it into matter of external observance; Viz: Unless one uses the word “Lord” mantra like, one’s salvation is certainly in danger. As the tract puts it:

…the masses… speak of Him as Jesus without adding His rightful title. This way of speaking must be very grievous to any true child of God. It is the speech of unbelievers… only those who personally know and love Him as “Lord” will confess Him as such… the enemies of our Lord only call Him “Jesus”.

So there you have it: According to this sect it is not enough to love Jesus or treat him as Lord or refer to Him by name: What’s in your heart is of little value to this sect unless it is supplemented by the verbal use of the word “Lord” because otherwise you are in danger of being regarded as one of the unbelieving masses; in fact never ever refer to Jesus as Jesus because that’s what His enemies do! Such is the perverse thinking of a legalistic sect who have such a low view of the Grace of a God who adopts as children all who call on Him. Seldom can such sects get past the outward man and the suffocating trappings of a physical piety; in this case those trappings include "a way of speaking". Those external trappings are necessary to the sect’s survival as it allows some religious wallah to check up on its members and to make sure they are in line with the sect’s practices and teachings. For them Christianity is not about an inward relationship with the Father but rather about obeying their strict articlisation of the faith.

2011-02-19T02:41:00.000-08:00

COUNSELLORS, NOT DICTATORS
We recently had a speaker at NCBC who took a very hard "Young Earth Creationist" line. This has generated some correspondence. Below I reproduce one of the emails I sent out. I have amended the email to make it suitable for posting:

I think our epistemic limitations are with us in everything - even our grasp of the kernel truths we cherish most, like, repentance, forgiveness, sacrifice, and salvation by grace etc. (See my last post here) Any attempt to underwrite what we believe with the claim that it is "God's Word" ignores the truism that we are always ontologically other than God; we supply meaning to the bare "Word" and whilst we believe that a loving God is ultimately sovereign over our perception of meaning (via the Holy Spirit) we realise that this doesn't entail our infallibility in supplying it. The upshot is that there is, or should be, a healthy tension between knowing that a loving God is the sovereign manager of our perceptions and the undoubted fallibility of these perceptions. The indwelling Word supplies meaning, but I think He is a counsellor, not a dictator. Therefore whenever we proffer a message we too come in the role of counsellors not dictators.

The fuss over this YEC business is, I suggest, an excellent outworking and test case of this very tension. The differences we have in our fellowship are a sure sign of our fallibility. But the differences will only become sharp and angry if one or both parties think they somehow have direct access to the Word and attempt to account for those who differ from them as being compromisers with bad consciences. If an attempt to spiritually mandate YEC is made, it will inevitably cause tension.

However - and this is important - I don't see the differences being a problem at all...unless...unless...unless one party is utterly unaware that their beliefs are subject to epistemic uncertainty for reasons I have outlined above. I would hate to see the creation question to go underground simply because one party has such a profound epistemic arrogance that whenever the subject is mentioned a self righteousness kicks which will naturally be the source of hard feeling. Have you noticed that the more fundamentalist a fellowship is the deeper and nastier the disagreements? That's because both sides are sure they are on God's side.

If the Creation issue must surface in order to act as a test case and expose a deep seated sectarian and epistemic arrogance in our fellowship then I suggest that it is better to air it rather than for it to fester underground. People who are aware of their epistemic fallibility can agree to differ, but for those who "know" they are right, "agreeing to differ" is anathema - and it will show!

***

Note: The YEC philosophy seems to have come to the fore amongst evangelical fellowships since the sixties; it is worth comparing the views of our pre-war minister Gilbert Laws who appears to have accepted and came to terms with the findings of science. See here for a post I did on Rev. Laws views. Relevant to my comment above that "for those who know they are right, agreeing to differ is anathema - and it will show!" is an email I had from a member of an exclusive and exacting Christian sect who happened to visit the church on the evening of the talk. Almost to order he provided the expected response: He was appalled by the largely polite allowance that was given to the disagreements that surfaced in the Q&A session after the talk. This is what he wrote:

"How many spoke for and in the Lord in your meeting today? 1 may be 2 or 3? Any? Or was it all objective knowledge concerning this and that like the the age of the earth and you agreed to disagree yet still not touch the living Christ. Did you practice the all inclusive priesthood? "

His sect has a view of man that approximates toward gnosticism: "particles of spirit" are trapped in a "soulish" world and by blending with the sect can one best learn how to "release" the spirit. What he calls "objective knowledge", is, of course, considered inferior to the inner spiritual knowledge (or gnosis) available to the initiates of the sect - only they have the best chance of "touching the living Christ" via the sects teaching which imparts spiritual gnosis. And of course amongst this small group, whose number in Norwich is barely measured in tens, a uniformity of opinion reigns - as is the wont of exclusive sects where epistemic over-confidence is normative and the fellowship pressures are great (in this particular case those pressures are subliminally coded by my corresponded in the expression "practice the all inclusive priesthood")

Oh the childish arrogance of it all! It's all too human and predictable!

2011-02-05T10:37:00.000-08:00

THE COOLEST EQUATION EVER

The picture on the left shows me as I appear on the "Vulnerable Mission web site here. What am I pointing to? That will take a little telling.

Long ago it was obvious to me that the texts of the Bible, in fact the text of any book, remain as meaningless marks on a surface unless those marks are the trigger for a very proactive process of interpretation. This is how I put it in 2001:

For some the issue is simple; it is simply a case of whether you are prepared to believe what the Bible clearly means and what it clearly means is, of course, what they believe it to mean. They think their interpretations to be relatively free of ambiguity and there is therefore perhaps more than a hint that those who disagree with these "plain meanings" are not doing so with a clear conscience. But as Luther's faux pas* has shown, Biblical interpretation is not to be trivialised and taken for granted. The questions of Biblical style and where and how it uses metaphor, literality, poetry, narrative, symbolism etc. are sometimes difficult to answer and impinge upon the extraction of Biblical meaning. Moreover, one extracts that meaning through the complexities, contextuality, informality, fussiness, historicity, and flexibility of common language and this binds the Bible to the ambiguities of the world of which it is part.

There are not many "meta statements" in the Bible telling us what "reading mode" one is to use to interpret it. In fact, it is impossible for any document, even a legal, one to contain exhaustive instruction on how it should be read, because such "meta-statements" must themselves be read in some manner; if each set of reading mode instructions were to have their own information on how they should be read, then one would get an impracticably large regress. Thus, to inform its readers the Bible must rely on them being suitably primed in the first place, although, no doubt, the Bible itself becomes, in time, a source of further priming. The process of interpretation necessarily requires that the interpreter bring something to it to make it happen. It is a process that cannot start or continue in a cultural and cognitive vacuum and requires not only a "bootstrap" to get it going, but also, I suspect, continuous input to maintain it and keep it in progress.

Without the act of interpretation scripture remains a sequence of meaningless symbols and the authority of scripture cannot be applied. Statements of the form "The Bible says so & so" are really short hand for the more subjective "My interpretation of the Bible is so & so". This does not mean, of course, that Biblical meanings are arbitrary or relative, as there are such things as right and wrong interpretations. However, whether right or wrong interpretations are reached depends on a complex of contingencies and conditions regarding the experience and propensities of the reader. Thus, whether the application of scriptural authority is either blocked or facilitated is a function of the interpreter who brings to his Bible reading various cognitive qualities; his culture, his beliefs, his personal history, his knowledge of the physical world, and above all his spirituality, all of which have bearing upon on the act of interpretation. For example, on the subject of the Solar System Luther brought to bear his respect for the astronomical establishment along with some very elementary physics and these probably coloured his interpretation of the relevant Scriptures. The conscious mind draws on a variety of resources when it makes its interpretations and in the case of Luther's comments about Copernicus those resources betrayed him. There is a deep lesson here about the nature of the rational consciousness which is God's gift to each of us: We have far less control than we think over the mental processes and resources from which our decisions flow. Yes, we are free to make this and that choice but self-referencing problems limit just what we are able to do with the complex mental skein which is the source of those decisions. When I think of this I think fearfully of Romans 9:15-23; but then I think of Col. 2:13, Eph. 5:14 and the like, and hope returns. God is sovereign over the countless strands of events that comprise and influence a neural end product that is staggeringly complex and yet not complex enough for full self-understanding and control.

That Biblical interpretation is a process, which harnesses a diverse range of non-trivial resources is an implicit challenge to the notion that the Bible is somehow an alternative source of information which competes with experience of the wider creation: For it is clear that our ability to understand scripture in the first place is influenced by an interaction with the creation as a whole. It is, therefore, wrong to suggest that the Bible and the rest of creation are two independent revelations which, when they apparently contradict, means that precedence is to be given to one over the other. Typically, in fundamentalist circles it is considered a virtue to give certain traditional interpretations of the Bible automatic precedence when these conflicts arise. But the messages of the Bible and the world around it are subtly intermingled and blended, and it is impossible to correctly interpret one without the other. These two sources of revelation are interdependent and together they form a single self-consistent body of testimony revealing something of God Himself and the Grand Rationality of the created order, which He has authored and underwritten. The veracity of these blended revelations is as good as their source, and that source is none other than God Himself, but their effectiveness is only as good as the recipient's willingness to seek the grace to correctly interpret the messages received. Apparent conflicts in the testimonies of the Bible and the rest of creation are not resolved by assuming the superiority of one testimony over the other but by seeking, under grace, to correct the faults in the interpretation of either source.

Now that was a rather long winded explanation wasn’t it? In contrast Vulnerable Mission director Dr. Jim Harries, who also has done a lot of thinking about this subject, has cut this explanation down to an extremely succinct and elegant “equation”, an equation I refer to "Harries Formula". Here it is:

Meaning = Text + Context.

It is this profound formula that I’m pointing to in the picture; in fact it has pride of place on my “Top Gear” cool wall. In this equation all the complexities of the Divinely managed resources of interpretation are embodied in one variable: “Context”. All Christians should learn this formula off by heart; especially the fundamentalists who so readily equate their interpretations and their understandings with the very Words of God. For them there is no context of interpretation. For them God’s Word is acquired very directly without any interpretative hassle. For them the process of acquiring meaning is so often thought of as a trivial process where meanings are “plain” and by “plain meanings” they mean, of course, their own meanings. If fundamentalists hold a suite of erroneous and proprietary ideas they are very likely to be unable to identify them as their ideas at all and instead take it for granted that they are the very Words of God to be obeyed and believed or else. Out of fear of Divine displeasure their self critical faculties are thus utterly hamstrung and they are unable correct themselves. Self criticism and epistemic humility are foreign to them.

* Footnote: Luther was alleged to have said of Copernicus: "The fool wants to overturn the whole science of astronomy, but according to the Scripture, Joshua bade the Sun and not the Earth to stand still."

2011-01-05T15:43:00.000-08:00

THE FOUR-TO-SIX-MIX REMAINS STEADY

At NCBC's first prayer meeting of 2011 I counted 12 males and 19 females. (excluding employed male leadership which is overwhelmingly biased toward males) That ratio rounds nicely to 4:6. It's remarkable how averages like this hold up over all causes. Koeslter would be proud (See his "The Roots of Coincidence", page 26-27 )

See this post for more details.

2010-12-04T09:46:00.000-08:00

ANOTHER MANIFESTATION OF THE LOGOS/MYTHOS TENSION

An African Indigenous Church meeting for Worship

Here is a link to the notes I compiled for my talk at NCBC on Vulnerable Mission. Vulnerable Mission is an approach to mission developed by Jim Harries in Africa. Roughly speaking the Vulnerable Missionary avoids being a channel of Western culture, language and wealth and instead seeks to work beside his native colleagues using the language and resources they already have. This circumvents some of the problems that arise when Western backed mission becomes bound up with crude attempts to graft the methods and resources of the industrialized world upon African culture, a grafting that often comes to grief in rural Africa because it fails to cater for vast differences in culture and industrial infrastructure. In this video Jim explains in detail what his work involves.

Jim Harries mission is of particular interest to me because it picks up on a recurrent theme in my thinking; namely, the polarisation between the Logos and Mythos world views. The Logos world view builds models of the world using linguistic tokens and in particular exploits the mechanistic “law and disorder” ontology that seems to be the dominant dynamic of the cosmos. This dynamic facilitates the techno-scientific exploitation we are familiar with. The Mythos world view, on the other hand, is far more intuitive and far less easy to articulate. It resorts to mystical connections with reality via feelings, sensings, epiphanies, revelations, rituals, mysticism, mythology, instincts etc. In contrast to the Logos paradigm which seeks explanation using the elemental and the impersonal, Mythos thinking has a propensity to personify the cosmic dynamic by imputing spiritual significance to the events around us. In its world spirits are pervasive; in other words it is inclined toward animism.

If the “Out of Africa” theory is valid then African culture is far older than the cultures of the northern hemisphere. Migration to northern latitudes was probably inhibited by the ice age and thus it is only relatively recently that the north hosted modern humans. It is in Africa then (and perhaps Australia as well) that human culture finds its roots, in particular, its roots in animism. But the experience of finding roots grates and highlights the existential dissonance present in Western thought. In the industrialized hemisphere there is an instinctual alienation from the anonymous social systems and technology required to administrate huge communities: Firstly, the sheer size of these communities means that it is beyond human cognitive ability to know and identify with everyone in a community; tribal identifications are difficult to foster. Secondly, the paradigm of mechanistic elementalism that facilitates industrialization cuts across preliterate animism, an animism that is so natural to the thinking of many aboriginal people, including, it must be said, the religious sensibilities of many Westerners.

The biggest intellectual feat of homo sapiens is not so much the discovery of the laws of physics as it is the ability to comprehend other human psyches – objects which are far more intricate than the relatively elementary models normally dealt with in physics and chemistry. However, humanity doesn’t piece together an understanding of other minds from first principles; when it comes to inter-human relations human beings have a large amount of “hard wired” faculties (like the “language instinct”) dedicated to enabling those relations. These built in social cognitive abilities do such an effective job in facilitating human-human relations that we are unconscious of the underlying complexity of the mental resources they muster, and in most cases this background mental processing only surfaces in our minds as instinctual perceptions. But these instinctual intuitions are extremely important for they make our human relations possible; without them we are autistic. It is no surprise that given this awesome instinctual package of dedicated mental resources for handling the understandding of personality it is very natural to turn the power of this package beyond human society to the cosmos as a whole; very naturally, then, the human mind populates the world with spirits and imputes to it intentional forces. It is second nature for human beings to humanize their environment in this way. In contrast the instrumentalism of science tends to exorcise the animistic dynamic and expels the magical enchantment of religious meanings.

Jim Harries Vulnerable Mission brings him into close contact with an ancient strain of animistic and magical thinking about the cosmos that is often at odds with the successful working of industrial society. Jim’s work with African Indigenous Churches reveals what to Western minds are bizarre practices. But there is no cause for Westerners to feel superior. Animism is not far under the surface of Western society; less than three hundred years ago, well into the Newtonian revolution and the enlightenment, witch hunts were still being conducted in Europe. Moreover, today, many Western Indigenous Churches have a version of Christianity that is weird & wonderful; for example, they may eschew intellectual engagement in favour of a shamanistic relationship with God and Angels mediated through trance like modes of consciousness. (See the video below). They effectively supplement the basic Gospel message of God’s love and sacrificial grace with Gnostic elaborations. In general there is an underlying dissonance in Christian fundamentalist philosophy that manifests itself in a dualistic outlook that sets the material against the spiritual. In contrast the culture of rural Africa harks back to a time when humanity’s world view was less dualistic and more holistic. But the thoroughgoing animism of Africa sits uneasily with techno-scientific mechanism and so it is not surprising that the vestigial animism of the industrial north has resulted in a gnosto-dualist discontinuity in Western religious thinking.

Like gravity and quantum mechanics, science and animism remain as an incommensurable and disunited duality in the West. But the simple mathematical objects of science are too simple to be self-explaining. Science, then, is therefore destined to leave an irreducible logical hiatus in our thought. Self explanation, I submit, is more likely to be found in the a priori complex rather than the simple objects of a law and disorder ontology. The fundamental and necessary incompleteness in scientific explanation leaves a vacuum that those very human abilities for dealing with complexity will rush in to fill; in short Humanity’s personality processing package will readily step into this space with an argument from intentionality. The fundamental incompleteness of scientific explanation will help ensure religion is here to stay; even in the West.

“Angels! Angels! Angels! Angels…” screams Todd Bentley. Weird vestigial animism manifests itself in Western indigenous churches

2010-10-22T09:51:00.000-07:00

STEAM PUNK MUSIC FACTORY

Behind the sacred looking wooden façade of NCBC’s “rood screen” stands a large assemblage of machinery two stories high ; the church organ installed in the early nineteen fifties. It stares everyone in the face Sunday by Sunday, but in spite of that the congregation is only conscious of the all too familiar sound of traditional organ music, music that gives every appearance of not emanating from behind this holy façade, but instead from where the synchronizing initiating action is seen to take place: At the keyboard.

In the Middle Ages the chancel was the sacred domain of the priests. These priests dispensed the sacraments in accord with their divinely ordained authority. The mystique of this authority held the serf congregation in awe and (mostly) in their God ordained place. But how times change. The Protestants who built churches like NCBC had a tradition that was apt to erode the distinction between laity and clergy. But during their socially up and coming years after the repeal of the Test Act, the Protestants often built churches along similar lines to the architectural styles of the established Church of England. They thereby gave themselves the problem of what to do with the chancel as they had no priesthood to make use of it. In NCBC’s case, however, the chancel was half filled with the machinery of music – a large two tare organ containing resonant pipes whose number must run into the hundreds. It is so large that it is one of those machines you can walk around inside of. It is, in fact, a semi-automatic music factory controlled by the human operator stationed at the keyboard.

When music machines were introduced into nonconformist chapels in the nineteenth century, thus serving notice on the traditional music leaders, there was, needless to say, resistance to them. As is so often the case a peripheral matter bound up with convenience and taste was cast in the mold of a vital issue endangering the spiritual life of the church: Charles Jewson, NCBC Church historian, tells us of the stormy introduction of a harmonium in the second half of the 19th century:

The year 1863 saw a revolution in worship, when for the first time, a musical instrument – a harmonium – was introduced into the Chapel with the consent of the Church. Thirteen years before, when the pastor had offered to present such an instrument, Robert Tillyard, a deacon and a leading shoe manufacturer, had raised a strong objection to the introduction of an instrument as “imperiling the rights and spiritual interests of the church.” The idea had been dropped, and James Colman appointed to lead the singing instead.*

When it comes to new innovations the moral of this story seems to be to keep trying until people get used to the idea! However, today things have come full circle: The modern tendency to replace the traditional organ with a leading band is often met with disapproval. But the circle may have turned yet again: I suspect that there are Christians out there for whom the bulky steampunk organs of the past are just too steeped in stultifying tradition to express spiritual life. Thus, any revival of the organ’s fortunes is likely to be greeted with dismay by Christians who instinctually feel that an airy spontaneity and exuberance is a requisite of authentic worship and that this is incompatible with the traditional heavy duty mechanisms associated with large organs. I suspect therefore that the issue of music will, once again, likely be argued from fancied spiritual mandates.

For me the experience of entering the internal world of NCBC’s organ was very reminiscent of my time amongst the fully automatic organs at the Thursford collection (See here). To be frank the experience is slightly unnerving; it reminds me of those last scenes in the Wizard of Oz when an awe aspiring apparition of the Wizard is revealed to be the contrivance of a bumbling man operating some machinery. In some ways the NCBC organ is a fitting symbol of the demise of the medieval priesthood whose mystique of authority, an authority which help sustain it for hundreds of years, was in due course revealed to be merely a contrived interface not unlike the Wizard of Oz.

As I walked round the NCBC organ interior I was struck by the apparent discontinuity between the experience of its music and the mechanisms behind that music; the former is, if the organ is well played, seamlessly integrated into an apparently indivisible experience, whereas the latter is analytic and reductionist. There is a metaphor here for the human psyche: Human experiences are so well fused and orchestrated that their coherence seems axiomatic. And yet get inside the human skull with the latest probing technology and these experiences appear to map, on a point by point basis, to the operations of neurons, connections, signals, fields, neurotransmitters and the like. This dichotomy between the qualities of human experience and their formal tokens realized in matter must, I submit, be accepted and embraced as is. To make full sense of reality both perspectives must be held in the mind as complementary accounts of reality. We must come to terms with both accounts - one perspective should not be done away with at the expense of the other. It is a dichotomy that is an irreducible feature of our world, a dichotomy giving meaning to the cold and heartless formalities of mechanism and yet giving coherent scientific account of the qualia of experience: The formal objects of science give account of our experiences, but those experiences are required to provide science the observations it needs; the relationship between the two is one of mutual dependence.

"I can't see any music in here - just pipes, wires and valves"

*From the Baptist quarterly 1941

2010-09-16T08:31:00.000-07:00

THE FOUR TO SIX MIX

A survey at NCBC last Sunday returned a male to female mix of 37% to 63% . So, after first posting on this subject three years ago what I refer to as the “four to six mix” of males to females is being approximately maintained. My previous posts on this subject can be found in these monthly postings:

http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html

http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html

http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html

http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html

2010-07-09T04:16:00.000-07:00

SHIELD OF FAITH

English heraldry has its origins in the middle ages; it originated in the symbolism appearing on the shields of nobles as they rode into battle. These nobles were quite often far from noble in their behavior, but that didn’t stop heraldry accruing idealized connotations of lineage, stability, strength, dignity, chivalry, good breeding, excellence and above all identification with, and the protection of, the community the symbols stood for. The irony of human behaviour is that admirable ideals so easily become mixed up with pride and snob value and so in a desire to ape the upper classes the up and coming middle classes adopted heraldry themselves. Below are two examples of non-aristocratic parties associating with heraldic motifs.

The above picture is a detail of the statue of Sir Samual Bignold, son of a freeman grocer, Norwich Union grandee, Sheriff of Norwich and MP. The statue appears outside the Marble hall on Surrey street. The coat of arms can be seen hanging from the chain.

This coat of arms is found on the stained glass window of Norwich Central Baptist Church, home church of successful business men, mayors and MPs (we're talking ancient history here!).

The coat of arms we can see in these pictures is the Norwich civic coat of arms. According to this web site:

The City's arms are based on a seal of the Fifteenth century. They were recorded and confirmed on 27th May 1562.The shield depicts Norwich Castle and the royal lion of England. This was traditionally granted to the city by King Edward III (1327-1377).

Thus Baptists join with the old Norwich Union to proudly display their identification with their community, city and country. What a contrast: Today Christian groups are largely subcultures found on the margins of civic society with little to give them a sense of belonging, identification or protection. Accordingly, some Christian groups have become alienated “holiness” sects with a tendency to attract only clients with a propensity for an unbearable spiritual intensity and a self righteous hostility toward the rest of society (and church) around them. As I said, the irony of human behaviour is that admirable ideals so easily become mixed up (and corrupted) with pride and snob value. Let them take note of the following epitaph found on a tomb in St. Stephen’s church, Norwich:

“A scholar without pride, a Christian without bigotry, and devout without ostentation”.

Norwich's coat of arms: Symbols of dignity, protection and attack.

2010-05-26T10:23:00.000-07:00

ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH DEAR FRIENDS, ONCE MORE: MYTHOS VS LOGOS

This post on Uncommon Descent by Young Earth Creationist (?) Paul Nelson tells the interesting story of Martin Gardiner, a man who started life as a Christian fundamentalist. I set this story against this post where I published a church magazine article by the prewar Minister to St Mary’s Baptist Church, Gilbert Laws. This article was evidence that Laws respected the results of science; he believed that those results should be coped with rather than rejected. The fundamentalist ethos that the findings of science are automatically suspect because they are to be identified with an anti-Christ scientific conspiracy probably never entered Laws head; but then those were was the days of the civic church, a church that identified itself with the establishment.

Paul Nelson takes up the story of Martin Gardner:

It is not generally known that Gardner grew up as a Christian fundamentalist in Oklahoma, and indeed entered the University of Chicago as an undergraduate zealous to defend his faith, and to return America to its Christian heritage:

"In his adolescent fantasies he saw himself as chosen by the Lord to lead this new awakening. And to carry out this stupendous undertaking he conceived a brazen plan….He would enter the very citadel of the enemy. He would master all the science and modern learning that a great secular university had to offer. Every false and infernal argument would be examined and exposed. He would probe the diseased heart of twentieth century theology, dissect it nerve by nerve, artery by artery."

The passage comes from Gardner’s autobiographical novel, The Flight of Peter Fromm (1973), which Bill Dembski has used as a textbook in seminary courses he’s taught. While Gardner’s fundamentalist Christianity died a long and painful death, his theism never did.

And according to Gardner’s Wiki page:

His semi-autobiographical novel The Flight of Peter Fromm depicts a traditionally Protestant Christian man struggling with his faith, examining 20th century scholarship and intellectual movements and ultimately rejecting Christianity while remaining a theist

The candid fundamentalist mind, when exposed to honest science, finds no elaborate conspiracy to deceive but instead genuine challenges to his faith. I don’t believe there is any necessary conflict between science and theism or between science and Christianity for that matter, but there is a conflict between science and fundamentalism.

The tradition of NCBC is not one of opposing science. However, the potential to oppose science and reason are present: The tensions and paradoxes found in the logos versus mythos dichotomy have a tendency to resolve themselves by resort to extremes of legalistic rigidity and/or gnostic irrationality. When faced with the challenges of science both of these religious extremes are apt to barricade themselves into the epistemological play pen of an assertive fideism.

2010-03-03T07:03:00.000-08:00

THEODICY AT NCBC

The last two NCBC evening services have been café style services with the aim of introducing and discussing intellectual conundrums relating to Christianity. Rev James East has done an excellent job of presenting this series and has managed to cover a lot of ground succinctly and clearly. Last Sunday’s café service was on Theodicy. Below is a copy of the handout we received.

(Click to enlarge)

My Comments:
The need for theodicy arises out of the seeming inconsistency in positing a loving, just and almighty God who creates and sustains a world containing evil and innocent suffering. Are we to conclude that God is neither loving nor almighty? Or perhaps He simply doesn’t exist? A “Theodicy” is an attempt to resolve this paradox.

The Augustinian theodicy probably ranks as the de-facto folk theodicy of suffering and evil: “It’s not God’s fault; it’s all those creatures of His who keep abusing their free will”. This theodicy attempts to shift the responsibly for suffering and evil from an all almighty God to His created subjects. This answer, however, begs the question of why God should be absolved of any responsibility when it is He that creates and sustains free-will; surely an almighty God could do a better job of creation? If free-will is bound up with a strong likelihood of evil choice making, is it, in fact, right to claim that it is ‘free’? Should God have created it at all?

The other problem with this theodicy is that it obliges the view that all innocent suffering is ultimately sourced in human, demonic or Satanic activity. Thus, suffering found in natural disasters has to be somehow causally linked with creaturely willfulness somewhere; a point of view that can be tricky to maintain given our modern understanding that the natural world seems to conform to its own patterns and logic rather than the fiat of inscrutable freewill. Sometimes there are attempts to see suffering as an obscure ramification of the fall or may be construe it as a righteous judgment visited upon sin. There is a strong resemblance between this folk theodicy and the pre-scientific weltanschauung of a capricious nature ruled by malign spirits; a view well symbolized by the green man one sometimes finds depicted in medieval churches. The invention of agriculture lead mankind into an even more up and down existence; it offered very great winnings and yet at the same time the risk of disastrous famine.

I’ve never been impressed with the Augustinian theodicy. Trying to link every daily aggravation to the choices of humans, demons or Satan requires the same kind of paranoiac mentality that is able to support the intrigues of conspiracy theory. Moreover, as far as I am aware the Biblical writers expressed no similar sweeping opinion that all suffering traces back to the willful choices of God’s creatures.

However, the Irenaean Theodicy and the comments of Dostoyevsky and Clayton (see handout) lead us down an entirely different avenue. To be sure all three have an important commonality: They weigh suffering and evil against virtue and whilst they may not dare to suggest that virtue outweighs the former they leave us on the horns of a dilemma. One might ask, however, why isn’t it possible to have virtue without an offset of pain and evil? But the trick employed by this class of theodicy is that they make suffering and evil logically inseparable from an accompanying virtue. The Irenean theodicy points out that the virtues of courage, forbearance, hope, spiritual growth and above all the grace of Christ’s sacrificial love are best observed in a world of suffering and evil. Like stars they shine all the more brightly against a background of darkness.*

The underlying idea here is cost; some beautiful things come with an inevitable cost. Dostoyevsky invents a rather contrived situation in order to help us appreciate this truth, but there is, I believe, logical necessity behind it. God has chosen to reify the story of our contingent world, a world selected from who knows how many other possible worlds residing in the platonic realm. He could have reified a story of perfection and angels, but he didn’t; instead He choose to tell our story, a story of a world where our very existence is inextricably intertwined with the presence of suffering and evil – get rid of that suffering and we cease to exist; our existence is conditioned on it. Thus, I face a dilemma: Do I say ‘yes’ to life with all its suffering and evil? Or do I say ‘no’ and wish for annihilation or that I never was? For surely if God had created a world of perfection I, a saved sinner, would have no part in that world. Dostoyevsky is weighing suffering against existence itself: What is to be one’s choice given that one’s existence is being weighed against the suffering and evil inevitably entailed by this existance?

According to Clayton the dilemma here should be met with silence. But perhaps we know the answer in our hearts: Even Nietzche, the atheist, via the intellectual device of the so called “eternal return” answered with an affirmative ‘yes’ to life; to him sentient existence was worth all the pain and evil of this world. Something inside us puts a very high premium on conscious existence, come what may.

However, Clayton is right in one sense: In the face of real suffering silence (if not rage) is the most eloquent and empathic response. Clayton also alerts us to the ultimate cost of our painful yet beautiful world, namely, Divine suffering on an unimaginable scale. He tells us of an empathizing God who takes creative responsibility for His world and who, above all, identifies with it emotionally; a world only He can witness and feel in all its heart rending entirety. Thus, the gift of existence is given to our world with the deep love and tears of God. The picture is of a suffering God who reifies, maintains and identifies with our contingent world at profound emotional cost to Himself. What more powerful, enduring and inspiring symbol of that love and suffering can we find in the history of time than the cross of Christ? Given the grace that our world should receive the gift of existence, then once this choice is made there is a binding logic of divine suffering from which even the Almighty has no escape.

The Divine Predicament

Footnote:
* The notion of weighing evil and suffering against virtue may have some biblical support from St. Paul when he says: “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” (Roms 8:18)

2010-03-01T04:28:00.000-08:00

HERALDRY AND SYMBOLISM AT NCBC

Have a look at these examples of heraldry and symbolism on the north windows of Norwich Central Baptist Church. What do you think they mean and what light do they throw on the spirituality of the post war church? (I'm working on it, but any help and comments welcome)

(Click to enlarge)

2009-12-15T13:02:00.001-08:00

CHRISTMAS 1939….

During this season of dark nights, sharp viewing conditions and twinkling Christmas lights, my mind’s eye turns to the stars of deep space. It is appropriate then that during my perusal of the December editions of St Mary’s Baptist church magazine I should find the following article written by St Mary’s minister Rev Gilbert Laws, D.D. The date is December 1939, about 3 months after the declaration of war with Germany. I think the article should speak for itself so here it is in its entirety:

Click to enlarge

My Comments

Given the darkness of those days in more sense than one, perhaps Laws’ mind turned to the heavens in an attempt get a perspective on the affairs of men. Or perhaps whilst pondering the evil of his times he wondered if God was really mindful of man. Laws remarks on the paradox that the modern Christian theist faces given man’s ever increasing understanding of his context; the familiar paradox arising out of a generalized form of Copernicanism: The vastness of the universe revealed by science cuts across any notion that man is the physical center to that universe. There is, as Laws points out, absolutely nothing special about the cosmic situation of man. This sets up a paradox for Biblical theists like Laws because, says Laws “ ...the Bible speaks as if man were the centre of the universe, as if things existed for his sake, and derived their meaning from his existence”. But for Laws what offsets these huge distances and restores the specialness of man is that “there is something in man that over-balances mere magnitude, however vast” and that something according to Laws is the self conscious sentience of man: “Man is able to look up and say ‘I’ which no sun or star or other material created material thing could ever say. Moreover, man in looking up is able to say ‘Thou’ to God…”.

The physical universe as Gilbert Laws conceived it: vast and impersonal.

Leaving aside the deep philosophical questions over whether man’s consciousness really does restore asymmetry to the universe by justifying the assignment of a pre-Copernican specialness to man, what I would like to draw attention to here is that nowhere does Laws attack the science of his day. He assumes the universe is old: “He [Man] dwells on one speck of a world and even so is a late-comer on it, for as the testimony of the rocks declares, it was a world of life for uncounted centuries before man appeared at all”. He also assumes the Earth is a natural product of the solar system: “Our Earth is but a child of the Sun, a speck at one time flung out of that molten mass into space..” Laws raises no anti-evolution sentiments when he has the opportunity to: “….now cooled enough for the appearance of life upon it, and so fitted through uncounted years, for man’s abode.” There may be life on other planets suggests Laws: “Other children also our sun has, though whether they have life upon them we do not know. Moreover our sun is but one of millions of suns… immeasurably greater many of them than the sun round which our little world revolves.”

It seems then that there is no implicit assumption on Laws part that science is fundamentally anti-Christian; he takes the findings of science on board at least tentatively. In the milieu of his day there appears to be no need to even so much as defend science’s findings and status, let alone attack science as an anti-Christ conspiracy. As a respected leader of a civic church Laws belonged to no marginalized sect alienated from the rest of society and thus had no reason to question science; if anything the Baptists he represented were very much part of the establishment. What concerns Laws’ most is not the validity of science’s findings, but just what light they throw on the human predicament should those findings prove to be true. And yet reading the church magazines of Laws’ day there is nothing to suggest that these Baptists where anything other than Biblically orthodox.

Laws attitude, of course, is in sharp contrast to many of today’s Christian ministers who have taken on board the anti-science fideism of fundamentalism. They have attempted to reestablish a physical pre-Copernicanism by shrinking cosmic dimensions in time and they even toy with geocentric models of the universe. My guess is that this stance is bound up with a church that is increasingly becoming marginalized. In fact in some quarters this church is morphing into a sect alienated from civic and academic life, a fertile ground for conspiracy theory. Consequently there is more reason for that church to set up alternative and even rival communities that sharply contrast themselves over against the rest of society, despising the science of that society. In Laws’ day the term “community church” would have been difficult to understand, for as I have said many church goers, even nonconformists, were part of the establishment and pillars of society. They were no separatist Mennonite-like pacifist community alienated from the bulk of society; they had moved into the social main stream and in 1939 St Mary’s Baptist church was mobilising its members to fight in the biggest war of all time, a war that took 50 million plus lives.

Fundamentalist geocentric cosmologies are a kind of cute cosy sentimental Kincadain Kitsch. But something has gone badly wrong in this picture – the cold scientific conspiracy looms in the background.

Laws knew a great deal more about science than the Biblical writer of Psalm 8 (or some of today’s willfully ignorant and shallow fundamentalists) who provided the text for his probing article of Christmas 1939. But Laws took comfort in the fact the Copernican paradox wasn’t just a discovery of the scientific age. For although the Biblical writers were part of an arcadian culture very different from our own industrial culture, they were nothing if frank about their doubts; with candor they brought these doubts out into the open. They too could say “Thou” to God and although they only had at their disposal naked eye astronomy and crude theoretical models when they looked up at the dark sky they nevertheless sensed the same intuitive diffidence engendered by the Copernican paradox*. But along with Gilbert Laws they also took it as an opportunity to glory in God’s grace: “For a single rose a field of thorns was spared”

Note 18/12/09

* When David wrote Psalm 8 he presumably had a geocentric vision of cosmology; it is therefore all the more interesting that the stars of the sky should provoke such a strong feeling of amazement at God's mindfulness of man. Today, with our modern cosmic vision, we perhaps impute far more meaning to David's words than he ever could. It is likely that these words were based more on intuition than they were a full appreciation of man's actual physical insignificance. In fact it is possible that the connection David was making was less to do with man's physical insignificance than it was to do with some deeply felt inspiration of God's majesty and immensity.

In this context it is interesting to note the reaction of some Young Earth Creationists to generalised Copernicanism. One YEC web site I have read entertains a cosmology where "The Earth is near the centre of the Universe". They go on to question the "Copernican Principle": "This principle, it is important to note, is not a conclusion of science, but an assumption thought to be valid. ". YEC theory is moving to a point where it sees the Christian faith bound up with a pre-Copernican cosmology. This is so counter current to the trends of mainstream science that it's no surprise that the YEC movement and conspiracy theorists are eying one another up with interest.

2009-11-27T05:34:00.001-08:00

THE GHOSTS OF NCBC

Nowadays cleaning is the only job I can get. I used to be computer programmer but in the fast moving IT world of “here today and gone tomorrow” experience is constantly requiring a rebuild. Thus accumulated wisdom is of less value than it used to be. Nevertheless cleaning has its big compensations, especially if you are a cleaner at locations of historical interest. It means you get to savour that spooky out of hours mood in places where, for the imaginative mind, history comes back to haunt the living. I have to confess, however, that in spite of the strange things I hear said I’ve never seen, heard, smelt, or felt any “ghosts” even in some of Britain’s premier haunted sites (e.g. in a deserted Bodmin jail which got a five skull rating from the team of Living TV’s “Most haunted” series). But having convinced myself that subjectivity plays a large part in hauntings I was in for a shock one day whilst cleaning at NCBC near sunset. In the deserted church I saw a man surrounded by an eerie illumination carving a memorial stone:

NCBC's creepy memorial stones.

As if there is a measure of shame or distaste associated with the history and traditions of the Duke Street location I once heard a rumor that the removal of NCBC’s old stone memorials was mooted at a church council meeting. There was even a suggestion that someone had somehow construed these memorials as “Blasphemous”; yes my church does contain believers with that kind of paranoiac spirituality which sees terrible sin lurking wherever its own practices and beliefs are not observed. (Any truly inclusivist church must allow a quota of such people). So given this background I racked my brains in doubt; whoever in our church would initiate the carving of a post mortem memorial? I had heard no mention of this stone work in the services, so what then was I witnessing? Was this a ghost? Was it a vision of a past time? Was it a time slip?

A restorationist and rivalist mentality has pervaded large parts of EPC (Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Charismatic) Christianity. In reaction against the traditions of the fading and spent civic church the latter third of the 20th century saw a desire to rediscover fancied church blueprints and gnostic blessings in an endeavour restore a “New Testament” church. True, it has to be admitted that large tracts of history display a very mongrel church, a church swaying this way and that in winds of time. But late 20th century EPC church looked (naively I to my mind) for an anchored spiritual pedigree. It had no self conscious inkling that the styles, tastes and imperatives it hankered for may one day also pass and look quaintly arbitrary. Fortunately this ethos has not infected NCBC strongly but it has perhaps left it with a desire to disconnect from the past; its historical setting is accordingly undervalued impeding a proper evaluation of its own ephemeral place in history.

If Christianity means anything at all, then it cannot adopt the stance of the restorationist and rivivalist cults like the Mormons and JWs who write off large swathes of the past as beyond redemption. We must look back on previous Christian cultures with sympathy, making all due allowance for the environment in which they found themselves and had to do business with.

After a bit of investigation the situation over the memorial stone became clear. Legal obligations on the death of a spouse required her name to be carved beside that of her dead husband. The memorial stone concerned is none other than that for the late Mr. and Mrs. Charles Boardman Jewson who respectively served as Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress of Norwich in 1965. They were the bastions of both civic society and the Duke St Baptist church.

Pillars of Church and Society: The Jewsons in 1965

What I had witnessed on that atmospheric late autumn afternoon was real, but no less incongruous and peculiar. Here was an event that had its cause rooted in the distant cultural past of the church – the fag end of the logic of that culture was still working itself out and I felt privileged to be in the right place at the right time to see what may well be one of the very last deeds of the spent civic church. The legal connection was no surprise to me; no one in NCBC would have initiated it otherwise. The deed, as it were, had to be a signal emanating from past, like the light of some distance galaxy; so in that sense I had witnessed a ghost!

An echo from the past: Memorial Stone addendum with mason's marking paint still in place.

2009-10-10T05:03:00.000-07:00

SEVENTY YEARS AGO

A few years ago (2003) I wrote a short article (for a now defunct church magazine) on the pseudo gothic architecture of Dereham Road Baptist Church (The building used by one of the churches that merged to form Norwich Central Baptist church). In that article I wrote of Dereham Baptist Church and its Baptist builders:

Their aping of establishment architecture was a sign that they were more at ease with and better integrated into the wider culture than we are. Their churches were chiefly preaching centres serving a much more public life oriented Christianity.

Like the mammals of saurian times, faith has often been unable to venture beyond the deep recesses of an intensely private life. Today, the "Sermon in Stone" that is DRBC hardly seems a safe way to express faith and it is unlikely to elicit the respect of today's touchy-feeley Christians for whom it will not register as a product of authentic heartfelt religion

However, the church, now somewhat marginalised, is much less part of the trappings of civic society than it used to be and has had to re-adapt. The community church has superseded the municipal church, and yet the community church often has little choice but to make best use of an architectural legacy. We may feel more at home with that legacy if we try to judge it on its own terms. To the Christians of its day the quasi-civic architecture of DRBC was clearly significant and betrayed a pride in their public connections, connections that for us are all too thin on the ground.

The general idea I tried to express here was that in those days the non-conformist church felt itself to be part of the civic establishment, and this showed in their use of civic architecture. In the case of DRBC they used the gothic style, but often the “secular” classical style was also co-opted to express how Christians felt about their role and position is society; they didn’t think of themselves as a marginalized pressure group or social charity on the edge of an otherwise alien culture but saw their role as much needed Christian salt well, qualified to help run society. They identified with their society and to some extent they were that society.

The conclusions I drew in 2003 have since been corroborated in my mind by a recent delving into the archive of back copies of St Mary’s church magazine. I randomly selected the year 1939, opened up the first page of the January edition and this is what I read:

(click to enlarge)

…we take it as recognition of the place the free churches fill in the life of the community and the service rendered by them to the public well being…. Have made a notable contribution to the moral, educational and spiritual welfare of this city… St Mary’s honourable association with the Sheriff… George White MP…. eight members have filled the office of Mayor….public servant…..President Lincoln…

This stuff sounds so much like parts of America today*. But over here? Things, of course, have changed. In my original article I contrasted the “municipal church” of the past with the “community church” of today, but I added a footnote saying that I really wasn’t sure just what the so called “community church” was:

I am sure it means something, if only to express the self image and aspirations of churches groping to find an identity and role as they attempt to adapt to changed and changing circumstances. My use of the term “Community Church” doesn’t mean to say that I know what it means; I am attempting to understand this self proclaimed role of contemporary churches by contrasting it with something that it certainly is not, namely, the old style municipal church.

“Adapting to changed and changing circumstances…” is probably the key point here. But as Christians adapt to changed circumstances they may be egotistical enough to think that their contemporary expression of church is not a mere adaptation to the current milieu but the restoration of a timeless blueprint and the only way of doing church. In this connection it is perhaps worth noting that today’s marginalized church probably finds itself in circumstances similar to those of the early emerging church. This may help explain why some contemporary Christians connect with the emerging church of the first century and find a ready expression by doing things the “New Testament way”. But human restorationist conceits may underrate those who in times past did their emerging church differently in order to adapt to the opportunities society provided in their day.

This scene from the NCBC launch service of 8/6/03 looks to be a nostalgic throwback!

* Footnote
Interestingly evidence suggests that St Mary’s Baptist church had sympathy for the Americans in the war of independence. In 1781 Rees David, minister of St Mary’s Baptist church, preached a sermon attacking the war against the Americans.

2009-10-04T07:57:00.000-07:00

THE PASTOR IS MY SHEPHERD.

After a quick investigation on the web I wasn't able to determine whether the above was a piece of satire or the real thing. Then I thought to myself shouldn't I be able to tell anyway? Fact is, I can't tell the difference and that's a little bit worrying. The man pictured here might have something to do with it.

2009-08-26T09:39:00.000-07:00

THE BEDFORD BLESSING FINAL PART: FAILURE AND RECRIMINATION

The last in my series on the arrival of the 1995 "Bedford Blessing" at Dereham Road Baptist Church. This series was written in 1997, but only now has been released for general view.

As a principle in public relations it is a good idea to give people the benefit of the doubt and to be prepared to at least to give an initial qualified acceptance to those Christians who believe they have had some blessing or revelation from God. So, when the Bedford Baptist group arrived at Dereham Road Baptist church in the early spring of 1995 I thought it important that nothing be ruled out in an off hand manner and felt it right to show them the courtesy of being prepared to receive whatever they thought God saw fit to make them agents of. After all, in the architecture of his church Christians are the living stones of a spiritual house, a holy priesthood ministering to one another in spite of human defect. And so I submitted myself to their prayers, although with no observable effect.

"No observable effect" was, except in a handful of cases, the rule that day, and the acclaimed hallmarks of the "Toronto blessing", at least in quantity, were absent; there was no mass loss of balance, little, if any, hysterical laughter and crying, and absolutely no "old McDonaldisms". There was one person who stood up and was prayed over for a long time, the intention being that he would eventually collapse under the wind of the Spirit. To all appearances one of the Bedford assistants started to get impatient with this person, and proceeded to flap his hands up and down in front of the subject as if the small wind thus created would help achieve what they were looking for. When the subject, who had closed eyes and outstretched hands (a position, which if maintained, is not conducive to good balance), eventually did keel over, it was not really a surprise, and I wondered how that person managed to keep standing for so long.

As a principle of self protection, it is a good idea that one's acceptance of the claims of Christian subcultures is always qualified, and if such cultures fail to claim the benefit of the doubt and fail to earn respect, then there is an even chance that there is something wrong with them. Of course, there is an even chance that one's assessment is at fault, but the point here is that no one is so privileged that they are excepted from having to prove themselves. But herein lies the rub for many vendors of blessing and quasi cult Christian groups, because for them an attitude where the benefit of the doubt is given against a background of qualified acceptance is simply not considered enough ("benefit of the doubt ? - you shouldn't have any doubts !"), and anything less than an a-priori unqualified proactive acceptance of their claims is seized on to explain away why things don't work out in the way they expect. Unless it all happens in the way they say it should, happen you fail to get their religious respect and may even be despised. In particular there is often a deep suspicion of positive, convinced, and secure Christian living independent of their means and method of blessing as, of course, they believe that it must all happen in the way they understand or via their ministries. It is upon an ethos of this sort that many "holy spirit "gnosis ministries are founded and nowadays, once I detect it I usually rule them out because, frankly, experience has taught me that you just cannot win with such people.

Therefore, as far as I personally was concerned, the Toronto Blessing, under the agency of Bedford, had a window of opportunity between two principles; one principle requiring an initial positive response, a kind of being prepared to give it a generous try, and the other stipulating that patience is not unlimited because anything coming via human agency must prove itself. Both with deference to these principles and with hindsight I now have to admit, however, that although I believe I gave Toronto-ism a fair hearing, my eventual overall impressions of it were not good. Several years after its beginning it was difficult to ascertain if, amid the gains and losses, there was in fact a net gain of anything except disillusionment. Perhaps there may have been something in it at the beginning (and I wouldn't want to rule it out absolutely), but let me say this; if there was something in it then the Christian subculture which promulgated it did such a bad marketing job that I found it impossible to tell.

For my own part I have to say that if there was a positive side to the Bedford Blessing they did not only failed to prove this to me but they also, in general, failed to communicate to me at all in a way that I understood or on a level that met me where I was at. They would, of course, be likely to see this as my fault rather than their own. But herein lies the problem, because it is often true that if the latest concept in blessing is not seen to be received it seems that the vendors of blessing will not let things lie and simply accept that God's time and place is not yet, but instead are inclined to witch hunt. It is then not advisable to reveal a less than wholly uncritical attitude as this will seem to explain the ineffectiveness of their ministry, and be taken as a sign of some deep seated spiritual blockage that needs exorcism; for it seems that they find it difficult to have a healthy regard for any faith they consider to be uninitiated into the secrets of the Holy Spirit as they understand them. Their self satisfaction leads them to carelessly squander the chance of acceptance they are given; they excuse themselves from the duty of earning respect and the responsibility of proving their worth by faulting instead those who fail to respond to their ministry, thus unintentionally reinforcing some of the very reservations they would criticise. The result is a feedback cycle that needlessly strains loyalties, alienates and may even lead to deep enmities.

Sometimes I feel that there is some awful joke being perpetrated upon the church that plays on peoples insecurities and uncertainties about the nature of God, what he can do, and his claims on us. These uncertainties are exploited by an archetypical system of human religious relationships to subtly cast doubt on the Christian’s independent ability to judge and discern, and to help ease the introduction of a culture of childish dependence. The protective value of critical reservations are thus confiscated amid hints that such are somehow anti-faith and anti-God. And so the aim is to beat down bit by bit the spiritual immune system as the tasks the Christian is asked to perform and what the Christian is asked to believe, slowly get more and more insane, until eventually he or she is on all fours barking like a dog.

c. T. V. Reeves June 1997

2009-07-18T03:04:00.000-07:00

THE BEDFORD BLESSING PART 4: HISTORY MOVES ON BUT DOESN'T CHANGE.

Continuing my series on the arrival of the 1995 "Bedford Blessing" at Dereham Road Baptist Church. This series was written in 1997, but only now has been released for general view.

The scene on that day in the early spring of 1995 was, however, fascinating, and in many respects was replete with historical significance. History hadn’t stopped, but time was marching on there and then, presenting a new transition and a new puzzle, a puzzle that, if there is much more history, will one day be looked back on and seen as deeply mysterious. Historians of those future days will wish for a time machine in order to solve the enigma. But I needed no time machine; I was privileged to watch as history was deposited before my eyes. Here, in one environment, was the superposition of three layers of Christian culture: First, the mediaeval period, whose symbolism could just be discerned in the pseudo Gothic architecture; second, the pulpit period, and its “Logos culture” which had at its heart the ministry of words, the sermon and message; third, the post-modern crypto-priesthood period with its “holy spirit” culture, having at its heart the ministry of gnosis and God’s touch in a variety of forms. And the latter two periods vied with one another. But for all the differences between the hi-pulpits of hi-reason and the hi-priests of hi-mystique, they have, at their extremes, profound similarities. Behind the pulpit ethos, derived from the reformation, of a desire for the Bible to be a book open to and interpreted by all, is some kind of overcompensation; an overcompensation seen in the overpowering and central presence of the pulpits, overstated in their height and grandeur, like mini ramparts defending the Bible’s message against those who would attack it. Likewise, in those crypto-priesthoods, with their patriarchy, mystique, and their living pulpit of supporting followers, who hang onto their words not daring to fault them, we also find an overpowering and overstated presence engaged in some kind of overcompensation; an overcompensation seen in their tendency to closely identify the power of the Spirit with a gnosis that is experienced rather than learnt; an adaptive response, I believe, to help cope with a world that seems increasingly spiritually sterile, and with which those crypto-priesthoods have failed to come to terms with, or make sense of. The ironic truth is that they have never really understood or accepted the work of the Spirit of God, except perhaps when it appears to them as some novel kind of magic. In them has Christian thought sunk to its nadir: They cannot account for the depths of space; they cannot explain the meaning of atomism; they cannot throw light on evolutionary theory; they cannot bridge the gap between consciousness and matter. In short they can offer no explanations at all to a secular culture that ponders the meaning of these things. One may well ask, however, "Who can explain them ?". But our spiritual patriarchs are likely to claim that no explanations are required; fearful perhaps of a threat to their authority they prefer to believe that spirituality can in no way be a function of such things. Instead they bypass the difficulties these questions create by stressing the superiority of a deeply felt heart knowledge which is often caricatured as an almost a fidiest state of mind that should be independent of the products of the enlightenment. They therefore depict Christian experience as primarily finding its solace and resting place in a kind of gnosis which does not need to feed on reason. Thus is faith disconnected and therefore protected from the awkward challenges of the material world. With the loss of credibility in Christian rationales, both within the church and without, the pride in the ministry of words which those huge pulpits once represented has gone and their sheer size has become an embarrassment. The church has therefore withdrawn somewhat from the intellectual role it once played preferring instead to enhance the personal and social dimensions of its community life; something that in these days of social anonymity and disruption it can usefully engage in and retain self respect. The crypto-priesthoods, however, have diffused into niches created by the need for stable religious communities by inventing themselves as patriarchal overseers, their vaunted closeness to God offering a little bit of the divine on Earth and therefore, some might feel, a much needed sense of the presence of God.

But it may be even worse than this. At the extremes of the dichotomy of pulpit and priest the unspoken message one gets from both is the same: With their overstatement, their kudos and their overpowering and sometimes intimidating presence, that message is: "We give and you receive", "We teach and you learn". It is, therefore, in return, very hard to teach them anything, the spiritual traffic being mostly one way, and to attempt to open a dialogue with them is to put yourself up as a rival and to be the cause of an affront. They do not willingly and knowingly draw from traditions different from their own because they are usually unacceptable to them, whether or not those traditions have a positive faith in Christ. Here we have a demonstration of a very ironic yet important moral fact: Receiving is something that is actually harder than giving, a nigh on impossible task for the spiritually proud. It is, nevertheless a moral duty, just as, say, providing alms for the poor. But this is hardly a surprise: Christianity is, from the outset, more about receiving than giving, a religion that requires one to repent of sins and through Christ receive forgiveness and the Spirit of adoption by which we cry "Abba, Father". What need is there for anyone to tell us this and to administer this spirit to us when it is written: “You have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth ... it remains in you and you do not need anyone to teach you”.

2009-07-05T03:58:00.000-07:00

THE BEDFORD BLESSING PART 3: SWEET FORGETFULNESS AND SUBLIMATION

Continuing my series on the arrival of the 1995 "Bedford Blessing" at Dereham Road Baptist Church. This series was written in 1997, but only now has been released for general viewing.

There is nothing in a name but an expression for what something is, and whether you called them an acting priesthood or not, those Bedford Baptists were what they were, and what they were was apparently archetypical. But just how much of the old priestly archetype was actually, and no doubt unknowingly, being rehashed on that day at Dereham road Baptist church in the early spring of AD 1995 is difficult to tell, because if it was, then it was all very subliminal and heavily encrypted. History never truly repeats itself because there is always some feedback from the past. A man may learn from experience and yet still be tempted into old ways of doing things. He thus satiates both the temptation and the demands of learning by a combination of energy redirection, and behavioural modification that include the use of terms, labels and language that dress up his behaviour in a different guise. He is, however, always walking on the edge, and is in constant danger of deceiving himself and fulfilling his temptation directly. On that early spring day of 1995 I saw an analogous situation; the gravitational draw of ancient religious relations was acting, or at least trying to act; ethereal lighter than air high passion spiritual patter was bubbling to the top; familiar old motifs were presented in a modified guise: “Gnosis” became “God’s touch”, “Inner light” became “heart knowledge”, Priestly bearing became Spiritual Authority. It is really, however, all a matter of degree and balance. Each of these religious motifs may have a place in a genuine Christian culture, but if the balance is lost over these things it starts to show. The ministers of blessing then become imparters of gnosis and a closed shop who claim sole agency, seeing in their own expression of faith the prime focus and source of God’s work and blessing. They then show an unwillingness to engage in equitable and reciprocal relations with those whose blessings are different from their own, much preferring to relate, like religious salesman, by offering their priestly services. They exploit the demands created by spiritual vulnerability, and fulfil the need for patriarchal leadership of close Christian community in a remnant church whose role is now far less integrated with the larger society. They have a sharp eye for the spiritual inadequacy and flaw that creates the need for their services amongst those they seek to lead and those who may sometimes confer upon them a status not unlike that of the priestly patriarchs of old. For these patriarchs do not chose their role themselves; it is chosen for them by those who choose to be lead by them. They are an evolutionary product of the sea of faith, being selected, at times unwillingly, by an unsettling modern spiritual environment where people are once again tempted to look to the chancellery for authority, blessing, and above all religious security. This, then, is one facet of today's spiritual ethos. It is one that works. It is one that has not so much been consciously selected for as it is what is left when other candidates for selection have failed; it is an an island of survival in a sea of failure.

2009-06-20T09:11:00.000-07:00

THE BEDFORD BLESSING PART 2: THE PRIESTHOOD!

The origins of the Mormon Priesthood

Continuing my series on the arrival of the 1995 "Bedford Blessing" at Dereham Road Baptist Church. This series was written in 1997, but only now has been released for general viewing.

The Priesthood ! - A means, sometimes the means by which one can relate to God or by which blessing may come. Priesthoods are an ancient spiritual architecture, not one cast in stone or brick, but in the systems of relations between leaders and the lead. It is an architecture which exploits a rich complex of emotions and motif, and which has helped stabilise the relations between the shepherds and the sheep down untold ages. Mystique, gnosis, patriarchy, autocratic authority, spiritual inferiority, nervous expectancy, dependency, submission. These are some of the elements of the religious complex at whose heart is the underlying fear of the numinous and of the awe inspiring, holy, glorious and, without Christ, nameless God, from whose awful light the guilty seek safe refuge. In the stumbling, hesitant, and tense relations humanity naturally has with a holy God, any one able to confidently take up the dangerous task of interfacing with the divine is a boon, and attracts like a magnet the religiously insecure. Priesthoods in their various shapes and sizes, can be big business. But it is not all bad. Given the problems man has had relating to God, priesthoods have, in times past, been a legitimate and sometimes an only way to relate to God, and a means of blessing. They are, however, a way fraught with difficulty and the possibility of corruption. Human agency is always fraught with difficulty and the possibility of corruption as the Israelites discovered when Kings were anointed over them. But given the terrible state Israel had got itself into by the end of the Judges period it had little to lose. In fact they may not have even had a choice here: Given their moral and political condition, Israel ‘s desire to become a kingdom was less plan B than it was plan A, the fault being not so much in the plan itself but in the conditions which engendered it; it was the next logical step forward given their condition. They also experienced that peculiarly human dilemma of having to choose solutions to problems that themselves had problems. And so it is with human priesthoods. The general lesson is this: The givens of the human predicament are met with plans and covenants that, with varying degrees of effectiveness, treat the human condition, taking it forward from where it is; but given the sin of man, covenants employing human agency, whether of kings or of priests, are only a pattern and shadow of heavenly things, and therefore must decay and grow old and eventually pass away to be replaced by a covenant of divine agency; a perfect plan meeting the imperfect precondition just where it is: “In those days .. I will put My law in their mind and write them in their hearts.... And they shall no more teach one another, saying know the Lord - for all shall know Me from the least of them to the greatest of them”.

2009-06-10T10:09:00.001-07:00

PENDING POSITION STATEMENT

As a result of direct inquiries I intend to produce, at some stage, a position statement regarding my views on Christianity. However, I am currently absorbed with one two other matters that I am following up; hence this promissory note.

2009-06-07T15:15:00.000-07:00

THE BEDFORD BLESSING
PART 1: THE COMING OF A PRIESTHOOD

In 1995 during a church family weekend an attempt was made by a visiting group of Baptists from Bedford to introduce Dereham Road Baptist church to the Toronto Blessing. A couple of years later in 1997 I wrote three essays in response to this weekend entitled respectively “High Pulpits”, “High Priests”, and “The Bedford Blessing”. The first essay, which was an analysis of the pulpit-centric architecture of Dereham Baptist Church, was circulated in 2000. However, the other two essays which concerned the actual “Blessing” at Dereham Road remained in my private collection ..... until now. I intend releasing the contents of these two essays in parts. Here is the first part.

History can be ruthless. The 70 year quantum of human life ensures that no one person's experience is measured in centuries, and so experience is constantly being destroyed and remade and old themes return as if they are new discoveries. In the sea of faith new spiritual life forms appear in response to changing spiritual environments and they are likely to have different attitudes to hi-pulpits and what they stand for. I saw one of these newer life forms one day in the early spring of AD 1995 when the Church on Dereham road had invited a Baptist minister from Bedford to speak for the day. This warm mannered bearded Bedford Baptist spoke intimately, if not profoundly on his theme, the "Father heart of God". He did not use the pulpit at any time during the day, but instead used the lectern at the side and below it, a position not unlike that of mediaeval times. At one point he indicated he would not be so presumptuous as to use the pulpit "up there", and his voice may have held a hint of contempt. Perhaps he knew that he needed nothing to stand on, because he stood for something else, for as the day developed a feeling grew on me, as it has done on other occasions, that I was seeing before my very eyes the formation and modern rediscovery of a spiritual ministry that recurs down the ages. Gone was the didactic logic and reason of the pulpit to be replaced by patriarchal expressions of feeling and warmth; one did not grapple with this stuff with the mind so much as with the emotions. In comparison to this “voice of the heart”, the sound of pulpit polemic would, to some, seem distant, and without the the ability to touch the inner most being. But the owner of that voice wasn't here primarily to talk, and a ministry of words was not what he was here to give; the purpose of his visit was to confer a blessing; a blessing that had its origins in a church in Toronto, Canada. The Baptist minister had recently visited this far flung church, and this visit no doubt made him better qualified to supervise the conferring of this blessing. Thus, in due time the assistants of the Baptist Minister moved amongst the congregation, praying over them for this strange blessing to come. It was as if they were custodians of some hidden spiritual power, holders of a mysterious gnosis that could not be imparted by expository logic, but only through their hands and upon those of sufficiently submissive and expectant attitude. I had seen it before; they were those kinds of believers who, apparently initiated into the inexpressible secrets of the Holy Spirit, are often sought out by those anxious for some deep experience of God, and those who fear divine disapproval if blessing is not claimed or taken. The ostensive qualities of the Bedford Baptist’s demeanour, their apparent agency to some mysterious blessing, the submissive, expectant, and dependent attitude required of those who were to receive the blessing were all things that were highly reminiscent. The members of religious cultures from the neolithic period to Salt Lake City would probably have been able to identify which class in their own communities this Bedford group most resembled and would have had little trouble finding a title for them: The Priesthood.

2009-02-01T14:42:00.001-08:00

NCBC Guided Tour. Anglo Saxon Norwich

Below are my tour guide notes for the Wensum valley walk from Norwich Central Baptist Church to the Cathedral and back. These notes are likely to be enhanced as new information comes to light.

History: Looking back we see ourselves in perspective. We can see repeated themes and ask ourselves if our world view really works when seen in the context of a larger history. The enhanced experience sample provided by history can change the significance and meaning of our own smaller subset of experience.

• This is a picture of St Mary’s Baptist church (now NCBC) before it was destroyed by bombs in WWII
• Baptists came to this site in 1744, but built this structure under the popular and famous minister Joseph Kinghorn in 1811.
• Why does it have a classical Georgian facade? Why did the nonconformists fail to find satisfaction in the protestant Church of England?
• Why did the Norwich Baptists emerge during the 1600s?
• Why are the 1600s are such is a pivotal century for non-conformity in England?
• Answers to these questions take us right back to Saxon times
• Saxon government was closer to a kind of protection racket model whereas the feudal/serf system introduced by the Normans was closer to a slave model. This gave rise to Saxon discontent.
• Saxon England never really took to the feudal system and the Normans themselves become saxonised in attitude.
• This may have helped create the conditions needed for religious dissent, the rise of parliament, and the industrial revolution and science – the seeds of the modern world.
• The NCBC tour around old Norwich takes us around the ancient urban theatre that hosted the history behind these questions and issues.

SEE THIS LINK FOR A MAP OF ANGLO SAXON NORWICH

• The tour takes us along the Wensum valley to the Saxon centre of Norwich, Tombland a name which means “Open Space” or “Empty Space”
• In Saxon days Tombland was the centre and market area of Norwich
• The valley is densely pock marked with churches evidence that this part of the city is older than the higher parts of Norwich
• Major routes into the city still lead to Tombland: for example King street, Magdalen Street, St Benedict’s.
• Many of the street lines we will follow are Saxon.
• Notice that many street names in this area end in “gate . This ending is derived from the Danish word “Gade” which means “street” (“wick” or “vik” may also have Danish origins)
• The Normans (after 1066) moved the market place to the apron of the newly constructed castle.
• This castle dominated old Norwich in the valley: it was built to see and to be seen. These were the new men in charge.
• The current centre of Norwich (i.e. the castle area) was created by the Normans and not the Saxons

St Mary’s Plain
NCBC
• Baptists first came to this site in 1744 (at the start of industrial revolution) under John Stearne.
• Expansion of the congregation under the popular and famous Joseph Kinghorn resulted in Kinghorn laying the foundation stone of a Georgian building in 1811. (see picture above)
• Where is his grave?

St Mary’s Coslany Church
• Anglo-Saxon style tower, possibly the oldest in Norwich and may be pre-conquest.
• Note V shaped heads of tower widows as opposed to Romanesque arches.
• About 400 years separates tower and nave. Latter built in perpendicular style with large windows.
• Cotman was baptised here.
• The church became very dilapidated in Edward times. A newspaper correspondent described the church as being left to the mercy of “Stone throwing street urchins”. A sign that working class people had left the church in droves as a result of life style changes.

Zoar Chapel.
• Strict and particular Baptists separated from General Baptists in the 1600s.
• They were strong Calvinists: They believed Christ’s saving work only for those elected to be saved.
• The General Baptists believed all men have the potential to be saved.
• The Baptist Union was formed from a merger of the Particular Baptists and General Baptists.
• Zoar chapel are the strict and particular Calvinist dissenters who maintained a closed communion.
• Zoar in Hebrew means "small" or "insignificance." Zoar was the town of Lot’s refuge as he escaped from Sodom and Gomorrah. (NCBC = Sodom?!!)
• It is a coincidence that they are next door to us? Research has not been able to uncover a link.

Roman Roads
• A north-south Roman road from Ber Street or King Street ran along Oak Street.
• An east-west Roman road ran from the cathedral area and then along St Benedict street.
• The roads may have crossed at Charing cross (?)

Muspole Street
• Possibly part of the Saxon street system
• “Muspool”. A pond used for drinking.
• Interestingly there is a very old water fountain at the Colgate end of the street.
• Another source claimed that Muspool derived from a pool of refuse!

Colgate East
St. George’s Church.
• Notice the ‘Basilica’ design: This was copied from the Roman forum design. Christians avoided the temple design with its association with idolatry.
• Nave built 1459, Chancel 1498, aisles 1505 (north), 1513 (south).
• Probably not the site of a Saxon church.
• This was the Renaissance period of perpendicular churches. They are called “perpendicular” because of the predominance of vertical lines and edges.
• Perpendicular churches were light and airy with big glass windows; perhaps a sign of increasing human technological confidence. In comparison Norman churches are dark and cave like.
• This church would have looked really up to date and modern in its time.
• These churches are evidence of the end of feudalism and the rise of a merchant class who helped subsidise them.
• It was these merchants who were to fall out with the monarchy and they found common cause with the non-conformists.
• Norwich was getting rich on the wool and textile trade and also confident.
• Perpendicular churches are the wool merchants churches. They are very prevalent in Norwich and have all but wiped out the early medieval designs. Their prevalence is a sign of a Norwich grown rich on the textile trade.
• John Crome worshipped here.

Henry Bacon House.
• Houses in this area belonged to wealthy (textile) merchants.
• Henry Bacon, a Worsted merchant, built this house in Colegate in the 16th century. He was Mayor in 1557 and 1566.
• Quote: “As Sheriff in 1548-9 he entertained the Duke of Northumberland at the time of Kett’s Rebellion, putting the Duke’s emblem of a ragged staff above his door. The lintel of the front doorway has a merchant’s mark balanced by the arms of the Grocers’ Company and his mark also appears over a window to the left as well as high up near the south-west angle”.
• The merchant class rising to a place of power and influence in society is a recurring theme in the Wensum valley area.

Norvic Shoe factory.
• A Victorian building.
• In times past shoes would all have been made and bought locally.
• The factory system produced a local surplus. Hence trade became more global and distant economies became linked. This is where the profit makers have taken us: if one economy falls over, it can take all the others with it!
• It is not known why Norwich should become a shoe making centre.
• By 1830, however, the textile industry in Norwich had decayed, but not the shoe industry. This may be because textiles are power intensive whereas shoe making is labour intensive.

Octagon chapel
• Originally the site of a Chapel for the Black friars.
• Dr John Collinges, vicar of St Stephen’s dissented under Charles II in 17th century, and set up the chapel with his Presbyterian followers.
• This is our first location with a link to NCBC in that it has a common ancestor; namely the disaffection with the established Church of England under the subliminally catholic Stuart dynasty of the 1600s
• These Presbyterians built the Octagon in 1756. The architect was Thomas Ivory (architect of the assembly room and many alterations to Blickling hall)
• John Wesley visited in 1757 and admired it. First of its kind in England.
• The Martineaus worshipped here (An influential Huguenot protestants) .
• Presbyterianism is the Scottish version of Congregationalism with a preference toward national centralisation.
• The congregation here had become Unitarian by the early 19th century. Was this connected with the enlightenment?
• Notice the pattern here: dissenters worship in a private house first and then create a building fit for purpose as the congregation expands and becomes more established – we see this pattern today.

Old Meeting House.
• Built in 1693 after the toleration act. The roots of the congregation go much further back to the disaffected Congregationalists who first met in private halls and houses.
• The Baptists that eventually became NCBC came out of the Congregationalists.
• Notice the classical architecture: they were disaffected enough to want to get away from churchy gothic looking buildings. There is irony here: when the early church started building churches they took their model from the Roman secular basilica, the public forum. This was a reaction against the religious temple with its associations with idol worship. Later as the nonconformists integrated with the establishment they started building pseudo gothic churches – see for example Dereham Road Baptist Church.
• Men and women entered the building by different doors. “The arrangement is similar to that of the Unitarian chapel in Ipswich, which began life in almost exactly the same way and is from the same decade.” Congregationalists still meet here and the liberal Jewish community meet here.
• Note: Congregationalism in Norwich goes right back to 1580 when Robert Browne set up a congregation: its chief characteristic is that of a rejection of a centralised church government in favour of local government.

St Clement’s Church:
• St. Clement was the patron saint of sailors. Churches of this dedication are found near the crossing point of rivers.
• It is the site of a Saxon church.
• Largely a perpendicular church with some older parts suggesting it was one of many perpendicular rebuilds. Some of its older parts can be seen; see for example the east end window which from the 1300s decorated period and also the corner stones on the west wall next to the tower showing that the nave was once narrower.

Fye Bridge Street
Fye bridge
• Had a ducking stool that records say was actually used.
• This was one of the first bridges and started as a ford in Saxon times.
• Its vicinity to the important space of Tombland is evidence of the antiquity of the crossing.
• It isn’t true that ‘fye’ minds ‘five’, but it so happens that this is the fifth bridge to be built.

Tombland
Augustine Steward House:
• Augustine Steward (1491-1571) was a common councillor, a sheriff and then later an MP for Norwich.
• During the time of the Kett’s rebellion in 1549, Steward was Deputy Mayor and the rebels ransacked his home but he managed to escape. Merchants tend to side with law and order because that is best for business.
• His merchant’s mark and the arms of Mercers Corporation can still be seen on the building.
• He was another textile money maker.
• Ultimately this merchant class clashed with Stuart King Charles I in parliament over demands for money (Now, that really does upset the merchant class!). This lead to the civil war off 1642 which intimately impinges upon the history of NCBC.
• Inside the building the undercroft has blocked tunnels that lead to the cathedral across the road. The purpose of the tunnels is unknown. (Symbolically undermining King and High church?)

Tombland Alley:
• Follows the line of the east-west Roman road that crossed the north-south Roman road around Charring Cross (?)

St George’s Tombland:
• This is where we pick up the story of NCBC again.
• The Rector of this church, Rev William Bridge (and also of St Peter Hungate) became disaffected with Stuart King Charles I high church.
• He left for the Rotterdam in about 1635 and joined the English Chaplaincy in Holland where he had a freer rein.
• This Chaplaincy ministered to English merchants in the lowlands.
• Once again notice that the merchant wealth makers are figuring in the subversion of King and the established Church.
• Congregational dissent started to brew amongst the English Christians in the Netherlands.
• When the Congregationalists returned to England after the Civil War they asked sympathetic established church ministers to pastor them.
• The first was Rev Henry Amitage in 1647 who was associated with St Michael’s church in Coslany.
• The second was Rev Thomas Allen in1655 who was rector of this church (St. George’s) and St Peter Hungate.
• The early Congregationalists used this church for their services and a gallery (long since gone) was built for increased numbers, but they were thrown out after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

Cathedral Close
Norwich School
• Originally a free school for poor boys set up by the Benedictine monks in about 1300
Cathedral:
• Notice the basilica design. Notice also the Roman “viaduct” look of tier upon tier.

Elm Hill:
A very dilapidated Elm Hill was up for demolition by the council in the 1920s but it was just saved by one vote by the newly formed Norwich Society.

St Simon and St Jude church
• Goes at least as far back as the Normans. The chancel is from the 'decorated' period and is older than the perpendicular nave. Contains the famous monuments of Sir John Pettus.

Pettus House
• Fifteenth Century Merchants house.
• Original diamond leaded lights on top floor. Has a Georgian shop front.
• Sir John Pettus was knighted by Elizabeth I. Major of Norwich 1608.
• As Pettus got wealthier he moved to an estate at Rackheath. He was aping the aristocracy with their large estates.
• House owned by the Pastons at one point. The Pastons have their roots in the peasantry. Their rise to wealth was contested by noblemen.

Strangers Club
• Started in 1927and intended to have a 50-50 mix of locals and foreigners
• It is now an elite club of professionals. The phenomenon of such clubs goes back to the Free Masons. Once again notice the mercantile connection.
• The house was owned by Augustine Steward who lived here around 1545.
• The club badge is adapted from Stewards coat of arms.
• The Club has entertained dignitaries such as Queen Mary, Princess Alexandra, the Lord Mayor of London, the Netherlands’, Belgian and Mexican Ambassadors, Lord Birkenhead, Lord Baden-Powell, Sir Henry Wood, Sir Alfred Munnings, writers, actors, politicians and overseas visitors to the City who are brought to see the Club Premises.
• Professional gentleman’s clubs were very important in the industrial revolution as the seed bed of new ideas and their dissemination.
• The Mason’s had their roots in the enlightenment and the notion of God as a rational architect.

Britons Arms: The only building on Elm hill to survive the 1507 fire. Medieval doorway. Home to a group of religiously minded women.

St Andrews Area

St Andrews Hall:
• Built in the “Decorated” period: about mid 1300s.
• The most complete friary complex in the country.
• Friars lived to serve the community rather than live the detached lives of the monks. They were popular amongst the people. They depended on gifts of charity.
• They were established in the late 12th Century as a reaction to the wealth and power of the monks and monasteries, which is ironic because monks started out as religious ascetics.
• However they were not exempted from the dissolution.
• After the dissolution Augustine Steward sent a proposal the Henry VIII that the City buy the building from the Crown and this was accepted. This insured the buildings survived.
• Hence from 1540 the city took possession and the building has served as a church, a priory, school granary, workhouse, and mint. It contains the country’s largest selection of civic portraits.

Anchoress/Anchorite cell:
• An ascetic of the Middle ages who lived for prayer and the Eucharist.
• They were bricked up permanently in cells against church walls and sealed by the Bishop in a special ceremony.
• A Squint hole enabled them to hear and receive communion.
• A hole facing the outside world enabled them to receive food and give advice and counsel.
• Maintenance of Anchorites may be provided by wealthy people: whilst the wealthy tried to make their name in this world the anchorite helped make sure their names were also heard in heaven.
• Julian of Norwich who lived in a cell off King Street is world famous for her teaching.
• Many anchorites and Anchoresses in Norwich.

St Peter Hungate
• The second of Rev William Bridge’s churches; the rector who defected to the Rotterdam congregations.

Cloisters, East Granary,
• By 1667 under Daniel Bradford the Baptists had split from the Congregationalists over the issue of child baptism. Bradford is the name of the first minister that appears on the NCBC history of ministers.
• In 1688 the catholic Stuart monarch James II was deposed. Sometime after this date the Baptists under their minster Henry Austine took the lease on what was originally the dormitory over the cloisters of the of the St. Andrews friary.
• However they left the East Granary circa 1720 for a house in Coslany. (There is a plaque on the Granary referring to the Baptist presence)
• These Baptists came out of a melting pot of religious dispute amongst non-conformist protestants.
• Congregationalists heart ached about the loss of the Baptists from their number: “….they have not only forsaken the churches for want of the ordinance of baptism, but also judged all churches no churches that were not of their mind or came not up to their practice” says a congregationalist source.
• There were other divisions amongst the Protestants: ‘Kingdom Now’ Anabaptist extremists even went as far as wanting to overthrown Cromwell’s puritan government in order to help usher in Christ’s rule with His saints.
• There were disputes between Baptists and Quaker “Charismatics”. The latter suggested that the Baptists water baptism was on a par with St John’s baptism and inferior to Christ’s baptism with the Holy Ghost.

• The 17th century was a century of intellectual and political turmoil.
• It was a century that looked for the right balance between leaders and the people, between materialism and spirituality, between science and revelation.
• What should be at the centre of things? Earth or Sun? People or King? Mind or heart? God or man? Or most sinister of all: was there any centre at all?
• The Copernican revolution and what it means was by now well underway and is still ongoing.

St Georges Street
Art College: Now “Norwich University College of the Arts”

Black Friars Bridge: Not an original Saxon bridge.

Colgate West
Duke Street:
• So called because the Duke of Norfolk had a palace here in 1540.
• In former days it was probably only a small lane and Colgate was the main thoroughfare and had priority.

St Michael Coslany Church
• This church figures in NCBC history. In 1647 Rev Armitage of this church was asked to pastor the Congregationalists after they returned from Rotterdam (This was before the NCBC Baptists came out of the Congregationalists).
• When Armitage died in 1655 they moved to St George’s Tombland, and Rev Thomas Allen’s ministry
• St. Michael’s is obviously a perpendicular church. (That is, a church built on wool money)
• The fine flint flushwork has been likened to the inlaid ivory of cabinets.
• The flushwork on the south and east walls of the chancel is a late 19th Century copy.
• The south side is the most decorated face because this is the side that faced what used to be a busy street. Duke Street which cuts off this end of Colgate may only have been a small lane rather than the main thoroughfare it is today.
• St Michael’s is now the Inspire centre whose purpose is “...to promote and encourage the discovery and enjoyment of science by all members of the community using hands-on exhibits and related activities." Very appropriate. The merchants helped subsidize the perpendicular churches, and in the long run their search for profit promoted science as a side effect.
• The conflicts we have talked about resolved in favour of commercialism and nonconformist religious freedom.
• Ultimately this commercialism lead to the industrial revolution and this revolution in turn helped to promote science.
• So at St Michael’s science has come home: Norwich’s glut of perpendicular churches was down to the wealth of the merchants and it was the merchants who ultimately (if a little inadventantly) laid the seed bed of non-conformity, parliament, and science

Old Baptist Meeting House:
• This house was situated somewhere beyond the west end of St Michael’s.
• The Baptists moved here from the East Granary circa 1720.
• The house was extended at one point to accommodate increased numbers, but in 1744 they left for a house situated on the current site of NCBC.

Rosemary Lane:
(Before and after photo)

Thomas Pykerell House
• Built late fifteenth century by Thomas Pykerell.
• A mercer (textiles again!) who was Sheriff in 1513 and Mayor in 1525, 1533 and 1538. He died in 1545 and was buried on the north aisle of St Mary’s Church.
• Quote: In 1860 the building was an inn with the sign of the Recruiting Sergeant, and the yard at the rear was even then known as Pykerell’s Yard. It was later the Rosemary Tavern, but by the 1930s was being considered for demolition under a slum clearance scheme.
• One of the few thatched houses remaining within the city walls.
• It had the characteristic medieval hall layout of an entrance with a hall (then the living space of the house) on one side and private withdrawing rooms attached. On the other side of the entrance were three doorways into the pantry (for bread & associated foods), buttery (for meats and alcohol) and Kitchen (for food preparation).
• The site of the kitchen was probably that now occupied by the Zoar chapel.
• The spandrels over the arch would likely to have contained some sort of heraldry.

Self Link

2008-12-22T06:57:00.000-08:00

SMITH VERSUS REEVES

I am currently talking to an ‘anonymous’ contributor to Network Norwich (here) who, for various reasons, I refer to as Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith is a Christian dualist: that is, he sees the cosmic drama very much in terms of a superior spiritual world set over against the inferior world of matter. Mr. Smith attempts to resolve those notorious ghost/machine incompatibilities via the introduction of a third component that he identifies as the soul which acts as the medium between incommensurables.

It is precisely this kind of dualist dichotomy, real or imagined, that I have been putting under the spotlight for a long while now. And for good reason too: so much human angst, so much existential heartache, so much religious alienation from the cosmic context, are bound up with man’s perception or misperception of his nature and place in the greater scheme things. Atheism is inclined to the view that we are no more or less than a configuration of a small subset of the matter we find in abundance around us. There is a consequent anxiety, even paranoia, that because we therefore apparently occupy no special or sacred place in the cosmos then perhaps one day the material cosmos, either in the form of machines or natural calamity, will visit us with disaster. Moreover, unconscious matter, rather than sentience seems the dominant and even primary cosmic phenomenon. Deep space views delivered by the Hubble telescope show more of the same: just more and more starry whirlpools of insentient matter indifferent to human affairs. The huge star fields over our heads are surely more than a mere façade painted onto a canopy. Billions of galaxies and eons of prehistory, we instinctively sense, must have a noumenal existence, thus making our place in the greater scheme of things seem insignificant. We experience great pains and passions, but extreme materialism not only sees humanity as ultimately fading without trace but even denies the reality of those ephemeral pains and passions.

As a reaction against all this Dualism is a seductive philosophy. It seeks support in the intuition that the activity of matter is mechanical, absent of sentience and has an independent ontology very distinct from our self aware selves. Although this intuition is not shared by animistic societies it is a common perception of industrial societies who have exorcised the haunted environment and now view it purely instrumentally and mechanically. And so industrial societies are acutely aware of the dichotomies of mind and matter, will verses mechanism. Ironically religious dualism doesn’t question the materialist’s assumption that an independent gritty matter is a real ontology. Instead it sees matter as a potential upstart and rival to the sublime spiritual world. Religious dualism is humanities way of reaffirming the specialness and sacredness of humanity by attributing an extra spiritual ingredient, an extra zing that sets humanity apart from and above mere matter.

And yet dualism as a philosophy is by no means obvious: Idealism challenges it by suggesting that matter cannot exist without mind, and moreover that matter is a phenomenon of mind. Berkley’s idealism sees God’s Mind as the substrate ontology and matter as an ephemeral concept that floats for while inside that Great Mind.

2008-10-03T05:29:00.000-07:00

THE HUMAN PREDICAMENT.

In this article posted on the Christian Web site ‘Network Norwich’, the minister of Surrey Chapel, Tom Chapman (seen above with his wife), describes his struggle with a serious brain tumor. After quoting Isaiah 43:2 (“when you pass through the waters I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers they will not sweep over you.”) he goes on to say:

This is not, I think, a guarantee that we will always be aware of him holding our hand. That was not my experience, and don’t think it is the Bible’s promise. The point is not that we will never feel alone, but that we will never be alone. Cue “Footsteps in the sand.” Of course, if this promise never touched our emotions in any detectable way, we might reasonably start to doubt its reality – experience matters. But we must never reduce what is true to what feels true. And so I got wet, but didn’t drown.

We see here an age old theme, namely the interplay between feeling and knowing, between sensing and believing, between perceiving something and thinking something. Specifically we find, in this case, feeling, sensing, and perceiving the presence of God being contrasted with knowing, believing, and thinking God to be present.

As I have written elsewhere: “Ideas Versus Experience!” is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas.

So much of our thought turns on this dichotomy. So much of thinking life is taken up with the attempt to make sense of a world for which our immediate perceptions only ever provide a small sample. The struggle to join the dots of our experience into the wider understanding of a theoretical framework is a ubiquitous activity. The struggle is particularly poignant if a theoretical framework tells us that in spite of the immediacy of troubling experiences, things will turn out to the good in the end.

But although the dialectic between experience and theory is part and parcel of the human predicament there is often a great yearning to short cut this sometimes-tedious process. In particular, the devout have a tendency to be seduced by the promise of a direct connection with the Divine through sublime mystical experience. They are therefore more likely to be susceptible to the instinctual and inscrutable prepackaged conclusions of the intuitive 'right side of the brain' than to the analytical ‘left side of the brain'*. In this context there is a spiritual premium on sublime emotional contact with the divine; anything less is considered to be spiritually inferior.

Large swathes of evangelical Christianity are in denial about the fact that all of us see the cosmos through theoretical frameworks. They hate the taint of the theoretical; They despise so-called doctrine and ‘head knowledge’; They affect to have a direct communion with God via gnostic connections and frequently express fideist sentiments; Viz:

If you always process salvation through your mind you will never enter the fuller things in your walk. You must move from a place of cognitive reasoning ability to a place where faith and belief flows through your spirit and not your head … God is beyond your logic.

.... they don’t want a faith contaminated by the analytical mind; they affect to have a rustic faith where ‘just knowing’ is all there is to it; a plain and simple faith uncomplicated by whys and wherefores. But the view I have quoted above is inconsistent as it is itself an expression of a theoretical position, albeit an incoherent one.

The struggle that Tom Chapman relates is very candid, very true to life, and above all, very moving. Sometimes it seems that Christians who find themselves in the valley of the shadow of death have to be almost apologetic about not being on the mount of transfiguration. It is a perverse gnostic logic that estimates high spirituality to be measured by transfiguration experiences; accordingly those who are not exactly on the mount of transfiguration confound a popular spiritual paradigm and thus are to be applauded for having the courage to own up to the actual reality of their spiritual life. True spiritual values are, in fact, the very opposite of gnostic values. Those who traverse those dark valleys where hills hem them in, where they cannot see the horizon, where immediate experiences seem at odds with their grasp of the big picture, are facing a spiritual test that few of us wish to face. In that test, knowledge, theory, and analysis, objects so despised by today's touchy-feeley spiritual paradigm, provide the vistas onto a wider perspective that feeds hope and faith.

My prayers and hopes are with Tom Chapman and his family. I applaud his intellectual integrity as he drinks from the cup chosen for him. We all dread this cup and feel relieved that it hasn’t (yet) been served us; but there is no good reason why one day it might not come our way and who knows we may fail at the test; one works out one’s faith in fear and trembling. Tom Chapman’s integrity is to be cherished in the face of an evangelicalism that is so often inclined to compromise its authenticity by affecting to glory in the act of sacrificing intellectual integrity to the murky waters of fideism.

Footnote

* The intuitive right side vs the analytical left side is an over simplification of brain operation, but it serves as an approximation and metaphor in this context.

2008-09-14T09:04:00.000-07:00

DIFFERENT PLANETS

The NCBC web forum has recently been removed – hopefully archived and then removed. The active life of the forum ran from late summer 2006 to about the end of 2007. During its 18 month life the forum accumulated many postings and even hosted discussions with gravitas and significance. But apart from myself there have been few postings since the beginning of 2008 and perhaps it has become an embarrassment that too many of the discussion threads were terminated with latest comments by yours truly.

After first notification of its impending doom, I suggested that the old forum at least remain available as an archive, perhaps with the possibility of adding further content should the need arise. This request, as expected, wasn’t granted and so I took the precaution of archiving some of the material that interested me. I may reproduce some of this material on this blog in order to reestablish its much-deserved WWW exposure.

In theory NCBC web activity has moved on to its facebook pages. But looking at these pages, and especially the related facebook group, there has only been a trickle of light and innocuous activity during 2007, and very activity little since the beginning of 2008. Compared to the first year of the forum NCBC facebook looks as though it has been struggling from day one. Other than some light chat and occasional news items NCBC facebook, in spite of its 70+ members, may be suffering in part from novelty and subject exhaustion as a consequence of sustaining the forum for over a year.

And yet there is evidence on NCBC face book of a casting about for something and a sense of where to next? The discussion board kicks off in April 07 with someone pointedly asking, “Why do people join groups but not contribute anything?” and in March 07 someone else asks “What do you think I should talk about to appear interesting?” There is also a hint of that sense of brooding and of marking time before a much hoped for revival of religious fortunes or ‘shake up’ as someone puts it - often associated nowadays with Gnostic revival and ‘swoon for Jesus’ worship; a common reaction in these days of depressed spiritual malaise.

I won’t disturb the NCBC facebookers discussing what they are going to discuss or any prerevival blues. In any case my work is cut out engaging some of the issues raised on this and other blogs: e.g. the Wensum valley churches, the feminisation of church, the questions raised by recent revivalists, the Open Gospel, the ID/evolution debate, the polarisation of analytical knowledge and gnostic knowledge etc etc. These subjects appear not to register on NCBC radar at all and that is probably down to different priorities, different perspectives, different problems, different personalities, different planets!

Stop press: The old forum is still available on this URL (but for how long?)

http://www.norwichcentral.org/discuss/Blah.pl

However, there seems to be no link from the NCBC web site.

2008-08-24T13:34:00.000-07:00

YOU CAN COUNT ON IT
Tonight in the evening service, still with are eye on the male:female ratio and the feminisation of church, I did a quick count. This returned 30 males against 36 females, which reduces to a five to six mix. This, I suppose, is not far from the four to six mix I was averaging a few months back.

2008-06-23T07:46:00.000-07:00

THE RIGHT PITCH

The Sunday evening service was billed as a “Special Football Service”. I’m not the least interested in football and I went expecting to be bored to death by it all, although I would certainly want to concede that churches need to connect with a wide range of personalities, temperaments and interests and so I was prepared to stick it out. However, the whole service not only proved to be very well put together, but even interesting to someone like myself. It included a wide range of fascinating material; from the history of the Norwich Churches league, through the origins that some premier league clubs have in church teams, to the testimonies of Christian footballers. I was reminded somewhat of the old boys brigade where young lives were introduced to discipline, team spirit, and service, against a military looking backdrop. The ethos of today is unlikely to bear something like that, and so football may usefully have supplanted it.

Excellent, well done, I thought. However, that the service was clearly constructed with imagination and lots of hard work puts the contemporary dualist spiritual paradigm on the spot. That paradigm contrasts God’s work – which it tends to only perceive in acts of special dispensation – against ‘natural’ or profane agencies like man. The kind of shipwreck analyses that the dualist paradigm is inclined toward can be seen when it insists that creation was an act of special dispensation about 6000 years ago. In its most extreme form the perspective of the dualist mindset is inclined to perceive something like the NCBC Football Service, which ostensively taps into general dispensational resources, as purely a product of human effort and therefore lacking in spiritual power. The extreme dualist has difficulty registering the presence of God’s work unless it is in the form of ‘supernatural interventions’ and these are so often identified with bizarre religious practices that dehumanize and eclipse personality in favour of ‘blessing fodder’ events.

In the dualist mind activities involving creativity, skill, and interest are likely to be perceived as profane, even Godless activities. Utterly lacking in self-awareness the extreme dualist exempts his own mindset from self analysis, and is therefore unable to identify his perspective as a very facetiously human feature. He cannot see his mindset, but instead sees through it. Therefore that mindset never comes up for review and criticism. Unaware of his all too human perspective he sees himself as through and through a sublime spiritual being, a cut above the skills based Christian.

2008-05-07T04:18:00.001-07:00

SPIRITUAL BULLYING
The sermon started well: It was about that nasty third generation Herod, Herod Agrippa I who beheaded James (brother of John). Realizing that moves against the early church curried favour with the Jewish leaders Agrippa went onto imprison Saint Peter. In the New Testament Agrippa is portrayed as the archetypical sinner, the sort of person who puts the ‘I’ in the middle of the word sin. He aggrandized himself with rich clothing and won his position with the Romans and Jews with flattering words and sycophancy. Sometimes it was very difficult to tell if he genuinely cared or whether it was just a ploy to further his own interests and position. Agrippa, it seems, was the kind of person who is so self centered that when they shut their eyes they believe everyone goes away; in effect a solipsism of the worse type. He was utterly superficial, a mere façade motivated by the golden sin: egotism. Agrippa had acquiescenced completely to his egotistical temptations and lived the kind of self seeking life that is the antithesis of true Christianity. Excellent, I thought: this is what our spiritual battles are all about.

However, the Preacher went onto tell us that Peter had been imprisoned and shackled by his culture …. wait a minute surely not Peter’s culture, because presumably Peter had rejected the profound shallowness of the Agrippas of this world? But OK then, fair enough, we can accept that Peter was effectively a victim of a hedonistic culture. So, the preacher deduced, “We must repent of our culture”. Hhmm…, this is getting ambiguous, I thought: humans can’t operate in a cultural vacuum: we are all destined to express ourselves via the medium of some culture or other, hopefully a culture with moral fibre. Just what sort of culture was the preacher thinking we should repent of? To illustrate he went on to relate an anecdote about a Christian friend who far from home one Sunday happened to stumble into a church and who knows it could have been anything from a strict brethren assembly to a church of the snake handlers. However, ‘stumble’, it seems, was the name of the game because at one point in the service, at the cue of the speaker, the entire congregation fell to the floor except our preacher’s Christian friend who decided that he must repent of his culture in order to receive the sublime states of heart and soul associated with the ‘carpet blessing’. So, the take home lesson for us that day was that we should repent of our culture and, who knows, we might then be able receive the carpet blessing. And if we had any doubt about just how bad our culture is, a culture that may be resisting this sort of blessing, there was the illustration of Agrippa’s hedonistic world for comparison!

This sermon was typical of its class and I have seen it time and again amongst evangelicals: in an attempt to foist the idiosyncrasies of one expression of Christainity upon other Christains, a strong hint is dropped as to how sinful they must be if they don’t embrace these bizarre foibles. And what authority is offered to back up these quite extreme demands? None accept opinion, cronyism and vague references to an intuitive sensing of what 'God wants' or what 'God is doing'. It was classic spiritual intimidation.

2008-04-25T04:49:00.001-07:00

CHURCH IS A DRAG
The May edition of 'Christianity' Magazine has two articles on the issue that I have repeatedly raised in this blog: That of a church culture skewed toward the feminine. A point that neither article seems to grasp is that the masculine-feminine ‘spectrum’ is an abstraction defined by the clusters of traits that have varying probabilities of being associated with the more clear cut phenomenon of genetic typing. For example, physical strength is more likely (but NOT necessarily) to be found amongst males than females. Once this abstract male-female space is set up, actual genetic males and females may find themselves at different points in that space.

Given this concept of the male-female space, the fact is that churches are a niche subculture that is biased toward the feminine cluster of traits in that space. Males who demonstrate a more feminine mindset are in turn more likely to find themselves in line with church values than those with obviously extreme masculine traits. But there is one exception; the Male ‘Leadership’ patriarch is often welcomed with open arms, and finds a place in an subculture that frequently favours submissive behaviour and a dumbing down of an analytic mindset, whether that mindset belongs to a genetic male or a genetic female. See the restorationists for fine examples of patriarchy.

Both articles in 'Christianity' were written by females. One of the articles ends ironically with what to me is actually a call for the church to become even more feminine in its slant! That is, according to the article writer we should get out of the comfort zone of our safe and highly focused stereo typical roles, connect to the holy mystery of God and the mysteries of the gender gap, generally be more outgoing, relate to one another and learn from one another! Next time I go to church I think I’ll dress up in drag and act in a less focused and more scatter brained way; I might fit in better.

2008-03-12T07:53:00.000-07:00

DROPPING ANCHOR AT NCBC?
Last Sunday evening, during the NCBC service, we were presented with a logo of an anchor captioned with “You are my anchor, my light and my salvation”. This brought back memories of a piece I wrote 1995 that reflected on the styles of past and present Christianity. Of the past I wrote:

In those days they knew Christianity was good for you because they knew it to be true, and a good Christian was like the pews; strong, silent, resilient, steadfast and anchored - steadfast and anchored? Where have I heard that before?

“Steadfast and anchored” was in fact the caption under the anchor logo of the outgoing boys brigade. I say ‘out going’ because the boys brigade was soon to be defunct and the youth worker of the day was concentrating his efforts on a young persons group he had set up called “Power pack”. The logo of this newer group was a battery being struck from above by a bolt of lightning. With this in mind, in the same article I wrote:

These are the days when they know that Christianity is true because it is good for you and a good Christian is rather noisy and a bit of a power pack - power pack? Where have I heard that before? .... the newer tradition (often associated with charismatic churches) has a tendency to stress a kind of "intravenous injection” of God's blessing in the form of feelings, sensings, touchings, movings, reveries, ecstasies, and occasional bolts out of the blue.

The demise of the well and truly anchored boys brigade in favor of a group called “power pack” was symbolic of the day. In 95, and the three decades proceeding it, God was about “moving on”, God was about doing a “new thing”, God was about being zapped with power from above, God was about experiencing “more God, more…”, God was about the moving goals posts of God’s latest intimate “touch”. All this somehow seemed to find consummation in the Toronto blessing of 94 and the failed “Diana prophecy” of 1997. Today, however, that’s all forgotten water under the bridge. So perhaps we are getting anchored again.

Sometimes Christains seem so unconscious of the meta-narrative.

2008-02-22T07:19:00.000-08:00

THE FOUR TO SIX MIX: AGAIN
‘Christianity’ magazine has run two articles (see February and March) on the disparity in the ratio of males to females in churches. Here are my comments, as promised. As I have been aware of this issue for some years (and have written about it) I’m rather disturbed that only now have I found an article airing the matter. Anyway that’s an important start – my own church remains utterly unaware of it.

The two articles cover an interview with Carl Beech Chief executive of Christian Vision for men. I’ve got to hand it to him, Beech does seem to know how to connect to men, although his take on masculinising the church is to give occasion to the issue driven laddish sporting bravado that many men enjoy and engage in. If Beech’s succeeds here then he would have done the church a service.

In my case the way of being a male is slightly different. I have never been one for the laddish culture, as I approximate closer to that male preserve of the quasi-autistic loner who focuses relentlessly on single goals - stereotypically represented in the media by the likes of ‘The hit man’, ‘the terminator’, the lone hobbyist or geek etc.

But in common with the lads it isn’t just a case of me feeling that church just isn’t getting through; in actual fact it’s more a case of that church being proactively against the masculine model and its various manifestations. In modern evangelicalism conversion is all about a personality change that seeks denial of one’s masculine traits in favor of an intuitive reverie so aptly summed up by the phrase ‘The Heart Knowledge Christian’. What church wants, as Beech puts it so well, is chatty friendly ‘small talkers’, effeminacy, wimpishness, a passive submissive imbibing of homiletic monologues on Sunday, indifference to technical gadgetary, and drivers of cutsie feminine cars instead of real manly cars. As far as masculine pursuits are concerned, Beech says that the signal from the church is ‘Stop it because it’s all really sinful’.

As for the state of worship in church with its male alienating ‘Swoon for Jesus love ins’ Beech seems to understand this as well: “Our terminology is that Jesus is our lover – press yourselves into his arms and let him embrace you”. Beech goes onto to say: “I’m very grateful for the charismatic movement, but I think we need to recast the terminology. Some of the songs which emerged in the 90s were very cathartic.” It was a lot worse than that Carl: the mid nineties was the heyday of the Toronto Blessing when, if you didn't want to be accused of resisting the Spirit, you emulated those 'in the Spirit' and got down on all fours and barked!

Not news really, but having identified the problem what do we do next? In some ways the loner like myself is much better placed than the lads; I can simply ignore all these soppy goings on and pursue my own projects. But what does jack the lad do when he can find no social outlet for his laddishness? He says: "Fuhgeddaaboutit!"

2008-02-11T05:26:00.000-08:00

BOOTIFUL
Views News and Pews scoops another NCBC story!

Whilst photographing this idyllic scene at the church weekend at Sizewell Hall I happened to catch a UFO in the frame – an Unidentified Floating Object - and here it is:

A gumboot floating on its own raft? What’s more it’s not an ordinary gumboot; it is elaborately encrusted with colourful hearts. What’s the story behind this high status gumboot afloat on Sizewell hall’s lake?

Well, this boot was floated by none other than the good Rev Mark Tall. The Lord clearly guided the Views News and Pews reporter to be in the right place at the right time to witness the launching so that VNP could bring it to you first - although Mark may have a different view on that. When I caught the Reverend gentleman in the act of preparing this unusual spectacle and snapping it with his camera phone I thought, Ahh haa! Another snappy sermon illustration coming up! After all, Mark is a dab hand at starting his sermons with punchy and relevant homiletic illustrations, and this exhibit was clearly going to be used by him to illustrate what a miracle it is to walk on water; If it takes all of man’s ingenuity – no, make that all of Mark’s ingenuity - to come up with this ruse of a single boot standing on water without anyone actually wearing and walking (or hopping) with it at the same time - think how great was The Master’s feat in comparison!

But no, this wasn’t the idea at all – This was the follow up to Mark’s blog entitled 'Polishing thy neighbour’s shoes'. Mark now goes one better – he treats his neighour’s footwear not just to a clean, but also to a scenic pleasure cruise on Sizewell Hall’s picturesque lake, proving that he is as good as his word. But in creating an illustrative message that effectively alludes to walking on water as well, in one fell swoop of homiletic genius Mark has come up with a three-in-one illustration that combines the lessons of his alliterative blog on Words, Works and Wonders.

About the poor saintly lady who owns the boot you needn’t worry one little bit, because she was recently voted on as one of the church elders. She’s going places spiritually and doesn’t need gumboots anymore – as you can see from the picture below she’s so holy, ethereal and angelic looking, that she really does walk on water.

A spiritually up and coming Holy Jo holds council as eager listeners gather round at Sizewell Hall’s high table - Notice discarded, clapped out (and a whole lot less better looking) saints in the background.

VNP at NCBC: Telling it like it is. Remember, you first heard it in VNP!

2008-01-20T15:29:00.000-08:00

CHARIOTS OF FIRE

One of those ironic juxtapositions pregnant with subliminal meaning occurred in church tonight. A song written by Jeremy Camp called ‘Beautiful one’ was projected on the screen from ‘SongPro’. The second verse reads:

Powerful so powerful Your glory fills the skies.

Your mighty works displayed for all to see

The beauty of your majesty

Awakes my heart to see

How marvelous how wonderful you are

SongPro often projects its songs with a scenic backdrop. In this case the backdrop was a cloudy skyscape – rather appropriate one might think given the above verse, except for one glaring feature; the clouds were those linear formations generated by jet aircraft! Man’s most advanced application of the discovery of fire, the jet aircraft, Promethean in its vision, scores the sky from horizon to horizon, and the yet song declares: ‘Your glory fills the skies’! This breath taking paradox turned out to be a picture and anticipator signalling the need to proceed with caution with what followed; a sermon embodying the great 'genesis paradox' one so often finds in modern evangelicalism. For some Christians Exodus 20:11 (and the like) have a meaning that is as clear as a blue sky, and yet the Promethean project of science blazes its trail across those meanings. For some the paradox has become a chronic contradiction: How could a creator have created such a proactive world, a world so proactive that if it were not for self referencing problems it would seem to be logically self contained? One easy solution, of course, is to simply ignore those vapor trails and their meaning.

An aircraft emerges from the 'Big Bang'!

2008-01-16T09:55:00.000-08:00

THE FEMINISED CHURCH

The February edition of 'Christianity' magazine carries the first part of a feature article billed on the front as "No man's land: How gender imbalance has feminised the church". Have they only just noticed this? Moreover, hasn't it occurred to them that it may be a coupled effect: that is, gender imbalance has caused feminisation AND feminisation has caused gender imbalance. I'll do a longer blog on the subject after the second part of the article is published in March.

2008-01-07T05:12:00.000-08:00

GODHEAD AND BLOCKHEADS
In yesterday evening’s sermon an allusion was made to Augustine of Hippo’s “heresy”. Yes, it was heresy as Augustine fell into that well-worn trap which, starting with attempts to resolve the problem suffering and evil, leads to an attempt to disconnect from this world by an escape into the confused religious complex of dualism and gnosticism (specifically Manicheaism in this case). This often has ramifications for the views held on the nature of the Godhead. However, I write ‘heresy’ as “heresy” as I much prefer to be lenient about the foibles and blind allies that Christains often traverse – although, needless to say, leniency is seldom reciprocated by these highly religionised Christains who earnestly indentify satanic infiltration with contradiction of their opinions. They are all too ready to accuse fellow Christians of ‘letting in Satan’! (Yes we’ve had it at NCBC too!)

I was reminded of an article in Reachout’s 85th newsletter entitled “Heresies, Ancient and Modern”. The newsletter listed and described the following “heresies”: Aphthartodocetism Monophysitism, Apollinarainism, Alogi, Arianism, Docetism, Ebionite, Encratite, Eutychianism, Gnosticism (Proper), Marcionism, Monarchianism, Monophysitism, Monothelitism, Monotanism, Nestorianism, Origen’s ‘heresy’, Pelagianism, and Sabellianism. Nearly all of these ‘heresies’ fall over on one or more issues connected with legalism, gnosticism, and most often, the nature of the Godhead. Reachout are good at collecting, compiling and tabulating the facts (at least I hope they are), but are not so adept at evaluating the real meaning of what is in their hands; they make no mention of the common themes running through these 'heresies'

Attempts to define the nature of the Godhead are notoriously difficult and I personally have no issue with those who theorize, even wrongly about the Godhead on the proviso that these attempts are tempered by tentativeness, perspective humility and a studied detachment. After all, theorizing attempts to join the dots, and like all theorizing, theologies may not succeed in joining all the dots and the true nature of the Godhead may be a misrepresented. However, that’s no problem if humility of perspective, tentativeness and a studied detachment are the frame of mind in which the theorizing proceeds.

Perspective humility? Tentativeness? Studied detachment? One may as well run after the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow as expect such values to be held in fundamentalist circles. These are the very things that redneck religionists eschew and interpret as the antithesis of faith, revelation and commitment. But the irony is that this is where the real heresy starts, for those who arrive at, say, a Gnostic view of God, are likely to do so as a side effect of the search for an exclusive club of the spiritual elite and will claim other Christains to be all but beyond the pale of grace. They will then proceed with threats of Divine displeasure or even damnation toward those who don’t follow their line or fail to join them.

2007-12-02T15:44:00.001-08:00

HAVING SEX WITH GOD

Sometimes life delivers unreservedly classic film set scenarios and clichés. For example, an owl hooting just as I arrive on a dark starry night at the door of the Old ‘Haunted’ Castle where I work. Or the red cloud streaked sunset of December behind the Castle's East Wing as a gentle warm yellow glow filters out through leaded lights – so Kincaid that if it wasn’t real it would be considered naively kitsch. Well, today at church I had one of those unreal moments, too perfect, too stereotypical, and so textbook and clichéd that you’d think I had invented it.

Shortly after I walked late into the foyer on security duty the congregation struck up with one of my favourite carols ‘O Come Emmanuel’. This carol is packed with allusions and imagery taken from the texts of Old Testament history: ‘Ransom captive Israel’, ‘Lonely exile’, ‘Thou rod of Jesse’, ‘Thine advent’, ‘Key of David’, ‘Sinai’s height’, ‘In ancient times did’st give the Law’. As I listened I wondered how many of the congregation connected with a language that to be understood requires a modicum of OT scholarship. After all, this was the church where I had heard on more than one occasion a negative response to having ‘Yet another Bible study’. Anyway, as I had barely finished mulling all this over the next song started, and it turned out to be a quantum leap from the ridiculous to the sublime – no, make that ‘from the sublime to the ridiculous’.

The mind often filters, generalises and then forgets the data on which its generalisation have been made, and one is then left in doubt about the validity of the mind’s abstractions because the original protocols aren’t there to check against. Thus, my generalisation that parts of the contemporary church has abandoned erudition (whether Biblical scholarship or science) in favour of the much exalted and sought after ‘there and now’ quasi-sensual God experience or ‘God orgasm’ has sometimes felt a little off the wall. But as this new song struck up I felt vindicated. As if to emphasise the polarity of scholarship versus the ‘God orgasm’, starkly contrasting against the obscure Old Testament lyrics of ‘O come Emmanuel’ still sounding in my mind, steamy allusions to the ‘God experience’ now assaulted my ears: ‘Fill us’, ‘Passion!’, ‘Breathe within’, ‘abandoned to you’ ‘Lord have your way with us’, ‘God fall on us’ ‘More than this!’ all packed into a single song. (Note: More! More! Is an ecstatic cry one hears in some churches – I wonder if one also sometimes hears Yes! Yes! Yes!…?)

In spite of all the pretensions of prophetic insight that Charismatic Christianity has brought to churches nowadays, those churches seem so utterly unconscious of themselves!

So there you go, yet another minor adventure so pregnant with freudian meaning and insight that I'm sure I'm dreaming!

2007-10-31T06:14:00.000-07:00

THE FOUR TO SIX MIX

The November edition of 'Christianity' magazine contains the results of its reader survey. The male-female gender mix of the survey respondents was reported to be 43%-57%; once again the approximate 4:6 mix ratio pops up. By way of comment ‘Christianity’ adds ‘This mirrors the majority female church attendance in the UK’.

2007-10-20T07:30:00.000-07:00

FIGHTING SPIRITUALITY

Whilst trawling through the NCBC archives at the record office I stumbled upon the following typed note. I have no idea what the exact connection was, but it was written at about the time Dereham Road Baptist Church premises were being extended to include a large church hall and more schoolrooms. It appears to be part of an address dating around 1935.

“Now we shall have the building – but buildings alone are not enough. We must have earnest, concentrated devoted service. We who have laboured must strive to make ourselves fit, more willing, more persistent. You who have watched but not put your hands to the plough, what of you?”

Press articles of the day convey that mild intoxication experienced by a group of people when something new and full of hope is in the offing. With the recent renovations of our current building we can empathize with that. But can we empathize with this language? It is the language of different times, the language of a spirituality that was founded in the will, and not that of the late 20th century which equated a quasi-orgasmic perpetual honeymoon ‘experience of God’ with ‘closeness to God’. Instead we hear of labouring, ploughing, persistence, earnestness, concentrated service, devotion, striving. The unknown speaker is saying “OK, many of you have worked hard, but now ALL of you must work even harder”. With the living memory of World War I still very much in the public domain they soon had to face the privations of another war. They were ready.

2007-10-05T09:57:00.000-07:00

MORE MALE-FEMALE HEAD COUNTING: A CONCLUSION

Taking the average of figures I have posted on the above subject gives a 42%-58% split between males and females at NCBC services. Last Wednesday night I had the opportunity to take a peek at the list of names of people who have signed up for NCBC’s “Christianity Explored” course. I tallied up the males and females (excluding one or two foreign looking names I was unable to identify as either male or female) and arrived at 14 males against 23 females; that is a 38%-62% split. Once again we have the approximate 4:6 ratio popping out of the woodwork. What makes this result interesting is that the same value now emerges in a rather different situation to the services – namely, the take up of a course which is probably populated by a younger cross section, but nevertheless returns a similar ratio. Interestingly, and I don’t know if this means anything, I got exactly the same 38%-62% ratio in the morning service, a service that includes widows. Is this evidence of “first in last out” effect amongst women?

So what does it all mean? Well, I’ve rattled on about the feminization of Christianity, and that may be a factor, but is this bias toward the feminine part of something more general? After all, the readers of astrology columns and the members of a stage spiritualist’s audience have a female majority. Likewise, although I did no sample counting on the evening, the Benny Hinn rally in Norwich (which I endured for research reasons), looked as though it had a female majority amongst the white members of the audience. Is the female mind more likely to tune into the ‘spiritual’ than the male mind? In attempting to explain all this, my best shot at the moment is what follows.

The mind has at least two modes of working. Mode 1: It uses a series of prefabricated heuristics and algorithms. Mode 2: it is capable of actually constructing new heuristics and algorithms. Mode 1 is often loosely associated with the’ limbic’ system; it is instinctual, intuitive, emotional, inscrutable, mysterious and largely unconscious in operation apart from its end results perhaps. Its pros and cons are that it is fast in producing results, embeds much age-old wisdom, but its inflexibility makes it error prone and its inscrutability makes it difficult to correct. Mode 2 is associated with cerebral and conscious thinking. It is clearly a much more complex and difficult activity. Its disadvantages are that it is painstaking, doesn’t quickly arrive at conclusions and can be indecisive, but it is flexible, adaptable, accountable and correctable.

Now here is the rub: these two different modes can be at odds: in fact industrial society, which is largely the product of mode 2, has created conditions in which the prefabricated mental structures of the intuitive mind often feel like a fish out of water. It’s the old head verses heart cliché in another guise. Religion, which so often uses the limbic as its main resource, may find itself alienated from the products of conscious cognition. Rather than a negotiated peace between two complimentary modes of mind there is, in some religious circles, a war on, a head versus heart war. And one can see this in Christianity. Take for example these two quotes that I have culled from Christian circles:

If you always process salvation through your mind you will never enter the fuller things in your walk. You must move from a place of cognitive reasoning ability to a place where faith and belief flows through your spirit and not your head … God is beyond your logic.

A softer and perhaps less objectionable version of a similar thing:

I have met many people over the years who have tried to build their faith in their minds. However the mind is based on logic and sometimes the things of God are not logical! The key, I find, is to have your faith in your heart, here needing to understand every detail is not important as all you believe in is based and surrounded by the ultimate truth that God loves you!

(Interestingly in the audience listening to speaker of the first quote I estimated a 35%-65% male-female mix) These quotes attempt to elevate the 'limbic' by heightening its inscrutable mystique and defame the cerebral by suggesting it is mundane, prosaic, earthly, dead and cold. But the fact is that both modes are human and both modes are error prone and yet at the same time both are deeply mysterious in their operation and function under Divine sovereignty. They are complimentary and they should negotiate and not be set against one another.

Now here is the second rub: the female mentality is slightly more skewed toward the limbic mind than the male mentality and hence (I submit) the 4-6 mix of males to females found in churches and other ‘spiritual’ connections. Religion often exploits the age-old limbic system. I wouldn’t want deny that revelations come via this system, but its inscrutability leaves it wide open to exploitation by charlatans and religious quacks. I would be the first admit that we need different kinds of folk in church: intuitive oracles and conscious thinkers and they should compliment one another. However, it seems that looking back at the recent history of western Christianity the swing betrayed by my male-female statistic is not just a statistic – it is thermometer indicating a swing in values toward the limbic: limbic responses are considered to be a sign of a superior spirituality. As limbic Christians have become more and more alienated from the results of a science based society whose main resource is the cerebral mode of thinking, there has been a reaction against the cerebral in favour of the intuitive, emotional, and instinctive and this reaches its extreme in Gnostic flavours of Christianity.

There is an irony here: Christians place a heavy emphasis on the role of the Holy Spirit in bringing people to faith. That’s true enough, but it seems that the Holy Spirit is not transgressing the properties of His own creation: The same subtle pressures found in the current social milieu which favour a retreat of a cross section of religious people into the inscrutable world of limbic reactions are also found amongst Christians. The limbic appeal of Christian churches, like astrology columns and spiritualist churches, is betrayed by the side effect of a skew toward female majorities. This doesn’t invalidate Christianity but it suggests that the Holy Spirit is working very much within the parameters of His own creation.

How does someone like myself fit into all this? The ‘skeptic’ Larry Moran on Sandwalk, is likely to accuse someone like myself of being a deist. In his own terms he may be right as I am inclined to stress the full range of options that the Divine has available without resort to the overtly miraculous. In defence I would have to say to Larry that with the passing of the Newtonian universe deism is a less clear cut category than it was – the day by day providence of God is seen in the vicissitudes of chaos and randomness. But of course redneck limbic Christains will have none of this: they react instinctively against any thing that goes against their instincts and they have no truck with such fine distinctions. This attitude is at once both conceit and self-deceit.

2007-08-19T15:15:00.000-07:00

DARE TO ADMIT IT

Norwich Central Baptist Church is the product of two main events: Primarily: the merger of Dereham Road Baptist Church and St. Mary’s Baptist Church. Secondarily: the decision to use the St Mary’s Baptist Church premises as the venue for the merged church.

The following admission is long overdue. Dereham Road Baptist Church’s view on both of these events was initially wrong, whereas the St. Mary’s congregation were at least right from the very beginning that the merger should take place. Initially, however, almost everyone was of the opinion that if the churches merged the Dereham Road premises would be the venue to use and that the fate of the St Mary’s building would be demolition. However, after the merger of the two churches, minds began to change on the on venue question and in this, as with the merger, the St. Mary’s congregation lead the way.

It’s going to be a tough admission for some, but it is clear that God spoke through the St. Mary’s congregation first; not the Dereham Road congregation. I can say this because I’m the first to admit that I got it wrong on both counts. However, perhaps it was easier for me than some to eventually admit I had got it wrong: at the time I was very careful not to back myself into a super spiritual corner by claiming my (wrong) views were based on what “God was saying” or a superior gnostic insight. The gnostic spirituality that sometimes influences evangelicalism is part of the problem rather than part of the solution. (there I go again, slagging off Christian gnosticism)

So, many thanks to God’s servants at the original St. Mary’s Baptist Church who helped bring us to where we are now. Special thanks should also go to the efforts of Rev. David Milner, Mrs. Mary McLarty, and to Rev. Neil Walker; in particular the latter spoke very well at one church meeting and helped me correct my views.

2007-08-10T06:42:00.000-07:00

THE HYPERFEMINISED CHURCH.
After my blog on the hyperfeminised church and the subsequent head counting blogs that resulted, I was interested to read a review in the September 2007 edition of ‘Christianity’ about a book called “No More Christain Nice Guy” by Paul Coughlin. The reviewer (Tony Horsfall) says that the book contains a chapter called ‘Jesus the Bearded Woman’ and that it is a “...hardhitting call for men to rediscover their true identity, which he (the author) claims has been emasculated by radical feminism and the teaching of the church. Rather than being passive, naive and avoiding conflict, men should be proactive assertive and courageous, taking hold of the rugged side of Jesus.”

At the very least, it does seem this is not just another of my own idiosyncratic hobby-horses and that there is an issue here percieved by others. Although I wouldn’t say that I find what goes on in my own church particularly obectionable, I have to admit that I often feel its ethos fails to connect, relate, or illuminate the interests, problems, and aspirations I face in my own day-to-day living. In fact this very issue of hyperfeminisation is one of them. As far as my church is concerned the issue simply doesn’t exist. Moreover it is likely to remain outside the cognizance of the church, and the ‘prophecies’ it receives will in turn reflect its ethos. Surprise surprise!

2007-08-03T03:17:00.000-07:00

MALE_FEMALE HEAD COUNTING RESULTS
Here are the latest male-female head counting results at NCBC.
Morning Service 23/7/2007: 48 males and 79 females: 38%-62%
Evening Service 23/7/2007: 36 males and 47 females: 43%- 57%
The evening service ratio remains stubbornly static. The morning service shows an even greater preponderance of females, perhaps because it includes the older members, many of whom are widows.

2007-07-19T03:59:00.000-07:00

MALE-FEMALE HEAD COUNTING RESULTS
On the Sunday night service of 15/7/2007 I counted 34 males and 45 females and 34 males – that’s a 43%-57% ratio. At the church meeting of 19/7/2007 I counted 20 males and 27 females and 20 males – that’s a 43% - 57% ratio. So, the roughly 4:6 ratio seems to be holding up. What’s it mean? I’m working on it....

2007-07-09T04:15:00.000-07:00

MALE-FEMALE HEAD COUNTING RESULTS.
Last night I did another male-female head count at church and got 41 males against 57 females – that’s a 42%-58% cut and very close to the previous cut of 41%-59%. It is interesting to note that although we had 17 more people at the service last night the male-female ratio was more or less constant – that’s suggestive of a general background ratio, although it has to be admitted that it is rather early to be sure about this.

2007-06-28T04:01:00.000-07:00

THE HYPER FEMINISED CHURCH
An article in the July ‘Christianity’ reports on the difficulty Christian women are having finding marriage partners because of the paucity of males in church. As a result of this article I did some head counting at last Sunday night’s service at NCBC. I came up with 32 males against 46 females – that’s a 41%-59% cut. I suppose this isn’t really news. Moreover, the article brought to my mind another article in the September 2006 issue of ‘Christianity’ which raised the question of whether there is room in today’s church for the expression of the masculine. Also, I have written before on an apparent imbalance toward the feminine in contemporary church culture.

I think there is something very deep here, something that’s actually bound up with the very fabric of our world. One senses it when one reads a book like H. G. Wells “The Time Machine”, a book that investigates feminine and masculine traits by separating them out into two different branches of human evolution, the Morlocks and the Eloi. Looking back on history since enlightenment times one sees a twoing and froing between the analytical and the romantic, as these two perspectives, like Wells' Morlocks and Eloi, constantly react against one another. The analytical favours the masculine caricature: objectivity, focus, the impersonal, the mechanical, the unfeeling, the categorical, the rational, knowledge, evolutionary competition, conquest, even war. The romantic favours the feminine caricature: subjectivity, holism, the personal, mystery, feeling, the intuitive, the heart, the irrational, the inner life, gnosis, tenderness and pacifism.

Like some deep underlying geological fault line imposing itself on the geomorphology of the Earth above, there is, I feel, a deep dualism in the way the world is being perceived and this dualism is making itself felt here. That psychological fault line is constituted by a perceived dualism between the inner life of the heart versus the ‘external’ world of apparently impersonal things. This conceptual fault line is not only affecting our weltenshauung but even affects our church culture; as that culture attempts to disconnect itself from the impersonal, it skews itself toward the feminine.

2007-05-07T07:48:00.000-07:00

COMPLIMENTARITY

I was interested to hear Sweet Pete, during his leading of worship on Sunday evening (06/05/2007), quote from a book by Gary Thomas, a friend of Rick Warren. This is what Warren, in his book “The Purpose Driven Life”, says about Gary Thomas’ view (see page 103):

In his book Sacred Pathways, Gary identifies nine of the ways people draw near to God. Naturalists are most inspired to love God out-of-doors, in natural settings. Sensates love God with their senses and appreciate beautiful worship services that involve their sight, taste, smell and touch, not just their ears. Traditionalists draw closer to God through rituals, liturgies, symbols and unchanging structures. Ascetics prefer to love God in solitude and simplicity. Activists love God through confronting evil, battling injustice, and working to make the world a better place. Caregivers love God by loving others and meeting their needs. Enthusiasts love God through celebration. Contemplatives love God through adoration. Intellectuals love God by studying with their minds.

Warren concludes:

There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to worship and friendship with God. One thing is certain: You don’t bring glory to God by trying to be someone he never intended you to be. God wants you to be yourself. That’s the kind of people the Father is out looking for: those who are simply and honestly themselves before him in worship.

What can I say other than, “I’m extremely relieved to hear this”? I think it is the first time I have ever seen the complimentary role played by personality types amongst the ecclesia not only being acknowledged by prominent Christian leaders but also so clearly expressed. This is certainly not the message that has so often been thrust down my throat by a miscellany of Christian leaders who are apt to define authentic Christianity exclusively in terms of what is accessible to their own personality type. Very well said Gary, Rick and Pete.

2007-04-19T13:51:00.000-07:00

SERMONS IN STONE
..... is the name of one (yes, just one) of my latest projects. I was asked by the NCBC powers that be to compile an album of photos of our church buildings as they used to be before the recent renovations. This album is intended to be an artifact that people can browse in order to see how things have changed, property wise. This task provided me with an excellent cover story to commence a project that I have had in the background for years: Namely, the “Sermons in Stone” project. It entails using a set of photographs of our church architecture to illustrate a piece of text I wrote ten years ago called “High Pulpits, High Priests and the Bedford Blessing”. This piece briefly explored the architectural significance of the ex-Dereham Road Baptist church in relation to the mediaeval period, through the reformation, to the coming of the exotic sounding “Toronto blessing” (except that the “priesthood” who administered the blessing at the Dereham road venue - and wouldn’t you just know it - hailed from ........... Bedford)

In the cover story of an “nostalgia album” I had the perfect excuse to prize out some excellent photographic material from skilled photographers like Steve Genders and Les Thacker both of who obviously have some class equipment. Because every one at NCBC obeys the leadership to the letter, this couple of poor stooges had to hand over their artistic work to me! The album will, of course, ultimately be published in order to maintain my cover story, but the background project will be a little bit more nefarious. Little do they know!

As I have said “Sermons in Stone” is just one of my projects. Another of my current projects also harks back to the past, in fact right back to 1977 when I was involved with the ultimate mathematical control freaky: a study of randomness that attempted to capture it completely in mathematical equations. There was a paradox here that fascinated me – how can you mathematically characterise unpredictability and chaos by bringing it into the compass of the Great Rationales of Mathematics? Aren’t chaos and unpredictability the antithesis of mathematical order? To embark on this project is the ultimate conceptual imperialism. Right up my street.

This project was partly triggered by a question raised Arthur Koestler in his fascinating book “The Roots of Coincidence”. In chapter 1 he tells us how roulette wheels, the daily frequency of ‘dog bites man’ in New York and the number of lethal kicks delivered to German soldiers from their own army horses, all conform to the mathematical patterns of statistics and then he asks a simple but profound question:

How do those German army horses adjust the frequency of their lethal kicks to the requirement of the Poisson equation? How do the dogs in New York know that their daily ration of biting is exhausted? How does the roulette ball know that in the long run zero must come up once in thirty-seven times?

My mathematical work on this fascinating subject was completed by 1987 and I defined, at least to my own satisfaction, the notion of randomness without resort to algorithmic information theory. I typed up my findings, somehow managing to create all the mathematical formalisms using the limited character set of a mechanical typewriter. Hence, my current project is to transfer this paper to computer format, probably expanding and enhancing it in the process. In some ways this mathematical project does have parallels with my attempts to formulate the Open Gospel – in both cases my desire was to find order and theme amidst disorder and complexity. In the first case the complexity is found in those prosaic patterns of heads and tails generated by the throws of a coin and in the second case the complexity was found in the chaotic varieties of Christian culture.

Why do I do these projects? It’s not necessarily that I am particularly expert at them or that I uncover anything special. There are probably two reasons; the first is that I find mystery to be kind of food, a food that I need to devour in order to sustain myself. Thank God then that His mysteries are infinite in number thus ensuring an eternal supply of ‘food’. The second reason is that if I don’t keep at it, if I don’t keep hunting in this world of mystery, boredom, to the extent of being a mild form melancholy, settles upon me – I find the stimulation is necessary. It’s like having to run to keep warm, or like the shark that has to keep swimming to prevent itself from sinking. If you think that there is something wrong about this then think again. God’s creative activity has pulled all sorts of strange creatures out of the nether world of contingency space. I, along with you weird lot out there, seem to be the strange forms he has graciously extracted from the everlasting limbo of possibility, into eternity.

c 1977, 1987, 1997, 2007

2007-02-02T09:39:00.000-08:00

EAST IS EAST AND WEST IS WEST….
The good Rev James East expressed the perception (NCBC 21 January, Sunday evening service) that there is a current resistance to any suggestion that the failure to invoke miraculous healing is bound up with a lack of faith in Christ’s power (and willingness?) to heal. This perception of James probably stands a better chance of being right if it is qualified. Perceptions like this are notoriously dependent on the Christian subculture one naturally identifies with, not to mention swings in fashion. Swinging pendulums, counteractions and polarization may explain why in the May of 1996 I wrote the following passage which, in fact, expresses the very opposite perception – namely, that the “Faith deficit” hypothesis as an explanatory tool for making sense of an apparent dearth and/or failure to invoke miraculous healing was very much in vogue. The following is from a work of fiction I entitled “Signs and Numbers” and it uses the device of a fictional Christian fundamentalist organization (whose acronym was simply “BO”) to explore the subject of the miraculous:

The larger part of the healing theory of the BO was a cluster of ideas that could be invoked to explain why, in so many cases, what they thought should be the norm of miraculous healing on demand did not actually appear to be the case. When faced with a "healing" that conflicted with appearances they resorted to two types of explanation to resolve the conflict. The first were those ever popular explanations, although very unpopular with those on the receiving end, that healing had not taken place because of some hidden impediment like a lack of faith, spiritual blockage, hidden sin, fear, demonic influence, or lack of desire for healing etc. The second category were more subtle, for they asserted that healing had actually taken place but then gave an account of why appearance suggested otherwise; for example it might be claimed that although the indisposition was healed, only the symptoms persisted, or that old age and not illness was the problem, or that the healing would eventually take place even it took days, months, or years (making it ostensively indistinguishable from “natural” healing), or that demonic influence was manifesting itself with misleading symptoms etc etc. The BO was a heavy-duty user of explanations of this kind and from a collection of ideas of this sort it was always possible for faith to find refuge in some explanation of why the appearance of indisposition persisted in spite of prayer for healing on demand.

The BO was proud of its strong affirmation of miraculous healing, but with a cluster of explanations with which it could spin-doctor the awkward realities of failed healing events, when it came down to it, the BO did not have much more faith than anyone else. Certainly not more than those Christians who would claim that miraculous healing did not take place on demand; The latter Christians accepted that there were many cases when miraculous healing did not happen for inexplicable and inscrutable reasons; reasons whose mysteries would not yield to heavy handed spiritual trouble shooting which either intimidated the acceptance of an ambiguous "miraculous healing" or else sought someone to loudly blame for having obstructed it in some way. In fact even dispensationalist Christians who claimed that miraculous healing was largely confined to early church history could hardly have their faith faulted by the BO when they were only doing what the BO itself did; namely, to provide their own explanation as to why certain miraculous healings did not happen. The fact was, and is, that most traditional Christians believed in miraculous healing and they only differed in their beliefs about why it did not always take place: Consequently, the cause of contention was not so much the concept of miraculous healing itself, because most orthodox Christians believed in it anyway, but rather in the differing theories they invoked to explain why miraculous healing was not invariable. Some said that miraculous healing once happened and now doesn't. Some said that it sometimes happens and sometimes doesn’t. The BO, although it was unlikely to admit it, also said, in effect, that it sometimes happens and sometimes doesn't; but they, like many other authoritarian Christian groups hinted at the causes of failed healings by mixing up imperatives with matters of fact; for them miraculous healing should happen and sometimes didn't because someone somewhere was to blame.

The BO, paradoxically, probably prospered all the more for these views, which provided a pretext for spiritual bullying and thus pandered to the quasi-masochistic drives of the religiously insecure and guilty who needed an opportunity to punish their fleshly intellects that ran on logic.

Let me summarise: The task of human cognition, as always, is to make sense of reality and when difficulties of interpretation arise that cognition is capable of creating some very ingenious devices to maintain a semblance of logic and balance. Accordingly, the “faith deficit” hypothesis takes its place amongst other sense making cognitive resorts that are commonly used to explain away a lack of healing (or failed healings) and other awkward facts of Christian reality via a kind of ontological laundering. All this is highly ironic as many fundamentalist Christains who are heavy duty users of cognitive resorts often disparage any attempt to bring logical sense to “spiritual world”, which they believe to be better experienced through the quasi-illogical sensings of the “heart”. Hence, the suggestion that Christians tender interpretative hypotheses in such a spiritual area as miraculous healing will, of course, be strenuously denied if only on the grounds that “heart Christains” don’t work in the scientifico-intellectual fashion of consciously trying out this or that hypothesis: True! They don’t! But what they do, in fact, is to tender interpretations unconsciously just as the mind unconsciously and automatically tenders such things as face patterns in the clouds (or even on the surface of Mars!), but which presumably get short shrift when it is clear that these patterns, in this context, are not evidence of real faces. Hypothesis tendering, of sorts, is what the mind does unconsciously and this process is so effortless, seamless, unconscious and so often successful that it is easily put down to some kind of esoteric understanding. It is at once both an irony and an hypocrisy that those who impugn the faith of fellow Christains for finding reasons why miraculous healing is absent, cannot yet see that their preference for the faith deficit hypothesis fits in the same category of being an explanation for the absence of healing!

Since I wrote the piece of fiction above I have heard of another way of laundering healing ontology. This ontological resort depends on the distinction between “cures” and healing, the former being a complete cessation of the pathology and the latter being only a degree of cessation. One can then employ this device to widen the goals posts and broaden the range of circumstances that can be classified as miraculous healing. However, I have to remark that using this relaxed criterion, Christ’s miraculous healings would probably all count as cures. Another factor that makes the whole subject a slippery area is the sheer complexity of human pathologies, which sometimes make it impossible to identify just when a “miraculous healing” has occurred.

If James is right and the faith deficit hypothesis is now well out of vogue, then perhaps past reckless and unfair abuse of this hypothesis by Christian groups not unlike my fictional “BO” has resulted in a counter reaction that has made the whole subject off limits. Hence, given this qualification James may be right - although I suspect there are still many Christian groups out there who are heavy duty users of the faith deficit hypotheses: for them explaining away a lack of miraculous healing in this way is still very much in fashion.

I have to say that my own acquaintance with invocations of miraculous healing that have ultimately failed to bring an end to pathology, have all been in the context of great faith and unless I had constantly surmised the presence of hidden spiritual impediments in order to explain the anomaly, I could see no reason why the healing should not have happened if sheer faith in God is a sufficient condition to make way for it. Of course, it goes without saying that it would have been totally wrong of me to invoke scriptures like Mark 6:5 to criticize Christian groups who have failed to secure miraculous healing, as this scripture (which links to material in Luke 4) concerns those who openly opposed Jesus and it would have been unfair to use this scripture against Christian fellowships who gave every appearance of following Christ and having complete belief in His willingness and power to heal.

Given a belief in basic Christian theology we are left, therefore, with an outstanding cognitive problem – why, apparently, is there such dearth of successful miraculous healing? The orthodox dispensationalists tell us that the overtly miraculous phase of the church’s work ended a long time ago when the apostolic period came to a close (although I myself am not entirely convinced of this view). On the other hand many Christians invest their hopes in “healing ministries” – itinerate religious showman that occur with a frequency similar to the distribution of faith healers who appear in the general populace. This phenomenon looks suspiciously like the “7th son of a 7th son” effect rather than any general miraculous healing power bestowed as a gift by Christ upon certain individuals in His church. Others rely on “social texts” (or “rumours” might be nearer the mark) that do the rounds; for example one often hears someone claim that they know someone who once attended a rally who saw someone healed. I have to admit I do not yet have in my possession any evidence of spectacular healings that are of any better quality than rather remote anecdotal accounts. That I treat such accounts with reserve has more to do with a lack of faith in the human ability to reliably interpret rather than a lack of faith in God.

For myself I would not accuse even dispensationalist Christains of throwing up a doctrinal screen in order to cover up a faith deficit. Any genuine Christian who has some acquaintance with the omni-powerful vistas opened up by the Biblical vision of the super-total God, can see immediately that the sweeping and comprehensive powers available to the Biblical Creator makes miraculous healings a relatively small task, and this is clearly understood in deep way by all the Christains I have met. Hence, my own theory, as suggested in the piece of fiction above, is that the apparent dearth of miraculous healing has nothing whatsoever to do with a lack of faith in God’s authority and power; for Christains of all shades have different ways of laundering away the difficulties of applying a Christian ontology in the area of miraculous healing - and that applies as much to the users of the faith deficit hypothesis as to any one else. This whole area, in fact, is very closely related, and at least analogous to the subject of theodicy – that is, attempts to reconcile a loving omni-powerful God with suffering and evil.

Let me summarise: The apparent dearth of miraculous healing has no necessary connection with a lack of faith, and invokes a variety of Christian attempts at making sense of the realities of healing as they seek to come to terms with them. Quality of faith is not so much the variable amongst Christains as is the way that faith is applied. However, this view is certainly not going to be accepted by Gnostic Christains, because for them it is always a faith question. This is because for them belief in God is not about a cognitive encounter with reality, but rather it is almost exclusively about the achievement of sublime states of faith and mind that are capable of unlocking the door to the miraculous. Hence, if faith is to be equated with esoteric states of mind, as is the wont of Christian Gnosticism, then it is an easy task to rubbish the claimed faith of fellow Christains by accusing them of not having these sublime states of faith.

But, of course, the Christian Gnostic position, in spite of all its fideists sentiments, counts as a cognitive point of view, an attempt to make sense of reality even if this is strenuously denied. Moreover, it also counts as just another Christian subcultural platform from which Christians can impugn the faith of fellow Christains. Fine, that suits me. As readers of my electronic columns know the divisions and mutual-slanging matches that go on amongst Christains is a constant theme to which I return with satire and comment. It is the great anomaly that hides the deep truth of Gospel Grace. This polarized “east versus west” activity of Christains is unlikely to stop before kingdom come but that’s OK with me, because it gives me plenty of material to think (and laugh) about!

2007-01-29T09:37:00.000-08:00

NCBC’s SIN TIN
Norwich Central Baptist Church’s chocolate distribution ritual, which takes place during its now famous "Chocolate Sandwich" services has fascinated me for long time now, and I have often pondered on its real meaning. But, I won't have to ponder much longer: The incumbent professor of UEA's centre for liberated studies and sexology, Prof Trevor H. E. Pitts, whose open-minded, open-ended, open-mouthed theoretical studies department leaves no taboo unquestioned, and whose "moral exploration" laboratories rings the changes on novel "gender reconstructions", is writing an illuminating academic paper on the subject.

In a queer twisted echo of the J. John "Just Ten" Christian talks at the Norfolk show ground a few years back Prof Pitts has organised a series of lectures entitled "Just None; Just Do It!". Recently, however, the good Prof was seen sitting in NCBC’s congregation and sure enough, as a prelude to his paper, he commented on the chocolate distribution ritual in his highbrow lectures. "These oppressed people at Norwich Central Baptist Church have a need to Sin", declared the learned Prof. He went on to say, "This Church clearly indulges in chocolate distribution as a cathartic abreaction. It is, in fact, a ceremonial and ritualised form of subliminal sinning punctuated with carnal innuendo; witness the distribution being accompanied by feigned expressions of greed, and sensual indulgence, supplemented by allusions to dishonesty, bribery, and pilfering. This make-believe submission to temptation is a cry for help from the emotionally and morally repressed. If they come to me I can help set them free and show them the pleasures of what they arbitrarily label as 'sin'. They are free to make use of my department's sin laboratories; these are equipped with videos and an assortment of specialist equipment (including, if they so wish, plenty of chocolates) in order to promote an open ended and uninhibited exploration of liberated adult behaviour patterns "

With all this talk of ceremonial sin I, of course, steer well clear of this whole chocolate distribution business and you won't see me collecting my chocolate in a month of Sundays. Or should I say at least not publicly: Ever wondered why the chocolate tin never contains any Rum fudges? Having a set of keys sometimes comes in handy and when it comes to this sort of thing I'm as big a subliminal sinner as any of people who traipse out to the front every Sunday morning and publicly make show of their self-indulgence. So you can't accuse me of not getting into the spirit of NCBC's chocolate distribution extravaganza.

Based on an article first published in the September 2002 edition of “Views, News, and Pews”

2007-01-18T08:58:00.000-08:00

SIXTY YEARS AGO

The St. Mary’s Baptist church of 1947 was a church without premises or Pastor. In an article in the Church magazine of January 1947, the Church secretary (Mr. W.J. Mildred) wrote:

May I be allowed to put in a special plea for a larger attendance at the weekly prayer meetings. In recent months, under the leadership of Dr. Gilbert Laws, Rev. Maurice Hewett and the Deacons, a fine spirit of prayer has been sustained. There is room for improvement, however, in regard to attendance. See what you can do in helping to maintain and increase the prayer life of the Church.

The spiritual prosperity of the Church rests with each member. Let this be your SLOGAN for 1947 and for all time, “THE CHURCH DEPENDS ON ME.”

2006-12-22T11:20:00.000-08:00

SPIRITUAL FAST LANER

This photographic study juxtaposes the sleek horizontal lines of the foreground sports car with the background perpendicular architecture of a 13th century church setting up a pleasing contrast that evokes the mix of temporal and eternal duties of man’s life on Earth. The vaulting vertical stone tracery in the expansive windows of the mediaeval building signifies the striving Godward dimension of man’s life whereas the earth hugging lines of the motorised chariot are eloquent expression of thrusting Earthly purposes as the pilgrim on the road to heaven is challenged to do his utmost to stay in the outside lane to glory (1 Cor 9:24).

Not that the driver of this sleek machine should have any trouble staying in the fast lane - looking at the length of that bonnet I am sure vehicles of inferior house power move over when they see this mean green machine in their rear view mirrors, and we as a church can thank the Lord that we have the faster pastor.

2006-12-13T09:27:00.000-08:00

THE RETURN OF THE KING

The very week after my last post reporting on the missing bust of Joseph Kinghorn, it suddenly reappears. The cover rumour for this reappearance is that Kinghorn reemerged to help host a minister’s fraternal. So it seems that the reputation of the good Rev Kinghorn hasn’t entirely dissipated and somebody somewhere decided that it would be a good idea for him to make the journey from some dusty cupboard back to his plinth in the Deacon’s room. I wonder if the church has a copy of “The Life and Works of Joseph Kinghorn” in its library? (Come to think of it, where is the NCBC library now-a-days?) The “Feelings versus Knowledge” dichotomy, such a common motif in contemporary Christianity, was also an issue in Kinghorn’s day. I wonder what his views on it were? – If indeed he expressed them – he seems to have spent some time challenging the “Unitarians” just down the road.

2006-11-28T13:02:00.000-08:00

PURGING HISTORY AT NCBC

Mainstream Churches are at once both conscious and unconscious of themselves. They are conscious of the image they project onto a society where religion is often portrayed as stuffy dated and inconsequential, and yet they are also unconscious of their own image-consciousness.

Take for example, the recent merger that resulted in the formation of Norwich Central Baptist Church. NCBC occupies the site of a historically prestigious local church whose foundation goes back to pre-enlightenment times; 1669, in fact. Before its recent renovations, the walls of the church were graced with paintings, old photographs and memorial stones celebrating the lives of past Baptist grandees and their positions both in church and society (See photos). Some members of the newly formed NCBC, however, felt uncomfortable with the rather starkly formal surroundings of the 1950s built church. My guess is that the display of solemn looking grandees and memorials was part of the problem. During renovations the pictures disappeared and there was even talk of removing the stone memorials. The bust of Joseph King-Horn, one of the church patriarchs, which dominated the Deacons room, also mysteriously disappeared. In fact a split in the vacated wooden base of the bust gives the appearance of it having been removed with some force! Although I don’t think this is actually the case, nevertheless, when I examined the empty pedestal I was sharply reminded of the broken stone to be found in the empty niches of medieval churches that suffered at the hands of zealous puritans! The comparison here may be a little strained, but one thing we can be sure of: once again the goal posts of religious perspectives are on the move and contemporary Christains no longer feel comfortable with the icons, images and expressive modes of a bygone time.

NCBC senses that the current cultural climate no longer favors the ecclesiastical and traditional trappings that encrusted the Baptist faith of the past. Church members seem non-plussed about the meaning of these overt and shameless displays of Baptist tradition and I can’t help but be reminded of the ruinous stone iconography of ancient Egypt whose power to invoke any sense of religious seriousness has long since gone because their mystique was bound up with their social context. Take a close look at the paintings and pictures of those Baptist patriarchs that once proudly hung on the walls of the Old Duke St. Baptist church: the demeanor and dress of these men signal anchorage, solidity, stability, tradition, experience, civic connection, scholarship, all of which seem inappropriate in fluid times of fast moving media images, disaffection and societal changes capable of rendering a life time’s experience void. Moreover, this religious memorabilia harks back to an era that had more confidence in secular government and was proud of civic status. Contemporary government no longer presumes a consensus and has more the character of a collection of pressure groups whose raison-d’etre of agitation are found in the fragments of postmodernism’s ‘little narratives’. In that process churches have become yet another marginal pressure group, often alienated from the secular civic authorities that once had a Christian gloss. Churches are therefore less able to identify with government and less willing to celebrate their civic connections, unlike their Christian predecessors.

As it is with the fragmentation of governmental vision so it is with theoretical visions. Grand narratives, like grand authorities, are taken as a sign of didactic presumption. These days you don’t let on if you have an all-embracing theoretical vision giving you the where-with-all to comment on anything, because that just comes over as intellectual hubris. The Postmodern vision does not accept that we live in a world sufficiently coherent to allow that sort of thing - the miracle of a cognitively integrated world is “pie in the sky” (Ironically that is precisely what it is!). Thus do churches feel uncomfortable with a confident modernist approach and they tend to make concessions to the ambiguities, diffidence, and downright nihilism of the day. The contemporary church is unlikely to make much of its claim to being the steward of an all-embracing theoretical cosmic vision and instead sells its feminine caring side, making show of primeval human traits such as relationship, love, music, feeling, adoration, and personal connection. These are values that few would dare to gainsay, as they seem to be the last bastions of humanity as the cold of a heartless cosmos seeps in. Not for the first time in history, then, there is a swing toward a touchy-feely romanticism in reaction against the hell like vision of an unfeeling machine world. At its most extreme this retreat into one’s humanity takes the form of a gnostic conversion to spiritual mysticism and fideism, a conversion that makes the recipient open to exploitation by shamanistic authoritarian demigods such as we find in the charismatic cults. It is surely an irony that those rather stuffy looking but scholarly genteel Baptist patriarchs, often vilified for being six feet above contradiction in their high pulpits, should now be replaced by apostles of anti-reason who take a dim view of so much as a probing question, let alone contradiction, and demand an unthinking fideism that rubbishes any investigation of their work as a sign of the unbelief of man’s reason.

Traditional ways are often discarded like outdated clothing and sometimes with the affected abhorrence that pubescent offspring show toward their parent’s styles and outlook. True, there is wisdom in this reaction in as much as it refreshes outmoded practices and language. But injustice is done if this also entails a forgetfulness of the past and a failure to acknowledge the good work of those who have gone before. I am not arguing for the formal portraits and Kinghorn’s bust to be prominently and dominantly displayed at NCBC – times have changed and we are here to serve the present and not the past. However, I can’t help but be suspicious of the motives behind the quiet disappearance of certain historical artifacts from NCBC. Does it betray a failure to come to terms with our past? Churches are often uncomfortable with one another and may even be alienated from each other (See previous post) so it comes as no surprise if churches are alienated from their own histories. In fact they often haven’t come to terms with some of their own members; there is sometimes a gap between an aspired church self-image and what is actually the case, and this can lead Christains to turn on one another demanding that they conform to this or that blessing, this or that renewal, this or that doctrine, this or that church structure, this or that preacher man, this or that prophecy, or this or that style of worship.

As for those old Baptist grandees, their own iconography has done them an injustice – they come over to us as anachronisms, static museum pieces conveying a message that can be misunderstood even by Christains. But rather than contemplate their dusty memorials it is much better to read their words in, for example, back copies of the church magazine, “The Messenger”. It is then that one starts to come into contact with their personalities and one is then left in no doubt about their faith. They successfully carried the flame for a while: as one Christian Blogger has put it using the words of another, if eccentric, giant of faith: “We stand on the shoulders of (the) giants (of faith).” They were spiritual, even if we despise their memorials. But I suppose our opinion of them doesn’t really count. If they worked well, their work will remain long after we have gone and will outlast even their stone epitaphs. Let us pray that our work will also stand the test of eternity. (1 Cor 3:11-15).

Joe Kinghorn: Gone to the great free lunch in the sky.

2006-11-20T09:51:00.000-08:00

MIRROR, MIRROR.....

Norwich Central Baptist Church is part of a phenomenon I have called the “Wensum Valley Churches”. These are a group of protestant churches that huddle around an ancient meander in the Norwich Wensum valley and I list them as follows:

Norwich Central Baptist Church (conservative), Surrey Chapel (orthodox), Silver Road Baptist (Traditional?) Zoar Chapel (Strict and Particular), JW Kingdom Hall (Cult), Wensum Chapel, now City church (Charismatic), The Octagon chapel (Traditional), Princes Street UR (Traditional). The Cathedral (Traditional). St. Augustine’s (Emerging/postevangelical church), St Luke’s (Postevangelical/emerging church),

Stretching the line a little one might also include “Potters House” (Charismatic Cult) on Dereham road, St Barnabus (traditional) and even Kings Church (Charismatic). Tell me if you think I should add anymore to the list. This is a phenomenon I am still studying, classifying and describing, and so I’ll appreciate any input. Some of my labels may be non-distinctions e.g. it is questionable if there is much difference between the ‘conservative’ NCBC and the ‘orthodox’ Surrey Chapel. However, I want these two labels hanging around just in case I should at some date need to fine-tune my categories. Some of the categories actually overlap. Take a good look at this group of churches – they are perhaps just as diverse as the seven churches of Asia minor (Revelation 2ff); this group of churches sprawl over the best part of the Protestant spectrum.

I have attempted to classify these churches by introducing a classification scheme that is not based on doctrine but has more to do with “style” than “content” (although style and content are often well and truly conflated) One can, in fact, find similar differences of ‘style’ in Judaism: - e.g. Judaism has the equivalent of ‘orthodox’, ‘charismatic’ and ‘cult’ styles. The generality of this taxonomy does suggest that factors, not uniquely Christian, are at work here to produce these variants. Something else must unite distinctly Christian churches, something far more fundamental than just how orthodox, gnostic, traditional or progressive churches are. For me it is easy to identify what it is: Truly Christian churches understand that their faith and anointing (of 1 John 1:23&27) are void unless underwritten by the ultimate sacrifice made by God Himself, in Christ. But having said that one has to admit that some of the above churches have adopted novel doctrines and idiosyncrasies that threaten the very core of this inclusive faith. However, for those churches who do grasp the Truth, the Truth that gives purpose to life, the universe and everything, they are united by one faith, one baptism and one spirit, in spite of themselves, whether they like it or not. You don’t choose your blood relatives – and by ‘blood’ I mean “Christ’s blood”.

Churches of Norwich look at your selves in the mirror! Don’t be tempted to admire your self or drift off into a narcissistic reverie of self-praise, discounting “all them other churches” as your spiritual inferiors or even apostate! Look in the mirror and see what you really are: You cannot dissociate yourselves from one another: from the outside you all look to be part of the same untidy theme of history, a rough and ready hodge-podge of sometimes ‘anointing denying’ people, a people whose religious elaborations piggy-back on a core faith. There are those churches amongst us who still hanker after a propriety branding of all other churches after their own image, and whose fragile sectarian conception of faith identifies the ecclesial remnant with just another tiny purist splinter group of no cosmic significance whatever, here today and gone tomorrow. Instead Christianity, in actual fact, has cut a broad fuzzy variegated swathe through history, a swathe that sometimes includes some very uneasy partners! We must strive for a robust historical conception of church that mirrors the real state of affairs we find both in Norwich and else where. This is the Open Gospel.

But the Open Gospel is not just a new fangled idea of information and systems theory: In their heart of hearts all true Christians know it:

Though with a scornful wonder
Men see her sore oppressed,
By schisms rent asunder,
By heresies distressed:
Yet saints their watch are keeping,
Their cry goes up, “How long?”
And soon the night of weeping
Shall be the morn of song!

One foundation yes, but a complex sometimes-tacky superstructure! (1 Cor 3:1-15!)

2006-10-24T11:16:00.000-07:00

CHAUVINIST'S CORNER

Political incorrectness has been all but banished from our church, especially in the matter of the equality of the sexes. But that hasn’t stopped us using music from Newfrontiers. Newfrontiers? What’s wrong with them? Their music is good and it’s theologically sound? I am sure it is, but it comes from a stable that the liberal minded may find just a teensy weensy bit tainted with patriarchy.

Newfrontiers came out of the late seventies restorationist movement, a movement whose “apostolic” father was Arthur “I learnt it in the Army” Wallis. In the summer 1979 issue of the Restoration magazine Wallis wrote of the role of women in church:

“Man’s head is Christ, so that in submission to Christ he receives authority from Christ. Women’s immediate head, however, is man, so she acts under man's authority”

Newfrontiers have mellowed since those heady days of rapid sideways growth of the Restorationist movement and now assume what they call a complementarian position on women. But according to Wikipedia, this means:

“… that women are not able to occupy positions of governmental leadership within the local (or wider network of) churches, such as eldership or apostolic ministries…”

So there you go girls, it's back to your place by the kitchen sink. But judging from the snaps I took below of our politically correct dual ‘his and hers’ sink system it is precisely at the kitchen sink where NCBC is getting most flack from the “weaker sex”. It looks to me that we could do with a little bit of help from the Newfrontiers patriarchs. I wonder what their remuneration rate is for a Sunday sermon: pretty steep I should imagine as many of them were in high flying jobs as management consultants at some point. And what do we get? An RE teacher and a guy who lives with a cat called Lily.

Peter: Being a girl, Jo, I am sure there is nothing you like better than a bit of washing up and wouldn’t mind doing my sink as well.

Jo : Being a boy, Peter, I am sure there is nothing you like better than a bit of car mechanics and wouldn’t mind changing a slashed tyre on your car before you go home.

Jo Westwood? More like “Jo Wayward”

Andy: Don't look now Debbie, but someone's taking a photo.

Half a second later: Speak to yourself Andy.

As you can see these two attempts by church elders at 'covering authority' are about as effective as the Canutian school of tidal management.

2006-09-28T08:47:00.000-07:00

NEW NCBC BLOG GETS BULLET PROOF BLESSING FROM REV JAMES