Brian McLaren: A GENEROUS ORTHODOXY

Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (2004)

Brian McLaren is probably today’s most widely-read ‘progressive evangelical’. Surprisingly he’s never attended classes for credit in a theological institution, nor has any ordination qualifications from a bona fide denomination… ‘Rather I am a lowly English major who snuck into pastoral ministry accidentally through the back doors of the English department and church planting…’ But he’s very widely-read, writes in a racy, readable manner, and is au fait with modern, post-modern, and post-postmodern thinking. He’s honest, and the key reason he’s ‘progressive’ is that he rates ‘orthopraxy’ (right behavior) over ‘orthodoxy’ (right thinking).

A Generous Orthodoxy is a book I wish I’d written. Below is my summary of his seminal ideas:

From John Franke’s introduction: The term ‘generous orthodoxy’ was coined by Yale theologian Hans Frei, to help move beyond the liberal/conservative impasse. It connotes a rejection of both liberal and conservative certainty/universal knowledge resulting from a commitment to Enlightenment Foundationalism. (The liberals constructed theology upon the foundation of unassailable religious experience; the conservatives looked to an error-free Bible. So a generous orthodoxy is ‘post-liberal’ and ‘post-conservative’ – to foster the pursuit of truth, the unity of the church, and the gracious character of the gospel). Jesus Christ is the center of the Christian faith. This faith, as Lesslie Newbigin articulates it, is exclusive (the revelation in Jesus Christ is unique, but not in the sense of denying the possibility of salvation to those outside the Christian faith); inclusive (refusing to limit the saving grace of God to Christians, but not in the sense of viewing other religions as salvific); pluralist (acknowledging the gracious work of God in the lives of all human beings, but not denying the unique and decisive nature of what God has done in Jesus Christ).

McLaren does not covet the last word – his aim (at times) is to be ‘provocative, mischievous, and unclear’ for the purpose of encouraging readers to think and enter into the conversation themselves.

Hans Frei: ‘Generosity without orthodoxy is nothing, but orthodoxy without generosity is worse than nothing.’

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Shalom!/Salaam!

Rowland Croucher

WHERE HAVE ALL THE PROPHETS GONE?

Here’s the gist of Marvin McMickle’s Where Have All The Prophets Gone? Reclaiming Prophetic Preaching in America, 2006. It’s black writing-as-preaching at its most passionate, biblically enlightened, and intelligent (he has a couple of earned Drs).

When (American) preaching isn’t prophetic you won’t hear anything about the two million persons packed into overcrowded prisons, most of them for drug-related offences that could be treated more effectively and at a fraction of the cost; or the 46 million persons without medical insurance; or the still-prevailing racism and sexism. Instead there’s an emphasis on just two ‘justice’ issues: abortion and same-sex marriage; the emergence of an oxymoron called patriot pastors; a focus on ‘praise and worship’ that doesn’t result in compassionate discipleship; and finally the vile messages of prosperity theology which have dominated the preaching of televangelists and many pulpits.

Where have all the prophets gone?
Gone in search of megachurches, every one.

Where have all the prophets gone?
Gone in search of faith-based funding, every one.

Where have all the prophets gone?
Gone in search of personal comfort, every one.

Where have all the prophets gone?
Gone in search of political correctness, every one.

Where have all the prophets gone?
Gone into a ministry that places praise over speaking truth to the powers, every one.

When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?

Walter Brueggemann (The Prophetic Imagination) says the prophet offers us an alternative consciousness to the prevailing ‘royal consciousness’ of the entrenched political, economic, social or religious powers.

An example: Tony Campolo (Speaking My Mind) writes about the hypocrisy of those who staunchly oppose same-sex marriage, but whose heterosexual divorce rate is 50%: ‘Gays often ask why evangelicals seem willing to accept couples who are divorced and remarried, a sexual relationship Jesus specifically condemned as adultery, and then come down so hard on a sexual relationship Jesus never mentioned.’ If we follow the Levitical laws proscribing same-sex behavior, why do we not also forbid the eating of pork, or promote the idea of Jubilee – releasing people from prisons and from debt? Reason: homophobia, ‘the last acceptable prejudice in America’.

But it’s not only conservative evangelicals who have a problem here: whenever the convocations of mainline churches gather, what’s the #1 item on their agendas? Same-sex marriage, and ordaining active homosexual pastors. What about the staggering number of people confined to America’s prisons, or the 46 million without health insurance (there’s that refrain again) or the scourge of HIV/AIDS, or the explosion of divorce and teen pregnancy in America?

And the black churches? ‘Too many black clergy, especially those heading megachurches, are either apolitical or apologists for the status quo. What about [the refrain plus] staggering rates of black unemployment, black-on-black crime, the rapid spread of Islam as the religion of choice among many inner-city young men?’

America is the most professedly ‘Christian’ of the developed nations (over 85% identify as Christians), and the least Christian in its behavior. It leads them all in the murder rate, the use of capital punishment, the number of persons incarcerated, the percentage of marriages ending in divorce, the rate of teen pregnancy, and the number of children living in poverty.

Meanwhile, Christians are locked into the two issues of abortion and same-sex marriage. Where have all the prophets gone?

President Bush has said ‘Owning stuff is good.’ But that’s hard for many when 85% of the nation’s wealth is controlled by 18% of the people. While conservative evangelicals focus on their two-pronged agenda, Enron and WorldCom and other companies have been looted by their chief executive officers, leaving their workers and retirees in financial ruin. But Focus on the Family won’t get too upset about these ‘family values’ concerns. Nor will they mention anything about African Americans comprising 13% of the population yet constituting over 70% of the prison population. In 9 states when offenders are released their right to vote is revoked for life. And it’s well known that if you have a black skin you’re much more likely to serve a longer sentence than whites for the same crime. (And if you’re white and rich like Martha Stewart you’ll get less than six months for securities fraud and lying to a grand jury, and then receive more television deals).

And re Iraq: many Christians do their best impersonation of ‘hear no evil – see no evil – speak no evil’. The world is full of brutal dictators, but the Bush Administration chose to eliminate one who sat on the world’s second largest reserves of oil. The war in Vietnam failed to end communism in that country; and democratization in Iraq looks to be in dire peril of suffering the same fate. The president wages these wars abroad at the expense of the war on poverty in America.

The justice agenda of Jesus (Matthew 25): poverty, sickness, prisons, and other forms of human need.

Abortion and human sexuality are not unimportant: but they are simply not the limit of what should occupy a justice agenda in the 21^st century.

PATRIOT PASTORS

‘Patriot pastor’ is an oxymoron: a pastor’s allegiance should be to God and not to a political party. Amos, Micah, Samuel, Nathan, John the Baptist and Jesus regularly stood against the political establishment of their day in the name of the God of heaven and in defense of a more just and compassionate world. Where is patriot pastors’ concern was for the homeless, the hopeless, the hungry and the heartbroken in our society?

The evangelical East Waynesville Baptist Church, North Carolina forced nine members out of their church because they didn’t vote for George W Bush in the 2004 presidential election! The pastor said these people were holding back the work of the Kingdom of God.

But not all evangelicals are narrow: Rick Warren has been advocating help for the poor in Africa and elsewhere: ‘It is a moral issue… Jesus commanded us to help the poor so it is an obedience issue as well.’ Others are pressuring the government to do more about religious persecution, Darfur, enact legislation about prison rape in the USA and push for more funds to fight AIDS in Africa [PS and recently, climate change issues]. ‘God bless America is a patriotic tune and not a theological mandate. ‘In God We Trust’ may be engraved upon our nation’s currency but there is no evidence that those words have been etched upon the hearts of our nation’s leaders.

WHEN PROPHETIC PREACHING GIVES WAY TO PRAISE

On Christian television programs there’s an incessant theme of praise – but it, too, is severed from the prophetic message. Which is exactly what Amos condemned: ‘Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’ (Amos 5:23-24). When upstretched hands in praise do not also become outstretched hands to lift up a fallen brother or sister, that is an abomination to God.

Now praise is good: read Psalm 150. The prophets are not calling for an end to acts of praise worship, but the striking of a balance so that deeds of justice are not overlooked or ignored while Christians are busy ‘having a high time in the house of God’. Lifting up holy hands is good: provided they extend to helping hands to those Jesus describes in Matthew 25 as ‘the least of these’.

PROPHETS TO PROFITS

‘Her leaders judge for a bribe; her priests teach for a price, and her prophets tell fortunes for money’ (Micah 3:11).

A favourite text for many ‘prosperity gospel/ health and wealth/ name it and claim it’ preachers is John 10:10, where Jesus promised his followers abundant life. But the good life and the abundant life are not synonymous. Indeed prosperity preachers who base their message on John 10:10 are in fact more reflective of the thieves and robbers who come to steal and destroy. ‘What will it profit,’ asked Jesus, ‘if you gain he whole world and forfeit your life? (Matthew 16:26)? The life of abundance offered by these preachers is more defined by television commercials and magazine advertisements than by anything found in Scripture. Jesus told us not to store up treasures on earth, but rather to store up treasures in heaven (Matthew 6:19-21). Paul says he’s content with whatever he has: ‘I know what it is to have little, and I know what I is to have plenty’ (Philippians 4:11-13).

And Jesus promised his followers that they would suffer trouble. Many preachers, writes Barbara Brown Taylor, are promising a smooth road which goes around the wilderness rather than one that leads people through the wilderness with its rough places, and crooked paths and low moments.

Item - Paula and Randy White have been blessed with an 8,000 square-foot home – and urge people who are broke to borrow money from others to give to their ‘ministry’!

Very little if anything is said by these preachers about the grinding poverty which affects hundreds of millions around the world. ‘Nothing is said about the thousands of US military who have been killed and injured in an ill-conceived and poorly conducted war in Iraq, a nation that did not attack us on September 11, 2001, and a nation that did not have weapons of mass destruction’.

In his book God Has a Dream Desmond Tutu says ‘To oppose injustice and oppression is not something that is merely political. No it is profoundly religious.’

The most prophetic voices among us today may well be the voices of women who continue to push both church and society beyond the single issue of race. If the role of women in society must remain unchanged from the days of the early church, then any opposition to slavery should also have been resisted, since Paul seemed to have accepted the reality of that evil institution in Romans 13:1-7. You would have thought Galatians 3:28 – ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’ – would have settled this question long ago.

There are now about as many US fatalities in the Iraq war than there were fatalities on September 11, 2001. What will have been accomplished by this reckless venture?

We should be informed by a line from the hymn ‘God of Grace and God of Glory’ written by Harry Emerson Fosdick that warns ‘Save us from weak resignation to the evils we deplore’.

SERMON

The book ends with a magnificent sermon on the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag where he takes to task those who oppose the inclusion of the phrase ‘under God’. One nation? What about he great divide between rich and poor? Liberty and justice for all? When over two million people are in prison? Republic? The inference is that no one is more important than anyone else and where everybody’s vote is supposed to count. But ‘what kind of republic allows what happened in Florida in the 2000 election? Indivisible? ‘We are divided by race, by region (ask the people in New Orleans whether we are indivisible).

And McMickle’s own moving story: His father abandoned the family when he was ten years old. Later, his mother tried to enroll in the music department at Moody Bible Institute, but was denied admission because she was a divorcee!’

Buy this powerful and moving book, read it, and suggest your pastor preach from it (if he/she is game!).

Rowland Croucher

April 2007

LOVER OF LIFE: F W BOREHAM'S TRIBUTE TO HIS MENTOR

'Mr. Doke', as Boreham respectfully calls his friend and mentor, was by all accounts - or at least this one - a most amazing human being and pastor.

Here we have John Broadbanks Publishing's first effort at re-issuing out-of-print F W Boreham books. Congratulations to Geoff Pound and Michael Dalton for a beautifully put-together version of Boreham's 1948 book The Man Who Saved Gandhi: A Short Biography of Joseph John Doke.

F W Boreham is Australia's and New Zealand's only really collectable religious author. (Some of his rarer works have passed through my hands - to serious collectors like Ruth Graham, Billy Graham's wife, and Ravi Zacharias - for a 3-figure dollar sum, and sometimes more). So what was his special appeal? Well, he wrote about 50 very readable books (and over 2,000 newspaper articles), preached to large crowds in Hobart and Melbourne and around the world between the two World Wars, read thousands of books, but also had a pastoral 'common touch'.

And here we meet his mentor: an amazing man. Doke was - all in one person - a brilliant preacher, wise counsellor, gifted pastor, a passionate and holy Christian, lover of Scripture (he read the Bible through four times most years) and highly committed to 'foreign missions' (he died on a journey to encourage missionaries in the middle of 'darkest Africa').

And he may have been the most authentic Christian Gandhi ever met. Which makes a puzzle out of the Mahatma's often-quoted comment "Oh, I don't reject your Christ. I love your Christ. It's just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ." Well, if we take Boreham's word for it, Doke was the man most-like-Christ of any he knew. And Doke was amazingly Christlike to the then little-known Gandhi when they met in South Africa.

You can read these 34 pages in one sitting. Don't. Buy it for your pastor, but read it slowly first. Order some copies to give away here.

When I get more time I'll jot down here some of the wisdom I marked from this wonderful little book.

Shalom!/Salaam!

Rowland Croucher

CHURCH AND STATE (Tom Frame)

Review: CHURCH AND STATE, Australia’s Imaginary Wall, by Tom Frame (UNSW Press 2006)

Tom Frame, historian and writer, left a military career in the navy to train for the Anglican priesthood and was, until recently, the (high profile) Bishop of the Australian armed forces. In this little book (96 pages) he probes the complex relationship between church and state, especially in Australia, where the influence of religious organizations, lobby groups and individuals has increased the temperature of the discussion about whether and to what extent government policy should be ‘ínformed’ (to use a neutral word) by religious dogma.

Briefly: Tom Frame reminds us that the Australian constitution does not formally separate church and state. He argues that some contact between the two spheres is both inevitable and, occasionally, desirable. But, yes, there are tensions, and, he believes, Christians are largely responsible for these.

This is really an ancient problem, as theologian Karl Barth famously reminded us: the state which God has ordained to keep order in Romans 13 is also the ‘beast from the abyss’ in Revelation 13.

Tom’s first words: ‘Australia is not a Christian nation… it never has been, [although] public life has, of course, been shaped by a long and close encounter with Christianity.’ There’s nothing in Australian law (as there is in British law) which gives any privilege to the Anglican church or precedence to any religion.

Those who demand a strict separation between church and state (eg. the Australian Democrats) are ‘separationists’: they want to erect a legal ‘wall’ that prevents interactions from a fear that an ‘established’ church might emerge. Thus separationists want to end any special privileges churches receive – eg. taxation benefits, because, it is claimed, they amount to de facto recognition of Christianity. The opposite view is that because a clear majority of Australians declare some connection with a Christian denomination, some public reflection of the beliefs and values of Christians is warranted.

There are of course, extremists on both sides: some advocating a theocracy, others a purely secular state. And inevitably against the backdrop of global religiously-inspired terrorism, church-state relations have become a cause of widespread anxiety.

Tom’s historical overview is succinct and well-researched. Ancient Israel was a theocracy: there was no administrative or political division between the religious and mundane aspects of life. Jesus was largely indifferent to Roman rule: ‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s; and to God what belongs to God’ (Matthew 22:21). The Christian apostles told their people to live in peace with each other and with the powers-that-be, although when those powers stepped up their persecution, they were an evil to be resisted – but peacefully, and if necessary, through martyrdom. The state was simply the means to an end in the divine ordering of the world. But Constantine’s conversion to Christianity (312 AD) changed all that: Christian baptism became a rite administered at birth, and was now a symbol of citizenship. For 1,000 years, 400 to 1400, in Western Europe, church and state were thoroughly intertwined – ending, in England, when Henry VIII declared in 1534 that the Pope’s jurisdiction did not extend to his realm. The English church was effectively nationalized and the church *in* England became the Church *of* England. But people like John Bunyan now suffered if they were not willing to conform to the laws and dogmas of the established church.

The pioneering American white settlers sailed across the Atlantic to get away from the strictures of state religions in Europe. For the first time we read of a ‘wall of separation’ between ‘the garden of religion’ and the ‘wilderness’ of temporal government (Roger Williams). Thus began the practice in the U.S. of church leaders and politicians advocating separation: as Tom Frame writes ‘the former [is] for protection, the latter to avoid interference.’ Thus began a uniquely modern phenomenon: the idea of constitutional freedom *from* religion, leading one nation (France, since 1905) towards constitutional secularism. To Tom’s knowledge no other nation has similarly legislated for a formal and legal separation of church and state. Overall, 2000 years of Christian church history led French theologian Jacques Ellul to lament that ‘whenever the Church has been in a position of power, it has regarded freedom as an enemy.’

Tom's interim conclusion at this point (p. 47: halfway through the book): ‘It is for these reasons that Christians must be encouraged to allow some distance between the church and state – for the church’s good, if nothing else.’

After some discussion over the years, the words ‘humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God’ were eventually added to the ‘draft preamble’ to the Australian constitution (1898). Section 116 deals with religion (it’s similar to the first amendment in the U.S.): ‘The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.’

Of course there has been public discussion about all this, when, for example Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse to participate in any politics or wars, or the Exclusive Brethren forbid voting (but allow many dollars to be spent lobbying for conservative political causes), or the Scientologists arguing (1983) that they are actually a religion and should be exempt as other churches are from government taxes. Then there was the Defense of Government Schools debate, and (Tom writes) ‘the subsequent legal argument highlighted the significant differences between the US first amendment and the widely held but mistaken belief that the Australian constitution provided a ‘wall of separation’.

Conclusions? ‘At no stage do the founders of the Australian federation seem to have been motivated by a sense that engagement between religion and the state was itself an undesirable thing’ (Catholic academic lawyer Joshua Puls).

A ‘wall of separation’ is impossible to maintain. Church and State… ‘are not two societies that can be separated by the erection of a wall between them. Religion exists within a society and is part of it’ (Dr. Cliff Pannam QC).

Tom’s cautious about right-wing religious influence on the political process in Australia (he’s referring to conservative groups like the Christian Democratic Party, Family First, and the Australian Christian Lobby, and Creationism/Intelligent Design people): he is concerned about the absence of strong ‘accountability to the broader Christian community’. A socially conservative mindset does not reflect the mindset of all Christian traditions in Australia.

But he’s also critical of ‘doctrinaire secularism’, which in its extreme form in the U.S. tries to forbid mentioning God or do any religious act in the public square. Doctrinaire secularism is not religiously neutral: it actually amounts to the promotion of a type of atheism as the unofficial state religion.

But, overall, ‘I have argued that interactions between the church and the state are inevitable, and, for the greatest part, no threat to the health of the body politic.’ ‘Christianity does not need political goodwill or financial support to survive or fulfil its mission…’ but secularists can sleep easily because ‘there is no future prospect of a religious establishment in Australia and none should be encouraged…. Unlike the U.S. Australia does not need a wall of separation between church and state, and none will be needed in the future.'

I have only a couple of minor puzzles with Tom’s approach. Why does he use the (evangelically- biassed) New American Standard translation of the Bible when he could have chosen a more respectable version, like the NRSV?

More importantly, he should have given us just a few pages outlining sympathetically the approaches to the left and right of his position. Why did the outstanding leftist jurist and senator Lionel Murphy fear too much religion ‘meddling’ with politics? On the other hand, why do the evangelical right fear that their convictions about abortion and homosexuality (in particular) will be eroded by liberal legislation?

Also he could have given ordinary folks a better handle on the essence of the debate, which might be expressed this way by conservative Christians: ‘The doctrine of separation between church and state is not about keeping religion out of politics, but keeping politics out of religion.’ And in these words by more liberal – but not secularist - thinkers: ‘If freedom and democracy mean anything, they mean the right of the individual to bring their personal beliefs into the sphere of public discourse regardless of the religious, philosophical, or political basis of those beliefs.’

Rowland Croucher
April 2007

TEN BLOGS

Dear friends,

I am in the process of composing ten Blogs for different audiences. Here are their titles and URLs:

1 Month to Meet the Baptists

1 Month of Books you should Read

1 Month to Learn About the Internet

1 Month to Understand your Local Church

1 Month of Answers to Tough Questions

1 Month of Devotions

1 Month to Change Your Life

1 Month to Meet Some Interesting People

1 Month to Become a Christian

1 Month To Meet Jesus

So for the remainder of this year I'm aiming to write about five articles a week: watch for them. And feel free to leave your comments!

Shalom!/Salaam!

Rowland Croucher

John Mark Ministries

Huston Smith: THE SOUL OF CHRISTIANITY

Huston Smith: The Soul of Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco 2005.

Huston Smith, son of Methodist missionaries in China, friend of Thomas Merton and Joseph Campbell, teacher and friend of Marcus Borg, wrote this book in 2004, and says it was 'the most exciting year of my writing'.

His parents' first child, whom he never knew, died in his father's arms one Christmas Eve. Other insights into his spiritual formation are interesting: 'One night, [my father] was visiting a village thirty miles away and he went by boat, but the lake froze over in the three days he was there... [so] he walked thirty miles home over ice. So it was that intensity, sincerity, devotion that I assimilated from my parents that was most important.' 'In our missionary home in traditional China, breakfast was followed by morning prayers, which included our servants' family. As we sat in a circle, our mother would lead us in singing a stanza of a hymn, in Chinese, of course. Then adults would take turns reading verses from the Bible... Then we would stand, about face, get down on our knees, and bury our faces in our hands on the seats of our chairs as my father led us in a prayer that closed with all of us saying the Lord's Prayer...'

Huston Smith has generally succeeded in his aim of writing a book about Christianity 'that carries the assent of all Christians', a book which is not combative, respecting various interpretations of Christianity without arguing with them. My view would be that only a liberal thinker like Huston Smith could do this. How liberal is he? Study this: 'I'm a universalist. I refuse to prioritize any one of the eight great religious traditions over the others.'

He ranges over the whole spectrum of Christianity (though hardly mentions Pentecostalism, if at all), citing liberal authors (eg. Marcus Borg) and conservative ones (like N T Wright and John Polkinghorne). He is critical of conservative Christians for their literalism and dogmatism and tendency to slip into 'disastrous political agendas' which are 'untrue to Jesus'. But Liberal churches 'are digging their own graves, for without a robust, emphatically theistic world-view to work within, they have nothing to offer their members except rallying cries to be good. We have it from Peter Berger that "if anything characterizes modernity it is the loss of the sense of transcendence".'

Huston Smith has more of a gift of wisdom/knowledge of comparative religions than accuracy. It wasn't Timothy who said 'Without doubt the mystery of our religion is great' (p. 32) but the writer of 1 Timothy (maybe Paul). It wasn't Jesus who talked about 'rejoicing with those who rejoice, and weeping with those who weep' (p. 63), it was Paul in Romans 12:15 - unless Smith has some evidence that Paul quotes Jesus at this point, evidence no one else has! For mispellings of Annie Dillard ('Anne Dillard' p. 125 etc.) we can forgive an old man - but not his editor/s. And his use of the Authorized Version of the Bible here and there (some quotes with sexist language) is unusual for a Christian scholar.

A couple of statements are in the category 'But that I can't believe', like

* 'If Jesus had not been followed by Paul, the Sermon on the Mount would have evaporated in a generation or two' (p. 89).

* 'The Christian worldview compressed into a sentence: the world is perfect, and the human opportunity is to see that and conform to that fact' (p. 33).

However, all that said, I marked the following for more reflection:

* God is *defined* by Jesus, but he is not *confined* to Jesus

* The Infinite is that out of which you cannot fall

* If it is not paradoxical, it isn't true (Shunryu Suzuki)

* A NT scholar went to heaven and asked Paul if he wrote the Letter to the Ephesians. Paul thought for a moment, stroked his beard, and said 'Yes, I think I did' which is as much as to say 'Who cares?'

* The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is its faithful servant

* 'I pray God [the God above all distinctions] that he may quit me of [the personal] God' (Meister Eckhart)

* [The people who first heard Jesus' teaching] were astonished, and with reason. If we are not, it is because we have heard Jesus's teachings so often that their edges have been worn smooth, dulling their glaring subversiveness

* 'O God whose boundless love and joy / are present everywhere, / He cannot come to visit you / unless you are not there' (17th century German mystical poet Angelus Silesius)

* Hell is popularly depicted as a fiery furnace whose flames do not consume bodies but torture them forever. But this is only a metaphor; it cannot be literally true, for resurrected bodies are incorporeal and do not have flesh that could be burned. (Remember that resurrection is not resuscitation). The theological definition of hell is total aloneness... Will anyone burn in hell forever? The answer is no, for nothing can deprive us of the imago Dei that is the foundation of our humanity

* 'There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess/ I knew no one worth my envying him' (Czeslaw Milosz)

* Though divine in origin, the Church is made up of humans, of sinners, and so in an act unique for any institution, at the end of the second millennium the Pope publicly apologized and did penance in the name of the Church for the sins of individual Christians throughout the ages

* 'The Protestant Principle', stated philosophically, warns against absolutizing the relative. Stated theologically, it warns against idolatry. (But the chief Protestant idolatry has been bibliolatry)

* Protestant diversity is not as great as its hundreds of denominations (most of them more adequately termed sects) suggest... Actually, 85% of all Protestants belong to 12 denominations.

It's a challenging book.

Shalom! Rowland Croucher

March 2007

Review: Alan Hirsch, THE FORGOTTEN WAYS

Review: Alan Hirsch, 'The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church’. Michigan: Brazos Press, 2006.

Ivan Illich was asked what he thought was the most radical way to change society; was it through violent revolution or gradual reform? He gave a careful answer. Neither. Rather, he suggested that if one wanted to change society, then one must tell an alternative story.

And for Christians the alternative story has to do with the evils of institutionalism and clericalism. A quote from sociologist Robert Merton jumped out of a Masters’ degree I once did at the University of Sydney: ‘The evil in institutions is greater than the sum of the evil of the individuals within them.’

Martin Buber warns that ‘centralization and codification, undertaken in the interests of religion, are a danger to the core of religion.’ This is inevitably the case he says, unless there is a very vigorous life of faith embodied in the whole community, one that exerts an unrelenting pressure for renewal on the institution. C.S. Lewis observed that ‘there exists in every church something that sooner or later works against the very purpose for which it came into existence. So we must strive very hard, by the grace of God to keep the church focused on the mission that Christ originally gave to it.’

In this exciting, readable and provocative book, ‘emerging church’ missiologist Alan Hirsch tells an alternative story by unlocking the secrets of the primal ‘pre-Christendom’ apostolic church – and the church in modern China. Why were/are they so dynamic, whereas mainline churches over time suffer from what sociologists call ‘the routinisation of charisma’?

Historians have often accepted the claim that the conversion of Emperor Constantine (ca 285-337) resulted in the triumph of Christianity. To the contrary, he destroyed its most attractive and dynamic aspects, turning a high-intensity, grassroots movement into an arrogant institution controlled by an elite who often managed to be brutal and lax.

Hirsch suggests that the prevailing expression of church (Christendom) has become a major stumbling block to the spread of Christianity in the West. The ‘Christendom paradigm’ doesn’t work very well any more.

On the other hand the Chinese churches grew in spite of the following:

1. They were an illegal religion.
2. They didn’t have church buildings.
3. They didn’t have scriptures (the Chinese had underground, partial copies).
4. They didn’t have any central institutions or professional forms of leadership.
5. They didn’t have seeker-sensitive services, youth groups, worship bands, seminaries, or commentaries.
6. They made it hard to join the church.

One commentator has said that in this book Alan has challenged our thinking, our vocabulary, and ‘hopefully our way of doing church in this century’ – particularly with the ‘Jesus yes, Church no’ generations. Thus we have the phenomenon again where more people are coming to faith in small informal groups but don't want the organized part of the religion to be part of the deal.

Alan has several things going for him. He’s read and digested the thinking of great missiologists like David Bosch. He was a missionary pastor – of an ‘alternative’ church: the ‘South Melbourne Resoration Community’. I’ve spoken at this church (‘church?’), and spent a weekend away with them. It was truly one of the rare communities of faith and hope which I could recommend to those on the ‘margins’.

He was also, later, a ‘denominational officer’ who tried to plant these ideas into the thinking and praxis of established churches, with, he says, mixed success. And he is now the founding director of the Forge Mission Training Network.

How do we discover our missional DNA (mDNA)? What caused the early churches to grow from 25,000 to 20 million in 200 years? How did the Chinese underground church grow from 2 million to over 100 million in sixty years despite considerable opposition, and without professional leaders, training facilities, or buildings?

Hirsch identifies six elements of Missional DNA:

· Jesus is Lord

· Disciple Making

· Missional-Incarnational Impulse

· Apostolic Environment

· Organic Systems

. Communitas

Wonderful principles, which are very hard to apply in practice. Why? My contention would be that the radicalization of family-units which imbibe a Western consumer culture with their muesli every day is a very challenging and difficult task. Parents want a ‘safe place’ for their children – in ‘church’, as everywhere else. They want peer-reinforcement of Christian faith and values for their teenagers. They look to the weekly gatherings of the Christian community to provide spiritual food for the journey, which in terms of work-stress or family-stresses may be a real battle. So they bring expectations ‘to church’ as they do to every other facet of their privileged lives.

Christian communities come in four varieties (as do commercial retail enterprises) – megachurches (= shopping malls), boutiques, franchises, and ‘parish churches’ (= corner stores). Many ‘emerging church’ folks I meet despise the megachurch model, but they shop at supermarkets, for convenience and to save time. They’re at home with technology – they have lots of powerpoint presentations, and audio-visual effects – but are (healthily) wary of multiplying committees and programs. Above all, they know that re-jigging the ‘ministry mix’ won’t bring life and health and peace to their community-of-faith. But on the other hand, they too can easily form ‘clubs-for-people-like-us’ and forget their missional mandate.

Alan Hirsch writes: ‘We cannot consume our way to discipleship.’. (On this see also Ron Sider’s ‘The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience’ and Robert Webber ‘Ancient Future Evangelism’). The alternative? A covenantal approach to discipleship.

We have in Alan Hirsch an idealist, who is also a pragmatist. There are many diagrams, and excellent footnotes for further study.

Alan Hirsch is coauthor, with Michael Frost, of The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church. Another good read.

More…

Another review

Rowland Croucher March 26, 2007

Book Review: Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics

Book Review: Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics by Margaret Farley (Continuum International Publishing Group, June 2006)

Dr Margaret Farley, a Sister of Mercy and a professor of Christian ethics – since 1971 - at Yale Divinity School, is one of American Christianity’s foremost ethicists.

In this book she tackles some of the most complex issues relating to Christian Sexual Ethics, and writes thoroughly, thoughtfully, compassionately and convincingly (but also, according to many conservative fellow-Catholics, too progressively). If you want to put her into a theological/philosophical box (which is difficult, given the breadth of her opinions and research) I’d say she’s a liberal, irenic feminist.

These days Amazon.com helps inform us about an author’s biasses/breadth/depth via her/his citations. This book, we are told, cites 287 books (it seemed like more!), principally: Christianity and the Making of the Modern Family by Rosemary Radford Ruether on 8 pages, Moral Theology: Challenges for the Future : Essays in Honor of Richard A. McCormick by Charles E. Curran on 7 pages, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex by Judith P. Butler on 6 pages, Being And Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre on 5 pages and Summa Theologiae by St.Thomas Aquinas on 5 pages. (I seem to recall stumbling over references to Ricoeur and Foucault more than five times).

Her main point? Justice and love should permeate all relationships, including sexual relationships. She ranges throughout history, across cultures, and tackles most of the big questions of embodiment, gender, and sexuality – including thorny issues relating to same-sex relationships, marriage and family, divorce/ remarriage, celibacy, and sexual behavior. (She doesn't touch abortion, interestingly).

She’s frank, but there’s nothing titillating here. On the contrary it’s an academic book replete with hundreds of valuable footnotes (ideal, probably, for Christian Sexual Ethics 101), occasionally dull and heavy-going, but generally jargon-free. There are surprisingly few case-studies. She’s sometimes repetitive (‘I have said several times..’).

The ‘large questions’ about sexuality she says have to do with the status of the human body, increasingly complex questions about gender, and the sources and aims of sexual desire. One online reviewer summarizes the scope of her work well: ‘Throughout history and across cultures, societies have regulated the sexual passions, channeling them mostly into heterosexual marriage involving either monogamy or polygyny; in both patrilineal and matrilineal societies, women were often subordinated to men; and polygyny presents special dangers to women's equality.’

According to Farley, the basic question of sexual ethics is, 'With what kinds of motives, under what kinds of circumstances, in what forms of relationships, do we render our sexual selves to one another in ways that are good, true, right and just? Her framework for "just sex" centres around seven criteria: do no unjust harm, free consent, mutuality, equality, commitment, fruitfulness, and social justice.

She’s realistic about the fluidity of modern notions of commitment, and indeed is quite relaxed about commitment being conditional and contingent because life is often too hard and full of unexpected surprises to live a permanent and unconditional commitment. What we must do, she says, is teach moderns just principles of relationships and sex.

What do these principles mean in practice? Farley can be quite explicit. Masturbation is OK when it serves relationships rather than burdening them. Use of pornography that weakens our capacity for healthy sexual relations and any kind of sexual abuse or use of power to obtain sex are wrong. Scriptural arguments cited in opposition to homosexuality and homosexual relationships are misinterpreted, ambiguous or part of a worldview in which the central issue was that men are superior to women. In the end there are no good reasons to apply different standards to same-sex and heterosexual relations. Both kinds are good if just, bad if unjust.

Her irenicism is quite marked in two areas where Western feminist liberals and others are mostly polemical: female circumcision and the gender-justice struggles of Islamic women. Farley is amazingly restrained, sensitive and broad-brush in her attempts to understand the background of these issues. She is also sensitive to the complexities faced by intersexed and transgendered persons. In terms of reproductive technologies she believes the key principle is that “no children should be conceived who will be born in a context unconducive to their growth and development in relationships.”

I hope that's whetted your appetite. It's a book filled with commonsense, which will gently dismantle many of your prejudices.

Rowland Croucher

March 2007

HOW I’VE CHANGED MY MIND

Here’s an expanded version of a talk I gave to our small group. It’s a meandering chat, I haven’t put much order into it, and it’s a summary of just one of six pages of notes…

People – including Yours Truly – do not change their minds simply because a Compelling New Idea comes floating by. To summarize four years of a Masters’ degree in social psychology: given that the new idea has to make sense, it also has to win in the ‘reward/punishment’ stakes. Punishment? Yes, if the group to which you belong and/or whose approval you need despises or even expels you for espousing the new idea, you’ll think twice about embracing it.

Also, one asks the ‘source credibility’ question: can I trust the purveyor of the new idea. Are they ‘opinion leaders’ in this field?

Then there’s the ‘cognitive dissonance’ issue: can the new idea fit into the schema of ideas already registered in my brain? And the ‘personality/ persuasibility’ question: some of us are suckers for any novelty at all, including new ideas.

Many people belong to groups which not only abhor new ideas, they ensure that their members don’t connect with any (‘monopoly propaganda’). And finally, the incorporation of a new idea is reinforced if the welcomer-of-the-idea has to role-play with it in front of others (which is why cults/sects and many other groups get their devotees to give ‘testimonies’).

OK, so much for psychology. As I’m mainly talking about Christian ideas, there’s the question of authority, and Christians have four broad approaches: the Bible, the Church and its tradition/s, reason (together with contemporary secular disciplines), and experience – past and present, one’s own and others’.

People embrace new ideas in different ways. Will Rogers said there are three kinds of men (ie. males): those who learn by reading; the few who learn by observation; and the rest who have to pee on the electric fence and find out for themselves… Most of my mind-shifts have resulted from reading.

I grew up in the ‘Open [Plymouth] Brethren’, and they would have approved of this quote: ‘[I hope] they would not find me changed from him they knew/ Only more sure of what he thought was true’.

I’m now a bit wary of such a maxim. One of my greatest fears is to come across a new idea and reject it, through stubbornness and/or fear. Or, OTOH, how pathetic to go to your grave believing something that is not true, or resisting a good idea which might be inconvenient. However I am a ‘work in progress’. I’m only 70 years young, and have many ideas to reject/modify/embrace before I die. And I have a way to go yet on the road to wholeness/holiness.

We begin our quest-for-certainty by believing and observing the Big People. Children, says Lyle Schaller, are ‘in church taking notes’. Huston Smith, a theologically liberal retired professor of comparative religion, says (in The Soul of Christianity – brilliant book) that his formative experiences religiously comprised his Methodist missionary-father’s walking 30 miles in the bitter cold of a Chinese winter after helping someone; and also the family prayers they had every morning…

I remember Uncle John Clark, a very godly man who cried when he talked about Jesus dying on the cross to save him. And Mr. Harold Messer, a fairly prominent government official, who walked many miles to church each Sunday, morning and night, in fine weather and in the rain. Or Mr. Alf Clines, who would travel to the other side of Sydney to deliver a ‘message’ (in other churches they ‘preach sermons’) which he’d spent twenty hours preparing. At my mother’s funeral a few years back, I overheard some of those Brethren men discussing alternative interpretations of passages from Ezekiel and Daniel which might influence their view of the ‘End Times’. They were – and are – passionate about ‘Bible study’, and that at least has, in principle, rubbed off on to me.

Until I was an older teenager I sometimes heard the terrible words: ‘Don’t ask questions, just believe!’ Fortunately, I made a serious commitment as a teenager to believing whatever I thought was reasonable irrespective of others’ stupidity or ignorance. IOW, even if these Brethren held some belief or other - and I have since rejected many Brethren doctrines - I would still believe something if there were good reasons to. I am saddened to meet many whose philosophy of life is constructed in reaction to/against authority-figures they’ve despised or rejected or even been abused by. The question for the honest questioner is not ‘Who says what?’ but ‘Is it true, irrespective of who else believes it?’

So I would ask questions of our venerable Brethren teachers, like Mr. Tom Carson: ‘What did the great missionary Hudson Taylor miss because his doctrine was imperfect and he wasn’t one of us?’ Response: ‘Ah, Rowland, just think how much more fruitful he might have been if he did believe the Whole Truth’. And when I eventually gravitated to the Baptists, I was told – quite seriously - that ‘God never leads contrary to His Word.’

The Brethren Jesus was docetic: much more divine than human. Their ‘gospel’ began with ‘the fact of sin’. Their main theological quest was to find certainty and avoid ambiguity: they sought answers for everything. Their Bible was inerrant.

In all these areas I’ve changed my mind. Jesus was divine, yes, but fully human, and, for me, is primarily a prophet. (I never heard any preaching on the pervasive biblical idea of social justice in the first 20 years of my life). The Good News doesn’t begin with bad news (sorry, Augustine), but with Jesus Christ saying first ‘I do not condemn you’; the prodigal’s father exclaiming with joy ‘I welcome you!’ (Reading Matthew Fox’s Original Blessing helped here). I now strongly believe that living with ambiguity is essential for an authentic faith. And I reckon it’s silly to hold a view about the Bible which the Bible doesn’t posit for itself.

However, I’m not anti-fundamentalist as such. Fundamentalists are trying to answer the questions ‘What is truth? Where is certainty?’ Progressives/liberals are primarily addressing other concerns: ‘Where is authentic love?’ ‘What does a contemporary rational belief-system look like?’ Fundamentalists tend to absolutize relatives. Liberals tend to be nice, and better-educated, but don’t know much about the ‘lostness’ of people outside the Kingdom of God, as Jesus taught. And often liberals are just too ‘with it’ in terms of the latest fancy theological theory, forgetting that in the past these were often proved to be nonsense a generation later…

So fundamentalists (like me) believe in ‘hell’. Why? Because the Gospels have Jesus asserting its reality. But liberals (like me) do not believe God will allow precious humans to be tortured forever. I’ve read C S Lewis’s ‘The Problem of Pain’ and its chapters on hell about five times. To his question: ‘What are you asking God to do? Take them into heaven without their will?’ my present response is: ‘Jack, that’s too clever-by-half. You did not parent children when you wrote that. Would I prevent my 3-year-old grand-daughter from running on to the road and getting hurt against her will? You bet!’ But, my conservative friends ask, how do you resolve the ‘cognitive dissonance’ in all that? Look up the keyword ‘universalism’ on our website if you’re serious (but don’t label me a ‘universalist’ - though I wouldn’t be surprised if God is).

Another ‘hero’ for me during my young adult years was John Stott. I still regard him as one of the greatest Christian men I’ve been privileged to know (a little) and read (a lot). But I now think his ‘rational evangelicalism’ is too cut and dried; and his view of the atonement is too forensic (he’s a bachelor too). I’ve recently read the 1,000 page biography of Stott by Timothy Dudley-Smith, and hope to write a review of those two volumes soon.

An author somewhere close to where I am on most things is Brian McLaren (eg. his book A Generous Orthodoxy). (He also, incidentally, was raised in a Plymouth Brethren church, where he was ‘unfathomably bored and turned off by their hypocrisy’). About the Bible he writes wisely: ‘When we let it go as a modern answer book, we get to rediscover it for what it really is: an ancient book of incredible spiritual value for us. …’ And… ‘It’s a book that calls together and helps create a community, a community that is a catalyst for God’s work in the world.’

The most divisive issue on which conservatives and liberals (religious and secular) differ these days is homosexuality. This topic will eventually be added to the list of major paradigm shifts in the history of the Church (like the Protestant Reformation, slavery, and women’s issues). I’m moving towards the left on this broad question, but as the jury is still out on a number of issues, I’m open to more ‘light and truth’.

The jury is also out on ‘the quest for the historical Jesus’. I’m closest to N T Wright at the moment, but am reading and enjoying Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan and other liberal scholars. As I said before, I relate best to Jesus-as-prophet.

Regarding corporate worship: I have a greater yearning these days to be ‘lost in wonder, love and praise’ - not so much in a charismatic sense, but more in terms of Rudolf Otto’s ‘Idea of the Holy/mysterium tremendum’. A lot of what happens ‘in church’ is fairly wooden/pedestrian really.

Back to those godly Brethren elders. I believe now that there are very holy people in most branches of the Christian church – and indeed in other faiths. And also evil people. I believe each branch of the Church is asking different questions: and we should be patient with each others’ differing stages along the journey. I’m strongly committed to affirming diversity in our Christian churches. At Blackburn Baptist Church we had seven pastors: they ranged theologically right across the Baptist theological spectrum, from liberal to quite conservative. We got along well for eight years, and loved each other. Why not?

On a couple of issues I have a minority opinion amongst my Baptist pastoral colleagues, and as time goes on I’ve been disinclined to change my thinking. I am skeptical about the value of seminaries-as-(primarily) academies, even though I teach in several (until recently, for example, hardly any of them taught future pastoral leaders how to pray); and I believe we clergy are ‘the (clericalist) cork in the bottle’ in terms of the non-empowering of our sisters and brothers for their ministries.

Churches generally? I’m with the ‘emerging church’ people broadly. If we are supposed to be equipping/encouraging people to be ‘passionate about Jesus’ (as Tom Bandy suggests is our primary aim), we in the mainline churches are not doing a brilliant job of it.

At this point I want to mention the greatest regret of my life: during those heady years when ‘BBC’ saw over 1,000 people attending each Sunday – probably the first time for a Baptist church in Australia - our two eldest children felt they did not have their father’s attention sufficiently. After a day’s interactions with people, this introvert came home needing head-space. But our two teenage children needed my presence. In 1978 a cathartic experience in Korea brought it up from the depths to the surface, and I cried penitentially about all this for many hours. In terms of changing my mind about something, I would have done pastoring-and-fathering differently if I had my time over again. Husbanding? Yes, that too, though my beautiful pastor-wife is 100% with me in this great calling.

How will I continue to change? I have pages on this, scribbled at a Men’s Retreat with Richard Rohr in Arizona in 2005. Two primary issues: As I’ve been inoculated with a ‘pedagogical serum’ I have to learn that every opportunity to make others wise doesn’t have to be taken. (I’m listening to Will Rogers: ‘Never miss a good chance to shut up!’). And I want to be a more Jesus-like person, constructively angry about injustice, and also practicing ‘acceptance before repentance’ in terms of relating to others.

To conclude: which of the four ‘authorities’ is valid for me these days? If I have to put one first, it’s the Bible, interpreted through the ‘prism’ of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. However I want to use my reason to understand the Bible, but still be ‘under the Word’ rather than simply its critic (and anyway, the ‘Word’ is not essentially the Bible, it’s the living Christ: the fundamentalists’ tendency towards bibliolatry doesn’t give them a good handle on that). Experience? Yes, I’m interested not simply believing in Christ ‘because he lives within my heart’ (indigestion can create problems there) but I’m impressed when I see Christ’s aliveness in an authentically holy person (like Dom Helder Camara). Church/traditions? Because they often don’t stack up with integrity (or even usefulness) against the other three canons-of-authority, I’d put that one at the bottom of the heap. I have a continuing antipathy towards dogma and legalism; I don’t much like straight-jacketing truth into man-made creeds; and will continue to set cats loose among these pigeons when I encounter them.

Ad maiorem Dei gloriam : ‘For the greater glory of God’.


Rowland Croucher
March 2007

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BEST SERMONS EVER

Best Sermons Ever

Christopher Howe (compiler), Continuum, 2001

Some people - I'm one of them - actually enjoy reading others' sermons.

When John Claypool used to publish his each week, and sent them out once a month, I often found myself dropping everything to read them.

I've done the same with other contemporary homiletical "greats" like Barbara Brown Taylor, Tom Long, Fred Craddock and William Willimon. And, a generation ago, W. E. Sangster and James Stewart. And before that, F. W. Boreham. And if you add the black preachers Martin Luther King and Gardner Taylor, that just about completes the list of English-speaking/writing "greats" in the 20th century, in my view.

So how would you select the Best Sermons Ever? Here's Howe's list: Peter the Apostle, John Chrysostom, St Augustine, Aelfric, St Bernard, The Homilies, Lancelot Andrewes, John Donne, Jeremy Taylor, John Bunyan, Jonathan Swift, Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, Lawrence Sterne, Sydney Smith, John Henry Newman, Charles Spurgeon, Martin Luther King, H.A. Williams, and Pope John Paul II.

Now, class, what does that list suggest to you? We'll come back to that.

In addition, Howe offers excerpts from other sermons and prayers from people ranging from St Francis of Assisi, George Herbert, John Keble ... to moderns like Mother Teresa and Billy Graham.

First, a little introduction to the "practical theology" of preaching. What is preaching supposed to "do", if I can put the question into a utilitarian frame of reference? I'd suggest the best preaching is didactic, prophetic, and dramatic (see http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/8100.htm for more on that).

Christopher Howe would, I think, prefer three other adjectives: erudite, scholarly, and/or "literary". In other words, he comes to this exercise as a litterateur, rather than as a homiletician.

Notice the absence of modern American mainline preachers in his list? Yes, perhaps Jonathan Edwards, M. L. King and Billy Graham deserve a place, but what of the others most theologically-sophisticated Americans are reading, like those mentioned above? (The answer, from my experience of eight to ten trips to the UK for pastors' conferences: on that side of the Atlantic they've never heard of them). And I'm surprised Sangster and Stewart are missing.

So, frankly, most of these sermons are of classical - rather than devotional - interest only. Some of them are heavily impregnated with Latin phrases and other obscurantisms. And some fit into the category of "Why use ten words when 100 will suffice?"

One of the best is a homiletical essay - Jonathan Swift's "Upon Sleeping in Church". The text, of course, is about Eutychus falling out of the window, Acts 20:9: "The accident which happened to this young man hath not been sufficient to discourage his successors." But, frankly, I'd go to sleep in some of these sermons - especially Laurence Sterne's on "Evil Speaking".

And some are both brilliant and scary. How about this, from Jonathan Edwards' 15-page sermon (without a title - but from one version of his famous "Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God" - see http://www.jonathanedwards.com/sermons/
Warnings/sinners.htm ): "If you cry to God to pity you, he will be so far from pitying you in your doleful case, or showing you the least regard or favour, that instead of that, he will only tread you under foot. And though he will know that you cannot bear the weight of omnipotence treading upon you, yet he will not regard that, but he will crush you under his feet without mercy; he will crush out your blood, and make it fly, and it shall be sprinkled on his garments, so as to stain all his raiment. He will not only hate you, but he will have you, in the utmost contempt: no place shall be thought fit for you, but under his feet to be trodden down as the mire of the streets."

No wonder "revival" broke out when people heard this sort of diatribe!

Some excerpts and notes (many of these are in the category "they don't produce them like this anymore!"):

• Wesley travelled on foot or horseback 225,000 miles and preached 40,000 sermons!

• Lancelot Andrewes mastered 15 languages!

• "In Lapland witches sell winds" (John Donne).

• "Celibate, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in a perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity; but marriage, like the useful bee, builds a house and gathers sweetness from every flower ... and feeds the world with delicacies" (Jeremy Taylor).

• "It is my duty - it is my wish - it is the subject of this day to point out those evils of the Catholic religion from which we have escaped" (from Sydney Smith's 'The Rules of Christian Charity' !). Another profundity from that sermon: "The evil of difference of opinion must exist - it admits of no cure."

• "When people say that I acted charitably towards so and so, what they generally mean is that in fact that I hate his guts but managed to behave as though I didn't" (H. A. Williams).

An inspirational note from Martin Luther King to conclude: "Let us not despair. Let us not lose faith in man and certainly not in God. We must believe that a prejudiced mind can be changed, and that man, by the grace of God, can be lifted from the valley of hate to the high mountain of love ... Let us have love, compassion and understanding goodwill for those against whom we struggle, helping them to realise that ... we are not seeking to defeat them but to help them, as well as ourselves."

This book reminds me of the November 9, 1895 Punch cartoon, which showed a timid curate having breakfast in his bishop's home. The bishop is saying, "I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr Jones," to which the curate replies, in a desperate attempt not to give offence, "Oh, no, my Lord, I assure you that parts of it are excellent!"

If you are a theological or literary sophisticate who reads sermons without wanting to be "spiritually challenged" by them, this book is widely available.

Rowland Croucher

John Mark Ministries

PROPHETS VS. PHARISEES

PROPHETS VS. PHARISEES

(OR, IF JESUS CAME TO OUR CHURCH WHAT WOULD HE SAY?)

Reading: Matthew 12: 1-21

Being an itinerant ('hit-run') preacher has some advantages. I remember a Sunday evening service in a conservative church in rural Victoria, Australia. They had big black Bibles and severe expressions... And they knew their Bibles, and were proud of that. It was a smallish group, so I decided to engage them in dialogue:

'Who knows who the Pharisees were?' They did. 'The Pharisees got a pretty nasty press in the New Testament - particularly Matthew.'

'Now tell me all the *good* things you can think of about the Pharisees.' I wrote them up on a blackboard:

The Pharisees knew their Bibles; were disciplined in prayer; fasted twice a week; gave about a third of their income to their church; were moral (very moral); many had been martyred for their faith; they attended 'church' regularly; they were evangelical/orthodox; and evangelistic (Jesus said they'd even cross the ocean - a fearful thing for Jews - to win a convert).

There was a deep silence. I asked 'Peter' sitting at the front: 'What's wrong?' He pointed to the list and said 'That's us!' 'Is it?" I responded. 'Then you've got a problem: Jesus said these sorts of people are children of the devil!'

Then we did an inductive exercise on the question: 'What's so wrong with this list of admirable qualities?' Short answer: it omits what was most important for Jesus. Whenever in the Gospels he used a prefatory statement like 'This is the greatest/most important thing of all...' none of the above were emphasized by him.

What were they? Yes, loving God, loving others, seeking first the kingdom = obeying God the King ... And, from two Gospel verses the evangelicals/orthodox have rarely noticed - Matthew 23:23, Luke 11:42 - justice/love, mercy, faith.

None of these were on the Pharisees' list. But they're the most important of all, according to Jesus. Have you noticed items like justice/love don't get into our creeds or confessions of faith or 'doctrinal statements' either :-) ? (I've written a book about that: Recent Trends Among Evangelicals, if you want to chase that line).

Back to the Pharisees. Our text (Matthew 12:1-21) is about the problem of religious 'scrupulosity'... Jesus and his disciples were walking on the Sabbath through the fields on their way to the synagogue, to church, and they were hungry. So as the law (Deuteronomy 23:25) allowed, they plucked some ears of corn to eat. The Pharisees had problems with their 'reaping' on the sabbath. In fact, the disciples were breaking four of the Pharisees' 39 rules about work on the sabbath: technically they were reaping, winnowing, threshing, and preparing a meal!

Now the modern picture of the Pharisees almost certainly trivializes - or demonizes - their piety These were good people with good motives. But they were 'good people in the worst sense of the word'. More of that later...

Jesus' response is to argue from two precedents (lawyers/legalists are at home there) - precedents about necessity and service. David and his friends were hungry, so ate the forbidden bread (though note that when King Uzziah invaded the sacred area from another motive - pride - he was struck with leprosy, 2 Chronicles 26:16). Then the priests did a lot of 'work' on the sabbath - killing and sacrificing animals: so Jesus is saying that if sabbath-work has to do with the necessities of life and duties of sacred service, it's O.K. and the *spirit* of the fourth commandment is not violated. Then Jesus reinforces all this with thr ee arguments: someone greater than the temple is here; God wants mercy to have priority over sacrifice; and 'the Son of man is lord of the sabbath'. Or, as the New Interpreters' Bible Commentary puts it (in a way that would appeal to a rabbinical way of arguing): 'Since the priests sacrifice according to the law on the sabbath, sacrifice is greater than the sabbath. But mercy is greater than sacrifice... so mercy is greater than the sabbath' (Abingdon, 1995, p.278). I like Eugene Peterson's translation of this section in The Message: 'There is far more at stake than religion. If you had any idea what this Scripture meant - "I prefer a flexible heart to an inflexible ritual" - you wouldn't be nitpicking like this.'

Then we have the story of the man with the withered hand. Jerome, the fourth century bishop-scholar, says some ancient Gospels tell us his name was Caementarius - a bricklayer - and he said to Jesus: 'Please heal my hand so that I can earn a living by bricklaying rather than begging'. The Pharisees challenge him: 'Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath?' Now there's a technicality behind that question, and Jewish scribes used to debate it: is it lawful for a physician to heal on the sabbath? If the answer's 'yes' how about someone else, like a prophet? The Shammaite Pharisees did not allow praying for the sick on the sabbath, but the followers of Hillel allowed it. Arguments, arguments: 'arguments by extension' to which Jesus answers with an 'argument by analogy'. If the sabbath laws allow you to help a sheep, why not a person? (But then, the Essenes wouldn't have rescued a sheep either: gets complicated!).

So Jesus healed the man. Two notes at this point: # Jesus asked the man to stretch out his hand, to do as much as he could. Jesus often did that in his healings. It's the same today: we get help any way we can, and do what we can. Jesus still heals: sometimes slowly (always slowly in cases of sexual/emotional abuse), sometimes instantly; sometimes with, sometimes without, the help of medicine... # I was a co-speaker at a conference with the Dr Paul Yonggi Cho, pastor of the largest church in the world. He said: 'Every miracle recorded in the New Testament, including the raising of the dead, has also happened in Korea: we are praying for some miracles not mentioned in the Bible, nor recorded in Christian history. Like the replacement of a limb - an arm or a leg - that's not there . We're believing God for that...!' Do what you like with that one!

We ought to make a little excursus at this point. What's the Sabbath all about? Two things, basically: faith and rest. Faith that God will supply our needs if we don't have to work all the time; and rest so that our lives will be in balance. As you know, I counsel clergy: that's what John Mark Ministries is about. They're often burned out. But when they are, it's almost always associated with a failure to take the idea and practice of sabbath seriously. They don't take a day off: a day off is any day (for pastors it's often Thursday) when from getting up to going to bed at night you are not preoccupied with your vocation. Isn't it interesting that in our leisure-oriented culture, there's also more fatigue? A lot of people are just plain tired. The five-day work week is a recent innovation, but 'leisure' and 'sabbath-rest' are not the same. Gordon McDonald, in his excellent book Ordering Your Private World has a chapter 'Rest Beyond Leisure' which I urge you to read. He writes: 'God was the first "rester"...Does God need to rest? Of course not. But did God choose to rest? Yes. Why? Because God subjected creation to a rhythm of rest and work that he revealed by observing the rhythm himself, as a precedent for everyone else... [For us] this rest is a time of looking backward. We gaze upon our work and ask questions like: "What does my work mean? For whom did I do all this work? How well was my work done? Why did I do all this? What results did I expect, and what did I receive?" To put it another way, the rest God instituted was meant first and foremost to cause us to interpret our work, to press meaning into it, to make sure we know to whom it is properly dedicated' (Highland, 1985, pp.176-7).

The Pharisees had lost sight of the essence of the sabbath. Alister McGrath says in his NIV Bible Commentary: 'The Sabbath was instituted to give people refreshment, rather than to add to their burdens' (H&S, 1995, p.242). Precisely how you keep the Sabbath today will be governed by love for God and neighbour, and the kind of work you do. If you're a manual worker, rest. If you're sedentary, do something physical. Make sure it's 'recreational' for you - re-creating your body, mind, emotions and spirit.

Jesus healed... and 'the Pharisees conspired... how to destroy him' - destroy the One through whom we have life. (When you're beaten by goodness, reason and miracle, you have no other option but rage). And 'great crowds followed Jesus'. They knew he loved them. He taught them and healed them. While the Pharisees were into destroying, Jesus was healing. The Scottish Baptist preacher Matthew Henry makes a good point here: though some are unkind to us, we must not on that account be unkind to others.

Sometimes I talk to a pastor who is being 'destroyed' by Pharisees. They are still with us. Why? It's all about what American social scientists call 'mindsets': the mindset of the Pharisee and that of the prophet are antithetical: they can't get along. Let me explain.

The Pharisee is concerned about law: how to do right. Now there's nothing wrong with that as it stands. Except for one thing: you can keep the law and in the process destroy persons. I have a friend who lectured in law in one of our universities, before he got out of it all in disgust. He said with some conviction: 'The whole of our Western legal system is sick, unjust. For one thing: if you're rich, and can afford the cleverest advocacy, you have a pretty good chance of not going to gaol; but not if you're poor.' There's something wrong with a system supposed to preserve 'fairness' when double-standards operate...

There's a tension between law and love. Law is to love as the railway tracks are to the train: the tracks give direction, but all the propulsive power is in the train. Tracks on their own may point somewhere, but they're cold, lifeless things. But love without law is like a train without tracks: plenty of noise and even movement but lacking direction. Both law and love ultimately come from God. We need God's laws to know how to set proper boundaries and behave appropriately: without good laws we humans will destroy one another. Prophets, in the biblical sense, try to tie law and love into each other. The O.T. prophets were always encouraging the people of God to keep the law of God. But the greatest commandment is love: love of God and of others.

The recent Australian Uniting Church Interim Report on Sexuality looks at these two issues. It answers one of them very well and the other poorly. The question: 'How can homosexuals (etc.) know they're loved by us?' is addressed with deep compassion. Marginalized people ought to feel they're accepted in our churches. But they don't, generally, so we're more like the Pharisees than Jesus in that respect. (I once discussed the issue of the legalization of brothels with a couple of women from the Prostitutes' Collective on ABC TV. In the middle of it, one of them turned to me and said, 'You Christians hate us, don't you?' How would you have responded?)

But the other question: 'What is God's will in God's word-in- Scripture about all this?' is answered poorly in the UC report. Not just poorly, but heretically, I believe. It gives us permission to be revisionist when it comes to the clear mandates of Scripture, and that's not on, for a follower of Jesus. He came not to set aside God's law, but to fulfil it, by embodying the great law of love in himself.

The last section of our Gospel reading takes all this further: Jesus the prophet was fulfilling the Scriptures. As God's chosen servant whom God loves and in whom God delights, Jesus was a meek Messiah, not a warlike one. And he 'proclaims justice' (v.18), indeed 'brings justice to victory' (v.19). Now why is justice so big for prophets - and for Jesus (but not for Pharisees)? Hang in there. Fasten your seat-belts. There's some turbulence coming as we close.

First a word to the prophets in this congregation. 'Prophets'? 'Here?' Sure. Well, who are they, and why don't they - or the church - know who they are? Why don't we recognize and commission them? Why don't we hear them speak a special revelation of God to us? Ah, there are several answers to that. Mainly, of course, prophets are somewhat unpredictable. I'm studying the second half of Jeremiah at the moment to write some Scripture Union notes: here's a guy who tells the king and the army to surrender to the enemy, otherwise they'll be wiped out and/or carted off into captivity. Not the sort of message to stiffen the resistance of your armed forces! So they tossed him into a septic tank. Prophets disturb the comfortable; pastors comfort the disturbed. But we don't want to be disturbed. And so the church organizes its life - its doctrines (like 'prophecy isn't needed anymore, we've got the Bible, and preachers') and its structures (by-laws and committees to cover everything) to exclude this more spontaneous 'word from the Lord.' And prophets tend to major on social justice which isn't nice for middle-class people - more about that in a moment.

But you can't get away from the high priority the early church and the Hebrew people put on prophecy.

What is this gift? 'The gift of prophecy is the special ability that God gives to certain members of the Body of Christ to receive and communicate an immediate message from God to his people through a divinely-anointed utterance' (Peter Wagner, Your Spiritual Gifts Can Help Your Church Grow, Regal, 1979, p.228). Prophecy isn't just predicting the future, though it can include prediction. Prophets aren't always right: so they ought to be in submission to the leadership of the church (I ran these ideas by our senior pastor during the week). Prophets aren't adding a 67th book to the Bible. The canon of Scripture is closed: the prophet is simply bringing a biblically-relevant message from God to us today, for our situation. Are prophets sort of carried along by the Spirit? In a sense, yes. Michael Green writes: 'The Spirit takes over and addresses the hearers directly through [the prophet]. That is the essence of prophecy' (I Believe in the Holy Spirit, Eerdmans, 1975, p.172). Do prophets tend to be political activists? Often yes - as in the Bible. And today, therefore, such people are unlikely to be pastors of churches - if a pastor has a prophetic gift they'd better have also an independent income! 'Since their message is frequently unpopular, they would feel restrained if they were too closely tied to an institution. And many church institutions feel uncomfortable with such prophets around too much... they tend to shun church bureaucracies and prefer to be outside critics' (Wagner, p.230). Now there are varying points of view - between and among Pentecostals and Evangelicals about the ministry of prophets, and this is as much as I want to say about it all here. Except for this: if God gives you a special message for your church, write it down, and give it to the leadership: and hold the leadership accountable about praying over it, and then leave the decision about whatever happens with it to them.

Let us go back to those two Gospel texts evangelicals (like me) have ignored for 500 years: Matthew 23:23, Luke 11:42. Jesus is inveighing against the Pharisees, and saying that despite their religiosity they've missed the point - which is justice/love, mercy and faith. Justice comes first (as with the prophet's message Jesus is quoting: Micah 6:8). Why? Simple: justice is all about the right use of power; it's about fairness; it's about doing right - particularly for the poor and oppressed. Social justice is all about (it's *only* about) treating others as being made in God's image; human beings with respect and dignity and infinite worth. Justice is about the most important characteristic of human beings - their Godlikeness. Homosexuals, for example, aren't just individuals who parade their gayness in Mardi Gras festivals. They're made in the image of God. Hitler was made in the image of God; so was Stalin; so is Pol Pot and Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein... And so are the people in church next to you this morning. CSLewis says somewhere (The Weight of Glory?) that if we realized who the others really were with whom we were worshipping, we'd be tempted to fall down and worship *them*!

There's probably something of the Pharisee in all of us. We take two good gifts from God - law and truth - and create all sorts of legalisms and dogmatisms to save us the trouble of loving people we don't like. What is your spiritual 'achilles' heel'? How does the devil get to you? One of our '19 questions' (see our home page) for retreatants asks: 'for what non-altruistic motives are you in ministry?'

Have you noticed that in the ministry of Jesus, the message of repentance was mainly aimed at religious people, church-folk, like us? When we elevate law over love; rules and precedents and structures above persons; when social justice is not at the top of our agenda; then we've got some repenting to do. Pharisees are people who know the Bible and miss the point. Lord help us!

(P.S. The statement about 'trivializing the Pharisees' refers to several problems biblical scholars have about the Pharisees in the NT in general and Matthew in particular. See, eg. the excellent article on the subject in The Anchor Bible Dictionary (Doubleday, 1992)

Rowland Croucher

John Mark Ministries

THE INCOMPARABLE CHRIST (John Stott)

At the moment I'm reading about 10-15 authors on Christology. They range, via their theological presuppositions, from 'right' to 'left' - or 'high' to 'low' Christologies - respectively: the Creeds of the first five centuries CE, Pope Benedict XVI, Josh McDowell, CSLewis, Leon Morris, John Stott, Gordon Fee, Paul Barnett, Gerald O'Collins, Alister McGrath, Ben Witherington III, N T Wright, B.A. Gerrish, Ernst Kasemann, James Dunn, Karl Barth, L. Michael White, Philip Gulley & James Mulholland, Rudolf Bultmann, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and Barbara Thiering.

Some of these, of course, may be, in varying degrees, 'lightweight/ derivative' (especially Josh McDowell), but they mostly (with the possible exception of Gerrish, and maybe Paul Barnett) have a large Christian - and even non-Christian - readership. Neither Stott (a pastor and teacher/ apologist) nor CSLewis (a scholar primarily in the areas of medieval literature and literary criticism) nor Gulley/Mulholland (whose recent book on Universalism - 'If Grace is True: Why God Will Save Every Person' is climbing the Christian best-seller lists in the U.S.) would claim, I think, to be professional theologians. Apart from these all the others would. Anyone want to rearrange my generalized order - from conservative to radical?

John Stott is the English-speaking world's highest-profile and most acclaimed 'evangelical'. We have lunched together, corresponded a bit, mentioned each other 'in despatches' (John Stott commended me to a congregation in Vancouver, British Columbia, which soon after called us to the pastorate there) and Jan and I were privileged to attend his 80th birthday celebration at the Albert Hall in London a couple of years ago: a great man, who has, with CSLewis, influenced more undergraduates around the world in the last half-century towards an informed acceptance of the Christian faith than anyone else. (Watch for my review of Timothy Dudley-Smith's two-volume biography of Stott: generally inspiring, and worth anyone's investing time to read, though you'll have to skim a lot of unnecessary/irrelevant details!).

John Stott's 'The Incomparable Christ' (IVP, 2001) puts into print his A.D. 2000 London Lectures on Contemporary Christianity. The book is divided into four sections: 'The Original Jesus' (NT Gospels, Acts, Letters); 'The Ecclesiastical Jesus' (how the church has viewed Jesus, from Justin Martyr to the Lausanne confessions of the 20th century); 'The Influential Jesus' (how he has inspired people from St. Francis to Tolstoy, from Gandhi to Roland Allen, from Father Damien to William Wilberforce); and 'The Eternal Jesus' (based on ten visions from the book of Revelation).

The then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. George Carey, wrote in the Foreword: 'John... falls into the classic Anglican tradition of the "teaching pastor"... And... according to no less an authority than David Edwards, "With the exception of William Temple, John Stott is the most influential clergyman in the Church of England of the twentieth century".'

Stott's Introduction is, as you would expect, highly critical of the three scholarly 'Quests of the historical Jesus', especially the work of the 'Jesus Seminar': '[Funk's and Crossan's] book "The Five Gospels: what did Jesus really say?" (the fifth being the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas)concluded that in their view "82% of the words ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels were not actually spoken by him". Now they have turned from an examination of the words of Jesus to his works. Their study is not likely to be any more profitable, however, as their criteria are largely subjective.' Stott is a little less dismissive of form criticism ('preoccupied with the concerns of the early church') and redaction criticism ('preoccupied rather with the concerns of the individual gospel authors'), rather emphasizing that the gospel authors are primarily evangelists, 'consciously proclaiming the gospel, and theologians, developing their own distinctive emphasis.'

John Stott then generally ignores - except for brief quotes/citations here and there - the work of modern scholars/theologians, with the notable exception of N.T. Wright (more on him below). For example, the first chapter on 'The Gospel of Matthew: Christ the fulfilment of Scripture' is classical orthodoxy. You won't find any reference to the problem of 'prophecy historicized' as Marcus Borg and others put it. Matthew's Christ was simply the fulfilment of prophecy, the law and of Israel.

Albert Schweitzer's declaration that he saw no discernible continuity between Jesus and Paul is dismissed in favour of David Wenham's 'massive overlap' between the two. Stott follows the ancient tradition of assuming the Pauline authorship of the 13 letters attributed to him.

Stott quotes A.M. Hunter with approval: 'There is a growing recognition of the essential unity of the New Testament... a unity that transcends and dominates all diversities'. And also Oscar Cullmann's condemnation of New Testament scholars who take 'an almost sadistic pleasure' in finding apparent discrepancies.' He is dubious about James Dunn's notion that 'Any attempt to find a single, once-for-all, unifying kerygma [in the NT] is bound to fail' but he does like Dunn's concession that there is a 'unifying element' in the 'unity between the historical Jesus and the exalted Christ'. Stott: 'The four gospels complement each other; they do not contradict each other.' And he likes Bishop Stephen Neill's 'It is the view of many competent scholars today that all the fragments of Christian tradition which we possess in the New Testament bear witness with singular unanimity to one single historical figure, unlike any other that has ever walked [the earth]...'

He concludes the first section with 'We pay our tribute to the original Jesus, the Jesus of the New Testament witness, who is the incomparable Christ.'

In Part II 'The Ecclesiastical Jesus' Stott begins with the assertion that 'In contrast to the "one Lord" of the diverse yet united witness of the New Testament, the church has displayed a remarkable ingenuity in adapting, shaping, and presenting its own images of Christ.' I don't think anyone will argue with the second part of that sentence! Stott then has an excellent summary of (and endorses) the high Christology of the first four ecumenical councils. In summary: 'The Council of Nicea (325) secured the truth that Jesus is truly God, while the Council of Constantinople (381) secured that Jesus is truly human. Next, the Council of Ephesus (431) secured that, although both God and man, Jesus is only one person, while the Council of Chalcedon (451) secured that, although one person, he had two natures, divine and human.'

John Stott's high Christology is then affirmed in a succession of quotes. Samples: 'The debate about Christology was a debate about salvation, for only a Saviour who is fully divine and fully human could represent both sides and reconcile us to God.' The second Anglican Article (1563): 'The Son, who is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting of the Father, the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father, took man's nature, so that two whole and perfect natures, the Godhead and the manhood, were joined together in one person.' Pope Leo's 'Tome': 'Christ is God and Christ is man. The two natures co-exist. Neither nature diminishes anything or adds anything to the properties of the other.' And paraphrasing the Anglican scholar-pastor Charles Simeon: 'Jesus Christ was neither God pretending to be human, nor a human being with divine faculties, nor semi-divine and semi-human, but fully human and fully divine, the unique God-man.'

The book then takes a journey in Part II through Christian history, from Benedict's 'Christ the Perfect Monk' to N T Wright's 'Christ the Jewish Messiah' and the 20th century missionary councils' 'Christ the global Lord'.

A few comments:

* Stott is critical of the monastic movement 'glorifying retreat from the world; it could be a denial of the incarnation' without noting that many/most conservative Christians may be essentially monastic, having only like-minded Christians for their friends.

* Stott likes 'Abelard's passion' and 'Anselm's logic' and calls for a combination of the two for a more 'Scriptural' view of the atonement (and yet in his book 'The Cross of Christ' the idea of the atonement as demonstrating God's love is, I believe, subordinated to substitutionary/forensic views.

* Dr Tom Wright's championing of 'Christian orthodoxy over against (for example) the radical reductionism of the "Jesus Seminar"' is applauded, but Stott chides Wright's 'ambivalence' about Jesus believing that he was 'in some sense divine'.

The Third section 'The Influential Jesus (or how he has inspired people)' is quite inspiring. I won't refer to those stories here, as they reveal little about the high/low Christology which is my special interest at the moment.

Finally, we take a journey through the book of Revelation. Summary: 'Thus Jesus Christ, who originated all things as Creator, will consummate all things as Judge. For he is 'the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End (Rev. 22:13). These very same titles are attributed both to God (1:8) and to Christ (1:17; 22:13).'

A very challenging and inspiring book. Scholars to the theological left of Stott - particularly those like Marcus Borg and the Jesus Seminar people - will say it's all too orthodox and simplistic. But, then, even most of my clergy-friends don't understand what 'history metaphorized' means, and are not inclined to find such concepts grist for preaching. As Professor B. A. Gerrish puts it a little cynically: 'Is faith really at the mercy of the latest report of the quest for the historical Jesus?' (Christian Century, October 13, 1999, p. 971).

A criticism then a little homily:

It's a pity that Stott mainly uses the sexist (and evangelically-biassed)

NIV throughout. (Eg. 'The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world'; 'The Lord does not look at the things man looks at'; 'The dwelling of God is with men' etc.).

John Stott concludes his book with a story which the late Donald Coggan, former Archbishop of Canterbury sometimes told:

'There was a sculptor once, so they say, who sculpted a statue of our Lord. And people came from great distances to see it - Christ in all his strength and tenderness. They would walk all around the statue, trying to grasp its splendour, looking at it now from this angle, now from that. Yet still its grandeur eluded them, until they consulted the sculptor himself. He would invariably reply "There's only one angle from which this statue can be truly seen. You must kneel!"'

Rowland Croucher

April 2005.

This book may be ordered from Ridley College Bookshop -