Author Archives: Elizaphanian
Vocal range
Just discovered, thanks to the help of my much better half, that I have a vocal range that runs from the F two octaves below middle C up to the G two octaves above middle C (ie 3 octaves). I should emphasise that I wouldn’t want to sing something using all of that – my “comfortable” range is probably less than two octaves – but it reinforces something a singing tutor once said to me – I’ve got a powerful instrument, I just need to learn how to use it properly. Definitely something to pursue.
Evangelicals and the Bible
Just been reading two assessment reports, of Wycliffe Hall and St Stephen’s House in Oxford (both theological colleges = seminaries in US speak). Lots of interesting stuff in them, but I had to laugh when it was pointed out that the evangelical college was deficient in its use of the Bible in worship! A trend that I’m coming to associate with evangelical styles.
This is the relevant paragraph in full:
“We were also surprised at the very limited amount of biblical material in the daily
services. A psalm is required to be used on Monday mornings, and a psalm was
said on one other day. A short reading from the New Testament is recommended
on three mornings, and a short reading from the Old Testament on two mornings.
The Hall lectionary provides for reading ‘the whole range of biblical literature’
over a four year cycle on three mornings a week for 32 weeks of the year. However,
no student spends four years in the Hall, and such an arrangement does not
encourage students to read the Bible themselves ‘in course’ on days when there is
no corporate worship in chapel. Therefore we do not think that this practice is
consistent with the Anglican tradition of reading the psalms and the greater part of
the Old Testament and all the New Testament, in course, during the calendar year.
This is intended to immerse the Church’s ministers, and the laity, in Scripture, and
thereby to familiarise them with the great sweep and variety of salvation history
and literature in the Old Testament, and with all the gospels and letters and the
Revelation to John in the New Testament. Attention should be paid to providing
more extensive use of the psalms, and the biblical canticles, which praise and
thank God for his intervention in his world in the incarnation of his son, Jesus
Christ, for the salvation of his creation; and for publicly reading the Old and New
Testaments in course.”
Quite so.
Idolatry and Abortion
I’ve been pondering that case in Brazil where the RC church has excommunicated a nine-year old girl, her family and doctors, for having an abortion, yet has not excommunicated the person who did the evil deed itself. I think this is a good example of idolatry, and I want to unpack why as it may help to explain what I mean by idolatry (and also, for atheists, what I mean when I say that God is not a member of a set – an explanation which, whilst technically correct, ends up misleading, so I might abandon it.)
In Scriptural terms, we are called to love God with all our mind, soul, heart and strength – in other words, we must put God above all other things, we are not allowed to compromise with God.
This means that nothing else can be given the authority or perfection which belongs to God alone – not Scripture, not religious custom, not ethical principle. Nothing which can be described in human language is beyond being relativised by the fundamental command that we are to have no other gods but the one God. Furthermore we are to know this God, and the nature of this God, in order to carry out his will faithfully (that’s what Scripture is about).
Using slightly more philosophical language, the teaching is that God is the only Absolute – and nothing else is allowed to become an absolute, for if it does, it usurps the place of God and becomes an idol.
In this instance, the principle of ‘no abortion ever’ has been made into an Absolute, and the suffering which will ensue on the child, the child’s family, the doctors involved, and any future situations where a child dies from being prevented from having an abortion – this suffering is the consequence of idolatry. The teaching has been made into a rigid rule that is required to apply in any and all circumstances, no matter what the specifics of the situation. Morality and judgement become a technique rather than something involving the application of human feeling – and the absence of human feeling is one of the key signs that idolatry is present, for it is only human feeling, empathy and compassion, that can lead us rightly to God; it is these things which allow us to know what his ‘way’ actually is.
Note that calling this idolatry does NOT mean that the abortion is morally right in any ‘pure’ sense. What the idolatry in this case involves is an abandonment of the messiness of human life, the recognition that, in our fallen world, there are no morally pure, morally righteous alternatives. There are only choices between evils. Idolatry means that, in order to avoid one evil, a different evil is committed – and the idolatry blinds the idol-worshipper to the nature of that different evil.
In this case the lesser evil is the abortion – calling it a lesser evil acknowledges that it is still an evil – and the choice to never share in that evil has consequences that are a greater evil.
This is the sort of situation that I think Jesus had in mind with the story of the Good Samaritan. People are following religious precepts – they think that they are doing the right thing – yet their hearts have been hardened against compassion, and so they fail to do the Father’s will. Consequently, those who have chosen this idolatrous path are liable to damnation for it.
6 Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker;
7 for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care. Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, as you did that day at Massah in the desert,
9 where your fathers tested and tried me, though they had seen what I did.
10 For forty years I was angry with that generation; I said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they have not known my ways.”
11 So I declared on oath in my anger, “They shall never enter my rest.”
(from Psalm 95)
40FP(13): Matthew 25.31-46
As I’m on a roll with this theme….
31 ‘When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory.
32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats,
33 and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left.
34 Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world;
35 for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me,
36 I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”
37 Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink?
38 And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing?
39 And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?”
40 And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”
41 Then he will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels;
42 for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,
43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.”
44 Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?”
45 Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”
46 And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.’
Why is this a favourite passage?
This summarises some of the principal themes which I take from my reading of Scripture, and I see it as a summation of the message of the Old Testament: it’s not about what you call Jesus, it’s about how you live, and in the end we will be judged on how we have lived – this is simply what it means to be righteous. As it happens, I don’t think this completely undermines the priority of grace, nor does it render faith irrelevant, but I’ll save the explanation of that for another post.
40FP(12): James 2.14-26
This is a text I refer to, more or less explicitly, on a regular basis (from the NRSV this time)
14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you?
15 If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food,
16 and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?
17 So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
18 But someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith without works, and I by my works will show you my faith.
19 You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe — and shudder.
20 Do you want to be shown, you senseless person, that faith without works is barren?
21 Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar?
22 You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was brought to completion by the works.
23 Thus the scripture was fulfilled that says, ‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’, and he was called the friend of God.
24 You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.
25 Likewise, was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road?
26 For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead.
Why is this a favourite passage?
The short answer is that it is a key text preventing ‘faith’ from turning into an idol. A faith which does not bear fruit in good work is a meaningless faith – practice gives the words their sense, to use Wittgenstein’s pithy aphorism. So often religious debate gets tangled up in words when ultimately it is not the words that are important. Nor, ultimately, is it a question of beliefs about matters of fact – even the demons believe! – but only of beliefs which guide our actions. A belief which has no consequence for how we live is completely irrelevant, it is simply decoration upon our mental furniture. Verse 24 is a particularly entertaining one to quote when in discussion with extreme Protestants! (It is why Luther wanted this taken out of the Bible, and called it an ‘Epistle of Straw’.)
40FP(11): Luke 10.25-37
Text from the New Living Translation
25 One day an expert in religious law stood up to test Jesus by asking him this question: “Teacher, what should I do to inherit eternal life?”
26 Jesus replied, “What does the law of Moses say? How do you read it?”
27 The man answered, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.’ And, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
28 “Right!” Jesus told him. “Do this and you will live!”
29 The man wanted to justify his actions, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
30 Jesus replied with a story: “A Jewish man was traveling on a trip from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he was attacked by bandits. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him up, and left him half dead beside the road.
31 “By chance a priest came along. But when he saw the man lying there, he crossed to the other side of the road and passed him by.
32 A Temple assistant walked over and looked at him lying there, but he also passed by on the other side.
33 “Then a despised Samaritan came along, and when he saw the man, he felt compassion for him.
34 Going over to him, the Samaritan soothed his wounds with olive oil and wine and bandaged them. Then he put the man on his own donkey and took him to an inn, where he took care of him.
35 The next day he handed the innkeeper two silver coins, telling him, ‘Take care of this man. If his bill runs higher than this, I’ll pay you the next time I’m here.’
36 “Now which of these three would you say was a neighbor to the man who was attacked by bandits?” Jesus asked.
37 The man replied, “The one who showed him mercy.” Then Jesus said, “Yes, now go and do the same.”
Why is this a favourite passage?
It’s quite a familiar passage, but what I want to draw out are two points.
The first is to note that Jesus doesn’t challenge the grammar of the request, rather he accepts it and builds on it. In other words, Jesus accepts that salvation is a doing (or, it necessarily involves a doing) and the notion of ‘belief’ isn’t raised. Jesus could have said, in response to the initial question, something like ‘believe in me as your personal Lord and Saviour’ – but he doesn’t, and I find that both significant and reassuring.
The second point to emphasise is that the story isn’t really about reaching beyond ethnic boundaries, it’s about abandoning religious boundaries. The Priest and the Temple Assistant are both following the regulations for their conduct, because if they were to help the wounded man then they would then be rendered unclean and unfit for their religious duties. Whereas the Samaritan – off the scale in terms of being religiously ‘unrighteous’ – is the one who actually does the Father’s will by showing mercy and compassion.
So: a key text for me.
TBTM20090317
Obama vs Marx
(See Al, I can put up nice links about Obama too!)
In fact, as it’s St Patrick’s Day, how about this:
There’s actually a better video than that somewhere, but it seems to have been taken off YouTube.
