Author Archives: Elizaphanian

About Elizaphanian

Rector of West Mersea

On being too Christian

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Just a thought that occurred to me yesterday – it is surely possible to be too Christian.

Consider Jesus’ teaching about salt, and how salt that has lost its savour isn’t any good, it is fit only to be trodden underfoot.

Salt is not there as an end in itself. It is there to enhance the flavour of the food. It is not there to be eaten in its own right; to do so is in fact to be poisoned.

That is the role of the Christian. Not to have an alternative life, marked out with boundaries and little fishes, but rather, to enhance the life of all which is not salt.

In other words, the role of the Christian is to ensure that those who are not Christians can enjoy abundance.

When this is missed, I think that Christians have become too Christian, and have missed the point. They have become too isolated, and too concentrated, and have thereby become toxic to the wider community. Rather than enabling the savouring of the flavouring they induce vomiting. Not good.

(and after writing that, I see this)

The ghost of George Herbert

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A bit more on this topic. Justin (whose book is coming out soon) shared some figures with me in an e-mail. Over the period 1990-2006 the average number of clergy leaving the ministry each year, for various reasons, was:

Death in post: 24
Retirement: 344
‘Other losses’: 258

That’s out of a total clergy number of around 9,000 average, so around 3% of clergy leave the ministry each year. I wonder how that compares with other professions? I wonder also whether a vocational ministry might not expect a lower rate of departure compared to other professions (after all, there’s more at stake in priest leaving ministry than, say, an accountant joining a non-accountancy company). Unfortunately the CofE doesn’t keep figures on _why_ clergy leave the job.

It’s been on my mind again, partly for personal reasons (like discovering the other day that if I’d stayed in the civil service I’d be earning around £70k now, on a conservative estimate!), and partly because Tim put up an interesting post relating to it (see my comments in the thread).

TBTM20090129

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The subjective nature of scientific knowledge is increasingly being recognised. Scientific methodology is based on assumptions that cannot be examined scientifically, reflects the perspective of the observer in experiment and observation and utilises metaphor and worldview in creating hypotheses. The divide between subjective and objective and between scientific and faith knowledge is increasingly redundant, with all knowledge beginning to be understood as involving both subjectivity and objectivity.