Category Archives: church

A brief theological sketch about supervisions

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Last week I attended a training course at Pleshey (part 2 of ‘how to look after your curate’ although it wasn’t officially called that). This post explains my disquiet about one aspect of the course – click ‘full post’ for text.

This part of the course was primarily about the art of supervisions, how to conduct the regular meetings between training incumbent and curate in such a way that the curacy ‘succeeds’. There was a strong sense that the Diocese has been a little scarred by, some years back, a high number of curacies ‘failing’ – hence a renewed emphasis on the training of the incumbents who are due to receive a curate for training.

However, I was a little alarmed that in the opening session we ventured straight into various secular analyses of supervision which, however worthy, are not automatically entitled to be accepted within the church. I asked whether we were going to spend any time exploring the theology of supervisions and it seemed that apart from a minimal engagement with some passages from Mark’s gospel, we weren’t. This I see as a typical example of the way in which training as a whole in the Church of England is not just theologically lightweight but prone to being captured by secular philosophies travelling under the guise of ‘professionalism’.

What I want to do in this post is sketch out the sort of theological framework that would need to be explored prior to engaging with the secular perspectives. I have no doubt that secular perspectives have much to contribute to the conversation, it’s just that I believe we need to ‘arm ourselves with the Word’ before engaging with them, so that our minds are attuned to what is compatible with our faith and what is not. I don’t have any especial expertise in this area so this is really a requested agenda in four parts, to be developed by those who are more qualified.

First: I would want to establish the essential groundwork, which would be something about relationships. We worship the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a God who is relational within Himself – and therefore relationships are at the heart of the Christian life. What we have in the supervision is above all a particular and intense form of relationship. Clearly there is a lot of relationship between incumbent and curate that will happen outside of the supervision, but the supervision is when it will come under the microscope, and where there is the greatest opportunity for serious and prayerful growth, so I would want to make this the first theological point: that paying attention to the quality of the relationship between curate and incumbent, and ensuring that it functions well, is the primary task of the supervision process. This can then be developed by describing the particular characteristics that would enable the relationship to function well, eg that it should be truthful (for the truth sets us free) and that it should be loving in the way that Christ embodied etc.

Second: I would want to explore ‘the Eli principle’. What I have in mind is the passage in Samuel where Samuel receives his call from God. Eli is in the supervisory relationship and he at first sees the call that Samuel receives as an irritation (it disturbs his sleep – a theologically significant description). However, when Eli eventually recognises that God is present in the process he enables Samuel to listen to God and to follow his own vocation, at great personal cost. This seems to me to be the essential aspect to emphasise at the heart of the supervisory relationship: that God has a particular call on the curate’s life, and that this does not necessarily travel through the incumbent. The relationship of incumbent to curate is not that of parent to child, but that of midwife to child – with God as the parent. The task of the incumbent is to enable the particular vocation that God has implanted within the curate to come to flower. As with Eli, this may be a costly endeavour.

Third: I find it remarkable that there was no time on the course when incumbents were enabled to spend time with the ordinal, exploring the different elements contained within it. That could easily be covered in a session like this – or, even better, used as the framework for all the worship elements through the two parts of the course. That was a missed opportunity I think.

Finally: I would want to explicitly articulate and own the different varieties of ministry that are possible within the parameters of the ordinal. I was concerned on the course that there was often a tacit acceptance of the George Herbert model of ministry, even if it was often in the context of the more mature members lamenting the way in which the ‘new generation’ didn’t respect it. It would have been helpful if we had spent time considering the New Testament passages describing a variety of ministries, eg the five-fold division listed in Ephesians. This may have had a direct and positive practical impact in enabling the ‘Eli principle’ that I mentioned above. It would also have been a good opportunity to touch on wider issues, eg mission and the changed context of a post-Christendom church, which have a very real salience in the context where the curates will be working, and which therefore throw into question what sort of model of ministry should be followed by a curate.

I think a session devoted to exploring these elements would have been extremely beneficial. One of the best things about the course was the opportunity to hear people of widely differing churchmanships and experience discussing what it meant to train a curate. I think that conversation would have been enhanced if we had been able to share and debate the theological frameworks underlying our task as training incumbents.

David Ford: "If you have the Bible in one hand, what do you have in the other?"

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The clergy of the Chelmsford Diocese gathered together today at the Cathedral to hear David Ford give a talk about the Bible. Some notes available if you click ‘full post’.

Ford began by telling an anecdote about a train journey he had recently shared with Prof Nicholas Lash and Prof Eamonn Duffy, when he had asked them what the answer to the title question should be – Lash said ‘a glass of wine’, and Duffy riposted with ‘an Armalite rifle’…

The origin for the question was Karl Barth’s comment that the Bible should be read with a newspaper in the other hand – in other words we should relate what we read in Scripture to what we engage with in our world on a daily basis. After a brief discussion of Hans Frei, which I couldn’t quite hear well enough to determine how relevant it was(!) Ford said ‘What we most need in our church today is a wise interpretation of Scripture’ – which I thought was spot on, and this was really his theme.

Ford remarked that we clergy use Scripture professionally every day, and suggested three things that needed to be ‘in the other hand’.
1. Scholarship directly related to Scripture, of which there is an abundance to be used.
2. Interpretations of Scripture from Christian history (eg Augustine, Luther etc) so that we become aware of how texts have been understood in history, and therefore the need to re-read Scripture in the light of every new situation.
3. Contemporary theology, which is itself refreshed by contributions from 1. and 2.

This last was crucial, he argued. There are different grammatical moods available in Scripture, including the interrogative, indicative, imperative and subjunctive – but also, most crucially, an optative mood. In other words, our understanding of Scripture has to remain open-ended, constructed around a desire for something that we have not yet achieved. He said that we are on a road, in via, now we see through a glass darkly etc – and therefore the fundamental mood of our faith is desire and longing. It is therefore essential that we don’t wrap up our interpretation of Scripture in a tight package of indicatives and imperatives – something vital to faith would thereby be missed.

At the heart of any interpretation of Scripture is a relationship with the living Christ, and Ford discussed the Emmaus story in this light – that as Christians we bring a particular ‘resurrection hermeneutic’ to the text, and that this allows something new to be discovered – Christ explained the Scripture to the disciples and then their hearts burned within them. What is allowed, encouraged even, is a creative engagement with the text that allows new things to form. The best example of this was John’s gospel which begins with a Christian midrash on a Jewish text.

Lying behind the title question was the theme of how to live as a Christian in our contemporary society, and Ford said a little about Charles Taylor’s recent book on the secular age, commenting on how secular thought has its own set texts and axioms. There was a digression to discuss an American Jewish author whose name I didn’t quite catch (possibly Michael Fishbane??) but this brought Ford to his next major point – that we have to study and interpret the bible in the context of our worship and liturgy. He insisted that we must daily be exposed to reading and being read by Scripture, and that the Daily Office was irreplaceable, radical and basic. It is only by repetition that we become sufficiently immersed in Scripture and enabled to understand it. He remarked that one of the best forms of Anglican theology was the collect, eg from the BCP, and he read out the ASB collect for Pentecost which he regretted having lost:

“Almighty God, who on the day of Pentecost sent your Holy Spirit to the disciples with the wind from heaven and in tongues of flame, filling them with joy and boldness to preach the gospel: send us out in the power of the same Spirit to witness to your truth and to draw all men to the fire of your love; through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.”

He remarked that Scripture is full of cries, of pain and joy, and that the hallmark of wise interpretation was the ability to understand those cries.

Finally he ran through some other possible answers to the title question: an empty hand; a blessing; someone else’s Scripture; a quinquennial report (he had been a church warden for five years so knew about these); poetry, novels, radio local newspapers etc; a computer mouse and a diary.

On that very last point Ford finished with an impassioned cri de coeur for clergy to take more seriously the responsibility of preaching. He asked how much time we give to our sermons, and whether we mark out particular time for it in our diaries. It is sometimes the only contact that people have with the world of the Bible, and people have died for our ability to do this, so ‘please please please take this incredibly seriously’. We should have as our aim in preaching that people should leave with their hearts burning within them…

In questions he recommended some authors: Ellen Davis (three books of hers, especially this one); Luke Johnson; Richard Hays; Tom Wright; Richard Bauckham and, with warm endorsement, Rowan.

A really solid talk, and it was good to catch up with a number of fellow clergy.

Charismatic worship and speaking in tongues

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Still pondering these things after my experience in Yorkshire. (Did I say I had some really wonderful fish’n’chips up there?). I haven’t reached anything settled yet (except that I have been convicted of the importance of liturgy) but here are a couple of things I’m pondering:

Tim’s put up a testimony here.

Peter’s written some sensible stuff here.

More on this anon.

Fermentations of an old wino

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These are my initial reflections on the New Wine Leadership Conference “Releasing the Kingdom”. Brief summary: some prejudices confirmed, but also more confirmed that I have a charismatic side emerging.


OK – back when I had my ‘baptism of fire’ moment it became clear to me that I had some spiritual work to do on my expectations of the miraculous and various other charismatic elements in my nature. In particular, whilst I have slowly become intellectually persuaded both of the reality of miraculous healing, and the importance of that in Christian ministry, I was more aware that I still have a lot of secular assumptions in my habits of thought. So I went to the conference hoping for a breakthrough – or breakdown! – of those habits, so that I could start to act with a little more authority and faith in that regard.

Well that didn’t happen, for various reasons, but I still think it will at some point. The biggest handicap was that the venue wasn’t really a safe place for me to explore these things, but more specific things can be said.

Firstly, I thought there was a good amount of solid teaching embedded in the talks, and I’ve taken quite a few thoughts and inspirations away. I thought that John Coles was quite impressive, except for when he was making cracks about Rowan/ liberals/ homosexuality which were a distraction, and I attended one seminar with Anne Maclaurin which was excellent and very timely for me (lots of things at the conference were timely…), but the main teaching input was provided by Bill Johnson – and I had a few problems with him.

Partly the issue was about a culture clash. Bill is from California and it shows – in his first talk I found it quite difficult to get beyond an impression of appalling arrogance (yes I know it takes one….) but in the later sessions that was less of an issue. What was more of an issue was an underlying disparagement of the intellect. This seemed to be a major element of New Wine as a whole: firstly a division between ‘head and heart’ was assumed (in itself distinctly UNscriptural!), secondly the ‘heart’, ie emotion, was elevated and intellect was consistently denigrated. I think that this was the main reason that I struggled to fit in at the conference. I need to love God with my mind as well.

The second great difficulty, related to that, was the “worship”. When it began I was quite encouraged, and even felt myself tottering on the edge of that breakthrough, as we began by singing ‘Blessed by your name’, which I find tremendously meaningful. Unfortunately the worship band milked the song beyond what it was worth, and it was followed up by distinctly less valuable songs, which were also milked way beyond what they were worth (I noted that every song had to have a final third of repetitions with diminished force – the liturgical instinct cannot die!!). More than that – there was nothing other than the singing. No reading of Scripture, no explicit liturgy, not even a shared Lord’s Prayer: on the whole I found the worship to be something of a starvation diet when I had been expecting a feast (indeed I think a feast would have tipped me over the edge). To my mind, the most essential elements of worship are the public reading of Scripture set in the context of standard prayers that can be learnt by heart – those are the bones which can then be supported and enhanced by the addition of the musical items; without the bones you just have a big floppy mess. (This is to say nothing of the sacramental element of course). This isn’t to say that you don’t want emotion in worship – clearly you do – but that emotion needs to be integrated with everything else as a coherent whole. I kept thinking of the 9.30 service here on Mersea before I left – much better!

There was one rather curious coincidence – of course it wasn’t a coincidence, it was God’s sense of humour on display – but I left the first evening’s talk early, at about 9pm, because I found it less than worthwhile. Back in the hotel room I flicked on the TV and there was a fascinating program asking whether religion was a form of madness (called “Am I Normal?” details here). It was strange to have gone from an environment where I was surrounded by 2000 people speaking and singing in tongues, barking and cackling etc, to watch a fairly dry documentary exploring precisely those phenomena. It confirmed in me that there are some dangers involved in the New Wine way of doing things and that whilst I am convinced that living in the Kingdom necessarily entails healing, the way in which that healing takes place doesn’t have to be shaped by the New Wine style. There was a part of me that thought New Wine had itself been captured by a particular culture – that of US baby boomers, with the uniform of blue jeans and comfortable shirt, and the cultural form of a Rolling Stones concert. New Wine, for a certain sort of believer, must be way cool.

The best element of the conference was the chance to talk to colleagues from Mersea about it all, and to get some hints and tips about how I can take it forward, which is really about two things – taking it forward on a personal level, and taking it forward as a ministry on Mersea. The latter will probably involve something that could be described as ‘Charismatic Catholic’ – which is where I suspect I will end up churchmanship-wise – but the former is still a bit blurry to me. One especially helpful thing was a comment saying that the shift is best described, not as a ‘baptism of the spirit’, for that has already happened for each Christian – but as a ‘release of the spirit’. That makes an awful lot of sense, and will probably form my sermon on Pentecost Sunday!

So: a very worthwhile experience, timely in many ways, which moved me forward in my journey and confirmed me in the general direction that I’m travelling in – but also something that confirmed for me that New Wine isn’t the right vessel to carry my spirituality forward. It’s not a “comfortable coat” – which was, I believe, an authentic ‘word of prophecy’ spoken to me at the conference. Worship that is charismatic and fully liturgical and sacramental – that sounds like something being stitched by a heavenly tailor for me.

Interesting thoughts about church size

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At Bishop Alan’s blog here (and follow the links).

I think it’s true that you can’t be an effective pastor to a congregation of much more than about 60 adults; this ties in very strongly with things that Eugene Peterson teaches and, of course, with the Killing George Herbert approach.

Which means, in the Mersea context, that we need four or five ‘ministers’ for church to work, relational glue to be formed, and to ensure that people don’t fall through the cracks.

Hmm.

The Minster Model (March Synchroblog)

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Before there were parishes in England, there were Minsters. ‘Minster’ is simply another word for monastery, or monastic community. However, these Minsters were not enclosed orders, they were instead the central social and economic hub for a network of communities. The Minster church was a place for pursuing worship, prayer, study and formation in discipleship. There was room for specialisation in ministries given the concentration of resources, and these served as a resource for the surrounding communities known as parochiae – what became the parishes. The Minster model was fundamentally missional in orientation and concerned with evangelising and nurturing those local communities.

The parish model succeeded the Minsters principally because the Minsters were successful in that evangelisation. The local communities, converted to the gospel, raised sufficient resource to employ their own local minister – often with the support of a wealthy local landlord who saw the establishment of a church on his land as a feather in his cap – and so, over time, was born the classic pattern of the English parson – the George Herbert model. In this context the work of the church was primarily one of pastoral care and maintenance, with the local minister being a more or less capable jack of all trades, providing for the sacramental and pastoral needs of the local community.

There are several pressures acting upon the church today which, to my mind, make the restoration of the Minster model the way forward for the church.

Amongst those pressures are:
– the contraction of clergy numbers over time. The broader pattern is familiar, but I was surprised to discover recently that the local pattern is more alarming than I had realised – the Colchester area (ie North Essex) is facing a decline in stipendiary clergy of two posts per year for the foreseeable future;
– the need for, and embrace of, the ministry of all the baptised, in this diocese called ‘Ministry as Partnership’, which has allowed a great many gifts to be explored and expressed in the life of the church;
– an acknowledgement of the collapse in Christian belief amongst the wider population, and therefore the necessity to shift to a more missional model of church.
We are now in a situation where the evangelistic success of the Minsters of England, a thousand years ago, has been destroyed. The population of England has just enough exposure and inherited acceptance of Christianity to inoculate it from genuine commitment and discipleship. In this context the inherited pattern of Christian life – local parishes and the George Herbert model of ministry – are incapable of being obedient to our Lord’s command to ‘go out and make disciples of all nations’.

~~~

Other people writing on related themes this month:

Phil Wyman at Phil Wyman’s Square No More

Beth at Until Translucent

Adam Gonnerman at Igneous Quill

Steve Hayes at Notes from the Underground

Jonathan Brink at JonathanBrink.com

Sally Coleman at Eternal Echoes

Brian Riley at at Charis Shalom

Cobus van Wyngaard at My Contemplations

Mike Bursell at Mike’s Musings

David Fisher at Cosmic Collisions

Alan Knox at The Assembling of the Church

Erin Word at Decompressing Faith

Sonja Andrews at Calacirian

A very good point

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Today is officially my day off. As it happens I had to drive around 90 miles in a round trip to two fairly important (and good) meetings this afternoon, wearing my most official collar, but as you will have noticed I’ve managed to do some blogging again. What you won’t have seen is that I’ve been catching up on a lot of blog _reading_ – especially of various blogs that I haven’t managed to look at for a couple of weeks. One of which was Pam’s, who has a discussion of this marvellous point:

“there is a difference between: 1) Telling someone the Good News of the gospel and 2) Getting them to come to church”

Oh yes. Although the difference varies with the church 😉

Sound doctrines are all useless

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This is from my earlier book – and I realise that there’s rather a lot of material there which has never been posted. Reading something that Scott has written has prompted me to post it. It’s quite long but, if I might be so bold, I think it’s worth reading!


‘I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life)’
Wittgenstein, 1946

In much of what I have written so far I have explained the way in which certain Christian doctrines have come to be held, and the way in which the rite of the Eucharist has come to be understood. However, the most important part of Christianity is not the doctrine, or the rite, but the life lived as a result. That is the subject of this chapter.

In many ways, Jesus inherited the criticisms of Jewish practice that were first articulated by the prophets. One of their principal objections related to the way in which certain cultic practices were allowed to override the claims of justice. Consider the prophet Amos, who is generally considered to be the oldest of the prophets who have their utterances preserved in a separate book. He was active c. 750BC during the reign of Jeroboam II, at the end of a fairly long period of peace and prosperity. The prophet himself might be considered to be fairly well off as he is described as being a shepherd and a dresser of sycamore trees, and therefore a property owner. The people were quite ostentatiously ‘religious’ in that they paid their tithes, made elaborate sacrifices and so on, and yet there was a significant degree of corruption and social injustice. According to Amos:

‘Thus says the Lord: for three transgressions and for four I will not revoke the punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of shoes – they that trample the head of the needy into the dust of the earth and turn aside the way of the humiliated; a man and his father go in to the same maiden, so that my holy name is profaned; they lay themselves down beside every altar upon garments taken in pledge; and in the house of their God they drink the wine of those who have been fined’ (Amos 2.6-8)

Amos’ concern is with the humble and the needy, who are being excluded from the community and exploited by the wealthy. As a consequence of this injustice Amos proclaims the imminent judgment of God:

‘Hear this word, you cows of Bashan, who are in the mountain of Samaria, who oppress the needy, who crush the poor, who say to their husbands ‘bring that we may drink!’ The Lord God has sworn by his Holiness that, behold, the days are coming upon you, when they shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fishhooks. And you shall go out through the breaches, every one straight before her; and you shall be cast forth into Harmon, says the Lord.’ (Amos 4.1-3)

A key aspect of Amos’ criticism relates to the sanctuary of Bethel, which under Jeroboam II was being built up as a rival to the temple in Jerusalem. The priests there were being employed in the service of the king and at one point they drive Amos away from the sanctuary (Amos 7.13). As such this place was the centre of the ‘cultic’ aspects of worship, which Amos denounces: ‘Come to Bethel and transgress’. It is this criticism of the cult in all its aspects which is so unprecedented:

‘I hate, I despise your pilgrimages, and I cannot feel your solemn assemblies. When you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, nothing pleases me, from the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I turn away my eyes. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I cannot listen.’ (Amos 5.21-23)

This message is echoed in many parts of the New Testament, and is at the heart of the criticism of the Pharisees and Sadducees offered there. For example:

‘And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’ You leave the commandment of God, and hold fast the tradition of men”.’

‘When you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.’

And most clearly of all:

‘When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left. Then the King will say to those at his right hand, “Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?” And then the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” Then he will say to those at his left hand, “Depart from me you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sickand in prison and you did not visit me.” Then they too will answer, “Lord, when did we see the hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.” And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.’

As Jesus puts it on another occasion, ‘Not everyone who says to me “Lord, Lord” will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the will of my father who is in heaven.’

The point of these references is to indicate that Christianity is not a matter of believing certain propositions to be true, still less is it a matter of being a member of a particular institution. All the language used is there to explain a picture, a way of understanding life and the world. To claim that Jesus Christ is the Son of God is to say something about the way life should be lived. That claim, as a form of words, is irrelevant. If ‘Jesus Christ is a neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie’ had the same result in terms of the way life was lived then it would have equal doctrinal merit.

Christianity is about a way of living life, so that the life is lived in imitation of Christ, acting in accordance with his Spirit. In essence, it means that the faithful person lives their life in a way that has love at the centre, firstly a love for God, and secondly love for the neighbour. The first is crucial, for it is the relationship with God that constitutes the faith which Paul describes as necessary for salvation. To have that relationship with God is to perceive that the most fundamental feature of the universe is that it was created by a God of love, whose nature is revealed in the life of Jesus. ‘Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God and he who loves is born of God and knows God.’ Much of the early Christian writing was concerned with spelling out what this primacy of love meant in practice. For example, Paul writes in Galatians:

‘The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control’;

and in Colossians,

‘Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience, forebearing one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also forgive’;

and most famously of all, in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes:

‘If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love,I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all that I have, and if I deliver my body that I may be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, endures all things.’

These are all examples of Christian virtues, but of course, these words, these descriptions do not amount to much on their own – they require a life to be lived out in order to demonstrate their nature. Our culture suffers from the illusion, ultimately derived from Platonism, that the way to God is through the intellectual path. If we could only understand correctly, then we might be saved. Christianity is opposed to this, for ultimately that aspect of Platonism is idolatrous – it is the search for a truth which can be held with certainty in our own human sphere.

The Body of Christ is made up of all those who act in a way concordant with the Spirit of Christ, ie who exercise and demonstrate these virtues. It is by actions that faith is borne forth. As Paul writes,

‘For he will render to every man according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury…It is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law unto themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts…’

In this way, Christianity is very much a product of the Hebrew faith from which it sprang. In the opening chapter I argued for three elements in the Hebrew faith: anti-idolatry, relationship, and praxis. Those three elements are retained within Christianity, although the understanding of God is now lensed through the life of Jesus and not through the Law as delivered to Moses. As such, Christianity is a dynamic religion – it requires active moral judgement each day.

As Christianity developed this aspect was at the forefront. If you read the Church fathers their concerns are with this shaping of a life. The Church exists to serve the world by demonstrating this understanding of God – by acting in a righteous manner and showing the nature of love. Of course, if this is what the Church is about, how come we have ended up in such a mess?