Category Archives: theology

For I am God, not man (IV)

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An interlude, giving a few more ‘big picture’ points.


What most drives me in my rejection of PSA is the pastoral consequences of the doctrine. That is, the insistence on PSA as ‘the heart of the gospel’ seems to me to elevate divine wrath and punishment, and therefore the notion of justice and rule following, above the elements of gracious forgiveness within the gospel – and this has very damaging consequences in the life of the faithful. This isn’t just an abstract thing for me – a not insignificant part of my ministry is precisely picking up the pieces of souls that have been smashed by this insistence. The healing is difficult, and takes a long time, and both those parts testify to the depth of the damage done

I don’t have a problem with an acceptance of PSA which sees PSA as a minor element of the gospel, as one image – one METAPHOR – with which to ponder the mystery of salvation. That seems to me to accord moderately well with the importance given to it in Scripture and Church History. In this understanding it is essentially adiaphora – it is something on which Christians may disagree, whilst being united by the much more crucial doctrines (creation, incarnation, resurrection, redemption, trinity…).

The problem to my mind is when that single image is raised up and reified as the defining theory for understanding the work of Christ. When the wider testimony of Christianity and Scripture is conformed and constricted around a metaphysics built upon that image. Hence my remark that penal substitution is what happens when you take a metaphor and turn it into a metaphysics. I had two people in mind influencing that statement – James Alison, who criticises PSA precisely because it is a theory and not something that of itself changes lives, and Wittgenstein, with his criticisms of metaphysics more generally. Sometimes the whole weight is in the picture.

It is rather ironic that PFOT begins with a Foreword from John Piper saying precisely the opposite to this – but for the same reasons. That is, John Piper also sees this as a pastoral issue, and he references Jesus’ criticisms of the Pharisees as an example of how importantly we can take this issue. Piper goes on to say “…if God did not punish Jesus in my place, I am not saved from my greatest peril, the wrath of God.”

That is precisely what I object to, and which I see as a distortion of Christian faith. It is an attitude which has raised up God’s wrath into the determining feature of reality and existence.

To sum up my position:
– I would accept that there are some comparatively minor passages in Scripture which can be construed as referring to something like PSA; however
– I believe that Scripture has many more full and explicit passages which undermine PSA and give a much more healthy and liberating understanding of God and his most gracious favour;
– I believe that PSA is virtually unknown in the early church, and hardly more known for the first thousand years of Christian history;
– I believe that Anselm paved the way for PSA, but that Calvin was the first theologian to give it something like its modern form and place weight on it; more crucially I think Charles Hodge is the thinker with most influence on the way that it is presently portrayed;
– I think the doctrine is intimately tied together with a Modernist understanding of faith; it is a very good example of a ‘doctrine of men’; and I think that as we progressively move away from a Modernist culture so too will PSA lapse first into irrelevance and then it will be forgotten;
– I believe that PSA is a factional and party issue; that is, it is virtually unknown in orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism; it is not actively central in mainstream Protestantism; it is principally pursued by those who are already committed to a Calvinistic perspective on Christianity. It has become a shibboleth separating one Christian from another, and that, in itself, is one of the things most wrong with it.

For I am God, not man (III)

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Continuing the sequence on penal substitution, this time wondering – if there are some who support the sort of doctrine that I am objecting to, what would we expect them to look like? Click ‘full post’ for text.

I should say right up front that I have specific examples from my own personal experience in mind as I write this, but the truth of what I say isn’t dependent on that.

I’ve outlined what I object to in the doctrine of penal substitution, viz:

the doctrine is believed in wholeheartedly and the consequence drawn from the doctrine, within the life of the believer, is that the character of God is fundamentally one of inexorable justice; that the response to any transgression is ‘there must be punishment’; and that the life and witness of Jesus Christ is conformed to this controlling narrative, rather than all other narratives being conformed to the life and witness of Christ.

In other words – there is a distortion in belief, in terms of the prominence given to punishment when describing God’s character (a form of idolatry), and there is a distortion in christian behaviour consequent to this, which (to summarise in advance) becomes a form of ‘law not grace’ – guilt is prominent, and fostered, and forgiveness is underemphasised. Where rules and punishment are given excessive emphasis in the presentation of salvation there will be consequent harm done to the listeners. Where there is paradox – God is a God of justice and mercy/forgiveness – then much depends on how things are presented, if one isn’t to eclipse the other.

I’ll unpack that, as it’s quite dense, and begs lots of questions.

1. The character of God
Advocacy of this form of PSA would emphasise the holiness of God, understood as the utter incompatibility of sin with God’s existence. Such sin would be seen in personal and individualistic terms, and much would be made of the offence given to God. There would be less emphasis upon the gracious and forgiving aspects of God’s character, along with the corporate side of sin.

2. The character of Scriptural witness
PSA would be seen as either the sole or the determining way in which Scripture talks about redemption. Texts referring to PSA would be given the highest possible prominence; texts which give different models would be addressed less; arguments about the character of Scripture as a whole would be downplayed. The teaching of Jesus, eg about the Kingdom, would be considered much less important than the achievement of the crucifixion – understood through the lens of PSA.

3. The nature of preaching and the call to repentance
Emphasis would be given to the way in which humanity has sinned and broken the laws of God; PSA would be explained and the guilt provoked would, instead of being eliminated, be nourished as a healthy response to ‘the truth’. The important thing for a disciple would be to understand the way in which ‘Christ died for you’.

4. The nature of church behaviour
Consequent to the consistent emphasis upon rules and the breaking of rules, there would be an excessive concern to establish and police the boundaries between the rule keepers and the rule breakers, in order to prevent further provocation of God.

5. The tone of advocacy
There will be a shrillness of tone (eg “damn this diabolical doctrine to hell” 😉 associated with discussions on the topic; this will be directly linked to the level of fear of punishment felt by the advocate. There will be little concern to understand the objections to PSA, and there will be a comprehensive rejection of the possibility of Christianity without an acceptance of PSA.

6. The most important: the pastoral character of doctrine
The sheep pastored under this understanding of PSA will remain bound up in guilt and sin; they will not be enabled to experience forgiveness; they will remain emotionally crippled and not enjoy the abundance of life promised. Aware of their own sinfulness they will be reminded of it on regular occasions and not encouraged to affirm their original blessing of being made in the image of God.

Now – obviously! – these are very broad brush strokes, but I think they will serve for the time being. The question is: do such places and advocates exist? That’s for the next part.

For I am God, not man (II)

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Continuing a slightly more reasoned out – rather than ‘ranted out’ – discussion of penal substitutionary atonement. This one is looking at wrath. Click ‘full post’ for text.

I want to flesh out the distinctions that I made in the last post, especially the difference between the second and third ways of believing in penal substitution. (BTW It may help to give more specific labels to these two alternatives (the first is largely irrelevant, and for my purposes simply collapses into the second). Let’s call the first the ‘Tom Wright interpretation of PSA‘ (TW), and the second the ‘Pierced for our Transgressions interpretation of PSA‘ (PFOT)(PSA = penal substitutionary atonement!))

Now there is a way in which ‘penal substitution’ makes sense to me, and it will help to delineate what I don’t like about the PFOT approach. The idea of substitution itself is a noble one – “greater love hath no man than this than that a man lay down his life for his friend”. There are myriad examples of this, and I am very happy for this to be used to describe what Jesus is doing, that Jesus is a substitute for us in this way. A bullet is headed in our direction – Jesus pushes us out of the way and takes the hit on our behalf, out of love for us, and by this we are set free. [I think the most recent example of this I came across was in the last X-Men film which I re-watched recently, when Mystique saves Mysterio]. Indisputably, PSA does not describe a form of this.

The difference between this and PSA is the status of the bullet fired in our direction, which is seen as the direct consequence of our sin, ie it is a punishment for our sin – it is a ‘lex talionis‘ applied on the cosmic scale. God’s holiness and justice cannot allow sin to go unpunished – for this to be the case then God would cease to be God. Tom Wright puts it like this: “if God does not hate the wickedness that happens in his beautiful world, he is neither a good nor a just God, and chaos is come again”. This is God’s wrath. How should we understand it?

A few years ago I attended a conference on the atonement, and I wrote up my notes here. At the end of it I outlined an analogy for understanding God’s wrath that I think is worth bringing up front again:

In studying various species, biologists and zoologists distinguish the genotype from the phenotype. The genotype is the DNA sequence which is found in every cell of the life-form. The phenotype is the expression of that DNA sequence in a specific context, eg the wing of a bird as opposed to the beak, where both have the same DNA but the end-result is very different. In the same way, it seems to me that we must understand ‘God is love’ as referring to his essential nature, his ‘genotype’, whereas we must understand God’s wrath as something which derives from the interaction of that nature with a particular context (our sin), and so is derivative or ‘phenotypical’. The problem that I have with the notion of penal substitution is that it makes God’s wrath part of his genotype (and therefore part of the fabric of His creation), rather than being a reflection of human sin. If we are called to work towards a ‘peaceable kingdom’, as I believe we are, then I don’t think we will achieve it by worshipping a God whose fundamental nature is violent.

This remains my perspective: what I dislike about PSA is the way in which it makes the wrath of God something essential to God’s character rather than something which is a response to our action – that is, a secondary phenomenon. The problem is the idea that ‘there must be punishment‘ – that this is an essential, indeed THE essential attribute of God’s holiness. My concern is that in the doctrine of PSA this is the irrevocable point around which the world turns. To quote Tom Wright again, “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and all because of the unstoppable love of the one creator God.” In other words, it is the love which is primary.

(Note – I don’t have any worries about the use of wrath to describe God’s activities as such; what is at stake for me is the core character of the God whom we worship, and whose image we seek to cultivate). I doubt that PSA advocates would suggest that this is an obligation placed upon the Father by some outside force, for what is at stake is the character of God himself, unconstrained by any external pressure. The core question might be phrased: what is the character of God’s holiness? In what way is God holy?

There is one way of understanding God’s holiness which is manifestly pagan, and that is the sense in which God is simply an irritable human being on a large scale, with a well developed sense of social propriety and honour. Consider – an example I’ve used before – the story of Andromeda from Greek mythology, as dramatised in the film ‘Clash of the Titans’. The driver of her story is that her mother has praised her beauty excessively, and therefore offended the Gods, who lay down a curse upon her city until she is offered up as a PAGAN sacrifice to the Kraken. What makes this pagan is the scale of values employed – the people are the playthings of the Gods and there is nothing noble or humane about the divinities involved. They are simply monstrous human beings. (Note well the role of offence here! I suspect that Anselm’s account partakes more than a little of this pagan approach, but discussing him would take me away from where I want to go.)

Clearly there is Scriptural support for a frightening sense of God’s holiness. Consider Moses on the mountainside, and the way in which even goats who trespassed had to be stoned to death. Yet that has to be placed in juxtaposition with the babe of Bethelehem, born into the animal’s feeding trough and kept alive by their breath. The issue is: which is the determining image? Which account takes us closer to the holiness of the God revealed in Scripture (as opposed to the holiness of the God of the philosophers)?

I would want to argue that the God of the Scriptures revealed and known in the person and work of Jesus Christ is one who seeks repentance and offers forgiveness, who is always reaching out to us in mercy, but who allows us to embrace a wrathful destruction if we so choose. The classic source for this is the story of the prodigal son. I was reminded by my visitor the other day that one of the crucial aspects of the story is that the society in which the father lived would have poured shame and scorn upon the father for acting in the way that he did. The Father absorbs the ‘punishment’ that would otherwise have fallen upon the son; he accepts the loss of his own social standing, his own ‘loss of face’ in order to re-establish a loving relationship and home with the prodigal.

For me, that is the heart and transformative good news of the gospel. God is like that; God is not like Zeus or any other pagan deity. This is what I see as the distinction between the two senses of PSA. Tom Wright worships the Christian God; PFOT is worshipping a pagan deity.

Continued in part three.

For I am God, not man (I)

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I want to develop my position on penal substitution in a more rational manner than last week’s stream of consciousness. Tim commented that the issue has become a ‘King Charles’ Head’ for me – lovely image, derivation explained here – and I wouldn’t want people to think I was tilting at windmills too much. I want to narrow down more precisely what it is that I object to – what I really do consider damning and damnable – and explain why. In this first post I want to make some preparatory remarks about the nature of doctrinal belief and clear away some potential misunderstandings. Click ‘full post’ for text (not very long).


I have often commented (and preached) that there are two forms of belief. One is a purely intellectual and rational construct; the other is embedded within our patterns of life and – crucially – both reflects and structures our emotional commitments, ie what we give value to. (In practice there is a spectrum, but run with the dichotomy for the sake of argument!)

To quickly grasp the difference, consider the difference between ‘Mrs Jones is committing adultery’ and ‘your wife is committing adultery’ – the second is, other things being equal, much more embedded in a person’s patterns of life and will likely have much greater emotional impact when heard and understood.

Theology as I understand it is about the second form of belief, not the first. (Interestingly, the common perception of ‘theology’ is the exact opposite – ‘angels dancing on the head of a pin’ etc – and I’m sure this underlies much rejection of Christianity, the idea that it has no relevance.)

Theology is about the second form of belief because it is the study of ultimate value – it is the language that we use about God, that which is ultimate. Consequently, debate about doctrine is essentially a debate about what is most important in our lives. What is at stake in the question of whether penal substitution is an adequately Christian account of salvation is the nature of the God that Christians worship, what it is that is most important to us – and as a result, the nature of the discipleship and formation that we follow as we seek to reveal the image of that God within us. That is why it is so important.

Peter Kirk put me onto this post by ‘Theo Geek’, well worth reading in full, who wrote:

The difference between “a God who is loving and forgives sins out of love” and “a God who demands justice be repaid but removes this need from himself by Jesus and thus forgives sins out of love” lies only in the semantics, logic and character of God depicted within this statements and not at all in the resultant functionality of these two doctrines or how they relate to our everyday experience of life.

I have a great deal of sympathy with this perspective. It reminds me strongly of Wittgenstein’s discussion of private language. I think it is perfectly possible for someone to believe in penal substitution in two ways with which I would, in principle, take no objection (I think Tom Wright falls into the second of these categories):
– the doctrine might be believed purely as an intellectual matter, ie something which is abstracted from daily life, has no emotional consequences in terms of life lived, is simply seen as a coherent way of understanding the process of salvation etc etc; or
– the doctrine is believed in wholeheartedly but the consequences drawn from the doctrine are precisely those outlined above by TheoGeek: God forgives our sins out of love, and thus the ultimate value preserved by the doctrine in the life and witness of the believer is that of a loving and forgiving Father, revealed in the life and witness of Jesus Christ. Jesus remains the controlling witness and revelation of the nature of God.

My concern is not with either of these two interpretations. My concern is with a third possible interpretation of penal substitution, viz:
– the doctrine is believed in wholeheartedly and the consequence drawn from the doctrine, within the life of the believer, is that the character of God is fundamentally one of inexorable justice; that the response to any transgression is ‘there must be punishment’; and that the life and witness of Jesus Christ is conformed to this controlling narrative, rather than all other narratives being conformed to the life and witness of Christ.

I believe, and my so far not radically wide experience confirms, that this third form of understanding
– is prevalent within segments of the Christian church;
– upholds patterns of behaviour and belief which are destructive of Christian life;
– is in direct opposition to the gospel of Christ; and
– needs to be identified as a problem and struggled against.

In other words, it is this third way of understanding the doctrine of penal substitution that I consider damning damnable. Hopefully this narrowing down will lower the temperature a little, although I don’t expect the discussion ever to be particularly cool!

More in part 2.

A thought about paedobaptism

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Partly provoked by Tim’s stuff on anabaptism.

If Anabaptism is about discipleship more than belief, what’s wrong with infant baptism? That is, a child can be discipled into the faith – initiated into their practices and commitments and language – and I know many people who have been raised in the church, have always been members of the church, and are perfectly sincere in their declarations of faith. It seems that the insistence on an adult baptism has behind it some sort of Modernist experiential bias, you’ve got to have had some sort of conversion in order to be a real Christian, the corollary of which is that a child cannot be a Christian. They are not part of the household of faith unless they have had a particular specifiable experience.

Which is a way of saying: is discipleship really as core to anabaptism as all that?

I’m just thinking out loud here.

On being saved

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Something a bit more positive about the atonement, still in the form of notes. Click ‘full post’ for text.


‘Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.’

So wrote Wittgenstein, and this remains one of the clearest descriptions of what I take Christianity to be – it is something which actually takes place in our lives (it transforms our lives) – it is not theory-driven (as if we have been given the equivalent of laws of physics, just relating to those things that cannot be seen); rather it is directly driven by a change of life. This is one of the major reasons why I think atheists just don’t ‘get it’. They misunderstand the grammar of faith – but that’s a separate argument. Trouble is, a lot of self-proclaimed Christians also don’t get it – in precisely the same way. “A theology which insists on the use of certain particular words and phrases, and outlaws others, does not make anything clearer. (Karl Barth) It gesticulates with words, as one might say, because it wants to say something and does not know how to express it. Practice gives the words their sense.” (Wittgenstein again). I think what I want to say is: those who insist that penal substitution is the way – sometimes the only way – to understand the atonement are ‘gesticulating with words’. The words are floating free of a transformed life. The advocates remain trapped within the world.

But that is still a bit negative. What I want to do is say a bit more about what this ‘salvation through faith’ might mean. And to begin, I want to talk about sin.

Sin I see as something very real and concrete and actively harmful and destructive. (This is why I am more and more persuaded about spiritual warfare, and why what the Church Fathers write in those terms makes abundant sense to me, especially as it is linked to sacramental worship). I do not see sin as something abstract, something restricted to a ‘spiritual sphere’ separate from our daily life. It is not a theoretical construct. It is the name we give, it is the vocabulary we use, to discern, describe and defeat all that enslaves us and prevents us from displaying the image of God in the world.

Jesus saves us from that.

It is sin which crucifies Jesus. The prince of this world, the powers and principalities, see Jesus as the enemy and they use their powers to destroy him. He pays the price of sin: in other words, those values which are limited by the world express their hatred of all that Christ stood for by reacting against him with all the forces that they could command. So Jesus is rejected and despised by society (his social level quality is destroyed) and then his life is taken away from him (his biological level quality is destroyed). The world takes the worldly values (social approval, biological life) and removes them from Christ. That is the crucifixion.

The resurrection proclaims: there is more to life than this.

The devil is defeated. He has over-reached himself. Consequently, to embrace Christ, to believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, is to immediately relativise the biological and the social – all the powers and principalities of the world. That is what makes martyrdom possible: the devil is dethroned. No longer can the existing social and religious practices be seen as final. God cannot be captured.

More than this: the character of God is seen in Christ. The judgement goes two ways, not simply that the devil is cast down, but Christ is lifted up (John 12.31-32).

Our societies are irrevocably bound up in sin – that’s what I take the doctrine of original sin to refer to. We are all implicated, and we cannot get free. We cannot discern anything outside of the world of sin except for revelation. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.

To turn to Christ is to say that Christ is truth – and therefore that the world is not, that the devil is the prince of lies. It is to say that the way of Christ is possible, and real, and more deeply rooted in creation than expediency. The church is composed of those who recognise this – who live in the light of the resurrection. It’s not a matter of words, it’s a matter of priorities and the shape of a life.

If you forgive, then you believe in the resurrection.
If you affirm and succour the poor and broken-hearted, you believe in the resurrection.
If you resist the idolatries of the world, and fight for justice and mercy, you believe in the resurrection.

“Not everyone who calls me Lord shall enter the Kingdom, but those who do the will of my father who is in heaven.”
“What must I do to inherit eternal life? Go and do likewise.”

One way of understanding God is to say: this is what I am most committed to, this is what I most deeply and profoundly believe.

I have seen lives – in those who profess Christ and those who do not – which are literally crippled and stunted by an acceptance of worldly value. Those voices which say ‘I am bad’; ‘I do not deserve to be loved’; ‘If only I could do… then I will be worthy and loveable’.

These are the voices of demons. These are the internalised voices of worldly values. This is the realm of the accuser.

The difference between law and grace is: law says ‘do X’ and then you are worthy/ loveable/ redeemed. Grace says you are worthy/ loveable/ redeemed – now you can ‘do X’.

God sent his son, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

When that difference sinks into the heart, when it is truly accepted, that is when someone believes in their heart that God raised Jesus from the dead. That is when they are saved. That is when they are set free from their sins. That is when their faith has healed them.

And the consequences are visible. It is like a vomiting out of illness. The back extends a little straighter. The eyes are brighter. The tension leaves the body. And the Spirit comes. Now we can forgive – not with clenched teeth and ‘yes I really ought to forgive’ but genuinely from the heart.

This is not a matter of saying ‘Abracadabra’ in order to open the doors to heaven. This is heaven coming down to earth, and the angels rejoicing over the one sinner who repents. For repentance isn’t simply a mental shift – it is the turning around of the heart and the life, it is changing the way we do things. It is Zacchaeus refunding those he has defrauded – ‘this day salvation has come to this house’.

Salvation is not a matter of ensuring a quantity of souls in heaven – as if we were misers hoarding gold to fend off starvation. Salvation is something that takes place in a human life here and now – it is the present shaped by eternity. This is eternal life – life that is not subject to the constraints of the world.

Jesus saves us from our sins.
Until the resurrection dawns in our hearts we are dead in our sin – we are still bound up in the ways of the world that destroy life.
By his wounds we are healed.
In him is life, and light, and that light is the light for all people.

Salvation is to be dead to sin but alive to God through Christ. This is to have abundance of life (Jn 10.10). This is to be filled with joy and peace, the peace which the world cannot give.

1Come, let us return to the Lord •
who has torn us and will heal us.

2God has stricken us •
and will bind up our wounds.

3After two days, he will revive us, •
and on the third day will raise us up,
that we may live in his presence.

4Let us strive to know the Lord; •
his appearing is as sure as the sunrise.

5He will come to us like the showers, •
like the spring rains that water the earth.

6‘O Ephraim, how shall I deal with you? •
How shall I deal with you, O Judah?

7‘Your love for me is like the morning mist, •
like the dew that goes early away.

8‘Therefore, I have hewn them by the prophets, •
and my judgement goes forth as the light.

9‘For loyalty is my desire and not sacrifice, •
and the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.’

Some notes on divine forgiveness

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Jesus teaches us to pray to the Father: forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. My question: is Jesus asking us to do more than the Father is prepared to do? Or is he asking us to share in the nature of the Father?

Let me caricature the diabolical side of the doctrine of penal substitution.

Imagine that there is a school. And the head teacher of the school says to the children – you can make the rules. You can decide on what the punishments will be. So the children work out what their rules are going to be. If you’re late for class then this will happen. If you are rude to a teacher this will happen. And so on.

A rule is broken. One boy steals an apple from another boy. The rules stipulate that the punishment is three strokes of the cane. The children discover that the one stealing hasn’t eaten for several days; his family are so poor. So the one whose apple was stolen says ‘I will take the punishment for you’.

Actually, I’m being naughty, this isn’t a caricature, this was a story told to my children at (the otherwise extremely good and beneficial) Mersea Beach Club last week. But this is so bizarre. It’s probably even worse than the story from Bridge over the River Kwai that Nicky Gumbel uses in Alpha, which portrays the Father as a psychotic Japanese guard.

Why can’t the children just say ‘the rules don’t apply here’? Why not ‘mercy triumphs over justice’ (James 2.13)?

No, for some reason, this ‘stepping outside of the box’ is ruled out. What you have is an understanding of the Father that turns his holiness into a mechanism. The argument runs: God is holy, nothing that is not holy can stand in the face of such holiness, our sin is unholy, Jesus takes the heat so that we don’t get kicked out of the kitchen. God’s justice must stand! Otherwise he isn’t Holy! What this really means is that here is what we see as most holy: justice. Justice becomes God, within which God must act and to which God must conform. God cannot simply forgive for that would be to violate his character. There must be some mechanism by which justice is satisfied.

These rules have been graven in stone and handed down on the mountain.

It is not an accident that a mechanical age has raised up a mechanical God. What intrigues me is that the voices which shout most stridently for upholding Scripture against the culture are the ones most deeply implicated in that cultural idolatry.

Rules as such are holy. Irrespective of source or context. This tells of such a querulous faith.

This is not the God of the Bible. Though our sins be as scarlet yet they shall be whiter than snow. Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more. If we confess our sins he who is faithful and just will forgive us. Go and learn what this means, I desire mercy not sacrifice.

Jesus repeats that quotation twice; so shall I: Go and learn what this means, I desire mercy not sacrifice.

The Father is not a machine in a factory, liable to be hazardous to us, and to injure us, unless we treat it with proper respect. That is the pagan conception. That makes God into King Kong needing a virgin to eat.

Either we believe in a God of forgiveness – a God with the power to make all things new – or we believe in a God who cannot forgive, because his holiness and his justice demand recompense.

Do you think I drink the blood of bulls?

Saying Jesus is the satisfaction simply relocates the problem – either the deity is at war in itself, or else we are now in a protected area but the Father’s fundamental character remains unchanged. That is spiritually corrosive – for how can God’s fundamental character be eternally suppressed? The anger emerges somewhere.

This is a salvation issue. That is, it seems to me – and I have seen much too often – that if the doctrine of penal substitution is heartily believed then salvation is prevented. The believer in this doctrine does not experience redemption and the forgiveness of sins. They may feel better for a short while – the ways of the human heart are undoubtedly mysterious – but this underlying rottenness will come to the surface eventually.

For the diabolical doctrine states: God doesn’t really love you. He hates you because you’re a sinner. But he’s been bought off by the bloody sacrifice on the cross. He’s like an abusive parent kept at bay by a restraining order. There is always the fear that one day he’ll come back. And so the soul remains crippled. God’s true character is obscured and occluded.

In this situation the genuine gospel of forgiveness saves lives and sets the captives free. God loves you. Nothing you can do will make God love you more. Nothing you can do will make God love you less. This means you do not have to be afraid. And that means that you can love – for it is only love that can cast out fear, and when Jesus repeatedly tells us not to be afraid, that is because he loves us. That is what it means to love the Lord and walk in his ways. This is why it is good news.

God doesn’t play the game of blame. It’s not that he plays the game but has agreed to give you a free pass. It’s that this game is worldly and demonic and nothing to do with God at all.

If you repent of your sins you will be forgiven. In other words, a fresh start is possible. The slate gets wiped clean.

This is a spiritual reality. This is not something about some future life after death. This is not about some yellow stain upon the soul needing to be washed. Those are metaphors. Salvation is something that happens in daily life. I have seen it happen. And it is a miracle.

To genuinely believe in forgiveness – and to be genuinely given the spiritual strength to take that dynamic forgiveness out into the world – means to see forgiveness as of the very essence of God. If it is not of the being of God to be forgiving, then neither can it be of the being of humanity to be forgiving. We too will end up pretending, if we believe in our hearts that God is only pretending.

And we will live in a society of rules and law and justice. We will be cogs in the machine. We will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

Without forgiveness, there is no grace. Without grace, there is no gospel. Without the gospel, we are still dead in our sins and we are of all men the most to be pitied.

Damn this diabolical doctrine to hell.

LUBH 8 – the second great commandment

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Mainly talking about poverty. Click ‘full post’ for text.

LUBH 8: The Second Great Commandment

We are looking today at the second great commandment and I am sure that all of you all remember the most important commandment “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul”, second, “Love thy neighbour as thyself”. The great teachings of the prophets tend to be centred on two things which Jesus was summing up when he gave his two commandments. The first is precisely right worship, having nothing else in the place of God and the second is right relations, love your neighbour as yourself, but really what it is about is poverty. It is about making sure that no-one gets left behind. Now this is not a marginal part of Scripture, something like two thousand verses in the Bible refer to poverty, that express God’s concern for the poor. If you go through, for example, the prophets and take out all the bits that deal with poverty, you have taken out rather a lot. The Old Testament is saturated with it. One in ten verses in the Synoptic gospels, that’s Matthew, Mark and Luke, deal with poverty and in Luke it’s one in seven (I didn’t know that before doing a bit of research on this). But you can see it’s quite a significant part even through to the New Testament which is primarily about Christ and who He was. It’s fair to say it’s impossible to be a Christian and not be concerned about poverty. This doesn’t if you like enforce a right wing or a left wing political point. There are still all sorts of debates about what is the best thing to do about poverty. What it is saying is you can’t be a Christian and be unconcerned; it has to be a major concern in the Christian life, to be concerned about the poor, so it’s about our general priorities and our scale of values.

A quotation for you, from Deuteronomy 15: “Give generously to him and do so without a grudging heart (this is the poor) then because of this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to, there will always be poor people in the land.” This is what Jesus is quoting. “There will always be poor people with you, therefore I command you to be open handed towards your brothers and towards the poor and needy.” How much poverty? Well the good news is that on the whole poverty has been getting less throughout the twentieth century. This is using the United Nations definition, less than a dollar per day adjusted for what’s called purchasing power parity. So it’s not simply a dollar, a dollar will get you more in China than it will get you in America. So it takes that into account, but the equivalent of a dollar a day, so at the moment about 50, 55p. And you can see in particular the dark green line which is East Asia the most significant thing that has changed poverty around the world in the last twenty years is China’s embrace of market reforms and this dark green line, 60% of the Chinese essentially living on less than a dollar a day in 1981 comes down to less than 20% now, it’s nearly 15%. A huge shift with all sorts of ramifications which we are all aware of as China becomes much more of a market economy, much stronger economy.

But of course the one where we can have more concern is this pale blue one which is sub-Saharan Africa, that’s really where the main problems lie, it has been getting worse in Africa. This is a picture of what’s called the human development index, so it’s not just about money, but it’s taking into account all the factors like child mortality, prevalence of disease, I think literacy is included as well. And really what you can see again, you can pursue it what the different colours mean, darkest green is the richest, best off, and the black and dark reds are the worst off. And again you can see it’s sub-Saharan Africa which is where the problems lie. OK? That’s where the poor are in our world and where they are getting poorer as time goes on. And again this is just reinforcing the same point, the numbers of people with insufficient food and the change in the last ten, twelve years, you can see Eastern Asia, China it’s got much, much better, so the green lines represent progress, the red lines represent a setback. And again you can see sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Asia which means places like Bangladesh and Southern India. So sub-Saharan Africa is the main problem. You have heard of the Millennium development goals? The aim is to by 2015 drop the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day. The red line is the goal, the pale blue line is where it was in 1990, the dark blue line is where it is in 2001. So again you can see sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are really where the problems are. The major problems.

I want to say a brief word about oil because that was the initial context, for sparking these meditations. As the oil supply contracts, which it has begun to do, last year there was a decline, what will happen is that the market will ensure that the oil goes to those who can pay for it, which of course means that the oil will be purchased by those who are comparatively well off and those who are not well off will be taken out of the market for oil, and therefore out of the market for easily portable energy. Now this has already started to happen this year, sorry in 2006, stretching back a little bit into 2005, where entire swathes of the African economy are being taken out of action. There was a very interesting article in the Financial Times a couple of months ago by the President of Senagal describing how when petrol goes up by 10 pence a litre it causes grumbling in the West, but it means that those who live on 600 dollars a year they suddenly cannot afford the oil at all, and therefore all the economic links flowing from that start to break down, and he was expressing a great deal of concern that unless this changed through 2007 into 2008 there would be a massive refugee crisis, basically as the population pursued any form of energy in order to heat, to cook food and so on. So all sorts of problems will flow from that.

And it’s about things which are really trivial in many ways to us, and one example I was pondering, you know occasionally I do even less justifiable uses of the car, but taking the boys swimming in Colchester the other day, which is a sort of twenty mile round trip, is not something I particularly think about but magnify that around the population as a whole and that’s drawing up a huge amount of petrol for something which is not essential to life, it is something which makes life more pleasant. But as a result of choosing to make our life more pleasant, it’s actually causing severe deprivation to those who are poor. Now this is not something, and this is really the underlying point, I’m not really wanting to say this is a matter of individual choices. I think there are lots of ways in which individual choices can make a difference but actually I think there is something systemic here. Our Western economy has been built up around cheap oil and we can’t simply stop it. Because to simply stop the Western economy would also cause a huge amount of suffering. But I do think our Western economy is going to be profoundly changed and altered as the cheap oil gets taken away.

Now the imbalance that I’m talking about, things that are very marginal to us would have a huge impact on especially on what you might call the Fourth World or the destitute world, sub-Saharan Africa. It is profoundly unjust as a system, not necessarily every individual person within it is choosing to be unjust, but as a system it is unjust. Now I mean that in biblical terms and I want to read to you a story I ponder a lot which I am sure you are all very familiar with which is Dives and Lazarus, because there is a very important point in it.

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table, even the dogs came and licked his sores. The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In hell where he was in torment he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, “Father Abraham have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue because I am in agony in this fire.” But Abraham replied, “Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony, and besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.” He answered, “Then I beg you Father, send Lazarus to my father’s house for I have five brothers, let him warn them so that they will not also come to this place of torment.” Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the prophets, let them listen to them.” “No, Father Abraham”, he said, “But if someone from the dead goes to them they will repent.” He said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”

Lots and lots of things in that story, but the point I want to draw out from it this morning that there’s no hint at all that dives the rich man does anything actively against Lazarus. He simply ignores him. You know there’s no sense that Dives is horrible to Lazarus, that’s it’s because of the things that Dives has done that Lazarus is poor, it’s simply that the rich man ignores the beggar at the gate, and it’s that ignoring that the testimony of Scripture as a whole is criticising and saying renders us liable to judgement. But of course there are lots of other things in Scripture about poverty and riches. I’m sure a verse you’re all familiar with: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”.

Now one way of thinking of what Scripture talks about in these terms, is to think in terms of social justice. Because Scripture is not actually against material blessing. If you think of the vision of the Promised Land, it’s the land flowing with milk and honey. It is a materially wealthy environment which is God’s intention for us. And nor is it strictly speaking against absolute poverty, in the sense that the embrace of poverty is not something which is alien to God’s intentions for us. I’ll say more about that as we come on. It is against – and very, very strongly against – the idea that some people get left behind. OK, so to use modern language, the Bible is less concerned about absolute poverty than about relative poverty. It’s about people not being able to share in the community and it’s about not leaving people behind, not letting some people suffer while other people enjoy great wealth. It’s the imbalance that is being criticised. OK, hence “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” You don’t separate love of neighbour and love of self. You are part of the community. It’s a very communal attitude in Scripture.

Now I want to mention an article which I read, must have been about 1988 I think, in the Economist, which was comparing the reaction of the British and French governments to the decline of the coal industry in both countries, where to sum up, the British government has said “Let market forces decide”, and therefore you have the spectacle of entire communities being destroyed across the North of England, where the main source of income, the pit, suddenly closes overnight and you have the majority of the working people laid off, and not very much was done about it. The mantra was, “Market forces will decide.” And the Economist article was comparing this to the approach in France, which was also recognising that continually subsiding coal mining was not a very good idea for all sorts of reasons, but they basically said, they are going to take these coal mines out of commission over a period of twenty years so that the communities have time to adjust. In other words there was a concern on the part of their governments about the human impact of allowing market forces to lead the discussion, to lead the decisions. And of course, that means that we can still see the differences twenty years on. I just think that captures for me a different sense of priorities and what Scripture is very clear about is that one of those sets of priorities is much better than the other.

Now just to reiterate, this isn’t really a party political point, because there might have been all sorts of ways in which this situation in Britain could have been addressed without, if you like, top down government intervention. The issue was that there was no concern taken. If you read some of the biographies of Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher, who was admirable in all sorts of ways, there is this very telling bit in the early 80’s when she talks about, “These are not our people”. And that’s really what I’m trying to get at. The sense that “these are not our people”. That’s the heinous sin in biblical terms. You know, it’s not to say that this particular solution is the one which has to be chosen, it’s to say we must be concerned, we can’t say these are our people, those are the others and we are not going to worry about them. Come back to Dives and Lazarus. Dives doesn’t do anything active against Lazarus, he just ignores it, ignores him, and it’s that process of ignoring and not caring which is the concern.

Now three tools just to reiterate, which we are using in each section, idolatry, wrath and apocalypse. So look for where there might be an idol, consider what happens when idols are removed, and the language of apocalypse or to be more precise, eschatology. What is it like to live in the kingdom, where are we going, assuming that God is in charge, that he will accomplish his purposes, how can we live in the light of what’s coming. OK, just to reiterate.

Now I think the idol in particular which we need to be concerned about is growth. Understood as economic growth, which as an ex-Civil Servant, I have read many, many politicians speeches, I would be delighted if I never have to read another politician’s speech in my life, but you will see, if you look at politician’s speeches how there is lip service paid to economic growth so often. Now this is something which has been building for a long time, the economy has been growing for a long time and if you remember our third session when I was talking about exponential growth rates, you will see slow growth for a very, very long period of time and suddenly it starts to accelerate and zooms upwards, which is what has happened with Western economies. Now one of the reasons, in many ways is a very sane reason why such a dominant political concern is the experience of the 1930’s when growth reversed, there was very large scale widespread unemployment, huge social misery which was only really alleviated by the shift into the war economies through the 40’s. And the reasons why that happened to the Western economy, and there are still all sorts of academic debates about it, but this is something which the political classes are very committed to ensuring doesn’t happen again. Now I’m sure that’s one of the underlying reasons, it’s a question of fear, they are afraid of it happening again.

Now that, there is a group of six bars or eight bars covering different areas, you can see hidden underneath it, the exponential curve, since the industrial revolution here, growth, physical growth has taken off and it has shot up. We are astonishingly wealthy as a community, as a world society, we have more wealth than we know what to do with, but the systemic problems are that it all gets accumulated, you know,”to those who have, more will be given, and from those who have little, even that will be taken away.”

Now of course, Jesus has a very explicit instruction, “You cannot serve both God and mammon.” Mammon is the god of wealth. So if you are concerned to worship the god of wealth or economic growth, then you can’t also serve God. Now what is growth, beyond a certain point of having enough food to eat, clothing on your back, shelter from the wind and the rain, what does growth actually mean, because for the vast majority of our society, we left behind that level of need quite a long time ago. Alright, even if after the war we had rationing and so forth when we were much better fed than we are now, you know the sense of being afraid of famine in Britain is not really what is driving our economic growth. It’s more and more stuff. And we have to buy stuff in order that people can be employed making stuff. And they need to be employed making stuff so that they can buy stuff. And so you get more and more stuff and you get stuffed. One definition of cancer, OK, is growth in a part of an organism which takes no regard of the health of the wider organism. It’s one bit which has run away growth without respect to the wider context.

Now our human economy, our human ecology, involves many, many more aspects, you know human civilisation has much more to it than the accumulation of stuff, but the stuff growing has been growing without respect to the wider human context, and so when you hear politicians say we must have more growth, we must ensure that the growth of our economy continues to give jobs etc., try and add in each time you hear politicians say growth, the phrase “of our cancer”. Because what’s going on is that the economy is becoming more and more separate from the human concerns which are actually its base, that the economy is becoming more and more distorted and damaging. This was the sense in our last session talking about the environmental impact, that essentially what needs to happen is that the economy, you know the monetary flows and industry and so forth, needs to be reintegrated with our human context. And let us be human is our motto.

(The quote is from Isaiah Chapter 3, “The spoil of the poor is in your houses”, which my ethics tutor at university delighted in quoting to me. I’ll come back to that.)

Mammon soldiers, I want to say something briefly about this because it’s not just a governmental point, it’s not just about governments. Think of a listed company which has a certain legal personality and certain legal duties in terms of maximising the value for its shareholders. You have an institution which is geared up in pursuit of very defined aims, and those who work within that company, if they do not pursue those aims, they can either be liable, or they can be sacked or even taken to court. OK? Is that generally understood? But what you have, if, and again, it begs a lot of wider political questions which perhaps we can go into in the discussion later, because it is not a monochrome situation, but what you can have developing then, and I will give you an example, is a situation where an entire company is oriented on something which is destructive of wider humanity. Because they are doing what the whole company is designed to do, the company is designed to pursue economic growth for itself, and that is reinforced and strengthened by everything surrounding it in terms of its legal structure, its corporate ethos and so forth. And the issue is that this is not necessarily something which is healthy for the wider human context.

I think a good example is Exxon, and its financing of climate denial. For the last ten, fifteen years, Exxon has funded at least a dozen, what are called think tanks with very impressive academic sounding titles, like the Institute for Climate Research, for example, and of these many different think tanks which they directly fund, they often had the same people working for them, and all they do is push out – and this was a conscious strategy, there is documentation to prove this – there is a conscious strategy to persuade the media that there is debate in the scientific community about the nature of global warming. It wasn’t even to prove that global warming is wrong, the aim, the conscious aim was to ensure that the media portrayed it as a debate. Now for those of you who went to see Al Gore’s film, “The Inconvenient Truth”, there is this wonderful moment when he surveys I think the last fifteen years of published scientific papers on global warming, of which not 1% denied the reality of global warming, and it compared it to the articles in the media, discussing global warming which were split pretty evenly between those who said it was true and those that said it was false. In other words Exxon’s strategy had succeeded.

And they are doing the same with oil, about peak oil, I won’t talk about that too much now. The thing about what Exxon has done to change the way that this debate is framed and understood in the media, is a good example of something where a company has pursued its own interest at the expense of the wider community. And within the terms of what the company has set up to do it is entirely rational, it makes perfect sense. This has meant that they can have a better return on their investment for their shareholders. Does that make sense? And so I think we can think of them as mammon’s soliders, because they are working for mammon.

Now partly I think it’s a cultural thing and if you like the health or if you like morality of a company is not detachable from the health or morality of its wider society, OK. The Anglo Saxon companies tend to be a little bit more short-term for example than say the Japanese companies, which tend to go more for long-term market share, so you can’t detach, it is not purely a question of the legalities and so forth, it is something that reflects on the wider culture. But really, the point I’m trying to make is that business logic is different to Christian logic and the church and Christian community should feel bold enough to say that this is not acceptable, you know simply because something makes money and preserves jobs and so forth does not make it immune to criticism, that there are more important things than that. Like for example, avoiding catastrophic climate change. So that’s the idol, mammon.

God’s wrath, remember I was saying God’s wrath is simply when we experience the consequences of our actions. When you worship an idol the idol gives you what it promises, but takes life in return, so the idol of economic growth will give you economic growth but will take your life in return. So for example, although most surveys of economic growth concentrate on what’s called GDP or Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Product and so forth, which is looking at how much stuff is done, the last ten/fifteen years there are lots of ways in which the assessment of our economies has been done differently. So for example, looking at the human quality of life which gives a value or assessment to things like clean air, literacy rates, and using these, particularly in the States where it’s clearest, there has actually been, although there has been a monetary increase, you know there has been economic growth, there is more money going around, there has actually been quite a significant decrease in the average quality of life for at least twenty years. Mammon is giving economic growth, but it is taking life in exchange.

Anyhow, idols always collapse in the end and we can be fairly specific about it in the context of peak oil, physical growth will come to an end, just as a purely physical law you can’t continue to expand the physical process when you have a significantly contracting energy base. Hence the thing about oil. What won’t necessarily cease, and one of the things we can hope for, is actually human growth, human development doesn’t have to cease. And there are lots of ways in which the economy can shift away from something which is so dominated by the physical to a situation which emphasises the exchange of creativity. These things are not directly affected by the problems with oil and energy. So there is no reason why human civilisation cannot be rich in a civilisational sense, even if we haven’t got quite so much stuff. You know, think of Ancient Greece. They didn’t have half so much stuff but they had a rich society. So I’m just thinking in terms of the physical basis is going impacted. You will see the truth of our present situation. It’s one of those things that is so big and so vast, it’s often not addressed, it’s ignored. The question of how our whole society is structured around preserving growth. That when growth is taken away and chances are at least for a generation or two it will never come back, then suddenly we will see the ways in which our society, our community needs to change, it will see the truth and the truth will set us free. God will destroy what I think of as the systemic injustices.

There will be various consequences to this, not least of which human suffering, where as I say, it has already begun, it’s already started to happen and I think it has been happening for ten, twenty years. A graph which I put up when we looked at the catastrophes which looks at available energy per capita, which peaked in about 1979, which means less energy per person in the world ever since, and I think it’s sub-Saharan Africa which has been, if you like, where the problems started and of course it’s spreading. How far it spreads is still to be determined.

And the result of this will be as the President of Senegal warn in his article, human movement, mass migrations, you know. When people start starving, can’t feed themselves, they will move. And watch Mexico. Mexico’s oil production, well Mexico’s economy is heavily linked into the production of oil by the state-owned national oil company called Pemex. OK, Petrol of Mexico. And they have, just off shore, the largest oil field in the Western hemisphere, called Cantarell which is huge, the third largest in the entire world, largest in the Western hemisphere, and it is what has been sustaining the Mexican economy for twenty, thirty years. Vast flows of money coming through from it, and the production from that well is crashing. It was up to I think just over two million barrels a day, it went down by about two hundred thousand barrels per day just in the last six months. And that rate of decline is going to impact on everything to do with Mexico’s society. OK? And watch what happens when the people in Mexico move. You know, I have mentioned this before, President Bush signing the bill to pay for a wall to be built, and the walls are going to start going up. Anyway, it is something to watch. And something we will talk about a little bit more next week is what will the governments in these countries do when they see such problems and destitution?

Eschatological imagination, again, just to refresh, where are we going and how can we live in a way that’s in sympathy with it now? How can we live now according to the Kingdom that’s coming? How can we change what we are doing now so we are in tune with God’s final intentions for us? In a phrase, voluntary simplicity. Simplifying our lives. Not being so caught up in the great cycle of stuff. Stop passing new stuff on. Or a different way of putting it “most of twentieth century culture isn’t worth it”. I haven’t actually watched any but all the articles and fuss about Big Brother. It’s calling for a fundamental change in our values. OK? That we give value to different things. That we embrace the things that actually enrich our human lives. That we don’t simply accumulate. The spoil of the poor is in your houses. And it’s a bit of weird movement, marching to have less, not saying we want more of x, y or z, but actually quietly stopping marching if you like. Dropping out to use a sixties phrase.

And of course there is lots of backing for this in Scripture. St Paul, “I have learned to be content with whatever I have”. How about that for a radical sentence? That’s someone who is not wanting to accumulate more stuff. “I know what it is to have little, I know what it is to have plenty, I have learned the secret of being well fed and going hungry, of having plenty, of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me”. He has got his relationship to God right. Everything else then falls into place. Or in 1 Timothy, “Great gain in godliness combined with contentment, we brought nothing into the world and we take nothing out.” The idea that he who dies with the most toys wins. I think not.

So in some ways a slightly underwhelming conclusion, I will come back to this theme but just for today to finish with this. Stop buying stuff. I’m taking to myself here as well. But I do have a New Year’s resolution which I am going to try and keep because my besetting sin is buying books, you know, and I have got at least a year’s worth of books accumulated to read and I think this is scandal, I need to stop, but I am aware of what it is to compulsory purchase. At least Tom Wright’s earnt a lot more recently!

So purchase stuff for the long term. Purchase stuff which will last or which can be fixed. It is getting more and more difficult because of course, things like a toaster, OK, they are not designed to be fixed, they are designed to be thrown away, if they go wrong. This is insane! We have got an economy which is structured where that makes sense in economic terms. It’s barking mad! But is makes sense in economic terms. This is all common sense really.

The three R’s. You might have heard this. The three R’s are reduce, reuse and recycle in that order. You know recycling is a good thing but it is not as good, it’s not as important as reusing things or simply not purchasing them or using them in the first place. That’s the hierarchy, reduce consumption comes first. I’m sure you’ve all heard the phrase, “Walk lightly on the earth,” or “Live simply so that others might simply live.” This is not new stuff. Concentrate on being human, one of the most important distinctions I think to hold on to is the difference between the tool, which is something that you use, often that you use for your labour, and possessions, which is just the stuff that accumulates. Which is why I don’t feel quite as guilty as I might about my books, I am sure I have quoted this before, I had a conversation with my ethics tutor on this very subject when I expressed even twenty years ago my concern about purchasing too many books, he said, “Well actually, your theology books are your tools.” And it’s true. These are the things that I work with, even there though I think there are options for minimising and restricting.

Are people familiar with Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet”? He has some very telling things to say on this subject, about comfort. And he says, “Comfort begins as a guest in the house, then it becomes the master of the house, and then it becomes a tyrant who makes a mockery of our flesh.” Because we get used to being couch potatoes.

Now one thought which is part of the reason why I was wanting to have the film shown in here, going into so many people’s houses, people have DVD libraries. I’ve got one, my favourite films, but actually so many people have got copies of exactly the same films. Why shouldn’t we share? For example, why couldn’t the church invite people to share their DVD libraries, sell all the duplicate copies off and give the money to the poor, and actually operate a little library, free library, not something they have to pay for, but just where the people of this community share something. But of course, that raises all sorts of cultural questions. You know, “It’s no longer mine!”
“Aaah”. “What if it gets broken?” “Aaah”.

Final quotation: “If you wish to be complete, go and sell all you have and give to the poor” . I’ll stop there.

[Inaudible question] No it’s not true. The price of oil has come down for two reasons, one is that swathes of the Third World have been taken out of the buying market, they are simply no longer buying so there is less demand, but the other is the very, very mild winter. People are not needing to purchase as much gas or oil for heating. I think there is also a third reason which is that the price was pushed up by speculation over the summer and when it was realised that we weren’t going to have quite such a bad hurricane season, those positions taken by the speculators have unwound, and that’s given a bit of acceleration. But I think the main reason is we are going to have a very mild winter across the Northern Hemisphere. Across the Northern Hemisphere is the mildest winter for you know decades, I can’t remember the exact figure, but it is a very, very mild winter, and I am sure you have all noticed. Someone was telling me this morning there has only been three frosts so far, but that is the main drop in drive, the demand has been less. Much less than expected for this time of year. So hence the price drops.

I asked my Bible group yesterday, we were talking about anger, “When was the last time that the church, not individual members of the church, including individual leaders of the church, but when was the last time the church as a whole, corporately, either Church of England, or an ecumenical thing, officially expressed anger at injustice?” And if it hasn’t for a while, because we couldn’t think of an occasion, if it hasn’t, why not?! Come back in two weeks and I will be saying a bit more about that.

I think this is very much something which churches should engage with. I think the root of it is about raising the concern. I think one of the good things which the Christian community has been involved with over the last few years is the Jubilee campaign. Which was precisely about this, I haven’t talked about debt today, it raises lots of issues, and debt in terms of international relations and so forth, but also debt within our society. I think debt is a great hidden problem and that’s something where I think the churches should be doing something. You know the Bible is pretty clear about the evil of usury. It is much clearer about that than it is about some of the other things that we get agitated about. But the ways in which families get destroyed and when loan sharks move in and you get these 25% at best interest rates, there’s no way that can be justified from a Christian perspective.

There is an issue and I have tried to make it clear earlier. I think there are things which we as individuals can do, and there are even more things, and even more important things which we can do corporately, together as a church community. But I don’t think we can solve these problems. And I don’t actually think that we should try and labour ourselves, and weigh ourselves down with the expectation that we can, because actually I think God is in charge, not us. And much of what is coming is God, we can view it as God acting to dismantle the things, we call if you like, the structures of oppression. God is going to act, God is going to take these things down. A wonderful Johnny Cash song, “Sooner or later, God’s gonna cut you down.”

In the last session, I have started drafting this already, I am going to finish up with a dozen pledges, things that we can commit ourselves to as a community and number one is prayer. I think that the thing to do is to move towards the kingdom, move in the right direction and not worry too much about the fact that we are embedded in sin and we cannot escape from the sin. You know, this is what Jesus died on the cross to set us free from and therefore we don’t actually have to get too het up about it. We must do our best to move away from them, we must do our best to bear the fruits that befits repentance and so on. But not feel it’s like mortified that for example, I take my kids swimming. We live in the society that we do and the society as a whole is itself is enmeshed in sin. And simply by existing in society, by shopping, by eating food, we cannot avoid sharing in a sinful community. But you know, we should do what we can and keep pressing on in the direction of the Kingdom, but not get too het up by the fact that we are not going to be pure, because we’re not. We are never going to be pure this side of the second coming.