Archbishop Rowan calls us to be human

In a way rather similar to what I’ve been banging on about for the last few years.

Rowan says “We do justice to what we are as human beings when we seek to do justice to the diversity of life around us; we become what we are supposed to be when we assume our responsibility for life continuing on earth” and later “this surely is the main contribution to the environmental debate that religious commitment can make… it is to hold up a vision of human life lived constructively, peacefully, joyfully, in optimal relation with creation and creator, so as to point up the tragedy of the shrunken and harried humanity we have shaped for ourselves by our obsession with growth and consumption”, and later “What we face today is nothing less than a choice about how genuinely human we want to be”.

In other words, ‘Let us be Human’.

I do have differences with his perspective though, and whilst they will take a much longer post (even a book [grin]) to flesh out, I’d summarise it like this:

Rowan is still looking outwards – seeing the ecological crisis and saying we will not be fully human until we act in a way that safeguards creation. So safeguarding creation is the end purpose in mind. In this way, Rowan is channelling the Green perspective – giving a Christian spin to an agenda that is already in place.

What I want to do is look inwards. I want to give a fully Christian account of the ecological crisis. (See this and this.)

I see the ecological crisis as a symptom of two deeper crises, which are inter-related but still separable. The most important crisis is a spiritual one; we have forgotten God, we have succumbed to idolatry, and therefore wrath is descending upon us. The second is like it, namely this: we have abandoned any sense of social justice and our lack of concern for our neighbour is one of the prime drivers behind environmental catastrophe.

In other words, if we get our spirituality in order, if we worship God correctly, and if we safeguard the poorest amongst us, then the ecological crisis will be solved as a consequence of that.

If we carry on trying to fix the ecological crisis as an end separate to those two prime commands, then we will never be fully human. In particular, if we succumb to fear in our plans (which seems to be such a large part of climate change activism) then we will never get the spirituality right – and it is the spirituality that is more important.

I wish I could get a publisher… DLT? Continuum?

TBTM20090928


Word count: 0

Actually, that’s not the whole truth. Transcripts currently amount to a word count of 79,542, and the draft that I’m presently working on has a count of 7643.

But I’m really now starting from scratch. I expect to end up – God willing – by mid-December with a polished word count of about 65,000.

A summary of the book can be found here.

The art of constructive criticism

Last weekend I went up to the Peterborough Diocese to lead a study day on ‘Transforming the World’ using my LUBH material, which I thought went well, and the feedback has been solidly positive. Along with the positive feedback, however, came two bits of ‘criticism’, ie that I ask ‘is that clear?’ or ‘does that make sense?’ a bit too often, and I have a tendency to smile too much (something of a nervous tic) which might suggest that I don’t take the material as seriously as might be expected. This I felt was an excellent example of constructive criticism – things that I can do something about to continually improve my presentation skills so that the message gets across ever more effectively.

I do think that our culture as a whole, and clergy in particular, need training in how to give constructive criticism; it’s an incredibly useful art and would probably lead to many fewer of the conflicts now afflicting us if we were able to practise it more effectively. I suppose it’s a way of ‘speaking the truth in love’, which is something I need to work on myself (that is, I think I’ve got the ‘speaking the truth’ bit down OK, it’s the latter that needs attention….)

Climate change as – at best – a secondary issue

Climate change (and Peak Oil) are two symptoms of a much deeper problem, the Limits to Growth. That problem can be simply stated: in a finite environment, the exponential growth of one element within that environment is unsustainable. Our western industrial capitalist system has been growing exponentially for some two hundred and fifty years – accelerating over the last sixty or so – and this is unsustainable; in other words, it will come to an end. I believe that it will come to an end over the next twenty or thirty years or so, not by our own conscious choice but because we have gone into ‘overshoot’ and we are presently crashing into the wall at 100mph.

The original Limits to Growth report outlined the various problems that would manifest themselves and cause the system to break down: resource limits, pollution, overpopulation etc. These can all be understood as symptoms of the underlying problem, the idolatry of growth. Peak Oil, for example, is only one example of a resource constraint; other fossil fuels (and uranium) also go through a peaking cycle, but there are also very significant issues related to the availability of potable water, fish stocks and many others. Climate change is one form of pollution, but again there are others, less global but no less significant for those affected by them.

With all of these single issues it is possible to address and solve that particular issue. The force of the Limits to Growth argument is that even when one is solved, the others then become more acute. In other words, there is a systemic issue to be addressed: we need to tackle the root problem of growth itself; we need to shift to a steady-state economy. If this is done then all the subsidiary problems will be dealt with. Even if climate change is true, and – marvellously! – action is taken to address the problem and it is “solved” – the underlying issue remains. The same applies to the problem of Peak Oil. All it would mean is that we have dodged one bullet; if we don’t address the root causes then we will simply have to keep dodging more and more as time goes on, until one day one hits us and kills us.

Sometimes, I have the sense those who advocate radical action to deal with climate change miss this bigger picture (that’s certainly true of any politician who talks about climate change whilst also talking about ‘growth’ for example). The risk is two-fold: first, that the wider issues fail to be addressed through an over-emphasis upon one subsidiary aspect; second, that if too much weight is placed on climate change as the dominant problem – and it turns out that the issue is either false or not as bad as presently thought – then not only will effort have been wasted but those who may have been persuaded to address important problems on the back of climate change will become disillusioned and sceptical about the wider issues as a whole.

More fundamentally, as a Christian, my concern is with the habits of life that are bound up with the ideology of growth; the systematic cultivation of deadly sins by the advertising industry, for example. The problem of growth is, at root, a spiritual problem; it is a dislocation of our values, a distortion of our human nature. That is what the church needs to address – our human sinfulness which gives rise to these problems. We must be wary of jumping on particular band-wagons, stick to what we know best, and do the job that Jesus commanded us to do, remembering that “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”
(2 Chron 7.13-14)

25 things about me

I got tagged on Facebook by Jon for this. I’m not going to tag anyone else though.

1. I was born completely deaf in my left ear. Same as Rowan Williams.
2. I’m 6’1″ tall and 17.5 stone overweight.
3. I have a long ponytail – for the second time in my life – as a result of a Nazirite vow I made with myself. I’m not going to cut it until I’ve finished my book. As I’ve been wanting to finish a version of this book for nearly twenty years that may be some time.
4. I’m currently in therapy trying to work out why I haven’t done the book.
5. I’ve lived on or near the River Blackwater for most of my life, including six very happy years on houseboats. I’ve also lived in Oxford, Cambridge, Alnwick and lots of places in London, especially Stepney.
6. I have an IQ of 174 (the 99.8th percentile according to Mensa) and a First Class degree in Philosophy and Theology from Oxford University, but the academic achievement I’m most proud of is getting a scholarship grade in my English Literature STEP, which I took at the same time as A Levels.
7. I was rejected by Oxford the first time I applied – I had applied to read PPE; they told me I should have applied to read English. I took a year out and applied after taking my A Levels – definitely one of my best decisions.
8. The worst mark I ever received in an academic exam was for the Wittgenstein paper in my Masters; I feel aggrieved about the injustice of this even now. (Despite protests from my tutor there was a resolute (and not incomprehensible) refusal to re-mark. I now understand how and why it happened, and it’s a long story.)
9. I spent four years working for what was then the Department of the Environment as a Fast Streamer. This provided some royal jelly in terms of management training, which has held me in good stead, but I left because I was bored and didn’t want to drive a desk any more.
10. I spent the academic year 1996/97 working as a caretaker in a primary school. During that time I appeared on Blue Peter.
11. I dropped out of a PhD at Cambridge after two terms for a complex mixture of reasons, academic and spiritual. I’m sure it was the right decision, but there’s a lot of unfinished business there. (Unfinished business is a bit of a theme in my life.)
12. I failed my ordination training through not completing the academic syllabus. I was ordained anyway because I ‘met Bishop’s requirements’ – principally through having done a theology degree already. I only completed the MA after getting ordained (which is one example of finished business.)
13. I presided and preached at my father’s funeral. I think it was the most constructive outlet for my anger, and it crystallised a core part of my vocation.
14. I took a year out from parish ministry in 2002/03 to recover from several things, principally exhaustion. I came very close to starting a PhD at Durham but after a lot of prayer and reflection decided to come back into parish ministry. The right decision.
15. I like to wear colourful shirts.
16. I proposed to my wife seven days after we started going out. That was about 11 years ago now. That was a very good decision, possibly my best ever.
17. I enjoy singing but can’t stand the sound of my own voice. That applies to my speaking voice as well.
18. I am prone to visions, premonitions and religious experiences. I’m trying not to bury these things so much these days, which is difficult because I tend to see references to religious experience as theologically dubious.
19. I’ve recently started using a motorbike. I only passed my (car) driving test in 2003, on the same day as I was appointed to the Mersea job.
20. I think I have some gifting for spiritual direction, although I’ve never been formally trained for it. This seems to have been recognised by others, and people are (informally) being referred to me. I am suspicious of the formal recognition process as I see direction as being a core part of the priestly vocation, it is precisely the ‘cure of souls’.
21. I’m going on sabbatical this autumn. As well as trying to finish the book (see above) I want to do a lot more sailing. Sailing is one of the most profoundly refreshing things I know.
22. I don’t believe that the Church of England knows what it is doing. I think it is propped up by establishment and maintained by inertia. There are days when all I want to do is kick away all the supports and set fire to it. Then there are the other days, when I think it is massively under-rated and under-appreciated. I try to remember the latter on the days when I am prone to the former. It might be a grace that the Church doesn’t know what it is doing as it allows God some room in the process (!) but that being true doesn’t mean the church couldn’t do better.
23. There are three things in ministry which I value above all else: presiding at the Eucharist; teaching the faith; and intimate spiritual conversation.
24. I don’t believe there is such a thing as mental illness. I believe there are two things which are presently described as mental illness: physical illness which has mental effects, and spiritual problems.
25. Throughout my teenage years and early twenties I expected to go into a career in politics. I still occasionally feel the pang of temptation, but I am very glad that God prohibited that path for me.

LUBH 7 – The Green Bible

Reposted as it is relevant to the ‘Christian not Green post’. First posted 7/8/07, talk originally given at the end of 2006.

Somehow, I forgot to post this one on the blog. Click ‘full post’ for text. You can also follow the link in my sidebar for the powerpoint slides.

LUBH 7 The Green Bible

Good morning and welcome. Apologies for a slightly late start. “The Green Bible” – well as I am sure you are all well aware the Bible contains explicit instructions on how we are to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions, hence the joke. There aren’t, , specific instructions in scripture around most of what we currently consider environmental issues, so for example, global warming. But there are some underlying principles that need to be drawn out which are generally applicable and there is also one specific area where there are some detailed instructions, which is what I will concentrate on today.

So begin with the basic principles which I think are fairly incontestable, God is our Creator, we are his creatures and this makes a difference. The earth belongs to God, this is stated several times the quotation from Leviticus “the land is mine”. It’s fairly explicit and we therefore don’t have final custody for final charge over the earth, we are God’s stewards but we don’t own the land. God is the first gardener, God planted a garden in the East and set man within it – one of ways in which we are made in the image of God. Gardening I will come back to, but God is the first gardener, God is the one who plants us in the land.

In Christ the creation is renewed. I’ll say a fair bit about Genesis Chapter 2, because it’s rather important, but one of the things about Genesis 2 which is the fall, is that it’s matched up and overcome in the incarnation. So that which goes wrong in Genesis 2 we have the opportunity to go right with through Christ. So the fundamental principle. And the vision that God gives to us is of flourishing within a flourishing environment, the land flowing with milk and honey. The vision held out to us in scripture is not some sort of abstract state of soul, it is something very concrete and real and physical and it is within a particular sort of environment. So God is concerned with the environment.

I wish to read out to you one of my all time favourite Old Testament passages, headed the charge against Israel. “Hear the Word of the Lord you Israelites because the Lord has a charge to bring against you who live in the land. There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgement of God in the land, there is only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery, they break all bounds and bloodshed follows bloodshed. Because of this the land mourns and all who live in it waste away. The beasts of the field and the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea are dying.” That’s Hosea Chapter 4, which we will come back to in later weeks.

There is a common language within the prophetic tradition, there are lots and lots of examples, if you skim through Isaiah or Jeremiah you will glean these instances where there is a link between the sin which God sees in the people and the suffering of the land around the people. It’s like the land expresses the symptoms of the sin. “Therefore the land mourns.” And this goes right back to Genesis Chapter 2. The expulsion from Eden, ‘cursed is the ground because of your sin’. There is a direct link between the state of the environment and our state, our sinful nature. And this is a repeated theme throughout the Old Testament, lots and lots of examples.

And one of the fundamental truths coming from that is that there is no hard and fast division between humanity and the creation within which humanity is planted. It is one of the aspects of an incarnational faith and one of the ways in which Christianity is different from gnosticism is precisely in embracing and giving value to the physical world. Gnosticicm sees the physical world as the realm of the devil or the realm of wickedness and to be escaped from, you know we are souls trapped within this terrible flesh and these sparks need to be set free from the physical flesh. That’s gnosticism put very simply. And that’s very much something that Christianity is opposed to, it embraces and gives value to the created world.

So that’s basic background stuff. Three tools are set out in talks so far: idolatry, when we worship, give too much value to something which isn’t God and so our ways of understanding the world become distorted; wrath, being the consequences of our decisions, wrath not in the sense of a malevolent deity, but wrath if in the sense that if you stick your hand in the fire it will be burnt, because the creation has been made according to certain principles; and eschatology, rather than apocalypse, meaning the light of Christ’s return. He will come as a thief in the night so we need to be ready for it. We live in the end times.

Well, the specific thing I want to look at, not in a huge amount of detail, but enough to give a flavour, is about farming, because whilst the Bible doesn’t really talk about global warming or rising sea levels and so forth, since Noah that is – the Bible does talk in a fair bit of detail about how to farm. Leviticus 19 talks about the principles and you are not to farm right up to the edge of the field, nor are you to go back and harvest a second time. You are also, if you plant fruit trees, you are not to take the harvest from the fruit trees for the first three years after planting and the fourth year after planting the harvest from the fruit trees is to be given to God. Be offered up in sacrifice, so for four years after planting a fruit tree you are not to harvest it for your own consumption. Again Leviticus 19, you have got all the material about the Jubilee, but in particular the land itself is not to be farmed every seventh year, the land itself is to have a Sabbath and after seven Sabbath’s you have got the year of Jubilee when there is to be no farming anywhere at all. You are not to farm, you are only to go out and pick the food that is naturally growing. This is the basic principle.

This could be summarised as a radical trust in God’s provision and it deals with the instant concern: well hang on how are we going to eat? And it says in the sixth year God will send such an abundant harvest that it gives enough food for the two years following, not just for the year of the Sabbath, but for the year following when you are back to farming. So underlying this, I really want to draw out two principles. The radical trust in God’s provision but also not extracting from the land the maximum amount that can be gained, you know this putting off the harvesting of the fruit trees. What about year two, look at all that fruit going to waste, but that’s the point, there is an abundance being respected. And we can start talking in terms of the benefits of letting land lie fallow or the benefits of allowing a tree to grow for the fruit to fertilise the soil beneath it but I think that is actually to start rationalising all the commands from God and saying well God’s saying this command because it makes sense. I’m not sure all God’s commands do make sense, but these are the commands.

But really I think that the fundamental thing within it: trust in God’s provision is what is repeatedly emphasised. Think of the Israelites in the desert, grumbling because they are hungry and God sending manna and quail. This is the same principle being applied in a particular place and the idea that you don’t extract the maximum from the land for your own benefit, you leave some for the aliens, the widows, the orphans, you don’t get the maximum amount. And of course, when we come up against this sort of command, hang on this doesn’t make any sense, this is crazy – it is, it is crazy but, but, but, but why do we consider it crazy? What are our concerns? What’s driving us? Is it that we are afraid we are going to go hungry? What are we frightened of, is there going to be famine in the land? Or is it the question of greed? Wanting to make the most produce, make the most money and so forth.

Let’s have a think about Baal. He is rather important in the Old Testament. You can think of him as being the Canaanite fertility god. Baal means simply the son of El, El was the supreme deity. And Baal was originally the storm god, the god of thunder and lightening. So the equivalent of Thor in the Canaanite pantheon. And what happened was you had a sequence through the seasons where you had a mythology and the different God’s conquered each other in turn to represent the turning around of the seasons. But over time, Baal became the dominant figure and he was associated with fertility because the rains allowed the crops to grow, And so Baalism became the dominant worship. The word Baal simply means Lord and often it’s Lord of an area. So each area would have its Baal. Its local Baal. So you get the Baal of Tyre, and the worship of Baal took a very particular form, the worship of a fertility god involves celebrations of fertility and so you had cultic prostitution, in other words you had lots of people taking part in orgies, celebrating the human acts of fertilisation in order to charge up the god with lots of fertility energy.

This is what’s going on with lots of the criticisms in the Old Testament, against the Baal, against the prostitution. Whenever you have the instructions about do not let your daughter become a prostitute and so forth, it’s to do with this worship of Baal. It’s not prostitution in the sense we would understand it today, selling your body for money, it’s to do with fertility worship. And the story of Israel coming into Canaan, and one of the strong impetuses behind God saying you have got to drive out these other people from this land and you are not to inter-marry with them is precisely so that they don’t become contaminated with this fertility worship.

You can look through the Old Testament and it’s one of the major themes. Another thing, it’s a major theme because the people of Israel themselves were caught up in the worship of Baals. Various names even among say David and Solomon’s children, you can see influences from the Baalite mythology into their choice of names. And archaeologically from the excavations done exploring the practices of the Israelites and so sixth and seventh century BC, there are lots and lots of little Baals, little Ashteroths, little fertility gods. You know the people of Israel were not exclusively faithful to Yahweh. It was an ongoing struggle between the living God who’s in charge of it all and creates all things and these fertility gods. And of course one of the key things about worshipping a fertility god is that you are gaining some measure of control or influence over fertility, over the productivity of land. So again what is it being driven by, what’s the desire or motivation behind the worship of Baal? And how does that apply to how we practise our civilisation or agriculture today?

It is a form of idolatry. It’s giving too much importance to something which is not God. Remember we must love the Lord our God with all our heart, and so forth, placing God right at the centre and trusting in God alone, not in our own techniques. And our contemporary Baalism proceeds on the assumption that the world belongs to us, it for us to do with it what we will. That we have the power to remake it. That we can control fertility through our own efforts and we can pat ourselves on the back by the increase in grain harvest in the twentieth century, for example. But what you do have in contemporary systems of agriculture is a systematic exploitation of the land. You know, tell someone from Monsanto for example that you should not harvest for the first three years and then the fourth year you should give it to the church. This is not a plausible suggestion. But even ignoring giving it to the church, the idea that shouldn’t harvest the whole of the field, the thought that you might leave some of the harvest for those who are poor to come and glean. The crumbs from under the table, it’s that imagery. There are no crumbs falling from the table of modern agriculture. It’s all being systematically hoovered up, industrially hoovered up.

And what is it rooted in? Going back to the questions of hunger, fear of famine or it is just greed. Now some examples of how that is applied. I won’t go into this in huge detail, there are lots and lots of sources available if you want to explore it. Monoculture – one of the good things about the green revolution, middle of the twentieth century, is that they systematically assessed what was the most productive grain varieties, and replaced those less productive grain varieties with the most productive, which had a significant impact on grain harvests. One of the ways in which we have been able to feed the population more or less. What it has meant is an incredible loss of diversity. And this is again driven by this desire to get the absolute most possible.

Factory farming. I am sure you are all familiar with the stories of our chickens and pigs and so forth. Fossil fuel fertiliser – which is the big thing which has made the difference, allowing the land to become fertile where it wouldn’t be otherwise and allowing the farming to be done and the grain to be grown. But what you might call agri-business, something where the farmer becomes driven by corporate interests rather than their own link and assessment with the land, the soil itself. You have a systematic driver of agricultural behaviour and practices which isn’t directly linked with the processes of the world itself. It’s driven by financial priorities. I’ll say much more about this next time. Not next week, next time when I will focus in on what a corporation is and does. But this is one example, one area where we can raise questions against what’s going on. That a corporate interest may have no long term interest in the particular area of land. Think for example of the deforestation going on in the Amazon, where you have ranchers coming in to grow cattle, most of which goes up to McDonald’s shops in the United States or in Britain, and what happens is that the land, once the forest has been cut down the land is fertile for about three years and then gets desertified, because the value of the land has been taken up into the cattle and taken off elsewhere, and the value of the land collapses, and all that happens is that slash and burn agriculture simply moves on to the next bit of forest. You know this is one of the prime drivers behind deforestation of the Amazon. This is driven by a commercial logic, it makes sense for a company to pursue this sort of policy, because it means that they can make money. It is not long term sustainable. But within the logic of corporate thinking it makes sense.
One phrase is used to describe it – strip mining the soil. Getting what you can from it and then moving on, not seeing the soil as something that its own integrity, that needs to be taken care of, so that the soil takes care of us. So those are examples of the idolatry and following on from idolatry is wrath. This is the point about exploring idolatry and wrath, that wrath is what will happen to us if we simply experience the consequences of our own actions. Now factory farming I’m sure you’re all familiar with all these stories. And these are just the most prominent within British life, you know, mad cows. Feeding cows the broken down bits of bone of other cows is not very sensible. It might make sense financially, it might make sense in terms of corporate interest because here you’ve got a waste product, “Ah, we’ve got a waste stream, we can put that to good use, that’ll save us money.” But it’s not something respects the integrity of the life cycle of a cow. OK, so some examples.

More importantly, loss of top soil. Thirty to forty tons per hectare average in the third world, seventeen tons per hectare in the United States. Over the last forty years 4.3 million square kilometres of agricultural land has been taken out of production. That’s the equivalent of 30% of the present area of agricultural land. A large part of that is things like the deforestation of the Amazon. But it is not just that, it is across central Africa, South-east Asia and so forth. It’s the urge, it’s the drive to bring in the marginal land into production, which again it makes economic sense in the short-term, but it has devastating consequences in the long term.

A quote for you, “Nothing beside remains.” Recognise it? From Ozymandias.
Two more wrathful consequences. Our system of agriculture is hugely dependent upon the availability of cheap fossil fuels. Primarily in terms of the fertiliser put on it, but also in terms of the transport system, bringing food from a long way away to our tables. For every calorie of food on your plate, ten calories of fossil fuel energy has been expended to get it there. When that fossil fuel energy is taken away – the next ten or twenty years – it will have a huge impact upon how much food is available. It is a Faustian bargain. You know, we have taken the fossil fuel, we have done wonderful things with it, we have managed to sustain the incredible rise in population, but after a set time, just as with Faust, Mephistopheles comes back and says “I’m going to have that back. Thank you I’ll have that price that you wanted to pay.” Fossil fuels are going to be taken away.

I just put GM contamination as one example, perhaps we can talk about that later on but you know all these assurances from the scientist that GM contamination can’t happen. I was reading a story a few weeks ago where there’s a GM station in Iowa, exploring I think it is varieties of corn and their particular variety of corn turned up in Mexico which is quite a way away, you know they were assured “No, no we can’t – it’s completely contained, this variety of corn won’t spread.” And of course it did. Any how one little quote from Leviticus again, “If you defile the land it will vomit you out.” And this has happened serially over time in different parts of the world. Ancient Babylon is now effectively desert, because the people who lived there extracted the sources unsustainably and when the agricultural base got taken away the civilisation collapsed. Of course Baghdad is not too far away but it took a long time to recover.

Similarly Rome, I read an article saying that was hugely impacted by the over-cropping of the hills in Italy, what is now called Italy. A very interesting article I read recently about Florence and the Tuscans about how they abandoned the attempts to defend their land through chopping down the trees to make bows and arrows, and they planted, starting planting trees instead, disbanded the army in order to preserve their local way of life. They realised that destroying their land by chopping down the trees, causing soil run off and so forth, was hugely counter-productive. And the reason why Tuscany is now so healthy and beautiful and productive is because for 400 years they have had this concern with looking after the soil, in particular through planting trees. Just one example.

This raises the wider issues of how to live within our world. The fundamental question going back to the basic principle is that the world and the creatures within it are in inherently worthy of respect. They are not simply tools for us to do simply as we will. Now Job 40, 41 is when God responds to Job’s complaint at the end and says, Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?” And He goes on and lists all the wonderful things about creation, the Behemoth, the Hippopotamus, and talks about how wonderful it is and how wonderful different areas are within what’s created. And there is a good Psalm as well, I think it is Psalm 104 which has a good description of the water cycle, the donkeys that drink from it and so forth, as a another example.

But fundamentally the environmental crisis that we face is rooted in the spiritual crisis. Going back to this great theme in Scripture, that the wider environment is symptomatic of our state of sin. And if we persist in sin the environment will reflect that in judgemental ways, in wrathful ways. Therefore the land mourns. We have to respect the integrity of creation. That it is not simply for us to do with as we will, that we can’t expect to have no consequences from feeding cattle, dead cattle. OK, we need to respect the integrity of creation.

And the roots of the problem, which is why I spent such time talking about idolatry and science are in a particular scientific attitude, or a technological attitude, which I went into. Remember my phrase, we are radically anti-phronetic. We have no judgement, we have lost our capacity to judge between good and evil in this respect, to listen to what God is telling us, phronesis is the Greek virtue of judgement, of deciding what is the right way forward. Because we have lost these practical virtues, we no longer have any sense of our abominable practices like what led to CJD. We have lost sight of it, we are so meshed in sin that we cannot see clearly. Which is why going back to Scripture can be a very good prod to our sight.

And the consequences of this are all around us. Another good quotation, “The time has come for judging the dead and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your saints, and those who reverence your name both small and great and for destroying those who destroy the earth.” An aspect of the last judgement which isn’t flagged up very often. “Those who destroy the earth will be destroyed.” Book of Revelation. So eschatology, living in the light of the end, living now as if the end was about to come, changing the way we live, living in the Kingdom, all this language, it’s the same thing. We put on the armour of light, in other words we change the way we live to reflect the light which is coming in, we shift to Kingdom patterns of life, we live at peace with creation rather than this mentality of seeking to exploit it. We talk about dominion or stewardship or creation care not domination. Fundamental difference. And the verse, I think it’s Romans 8 – “The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” We live as God’s children within the garden when we don’t have these exploitative attitudes. We have these reverential attitudes. We respect creation as one manifestation of reverence of worship of the Creator.

So specifically, and only very, very briefly, I think learning how to garden. Simply as a way of reopening our eyes to how we are to be linked in with the natural world. Because our civilisation has become so far detached from the natural world. How many people within London for example get their food only ever from the local supermarket? And this episode of what I think of as writing on the wall from September 2000 when we had the fuel crisis. And the supermarkets started to empty, and there was great panic, where does food come from if not from the supermarket? That’s why it’s so important when I was working in Stepney, that was actually the city farm. And we keep on taking all the people in the primary school and the secondary school around the farm so they could actually see where food came from. Because the majority culture is wholly detached from these profoundly important roots in the soil, and gardening is one way of reconnecting with that.

But applying that more widely, becoming more aware of the natural environment on which we depend, so things like in your shopping, we can talk about you have got to go organic, yes, but actually local is more important than organic, just to talk in terms of fossil fuels and global warming and so forth. If you buy organic but it happens to be shipped even by trucks from central England, you are actually using more oil than if you simply buy a non-organic crop that’s grown closer. It’s more important to buy local or even to grow your own than it is to buy organic but buying organic is manifestly crucial. But more fundamentally, simply consuming less. That doesn’t necessarily mean consuming less food but the whole culture of consumption that is driving our economy. And again I’ll focus in on this crucially in our next session when I talk about poverty. But consuming less – you know the phrase – live simply so that others might simply live, it’s that process. And walking lightly on the earth, leaving stuff behind, not extracting the absolute maximum you can get from a harvest at any one moment in time, living mercifully, leaving some behind for the alien the poor, the widow.
Now I want to finish, something from 2 Chronicles, “If my people who are called by my Name will humble themselves and pray, and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” I thought that was a good summary. But I actually want to finish by reading you a poem by Wendell Berry, this chap who I have just discovered and I think is absolutely marvellous, so just ordered two or three books of his to work my way through them in more detail. He is a Christian farmer in America and he is a poet and writer and he has distinct perspective and this is a poem of his called “Manifesto – the Mad Farmers’ Liberation Front.” And I have a copy here for each of you, but I want to read it out first, it goes like this:-

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

OK, sums it all up. Questions, thoughts, comments?

Not all fertiliser comes from fossil fuel, night soil for those who aren’t aware is human waste, and it is something where alternatives are being developed. Now quick caveat I am not a financial adviser, please don’t take this, but there is a company in which I have invested called TEG Environmental which essentially takes waste, it’s now getting contracts with local authorities, it takes waste produced by the local authorities and turns it into fertiliser. So it is not fossil fuel based but it has got a distinctly growing market to look forward to.

That was the main burden of last week’s session, but I will recap, I think a good way to think about it because last week I was really talking about Apocalypse and Eschatology, Apocalypse being a sort of a pagan sense of a wrathful God coming to damn everybody, but Jesus uses a different sort of language and talks about living, more language about a thief coming in the night, it can happen very suddenly. And therefore the way of living as a Christian is expecting the end, what Wendell Berry is referring to, expect the end of the world and live in the light of it, and so think of – I know lots of passages, Romans 13 is a good one, about putting on the armour of light. Imagine that we are living in the hour before the dawn, this is the image I used last week, where a light is starting to creep in, and so you can start to see the way of the world, you can start to see what’s the works of darkness and what’s the works of light, OK?

And because we can see the light we know that the sun is about to rise in every sense and we live according to that light that’s coming in. Now that is simply living in the Kingdom. Because it is the Kingdom that is coming and the role of the Church is to live according to that pattern of life which is appropriate in the light. So we live in the light and we turn away from the works of darkness. But this is the Johannine language, some people rejected the light because they loved their own acts, the darkness of their own acts. And so this is, the great crises or judgement in John’s language that is coming in, that Christ has been revealed to us and we either live according to this light which is breaking in upon us, and which is coming, which is living in the light of the end or we remain trapped in our patterns and works of darkness. OK?

So applying that to this, we either carry on with business as usual, ignoring what God is saying to us both in Scripture and in terms of the environmental crisis around us, which reflects our sin back to us, or we start to shift the way we live, away from those destructive practices and more towards what I call Kingdom patterns of life. Does that make sense?

Those three bits, idolatry, wrath, eschatology, those are the three tools I am going to apply in each of the sections, so about the environment this week, about social justice next session, about foreign relations the session after that and then about practices of worship in the church in the session after that, before wrapping things up in the last three, looking at what the church should be doing and what the church is for. So this is the first of four applying those three theological tools.

The next meeting will be the second commandment “Love your neighbour as yourself” and if you want to do some homework, the story in Luke about Dives and Lazarus would be appropriate.
You are getting a resurgence of small scale farming driven by these different values, the problem lies in the fact that the great majority of farm land is maintained and developed and exploited by corporate interest.

Two things really, one is please do return when I do the fourth session on patterns of worship because I will probably indulge in my greatest ever rant at Christian leaders who have really not paid attention to Scripture, to doing the will of God. I do think there is a significant problem about Christian leadership, not just the Church of England, although I will not exclude the Church of England from criticism, but I think there has been a real loss of focus and it’s got deep roots, it’ s because the church, small c, has become trapped by the world and the worldly concerns and by worldly agendas, and I think one of the principal uses of Scripture is in calling us back to what God’s word and agenda is.

Having said that, it is changing, the Eastern Orthodox church about ten years ago were the first church to say that disrespect of the environment is a sin, to actually start classing it as a sin within the pathology of human sinfulness, and you might have heard the Bishop of London, who is strongly influenced by the Eastern Orthodox, picking this up. There’s one of the things I researched for this I came across in 1994, the evangelical churches in the States adopted a statement called Creation Care. It’s definitely starting to move. I think the Pope’s address, I haven’t looked at it in detail yet but two days ago the Pope’s Christmas address was dealing with this topic, and talking about how our stewardship of creation is something that we have a scriptural, a divine mandate to pursue, the care of creation. So I think things are changing, partly I think it is still though a worldly agenda driving it. And that’s one of the things I will go into in more depth, it’s not really about, so often choosing a more environmentally friendly lifestyle is seen as something driven by consumer choice, it’s another option, if you want to be a hippy that’s great, yeah live in a commune, but I will carry on with my corporate interests and so forth…

Socrates or Jesus?

(Originally written just after I had started writing this blog, on July 17 2005, but I thought it worth tweaking and updating and bringing up front. The ‘book’ has now become LUBH.)

Where have I got to?

After such a long time of first writing, and then thinking, and then reading and then thinking some more, have I come to any conclusions? Am I ever going to write this book?

Well, I do feel that I have been climbing a mountain, an intellectual mountain to be sure, but a spiritual mountain as well.

For this book that I am compelled to write is really a way of resolving a conflict within myself. The origins of the book lie in an experience that I had around the time of my twentieth birthday, which moved me from being a militant atheist to one who could not deny the reality of God, and one who is now a priest.

That transformation moved me spiritually in a way that I suspect I would never have been able to achieve on my own, and really the last fifteen years can be seen, in one light, as my trying to catch up intellectually with what happened in that summer of 1990.

I think I have now caught up – or at least, if I have not in fact gained the summit of my personal mountain, that summit is now in sight.

The best way to describe the reality behind these words is to talk about the difference between two paths to God, the Platonic path and the Christian path.

The Platonic path has its roots in Socrates, and his attitude in the face of death. He embraced the conflict with the Athenian authorities, and used that conflict – engineering the death sentence – in order to display his teachings about the irrelevance of death. For the true philosopher has an immortal soul, which is not affected by death. Indeed, the best life, the truest, most virtuous and most authentic life, is one in which a person prepares themselves for this death by removing all the ‘attachments’ to the world from their emotional life, restricts the objects of their concern to the realm of the Forms and seeks, ultimately, to ascend to a contemplation of the One, which, in one neo-Platonic phrasing, is the journey of ‘the alone to the Alone’. This is a journey for an intellectual elite; it is a journey undertaken in solitude; it is a journey which is self-directed and under the control of the individual will, properly trained. Those who become ‘perfect’ attain to the One. And the One does not care whether you make this journey or not.

The Christian path, in contrast, has its roots in Jesus’ attitude in the face of death, best revealed in the Garden of Gethsemane: “My soul is sorrowful, even unto death… Father, all things are possible to thee; remove this cup from me; yet not what I will, but what thou wilt.” Jesus is afraid of death; he is not facing the prospect of crucifixion with philosophical detachment. Yet he surrenders his will to God. Moreover, this surrendering of the will was characteristic of Jesus’ mature life, and it was this surrendering which was taught to the disciples. This surrendering bears fruit in a community of loving friendship, exemplified in the Last Supper: “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing, but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” So the Christian journey is one that is undertaken within a community of friendship; it is a journey for everyone; it is a journey which is centred on the abandonment of self-direction and a radical dependency on divine grace – for God cares very much whether you take this path. It is the journey of love: ‘Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God’.

So, to summarise: the Platonic path, as I understand it, is an individualistic and intellectualistic project to achieve the contemplation of the One and thereby to achieve immortality. The Christian path, as I understand it, is a Eucharistic and moral project to transform the world in the light of eternity, and thereby gain eternal life.

In the Platonic path, the intellect is dominant.
In the Christian path, surrender of the will to God is key.

(Christianity is not about the abandonment of intellect. It is about surrendering the intellect – and the intellectual products like our ego and the deadly sins that go with the desire for ego-preservation – to a higher power.)

To return to my militant atheism: it was a manifestation of the mainstream of our present culture, in which the modernist project of triumphant Reason – atheistic, self-sufficient, controlling, technocratic, inherently totalitarian – has largely succeeded in eviscerating the Christian alternative. As I am, temperamentally, an intellect-dominated person, that Modernist idolatry took deep root in my understanding. Although I would not have had the words to describe it accurately until very recently: my understanding was Platonist, in the sense that I have described.

That triumphant Modernism was built upon the re-incorporation of the Platonic path within Western Christianity itself, from which came the evils of the Inquisition, Scholasticism, the Crusades, the Wars of Religion and, ultimately, the Holocaust.

Really what my journey has been about is seeking a way to reconcile my intellect with my guiding spirit, my soul, that which is of God within me – to achieve an integrity between a part of myself which was ‘touched’ by God – and is therefore undeniable, for it is deeper within me than my understanding can reach – and an intellect which, every step of the way, has resisted the implications of that touch. To achieve integrity, to find that peace which the world cannot give, I have had to dig deeper and deeper into my understandings, to uproot what it is in my intellect which is opposed to that touch of God and to slowly and steadily surrender my will to God. Of course, I resist even now, for I am mulishly stubborn. Truly the Will is a terrible master.

I believe that, in essence, what I have to say in my book is to share the fruits of this journey that I have made: to, as +Richard put it, ‘speak the word that [I] have been given’. To offer a truly prophetic critique of Western Christianity – prophecy not as a prediction of what will come (although there is that) but prophecy as a demand to return to a proper worship of God, and thereby to alleviate the sufferings of the widows and orphans of the world. For God is a jealous God and a righteous God.

I am conscious of the way that sounds grandiose. Left to myself, my ego would seek to protect itself from such a reckless endangerment – for such boastful-sounding words are hubristic, and I believe deeply in nemesis, although I give that pagan concept a different name. If there was a way in which I could have a quiet and peaceful life I think I would choose it, yet ‘not what I will’.

I think much of Jonah fleeing to Tarshish; I think much of Amos: “I am but a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees”; I think much of Isaiah: “I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips”; I think of Jeremiah: “Ah Lord God! Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth!”. If I have a ‘guiding text’ which hovers at the back of my mind as I think and write, it is this:

“Hear the Word of the Lord, O people of Israel;
for the Lord has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land.
There is no faithfulness or kindness,
and no knowledge of God in the land.
There is swearing, lying, killing, stealing, and committing adultery;
they break all bounds and murder follows murder.
Therefore the land mourns, and all who dwell in it languish,
and also the beasts of the field, and the birds of the air;
and even the fish of the sea are taken away.

Yet let no one contend, and let none accuse,
for with you is my contention O priest.
You shall stumble by day,
the prophet also shall stumble with you by night;
and I will destroy your mother.
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge;
because you have rejected knowledge,
I reject you from being a priest to me.
And since you have forgotten the law of your God,
I also will forget your children.”

(Hosea chapter 4).

The Psalmist writes that ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’, and in truth, the more that I reflect on our world and the corruption in our mother the church (it is so corrupt that it no longer can see the corruption), the more afraid I become. I think apocalyptic thoughts.

And yet, and yet. Jesus tells us repeatedly: do not be afraid. For perfect love drives out fear. And we are called to love, for ‘God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.’ God is a God of mercy and of grace.

And I remember – at this time of both literal and metaphorical darkness – that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overwhelm it.

I hope, in my book, to give an account of the light and hope that is in me.

LUBH 13 – summary

Last gathering together of the ‘Let us be human’ argument, with an update of my ‘pledges’ at the end.

LUBH – summary

Welcome to the very last session of the Let Us Be Human sequence, prophecy, peak oil and the path for the faithful. Now today a summary which is why there is no crib sheet with notes so also I am going to suffer, I didn’t realise I was going to suffer because normally I have my notes right in front of me to spark things off. But anyway what I am going to do is run through what we have covered over the last twelve sessions and come up with some specific pointers for a way forward.

Now to begin with the prophecy bit, as I am sure you all know as I have said it so often the prophets throughout the Old Testament and culminating in Christ centre on just a handful of things, the call to right worship of the living God – that we shouldn’t indulge in idolatry, that we shouldn’t prostitute ourselves to false gods, and as the other side of that coin, there is the call to justice – to social justice to love thy neighbour, hence Jesus’s summing up that we love God, with all our hearts, etc. and we love our neighbours as ourselves. This sums up the prophetic teaching throughout scripture. And I started off with Jeremiah who was very unhappy to be a prophet because God said to him “Go and tell the people of Judah that Jerusalem is going to be destroyed and you are going to see such suffering in the streets of Jerusalem.” He said, “Oh please I don’t want to have to say such an unhappy message, they will all hate me”, and they did, they threw him in jail, they tried to kill him etc., but he was compelled to give this prophetic judgement when the Babylonian army would sweep into Jerusalem and destroy the temple and massacre the Royal family and take off all the leading lights of the community off into exile in Babylon itself. So the prophetic message is – “This is the right way to live, in touch with the living God, justice between you and your neighbours, and if you turn away from this for long enough then there is a mighty judgement coming.” And I think we are in a situation which is analogous to that Jeremiah faced, there is a mighty judgement coming on us.

Now I started off talking about peak oil, now peak oil is that geological phenomenon which describes when the flow of oil from any particular well hits its maximum, so it’s the point of maximum flow. The analogy I used is running a bath from your hot water tank, to begin with you can control the flow of water by turning the tap fully on or fully off or somewhere in between, and you open it up to fully on and you have got plenty of water coming through. But of course over time your hot water tank draws down and at the end there is just a trickle and no matter what you do with the tap you can’t change it from being a trickle. And the same thing happens with an oil well, with an individual oil well, with oil wells across a region and globally and the phenomenon is called peak oil, it is talking about when the global flow of oil is at it’s maximum and chances are we actually hit that two years ago, in May of 2005. Now it’s possible we might tick up just a little bit more from where we are, but the evidence is accumulating and becoming stronger and stronger, May 2005 was when there was most oil available in the world, and oil is a wonderful, miraculous substance as a source of energy, as a source of raw materials, and we have built up our economies upon it. Not simply in terms of the transport system where it is most obvious where we have an entire transport system built around the internal combustion engine and it relies on liquid fuel, without that liquid fuel it will collapse.

Now the point about peak oil is that, so far for the last hundred and fifty years as the industrial technology and revolution and economy has really picked up lots of steam, if you had enough money you could get the energy. That will no longer be the case. There will be a limit and a consistently declining amount of energy available. That means that energy, instead of being cheap and abundant is going to be scarce and expensive. And all the things which we do which depend upon cheap energy being available will cease. For example, private transport and use of cars. Now it’s not going to cease overnight, but within twenty years, that sort of time frame, unless we have a wonderful, technological discovery which solves all our problems. But we could have done with discovering that twenty years ago. In terms of the time frame for shifting all our infra-structure away from oil and onto bio-fuels or whatever technology has wanted to dream up, it takes a very long time to change things like engines and petrol stations and so forth, and the most exhaustive analysis that has been done of this is in the United States, it’s called the Hirsch Report, commissioned by the American government, says that if you plan for peak oil twenty years before hand there is no problem. If you start planning for it ten years before the peak, then it will take you ten years to recover. If you don’t do anything until the peak’s arrived, it will take you twenty years to recover. That’s what we are looking at: a great dislocation.

So this is the trigger, and this will factor in to all sorts of things, essentially, our economy, our civilisation is built upon this easy energy being cheaply available and that is going to be taken away. I then went on to talk about the background to this, which is the problem of exponential growth. That within a finite area exponential growth when there is a sudden new abundant resource available, oil in our case, allows for a local population explosion, and that population explosion tends to crash. If you have for example a petri dish with bacteria, the bacteria will grow and accumulate and use up all the available energy sources, you know glucose in the medium, in the petri dish, and if there are different blocks of bacteria growing at the same time they will end up having little lines between them where antibiotics are produced, little bits of biological warfare in the petri dish. But then once the available energy resources have been used up the population crashes and dies.

Now this is the very dark side of the predicament that we face, that we as the human species have rapidly and vastly expanded and you can see the dates, 1800 we are at 1 billion, 1930 at 2 billion, 1960 at 3 billion, 1975 at 4 billion, 1987 at 5 billion, 1999 at 6 billion – you can see it’s just shooting up. And that’s a wonderful thing in the sense that there’s enough food available to feed vastly more people, but that food is dependent upon cheap energy being available. Take that energy away and the food won’t be there. And the systems, the ecologies around the globe are straining under the weight of so many people and we are entering into a time of great stress and hardship.

I then went on to talk about idolatry, this central command from the prophets that you must worship none but the living God. And an easy way to think about what that means is to say get your priorities in order, don’t give too much importance to the things which aren’t really that important, and do give importance to the things which are important. So if your culture emphasises and values things like producing money, or becoming a celebrity, these are not as important as the compassion and solidarity which God calls us to show to one another, and think of the story in Luke’s gospel, Dives and Lazarus where Jesus describes the rich man who has lots of comfort in this life and Lazarus at his gate begs and then they die and Lazarus goes to heaven and Dives never actually does anything actively against Lazarus, he just ignores him, you don’t have to be actively hurting the poor, you just have to ignore what is going on, you have to ignore the extent of poverty in, (especially) in Africa.

And there is something about our Western civilisation, especially in north western Europe and United States, which has given science too prominent a place in determining what is of value and what is of meaning. And you can think of science as being the ability to look into the very small and the very big. Think of telescopes and microscopes, they are arrangements of lenses. Imagine that you take one eye out, and you put it in front of the other eye and with these two lenses, one in front of the other, you can look into the very, very small and you can look at the very, very distant, but what you lose is a sense of perspective. You get no sense of proportion. And this is what science has done to our civilisation, we can discover all sorts of interesting facts but we have lost any sense of what is meaningful and what is ultimately of most importance, and that I think is our root idolatry that we need to disentangle our culture from.

We then talked about the wrath of God, that there is a pagan understanding of wrath and I have the image of King Kong, when you have the pretty blonde about to get gobbled up by the monster and the whole point is you have got to sacrifice in order to appease the monster. And contrasting with that is the ancient Jewish understanding used in the first temple, whereby it is God’s initiative to come to us and redeem us from our sins. So our God is not an angry God to be appeased in the way that King Kong for example needs to be appeased. But there is this notion throughout the Old Testament and the New of the wrath of God, and what I’m saying is that the wrath of God is when we are allowed to experience the consequences of our own decisions. In other words it is when grace doesn’t apply. Grace is when we are allowed to escape from the consequences of our own decisions, we don’t get what we deserve. And the wrath of God is when we do get what we deserve. I think the wrath of God is rather similar to the notion of karma.

Now this is an image of New Orleans the day after the hurricane Katrina passed through. Now it is tenuous to say that any one individual hurricane is caused by global warming, but an increase in the rate and strengthen of hurricanes that has been seen, can be attributed to there being warmer sea temperatures as a result of global warming. And that is just one example, there are many, many others. But one example of where our actions have certain consequences.

I then talked about living in the Kingdom, talked about the apocalypse, apocalyptic imagination, living in the light of the end times. Because Christianity is structured around a longing for and an expectation of an end to the world. But this has become very distorted over time and has become something which has in a sense longed for by – I was going to say political reactionaries – it’s not just political reactionaries, I talked about the Left Behind series, multi-million selling in the United States, and they were all about the rapture when those who are good get taken away from the world and then those who are left have this almighty struggle where they, you know there’s even a video game where they were encouraged to kill the unbelievers, and you get points for how many you shoot and so forth. This is rather a long way from a genuinely Christian vision of the future.

The Christian vision of the future is that God will accomplish his purposes and the Kingdom is coming and the point of the church is to live in the light of the Kingdom, to live according to those Kingdom values and thereby be a sign to the rest of the world of what the world is going to be. We are to show the way to that end to the rest of the world, we are to embody it, we are to live it out, that’s what living in the Kingdom is. And of course, the Eucharist is crucial to that – the sense of sharing and equality and feasting in the presence of Christ this is where we are tending to.

And so when we look at things going wrong in our present society, we are to evaluate them by the Kingdom and say what can we do in this particular situation which is more like living in the Kingdom and then we are of course to live it out. That’s an image from Nigeria where they call oil “The devil’s tears”. And so one of the first things that we need to do and I’ll come back and say a bit more about this at the end, one of the first and most important things that we need to do is to turn away from the use of oil, and start to structure our societies and economies on the basis of non-fossil fuel use. That doesn’t mean no energy, it doesn’t mean no electricity, it does mean much more local work, much more local economy, especially local production of food. When that cheap and easy energy gets taken away we are not going to get food flown here from Kenya or New Zealand.

And we do have a vision held out to us of what the Promised Land is and what’s interesting I think in the Old Testament is that it’s a very material vision held out – the land flowing with milk and honey, material wealth is not to be scorned in and of itself. God doesn’t want us to starve, he’s not punitive in that sense, we can’t serve both God and mammon. We have to make a choice and if you seek first the Kingdom of God, then all these things will be given to you as well. But if we start to worship mammon then all sorts of bad things flow in consequence.

So I started to talk about the way in which we can look at the Bible in scripture as a resource for understanding our present ecological crisis, and I quoted Hosea 4, which describes the injustice and immorality being prevalent in the land of Israel, and it says – “Therefore the land mourns and the birds fly away, and the fish in the sea vanish and the cities are laid waste.” That the state of the world reflects the state of our society, if we are unjust then the world will reflect that back to us. We cannot disentangle poverty from looking after the environment, from the wider ecological understandings, they are closely tied in, and I think there are all sorts of resources in scripture for understanding ourselves as creatures within creation who have an obligation to be faithful and good stewards, that we are to tend the garden, not to destroy it for short term gain, which is what we have been doing for hundreds of years.

Coming back to the question of social justice I talked a little bit about poverty being widespread in the world, but especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and the collision that is going to take place between the rapidly growing populations, especially somewhere like the Middle East and Saudi Arabia and the lack of availability of resources for example, the lack of availability of water, that they are mining the ground water laid down over millions of years. When global warming gets into its stride, it’s already begun and those cities around the world that are dependant on glacier, melt water for their drinking water, like Lima in Peru, gets it’s drinking water from glaciers, when those glaciers go, and they are going at a rapid pace, there is going to be tremendous human suffering and tremendous human migration. This is what’s coming and this is the context where we need to share the wealth that we have.

I talked about foreign policy, another area of idolatry within our civilisation. About Sayyid Qutb, one of the founding fathers, philosophers of militant Islamism against whom we are engaged in the west in this long war. And you can’t defeat a philosophy with bombs – it needs hearts and minds and that means we must look to our own spiritual resources in order to meet the challenge. Because the challenge that Qutb makes to western society is not a trivial one, it is not a foolish or superficial one, it has profound accuracy in it, and it is also evil, it is also profoundly wrong in many ways, but his criticism is not stupid and it can’t be overcome by force of arms. If anything the opposite, to rely solely on the force of arms, plays into the narrative which he tells, whereby the western world is full of barbarians who have no sense of human value which is much of what I have just been saying. These are one of the ways in which the crisis which our society has begun going into are going to manifest themselves.

So in this context what are we to do? I think we are first and foremost to be faithful. Faithful is the one who calls, I think that’s from Hebrews, not to give up hope, not to give in to despair, but to keep the faith with the one who has gone before us and who shows us what it means to be human and how to live, that we are to walk in the path he trod. Unfortunately, as that Hosea passage goes on to say, God declares, after describing the immorality and the judgement being enacted upon the land, “With you is my contention O Priest.” The root of all the problems which the community faces lies in the apostasy of the clergy. It’s because, and I can tell you a long, eight or nine hundred year old story about how this happens, whereby those who are in charge of the church lose sight of the faith, they lose sight of the gospel, they turn away from the truth and theology becomes this academic subject with no practical relevance to how people live their life, and slowly, the fish rots from the head down. Slowly Christians get into the process of slaughtering each other, and there is a natural and necessary revulsion in the society against that slaughter. And you get the enlightenment acting against the church saying “These people are evil they will force you to do horrible things.” And those charges are not unjust. There have been some faithful witnesses, faithful witnessing communities, over the time, but broadly speaking western Christianity has been profoundly compromised, and we can see that even now, when the Anglican community get so caught up in it’s own internal business, when there is so much widespread suffering.
It brings to mind when Christ criticises the Pharisees, they are so concerned with tithing their dill and cumin that they reject the much weightier matters of the law and justice, so we are called to be faithful.

This quotation from one of my favourite theologians, Stanley Hauerwas, “We would like a church that again asserts that God not nations rules the world, that the boundaries of God’s kingdom transcend those of Caesar and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price”. That the church community is called to be distinct. We are called to be salt in the world, we are called to be the yeast in the bread, we are called to be the light shining on a hill, and when we simply become absorbed into the world and indistinguishable from the world then we are fit only to be trodden underfoot and discarded. We are called to show to the world what a different sort of community can be like and thereby draw people to it.

At the heart of it is keeping the Eucharist, breaking the bread and the wine which all the ecumenical summits agree is the source and the summit of Christian life, even the tutors at Spurgeon’s college, a chap called John Colwell, says, “The main purpose, the main worship of the church, should be meeting together on a Sunday morning to break bread and drink wine together.” And I went into what that meant in terms of the new covenant, that this is how we are put right with God and put right with the world and this is where we are taught and shaped as Christians, this is the heartbeat of the faith. It is not the entry way into the faith which is baptism, which has it’s own crucial importance, but it is for those who have come in this is where the abundance of life flows. We should maintain discipline, it is not a free for all. I talked about Alasdair MacIntyre and his image of those who are taught how to lay bricks and there is a tradition of bricklaying that it has been learnt and studied how to lay bricks and for someone who wants to learn to lay bricks, the best thing to do is to come in and learn at, be an apprentice to the master. That’s how it’s done. The skills, the practices are passed on from person to person. And of course, if someone comes in and says “I want to learn how to lay bricks but I’m not going to listen to you because my opinion is just as important.” They won’t learn.

And the idea that the training for example of clergy should be driven as much by personal choice and options or in fact the training and Christian formation of all the people who come into a church, the idea that personal choice is at the heart of how this proceeds is a nonsense. Imagine, just to bring this home, that someone was training to be a doctor, and in their first year at medical school they look at the syllabus and they say “I’m not sure I fancy doing anatomy this year, I think I would rather spend some time on, I don’t know, psychology, therapy.” You imagine that the school says, “Well, if you are interested in doing that, fine, but that won’t make you a doctor. To be a doctor you have to do, this, this, this and this, that is what being a doctor is.” And the way in which that sense of understanding what it is to be a Christian has been lost. It’s just one index, it’s just one sign of how far we have fallen away from what the faith means. There are certain things which are essential to actual living out the Christian life, the disciplines, which I’ll come on to. But that’s a picture by the way of the Amish, those of you who were here for my extensive rant against various churches might remember that I exempted the Amish from my criticisms, not because I agree with everything they agree with, that they believe, but because they are actively living out their faith. And they are a community who are shining as a light as we have seen after those awful murders of the school children.

So, I want to finish with what I call some pledges which are really trying to bring some of the preamble, that context into sharp focus, and sharp relief. This is a picture of Taize, tremendously successful ecumenical and extremely appealing to young people, Christian community in Southern France. Had a big influence on me, and at the heart of it, it is a highly disciplined community. It’s very difficult, it is almost impossible to be a Christian on your own, and it is very difficult for a Christian community to be a Christian community without maintaining some forms of discipline, some forms of structure, actually working together in a common purpose, in a common aim. It’s a bit like rowing, like the boat race, you have got eight beefy men and they are honed to work together in unison and together they can accomplish much more than any of them could do on their own, it’s the working together that makes a difference. And this is what I think the church, all churches are called to be. To be a community of people rowing in the same direction.

Question: What sort of community would we have to be in order to be the sort of people who live by our convictions? Stanley Hauerwas again.

1. Pray. It’s the foundation for everything else.

Everything I have being saying today might be wrong, everything I have been saying for the last few months could be wrong and the only way you will be able to discern, you and I, what is the truth is through prayer. Prayer is the foundation for everything else, and if we are to discern the will of God for each of us as individuals, for us as a community, then prayer is where we will begin.

2. Worship. Especially that breaking bread and wine.

It’s irreplaceable. It’s not the only form of worship. It’s not the only legitimate, and wonderful, and positive form of worship either. But it is essential, the breaking of bread and sharing of wine in the context of telling the story of who Jesus was and is and is yet to come. It is essential.

3. Abandon the idol of economic growth.

To use the jargon of economists, “Economic growth in our society now has negative marginal utility.” What that means is that as we grow a little bit bigger in terms of the economy, in terms of money and paper, the actual quality of life has become less, and there have been rather exhaustive, statistical analyses of this showing that actually our quality of life peaked in the late 60’s, early ’70’s. The quality of life for the people living in this country has got worse ever since, even those who are materially better off. You know there are various indices, there’s even one accepted by The Economist, you know the newspaper The Economist. They are quite robust, but it has become an idol in our society. Think of how often the politicians mouth the platitudes of needing to preserve growth, that you will be richer. And they do that because they are reflecting the desires and preferences of the voting population. I am not meaning to be, all the time, entirely cynical about the political class, lots of them are very noble in intent, but it is very difficult for them to stand up and say something against the idols of the age, if it means career suicide. If it means they just won’t be listened to, and to start to change that, to start to change the direction of the wind within which the politicians have to sail, means that communities need to change what they value. And we need to start looking more towards the quality of life, what actually allows for human flourishing, rather than simply repeating this economic cycle. That we buy more widgets so that the widget-makers can earn a living, so that they can buy more widgets, and keep the system ticking over.

And this will come to a real crunch, probably within a decade, fifteen years, when our society faces a choice – and the choice will be this, at that point there will be nowhere near enough oil flowing to keep our cars on the road, which will have widespread economic implications, and the choice which we will face is do we set up plants to convert coal into petrol, which can be done. But if we do that we can abandon any hope whatsoever of preventing global warming, which will be incomprehensibly destructive, if we switch to coal, because what that will do is simply give us one more generation of economic growth, another twenty, twenty five years. And then the coal will be exhausted so we will be back to square one, but in the meantime we will have destroyed the planet we live in, and that choice will be faced, within I’d say within fifteen years. Coal is the enemy of humanity. We need to switch away from, and make sure we don’t go down that road.

4. Switch to a green electricity supplier. Building on this and there
could be dozens of little points. Here is just a handful.

In other words one that will never use coal. It costs a little bit more, a few percent more. Of course beneath all this is conserve, actually use less, for all your electricity supplies, switch to a green electricity supplier.

5. Repudiate the aeroplane so far as is humanly possible.

For those who have got relatives in New Zealand or whatever, it is not straightforward to simply say “We are not going to use the aeroplane anymore”, because there are actually other priorities in life. Preserving links between families being one of the most important. But simply jetting off to Southern Spain for a fortnight in the sun, when this has a wholly disproportionate impact on global warming, because it’s not just about the oil that is used in flying the plane, it’s to do with the impact of flying the plane at that level in the atmosphere has, and the actual disruption it causes there.

6. Never set foot in a major supermarket.

The shops themselves are astonishingly wasteful of energy and if it is essential for you to get that something from Tesco and they are not going to have it in the shop up the road, which I believe is opening in July, they do home deliveries and home deliveries are a good thing, so it is not so much stop using Tescos, although I could argue for that, it is as much about not actually using the physical buildings themselves, because they are so astonishingly wasteful of energy. So that you have got chilled fish on open display while it is also warm enough for you to walk around in a shirt. To keep that system going requires a very complicated heating and chilling system which uses an awful lot of energy. If the Tesco buildings and supermarkets for example were to turn into warehouses so that the food was still available but was distributed, that would be a huge step forward in reducing our carbon emissions in this country, but of course it threatens the idol of choice, because we want to walk around the supermarket and say, “Oh, I fancy this, I fancy that.” A more disciplined approach might be needed.

7. Stop using the car. Or if you are using the car share it.

There’s a wonderful scheme – I’m hoping that we can start setting this up within the churches here for sharing car journeys. If someone is going to Colchester, we can get a little database running, saying, “Oh I can hitch a lift, share petrol costs.” We are going to have to do it anyway but this is a very easy and straightforward way of the church being this pioneer community showing where we have got to move to.

8. And of course, learn to grow your own vegetables.

I actually managed to grow a potato – success! I have broken the ice, stunning. So I am just beginning and I know there are many, many people here with great expertise in growing vegetables, but frankly we are going to need to have much more local sources of food, because the agricultural system itself is so dependent on fossil fuels, at every stage of the process, that it is one of the sectors that is going to be hit most hard by peak oil as it kicks in.

9. Share. Share to begin with simply with our own community.

I am very hopeful and optimistic that the computer systems and the internet will survive all this, because they can be incredibly useful. If for example there were people who had this a wonderful nice new Flymo which they used once a week to mow their lawn, why can’t that be shared amongst half a dozen families, so it takes what two hours depending on how big your lawn is to mow your lawn and that bit of equipment can be shared and used amongst the community, you know, reducing the amount of expenditure that needs to be done and actually bringing the community together. Another example we could set up a little our own DVD library, and again it can be done purely on the computer, no one has to shift things round, so that you look along who’s got what sort of film in the church community, and you say, “Ooh I want to watch that” and so you actually have some human contact with someone in your church community, and say, “Do you mind if I borrow your DVD of this film?” I mean simple, simple things, but it starts, and all these things can start to accumulate and the saving that are then generated can be distributed and given to various good causes. Last one.

10. Choose the human option.

This is a band called “Show of Hands”, Peter took me to go and see the other day, but what I was going for was this picture, although they probably do have a bit of electronic reproduction, you don’t have to have electronic reproduction to have good entertainment. If you are going to watch a film, like we were doing in here before, gather lots of people together to watch the film together, make it a much more human and interactive and social process. Or get people together to sing songs together, human entertainment rather than electronically reproduced entertainment, is what I mean by that. Because however much gloom I might sometimes come out with I do believe that on the other side of the crisis life will be incredibly good and positive, it will be much closer to the Promised Land, because our idolatries will have be forcibly removed from our way of life. But it will only be great and wonderful for those who get there, and frankly I think a large number of people won’t, because of the consequences of our past decisions as a society.

But there is a Promised Land, we will, there will be community, a human community, an advanced technological human community on the other side of these crises. But in order to, think of the crises as a great mountain, in order to get over the mountain we need to discard some of our heavy baggage and we need to lash ourselves together with rope and we need to work at it together in a disciplined way in order to get over the hump, to get past the mountain to get to the other side. And these I think are just indications of the ways in which we need to move, to leave behind some of the things which destroy human life, they destroy our own lives, they spiritually impoverish us, they destroy the physical lives of people in the planet. We need to leave these things behind in order to embrace a more fully human way of life. It will be difficult to get there, we will also have to go through the desert, but on the other side of the desert, here is a different image, there is the Promised Land.

I will be putting together all the material from these talks, ideally it will end up as a book, in the meantime I can supply the handouts but on the church web site all the talks are up to be listened to again and the power point presentations are available and the notes, so there will be a resource there. We are thinking about putting them on a CD for anyone who wants to use them again, but as I say hopefully they will come together in the form of a book when I have had a chance to polish it and remove all the things I come out and say where actually I’m not sure I really fully meant that!! There will hopefully be available a book bringing all this material together in the summer. Even if I have to self publish it, which is very easy now on the internet.

LUBH 12 – the nature of discipleship

Mainly about MacIntyre and Hauerwas.


LUBH 12 – the nature of discipleship

We are going to be exploring today the nature of discipleship, what it means to be disciples. Those of you who came to my talk on Stanley Hauerwas will recognise at least half of it and if you can’t remember who Stanley Hauerwas is, he’s the one who looks just like Derek. One of my favourite theologians. The nature of discipleship, this is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I am sure many of you will recognise him, he wrote an excellent book called the “Cost of Discipleship”, which is a sort of background influence to this, but I think he is an example of someone who actually lived differently as a result of his faith, he walked into some very dark places and he preserved the witness, so he is a good example of what I want to talk about. Now on the sheets there are several quotations, they are all from this chap called Stanley Hauerwas, an American theologian, and I am currently working through one of his books with the Ministry Team called “Resident Aliens”, most of the quotations are from that book, so that is quite readable if any of you want to pick up a copy.

This is a verse, “What sort of community would we have to be in order to be the sort of people who live by our convictions?” and that’s really the theme of what I wanted to describe today. Not so much the specific questions of what we do, that’s for the next and the last session, we will be going through quite specifically as a sort of conclusion to the whole sequence, the shape of life and the shape of choices that we will need to take in our present context. The real bit of theological background, what sort of thing is it? What sort of community would a church need to be to be the sort of people who live by our convictions?

I want to begin by talking about this chap called Alasdair MacIntyre who wrote a very influential book, came out I think in 1980, called “After Virtue”, and he’d tell the story that our understandings of morality and ethics has been profoundly fractured and we still have lots of language – the language of the virtues – but we no longer have a sense of the story within which they make sense. And he tells this parable to explain his perspective, and I am sure many of you will have heard me tell this parable before, but this one is worth retelling. He says imagine a time, one hundred years from now, when there has been a great crisis, perhaps a nuclear war or something like that, and for various reasons the scientific establishment have been taken to be responsible, and so there is this tremendous reaction against the scientific community and all the places of scientific learning are destroyed. The universities are destroyed, the laboratories are destroyed, the companies employing all the scientists are shattered and there is a real repudiation of science within the community.

And then after a generation or two generations the anger against the scientific community passes and you get a community of people who start to think “Well what was all this science about?” and they start to gather together the fragments of scientific learning, and they have some bits from Newton, and they have some bits from Einstein, and they have some bits from Darwin and so on. And they get all these different pieces and they don’t know how they fit together and so you have a development of some people who pursue the oxygen theory – which says we can understand our atmosphere by thinking about oxygen, and another group of people who pursue the Phlogiston theory – we think we can understand the atmosphere by talking about Phlogiston. (Phlogiston is the theory which was displaced by the theory of oxygen.) In other words, what you have got here is an evolution from people talking, scientists talking about the theory of Phlogiston to the people talking about oxygen, but once that story, that evolution has been taken away, there is no way of assessing which is the correct way to talk about things.

And what you have are lots of different communities, some people are devotees of oxygen, some people are devotees of Phlogiston, some people are devotees of Newton and absolute space and time, some people are devotees of Einstein and it’s all relative, etc, you understand the picture. That because the story, the narrative has gone, there is no longer any way of discerning what’s different and what’s best between the different alternatives.

Well MacIntyre’s argument is that exactly the same thing has happened to our understanding of moral theory – the virtues. And he essentially blames the enlightenment and we won’t go hugely into it, but he essentially blames enlightenment which has lost its sense of what it means to be human. We who live in enlightenment era civilisations, we no longer have a sense of what humans are growing towards and so the language, which we did have, which we have inherited from the previous few thousand years of Western civilisation, all of which assumed some aim of what it was to be a flourishing human being, that language no longer makes sense because we no longer have an idea of what it means to be human.

And what MacIntyre does is develop a theory which has become extremely influential which resets all our language of the virtues and so forth within a Christian context. And he was an atheist, he was a Marxist, I think he has still got lots of Marxist sympathies, but he has been received back into the Roman Catholic church, he is now one of the leading Roman Catholic theologians and the conclusion of his book “After Virtue”, is that we are looking for a new St Benedict. And it is documented that this is a big influence on Cardinal Ratzinger and his choice of name as a new Pope. So this is a very, very influential book. It’s one I have lots and lots of sympathy with.
Anyhow, that’s the bit of background context. He talks about practices. He says that we don’t know what the language does, what this language of virtue – so courage, honour, integrity, honesty – these are virtue descriptions. We don’t know what these words do without this sense of what human beings are moving towards and also without some sense of what they mean in practice. OK? That we are actually taught what these words mean in the context of certain ways of living, certain ways of behaving.

And so he says what the church in particular needs to do is to focus on these ways of life and he gives an example of bricklaying. And the way in which the practice of bricklaying is taught and is very much there is a master bricklayer and there is an apprentice and for the apprentice to learn how to lay bricks the apprentice has to do what the master says and listen and pay attention. Imagine that the apprentice comes in and says, “I know how to lay bricks already”, the actual – the practice of learning how to lay bricks doesn’t get up off the ground. There is an already existing tradition of laying bricks within which the master bricklayer has been trained and brought up and it involves all the language of laying bricks, I’m not a bricklayer but if there are people here who have done this, there must be ways of describing how you lay on the cement with your trowel, or how you set the bricks straight and all this sort of thing. There are ways of laying bricks which work, which are good, which make it a good practice, which make for a good strong wall that you have made with your bricks. And if the apprentice comes in a says “I already know how to do this, why don’t we do it a bit like this, this looks good”, then it is ignoring the whole tradition and the shaping of the language and the practice which has gone before, which has been proved and tested.

And he says this is really what the church is about. The church is like this community of master bricklayers, the church is there to shape those people coming into it so that they become qualified and able to carry on the discipline of laying the bricks, or being disciples, which is what we are going to get on to. That’s all background really.

Now this is an image you can see that the civilisation has been collapsing and we are living two hundred years really after the civilisation, what has shaped the values of the West has started to rot and we are living amidst the fragments. Any “Lord of the Rings” fans? I know there are some, did you watch the film? One of the ways in which the film was quite faithful to the book and it worked, because you often saw these monuments within the film that were never explained, they were just evidence of a prior culture that was clearly quite glorious and had gone, and all you had were the ruins. And this was Tolkien’s way of, if you like, portraying twentieth century, western civilisation, that it is living in the midst of the ruins. And it doesn’t quite realise all the glories that have gone before. And really our civilisation is in the same position. We are living in the midst of the ruins. And he is representing one of the monks, because of course, a monastery is a very good example is where disciples are formed, because you have a structure within which people come and within which people shape their lives around certain practices. Prayer and labour and hospitality and so forth, which shape them as disciples. I think, if you like, this is an image of where the church is called to go, to found something monastic.

Now the question of Christian character is a way in which MacIntyre talks about it. When someone has learnt the trade and the skill of laying bricks then they have changed, they have acquired traits of character. And in the same way, within the church once someone has been trained in the habits of Christian life their character has changed, they become the sort of people who don’t take offence at certain things, who are concerned about other things more, who display the fruits of the spirit. The love the joy, the gentleness, the peace and so on. That these are the virtues of Christian character and so the purpose of the church is to form people in precisely this Christian character. We are to set our minds on the things that are above. We are to be formed not by worldly values and worldly patterns, but by the light that is coming in from outside as it were, the sunlight.

Remember very early on I used the image where I had taken the dog for a walk and I saw these people in very early dawn light, before the sun had actually risen and they were digging for bait I think. So the light is coming, is coming up, we can see what it is to be a Christian, we can see certain things are now possible, whereas most people are still living in darkness; it is to live according to the light which is coming in, and that is what churches are called to do, to train people to live according to this light which is dawning.

So the key, the core point for the church is precisely this formation of character, what we can call the making of disciples. Because we are not actually in the business of converting people. We are not in the business of saving souls. Does that seem surprising? Jesus says, “Go and make disciples.” He doesn’t say, “Go and work out who is saved and who isn’t” He says, “Go and make disciples.” The salvation of someone’s soul is something which is utterly unknowable to us. We cannot know who is saved and who isn’t. What we can do and what we are commanded to do is make disciples. That is the business of the church. The salvation of someone’s soul is something belonging to God. We are not in that business, we are in a very related and closely attached business, but it is different. Make sense?

It’s the making of disciples that we are to be concerned with. Another quotation from Hauerwas, “We would like a church that again asserts that God is in charge of the world, that actually acts as if that’s true, that the boundaries of God’s kingdom are more important that Caesar’s, and that the task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly what discipleship is. This is the task of the church: to form disciples, to train people to live differently.

Now Hauerwas has this wonderful description, he says, “A church is precisely a community of character. This is where we learn what it means to be a Christian.” If you can’t learn how to love your enemies when you are in church, where will you ever be able to do that. Because here is the place where you come and you are gathered in the name of someone who is much bigger than our own concerns and squabbles. It is not that all Christians already enjoy each other’s company and get along perfectly, but here what it is to be a Christian is to sign up to something and say this is bigger than my own preferences, this is bigger than my own desires and choices and consequently, here I will learn to love someone with whom I have violent disagreements, because I believe the one who says to me, “Love each other as I have loved you.” And here I want to learn how to do it. It’s not like I come in already qualified to do it, here I want to learn what it is to love one another in that way, to not judge, to live without judging someone else, to live without being shocked by someone else. To say “I am a sinner, we are all sinners, let’s all gather together and hope for mercy.” Which is really what we do on a Sunday morning.

One of the aspects of this is that the practice, the actual living out of Christian faith, comes before the proclamation. And I will say a bit more about this as we go on, but the practice, the actual living out of the faith is foundational. Because that is what gives the words their weight. And so the practice is something which changes us on the inside and radiates out into our wider lives. And it is about being serious about our faith, taking the faith seriously, not paying lip service to it. Jesus saying, quoting, “This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” I will say a bit more about the importance of the heart a little bit later on. But it’s not about what we say, it’s about what we do, it’s the choices, it’s how we live.

And importantly, it involves obedience. Coming back to this question of the bricklayer. If the apprentice doesn’t obey the master bricklayer, he is unable to learn. If you have this community, doesn’t have to be bricklaying, it can be anything really, a community which embodies a certain way of living, certain practices, certain ways of doing things, and it says, “These are the things that we function by, these are the things which determine us, this is what we do,” and someone comes in and says, “Actually I don’t want to do any of those things, because I am not prepared to submit, then really that person coming in hasn’t joined the group at all. That doesn’t mean to say that they completely lose their ability to act on conscience or anything like that, but it is to say that within the practice of the community, without obedience there is no learning. Without some level of obedience there is no discipleship. And there is lots of stuff in the New Testament to support that.

Another quotation from Hauerwas, “That Christianity is unintelligible without witnesses.” Without the saints, the saints are the people who are exemplary in putting the faith into practice. The saints are the ones who show us what a Christian life looks like. Hence Mother Teresa. People whose practices exhibit their committed assent, you know people who live out what they believe. You can’t actually have the church without saints. Without the apostles, without those who were initially formed by Jesus whose main task was of course precisely gathering a handful of people together and training them as disciples.
It’s about doing. This is not a point that undermines the priority of grace, which is the great reformation level argument which has caused such havoc, which isn’t to say it wasn’t justified that Luther for example wasn’t right in protesting. To protest for the gospel is of course the imperative. But to emphasise this thing about doing, it is not to undermine the priority of grace. The wonderful prayers, the collects in the Book of Common Prayer, about “Go before us with your grace that all our works might be begun, continued and ended in you.” Grace precedes activity and anything which we do which is of God and displays God we are able to do by grace alone. So I am not arguing against the priority of grace at all. What I am saying is the strand which comes in through people like James and some of the Johannine letters, that unless we exhibit in our behaviour, something different, then grace is not having a purchase on our lives. It is about doing.

In the Book of Revelation, as I have quoted before, in the last judgement it says very explicitly, Chapter 20, “The dead will be judged according to their deeds.” This doesn’t mean that if we do the right thing we will have earned our salvation, it does mean that grace has fruit. And it is the fruits of our lives which we will be assessed on. Or Matthew 7, “Not everyone who calls me Lord, but those who DO the will of my Father.” Or from Micah, “What does the Lord require of us, but to DO justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly before our God.” And this is where it is worth saying something about the heart and about belief. When St Paul says, “Unless you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, then you shall not be saved.” And because of the enlightenment, western culture is very prone to misunderstand the second part of that, about belief.

Let me give you an example to bring it out. If you talk to a quantum physicist they might tell you that at the subatomic level there are things such as quarks and they are strange particles and there is a Higgs Boson and all this sort of thing, and you might say “I believe you, I believe that this is true,” and some more information goes into your head about the way in which physical reality is structured – that at the subatomic level there are quarks and they strange and they have Higgs Bosons and so on and so forth, and it makes absolutely no difference to how you live. In contrast, some beliefs change your heart. And the difference is that the beliefs which change your heart have an impact on how you live your life, your motivations change, and once your motivations change, the way you live out your actual life and your choices change. And it’s that latter sense that St Paul is talking about.

If we believe in our hearts that God raised Jesus from the dead and established him as our Lord, then we will do what he tells us to do. “If you love me, you will obey my commandments.” It’s about the transformation of the heart, which cannot but radiate outwards in how we relate to each other. If we experience the grace of being a forgiven sinner, then we will stop judging other sinners, for example. And so if you have someone who is caught up with a desire to judge and condemn and to exclude, I won’t name names, but I have someone in mind, not in this country, then that is a pretty clear instance that that heart has not been transformed. At least to that extent.

So this question of Christian ethics, ethos, the doings, our story is set against a different horizon. The world establishes the parameters for what it does and it says these are the things which are important, these are the foundational values – you must fear death, you must accumulate wealth, you must be socially respected – these sorts of things are the values, the foundational values of the world. And we as Christians have a different horizon against which we set the stories of our lives, that we are precisely not afraid of death, that we think that the repute of the world is to be scorned because we are foolish. To be a Christian is to be foolish in the sight of the world, we’re weird, we’re strange, I’ll come onto that. That’s something that might be the next one. We are aliens in the world. We don’t belong here and there is a profound sense in which we do belong here, we are creatures living within the creation.

But this book of Hauerwas, we are resident aliens, aliens in the sense of immigrants and we actually have our lives shaped by a different civilisation, a different culture one determined by Christ. He is the Lord of our culture, and therefore all the different cultures within the world which might want, seek to shape us are not for us final authorities. And so we are aliens. We have to get used to the fact that the world will see us like this. Hallelujah!

We must be weird for the sake of the gospel, except that we are weird. This is St Francis, just talking about some of the Christian virtues, I won’t say too much because of time, but one I really want to emphasise is imagination. That we are called to imagine the world differently to how it is. We have to have our imaginations formed by the Kingdom in order that the Kingdom may come. The chap who I have quoted before, an outstanding Old Testament teacher called Walter Brueggeman wrote a book called The Prophetic Imagination, and one of the core elements in that is he is saying that the Old Testament prophets first of all imagined and taught to the community that the world didn’t have to be the way it was, so Moses as the great pioneer of this – his first and most difficult and most important task was to go to the Hebrew slaves and say, “God doesn’t want you to be slaves any more. You don’t have to be slaves.” And this was unthinkable, they were born as slaves, they grew up as slaves, their parents and grandparents had died as slaves, that was the way of the world and the one who had the prophetic ministry went to them and said, “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

Those of you doing the Lent courses, William Wilberforce, “It doesn’t have to be like this.” God calls something new into being and if we train our imaginations to be formed by the Christian story, we are opening it up to hearing when God says, “It doesn’t have to be like this, I have a different form of life intended for you. One which allows you to be human, to flourish.” Another quotation from Hauerwas. When the church fails at this difficult and hard and challenging process of actually making disciples in obedience to our Lord’s command, when we stop forming people as Christians, then we are just trying to make people a little bit better. You know, be a bit nicer to each other. You know the Church has been captured by the world, all we are are people applying a little bit of oil to the machinery to stop the squeals when those who are suffering under injustice cry out. We are just trying to make the system run a bit better. And the Pastor becomes the Court Chaplain, presiding over the cult ceremonies or, worse, he becomes, she becomes the cult prostitute, trying to pander to the needs, the anxieties of the upwardly mobile middle-class.

That’s not what the church is here for. We are here for something rather more fundamental than that. We are called to live in the Kingdom and the thing about living in the Kingdom, in Christ’s Kingdom is that you come into conflict with the worldly kingdoms. “You cannot serve two masters, you will either love the one and you will hate the other.” I think Martin Luther King is a good example. The kingly powers of his time were accepting the injustices of racial segregation and he had the prophetic ministry of saying. “God doesn’t approve of this and it doesn’t have to be like this. Even if you have been born in this culture and your parents and your grandparents have absorbed all the teachings of this culture, this culture has got it wrong.” And God says, “It will be different.” God calls us into a different way of life.
And of course, the kingdom of this world killed him.

To claim Christ as King and Lord is inevitably political, it cannot but be political, it involves the way in which a community lives and if a community starts living according to different values, it will clash, there will be conflict with the world. One quotation. “Why did Jesus die? Why was he killed?” He wasn’t killed because he said, “Let’s be nice to one another, let’s be nice, pink and fluffy and love.” No-one’s going to be offended at that, that’s just pouring a bit of oil on the squeaky machinery. He was killed because he was a threat, a mortal threat to the powers that be. The religious authorities who were very comfortable thank you very much, “Yes we are the children we are assured of our salvation, that’s it, let’s get on and make lots of money.” Some contemporary echoes there. And he was killed by the political authorities, it was a political execution, it was the Roman state which killed him, because he challenged the state. This is precisely the way of the cross, that we are called to do. If we don’t come into conflict with the world, something is wrong, we are salt that has lost its flavour, worthy only to be trampled underfoot. We are to be different from the world. We are aliens here.

Another wonderful quotation, “Unable through our preaching, baptism and witness to form this visible community of people who are different and thereby by becoming the light to attract people to the light, unable to do that, we just lobby the political leaders to say, “Go on be nice, let’s try and reduce our carbon emissions a little bit.” It’s all displaced activism, it’s not that we change and we set up structures within which it is possible to live in this changed fashion, we just go along with the ways of the world. We become the big campaigning group, that actually puts the onus of decisions and changing of life somewhere else. Rather than it being within us, within the church community, it is all displaced, it’s elsewhere. Asking the culture to be a little less racist, a little less promiscuous, a little less violent.

That’s a picture of Taize, it’s a place that has had a big influence on me and it’s really just to say how the heart to re-emphasise really what I was talking about in the last session, the heart of what the Church is about is worship. Because worship is where we learn to be different. Worship is the primary means of making disciples. This is why worship and getting worship right is so important, because worship is where we come into the presence of God, formatively and we are formed differently. We hear the word, we share the sacrament and then that changes us. This is what worship is for. The Church is not primarily a campaigning group, it’s not primarily a social club, it does involve service to the world which is what liturgy originally meant. It’s like the public utilities, it’s what liturgy came from, public works.

But we are to be accountable to our worship, we are accountable to what we say on a Sunday morning. When we say we repent of our sins and all the things that divide us and all the ways in which we are destroying God’s creation, we are accountable to what we say, and if the rest of our week doesn’t reflect that, then what we say on a Sunday morning, we will be judged by our own words. Jesus says at one point, “Your own words condemn you.” He is quoting the King, “Your own words condemn you.” But that’s the position. We are here to witness to something different, and that is crucially what is going on in worship, that in worship we are precisely forming ourselves differently. And if we can’t see on the Sunday morning that we are being informed about something different, different priorities, we worship a different God to the God’s of the culture, then we have lost the point of what we are here for.

Our aim is precisely to show the light promised to us in the Kingdom, the life of the Kingdom. We are to be the first fruits of God’s redemption of the world, we are to show where the world is going to. And we can only do that by being different from the world. Final quotation, one of my favourite bits, “Our claim is not that this tradition will make sense to the world”. It won’t make sense to the world, you can’t justify this in terms of what the world values, because the world’s values are wrong. We can’t justify ourselves to the world and to try to justify ourselves to the world is a mistake. It will lead us into the wrong path. We are called to obey primarily Christ’s commands to us. The claim is not that it makes sense, the claim is that it is true. That God really is the one that is revealed in Jesus, that God isn’t unlike Jesus, that God shows us who he is, what his purposes are for us. We claim that this is the truth, and we live by that truth. We allow that truth to shape us, to control our choices, and therefore we live differently. Unless we actually live differently we are failing to be Christians. Which sets us up for the next and final session, when I shall try and indicate how differently we are called to live today.

[Q] Are we eventually going to be drowned unless the church goes out and starts trying to pull people in and oiling a few wheels?

I am going to reply to that what might seem obliquely, the story about the Russian church, which was very severely circumscribed under Communism and they basically said, “Look if you allow us to keep our liturgy, we won’t say anything else. We won’t criticise the politicians.” And the politicians thought, “Alright, we’ll do that.” And therefore, although there was lots of oppression of Christians, the actual practice of worship was maintained. And there is this description of what was going on in the churches in the late eighties where there church buildings were dilapidated and all you had in the church in Russia were half a dozen old ladies keeping things going. And yet twenty years later the churches there are completely transformed and resurrecting in a powerful sense and that’s only possible because of that faithful witnesses of those half a dozen old ladies keeping the fire going.

[Q] Wasn’t there also the underground church?

Yes. It’s interesting though that the underground church goes straight back to the public churches, redoes the public churches, re-engages in the public liturgy. There was an awful amount of underground stuff, but I think the same applies today, there is an awful lot of stuff going on underneath the surface, even if we just look at what is going on on the surface in the Church of England or the other churches, the Methodists have got the hardest task ahead of them that the Church of England is only a little bit behind. There is all sorts of things going on, bubbling on underneath the surface. What I am saying is that we don’t need to despair because of what we can see on the tip of the iceberg, because God will not let the gates of hell prevail against the church. Also there is, I think there is an awful lot that we can do. Even, you know, the people gathered here. We start where we are and if we move in the way that God is calling us to move, he will strengthen it, he will support it, he will bless it, if it is of God, it will be blessed. Is that an answer?

[Q] We have just come back from a church in Sevenoaks of 700 people where the average age is 35, so we must try and see the bigger picture.

I think there are lots of very, very successful church groups bringing in young people, Causeway is one. You know Causeway on the Island, lots and lots of teenagers and twenty somethings.

[Q] The interesting thing is that when one of our leaders gets up and speaks, you get well the thing that he goes on about is well I was once a drunk, nothing’s changed.

Exactly. That’s what I was saying about believing in the heart, it changes the life. That which was seen as of value before is now seen as worthless, and actually the things which give life are actually embraced and the lives are transformed, the result of embracing that which gives life.

[Q] There is a community in Canada who won’t have blood transfusions for their children, but the courts came in and made them give a blood transfusion and that is a Christian community and this is the way they want to live, but politicians …

Sorry which is the Christian community?

The Jehovah’s witnesses, the religious community.

[Q] And they said this is how we want our lives to be lived, but their community isn’t being allowed to live how they want to, and I have seen it is being played out in our courts as well, I mean there is just this ongoing, it is always going to be there, the battle between the community and what people think should happen. So I don’t really know, is it going to be something.

People’s choices.

[Q] We’re not being allowed to have them.

This goes back to the thing about obedience, especially in North American culture, personal choice is exalted as an idol and if you transgress this idol of personal choice then you must be doing something wrong, but just to come back to that specific example about blood transfusions to give a theological critique if you like, it flows from a particular reading of particular Old Testament passages about the blood being the life and so forth, but it is manifestly something which destroys life in this world, so what you have is a doctrine which is directly destructive of life in this world. Now I am not really convinced that that is what God is intending, but for example, children should be allowed to die when the option for saving a child’s life is present. 48.15