I remember as a fifteen year old, on a trip to relatives in
Holland, coming across the music of Tom Paxton. I felt like I had stumbled into
heaven. Soon the likes of Tom’s successors - Bert Jansch, John Renbourne, Paul
Simon and James Taylor – were giving me guitar lessons. Not that they knew it,
of course: I simply played their LP’s on my merciless record player until they
were irretrievably scratchy - but at
least I could play some of the most difficult passages. My education was supplemented
by weekly trips to the White Horse in Reading where I joined bearded
guitar-wielding hippies and other fresh-faced lads like myself nursing
under-age pints (which we made last the whole evening) as we worshipped the
guitar. I could soon finger-pick with the best of them and blew all my savings
on a wonderful instrument which cost me seven pounds and bore the label ‘Hi
Spot, Foreign’.
Friday, 18 May 2012
Monday, 12 March 2012
The Art of Being Human
In my teaching I find myself, occasionally, reminding my students that they are human beings, not human doings, for surely one of the consequences of the information age is a relentless doing? In London there are those who bring sleeping bags to work, who eat gazing at handhelds, who travel talking into mobile phones, and who do their deals ‘after’ work over a pint. I remind my students that at times it is good to take one’s foot off the accelerator — to simply be, for are we or are we not human beings? It has to be said that Christians are, on the whole, equally manic: great at doing things, not least some pretty exhausting services on the ‘sabbath’. Perhaps this is why within popular (I would use the term ‘unthinking’) Christianity there is a lot of talk about the afterlife, conceived in terms of clouds, interminable hymn-singing, gazing on divine glory, and, generally, taking a well-earned rest.
Monday, 12 December 2011
Reading the Bible Again - Again!
A response to Czech theologian Dan Drapel's article, 'Odpověď Johnu de Jongovi' (Reply to John de Jong)
.At the beginning of this year I wrote a short article called Reading the Bible Again which looked very briefly at some of the issues surrounding truth and the bible. Czech theologian Dan Drapel responded by posting a lengthy article on his website (in Czech) accusing me of treating the whole bible as a mythical work. This was not my intention, nor is it my belief. I therefore took the time to respond to Dan's article, and this is reproduced below for those who are interested in such things! (I am sorry I cannot post Dan Drapel's article here, but you will get a feel for the issues from my response.)
Reading the Bible Again - Again!
First of all, I would like to thank Dan for taking the time to respond to my article ‘Reading the Bible Again’. It is very healthy to have such discussions and debates, and I am glad that Dan and I are substantially agreed. As this response from Dan has been posted on his website, I would like to take a few moments to correct some misconceptions about my position and to make a few further comments.
A few preliminary words about motivation. The article I wrote – ‘Reading the Bible Again’ – was intended to encourage people to read the bible, and was designed to provoke those who make truth claims about its literality, inerrancy or infallibility without proper reflection. Or those who use the term ‘The Word of God’ as if the book was a deity. If such views become foundational to faith there is a danger – and this is something I observe in the Czech Republic – that Christianity becomes more about believing the ‘right’ things than following Jesus.
Monday, 15 August 2011
Healing Society
The recent rioting and looting on the streets of England have triggered an avalanche of comment from politicians of all colours, peppered with phrases such as ‘social deprivation’, ‘the breakdown of family values’, ‘no stake in society’, and so on. Deep conversations try to fathom why, within certain localities, there is an inbuilt desire for self-destruction — the social equivalent of a disturbed teenager slashing her wrists with a kitchen knife. Some have even tried to paint a Dickensian picture of social stratification, equating today’s looters with those that, until not so long ago, were hung for stealing a loaf of bread. The solution — according to this analysis — is simply to pump more money into deprived housing estates, presumably so the kids can go out and buy their own designer clothes without the trouble of stealing them.
Monday, 18 July 2011
The prism in the prison: a short tour of reality
I feel like apologising for a rather long article, but on the basis that this blog is supposed to be documenting a spiritual journey, I thought I’d include it. Hope it's encouraging. So here goes...
The ultimate boundary, the threshold, if you like, of the carceral realm in which we live, is death. Space and time may well stretch beyond the horizons of infinity, but for fallen mortals this is of little comfort if the end of our travels, the destination of the journey, is oblivion. The irony is that The Fall was an attempt to become god-like; a sudden dash for freedom — to flee from the ‘tyranny’ of subservience to God. Ironic because we exchanged an infinite divine horizon for a finite one, and found ourselves trapped in what philosophers optimistically call ‘totality’, an immanent sphere divorced from the transcendent. (SEE NOTE 1)
The great divorce
The effect of the Fall — however one conceives that primordial divorce of humankind from the divine — was to close us off from eternity: we were exiled from the Garden of Eden. (6) At first sight it might seem as though we were sent out into an eternal night, a limitless expanse of time and space — exiled wanderers, banished for ever from the ‘island’ Garden, now guarded by angelic sentinels. (The picture that comes to mind is that of an impoverished local populace excluded from some a lavish health resort built by a foreign investor.) This picture though, in many senses, reverses reality, for is it not the Garden that is the threshold of eternity, and the ‘exterior’ that is bounded?The ultimate boundary, the threshold, if you like, of the carceral realm in which we live, is death. Space and time may well stretch beyond the horizons of infinity, but for fallen mortals this is of little comfort if the end of our travels, the destination of the journey, is oblivion. The irony is that The Fall was an attempt to become god-like; a sudden dash for freedom — to flee from the ‘tyranny’ of subservience to God. Ironic because we exchanged an infinite divine horizon for a finite one, and found ourselves trapped in what philosophers optimistically call ‘totality’, an immanent sphere divorced from the transcendent. (SEE NOTE 1)
Thursday, 7 July 2011
Hard Times
It’s a pretty tough time in the UK at the moment. People are feeling the financial pressures, businesses are squeezed. I often feel discouraged — as I’m sure you do — when you have to watch every penny and tighten your belt. This morning I started to write a song called ‘Summertime’, the first verse goes like this:
Summertime and the living ain’t easy
Fish aren’t jumping, and the cotton is dry
Africa is burning and thirsty
And her fever is running high
It’s at times like these that we face difficult choices: do we bow to pressure, bury our dreams for another day, and go into survival mode, or do we hold our course — pursue those things that we feel called to do?
It’s a difficult question. I’m a firm believer in common sense. Too many Christians, so it seems to me, make the most strange (some might even say foolish) decisions based on whims and fancies without taking into account any practical factors. Surely God expects us to be sensible? There is a fine line between faith and presumption: blaming God for patently poor decisions seems a bit rich.
On the other hand, are we not called to a walk of faith? The danger is that we become so fixated upon immediate practicalities that we fail to see the bigger picture, fail to hear the prompting of God (which, to borrow a phrase from Boris Pasternak, is often no louder than a heartbeat), and become merely reactive to circumstances.
This week I read a piece of advice given by George MacDonald in a letter to his son in 1879. The MacDonald family had just suffered the loss of two of their beloved children, and George was asking himself whether his own failures or presumptions had contributed to their deaths. He confessed to facing ‘an Apollyon of unbelief', yet he gave this advice to his son:
Take care, my boy, lest you should ever lend ear to the advice of any with whom 'prudence', so-called, is the first thing.
Yes, we must be wise and make practical decisions, but sometimes — at least if we claim to be followers of Jesus — we have to walk into the unknown, trusting that he really is leading us. Would slavery have been abolished if Wilberforce had listened to the voice of prudence? Would England have experienced spiritual renewal if Wesley had listened to the voice of prudence?
In a few months I am starting PhD studies at King’s College in London. Prudence tells me to give up — that finances are insufficient, that London is too far away, that I’m too old, and so on. My heart tells me that this is a call on my life I must follow. Two things encourage me to go on. Firstly, I’m a firm believer that true hearts will be led into truth — if you or I are genuinely attempting to follow Jesus, I sure he’s capable of leading us in the right direction. Secondly, as has been pointed out, people on their deathbed do not moan with regret about not having spent more time at the office: most regret not having taking enough risks. So, with a mixture of excitement and fear, I am taking a big risk.
I hope that in these hard times God will be with you on your journey as you trust your decisions to him.
Summertime and the living ain’t easy
Fish aren’t jumping, and the cotton is dry
Africa is burning and thirsty
And her fever is running high
It’s at times like these that we face difficult choices: do we bow to pressure, bury our dreams for another day, and go into survival mode, or do we hold our course — pursue those things that we feel called to do?
It’s a difficult question. I’m a firm believer in common sense. Too many Christians, so it seems to me, make the most strange (some might even say foolish) decisions based on whims and fancies without taking into account any practical factors. Surely God expects us to be sensible? There is a fine line between faith and presumption: blaming God for patently poor decisions seems a bit rich.
On the other hand, are we not called to a walk of faith? The danger is that we become so fixated upon immediate practicalities that we fail to see the bigger picture, fail to hear the prompting of God (which, to borrow a phrase from Boris Pasternak, is often no louder than a heartbeat), and become merely reactive to circumstances.
This week I read a piece of advice given by George MacDonald in a letter to his son in 1879. The MacDonald family had just suffered the loss of two of their beloved children, and George was asking himself whether his own failures or presumptions had contributed to their deaths. He confessed to facing ‘an Apollyon of unbelief', yet he gave this advice to his son:
Take care, my boy, lest you should ever lend ear to the advice of any with whom 'prudence', so-called, is the first thing.
Yes, we must be wise and make practical decisions, but sometimes — at least if we claim to be followers of Jesus — we have to walk into the unknown, trusting that he really is leading us. Would slavery have been abolished if Wilberforce had listened to the voice of prudence? Would England have experienced spiritual renewal if Wesley had listened to the voice of prudence?
In a few months I am starting PhD studies at King’s College in London. Prudence tells me to give up — that finances are insufficient, that London is too far away, that I’m too old, and so on. My heart tells me that this is a call on my life I must follow. Two things encourage me to go on. Firstly, I’m a firm believer that true hearts will be led into truth — if you or I are genuinely attempting to follow Jesus, I sure he’s capable of leading us in the right direction. Secondly, as has been pointed out, people on their deathbed do not moan with regret about not having spent more time at the office: most regret not having taking enough risks. So, with a mixture of excitement and fear, I am taking a big risk.
I hope that in these hard times God will be with you on your journey as you trust your decisions to him.
Friday, 6 May 2011
God's truth police
Rob Bell’s book Love Wins has provoked a predictable (and somewhat tiresome) debate among Christians, with accusations of universalism, heresy, and the erosion of truth taking centre stage. (The idea that God might be nice seems to be a shock for many.) As I read the vitriolic comments it appears to me that a central issue remains unaddressed, and it concerns the heart of Christianity — truth.
Joni Mitchell, in a rare moment of optimism back in 1969, sang: ‘We are stardust, we are golden,’ adding the disclaimer (which must have sounded somewhat hollow in the light of Vietnam) — ‘but we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.’ The problem is that there is no father with whom to walk in the cool of the day in the garden of nihilism, instead we find pessimists like Schopenhauer who pat you on the head and say: ‘There, there. Life is but a pimple on a sea of cosmic puss.’ Hardly the stuff that dreams are made of. But I’m not here to critique nihilism: of more concern to me is the presence of an impostor walking in the Christian garden, claiming to be God. (He is not alone: it seems to me that philosophical pessimists and divine impostors seem, with perverse delight, to enjoy each other’s company and are walking with temerity in the garden with most believers seemingly unaware of the irony.)
Who left the door of the garden open?
This question — simple though it sounds — strikes at the core of the problem: it assumes a walled garden, or (speaking plainly) it assumes truth is bounded, settled, verifiable — a law that has passed onto the statute book. It is the naive act of encircling a very finite portion of the infinite and calling it ‘truth’ — ‘forgetting (as George MacDonald reminded us) that the more perfect a theory about the infinite, the surer it is to be wrong.’ In the act of reducing truth to mere dogma, I fear that we have excluded God from his own garden, and opened the door to impostors.
How is this possible? Two brief comments: first, concerning the myth that Christianity concerns what you believe as if — on entry to heaven — angels are standing there with clipboards to verify orthodoxy. (‘Did you believe in (a) infant baptism, or (b) adult baptism, or (c) the irrelevancy of baptism?’ Tick.) Is not the question more likely to be ‘are you a friend of Jesus?’ The response ‘I never knew you’ seems likely for many with a contractual approach to faith, who demand their ‘rights’ as Christians and constantly remind God of his promises and, yes, who feel it their duty to be God’s truth police forgetting that humility and servanthood are evidence of a true heart, not doctrinal purity.
Which brings me to my second point. It seems we live in an age when Christians have forgotten that ‘Christian’ means following Jesus (not believing in him — even demons do that), and just as Jesus is never static, so Christianity is a movement not a monument (after all, the first Christians were known as those who followed The Way). Have we forgotten that he is also the Truth? The problem is this: as soon as orthodoxy is defined in terms of circumscribed reductions of truth (however plausible), those who subscribe to this emasculated fragment of infinity feel it their duty to defend it. And W.H. Auden rightly observed: ‘those who believe it can be a duty to die for the truth can come all too easily to believe that it is also a duty to kill for it.’ Thus our peaceful faith is filled with those whose ‘teeth are spears and arrows, whose tongues are sharp swords’ (Psalm 57).
Such ‘truth’, instead of being a prism for infinite beauty, becomes a prison, a bounded assertion, a walled garden where only thorns and briars grow, guarded not by edenic angels, but by god’s self-appointed truth police. The problem is, this god has a small ‘g’ and the police have forgotten there is back door.
Joni Mitchell, in a rare moment of optimism back in 1969, sang: ‘We are stardust, we are golden,’ adding the disclaimer (which must have sounded somewhat hollow in the light of Vietnam) — ‘but we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.’ The problem is that there is no father with whom to walk in the cool of the day in the garden of nihilism, instead we find pessimists like Schopenhauer who pat you on the head and say: ‘There, there. Life is but a pimple on a sea of cosmic puss.’ Hardly the stuff that dreams are made of. But I’m not here to critique nihilism: of more concern to me is the presence of an impostor walking in the Christian garden, claiming to be God. (He is not alone: it seems to me that philosophical pessimists and divine impostors seem, with perverse delight, to enjoy each other’s company and are walking with temerity in the garden with most believers seemingly unaware of the irony.)
Who left the door of the garden open?
This question — simple though it sounds — strikes at the core of the problem: it assumes a walled garden, or (speaking plainly) it assumes truth is bounded, settled, verifiable — a law that has passed onto the statute book. It is the naive act of encircling a very finite portion of the infinite and calling it ‘truth’ — ‘forgetting (as George MacDonald reminded us) that the more perfect a theory about the infinite, the surer it is to be wrong.’ In the act of reducing truth to mere dogma, I fear that we have excluded God from his own garden, and opened the door to impostors.
How is this possible? Two brief comments: first, concerning the myth that Christianity concerns what you believe as if — on entry to heaven — angels are standing there with clipboards to verify orthodoxy. (‘Did you believe in (a) infant baptism, or (b) adult baptism, or (c) the irrelevancy of baptism?’ Tick.) Is not the question more likely to be ‘are you a friend of Jesus?’ The response ‘I never knew you’ seems likely for many with a contractual approach to faith, who demand their ‘rights’ as Christians and constantly remind God of his promises and, yes, who feel it their duty to be God’s truth police forgetting that humility and servanthood are evidence of a true heart, not doctrinal purity.
Which brings me to my second point. It seems we live in an age when Christians have forgotten that ‘Christian’ means following Jesus (not believing in him — even demons do that), and just as Jesus is never static, so Christianity is a movement not a monument (after all, the first Christians were known as those who followed The Way). Have we forgotten that he is also the Truth? The problem is this: as soon as orthodoxy is defined in terms of circumscribed reductions of truth (however plausible), those who subscribe to this emasculated fragment of infinity feel it their duty to defend it. And W.H. Auden rightly observed: ‘those who believe it can be a duty to die for the truth can come all too easily to believe that it is also a duty to kill for it.’ Thus our peaceful faith is filled with those whose ‘teeth are spears and arrows, whose tongues are sharp swords’ (Psalm 57).
Such ‘truth’, instead of being a prism for infinite beauty, becomes a prison, a bounded assertion, a walled garden where only thorns and briars grow, guarded not by edenic angels, but by god’s self-appointed truth police. The problem is, this god has a small ‘g’ and the police have forgotten there is back door.
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