Reconsideration of "The Rood"

After I finished writing my last Blopost here, I walked downstairs to make a coffee, and immediately realised I’d missed a whole area of reflection. I’d taken a completely negative view of the contextualisation implicit in The Dream of the Rood, missing the (very obvious) positive aspect, and the necessary nuance (and risk) involved in any attempt at contextualisation.

Wages of (Social) Sin

With the recent verdict in the George Floyd case, and the British government report on race, it seems appropriate to share some thoughts on the different levels of sin, and and their social aspects. In evangelicalism especially, we concentrate on the individual and neglect the collective effects of sin. Since this is a blog, my account will necessarily be sketchy and brief. 

Mission By Accident?

Several decades ago, I was interrupted by a phonecall from a Christian community worker I knew. Could we accommodate twenty Kurdish refugees from Turkey? They’d just arrived at Heathrow and the government didn’t know where to put them.

Over the next six months, a hundred came and slept in our church building, as our small congregation (20-30 people) gave money, and helped practically, to look after these arrivals. Other churches joined in: from Protestant and Catholic, Evangelical and Liberal, backgrounds. 

Critiquing Black Lives Matter

I’ve heard Christians criticise BLM for several reasons:

 

 

 

 

1. It’s political.

2. Not only ‘black’ lives matter: white lives, and those of other minorities, also matter.

3. It supports other ideas, besides racial justice, which Christians shouldn’t support.

4. It is a Marxist, or terrorist, organisation.

5. It is violent. 

Back to Life. Back to Virtuality.

I was woken up at 4am last night, by a party outside our house. The relaxation of lockdown is bringing people out into the streets and parks. Recently, several beaches were crowded by hordes of holidaymakers, completely ignoring social distancing. And pubs overflow their seating on our pavements. That it is mainly the young doing this reflects the state of their hormones, and their innate desire to mix and mingle. It also instantiates Mikhail Bahktin’s concept of the “carnivalesue”: that people occasionally need to let rip.

White Consciousness and Black Lives Matter

(My friend Nathan McGuire asked me to write this for his blog. You can see the article there - https://www.nathanlmcguire.com/blog/white-consciousness-and-black-lives-matter)

It could have been expected that the worldwide Covid pandemic would produce worldwide socio-political convulsions. The health crisis has brought to the surface deep underlying inequalities and injustices. In particular, of course, we see this in the unrest and uprisings sparked by the killing of a black man in Minneapolis. In one sense, nothing unusual; we’ve seen many of these. But coming during the tensions caused by inefficient and unjust responses to Coronavirus, it exploded into a global reaction.

Guilt

I feel guilty. I am not organising food banks or supplies for people during the Covid crisis. Am I reverting to type – my fundamentalist conversion during the tail-end of the Jesus movement overflow in Lancashire? Other churches seem to be doing so much – large ones like KXC starting up a brand new food bank, and smaller churches like Angel Baptist, and Notting Hill Community Church, feeding over 200 people every day with hot meals.

Crying over Corona

I have seen some Christian preachers online, who are calling this Covid-19 epidemic a sign of God’s judgment on the world. Another group, among which I suspect I sometimes fall, don’t go that far. They just say it’s a sowing and reaping of what we have produced in our way of life.

The problem is that, whether true or not, there is a gleeful delight in many of these commentators; an apparent pleasure in the disaster, a satisfaction that sinners are getting their comeuppance. But the proper stance of the prophet is to weep.

Prophecy and the Virus

What is the calling of a prophet in times like these? Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann suggests the prophetic ministry has two facets: criticising and energising. When the regime is most stable and prosperous, the prophet’s vocation was to point out the rot within the system, the injustice and oppression, which went on, often in the name of the religion. However, when times were hard, and the nation was in exile, it was prophet’s task to articulate hope, and the sense of the future, to indicate God’s new beginning, his new creation, for the nation.

Prosperity Theology: The Materialisation of Faith

Prosperity Theology contains a dirty little secret – that it possesses a kernel of truth. And this is an intuition that God cares – about our personal and material lives; which entails an active Divine opposition to everything that demeans our existence – in this case: illness and poverty.

Here it’s similar to another Twentieth Century theological development – Liberation Theology. Together, these re-introduced a ‘materialisation of faith’. While Prosperity Theology was individualistic and politically conservative, and Liberation Theology collectivist and left-wing, both highlighted the rediscovery of eschatology, specifically the doctrine of the Kingdom of God.

The Berlin Wall and Christian Dissent

Recently it was the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which harbinged the collapse of Communism throughout Eastern Europe. This celebration also highlighted the role of dissent, which involved different ideological positions, including many Christian intellectuals.

Do we not need an underground Christian resistance movement in the contemporary West? Of course, we do not live under a totalitarian regime. But we do live in one that is ‘totalising’. Totalitarianism is a deliberate system of ideological conformity. In the West, under cover of official pluralism, we inhabit a totalising system which imposes a single view of reality.

Sorry, J. John...

I write this with a heavy heart. I hate disagreements, and when people criticise me, so I am loathe to do it here. Nevertheless…

J. John is a superb evangelist, and a very funny man. However he has just written a blog on the Premier Christianity website. He’s taking issue with the matter of political correctness; responding to the BBC’s declared support for diversity, criticising for example the white middle class male, erstwhile counter-cultural heroes, like Monty Python.

Prophecy For Today

“But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.” Amos 5.24

I remember when I was a student, and noticed this verse for the first time. It helped me realise that God’s Word was not just spiritual, but also political. It also revealed the nature of the prophetic calling, the means whereby God warns his people of impending judgment for their injustice (3.7-8).

Naturally, the ruling class never wants to hear this word of Divine correction, so prophecy is frequently forbidden (2.11-12). But God challenged prophecy’s domestication by a caste of professional prophets, through calling this ex-shepherd (7.14-16).