Category: God talk

That’s theology by any other name

A Chuckle from the King James Version

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The Authorized / King James Version of the Bible isn’t exactly known as a book full of laughs. But I got a chuckle from it yesterday, seeing something I’ve never seen or thought of before. In Numbers 22, part of the story of Balaam and his ass:

27And when the ass saw the angel of the LORD, she fell down under Balaam: and Balaam’s anger was kindled, and he smote the ass with a staff. 28And the LORD opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times? 29And Balaam said unto the ass, Because thou hast mocked me: I would there were a sword in mine hand, for now would I kill thee. 30And the ass said unto Balaam, Am not I thine ass, upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day? was I ever wont to do so unto thee? And he said, Nay.

Read it aloud, and it sounds as if, when the ass has started to speak like a man, the prophet Balaam started to speak like an ass. It would be lovely to think the King James translators had that in mind when they translated לֹא as Nay instead of just No. But I suppose it’s too much to hope for.

The Times We Live In

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Looking at the world news, I keep being reminded of these words from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings:

‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo. 
‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’

Whether our world is in quite such a bad way as Middle Earth in its Third Age, when Sauron seemed on the point of regaining the One Ring To Rule Them All — that’s possibly debatable. Though to read some of the social media and opinion posts that I can’t help seeing, you might think the debate was pretty much settled. Things really are that bad.

There is so much anxiety, fear, hatred (doesn’t seem too strong a word for it) between groups of people who disagree about politics, religion, or simply, the truth about facts. We hate, because of what seems to us to be the extreme evil of the others’ beliefs, thoughts, words, policies, actions. When Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet to discuss the future of Ukraine, without any reference to the views of the Ukrainian people who have so bravely resisted Russian aggression for three years… how can we not think of other times when great powers have simply partitioned and plundered smaller eastern European neighbours? When the UN debates a resolution condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the United States joins with Russia, Belarus and North Korea in voting against the resolution… how can we not feel our times slipping into madness and chaos?

The great danger of such times of anxiety, fear, and hatred, is that they cause us to dehumanize those ‘others’ that we disagree with. We believe the worst about them, which may be based on exaggerated reports or opinions, or even ‘fake news’ — just as their opinions of us may be. Maybe we even want them to be worse than they are, to be as bad as we suspect them of being, because that gives us better grounds to hate them.

I was struck today by some words C. S. Lewis wrote some 80 years ago in Mere Christianity, about forgiveness.

Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves — to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good. That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not.

How would it be, if, instead of reading, and weltering in, and commenting on, and passing on all the negative comments and judgments about the people we dislike, we tried to forgive them? To wish for, and pray for, their good? And yes, that might mean praying for them to change, or be changed. 

Of course, if we did that… and if they did change… we wouldn’t have any reason or excuse to go on hating them. Am I just imagining that that might be the real problem?

Man of the Borderlands

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One of the things I do remember about that St Albans diocesan clergy conference in 1971, was one of the small discussion groups I was part of. One of the chapters in the book of preparatory reading, included the thought that, in order to engage with contemporary culture, Christians would need to be ‘people of the borderlands’, as Jesus was. Bridging the gap between people who were usually considered to be ‘in’, and those who were considered to be ‘out’.

I was taken with this idea. So much so that in between sessions I was inspired to write a poem about it. Not only that, but also to share that poem in the small group session. (I now think that was a bit bold, maybe presumptuous, for a brand new curate. But maybe I was too young to know better.) The poem:

God’s Debatable Lands

We all are people who fight shy of borders:
we want to life safe, deep in black, or white;
are creatures of light or darkness, fearing twilight.
Look how we build up fences against marauders,
miles, miles of wire that shout mankind’s disorders
in empty lands. There Love cannot alight —
it is a frightened bird flung into flight,
a beaten madman cringing from his warders.

Loving our brittle refuge better than God,
we shun his country, the Debatable Lands.
— But then, by brambly ways we never trod
there comes to us, with broken, bleeding hands
which hold out risk, and healing — not a rod —
our Jesus, Christ, the Man of the Borderlands.

You’ll notice, maybe, that it’s a sonnet. Malcolm Guite writes more of them. And better.

Stewards of the Mysteries of God

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In the course of nearly six decades of adult life, with numerous changes of address, most of them upsizing to a larger house, but latterly including a major downsize, we’ve acquired large numbers of books. Anyone who thinks ‘too many’ is clearly not One Of Us – for We all know there is no such thing as too many books. Nevertheless, there comes a time when downsizing means there will not be enough shelf space for all of our books… and certainly not enough for all the books we are bound to continue to buy. So during those six decades, we have not only acquired, but also from time to time shed books.

I’ve often wondered about the criteria for deciding which books to get rid of, and which to keep. Sometimes it’s easy enough: ‘I hated that’, or, ‘I’m never going to want to read that again.’ Sometimes you get rid of a book and later regret it and buy it again. In the worst case, you buy a book you think you got rid of, only to find the original copy is still there on your shelf. But that doesn’t happen very often. And sometimes there is something that makes you keep a book you haven’t opened for 20 or 30 years, because – well, what? Because it has some special significance in your life, because you feel it spoke to you or changed you in some really important way.

I was reminded of one of those books this week, when the Collect for the Third Sunday of Advent asks God to ‘grant that the ministers and stewards of your mysteries may … prepare and make ready your way’. It’s a reference to St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, where he writes ‘Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries. Moreover, it is required of stewards that they should be found trustworthy.’ (1 Cor. 4.1) The slender book on my shelves (only 88 pages) that takes its title from that verse is Stewards of the Mysteries of God, edited by Eric James, published by Darton, Longman & Todd in 1979 at £1.95.

It was a collection of essays written by a number of theologians whose names read like a Who’s Who of the Church of the 1970s. Richard Harries – not yet the Dean of King’s College, let alone Bishop of Oxford or Baron Harries of Pentregarth… Richard Holloway, not yet the Bishop of Edinburgh. But all of them, in some way, connections of the then Bishop of St Albans, the Rt Revd Robert Runcie. The book was planned as a preparation for the St Albans Clergy Conference in September 1979, but published as something of interest to the wider Church (as well as, incidentally, to help with the costs of producing the book and so save the diocese money.)

And the significance of that clergy conference, for me, was that it was the first major diocesan event that I attended after my ordination as Deacon just two months before. I can’t remember how many clergy attended – it must have been a few hundred – but we all travelled to the University of Kent at Canterbury, then a mere 14 years old. And there were all the things you would expect a clergy conference to include: worship, lectures, discussion groups, meals, drinks in the bar… Of which I remember almost nothing. It was 45 years ago, after all.

And yet. And yet. I believe now that the conference, and the book that I had (obediently, as a new young curate) read in preparation for it, represented a big turning point for me. It was perhaps not the first thing, but certainly one of the first things, that opened my eyes to the undoubted truth that there was more to Christianity than ‘Conservative Evangelicalism’ had to offer1.

So I took the book off my shelf and read it again, and find it does indeed have many insights which may not always have been part of my faith before then, but certainly have become important in the years between.

Concerning the importance of Mystery in the Christian faith, rather than certainty. The mysteries of God are not things that are secret or concealed, but things we could not discover by our own efforts, which God reveals to us. The ‘deep affinity between the mystery of God and the mystery of humanity’. Gabriel Marcel writes, ‘A mystery is something in which I am myself involved’. Patrick White’s epigraph to his book The Solid Mandala:
There is another world,
but it is in this one.2
I thought I came across this only years afterwards with the shock of recognition, ‘Yes, that’s true!’ but no, I first read it in 1979.

Vanstone, on the Church’s purpose:
“The raison d’être, the responsibility, of the Church is to recognize what is happening in the world, and what is actually at stake in what is happening. What is at stake is the triumph or the tragedy of the love of God.”
And on What God needs: (How radically daring it was, to consider that God needs anything!)
“God needs only that which love itself needs — the response of the beloved other, without which love’s own work of giving remains incomplete.”

Richard Holloway, on the proper role of the Church, following Jesus, a ‘spiritual terrorist’, out of whose mouth came both the certainty of hell and damnation for sinners, and a gentleness and pity for us in our lostness:
“The Church is really the trades union of the damned. … I have come to believe that it is always the Church’s task to plead with the divine anger on behalf of the divine mercy. I say this because I believe that this, finally, is the meaning of the mystery of Christ. … The final mystery, then, is forgiveness.”

And Richard Harries, arguing that the Church needs to take seriously the reasons for the radical unbelief of many in contemporary society. While remaining faithful to our own convictions, we must not immediately leap in to refute unbelievers, but listen and give full weight to the reasons for the unbelief that is in them. We must learn to be comfortable with inhabiting the space between faith and unbelief: “A person will therefore be a person of the borderlands, to use a word of Professor Donald MacKinnon.”

Listing some of those ideas now, they all seem so obvious. They make it sound like discovering Stewards of the Mysteries of God was a small thing. It wasn’t, at the time.

  1. Oh, you noticed that none of the worthies contributing to the book came from that wing of the Church? ↩︎
  2. This is often attributed to W. B. Yeats, but was actually by the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard who wrote, “Il y a assurément un autre monde, mais il est dans celui-ci”. ↩︎

Christmas – And whose Church is it, anyway?

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Christmas crib at St Nicholas, Marston

It’s that time of year again. When all the working clergy (God bless ’em. Who’d want to be one of them, just now1 ?) are planning for the annual influx of Christmas worshippers, and trying to think of different events and services to draw them in. Here’s my advice, guys: don’t bother with all those wizard wheezes for new and innovative and ‘relevant’ services. People will come anyway. They prefer the traditional, the tried and trusted, the things they remember and are used to from the last time they came, and the time before that, and every time they’ve ever come at Christmas. Listen, that’s what they come for.

It’s because Christmas is magic, miraculous. Even for the rest-of-the-year-round practical atheist or convinced agnostic, there is something about Christmas, the traditional so-familiar readings and hymns, that draws them again and again. And for some reason they tolerate all the extra stuff that the working clergy (God bless ’em) try to include in the services. Sermons (ugh) that are clearly meant to convert them into ‘real Christians’ who will come during the rest of the year. Activities. Film clips on the big screen. Sharing their thoughts with the people sitting round them.

It’s almost as if the clergy who plan such events don’t trust God, or the tradition. Trust them, brothers and sisters! The familiar readings really are the Word of God – so let them do their work. The traditional carols were written by people who were steeped in that Word: that’s why they work so powerfully. Let them do their work too: they don’t need endless commentary, and contemporary references laid on with a trowel.

Most important of all, please please please don’t refer to the extra worshippers who come at Christmas as ‘visitors’ or ‘guests’. If they are parishioners, it is their church. Calling them visitors or guests is already telling them they don’t belong; and I reckon part of the message of Christmas is that this is for everyone; that in God’s eyes, everyone belongs; that the angels at Bethlehem announced ‘good tidings, of great joy, which shall be to all people’. In the same way, don’t thank them for coming. They’re not doing you a favour, and that’s not what they came for. They came, for whatever mysterious, miraculous reasons, to meet with God. And they will meet with God, as long as there isn’t too much of you getting in their way.

And who knows? If you don’t stand in the way of other people in the Christmas services, maybe God will meet with you there, too. I’m certainly praying just that for all worship planners and leaders, and for all those who come to worship with you, this Christmas. In their church.

  1. Actually, it’s one of the best vocations in the whole world. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. But I’m still happy to be out of it, and no longer to have the responsibility and all the pressures and demands laid on the working clergy. God bless ’em. ↩︎

Thoughts on the Makin Review

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Long, long ago, I used to think I was a ‘Conservative Evangelical’. Maybe I even was one. All through theological college, while I was studying for my B.A. in Theology, and other qualifications for ordination, I somehow felt that I had to ‘hold the line’ against the liberalism (or whatever?) of modern academic theology. I have no idea where this came from… Perhaps it’s matter for another blog post sometime.

This didn’t survive for very long when I went to serve my curacy in a ‘Conservative Evangelical’ parish. I quickly learned that this wasn’t quite where I stood after all; I wanted something different and maybe broader; I realised there was more to truth than I had thought.

The things that I valued about the tradition I thought I belonged to were: love of Scripture; devotion to Jesus; personal faith and commitment. Somehow, unaccountably, I had learned that these were the special characteristics of this brand of Christianity, which were not shared by any of the other groups that called themselves Christian. Again, I have to ask where this came from, and how I could possibly have believed it. It’s one of the mysteries of my reflection on my faith journey, the way we pick up and believe and live with and find it so hard to move on from, what we are taught (or sometimes only imbibe subliminally) in the tradition we find ourselves in.

Looking at the Makin Review makes me not only wonder how I continued to think of myself as a ‘Conservative Evangelical’ for so long. It makes me wonder how anyone can still feel happy to subscribe to the narrow beliefs of that particular subset of God’s people. Of course, not every ‘Conservative Evangelical’ is going to be an abuser. Most people who call themselves ‘Conservative Evangelicals’ will have been as appalled as the rest of us, at the report of the Review’s findings. But at the same time, it’s obvious that John Smyth’s long history of physical, sexual and spiritual abuse, of his family first, and later of hundreds of boys and young Christian men, had its roots in the kinds of belief that were, and still are, often found in ‘Conservative Evangelicalism.’ A particular kind of emphasis on sin and repentance which focuses more on sex than on any of ‘the weightier matters of the Law’ like injustice, love and mercy, the abuse of power… Together with patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, belief in corporal punishment, self- and body-hatred. The image of God that Smyth must have had, to believe and behave as he did, must have been a hideous, cruel and bullying, idol.

I was particularly horrified by the quote from one of Smyth’s victims, describing the policy of the Iwerne Trust and its summer camps:

“The philosophy was … that you could only really serve God with a dog collar around your neck in the Church of England and that the job, the mission, the task, the quest was to get boys of real promise to become ordained in the Church of England, to become bishops and archbishops, and for the Iwerne tribal, evangelical, narrow-minded brand of Christianity, which is anti-gay, as Smyth was with the Whitehouse trials, to infiltrate the whole of the Church of England and to take it over.”

The sectarian arrogance of believing ‘We’re right and every other variety of Christian is wrong’, and ‘Therefore we plan to take over the whole of the Church of England’ beggars belief. It’s as if they had never read the Bible, either the teachings of Jesus, or St Paul’s injunctions to love one another and consider other Christians better than oneself. In the end, I guess that was one more reason why I left ‘Conservative Evangelicalism’: I wanted to be a biblical Christian; and for all their claims and posturings, I don’t believe that’s a priority for ‘Conservative Evangelicals’.

One more thought about the Makin Review, is about all the men who were involved in covering up Smyth’s abuses, not only when they first became known around 1981, but even after he had fled to Africa where he continued his activities. I knew some of these men, I went to some of the churches where they had been active. They were apparently sincere, honest, intelligent, educated men. So how could be so stupid? One of them, David Fletcher, explains why he did nothing to pass on what he had learned about Smyth’s abuses:

In an interview with us, David Fletcher said: “I thought it would do the work of God immense damage if this were public.”

How could he really imagine it would not inevitably become known some time down the line, and by then do even greater damage to the ‘work of God’?

Another leading Evangelical figure, also now deceased,

said that he was told of the abuse by a curate at Winchester College and was “sworn to secrecy.”

It’s a strange kind of morality that gives more value to ‘keeping a confidence’ than speaking out against evil, and telling the truth, even if it means ‘betraying’ a confidence (which should never have been asked for by a Christian clergyman in the first place), if it means saving not one but hundreds of victims from harm and trauma. Surely, that’s a sorry kind of modern Pharisaism, like the one that believes you can protect the work of God from damage by covering up the Truth?

I haven’t read all of Makin’s review, and don’t know if I have the stamina to get to the end of it. No doubt the repercussions will run and run. Who else will resign or be called on to resign? It’s good if we now have a culture of safeguarding which brings abuses to light sooner than the 40+ years it took for Smyth’s to be fully known. Or do we, yet? I pray, and long, for this battered old Church that I love to become a safe and inclusive space for everyone. Sooner, rather than later.

Coming ‘Home’

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So, I’ve been away. For quite a time – it’s coming up towards two years since my last post. The truth is, I’ve been on a Journey. A Pilgrimage, maybe, towards some holy destination. Or a Quest, to seek and find my True Self.

In my last post, I wrote about a part of that spiritual journey I had been on since retiring back in 2016. It’s a mistake to suppose that, if you’ve been a Christian for 45 years and a vicar for 37 of them, you have somehow ‘arrived’. At certainty, or a place where you no longer have any progress to make, or something. Pretty much the opposite of the case. I’m sure I’m not the only retired vicar who finds themselves

a) relieved beyond measure that they’re no longer responsible for running a parish, filling in all the returns required by the Bureaucracy, keeping up to date with the law regarding marriages, burials and what have you

b) but also, asking themselves, What was that all about? I know it’s impossible for people in many professions to measure how successful they’ve been, but: Did I actually achieve anything? Was it worth all the hard work and soul-searching? Do I really believe all the things I used to preach to others, or at least, thought I ought to preach? Was it all even true?

So yes: some time around the start of the Pandemic, I had been disturbed by reports of growing antisemitism in many European countries, including the UK. I started reading about the history of antisemitism, and especially the role of the Church, and many of its most famous preachers and theologians (St John Chrysostom, Martin Luther, et al.) in promoting and institutionalizing this hatred of Jews and Judaism. Soon I was wanting to learn about what it was that they hated: Did I even know very much about Judaism.

To cut a long story short, I fell in love with the faith I was reading about. The contribution that Judaism and its adherents have made to the world is beyond reckoning, far greater than you would expect from a people who number probably less than 0.25% of the world’s population. I thought that Christianity grew out of, or at least alongside, the Rabbinic Judaism we know nowadays. Yet I found that many of the articles of Christian faith which I found most difficult and unpalatable were simply not there in Judaism. Like Original Sin. The need for blood sacrifice to turn away God’s anger so that He will not punish us for our sins. The need for people to ‘believe in and accept Jesus Christ’ in order to be ‘saved’. Because God incomprehensibly chose to create a human race of which the vast majority are destined for everlasting punishment if they don’t believe the right things about Him. The dualism of ‘Spirit Good, Matter Bad’. The Patriarchy and suppression of women’s voices and contribution.

You could say (as I did), “I don’t like Christianity very much.”

As well as reading a lot about Judaism, I also started using Jewish prayers for my daily prayer. And I loved them! There’s so much less of the whinging and grovelling that Christian prayers sometimes feel like, trying to curry favour from a mean and ungenerous Deity. The standard mode of Jewish prayer is Thanksgiving, in the form of blessing God 100 (or more) times a day. Blessing God for everything. The prayers frequently take the form of

  • Blessing and praising God because He does X
  • Asking God to do X
  • Thanking God for doing X.

For a time, I even contemplated converting to Judaism. I spoke to a rabbi about it, and she said “You can’t.” (I think that, like the Benedictines, they deliberately don’t consider wannabe converts until the fifth time of asking, because it takes five attempts to prove they are serious.)

The great thing about that episode of ‘not liking Christianity very much’ was that I never stopped believing in God. In fact, I came to believe in and love God even more, as I learned to thank God more and more, in and for all things. And came to suspect that He often doesn’t like Christianity very much at the moment. And I’m immensely grateful for this time of wilderness wandering, when I was not entirely sure about who I was, or where, or where I was meant to be and meant to be heading.

And then, Someone apparently decided it was time for me to come ‘Home’, or at least somewhere approximating to it. Alison wanted to go to a week’s conference at Lee Abbey – a place that’s hard to get to without a car. So my services as chauffeur were required. I hadn’t been to Lee Abbey for years, and was glad for the incentive to go again. So we both went to a conference entitled ‘The Call of the Wild: The Feel of the Holy’, on the themes of Pilgrimage, holy journeys and places, and the Celtic Christian tradition, led by Michael Mitton and Russ Parker. They are great friends and a great team; their talks are much more like witnessing a dialogue between two men who know each other well, have abundant wisdom, and above all enjoy each others’ company and their subject.

I found the ‘worship’ hard going. There were lots of ‘worship songs’ which as far as I’m concerned were anything but. But the talks, the walks around the Lee Abbey grounds, and the opportunities to talk and pray together at the seashore, among the trees, and on the hilltops, were times of real blessing. Russ recommended to me a book on theories of the Atonement, which for all that it was weighty, was very readable and helpful. By Fleming Rutledge, it’s called The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.

I thought I’d give Christianity, especially of the Celtic variety, another chance. This was how, about six weeks later, I found myself driving Alison to Swanwick for the Annual Gathering of the Community of Aidan and Hilda, which is “a dispersed, ecumenical body drawing inspiration from the lives of the Celtic saints.” Getting excited about it as a ‘place’ that offers refuge and encouragement to people like me who feel disillusioned with much of what we see in the contemporary Church, and applying to become an ‘Explorer’, as they call wannabe members of the community.

So yes, it feels like coming ‘home’. And it feels like taking some tentative steps away from the spiritual home I’ve known, though not really away, but let’s say, forward, on new adventures of life and faith.

Watch this space, then…

A Very Peculiar Hatred

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In his excellent little book Radical Then, Radical Now, the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks addresses the question: Why be a Jew? He wrote the book originally as a wedding gift for his son and daughter-in-law, but then enlarged and published it for a wider audience, both Jews and non-Jews. In the post-Holocaust age, in spite of the greater freedom enjoyed by Jews in many (especially Western) countries, most Jewish communities report an alarming decline in numbers of adherents. Jews are abandoning traditional practice, ‘marrying out’ and not creating the ‘Jewish home’ that used to be a central feature of Jewish life. They are not so much unaware of their Jewish identity, as rejecting it or trying to shed it.

At the same time, Sacks quotes statements of non-Jews who admire Judaism.

The British historian and writer A. L. Rowse described in his memoir written near the end of his life one of his unfulfilled dreams: “If there is any honour in all the world that I should like, it would be to be an honorary Jewish citizen.” Winston Churchill said, “Some people like Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are beyond question the most formidable and the most remarkable race that has ever appeared in the world.”

Jews make up only about half of 1% of the world’s population. Yet the contribution they have made to world civilization is out of all proportion to their numbers. Since the Nobel Prize was established in 1901, over one-fifth, 20%, of Nobel prize winners, have been Jews.

Yet in spite of all they have suffered through millennia of persecution, in spite of the horrors of the Holocaust, in spite of their achievements and contribution, they are perhaps the most hated people in the world. In every country there are reports of antisemitism growing more widespread, more violent, more extreme.

Why this extraordinary, irrational, peculiar hatred?

At some time during the second year of COVID lockdowns, in the spring of 2021, as I became increasingly aware of the news of growing antisemitism, I decided to read about it. After years of not wanting to believe there was antisemitism in the Labour Party, I eventually learned I was wrong. I began to read more widely about Judaism and the experience and beliefs of Jewish people. It turned out that it was fascinating and beautiful. In retirement I was allowing myself to re-examine the beliefs of Christianity, expecially the ones I had always found difficult or unattractive. Like Original Sin, ‘total depravity’, the excellence of the spiritual over the physical and material, so that virginity was often prized over marriage. Like the exclusiveness of ‘salvation’, only through Christ — which, if you push it to its logical conclusions, suggests that a loving God created the vast majority of human beings knowing that they would be condemned to eternal punishment. Like, all the theories of atonement which attempt to explain how ‘salvation’ works. Like, the relentless drive to convert anyone and everyone who isn’t a ‘born-again’ Christian, and make them just like us.

And I find that most of these are just not there in Judaism. Whatever its peculiarities — and of course it has many difficulties of its own, like every human religion — it is in so many ways more humane, more universalistic, more life-affirming. Its typical mode of prayer is largely blessing and thanking God, not begging to be ‘let off’ the punishment we justly deserve, and longing for God to bring the world, and with it the whole human Story, to a blessed End.

So what’s to hate, about it?

Perhaps one answer is, it’s easy for bullies and haters to hate the people they regard as weak and unable to fight back. No one makes a scapegoat of a lion, which might have its own ideas about what was happening. But I have come to wonder if the real, deeper reason for the irrational hatred that is antisemitism, is that bad people hate what is Good. In its very essence, Judaism is about Freedom. Moses brought the people of Israel out of their slavery in Egypt, and made of them a nation who would be God’s “treasured possession among all peoples… a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” The people of Israel are radically free. And that is what rulers and tyrants have hated more than anything through all the centuries. And it’s what the little people, who know that they themselves are not free but are slaves or victims, also hate passionately. They envy the Jews and so they hate them. They would admire them, but they cannot bear to admit that they are admirable, and so they hate them.

When God first called Abraham, God promised him,
“I will make of you a great nation,
And I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
And you shall be a blessing.
And I will bless those who bless you;
And curse him that curses you;
And all the families of the earth
Shall bless themselves by you. (Genesis 12.2-3)

Anyone who hates Jews, will be — already is — under God’s curse. No wonder they are such unhappy, unfulfilled, violent, hate-filled people.

Is the Church Christian?

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The late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote:

“Despite the efforts of Marcion and others to detach Christianity altogether from its Jewish roots, it proved impossible to make sense of the Christian message without connecting it to the history and sacred books of Israel.”

Marcion of Sinope was a 2nd century theologian who believed that Jesus had come not to fulfil the prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures, but to preach a completely different God. This was a loving heavenly Father, radically different from the belligerent, judging God named Yahweh. Christianity therefore was completely discontinuous from Judaism, and so the Hebrew Scriptures could have no place in the Christian canon.

Marcion was denounced as a heretic by the great Church Fathers of the 2nd century, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Tertullian, and was excommunicated by the Church in Rome in 144 CE; but his teachings were in large measure a catalyst which helped lead to the formulation of the canon which came to be accepted by the orthodox Church. As a result, Christians have always read the Scriptures of both the Old and the New Testaments, making connections backwards and forwards in order to make sense of the whole of God’s revealed Word.

The Reformation in the 16th century enabled people to read the Old Testament in their own language, and this on turn led to a greater interest in learning biblical Hebrew and reading the Hebrew Bible in the original. The writings of the Old Testament were formative not only in the religious thinking of Protestant Europe, but also in their political thinking. The Puritans who drove the English Revolution and the moves towards constitutional monarchy, and in the following century the Founding Fathers of the independent American republic, were all inspired by the Hebrew Scriptures. It is impossible to imagine modern democracy without this biblical foundation.

Yet in the late 20th and early 21st century, developments in Church life and worship have led many churches to pay less and less attention to the Old Testament. The Parish Communion movement first brought about a decline in the services of Morning and Evening Prayer, both of which had included readings from both Testaments. The Eucharist became the main service, and often the only service, that many Christians now attend. Although the Lectionary encourages the use of three readings, Old Testament, Epistle and Gospel, many churches have found this unpalatable. It makes the service unacceptably long. People don’t want to listen to that much Bible. The sermon would have to be shortened, or we would have to leave out a hymn or a ‘time of worship’, and we can’t have that. I’ve heard all these ‘reasons’ put forward. Although many cathedrals still use all three readings, in the church I attend we hardly ever hear a reading from the Old Testament.

What effect will this have on people’s faith, in the long term? If Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is right, it will mean that the Christian faith will become incoherent, it will no longer make sense. Is this why more and more people are simply walking away? In the Evangelical churches, which are often reckoned to be the most ‘popular’, ‘successful’ and ‘growing’, there is an increasing tendency to be almost exclusively Jesus-centred. Instead of worshipping God the Father, we worship Jesus. We pray to Jesus, we sing to Jesus, often calling him our God, we ask Jesus for forgiveness, we use a form of Creed (in which we ‘affirm our faith in God’) which makes no mention of creation or the Father or the Holy Spirit, but only of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

This sickness may very well prove terminal. Because Marcion has won. Many parts of the contemporary Church are not Christian at all: they are Marcionite.

What is it, to be a patriot now?

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I grew up conflicted between the social and educational pressures to love my country and believe it was the greatest in the world – we Brits won the War, after all – and Dr Johnson’s adage that “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”. As soon as I was able to see that we weren’t the greatest country in the world, and not only that but it wasn’t we who won the war either, I leaned more towards the Johnsonian view.

So I was resistant to recording John of Gaunt’s famous speech from King Richard II Act II: “This royal throne of kings, this sceptr’d isle…” It sounded to me like the extreme of mindless, overblown, and unfounded patriotism. But it’s not, of course. As so often, I had never really heard it through to the end and heard what old Gaunt is really saying.

It’s a lament, that the country he has loved and served all his life has become something to be ashamed of. By their reckless misgovernment its rulers have betrayed their people and everything the nation should be.

If we feel similarly betrayed in our time, perhaps the Psalms can provide a resource. The ‘psalms of lament’ that we find there include powerful prayers that cry out to God, at times when God seems to have abandoned his people. Why have you allowed us to be conquered by the Babylonians? Why have you allowed us to be taken captive by politicians who care more for enriching the wealthy and powerful, than they do for protecting the vulnerable, feeding the poor, healing the sick, providing a decent standard of living for all their people?

We may not like the answers. People who pray like this often hear that what has happened is a judgment for their idolatry and disobedience to God’s way. Or in a democratic society, that we get the Government we choose or deserve. Then our prayer may change to one of determination and hope. That we may return to God’s ways. That we may (quickly!) deserve better than our electoral record shows we do.

And we may take heart from John of Gaunt’s words too. Here they are: