an anglican view

from a youtube message by bishop Stephen Cottrell
"If the Bible were a range of mountains I wonder what the mountain peak would be. I guess we probably have a different answer to this question every time we open the Bible. But certainly for me, one of the climactic passages -- the one through which we then interpret many others -- is this: Galations 3.28 'There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, for you are all one person in Jesus Christ'.

Now that great text -- it has taken us in the Church a long while to work out what it means. The first bit 'in Christ there is no Jew or Greek' only took us about 20 years or so to work out what it meant, and you can read about the debates and struggles the Church had over that text in the Bible itself. In the Acts of the Apostles and in some of Paul's letters you can see the Church grappling: 'do you have to become a Jew before you can become a Christian - how does that work?' Well, we resolved it, though there were big disagreements.

The next one, 'there is no slave or free' -- it took us 1,800 years to work that one out, but we did. Eventually we came to understand that in Christ there cannot be slavery, there cannot be slaves, we are all set free.

And it falls to our generation to be those working out the full implications of 'so what does it mean to say "there is no male or female"?' We all agree it can make no difference to our baptism. We've sort of agreed and found a way of living together by saying it shouldn't make any difference to someone being a priest. And now we say, should it affect being a bishop as well?"

vatican 2

from an article in the tablet this week: on the Vatican 2 Council - by a correspondent for Time magazine who was there to report on the event.
"In a new spirit, prompted by John 23rd, the bishops realised they werent there to condemn the world, but to serve it . . . . They werent asking what the church needed but what the world needed . . . and once they got used to the idea that nothing in the church was too sacred to discuss, boy, did they start talking!"

a few things

Tom Wright was an influence this week. 
Whilst the new liturgy makes you that little bit more remote, Wright impresses over and over again how close you are - want to be - long to be - to us. I urgently need to heed this;
this occurred to me forcibly today - sunny moments amidst prayer grown patchy and indifferent. 

teaching gradually - month by month - imperceptibly almost - turns me to stone. 
if I dont give you sufficient time, this also turns me to stone.

 . . . . but what I really mean is:
all of daily life outside of you does this bit by bit - not just teaching. It's just that the teaching makes it even harder to return to you afterwards . . . . . the constant immersement in problems without the accompanying gentleness and love that keep us in you; open to you. . . . . 

the psalms: a godsend   - but even more so today.

Wright mentioned the danger of 'over-spiritualising'. At the time, I didnt figure what he meant, but isnt this exactly what the new liturgy tries to do? reinforcing the fallacy that you are always just out of reach when, in strictest reality, you are closer than we can possibly realise. 

 . . . . . . right in the midst. 
Simultaneously the hardest thing and the easiest thing to understand;
fully realising it brings boundless joy.


our 'spiritual' lives are awash with fallacies. When we are young these can be so overpowering as to blot out the 'truth' completely at times.
My own experience tells me this: the wide gap between my direct experience of you (especially in my late teens) and my intellectual understanding - or lack of it - of these experiences caused me years of difficulty and confusion. 
Only through prayer and study can these fallacies gradually be washed away. Worse, these fallacies run so deep, that even after 'realising' - and even 'realising' several times - the same fallacies can rise out of the depths to take hold again to obscure and distract . . . . 

and so my time at Worth - albeit short - traumatic and painful though it was - was fundamental to any real enlightenment that followed - years later . . . . . .

another danger for me:
'doing' the liturgy tends to reinforce the fallacy that we need to 'do' to come closer to you.
really what we have to do is nothing. 
we need to stop doing, not do more . . . . 
I need to stop doing  . . . . . .

 . . . which does not mean - cannot mean - that I stop reading the office. This too would be fatal. I need to see psalms as less me 'doing' and more you 'saying' because this is what actually 'happens'. 
 . . .this is the very centre of everything: the fact that you speak to me through the psalms, sometimes so directly that I am still astonished . . . . . 

When I am 'working' at the psalms and hearing nothing I shouldn't stop reading them. Rather I need to recall over and over that 'working' at them is not the point: the only point is to hear your voice. 

. . . .sometimes hearing you involves not hearing anything at all. even for a long period of time. I know that now . . . . although I still do not fully understand it.

 I know that your absence is as important as your presence.

The only way I can make sense of this is to remember that any awareness I have of 'absence' or 'presence' is  subjective and therefore both limited and narrow.

Even in ordinary daily life this can be true. A friend can be hidden by a single piece of furniture or even a curtain and I would not know he was there . . . .how much more so in the spiritual life? 

 . . . and so our main aim in prayer has to be to open our hearts and allow you to be who you really are. 
to allow you to wash away all our theology and concepts, to allow you to change and redirect us in any way that you need so that we can come to see you as you really are. 
  . . . . another danger is that, at certain times, we come to believe that this can never actually happen;  that we can never even come close to it happening. This too is just another fallacy: in truth it has already happened. 
Long ago. 

all I need to do is to put my hand in yours . . . . .

going back to Wright: he spoke about the argument (re. homosexuality) that Christian gays tend to make that the negative views put forward by Paul are really directed at the 'free' sexuality that we tend to associate with pagan Romans. Wright says that Paul was not talking about pagan Romans but about gay Christians living in (if I recall correctly) Corinth. Moreover these gay Christians were, according to Wright, actually living in faithful partnerships and yet Paul still regards them as wrong.
but where does Wright get this information about ancient stable gay relationships? 
More research needed here. . . . .

Wright is in the Lutheran tradition. His immensely careful scriptural scholarship reminds me of Bonhoeffer. He is moreover a man whom the literalists might listen to and heed because he tends to argue from closer to their perspective. He is certainly a man who believes that scripture is implicitly the "word of God".

I was less convinced by his thought regarding the 'afterlife'.  He spoke meticulously about the fact that there would be a period after death when we are actually "just dead" and how we would be raised at a later time "because this is how it is depicted in scripture" . . . .
 . . . a very literal reading. 

 . . . and my own view?  I always go back to Jesus words on this. Matthew 22 (I googled it)

"have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”"

Our concept of time is just too narrow for us to understand how God 'sees'.
The life we have been given is the life that will always be.