Advent: on making paths straight and not having coats

It seems my accompanying text for this Advent is the beginning of Luke 3. I said something about it in Meeting for Worship the other Sunday, and have gone on thinking about it.Especially what John the Baptist says after the crowd ask him what they’re supposed to do…

[3:10] And the crowds asked him, ‘What then should we do?’ ¹¹In reply he said to them, ‘Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.’ ¹²Even tax-collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, ‘Teacher, what should we do?’ ¹³He said to them, ‘Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.’ ¹⁴Soldiers also asked him, ‘And we, what should we do?’ He said to them, ‘Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.’

The bit that struck me a couple of weeks ago was the advice to soldiers and tax collectors – which I used to think let them off remarkably lightly, but I now realise does nothing of the kind. I suspect they wanted John the Baptist to tell them to quit their horrible jobs, and escape the daily struggle of trying to make and walk a straight path where everything’s built crooked. They’d rather stay in the desert, but it’s not an option; things are never going to be that simple for them, but they are still supposed to prepare the way of the Lord.

Then today I was at the drop-in for destitute refugees and asylum seekers again, and the issue of the day was coats. It’s chilly in Leeds at the moment. Not nearly as cold as it often is in winter, but chilly. Today it was getting noticeably colder as the day wore on. You can be pretty sure, on a day like today, that if somebody walks into a church hall off the street without a coat on, he or she doesn’t actually own a coat. There were quite a few men, and one or two women, without coats on. We had a mountain of donated clothing, and we rummaged and rummaged for coats. There weren’t enough, of course. Coats are expensive. People don’t generally feel they have spare ones, not even if they have two. (I do have two, still). And it’s not like food, which you can easily divide up, make slightly smaller portions, feed an extra person at the cost of leaving everyone slightly less full. Coats are either/or, much harder to share or divide. But in the weather that’s coming, they’re almost as urgent a need as food. Especially for folk who have nowhere in particular to go during the day.

Nobody complained about leaving coatless; how could they, when the coats are a handout to people outwith the law, only possible because of uncoordinated donations from people all over the city who have a few more clothes than they need? How could they, or we, even complain if some others (perhaps) took things they didn’t urgently need, when nobody there is rich? Still and all – I lost my temper with the mountain of clothes, swore at it, kicked it. Actually I lost my temper with the crazy non-moral dilemmas that arise and the crazy mess that they arise from – distributing too few coats among people who’ve got nothing in the first place. In winter in Leeds. Stuff is wrong, I thought incoherently. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do here. Preach it, John. We need some mountains levelled and some valleys raised; or, failing that, a few more coats.

The man who cursed God out

This was something that happened in the drop-in centre for asylum seekers where I hang around most Tuesday mornings at the moment, and it has proved hard to get out of my head.

The drop-in is in a church hall, very large, very echoey, very noisy, people come and go all the time. Young man walks in and starts shouting, it takes me a second or two to work out that this isn’t just a loud conversation, and then a second or two more (his English is heavily accented) to work out what he’s saying; and by that time others have noticed, and very soon the room’s silent, the conversations have stopped, the pool game at the other end of the room has stopped, and everyone’s looking at him. He’s shouting in two directions – some of the time at us, but rather more at the small crucifix on the back wall:

“anyone here who’s Christians, well f**k you… and f**k Jesus Christ… you do nothing for me, you see me, I’m homeless… f**k God as well… look at me, I’m telling you, I’m homeless… f**king Jesus Christ…”

and the very gentle but determined volunteers who act as security guards are ushering him out of the door as he shouts

“and Jesus, his mother, well she…” and everyone can see the gesture as he leaves. A couple more seconds of silence, and the conversations rise again, and the pool game restarts. The volunteers learn later that the young man is a regular ‘service user’ at the drop-in, and has been for more than five years; which probably means that he’s been stateless, jobless and frequently homeless for more than five years.

This isn’t a religious organisation (though a lot of the volunteers, and even more of the ‘service users’, are religious people), but I think on this particular occasion it was good that we were in a church hall, especially one with a crucifix to shout at. It seemed to me that there was something appropriate about what just happened; and that it was better for the man to take it out on God than on the next person he met in the street (or, more likely, on the volunteers at the desk); and that God can cope with it (this being the point). And then how sad it was that he tried to call Jesus out for a fight by insulting his mother. You’ve got to be desperate, for some attention from somebody with power, to try that line.

Yearly Meeting Miscellany (3): Membership

This blog post is dedicated to Jane Muers, who as well as being my mother and ‘Granny Jane’ to all the children on our block at YM, was the principal author of the most radical change we made to Quaker Faith and Practice this year…

No, I don’t mean the changes to the marriage chapter. I mean the change to the meaning of membership. That’s right, the one nobody noticed (because of the way the business session was run, but that’s water under the bridge).

We changed the account of membership given in chapter 11, so that membership is primarily about being recognised (by yourself and others) as belonging to this community, and only secondarily, though importantly, about a personal affirmation of faith and commitment. This is a subtle but important shift.

In the immediate context, we did this so that child membership, which we decided after an extensive review to retain in its current form (folks didn’t notice that happening either, did they?) ceases to be a weird anomaly. Moreover, we did it so that we could make sense of admitting adults with limited (mental) capacity to membership, and put some principles in place so that that can happen.

More interestingly, I think this makes absolutely clear what many of us go on about all the time, that saying ‘we all’ or ‘our community’ or ‘Quakers’, and not meaning children and/or adults with limited mental capacity, is at best only partially truthful. Beyond this, it makes it rather clear that this community is not something in which we earn our place, or something to which we can only belong if we commit to doing lots of stuff, or (perish the thought) something that’s only really open to people who can read, understand and comment grumpily on Guardian editorials.

So in a way we’re saying: this community’s given to us by God before we make it into anything. We’re given to each other before we decide to be here. And we decide to be here, as well. But I think we need to acknowledge the people who don’t (yet, or ever) decide, as fully part of our community, and learn that in important respects we’re all in that situation.

The change takes us further away from the Baptist/Anabaptist position (although having the child membership option always meant that we weren’t straightforwardly aligned with it).  I have to say that, although I’m content with the changes myself, I rather hope some Friends will be bothered about the de-emphasis of personal expression of commitment. In any case, Quaker participants in ecumenical dialogue will need to take note. Arguably (though only arguably) what we’ve ended up with in Quaker Faith and Practice, because of our historical diversity of practice now acknowledged properly in the text, is what could be an attempt at an ecumenical ‘shared text’ on church membership.

It seems unlikely that one possible logical consequence, viz. an increase in the acceptance of children into formal membership, will happen (since children not in membership who attend Meeting are in any case generally recognised as ‘Quakers’).

Yearly Meeting Miscellany: 2. Storing up treasures

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven”. (Matthew 6:19)

Bear with me, this is going to be about Yearly Meeting, because I try reading this verse thinking about sustainability. The first reading doesn’t look promising; nothing on earth lasts for ever, so don’t bother with it. Concentrate on the spiritual stuff, forget the material. Get out as early as you can, and meanwhile be as unworldly as you can.

Um, not convinced that’s what’s going on. I’m not convinced, in particular, because reading scriptures and rabbinic texts with Jewish friends and colleagues has given me the strong sense that you don’t store up treasures in heaven by being ‘spiritual’; you store up treasures in heaven by keeping the commandments of God. Which suggests to me that the difference between ‘treasures on earth’ and ‘treasures in heaven’ isn’t the difference between caring about material stuff and caring about spiritual stuff, but the difference between doing things because you believe they’ll work and doing things because they’re right.

And because this verse sounds like wisdom teaching – sensible advice about how to end up with some treasure in the long run -  the point might be that it isn’t wrong to care about the success of what you do. It’s just not particularly reliable as a guide to how well things are going. ‘Treasures on earth’, good results of one’s actions, will always rely on other people and on circumstances (hence the worry ‘there’s no point us doing anything to reduce our consumption if the rest of the world doesn’t'). But, I hope, we don’t do what we do just because we think it’s going to work. We’re not doing very well on world peace, after all.

A passage from the Mishnah I read with Jewish and Muslim scholars a while back and thought about a lot at YM: “these are the things for which a person enjoys the fruits in this world, while the principal remains in the world to come: honouring father and mother, acts of kindness, and making peace between people; and the study of the Law equals them all”. [I've just failed to find the right reference within my time available; think it is Shabbat 127a]. On which I reflect that there are certain actions and courses of action – including peacemaking, and culminating in seeking the guidance and following the ways of God – that quite often do make the world much better (they bear fruits/ pay dividends); but even if they don’t, the principal, the main point of doing them, their true value, doesn’t go away.

Yearly Meeting Miscellany: 1. Walking pace

I have quite a lot of thoughts arising from or during Yearly Meeting Gathering in Canterbury, and am minded to try to set some of them out. Last time I tried this after a Quaker gathering, I think I only got to part 1. So don’t hold your breath. The theme of this gathering was sustainability; but the yearly meeting part of the event did quite a lot of other interesting and/or important business, and some of my thoughts are about that. The tentative plan is to type for half an hour each evening (when not prevented by guests, kitchen refurbishments, etc etc) and see how far I get.

First thought is to say some more about something I said in open worship at YM. It comes originally from one of my theological mentors, the late Dan Hardy, in a book that was published posthumously containing his reflections on a pilgrimage to Israel/Palestine (which he undertook while terminally ill). Dan’s experience of walking through the land led him to reflect on Jesus walking the land – and what it means that Jesus’ ministry is a walking ministry.

Walking the land means always being somewhere in particular; meeting one person at a time, inhabiting one place at a time, taking one step at a time. Walking the land is slow.

I heard a lot at Yearly Meeting about planetary-scale urgency – we must act now for the future of the world / the kingdom of heaven is at hand; and I also heard a lot, both frustrated and hopeful, about taking small steps. And I became more and more astonished that the announcement of the kingdom of heaven, the ministry that is the breaking in of the kingdom of heaven, the genuine good news, happens at walking pace. It’s positively pedestrian. One healing. One conversation. Another healing. The disciples can’t hurry it up. Sometimes, when they try to, Jesus seems deliberately to slow it down.He knows where he’s going, but he won’t go there any faster. He refuses to hitch a lift with the angels.

The kingdom of heaven is someone walking around chatting to his friends. How crazy is that?

It occurred to me that hardly anybody in the biblical world could travel over land much faster than somebody or something could walk. (As an aside, perhaps that is another interpretation of the OT/HB suspicion of kings who want to ‘ride on horses’. I always assumed that the horse was the equivalent of the aircraft carrier – expensive military hardware; but perhaps it’s the equivalent of the aeroplane – expensive high-speed transportation that stops you relating to what’s happening on the ground). So the sayings and ideas that we try to transform into global principles were, in their context, one-step-at-a-time ways of encountering the world at walking pace. They accompanied you on the way; they didn’t get you there.

The time is now – but the place is also here, the place we walk, not ‘out there’ (somewhere where we can see and make decisions about the whole world) or ‘up there’ (at another level of power or another level of theoretical abstraction).

And it can be very hard to stop trying to fly and start walking. But it hit me rather forcibly this week that the walk is what I’ve signed up for; and also that going on the walk is the only way to see the miracles happening. I’m not sure if this is what George Fox was on to when he wrote that to ‘walk cheerfully over the world answering that of God in everyone’ was the result of a life of discipleship (that ‘preaches’ by being the kind of life it is) but it’s a possible reading.

‘Students at the Heart of the System’

That, for anyone who is fortunate enough not to know, is the title of the new White Paper on higher education. We can assume they mean the higher education system, which is now supposed to have students at its heart for a change (as opposed to, I don’t know, pineapples, or meerkats, or dodgy statistics – oh, no, hang about…)

There is much I could say about it. But I will say this one thing. I do not think that the value of education can be measured in terms of monetary reward to the educated individual. My colleagues do not think that the value of education can be measured in terms of monetary reward to the educated individual. I have no evidence that my students think that the value of education can be measured in terms of monetary reward to the educated individual.We don’t think that, because it’s patently not true. If we thought that, we’d all give up and go home.

So this White Paper is an insult to all of us.

I don’t think students will choose courses on the basis of salary expectations (insofar as these can even be calculated with any degree of plausibility, which I am pretty sure is not the case, but that would be another argument). But I’m mighty cross that the government thinks they will, and apparently wants to encourage them to do so. And I’m also faintly sickened that we don’t have more academics coming out in public and saying: this is not all about money. The good and worthwhile life is not all about money. A person’s vision of his or her future is not all about money. We know this, our fellow educators know this, our students know this, and we respectfully beg to remind members of Her Majesty’s Government that they once knew this, too.

Students, Christianity and being good

Marking this year’s first-year exam papers I experience the – unusual – wish to preach to my students, something I am normally exaggeratedly careful not to do. I’m genuinely worried about the state into which some of them have got themselves, if they believe that what they’re writing is a reasonable representation of Christianity and believe that they are Christians. Christianity, like all religions, they think (because somebody somewhere had the bright idea of turning school RE into ‘ethics’) is about being as good as possible. You have the real meaning of a doctrine or a biblical text when you have the moral of the story. And, at the same time, difficult ethics is stuff that happens to other people (it’s stem cell research they’re all obsessed with, this year; I think that’s because I told them very fiercely that they were NOT to claim that abortion was a new moral issue, so they need a different example of something that isn’t and couldn’t be in the Bible). So ‘we’ are good people, who are expected to continue being good (but if we don’t, God can’t really blame us, because we’re good people, not like Hitler, who I’m afraid does crop up in essays occasionally). And that is apparently the whole point of religion, to tell us over and over again to be good (although actually telling other people what to do is, according to some of my students, an infringement of their free will). And then we wonder why people don’t want to sign up. I genuinely worry about people who think God only loves them if they’re good, but I worry more because there is so much anxiety in the lives of students anyway. Everything’s conditional on continued and improbable success – and on keeping the rules and being good. Perhaps that’s why they find it so hard to understand, even intellectually, something that isn’t. Or perhaps it’s just because of A-level Philosophy and Ethics.

What kind of theology is worth doing?

Wondering this in the context of being involved in the selection (from an enormous array of the good, the bad and the altogether strange) of papers to be presented in the Christian Systematic Theology section of the American Academy of Religion. I do quite like the three criteria used in the REF (though needless to say I hate with a passion the spurious conversion of them into numerical values that, when fed through the number-crunching machines, randomly destroy careers and departments). Originality, significance and rigour. Has it been done before, is it worth doing, and is it being done well?

It’s the middle one I’m having trouble with; what’s worth doing. There are easy wins, of course, that work in all fields of study. Lots of people in your academic discipline or subdiscipline, and/or the wider contexts that draw on it, are consistently wrong about something, let’s say the assumptions they make about what a canonical/historically significant text means or implies; you show them that they’re wrong; they mend their ways (or don’t, but at least they now have no excuse); you did a useful thing. If the consistent wrongness was causing other consistent wrongnesses, or more widespread confusion, you did a very useful thing.

Or there’s a pointless argument going on, you show that it’s pointless; you did a useful thing. If lots of people were having the argument, you did a very useful thing. In either case, you’re the friendly gnome of the academic world. You potter around fixing broken things. If you fix them so that they stay fixed, your rigour is demonstrated along with your significance and (we presume) your originality.

I haven’t seen many paper proposals that look like that. Most papers and articles don’t fix broken stuff, they make new stuff. That’s good. So what’s worth making?

I start by observing that a line – perhaps not a fine line, but a line – has to be trodden in theological writing between the trite and the crazy. Some people, admittedly, manage to be both.

Still here

Sorry folks. I’m still here. Happy new year. Happy spring. It’s been a long time. Today I’m on strike, and I hereby declare this blog not to be work – and thus create an excuse for not having posted for a long time, viz. too much work. I’m mainly on strike because my union is, and I value my union. I also value my pension, and would quite like to work for a real university (ie one where academic disciplines aren’t forced to compete with each other), so I am in sympathy with the aims of the strikes this week, but mainly it’s now about solidarity.

I think another reason I haven’t posted for a long time is that I’m going through a phase of feeling particularly depressed about the possibility (or lack of it) of having intelligent conversations related to religion, in public, any time soon. If I try to explain why, I’ll probably end up sounding rude about students, and I (mostly) really like my students, so that’s not a good topic for conversation.

One thing I’ve been thinking about a bit, though, is the current debates in evangelical Christian circles on which, via Steve Holmes’ blog (Shored Fragments), I have eavesdropped occasionally – the debates around Rob Bell’s book, universal salvation and substitutionary atonement. Now theologically and ecclesially I don’t belong anywhere near that argument. Doesn’t mean I can’t admire how people like Steve H conduct it. Doesn’t mean, also, that I can’t be disturbed about how quickly, away from the blogosphere’s occasional oases of sanity, it’s clearly turned horrible. And that makes me think:

They were right: the disciples steal a body and call it resurrection. Happens all the time.
Steal a body and keep it where we know it’s safe, check on it every now and then, make sure nothing’s changed. Because you never know what might happen if it fell into the wrong hands.
Steal a body and try to lose it, ditch it by the side of the road, carry on without it. Because ideas are easier to manage. Bodies, living or dead, tie you down.
Margaret Fell had it right, sometimes we’re all thieves; grab the scriptures in words (to hold them up or tear them up) and know nothing in our hearts.
Steal a body because it’s nearly the same as resurrection, nobody’s going to notice.

What’s said, what’s heard

Have had an interesting discussion over email recently about anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in Christian theology, with a scholar who’s spent much longer studying both than I have. The issue came up about a book that analysed numerous examples of anti-Judaism in Christian thought and described it as a “heresy”. My correspondent, who is not a Christian theologian, wasn’t happy with this description.

I could see where the description came from, and could see why it caused concern, and this relates to something I’ve been thinking about on and off lately – the problems that arise when normative and descriptive statements about religious traditions enter the same space.

In this example: I can imagine a Christian theologian teaching Christians about anti-Judaism, and feeling s/he had to make it very clear that this was a heresy – meaning something that Christians should not do/accept if they want to go on calling themselves Christians. That would, arguably, be a reasonable and responsible thing to do. But then I can imagine someone in the audience thinking “but isn’t s/he just trying to let Christianity off the hook here by denying that anti-Jewish thought is ‘really’ Christian, and hence pretending that anti-Judaism isn’t really a problem in Christianity?” The criticism would not be pertinent within a context in which everyone accepted that they were arguing about normative claims.

But we often, especially when we step gingerly into the public arena – but even when we do interdisciplinary work – find ourselves in a context in which normative arguments about religious traditions are not heard as such; so claims directed primarily at fellow-Christians (eg) about “what we should be about, but often aren’t”, or even “what I want rather controversially to suggest we might be about” are heard as implausible and/or frankly arrogant descriptions of “what we are about, all the time”.

And of course it’s complex, because a normative claim about “Christianity” does involve a lot of description; such claims are defended through appeals to scripture and tradition, and in some cases to various kinds of observational data.It is not straightforward, though it’s possible, to explain how the evidence for the claim “offering hospitality to strangers is a core Christian practice” that should be offered, say, in a book on theological ethics is and is not similar to the evidence for & against the same claim that might be offered, say, in a report on contemporary British attitudes to refugees and asylum seekers.

It’s not a problem with all “theology in the public square” of course; it’s primarily a problem with theology that talks about religion as well as talking about God. (I think it comes up with the Bible as well – a statement that’s in fact a proposal for how the Bible should be interpreted by Christians in a particular context, gets treated and/or attacked as a general description of “what’s in the Bible”).