I recently ordered a copy of a book just published on Romans. It is Richard Longenecker, Introducing Romans. Like many, the more I read Romans and the more I read books and commentaries on Romans, the less I seem to understand it. This book is in anticipation of a commentary on Romans that Longenecker is in the process of writing.
It deals with all the issues surrounding Romans such as when was it written, to whom, and why. It gives a very good overview of where scholars are at when it comes to understanding and interpreting Romans. If you would like to read a short review I have written on it, this is the link: Longenecker, Introducing Romans
Scroll down for the review.
Preparing the hymns for Sunday worship for the next few weeks (see the last post) has alerted me to the fact that we will be reading through Romans over the Summer starting at chapter 6. Longenecker's book arrived at the right time! Coincidentally, I have 5 short talks for the radio to prepare to be broadcast in August. Added to the fact that June 29 celebrates Peter and Paul, Apostles, it looks like this is a good time to return to Romans. The last time I preached and wrote on Romans was back in 2008 (see the label: Romans). I don't want simply to repeat what I wrote then, but it will be quite fun to be able to pick up where I left off, and I am grateful that this new book has helped me to do that.
Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Love Wins, and Loses
I am preaching at the services tomorrow and my intention had been to focus on the Epistle reading from Romans 4, which fits nicely with what I plan to say on Wednesday at the next Lenten Bible Study. However, when I sat down to write the sermon (I am still one of those who write his sermons out by long-hand), it became obvious that there was only one reading that I could focus on and one verse in it, that is, the Gospel Reading and John 3:16:
'For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.'
I have preached on this verse many times, but what gives preaching on it added significance this week is Rob Bell's book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, and the furore surrounding it that some are calling Hellgate! I have already mentioned it in the blog this week. As I have said, I am surprised that people are surprised that this is where Rob Bell is coming from. Perhaps they are just annoyed that he has raised the issue at all.
One of my favourite TV series at the moment is Outnumbered. There is something of a running joke in it about the 'elephant in the room': something large and significant, but about which we do not speak. Universalism, and more particularly a rejection of hell or any idea of it, is the 'elephant in the room' of the Church. We don't talk about it, but it is there, and universalism and a rejection of anything that passes for hell is the default position of most pastors, priests, and preachers regardless of their particular brand label. Even if we prefer, for whatever reason, not to talk about it.
(A Question for Anglican Vicars: have you ever told anyone who has asked you about what has happened to their loved ones who have died that they haven't just slipped away and that they might not just be waiting for them in the room next door?)
Rob Bell's book, even if this was not his intention, is making people come out of their own particular closets. Me included. A lot depends, of course, on what you mean by hell. For some it is a place and for others, a metaphor, but even a metaphor must be a metaphor of something, and, even on the most benign, understanding it cannot be something very nice. Certainly, it must mean that for some people the future is not one of heavenly bliss, but of hellish consequences.
Now Rob Bell is very clever. He asks whether we think Gandhi is in hell. But Gandhi is one of those nice non-Christians that we all like. What about Hitler and Stalin and Mao? The fact is we can all play this game and we would be wrong to do so. The question of who is in hell, wherever or whatever it is, is not for us to judge. After all, we may be going there ourselves.
But because we shouldn't speculate on its occupants, doesn't mean it doesn't exist (whether literally or metaphorically).
I personally deplore those who have labelled Rob Bell a heretic and a false teacher. (How many people have you brought to faith in Christ this week?) But that doesn't mean he is right. In fact, I believe he is seriously wrong, not in the questions he asks, but in the answers he implies.
It would be lovely to think that, ultimately, we were all going to cuddle one another in heaven rather burn in hell, but if cuddling each other is our destiny, then rather than appealing to those parts of the Bible we like, we should just get rid of it altogether, and admit we are making the Christian faith up as we go along and hoping we get it right.
However, for anyone who wants the Bible to play an authoritative role in what they believe, there is no escaping the consequences of God loving us, consequences which, because the set reading tomorrow stops at John 3:17, we won't be told of in our services, but which can be spoken of in places like this:
'Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.' (John 3:18)
God's unconditional love for all of us has very serious consequences. It is that some of us will be won and also that some of us will be lost.
I am preaching at the services tomorrow and my intention had been to focus on the Epistle reading from Romans 4, which fits nicely with what I plan to say on Wednesday at the next Lenten Bible Study. However, when I sat down to write the sermon (I am still one of those who write his sermons out by long-hand), it became obvious that there was only one reading that I could focus on and one verse in it, that is, the Gospel Reading and John 3:16:
'For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.'
I have preached on this verse many times, but what gives preaching on it added significance this week is Rob Bell's book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, and the furore surrounding it that some are calling Hellgate! I have already mentioned it in the blog this week. As I have said, I am surprised that people are surprised that this is where Rob Bell is coming from. Perhaps they are just annoyed that he has raised the issue at all.
One of my favourite TV series at the moment is Outnumbered. There is something of a running joke in it about the 'elephant in the room': something large and significant, but about which we do not speak. Universalism, and more particularly a rejection of hell or any idea of it, is the 'elephant in the room' of the Church. We don't talk about it, but it is there, and universalism and a rejection of anything that passes for hell is the default position of most pastors, priests, and preachers regardless of their particular brand label. Even if we prefer, for whatever reason, not to talk about it.
(A Question for Anglican Vicars: have you ever told anyone who has asked you about what has happened to their loved ones who have died that they haven't just slipped away and that they might not just be waiting for them in the room next door?)
Rob Bell's book, even if this was not his intention, is making people come out of their own particular closets. Me included. A lot depends, of course, on what you mean by hell. For some it is a place and for others, a metaphor, but even a metaphor must be a metaphor of something, and, even on the most benign, understanding it cannot be something very nice. Certainly, it must mean that for some people the future is not one of heavenly bliss, but of hellish consequences.
Now Rob Bell is very clever. He asks whether we think Gandhi is in hell. But Gandhi is one of those nice non-Christians that we all like. What about Hitler and Stalin and Mao? The fact is we can all play this game and we would be wrong to do so. The question of who is in hell, wherever or whatever it is, is not for us to judge. After all, we may be going there ourselves.
But because we shouldn't speculate on its occupants, doesn't mean it doesn't exist (whether literally or metaphorically).
I personally deplore those who have labelled Rob Bell a heretic and a false teacher. (How many people have you brought to faith in Christ this week?) But that doesn't mean he is right. In fact, I believe he is seriously wrong, not in the questions he asks, but in the answers he implies.
It would be lovely to think that, ultimately, we were all going to cuddle one another in heaven rather burn in hell, but if cuddling each other is our destiny, then rather than appealing to those parts of the Bible we like, we should just get rid of it altogether, and admit we are making the Christian faith up as we go along and hoping we get it right.
However, for anyone who wants the Bible to play an authoritative role in what they believe, there is no escaping the consequences of God loving us, consequences which, because the set reading tomorrow stops at John 3:17, we won't be told of in our services, but which can be spoken of in places like this:
'Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.' (John 3:18)
God's unconditional love for all of us has very serious consequences. It is that some of us will be won and also that some of us will be lost.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Can't buy me love
Pastor Rob Bell of Mars Hill Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan has been creating a stir in the United States with a book, Love Wins, that reportedly supports belief in universalism: the doctrine that God's love will save all. I first heard of it when a friend in the UK phoned and asked whether I had heard that Pastor Mark Driscoll had become a universalist. My friend had, of course, confused the Mars Hill Churches. Mark Driscoll of Seattle coming out in favour of universalism really would have been a story!
(A good account of the controversy is in fact available via a link on the Seattle Mars Hill web-site:
A Chronology of Rob Bell )
My own confusion, however, is different to that of my friend. I can't understand why anyone remotely familiar with Rob Bell would be surprised that he lent towards universalism. If you build your ministry on the idea that God welcomes everyone always, you are hardly likely to believe that he will change his attitude when you die.
My confusion extends to the reaction in the media, on blog sites, and facebook. Most Christians I know gave up believing in God punishing people after they die a long time ago. I don't simply mean us Anglicans whose God is just such a cuddly teddy bear he couldn't possibly hurt anyone - or do anything else for that matter - but even most evangelicals who lay claim to the Bible. I don't mean they have stopped believing in a God who judges in a theoretical sense, it's just that the belief has no practical implications for how they preach or minister. It's a belief that like Mrs Rochester is embarrassingly kept hidden away in the theological attic and is not allowed out or admitted to.
My suspicion, and it's just a suspicion, is that part of the commotion surrounding Pastor Bell's book is that he has stated in plain terms what most preachers and ministers pretend and imply to their congregations and the outside world that they believe. There is, in fact, a very simple test to find out whether we are universalists to all intents and purposes. It is to ask ourselves when was the last time we told someone that the consequence of not turning to Christ is that they will not be saved.
Whatever we think of Rob Bell's book, Rob Bell challenges us to be honest and to sign up openly to the universalism we imply by our lives and teaching to be true or to start telling it as it is.
Pastor Rob Bell of Mars Hill Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan has been creating a stir in the United States with a book, Love Wins, that reportedly supports belief in universalism: the doctrine that God's love will save all. I first heard of it when a friend in the UK phoned and asked whether I had heard that Pastor Mark Driscoll had become a universalist. My friend had, of course, confused the Mars Hill Churches. Mark Driscoll of Seattle coming out in favour of universalism really would have been a story!
(A good account of the controversy is in fact available via a link on the Seattle Mars Hill web-site:
A Chronology of Rob Bell )
My own confusion, however, is different to that of my friend. I can't understand why anyone remotely familiar with Rob Bell would be surprised that he lent towards universalism. If you build your ministry on the idea that God welcomes everyone always, you are hardly likely to believe that he will change his attitude when you die.
My confusion extends to the reaction in the media, on blog sites, and facebook. Most Christians I know gave up believing in God punishing people after they die a long time ago. I don't simply mean us Anglicans whose God is just such a cuddly teddy bear he couldn't possibly hurt anyone - or do anything else for that matter - but even most evangelicals who lay claim to the Bible. I don't mean they have stopped believing in a God who judges in a theoretical sense, it's just that the belief has no practical implications for how they preach or minister. It's a belief that like Mrs Rochester is embarrassingly kept hidden away in the theological attic and is not allowed out or admitted to.
My suspicion, and it's just a suspicion, is that part of the commotion surrounding Pastor Bell's book is that he has stated in plain terms what most preachers and ministers pretend and imply to their congregations and the outside world that they believe. There is, in fact, a very simple test to find out whether we are universalists to all intents and purposes. It is to ask ourselves when was the last time we told someone that the consequence of not turning to Christ is that they will not be saved.
Whatever we think of Rob Bell's book, Rob Bell challenges us to be honest and to sign up openly to the universalism we imply by our lives and teaching to be true or to start telling it as it is.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
5. Using the Bible in Ethics: An Aside
I am currently reading for pleasure a biography of one my favourite writers, Somerset Maugham, by Selina Hastings. Maugham described himself as in 'the front row of the second rankers'. In his time, he was immensely popular as a writer, but was never regarded as quite being up there with the literary greats: the sort who get their books listed on university English Literature courses. As I find most of these often incomprehensible and, frankly, boring, I do not see this as a particularly bad thing.
One thing you can be sure of when you read Maugham is that his books are very readable and never dull. His stories, for he was essentially a story-teller, translate easily and effectively to the big screen. The latest adaptation, the Painted Veil, is of special interest to me being set as it is in China! My recent shoulder injury required me to hang around the physiotherapist's for quite a while each week. To pass the time, I read a volume of Maugham's short stories. I came to look forward to those sessions of enforced idleness! Our Lord himself was, of course, known for his gifts as a story-teller.
What has struck me most so far in the biography, however, is how much the world changed during his lifetime. Maugham was born in 1874 and died in 1965. He lived through a period of incredible social, political and industrial change. Maugham himself wrote of this when 'looking back' on his life:
'In my long life I have seen many changes in our habits and customs.
One thing you can be sure of when you read Maugham is that his books are very readable and never dull. His stories, for he was essentially a story-teller, translate easily and effectively to the big screen. The latest adaptation, the Painted Veil, is of special interest to me being set as it is in China! My recent shoulder injury required me to hang around the physiotherapist's for quite a while each week. To pass the time, I read a volume of Maugham's short stories. I came to look forward to those sessions of enforced idleness! Our Lord himself was, of course, known for his gifts as a story-teller.
What has struck me most so far in the biography, however, is how much the world changed during his lifetime. Maugham was born in 1874 and died in 1965. He lived through a period of incredible social, political and industrial change. Maugham himself wrote of this when 'looking back' on his life:
'In my long life I have seen many changes in our habits and customs.
The world I entered when at the age of eighteen I became a medical student was a world that knew nothing of planes, motor-cars, movies, radio or telephone. When I was still at school a lecturer came to Canterbury and showed us boys a new machine which reproduced the human voice. It was the first gramophone. The world I entered was a world that warmed itself with coal fires, lit itself by gas and paraffin lamps, and looked upon a bathroom as a luxury out of the reach.'
I was born in 1955 and I suppose my memory kicks in at about the time of Maugham's death. In the years from then to now, change has continued at a constantly increasing pace. I was watching Fawlty Towers not long ago and the thing that struck me was how they used a typewriter with not a computer in sight and this only 3 decades ago.Maugham himself was a great traveller. It is one of my many reproaches against myself that I always resisted the idea of travelling when I had the time and freedom to do so. It was said of the Beatles that it was a big deal for them to make the journey from Liverpool to London. It was! I made the same journey just a little later and was not in any mood to go further. Now living in Hong Kong and, in the past ten years having travelled more than in the rest of my life, I wish I had travelled more and regret what I have missed. Yes, I know God willing, it is not too late to travel, but it is too late to see what life used to be like in different parts of our world even just a few years ago. (See under: Personal Journey)
When I visited the Taj Mahal in India a few years ago, I was able to ring my mum from it on my mobile phone. To me, this still seems incredible, but not to any of the young people I know and minister to for whom the worst crisis in life is their mobile phone going dead or not being able to access their Facebook. But I am beginning to get nostalgic.
My point (yes, there is one) is that the world we now inhabit has, over the past 100 years or so, changed beyond recognition from the world of the Bible. This was the point that Bultmann was making when he famously said:
'It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.'
I don't as it happens agree with him, but living in the world we now inhabit does make it harder than we realize to understand the New Testament world and even harder to know how to apply the New Testament to ours. It also raises the question of whether rules which were designed for and worked in such a different world still work in the one we live in today.
The first commandment God gave human beings in Genesis after their creation was to 'be fruitful and multiply' (Genesis 1:28). It was also the first commandment he gave Noah and his family after the flood (Genesis 8:17, 9:1, 9:7). Most of us would, I think, feel that while human fertility is a great gift, it now needs to be controlled in a way it didn't in the past. We do not hesitate to over-ride God's most fundamental commandment to men and women because of changed social conditions. What was right then is not right now. What other commandments in the Bible are there, I wonder, that were right then, but are no longer right now?
Anyway, I recommend Somerset Maugham's writing to you if you want a really good read!
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Deliver us ...
I took delivery yesterday of two books. The first, The Indelible Image is by one of my favourite writers, Ben Witherington. It is the first volume in a two volume work on New Testament Theology and Ethics. As I teach Ethics and with my main interest lying in the New Testament, it is a book which brings together my two principal concerns. As is to be expected, Ben's book is scholarly, well-written, full of insights, and devout: the fruit of many years of research and study. I expect to not only enjoy reading it thoroughly, but to be referring to it for many years to come.
What to say about the second? It is the Deliverance of God by Douglas Campbell. At 1,218 pages, it certainly is not a light read, but it is, nevertheless, getting rave notices on the Internet. Many are claiming, including Campbell himself, that it will revolutionize our understanding of Paul's theology and change Pauline studies forever. You get the idea.
The book clearly covers a great deal of ground tackles many difficult and controversial areas and, again, represents a large amount of research. I am always worried, though, when people claim to be the first really to understand Paul or some other part of the Bible. I find that a bit difficult to believe and not a little arrogant! Campbell basically dismisses most other interpreters of Paul as simply wrong and mistaken. He alone has decoded the mystery which is Paul.
I am looking forward to reading it fully, if only to see what all the fuss is about. I have, however, read parts of it and am a bit bemused. You will know the story of the Emperor's new clothes. How a group of tailors convince everyone that they have made the Emperor a magical new set of clothes that only the wise and clever can see. Everyone pretends that they can see the clothes not wanting to appear foolish. It takes a little boy to shout out, 'The Emperor has no clothes on!' before anyone realizes the deceit.
I wonder if this book may be an academic set of Emperor's new clothes. Campbell in interpreting Romans, for example, claims that in Romans 1-4, Paul is, in fact, saying precisely the opposite to what basically everyone has ever thought that he was saying. Paul, Campbell alleges, is arguing with a 'Teacher' in Rome (although Paul never actually says this is what he is doing) with whom he disagrees and in doing so quotes his argument at length. So, for example, Romans 1:18-32 is a 'speech in person', that is, Paul is giving the Teacher's argument not his own.
Now I know that there are some things in Paul, which, as Peter puts it, are hard to understand, but if Campbell is right then Paul is not only hard to understand, but basically impossible. It would mean that for 2,000 years no-one has been reading the most important work of Christian theology in anything like the right way. If this is the case, then I would suggest that we just abandon all study of the Bible as a waste of time and get on without it.
I don't think it is the case, however. The book is clever, no doubt. Just as the tailors who made the Emperor's clothes were clever. But the joke is on us if we let ourselves be convinced by such extravagant claims.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Tuesday
My diary is packed with events and meetings at the moment so today is a nice change with a relatively clear day ahead of me. This means I can get on top of the endless emails and reports that have to be written ahead of our Church's AGM later in the month. Last night, I had a School Council and Church Council meeting. Both thankfully went well. So I am going to enjoy a day of quiet today and hopefully open a bottle of wine tonight before it all begins again tomorrow.
Wine, when I came here 8 years ago, was quite expensive and became even more so when the then Financial Secretary seriously increased the duty on it. Last year, a different Financial Secretary reduced it and now this year another one has abolished it altogether.
Watching Sky News from the UK on cable TV earlier, I was interested to see that there are calls for the British Financial Secretary to increase the duty on alcohol in the UK to combat under-age drinking. As if that would make the slightest difference in a culture where the young see getting blind drunk as a normal part of a night out. Anyway, it's nice to live somewhere where you can afford to drink wine and where you can walk the streets at night without fear of being the victim of anti-social behaviour. Long may it continue!
For many years, I used to wake up to John Humphrys. Humphrys is a presenter on Today, a current affairs programme on BBC Radio 4 in the UK. I still try to grab a listen to TODAY online, but it's very infrequent. TODAY is one of the best current affairs programmes around. In 2006, John Humphrys also did a series of programmes on Radio 4 interviewing represenatives of the major religions about God. I am reading the book that he has written based on the series.
Humphrys is not himself a believer, but nor is he an atheist. He describes himself as doubter. The book is interetsing, stimulating, balanced, and fair. Definitely the sort of book that those of us who believe in God should read. It shows where many people in the West are at when it comes to faith in God. It's not that they are against belief in God, they just have genuine difficulty in believeing in him. Indeed, many, like Humphrys himself, wish they could believe. If we are going to avoid simply talking to ourselves in Church, we need to find a way to engage with people like Humphrys at an intellectual and spiritual level. Well done, him for taking the initiative.
At one point in the book he quotes Niles Bohr, the Nobel prize-winning physicist. I thought it a brilliant quote so let me share it with you here. Bohr had a horseshoe nailed to the wall over his desk. Bohr was asked, 'Surely you don't believe that horsehoe will bring you luck?' Bohr replied:
'I believe no such thing, my good friend. Not at all. I am scarcely likely to believe in such foolish nonsense. However, I am told that a horseshoe will bring you good luck whether you believe in it or not!'
Have a good week everyone!
My diary is packed with events and meetings at the moment so today is a nice change with a relatively clear day ahead of me. This means I can get on top of the endless emails and reports that have to be written ahead of our Church's AGM later in the month. Last night, I had a School Council and Church Council meeting. Both thankfully went well. So I am going to enjoy a day of quiet today and hopefully open a bottle of wine tonight before it all begins again tomorrow.
Wine, when I came here 8 years ago, was quite expensive and became even more so when the then Financial Secretary seriously increased the duty on it. Last year, a different Financial Secretary reduced it and now this year another one has abolished it altogether.
Watching Sky News from the UK on cable TV earlier, I was interested to see that there are calls for the British Financial Secretary to increase the duty on alcohol in the UK to combat under-age drinking. As if that would make the slightest difference in a culture where the young see getting blind drunk as a normal part of a night out. Anyway, it's nice to live somewhere where you can afford to drink wine and where you can walk the streets at night without fear of being the victim of anti-social behaviour. Long may it continue!
For many years, I used to wake up to John Humphrys. Humphrys is a presenter on Today, a current affairs programme on BBC Radio 4 in the UK. I still try to grab a listen to TODAY online, but it's very infrequent. TODAY is one of the best current affairs programmes around. In 2006, John Humphrys also did a series of programmes on Radio 4 interviewing represenatives of the major religions about God. I am reading the book that he has written based on the series.
Humphrys is not himself a believer, but nor is he an atheist. He describes himself as doubter. The book is interetsing, stimulating, balanced, and fair. Definitely the sort of book that those of us who believe in God should read. It shows where many people in the West are at when it comes to faith in God. It's not that they are against belief in God, they just have genuine difficulty in believeing in him. Indeed, many, like Humphrys himself, wish they could believe. If we are going to avoid simply talking to ourselves in Church, we need to find a way to engage with people like Humphrys at an intellectual and spiritual level. Well done, him for taking the initiative.
At one point in the book he quotes Niles Bohr, the Nobel prize-winning physicist. I thought it a brilliant quote so let me share it with you here. Bohr had a horseshoe nailed to the wall over his desk. Bohr was asked, 'Surely you don't believe that horsehoe will bring you luck?' Bohr replied:
'I believe no such thing, my good friend. Not at all. I am scarcely likely to believe in such foolish nonsense. However, I am told that a horseshoe will bring you good luck whether you believe in it or not!'
Have a good week everyone!
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Then and Now
I have been reading Rome and Jerusalem by Martin Goodman. It is subtitled: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations. The book provides a detailed examination of these two ancient cities as well as much historical information. I have also just finished, coincidentally, watching the second series of the HBO/BBC drama, Rome. What both the book and the TV series do, in their own different ways, is reinforce just how much the world has changed since then.
This presents a real dilemma when preaching because most congregational members are not really interested in exploring the implications of this change when it comes to understanding a passage of Scripture. And yet, an act of imagination is required if the Bible is not just to be a text on which we impose our own pictures inevitably drawn from our very different world.
I will never forget the shock I got when I first went to Galilee. The lake is so small. I was brought up with images inspired by calling it the Sea of Galilee. I imagined it being so much bigger. Being there, helped me get a better image of what the geography must have been like and that helps me now to imagine some of the journeys the Bible describes Jesus making as well as some of the events it tells us about..
We have a problem in our lectionary readings in church at the moment. The software I and many others use, giving us the readings for each Sunday, is out of synchronization with the version of the lectionary published by the Church of England and which is used by the English-speaking churches, amongst others, here in Hong Kong. This has resulted in us having the same Gospel reading for two Sundays running. I used the computer version for the first Sunday and my colleague the published one for the second Sunday.
The explanation of why the printed version is right, and not that on my software, is found on the Church of England Liturgical Commission’s Official website:
'The provision of Is 49:1-7, 1 Cor 1:1-9, John 1:29-42 for 20 January (3rd Sunday of Epiphany) is correct.
This is because the 2nd Sunday of Epiphany (13 January) takes the readings for the Baptism of Christ (Isaiah 42.1-9, Psalm 29, Acts 10.34-43 and Matthew 3.13-end), and the 1st Sunday of Epiphany (6 January) coincides with the Feast of the Epiphany itself.
Likewise the readings normally read on the 3rd Sunday of Epiphany are in 2008 read on the 4th Sunday of Epiphany (27 January), and Candlemas may - if desired - be celebrated on Sunday 3 February.'
So that’s all clear then!
One good thing, however, now I know which is the right one, is that I will get to preach this Sunday on the passage that the software gave for last Sunday, that is, Matthew 4:12-23. This describes how Jesus makes his home at Capernaum instead of Nazareth after John the Baptist is arrested. Again, one of my abiding memories of Capernaum, after visiting it, is how small these villages must have been. Peter’s house, which now has an awful looking modern church built over it, must also have been small. It is a beautiful setting, though, and must have been even more so when Jesus lived there.
All of which challenges us all both preacher and congregation to work at the text not just to understand what the words mean, but to imagine what it means: to picture the world in which the words were written. A world with no cars, electric, computers, telephones, and all those things we are so proud of having invented, but which have added to the stress of life and are contributing to the destruction of the planet.
I like this quotation from the historian G M Trevelyan that appears on the Rome website:
"The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today... The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once on this earth, once on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow".
Update
I have just downloaded an update for Visual Liturgy 4, the computer software I mentioned above, and it has corrected the problem. If anyone has been having the same problem as me, check for downloads!
I have been reading Rome and Jerusalem by Martin Goodman. It is subtitled: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations. The book provides a detailed examination of these two ancient cities as well as much historical information. I have also just finished, coincidentally, watching the second series of the HBO/BBC drama, Rome. What both the book and the TV series do, in their own different ways, is reinforce just how much the world has changed since then.
This presents a real dilemma when preaching because most congregational members are not really interested in exploring the implications of this change when it comes to understanding a passage of Scripture. And yet, an act of imagination is required if the Bible is not just to be a text on which we impose our own pictures inevitably drawn from our very different world.
I will never forget the shock I got when I first went to Galilee. The lake is so small. I was brought up with images inspired by calling it the Sea of Galilee. I imagined it being so much bigger. Being there, helped me get a better image of what the geography must have been like and that helps me now to imagine some of the journeys the Bible describes Jesus making as well as some of the events it tells us about..
We have a problem in our lectionary readings in church at the moment. The software I and many others use, giving us the readings for each Sunday, is out of synchronization with the version of the lectionary published by the Church of England and which is used by the English-speaking churches, amongst others, here in Hong Kong. This has resulted in us having the same Gospel reading for two Sundays running. I used the computer version for the first Sunday and my colleague the published one for the second Sunday.
The explanation of why the printed version is right, and not that on my software, is found on the Church of England Liturgical Commission’s Official website:
'The provision of Is 49:1-7, 1 Cor 1:1-9, John 1:29-42 for 20 January (3rd Sunday of Epiphany) is correct.
This is because the 2nd Sunday of Epiphany (13 January) takes the readings for the Baptism of Christ (Isaiah 42.1-9, Psalm 29, Acts 10.34-43 and Matthew 3.13-end), and the 1st Sunday of Epiphany (6 January) coincides with the Feast of the Epiphany itself.
Likewise the readings normally read on the 3rd Sunday of Epiphany are in 2008 read on the 4th Sunday of Epiphany (27 January), and Candlemas may - if desired - be celebrated on Sunday 3 February.'
So that’s all clear then!
One good thing, however, now I know which is the right one, is that I will get to preach this Sunday on the passage that the software gave for last Sunday, that is, Matthew 4:12-23. This describes how Jesus makes his home at Capernaum instead of Nazareth after John the Baptist is arrested. Again, one of my abiding memories of Capernaum, after visiting it, is how small these villages must have been. Peter’s house, which now has an awful looking modern church built over it, must also have been small. It is a beautiful setting, though, and must have been even more so when Jesus lived there.
All of which challenges us all both preacher and congregation to work at the text not just to understand what the words mean, but to imagine what it means: to picture the world in which the words were written. A world with no cars, electric, computers, telephones, and all those things we are so proud of having invented, but which have added to the stress of life and are contributing to the destruction of the planet.
I like this quotation from the historian G M Trevelyan that appears on the Rome website:
"The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today... The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once on this earth, once on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow".
Update
I have just downloaded an update for Visual Liturgy 4, the computer software I mentioned above, and it has corrected the problem. If anyone has been having the same problem as me, check for downloads!
Monday, August 27, 2007
Then and Now
Somerset Maugham begins the fourth Volume of his collected short stories with this preface:
Preface
In this final volume I have placed the rest of my stories the scene of which is set in Malaya. They were written long before the Second World War and I should tell the reader that the sort of life with which they deal no longer exists. When I first visited those countries the lives the white men and their wives led there differed but little from what they had been twenty-five years before. They got home leave once in five years. They had besides a few weeks leave every year. If they lived where the climate was exhausting they sought the fresh air of some hill- station not too far away; if, like some of the government servants, they lived where they might not see another white man for weeks on end, they went to Singapore so that they might consort for a time with their kind. The Times when it arrived at a station up-country, in Borneo for instance, was six weeks old, and they were lucky if they received the Singapore paper in a fortnight.
Aviation has changed all that. Even before the war people who could afford it were able to spend even their short leave at home. Papers, illustrated weeklies, magazines reached them fresh from the press. In the old days Sarawak, say, or Selangor were where they expected to spend their lives till it was time for them to retire on a pension; England was very far away and when at long intervals they went back was increasingly strange to them; their real home, their intimate friends, were in the land in which the better part of their lives was spent. But with the rapidity of communication it remained an alien land, a temporary rather than a permanent habitation, which circumstances obliged them for a spell to occupy; it was a longish halt in a life that had its roots in the Sussex downs or on the moors of Yorkshire. Their ties with the homeland, which before had insensibly loosened and sometimes broke asunder, remained fast. England, so to speak, was round the corner. They no longer felt cut off. It changed their whole outlook.
The countries of which I wrote were then at peace. It may be that some of those peoples, Malays, Dyaks, Chinese, were restive under the British rule, but there was no outward sign of it. The British gave them justice, provided them with hospitals and schools, and encouraged their industries. There was no more crime than anywhere else. An unarmed man could wander through the length of the Federated Malay States in perfect safety. The only real trouble was the low price of rubber.
(W Somerset Maugham, Collected Short Stories, Volume Four)
I am a big fan of Somerset Maugham. I have always loved his stories and since coming out here have liked them even more. So many are set in this part of the world. Living as I do now, as an expatriate, I am interested in how expats in the past have lived. What he writes here in this preface is true now only more so. Aviation, so to speak, has taken off even more in recent years. There are many direct flights from Hong Kong to London each day, all full. Then there is the telephone and the internet and all the other means of mass communication.
During my recent holiday home to visit family the School situation exploded. I was able to talk with everyone I needed to on my mobile standing in a forest in Scotland and deal with letters, read reports, answer the Press, etc, etc, all from hotel room as if I was in my study back here. The time difference was a little inconvenient, and it was not how I would have chosen to spend the holiday, but geographical distance made little difference.
It’s the same now I am back. I can phone family for less than it used to cost me to phone from Scotland and email is always there. I am a child of this global village no less than anyone else, but reading these stories of an age now gone does make me wonder if we are any happier and fulfilled. There is a charm about the life they lived. It was slower, but I wonder how much more we achieve with all our rushing around and constant communications.
One thing is for sure though, it’s not going to get any slower any time soon!
Somerset Maugham begins the fourth Volume of his collected short stories with this preface:
Preface
In this final volume I have placed the rest of my stories the scene of which is set in Malaya. They were written long before the Second World War and I should tell the reader that the sort of life with which they deal no longer exists. When I first visited those countries the lives the white men and their wives led there differed but little from what they had been twenty-five years before. They got home leave once in five years. They had besides a few weeks leave every year. If they lived where the climate was exhausting they sought the fresh air of some hill- station not too far away; if, like some of the government servants, they lived where they might not see another white man for weeks on end, they went to Singapore so that they might consort for a time with their kind. The Times when it arrived at a station up-country, in Borneo for instance, was six weeks old, and they were lucky if they received the Singapore paper in a fortnight.
Aviation has changed all that. Even before the war people who could afford it were able to spend even their short leave at home. Papers, illustrated weeklies, magazines reached them fresh from the press. In the old days Sarawak, say, or Selangor were where they expected to spend their lives till it was time for them to retire on a pension; England was very far away and when at long intervals they went back was increasingly strange to them; their real home, their intimate friends, were in the land in which the better part of their lives was spent. But with the rapidity of communication it remained an alien land, a temporary rather than a permanent habitation, which circumstances obliged them for a spell to occupy; it was a longish halt in a life that had its roots in the Sussex downs or on the moors of Yorkshire. Their ties with the homeland, which before had insensibly loosened and sometimes broke asunder, remained fast. England, so to speak, was round the corner. They no longer felt cut off. It changed their whole outlook.
The countries of which I wrote were then at peace. It may be that some of those peoples, Malays, Dyaks, Chinese, were restive under the British rule, but there was no outward sign of it. The British gave them justice, provided them with hospitals and schools, and encouraged their industries. There was no more crime than anywhere else. An unarmed man could wander through the length of the Federated Malay States in perfect safety. The only real trouble was the low price of rubber.
(W Somerset Maugham, Collected Short Stories, Volume Four)
I am a big fan of Somerset Maugham. I have always loved his stories and since coming out here have liked them even more. So many are set in this part of the world. Living as I do now, as an expatriate, I am interested in how expats in the past have lived. What he writes here in this preface is true now only more so. Aviation, so to speak, has taken off even more in recent years. There are many direct flights from Hong Kong to London each day, all full. Then there is the telephone and the internet and all the other means of mass communication.
During my recent holiday home to visit family the School situation exploded. I was able to talk with everyone I needed to on my mobile standing in a forest in Scotland and deal with letters, read reports, answer the Press, etc, etc, all from hotel room as if I was in my study back here. The time difference was a little inconvenient, and it was not how I would have chosen to spend the holiday, but geographical distance made little difference.
It’s the same now I am back. I can phone family for less than it used to cost me to phone from Scotland and email is always there. I am a child of this global village no less than anyone else, but reading these stories of an age now gone does make me wonder if we are any happier and fulfilled. There is a charm about the life they lived. It was slower, but I wonder how much more we achieve with all our rushing around and constant communications.
One thing is for sure though, it’s not going to get any slower any time soon!
Thursday, May 17, 2007
The Brothers of our Lord
Readers of this blog may remember that I recently wrote about a book by Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. I enjoyed it so much that I bought his earlier book, Jude and the Relatives of Jesus, which I am half way through. It, too, is a fascinating and enjoyable book.
Amongst other things, I must confess that 1 Corinthians 9:5 had not made the impact on me that perhaps it should have. Paul writes: ‘Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?’ The point is that he mentions the ‘brothers of the Lord’ as a distinct group who travelled around with their wives preaching and teaching for Jesus.
It reminds me of how much we don’t know about what was going on in the first years of the Church and how easy it is to impose a later perspective on it. It is so important to read the Bible in its historical context. This calls for some imagination as we try to picture what life really was like.
I remember the first time I went to Galilee. I was shocked by how small the Sea of Galilee was. I imagine that if we could travel back in time to the time of Jesus and the early days of the Church, there would be many such shocks and surprises! Time travel, sadly, is not an option, instead we must rely on the glimpses that work such as Bauckham’s gives us.
Readers of this blog may remember that I recently wrote about a book by Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. I enjoyed it so much that I bought his earlier book, Jude and the Relatives of Jesus, which I am half way through. It, too, is a fascinating and enjoyable book.
Amongst other things, I must confess that 1 Corinthians 9:5 had not made the impact on me that perhaps it should have. Paul writes: ‘Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?’ The point is that he mentions the ‘brothers of the Lord’ as a distinct group who travelled around with their wives preaching and teaching for Jesus.
It reminds me of how much we don’t know about what was going on in the first years of the Church and how easy it is to impose a later perspective on it. It is so important to read the Bible in its historical context. This calls for some imagination as we try to picture what life really was like.
I remember the first time I went to Galilee. I was shocked by how small the Sea of Galilee was. I imagine that if we could travel back in time to the time of Jesus and the early days of the Church, there would be many such shocks and surprises! Time travel, sadly, is not an option, instead we must rely on the glimpses that work such as Bauckham’s gives us.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Books that Make a Difference
Every now and then you read a book that you recognize as saying something significant, even if you don’t completely agree with it. A book that makes a difference. At least that has been true for me. The books concerned don’t necessarily have to be brilliant from an academic point of view, or even popular, they just have that certain something that affects you.
The first to have this sort of impact on me was a book by Isobel Kuhn, By Searching. In it Isobel Kuhn tells of her life and calling as a missionary to China in the first part of the last century. She writes of how the Christian life is a search and that we know God by searching. This has modern resonances where search is the big thing in spirituality. The difference between Isobel’s search and the modern search was that she believed that when you searched you actually found something. In much modern teaching, it is the search itself that matters! Anyway, her book changed me and gave me hope at a time when I felt God was impossible to find.
I have just been reading a very different book. It is by Richard Bauckham entitled, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. It looks at our Gospels and asks questions about how we got them and how historically reliable they are. This is not just another book arguing that the Gospels either are or are not reliable historically. It tries instead to imagine how what we have in the Gospels came to be there in the first place.
What I get very annoyed about in much academic New Testament research is how far removed it is from the spirit that gave rise to it. The New Testament was not written as an academic exercise, but in the white heat of a new faith that had changed the lives of those involved. So much of what is written about the New Testament fails to take into account the inner motivation and convictions of the writers: it breathes a different and foreign air. Bauckham’s book, however, has an air of reality about it that most scholarly writing does not have. It is not always an easy read, but it is a fascinating one.
This is an extremely good review of it, and I think a fair one:
http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25349-2633034,00.html
I hope Harvey is right and that we do get a paradigm shift in the way we look at the Gospels! It won’t be before time.
Every now and then you read a book that you recognize as saying something significant, even if you don’t completely agree with it. A book that makes a difference. At least that has been true for me. The books concerned don’t necessarily have to be brilliant from an academic point of view, or even popular, they just have that certain something that affects you.
The first to have this sort of impact on me was a book by Isobel Kuhn, By Searching. In it Isobel Kuhn tells of her life and calling as a missionary to China in the first part of the last century. She writes of how the Christian life is a search and that we know God by searching. This has modern resonances where search is the big thing in spirituality. The difference between Isobel’s search and the modern search was that she believed that when you searched you actually found something. In much modern teaching, it is the search itself that matters! Anyway, her book changed me and gave me hope at a time when I felt God was impossible to find.
I have just been reading a very different book. It is by Richard Bauckham entitled, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. It looks at our Gospels and asks questions about how we got them and how historically reliable they are. This is not just another book arguing that the Gospels either are or are not reliable historically. It tries instead to imagine how what we have in the Gospels came to be there in the first place.
What I get very annoyed about in much academic New Testament research is how far removed it is from the spirit that gave rise to it. The New Testament was not written as an academic exercise, but in the white heat of a new faith that had changed the lives of those involved. So much of what is written about the New Testament fails to take into account the inner motivation and convictions of the writers: it breathes a different and foreign air. Bauckham’s book, however, has an air of reality about it that most scholarly writing does not have. It is not always an easy read, but it is a fascinating one.
This is an extremely good review of it, and I think a fair one:
http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25349-2633034,00.html
I hope Harvey is right and that we do get a paradigm shift in the way we look at the Gospels! It won’t be before time.
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