10. Righteousing (Justification)

Today is Maundy Thursday. I have just completed writing and editing the reports for our Church AGM, which is on the Sunday after Easter. They have to go to the printer today. So I have today to get on top of the services for the next few days.

Tonight we have a meal together at the School. The weather is warm now so we will be sitting outside. Friends in other parts of the world may be jealous at that thought!

Here is the next installment in the series on Paul and Righteousness. I'll try to post the next one on Saturday.

10. Righteousing (Justification)

Paul and his opponents were agreed that present righteousing (justification) and future salvation from the wrath of God and the consequent gift of eternal life could only be found in Christ. They, no less than he, believed that Christ had died for our sins. It was on the basis of Christ’s sacrifice that salvation was to be looked forward to. But how was a person to respond to this sacrifice and make the benefits of it their own? How was a person to be righteoused (justified) so that they could experience all that being righteoused (justified) involved?

Paul’s opponents believed that it was by the ‘works of the Law’, which we have argued means keeping the commandments of the Old Testament Law, including circumcision while not being limited to it. Paul was absolutely convinced that it could only happen on the basis of faith. If it was on the basis of faith and not on the basis of Law that, consequently, meant that as far as the believer was concerned Law was no longer an issue. It was not that the Law was bad just that it fulfilled its role and had its day. It was time to move on!

But and this is I think a very important point, if righteousness is doing what God wants and what God wants is faith in Christ, then those who have faith in Christ are truly righteous. They are not declared righteous when everyone knows that really they are not. They are not made righteous in the sense that they can now do works that earn them the title righteous. They really are righteous because their faith is counted or reckoned as righteousness. This is real righteousness. It’s all God wants from us because Jesus has done everything that God required. ‘By the obedience of one shall many be righteoused (justified)’. Jews need it, Gentiles need it, we all need it, and without it we are not righteous – none of us. We don’t need works of any sort to righteous (justify) us, we just need faith in Jesus.

Now that we have been righteoused (justified), we can face the future judgement with confidence. Or as Paul puts it much more succinctly:

But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been righteoused (justified) by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. (Romans 5:8-10)

This verse brings together all the points that we have been arguing. It makes a clear distinction between righteousing (justification) now, here in the present, when we have been reconciled to God by Christ’s death, and future salvation when hope to be saved from the wrath of God and given the gift of eternal life.

For Paul salvation is in essence a future concept. At times, he talks about how we are ‘being saved’ (present tense) meaning the process that will result in future salvation is taking place, and sometimes, although more rarely, he can say we ‘were saved’ (past tense) because he is confident of the future result. Notice that on one of the rare occasions that he does say we ‘were saved’ (past tense), he qualifies it:

‘For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.’ (Romans 8:24-25)

Yes, much has already happened to the believer, but not everything. What is more we still have to face the final judgement. Again, to quote Paul himself:

‘For all of us must appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body, whether good or evil.’ (2 Corinthians 5:10)

Paul doesn’t seem to think that just because we have been righteoused (justified) that this is the end of the matter. There is more that needs to happen in the meantime.

So now that we are righteous, what happens between us having become righteous and the judgement?

9. Righteousness and Salvation

It's first thing on Tuesday morning and I am going over my Radio talks to record later this morning. Here is the next post in the latest series here.

9. Righteousness and Salvation

Paul argued that not only are all humans unrighteous, but also left to themselves there is nothing they can do to become righteous. All are sinners, controlled by sin, and slaves of sin. This means that all we have to look forward to is the wrath of God, which even now is being revealed against all unrighteousness (Romans 1:18). People need saving from it. How are we to find salvation?

This is where perhaps this blog gets in to stormy waters! In Paul, judgement really does sound as if it is ‘by works’. This was a point made by Sanders and which has been taken up increasingly in recent years by scholars from various theological camps. I have already quoted Romans 2 where Paul says it is those who do good that will receive eternal life. In the Bible and in Judaism, it is the righteous who do good, in the sense of doing what God requires of them. How are we unrighteous sinners to do good and so be able to find salvation on the last day?

It is important, I think, at this point to make a distinction between righteousness (justification) and salvation. This is a point made somewhat controversially by N T Wright. While many have criticised him for making this distinction, it certainly sounds to me as if it is there in Paul. Paul argues that we can only find forgiveness for past sins, be freed from the power of sin in the present, and so become one of the righteous here and now by faith in Christ, not by works of the Law, but solely by faith. There is a big argument over whether righteousing (justification) in Paul is about being declared or being made righteous. Writers discuss whether justification is forensic or ethical. Many describe it as a legal decision made by God on the day of judgement. It is a declaration that a person is not guilty. I find all this extremely unhelpful.

First of all Paul talks about us being righteous now, in the present. It has a very immediate focus. Scholars claim that Paul can talk about righteousing (justification) being in the present because God’s future, final judgement is read back into the present. This is surely an unnecessary way to look at it. Sanders, on whose work the New Perspective is based, argued that righteousness and being righteous in Judaism at the time of Paul is very much a ‘here and now’ concept. As he puts it: ‘the righteous are alive and well’. In other words, it’s a present state of being based on what happens in the present, not something that rightly belongs in the future, but which is read back into the present.

Righteousness is about doing what God wants. Those who do what God wants are righteous.

Paul’s opponents argued that what God wants is for us to keep the Law. Paul argues that this is a bit difficult, as we are powerless to keep the Law. And, in any case, that was not what the Law was for anyway. The Law’s job, says Paul, was to show us how sinful we were and how powerless we were to do anything about it.

As sinners under the power of sin, we are estranged from God, without God or hope in this world. All that awaits us is God’s judgement and wrath. Our only hope is the blood of Jesus. God has shown us his love in the past so that he won’t have to show us his wrath in the future. By sending Christ to die for us, God demonstrates his love for the ungodly, that is, for those who are separated from him because of their sin.

Righteousing (justification) involves God forgiving our sins, reconciling us to himself, freeing us from sin’s power, transferring us from the jurisdiction of the Law, and giving us the Holy Spirit as an outpouring of his love in the present and as a guarantee both of future salvation from the wrath of God and also of the gift of eternal life. It also results in whoever this has happened to becoming part of the people of God made up of everyone without distinction. All really are one in Christ: one in their past sin and one in their desire for future salvation.

The critical question then is: how can we be righteoused (justified) so that all this can happen to us?

8. The Righteous and the Unrighteous

I have just looked at the diary for the next few days and thought I had better get on and post now while I have the chance. I will aim to post again on Tuesday!

We have had to cancel Sunday School tomorrow, which goes against the grain, but we have no choice given the Government's decision this week. Hoepfully, we will still manage a good celebration!

I hope you have a good Sunday.

8. The Righteous and the Unrighteous

As I have argued in previous posts in this series, Paul’s opponents had a very strong case. It wouldn’t need a letter of the depth and detail of Romans to refute it if they didn’t. We will only understand Paul when we see how good their argument was. In fact, Paul’s opponents had a powerful reason for keeping the Law themselves and for wanting Gentile believers to keep it. It was God’s Law! God was the One who had given it and in the OT warned of the dangers of not keeping it. If it was God who had given it, and it had been right in the past to keep it, what had changed? Paul’s argument creates a problem that Paul himself acknowledges.

Paul argues that the Law has had its day, that Christians have died to the Law, and are now freed from it. They are no longer under any obligation to the Law. The Law, however, had been the basis for how God’s people had lived for centuries. It had regulated the behaviour of the people of God and shown them how to live. The New Perspective is right to draw our attention to the fact that, for Judaism at the time of Paul, the Law wasn’t the burden that some Christians in the past have imagined it to be, it was a gift from God, a thing of joy, a cause for profound gratitude and praise.

Read Psalm 119, for example. It doesn’t sound like the Psalmist had any problem with it. Whatever the faults of the Pharisees may or may not have been, they seem not to have had a problem with the Law. This presumably was why, when some of them became believers, they thought they should go on keeping the Law and should encourage everyone else to do so. Wasn’t Paul suggesting that the Psalmist and those like him who saw the Law as good and from God were wrong? And, logically, didn’t it mean if the Christian was no longer under Law, they could do precisely what they liked? As Paul himself asks:

‘What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!’ (Romans 6:15)

To understand how Paul deals with this it is necessary to try and understand how Paul understands salvation. This is a difficult topic because every word and every position is argued over with passion. But let’s have a go! At the risk of over-simplification, I think the key to understanding Paul is to realize that for Paul salvation is what happens at the end on the Day of Judgment and that salvation is salvation from the wrath of God. I think this comes out very clearly in Romans 2. Take these verses, for example:

‘But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. For he will repay according to each one’s deeds: to those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; while for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury.’ (Romans 2:5-8)

Paul believed that there will in the future be a day of reckoning when God will reward the good and punish the bad. This shouldn’t cause any surprise. Christians may not believe it any more, but just about every Jew and Christian in Paul’s time did and it is absolutely fundamental to the whole of the New Testament. Nothing can be understood without grasping the centrality of this concept.

The gift of eternal life will be given to those who ‘do good’, but for those who do not there will be ‘wrath and fury’. Those who ‘do good’ are those who are 'righteous' in God’s sight and those who don’t are the ‘unrighteous’. What we desperately need to know, therefore, is how to become one of the righteous.

‘The righteous shall live …’ that is receive eternal life, Paul and his opponents both believed that, but on what basis were they to be righteous? On the basis of Law, as Paul’s opponents argued. Or by faith, as Paul argued?

This is where the English language lets us down terribly and proves most misleading. The words that Paul uses to talk about righteousness in English are words such as: righteous, righteousness, the righteous. We can tell that they are all related because they have the same root in common, right, as indeed they have in Greek. The problem is while in Greek the verb has the same root as well, so you can see straight away that the verb is related to the noun and the adjective, in English it does not. The verb that we use in English to translate the Greek is justify and hence also the word justification. The verb, justify, describes how a person becomes righteous. We miss a fantastic amount because when we read in English we lose the connection between the verb and the rest of the group of words.

There have been attempts to overcome this by using words such as ‘rightwise’ instead of justify. The trouble is they are not words we normally use in English. Nevertheless, I have recently gone through Romans and instead of justify etc have changed it to a form of the made up verb, ‘to righteous’. So when Paul says we are ‘justified by faith’, I have changed it to we are ‘righteoused by faith’. If this seems as if I am just being pedantic, try doing it: it really makes a difference. The word processor makes it relatively easy!

There is another problem to do with translation. Important for Paul is the idea that we are righteoused (justified) by faith. Again, in English, when we come to the verb, we translate the Greek by a different sounding word, the word believe. But in Greek the words have the same root and again you can see the connection. I have changed all occurrences of the verb ‘to believe’, to the verb, ‘to have faith’. This again makes a huge difference. I’ll try to show why as we go on!

So to sum up: Anyone who God finds unrighteous on the Day of Judgement will face wrath and fury. We need to be saved from this. The ones who will be saved are those who do good, the righteous. Paul argues, as we shall see, that left to ourselves we are all unrighteous. How are we to become one of the righteous? How are we to be righteoused (justified)?

Friday

All the Primary schools in Hong Kong have been closed because of a flu epidemic except, as a report shows today, there isn't a flu epidemic or anything like it. It was case of over-reaction. Not that I am necessarily complaining. I think kids have to spend too much time at school as it is and I realize how much time school work takes up for me when I don't have to do it! With Holy Week coming up and schools originally going on right up until Easter, I will have a lot more time.

Some of this extra time will be spent writing five radio talks that I have record next week. I will post them on here. They will be broadcast in April so I am going to give them an Easter theme.

Tonight is the first night I will have had in for a week. I intend to have as relaxed an evening as I can, I hope you all have a good one as well!

7. 'Works of the Law'

I have the final of my Lent talks tonight. I have been talking about Christian living. This has overlapped with what I am writing in this series of blogs. I have found myself reading and re-reading Paul's letters to the Romans. It really is an amazing piece of writing and always seems to reward another reading. Commentators today seem not to know what to make of it with many different interpretations of every passage and often very contradictory interpretations. I am often left wondering how a single piece of writing can be interpreted in so many different ways.

I wonder what the Romans themselves made of it when it was first read out in Church. Did they scratch their heads and wonder what on earth Paul was going on about? Or did it make reasonable sense to them? I would dearly love to know.

Here then is another blog in the series on Paul and the problems raised by the Gentiles!

7. ‘Works of the Law’

I want to turn now more specifically to the issue of the Old Testament Law in Paul. What is his problem with the Law and what role if any does he see it as having for the believer? I hope you will forgive me beginning by repeating some of what I have already said in this series, albeit in a different form. I especially want to look at something that goes to the heart of the debate between the Old and New Perspectives on Paul and that is the meaning of the phrase ‘works of the Law’ in Paul.

When I first became a Christian, we all accepted that you couldn’t be saved by keeping the Law, which we equated in good Protestant fashion with doing good works. This made us different to the Roman Catholics who we believed were all trying to earn their salvation by doing works of various kinds. We knew that we were saved by faith not works. Nowadays, of course, I realize that this is desperately unfair to Roman Catholics. Anyway, the issue for us was what the role of the Law was now we were Christians.

It was common in those days to make a distinction between the moral, social, and ceremonial aspects of the Law. Jesus had got rid of the social and ceremonial laws of the Old Testament, but we still had to keep the moral laws. It wasn’t always easy to know which laws were which, but generally it seemed to make sense. Jesus surely wanted us to obey the 10 commandments, but equally he didn’t want us to stone women caught in adultery or worry about eating pork.

When I started theological study it seemed to be more complicated than that. After all, as Christians we didn’t even keep the 10 commandments: we had conveniently adjusted the one about Sabbath observance to suit ourselves, for example. What authority could the Law still have if we could be so cavalier in our approach to it? Where did the Holy Spirit fit in? And what was the relationship between keeping commandments and being led by the Spirit? I intend in the next few posts to turn my attention to these issues. But first, at the risk of repetition, I want to look at what Paul means by this phrase ‘works of the Law’.

It really is amazing the way that so many people can read what Paul says about the Law and yet understand it so differently. This has always been the case. The sixteenth century Reformers themselves, who agreed that the purpose of Law was not so people could earn salvation by keeping it, nevertheless disagreed on what was its purpose! The New Perspective has only added to the controversy and difficulty in understanding what was Paul’s view of the Law.

Paul says that righteousness (justification) is not by the ‘works of the Law’. Previously, previous to the New Perspective that is, this was generally understood to mean that humans could not become righteous by doing what the Law commanded. The New Perspective, however, has sought to offer a new way of understanding the phrase ‘works of the Law’ or, at least, a new emphasis. ‘Works of the Law’, it is argued, refers primarily to distinctively Jewish practices such as circumcision, food laws, and Sabbath observance. In other words to that which separated and distinguished Jews from Gentiles. This fits with seeing Paul’s main concern as being unity and equality between Jew and Gentile believers.

Paul, on this understanding, is not arguing against human moral effort as such. He is not making the point that Luther made against humans trying to achieve salvation by their own good works. It’s not moral good works that are in Paul’s mind so much as specifically Jewish works (circumcision, food laws, Sabbath observance, and the like). Paul argues against Law, not because he is against good works, but because these Jewish religious practices separate Jew and Gentile. Paul contrasts faith, not with good works, but with these Jewish works. Paul’s argument for faith is an argument against circumcision and the like because circumcision and the like divide Jew and Gentile and God’s purpose is that Jew and Gentile should be one.

Some New Perspective scholars agree that Paul would have argued against moral good works as a way of obtaining salvation if that had been the issue, in other words they accept that Paul would have agreed with Luther, they just don’t think that’s what he is talking about in his letters. Others don’t seem so sure. Some scholars seem to suggest that for Paul ‘having faith’ might well include good works so that without good works humans cannot be justified. To be justified by faith on the Old Perspective understanding meant believing in Christ that and nothing else. Indeed, it specifically excluded anything else. On the New Perspective approach, there is now a possibility that justification by faith may mean no more than justification without Jewish works. This means that excluding good works from the idea of justification by faith in Paul may be going too far and a misinterpretation of him. This may or may not be true – it’s certainly a different way of looking at what Paul says.

As I have argued in previous posts, the New Perspective has drawn our attention to something important here. Paul says what he does about the Law in the context of a dispute with Jewish believers over what is and what is not required of Gentile believers. Circumcision and food laws were an important issue. But, as I think is increasingly being recognized ‘works of the Law’ in Paul cannot be limited to circumcision and the like. When Paul discusses the Law he broadens the discussion to include all the commands of the Law: circumcision certainly, but also what we know as the ten commandments.

Paul sees the problem of the Law as human sin and our inability to keep it. This simply does not make sense if he is only thinking of things like circumcision and food laws. Nor does it make sense if the main issue is simply one of unity and equality between Jew and Gentile. As I have said, this is an issue for Paul, but his main concern surely is how Jew and Gentile together can be righteous before God and so be saved. ‘Works of the Law’, then, refers to the whole of the Law as given by God to Moses and these works, Paul argues, can never save them.

Of course, it is important to see the historical context of Paul’s discussion of the Law and the importance of the demand of some Jewish believers for Gentiles to be circumcised. The problem with the Law for Paul, though, is far bigger than the fact it belongs to the Jew, the problem with the Law is that it cannot give salvation. His opponents argued that while faith in Christ was essential, salvation would also depend on obedience to the Law! This Paul will not allow.

This means that Luther was on the right lines even if he did miss some of the historical dimension and context of what Paul writes!

Sunday

It's Sunday afternoon and I am catching up on all the bits and pieces that get left over during the week. Tonight I am going to a performance of Bach's, St Matthew's Passion. Easter always seems to get squeezed out and, while Bach may not be to everyone's taste, at least music like this makes us think of what really matters and not only at this time of the year!

Maybe I am getting old, but I can't help feeling that Bach will still be being played, listened to, and enjoyed long after we have forgotten most present day composers.

Are there any present day composers BTW?

I hope your Sunday is good!

6. The Apostle Paul and Modern Scholarship

I am trying hard to post regularly. If you are going to the trouble to read my posts, the least I can do is to write them on a regular basis! I am sorry when I fail: the spirit is willing but the flesh ...

Which is the subject of tomorrow's sermon. It is one of those instances when I really do think it matters how you translate the Greek. I have become more and more suspicious of preachers who base their sermons on one (disputed) interpretation of the text! If experts in the language (which I certainly am not) argue over the meaning of the text then we as preachers should not base our sermon on one particular reading.

Just to reassure you, I won't be doing that tomorrow. However, I do think that the some translations miss the point! I will explain later in this series!!

Have a good Sunday!

6. The Apostle Paul and Modern Scholarship

In interpreting Paul, scholarship is getting increasingly specialized as, indeed, it is in other areas of Biblical studies. Interpretation of Paul is made in the light of very detailed studies of second temple Judaism. There’s nothing wrong with that as such. Paul was a Jew and spent at least part of his childhood in Jerusalem. Understanding the Judaism of his day can add to our understanding of Paul. It makes sense then to try to understand how, for example, a phrase such as ‘the righteousness of God’ would have been understood by Paul’s Jewish contemporaries.

What I am a bit concerned about is the way it is assumed that the meaning of what Paul writes is not in any way obvious, but can only be arrived at after detailed and laborious research. Interestingly, those carrying out this detailed research cannot agree amongst themselves how Paul should be interpreted even then. For example, a scholar whose work is credited with starting the New Perspective on Paul, E P Sanders, provided an account of Judaism at the time of Paul that overturned much previous scholarship. Nothing wrong with that except that many other scholars have disagreed with him and one, C VanLandingham, has recently claimed that Jews at the time of Paul believed the precise opposite of what Sanders said they believed.

All this would not matter much, after all it is a scholarly game to agree and disagree with each other that’s how you get PhDs, except that the interpretation of Paul is made to depend on such scholarly reconstructions. I am not for one moment arguing that research into Paul’s background should stop or that historical context does not matter, I would question, however, whether it is being taken too far and whether too much is being demanded of us for understanding what Paul writes in his letters.

This is not a theological point I am making. I am not arguing that the Holy Spirit will make the meaning clear to us or that Paul’s letters are inspired so we don’t have to worry about historical research. I am arguing on purely historical grounds that perhaps the type of background research that is being demanded of us in interpreting Paul is not, in fact, necessary. I am asking the question whether we are missing the wood for the trees. By examining in minute detail the composition of the paint, are we failing to see the picture?

What grounds do I have for asking this question? Simply this: who were Paul’s letters written to in the first place? Take the two letters most relevant to the issues that I have been discussing in this series. Galatians was written to Gentiles in Asia whom Paul had spent only a limited amount of time with. Romans was written to predominantly Gentile converts in Rome whom he had never met. In both cases, Paul seems to think that they would understand what he writes. He doesn’t seem to think that they need to study for a doctorate in Judaism first. If we today can only understand Paul after very detailed academic study of second temple Judaism, how on earth were these Gentiles supposed to understand him?

Again, please do not misunderstand me, I am not arguing that we should ignore the historical context of what Paul writes or that academic research is unimportant, I am simply saying that taking seriously the historical context of Paul’s letters may require a different method of interpreting what Paul writes than the one being pursued by many scholars. By all means study Paul’s context, but do not make understanding Paul dependent on knowledge that Paul himself did not expect his original readers to have.

The meaning of what Paul writes about faith, the Law, righteousness, etc in Galatians and Romans must be what it would have meant for the Galatians and Romans. How would they have heard it? What would it have meant for them? Of course, we must ask questions about Paul himself and what made him write this way, but we should pay more attention to the letter itself and less attention to interpretations based on obscure research that would have meant nothing to those who originally heard the letters being read. The Galatiansand Romans presumably got Paul’s point without having studied E P Sanders - maybe we can as well!

5. The Apostle Paul and the Liberal Conscience of the West

Well, I did get my glass of wine last night, but not quite the break I had expected or hoped for! I am then a little behind in my preparation for my Lent Talk tonight which is on the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, I wanted to get the next in my latest series posted so here it is. I apologize if it could do with polishing a bit more!

5. The Apostle Paul and the Liberal Conscience of the West

In the previous posts in this series, I have been looking at the Old and New Perspectives on Paul. With the New Perspective, I see the Gentile question as the context in which we must interpret what Paul writes about justification by faith and the Law. This context has not always been taken as seriously in the past as it ought to have been with commentators wanting to rush beyond it to make more general theological points. With the Old Perspective, however, I remain convinced that at the heart of the dispute between Paul and his opponents is the issue of how Gentiles can be saved. It was in his attempt to answer this question that Paul explains his understanding of justification by faith, the Law, and the place of the Gentiles in the people of God.

Paul answers the question of how Gentiles can be saved by making a more fundamental point and that is that all alike need saving, Jew and Gentile. Both Jew and Gentile and are sinners under the wrath of God. Keeping the Law won’t work because neither Jew nor Gentile can keep the Law. All the Law does is reinforce this fact of human sin. The only ground for salvation is faith in Christ. It is because Jew and Gentile are both in need of saving that God’s plan is to save both by doing something new. This does not mean Gentiles joining the old people of God and becoming Jews, but both Jew and Gentile becoming part of a new people of God by faith. In this new people of God, ethnic differences simply do not count. All are now One in Christ and ought to demonstrate that oneness by how they live.

It’s this last part that the New Perspective has picked up on, that is, the Oneness in Christ. I would venture to suggest that the reason it has struck a chord with so many is to do with more contemporary concerns rather than understanding the first century context of Paul’s writing. New Perspective people argue that the Old Perspective owes more to issues around at the time of the Reformation than those of the first century. Is the New Perspective not also guilty of allowing issues of our own day to affect its understanding of Paul? Let me try to explain.

Modern Christians are very concerned about relationships between people in society and the Church. Issues to do with equality for different groups who are perceived as having been discriminated against in the past have been high on the agenda. The call for equality for women, homosexuals, and people of different races has played big. The New Perspective stress on Paul’s teaching about fellowship and equality in the Church clearly picks up this concern. It fits. Paul argues that Gentiles shouldn’t be treated as second-class citizens and, therefore, we argue nor should other groups in our own day.

Some New Perspective writing makes it sound as if Paul is a modern liberal whose main concern is to campaign for an end to discrimination and for there to be equality within the Church. One writer, Krister Stendahl, who was a forerunner of the New Perspective, wrote a book entitled, The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West. In it he argued that it was Luther’s 16th century obsession with sin that had led to a serious misinterpretation of Paul. Perhaps it is time for someone to write, The Apostle Paul and the Liberal Conscience of the West to show how 20th century liberal obsessions have led to a similar misinterpretation!

The perspective I have been arguing for while relevant to modern liberal concerns would put the emphasis elsewhere in addressing different groups of people. Paul would in the first place be more concerned with how any group - men, women, homosexuals, different races, minority groups - could be saved from the wrath of God. He would argue that they could only find salvation by faith in Christ. This would, of necessity, involve them joining the people of God who were being saved now and who would be finally saved later.

Clearly all those who by faith in Christ join this community of faith are in the same boat and so there are no grounds for discrimination. However, while the modern agenda wants to emphasize this last stage, it is not so keen on the earlier ones. But you can only get to the last stage by going through the previous ones. There is no fellowship without salvation. To have the hope of salvation means recognizing that all alike (men and women whether homosexuals, heterosexuals, black, white or whatever) are sinners under the wrath of God who are unable to save themselves.

Seen in this light the first thing to say to a member of a minority group (or any other group for that matter) is not that they can find equality in the Church, but that they are a sinner who needs saving. My suspicion is that Paul was worried about the issue of table fellowship in Galatia not so much because Peter wouldn’t have dinner with him and the Gentiles, but because of what this implied about how Peter thought people could be saved. I am sure he would also have had something to say about Peter not eating with them and what that said about his attitude to fellow Christians, it’s just that that’s not his main concern. The issue is not Peter treating Gentiles as second-class citizens, but the implication that they are not citizens at all.

To repeat a point from an earlier blog: if it’s just about equality of status amongst believers that Paul is concerned about, then that could have been achieved, as his opponents suggested, by the Gentiles agreeing to circumcision and to keeping the Law. This was something, I must stress again, that they were willing to do. For Paul equality of status does matter, but only after having established how anyone can achieve the status of being in Christ in the first place. Given that we are all, each one of us, only ‘in Christ’ by faith, we should treat others who are in Christ equally. It’s primarily a theological, not a political or social agenda.

It makes little sense to talk about equality between different groups of people until we have established the basis for that equality in the first place and that is finding salvation through membership of the community of faith by faith.

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!

4. Towards a Clear Perspective (Part Two)

I am posting this post today as it belongs with yesterday's and I didn't want there to be too much of a delay! I hope what I am trying to argure is clear(!), I know from experience that writing on this subject can be anything but!

Having laid out an outline of what I think should be our perpsective on Paul, I am going to look at what he says about the Law, which is at the heart of the dispute between him and his opponents. Before I do, I want to make some general comments about scholarship on Paul! The nice thing about blogging is that you can tackle the big subjects in a small way!

4. Towards a Clear Perspective (Part Two)

In the last post, I criticised the New Perspective for seeing the dispute between Paul and his opponents as being primarily about the basis of Church membership. Nevertheless, I think it is indisputable that the New Perspective has shown how important the dispute was between Paul and his opponents over the Gentile question. It provides both the context and the reason for what Paul writes. However, you wouldn’t know this from reading some Old Perspective writing on Paul. For many, Paul is writing timeless truths for all Christians. Paul, however, in Romans and Galatians, for example, is not writing a general essay on salvation. He is writing to real people to deal with a specific issue that affected them directly and personally. We can today, of course, learn from what he writes to them, but we have to understand what he says to them first.

Paul is trying to explain how he sees the place of the Gentiles in the purposes of God. This means he has to address two questions: how Gentiles can be saved and what is the basis for fellowship between Jew and Gentile in the Church. In so doing, he shows the inadequacy of the Law and why circumcision is not necessary for Gentiles. The reason why Gentiles should not be circumcised and keep the Law is not simply or primarily that this would be socially divisive within the Church, but because circumcision and the Law are not an adequate basis for salvation for either Jew or Gentile. Paul’s point is that it is useless to require Gentiles to do something that has failed for Jews.

Both Jews and Gentiles alike are one in their sin and can only be saved one way. It is in the process of being saved that Jew and Greek become one people. The issue is not what should be the grounds of membership of a club, but how to become one of the saved. One of the things that sometimes gets missed in New Perspective writing is that the Church is the community of those who are being saved. The issues of how to be saved and how to be part of the people of God are inseparably linked. To be saved requires becoming a member of the Church, the people of God, the community of those who are being saved and who will be saved. The answer to the question of how someone can be a member of the Church is also the answer to the question of how someone can be saved and vice versa.

For Paul the answer is clear: only by faith. This is the way for the Jew and for the Gentile alike. Paul as a Jew himself finds it incredible that God had planned all along to save both Jew and Gentile and to make one new people out of two different groups. They are one in need, one in salvation and one in Christ, and so should demonstrate that by being one in the practice of fellowship. Paul really does want Jew and Gentile believers to be equal. Ephesians 3, for example, is quite breath-taking in its vision of what Paul sees as God’s plan for the Gentiles.

However, to repeat a point from an earlier post, if Paul’s only or main concern was equality between Jew and Gentile in the Church and how Jew and Gentile could have fellowship on an equal basis within the Church, then his opponents answer is every bit as valid as Paul’s own. Inviting Gentiles to be circumcised and keep the Law is not making them second-class citizens, as some New Perspective writers claim, it is showing them the height of respect. Indeed, Paul himself acknowledges that his opponents took a positive attitude to the Gentile believers. If all Paul wanted was for Jew and Gentile to live as one in Christ and his argument is that this could be achieved by faith, then his opponents could argue that they too wanted Jew and Gentile to live as one in Christ and this could better be achieved by Law, that is, by Jew and Gentile keeping God’s Law together. They could claim that the Law is after all God’s Law. If it’s only fellowship in the Church that is at stake, Paul’s opponents seem to have the stronger argument.

A clear perspective on Paul will recognize that faith in Christ provides both the ground for our salvation and for fellowship now between Jewish and Gentile believers in the community of those who hope for salvation.

3. Towards A Clear Perspective (Part One)

It's Wednesday and I have my Lent talk to finish for tonight! The week certainly whizzes by. I was up at 4.30am today to meet some friends from the airport. Hong Kong is really nice at that time in the morning. There are still plenty of people about, but at least you can drive on the roads rather than sitting in endless traffic queues! Journeys are consequently much quicker and much more enjoyable!

The weather is still very pleasant here. Hong Kong has been having what everyone refers to as a 'cold spell'. It's not, in fact, cold, but it is considerably cooler. Mind you, I was still sweating profusely after the walk up to Theological College on Monday. Getting there takes me about an hour by public transport and involves a short walk, but up a steep road. If this is the condition I am in now, what will it be like when the weather gets up in the 30s? Not something to look forward to!

Here is the first part of my attempt to make sense of the different perspectives on Paul. This may seem very theoretical and academic, but when you are regularly preaching on passages from the Bible written by Paul you do need a perspective if you are to say anything at all. This isn't what I say in my sermons, but it is the basis for what I do say!

I hope your week is good!

3. Towards A Clear Perspective (Part One)

Much confusion is being caused by the two perspectives on Paul. For some, it seems as if time honoured beliefs are being called into question, beliefs they believe to be central to the Gospel. For others, it is sounds as if theology and doctrine are being allowed to determine in advance the results of academic and historical investigation. The real issue should be, as one book puts it, ‘what Paul really said’. The trouble is what did he really say? Some Old Perspective people make it sound as if they only have the truth and there is no need for further study. Some New Perspective people make it sound as if they are the first people since the Apostle Paul to understand him.

Now, of course, we always need to be open to fresh insights and there is always a need to study God’s Word more. Equally, we need humility when doing so and surely it is highly unlikely that the saints and holy teachers of the past got it entirely wrong? Yes, we need to be open to new ideas, but we must also be willing to learn from the past as well. At the risk, then, of rushing in where angels fear to tread, this is what I think a clearer perspective would look like!

With the Old Perspective, I think that Paul’s argument is about salvation, that is, about who can be saved and how. It is not simply or even mainly about Church membership. When you read some New Perspective writers, it really does seem that all Paul was concerned with was how different groups could get on with one another now, in the present, rather than how people can be saved both now and in the future. Obviously, Paul wanted all to get on with one another as fellow members of the body of Christ, but I, for one, don’t believe that his main concern was how different people could find peace with each other, but how all of us could find peace with God.

Interestingly, Luke reporting on the controversy between Paul and his Jewish believer opponents writes:

'Then certain individuals came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” ' (Acts 15:1)

In other words, the argument was over the issue of salvation and not simply the basis upon which Jewish and Gentile believers could have table fellowship and eat together, although clearly that followed from it.

Paul’s opponents all shared with Paul a common theology: they believed in and were sincerely committed to Jesus the Messiah. However, they also thought that commitment to the Jewish Messiah also meant commitment to the Jewish Law and that you couldn’t be saved without it. Sanders, the pioneer of the New Perspective, famously said that in Judaism keeping the Law wasn’t about ‘getting in’, but ‘staying in’. In Sanders' view, the Jew, contrary to what the Old Perspective taught, did not see keeping the Law as a way of earning God’s grace and favour thereby entering a covenant relationship with him (getting in), but as the way of responding to God's grace once already in a covenantal relationship with him (staying in).

I have always been a bit frustrated with this because many take it to mean that it followed for the Jew that you didn’t have to keep the Law to be saved. But as Sanders himself says you did have to keep the Law to 'stay in', which still means that without keeping the Law you couldn’t 'stay in' and, if you weren't 'in', you couldn't be saved. It may be a response to grace, but it is still, even on this way of looking at it, a necessary response.

Personally, I don’t think that Paul or his opponents would have disagreed with Sanders understanding of the role of the Law in Judaism. Nevertheless, for Paul’s opponents, the Law remained a requirement as a way of 'staying in' and so of being saved, for Paul it didn’t. And the reason it didn’t was that like Augustine and Luther after him he did not believe that salvation could in any way be made dependent on human works. His problem is not with the Jewish Law, but with Law as a way of obtaining or maintaining God’s favour.

With Augustine, Luther, and all who follow them, I think Paul really does argue against human works as contributing to our salvation and in so doing speaks of human sin and our resulting inability to do good and to keep the demands of the Law. The Law has failed because of our sin so the Law must go, not simply because it is the Jewish Law, but because it cannot give life. As Ephesians 2:8 expresses it:

‘For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God — not the result of works, so that no one may boast.’

2. Old and New Perspectives

It's just past 7.30am and I am about to go over to take our early morning Communion Service. The sermons today will be on the second of the set reading from Romans 5: ' Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God.' Coincidentally and appropriately this fits well with this short series of posts!

2. Old and new Perspectives

Opinions of the Apostle Paul differ even amongst those sympathetic to him. Paul’s message itself continues to be debated and discussed with scholars coming up with many different and contradictory interpretations of it. What we can say with some certainty is that Paul was vehemently opposed to Gentile Christians being circumcised and having to keep the Law. A simple reading of Galatians makes this clear. What is less clear is, why? It isn’t as though Paul is completely opposed to circumcision itself as is illustrated by his action in circumcising his closet aide, Timothy. He also continues to keep Jewish religious practices himself at the same time as preaching freedom from the Law. So what’s the issue?

There are at the moment two fiercely contested approaches:

1. The Augustinian-Lutheran Approach (the Old or Traditional perspective): As a result of the European Church Reformation of the 16th century, a reformation which was heavily indebted to the writings of St Augustine some 1,000 years earlier, Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith came to be understood as being about denying the role of human works and effort any place in human salvation. On this approach, Paul taught that, because of our sin, there is nothing that we can do that is good or sufficient to earn favour or merit with God. We are restored to a right relationship with God solely by faith. Paul teaches justification by faith because we can only be saved by faith and not by our own good works.

The reason then that Paul attacked the demand for circumcision and obedience to the Law was because Paul’s opponents, Jewish believers, were making them requirements for salvation. In Paul’s opinion, this was a denial of the doctrine of justification solely by faith.

2. The New Perspective: As a result of an academic reformation in the 1970s and 1980s, a new perspective on Paul has emerged, which is still being hotly debated today. It is associated with scholars such as Sanders, Dunn, and Wright and has led to much argument within some evangelical Churches. Many within these Churches see it as an attack on doctrines they hold dear, which, in many ways, it is! While the New Perspective is now some 30 years old, it is still new compared to the Old Perspective! It should perhaps be said that the New Perspective is a broad movement and not all New Perspective scholars are saying exactly the same thing, but that’s true of the Old Perspective as well! Both represent types of approach.

The New Perspective sees both Luther’s emphasis on and understanding of justification by faith as wrong. Paul’s main concern wasn’t who could be saved and how, but who could be a member of the Church and how. What Paul wanted was equality in the Church between Jew and Gentile and this he believed could only be achieved if both joined and continued on the same basis. Paul’s criticism of requiring circumcision and obedience to the Law was that it created division in the Church and made Gentiles second-class citizens.

This means that Paul’s main problem with the Law wasn’t that he thought it couldn’t be kept or that people were trying to keep it to earn salvation, but that it was the Jewish Law. It wasn’t that Paul was against good works as such or Law in principle, what he opposed was the Law as belonging to one group of people and not another. It wasn’t the Law as a means of salvation that was the problem, but the social division it caused.

My problem with each of these is that they both make sense of a significant amount of Paul’s writing. Paul can be made to sound both Old and New Perspective. My suspicion, then, is that there must be an extent to which both approaches are true and that a simple either/or won’t work or do justice to Paul. What I believe is needed is an approach which does justice to the insights of both. I am not going to be able to develop such an approach here, I would, however, like to suggest what such an approach might look like.

Ambridge Pews

Well, the decision has been taken and the pews are to stay by a close vote. The Vicar, Alan, tells a colleague while picking up broken glass in the churchyard. He blames those who don't want the pews removed for the young people not having anywhere to go and so breaking bottles. An interesting connection. Next time I am bored I must remember to smash an empty wine bottle in someone's garden.

I am glad the pews are staying and I appreciate the sincerity of the Vicar (or rather those he fictitiously represents and there are many of them), but perhaps he ought to appreciate the sincerity of those who voted against the removal. He seems to think that reaching out to people means having to do what he wants. Sadly, liberals preaching tolerance can be the most intolerant of all people.

If only the decision had gone this way in more churches in the past!

All One in Christ?

In my first Lent talk on Christian living, I intended to talk about how Jesus saw his teaching and ministry as being in fulfilment of the Old Testament. However, as I prepared it and thought of future talks, I found myself coming up against an issue that has occupied me for as long as I can remember, that of justification by faith and the place of the Law in the Christian life - and all else that flows from it. This issue has been increasingly complicated in recent years by what is known as the 'new perspective on Paul'. This is exactly what it says it is: a new way of looking at Paul. The new is some 30 years old, not that new it may seem, until compared with how old the old is! The old way being that of Augustine and Luther and all who followed them.

Anyway, I thought I would write a short series on the issue. The series will just be a few thoughts from a personal perspective. I make no claims to originality or thoroughness.

All One in Christ?

1. The Problem

The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is the God of the Old Testament, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Despite modern squeamishness about parts of the Old Testament, the Old Testament, what it teaches and the story it tells, was the basis for Jesus’ teaching and ministry. The Church itself was built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, all of whom were Jewish. For Jesus and the first Christians, second temple Judaism formed their spiritual universe. This meant that they could make certain common assumptions based on a shared identity. Becoming a follower of Jesus, however challenging it might have been, did not mean abandoning life-long beliefs and practices. The first 'Christians' in Jerusalem, for example, saw no problem continuing to go to the Temple.

Becoming a follower of Jesus for a first century Jew meant having faith in Jesus as the Crucified and Risen Messiah, it did not mean renouncing circumcision and the Law: anything but. Being a follower of Jesus the Messiah also meant keeping the Law. There was no contradiction and no problem. How could there be? When the Jewish believers preached the good news of Jesus to other Jews, they were talking to their own people. They were, after all, worshippers of the same God with the same religion and history.

This was all very different when the good news was preached to pagans as it was in Thessalonica, Athens, and Corinth. The preachers and those preached to had very little in common socially and religiously. Jews in Gentile cities kept themselves separate from their pagan neighbours. This encounter between Jewish believers and Gentiles raised questions that not even Jesus himself had had to face and on which he had not given explicit guidance.

The first question they had to deal with was simple. Could Gentiles be saved in the first place? This was not as obvious as it might seem to us and God had to intervene with a vision to Peter, thrice repeated, before Peter was ready to share the good news with a Gentile. Even then, God had to give his Spirit to the Gentiles in a dramatic way to convince Peter and his associates that the Gentiles concerned ought to be baptized. Even after all this, Peter still had to justify himself to the Church at Jerusalem who were uneasy at the news of what had gone on.

Anyway, to give them their due, the Jewish believers, even if somewhat reluctantly, accepted that Gentiles could be saved. But this raised other questions. Given that they could in principle be saved, what did the Gentiles have to do to be saved and to be part of the Church. At the risk of over-simplification, there were two basic answers:

1. Have faith in Jesus and keep God’s Law, including being circumcised.

2. Have faith in Jesus.

The problem was that, for Jews, Gentiles were not part of the people of God. Historically, they could only become part of the people of God if they converted to Judaism and converting to Judaism meant being circumcised and keeping the Law. For a person to be saved on the Day of Judgement at the very least they had to be part of the people of God. How could Gentiles become part of the people of God and be saved on the last day?

Some Jewish believers, and it was a significant number, thought that Gentiles should do what Gentiles had always had to do, that is, be circumcised, if male, and keep God’s Law. This was not such an unreasonable position to take as it is sometimes portrayed as being. It is worth remembering that the Gentiles concerned do not themselves seem to have had a problem with it. After all, many of the first Gentile converts came from a group known as the ‘godfearers’. These were Gentiles who were attracted by Judaism and who attached themselves to the Jewish synagogue. In a sense, they were half way there. They were certainly predisposed to Judaism. In Galatia, they seem to have been positively enthusiastic about the idea of circumcision and keeping the Law.

My own guess is that the route the Church would have taken would have been to ask Gentiles to have faith in Jesus, followed by circumcision, for men, and obedience to the Law. In other words, to invite Gentile converts to become one in Christ with them. I imagine that the Jewish believers would have welcomed them with open arms and that the Gentiles would have been quite happy.

What prevented this eminently reasonable and justifiable approach and caused the Church to be plunged into controversy and division was one man, Paul.

Dear All

I am sorry to have been away for so long. I was away for Chinese New Year, and it has been taking me a while to catch up since. All is well here, I am pleased to say, and I hope that it is with you too.

Hong Kong has had a prolonged cold spell. Not as cold as many of you have had, but down to 8 degrees celsius all the same, which is cold for Hong Kong - and most of us have no heating. Personally, I find it a welcome relief from the heat of the rest of the year, but most do not. Temperatures have been warmer today!

I started at Ming Hua College on Monday taking a small, but enjoyable, Christian Ethics class. I have inherited a progamme for the classes, which the Principal very kindly said I could alter, but which I thought it wise not to, at least not until I get used to the College and find out more about how things are done. So, for the next few weeks, we are going to be looking at various ethical issues including some of the usual controversial ones: abortion, homosexuality, war, etc.

In Ethics courses, in general, these are the issues that normally get tackled and they certianly need to be looked at. I am a bit worried, however, that Christian Ethics is seen as making decisions about issues many of which will only concern some of us irregularly. I think I am far more worried about the issues that confront all of us every day. Issues such as losing our temper, shopping too much, watching television, lack of self-control, and so on. It's not that the headline issues aren't important, obviously they are, but all too often we let ourselves off the hook of the immediate issues by focusing instead on the more dramatic ones. My hope in the future is to blend consideration of the doctrine of the just war with a discussion about when it is ok to get angry.

Anyway, to compensate for the time being, I am going to be leading a Lent course on Christian living starting tomorrow at Christ Church where none of the headline issues will be discussed and instead we will be thinking of the principles and motivations that underlie the Christian life.

One of my favourite verses in the New Testament is Ephesians 4:31

'Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.'

You may know the prayer:

'Lord, make all the nice people good,
and the good people nice.'

Ephesians 4:31 is the clue as to how we could all start to be both nice and good. And it's far harder than taking up an ethical stance on sex and war!

Ash Wednesday

Next Wednesday is Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. I have just recorded a talk to be broadcast on Shrove Tuesday. Here it is!

Ash Wednesday

We are about to enter the season of Lent. Lent begins with Ash Wednesday and in many churches a traditional service will be held that includes the imposition of ashes. This is where the minister makes a mark of the Cross in ash on the foreheads of those assembled. As this takes place, the minister says:

‘Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.’

There then follows a period of about 40 days when people are meant to be penitent, that is, to be sorry for their sins and to show that they are so by giving things up and practising self-denial.

This really goes against the grain of the sort of society we live in. Our economy would actually collapse if people did seriously engage in self-denial as opposed to a token self-denial such as giving up sweets or whatever. The consumer society is just that: a society in which we consume and the more the better. Of course, there is a downside to this as we are discovering with global warming. Yet even though we know we need to do something about global warming, one solution we won’t countenance is consuming less. The message of self-denial is not one we are ready for and not one any economy is likely to adopt any time soon.

If the idea of self-denial is one that we don’t want to hear, the words: ‘Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return’ are words we want to hear even less. The consumer society thrives on advertising designed to show us how happy we can be if we buy a particular product. The last thing we want to hear is that we are dust and that we are soon going to die. In fact, we are engaged in this orgy of consumption precisely because we don’t want to think about death. We want to focus on the here and now. If we did think more about death, we might have to reorder our priorities and change the way we live.

No, death is not something that we want to be reminded of. This is why millions spend millions on creams and treatments that are supposed to ward-off ageing. We do not want to see the face of a dying person in the mirror every morning. The creams and treatments don’t work, of course, but we are so desperate that we will try anything. However, the face that stares back at us in the mirror, whether we want to hear about it or not, IS the face of a dying person: Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

The reaction to this Ash Wednesday reminder is often to see it as typical of religious kill-joys: people who don’t know how to enjoy themselves and don’t want anyone else to either. It is seen as very negative and morbid. It is not meant to be. It is meant to remind us of who we are and of our mortality so that we can prepare for our death and make the most of our life. A popular saying is: ‘Life is not a dress-rehearsal’ meaning that this is all there is so we had better make the most of it.

The Christian message is that indeed life is not a dress-rehearsal, but it does not follow that this is all there is to it. There is another life beyond this one and what we do in this one directly affects our life in the next. No dress-rehearsal indeed!

It is because life is not a dress rehearsal, but the real thing, that we need to hear the Ash Wednesday sentences:

‘Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.’

We will die and the best way to prepare for our certain death is not by trying to blot the thought out with work or pleasure, it is by turning from sin and being faithful to Christ who Christians believe not only died, but rose again from the dead.

His death gives us hope as we face our own.

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!

The Morning After the Night Before

Last Sunday, we had one of the best congregations, numerically, we have had. We normally get a good turn out on Sundays, but this was especially good and especially for a January, which, after Christmas, can be a quieter time of the year. In fact, we had the highest number of communicants Christ Church has had at a service in January since 1966. (This is as far back as I have registers for. I am not sure where the older registers are – if I have the time I’ll try to find them and let you know!) In fact, the last time we had this many at a service was in September last year, which was also the highest for a September since 1966.

Numbers have to be taken cautiously and do not mean that the congregation is spiritually healthy, but it would be a brave Vicar who said they meant nothing and most of us being human are rather glad when people decide to come to Church rather than choose to stay away. I took them to mean that at least people were enjoying the services and finding something in them that met a need as well as giving them a way to worship God.

Last night, we had our first Church Council meeting of the New Year for which we also had a good turn out. During a fairly general discussion, at one point, the comment was made that there wasn’t ‘enough variation in the services’. This is church speak and code for: ‘they are boring’. I got the distinct impression that the person who voiced this comment wasn’t alone in his opinion. He felt we always said the same prayers in the same order. I explained that this was inevitable to an extent if you have a set liturgy. The music, the hymns, the readings, the intercessions, and even the sermon, however, are different. But what he meant, of course, was that the services feel the same irrespective of the reality.

I can’t pretend that this observation hasn’t got to me. Unusually, I was allowing myself a little optimism about how we were progressing here, but this comment is a cause for some concern. For me, the Sunday Eucharist is at the heart of what we are about as a Church: coming together as God’s people to offer him our worship, to bring him our needs, and to seek his strength to serve him both in mission and in our daily lives.

Clearly, this comment calls for proper reflection and prayer and not an immediate and, inevitably, defensive response, but if I can’t be allowed a few instant thoughts here, then where can I be allowed them?!

The dilemma for me is the tension between worship as service, the word liturgy after all means service, and worship as entertainment. We live in an entertainment culture. This is inescapable. People expect to be entertained in any free moment they have. This is why they walk around with wires dangling from their heads and with their ears glued to mobiles. Boredom is the one thing we won’t allow ourselves and why should we when there is so much out there to entertain us twenty-four hours a day?

All of which does not mean that our worship and church services should be boring. I remember many years ago a fellow member of the Youth Fellowship commenting that the way the choir sang the canticle, Te Deum, meant it should be renamed Tedium. Worship certainly shouldn’t be tedious. Our worship should be the best it can be. At its best, our worship should inspire us and lift us to heaven to join the heavenly choirs. But I still think there is a difference between being inspired and being entertained. Inspiration should lead us to take part, to join our prayers and praises with angels and archangels and with the whole company of God’s people. This is very different to entertainment, which is self-centred focusing on what I want and where the only thing that matters is whether I like it or not.

So are our services here becoming boring? Given the number who are coming to them, obviously not everyone thinks so, but it is worrying if committed people feel this way. Does it matter, or rather, should it lead to a change in our services? I know that we must constantly strive to do better and to give God our best. I am also sure that we need to avoid the temptation to change the services into entertainment. Quite what this means for our services, I don’t know and need to give it some thought.

I do know this morning that more than anything, I just feel a bit sad.

Agnus Dei

I hope that you have all recovered now from the festivities of Christmas and the New Year and are settling well into 2008! Here in Hong Kong and China, of course, we are now getting ready for what is a much bigger celebration in terms of the effort that goes into it, that is, Chinese New Year. Not having liturgical significance, this is a celebration I rather enjoy!

At the moment, however, I am preparing for the sermon on Sunday and it has led me down some interesting paths. I am going to be preaching on the Gospel reading from John 1:29 specifically John the Baptist’s words: ‘Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.’ The Lamb motif, the Agnus Dei, is in effect the logo of Christ Church, Kowloon Tong. We have it as a mosaic outside our church and it appears on our literature. This was something I inherited when I came here and have been more than happy to use.

In the past, I have spent some time looking up its use historically in attempt to understand where the symbol originally came from. Fifth century Rome seems the most likely answer, although it only comes to prominence in sources from the ninth century onwards. It was later widely used by the Knights Templar during the Crusades.

What I have been wondering this week, however, is why it was adopted by Christ Church. True, the Lamb represents Christ and we are Christ Church, but I have been at many Christ Churches and it has not been used in this way by them. I have started to enquire into its usage here and interestingly no-one seems to know when, or why, it came to be used. Enquiries are on going and I will let you know!

Does it matter? Not at all. This is just one of those fun things that it is nice to know!

Perhaps more interesting is something that I uncovered in an essay by Richard Bauckham in his recent book: The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple. He discusses the use of gematria in St John’s Gospel. Gematria is where a numerical value is assigned to a word. In Hebrew and Greek, he writes, the letters also represented numbers. Similarly, we sometimes do this in English with A having the value of 1, B equalling 2, and so on. He cites an interesting piece of graffiti from Pompei: ‘I love the girl whose number is 545’. That is, the girl the letters of whose name add up to 545.

Gematria is also behind the number of the Beast in the book of Revelation. In Revelation 13:18 it says:

‘This calls for wisdom: let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred sixty-six.’

The writer is telling his readers who the Beast is. It most likely is the Emperor Nero. The sum of the letters Nero Caesar written in Hebrew is 666.

Why this is interesting as I prepare for Sunday is that, according to Bauckham, in Hebrew the numerical value for the name ‘Jesus’ and for the ‘Lamb of God’ are the same, that is, 391. To quote Bauckham:

So when John the Baptist sees Jesus and says, ‘Behold the Lamb of God’ (1:29, 35-36), he is interpreting the name Jesus by gematria.

Does it matter? Not at all. This is just one of those fun things that it is nice to know!

Much more important is the question of what it means to say that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. The use of gematria that I have just referred to shows that the ancient Biblical writers used techniques with which we are not immediately familiar nowadays. This means that we miss things that would have been obvious to the first readers. But it isn’t just in the area of literary techniques that we run into problems.

The sacrifice of animals was a familiar practice in the ancient world. At Passover Jews in Jerusalem sacrificed lambs in their thousands. This is not something we do or understand the point of. In fact, we rather regard the whole business as barbaric and primitive. This makes understanding the concept of Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world also hard to understand. Indeed, it perhaps why some modern day Christians recoil from the idea of Jesus being a sacrifice for sin. As one recent writer puts it: ‘isn’t the idea of God sacrificing his Son a form of cosmic child abuse?’

We live in different worlds in more ways than one. The problem is that because we think we are more advanced than them in scientific and technological ways, we are also more advanced theologically. This is cultural and historical arrogance. We are back to the fact that God chose this time, 2,000 years ago, to give the supreme revelation of himself, the Word made flesh, as we have just celebrated. If we believe this, we are going to have to swallow our pride and accept that in this conceptual world we find so foreign, lie truths that are timeless and eternal, and which we ignore or dismiss at our peril.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.

Happy New Year

I am taking a few days off over the New Year but wanted to wish you all a very happy New Year wherever you are, and whatever you are doing. I hope 2008 will be a year of much blessing for you and that you will keep reading the blog!

Feast of the Nativity

I have just finished my last service for Christmas. Before I did anything else, I wanted to say Happy Christmas to all those who read this somewhat erratic blog. I appreciate your friendship and interest. I hope this Christmas will be a wonderful time for you and yours.

I will write more fully eventually.

Wherever you are, may the Babe of Bethlehem bless you.

Happy Christmas!

The Saturday before Christmas

I woke up this morning with a real sense of panic. So much to do! Of course, much of the panic is self-induced. I hope it's for the right reasons - simply out of a desire to get it right. But there really is no need to panic. At least, that's what I keep telling myself.

My school services are now all over. I see these as so important. What we tell the children will - for good or ill - stay with them for the rest of their lives. At a time when schools in the Western World are abandoning the traditional Nativity in favour of seasonal plays, I keep reminding myself, when I am tempted to get fed up of yet another Nativity Play, of the incredible opportunity we have here.

You are soon brought down to earth, though. We have a burst pipe. Not that we knew about it until the water bill came. It is an underground leak and has been leaking water (and hence money) for a while. We have shut the water down, but it does create problems when there are so many people coming to Church. Have you any idea how often the first thing people say to you as a Vicar is, 'Where are the toilets?' I, personally, had no idea until I had to tell them they were out of use.

We have now rigged up a temporary supply, identified the problem, obtained quotes, and arranged for the work to be done early in the New Year - it's a big job! The headteacher of one of the Schools that come to Christ Church for their Christmas Service asked me how things were. I replied that they were fine apart from the leak. She said, 'Didn't you have a leak last year as well?' She was right, of course, we did have a leak last year.

It looks like a new tradition!

Hope you are all well and coping!

Hark! the Herald Angels Sing?

The weekend went smoothly - thankfully - and the Carol Service was surprisingly successful - not packed, but with a good feeling amongst those who were there.

I say 'surprisingly' because it has in past years felt a bit like this has been one service that was struggling to find its place in the diary against other services that were more popular.

Our Carol Service is a traditional 'nine lessons and carols service' (as in King's College traditional). In days gone by, it was very popular amongst the expats when, in the colonial period, Christ Church was half expat. It reminded people of home at a time of the year when we all get a bit nostalgic. As I have described in previous posts, Christ Church is now a local Church, that still welcomes expats, rather than being one that is dominated by them (with the exception ironically of the Vicar). The Carol Service has not been popular with many local people compared to our other Christmas services.

So why continue it? Well, it is a nice service, but, more importantly, I continue it for those who are expats like me and for those others who like it. But, and it is a big but, I dislike just doing services because people like the form of them. They can easily become simply performances rather than services. For example, when I mentioned on Sunday the sermon I was going to preach at it to one regular, he said, 'Oh you intend to preach then!' Well, I do every year, but it shows how for some this service is primarily about singing. Nothing wrong with singing, but is that all there is to it?

I have been trying to turn the service it into a form of outreach. Not by changing the form of the service, but by trying to find the right group of people to invite to it. After all, it is non-threatening in its format, and it does give people on the fringes of the Church a gentle way into the fellowship at Christmas.

The interesting thing this year, however, was the number of people who came with family members who are studying or working abroad, but who have come back to Hong Kong for Christmas. It may be that I have only just noticed this phenomenon and have missed it in the past, but I don't think so!

So I am going to think about whether this is the way we can go in the future. In other words, to keep the format, but to publicize it as a service to which it is good to fetch your youngish adult family and to which you can invite your more anglicized friends.

My goal is to provide at Christmas services that appeal to people from different backgrounds. Now, you are probably thinking, 'Shouldn't you being do that all year round?'

Well no, I don't think I, or we, should.

Christmas is a time when we should be taking advantage of secular behaviour to preach the good news: that is, to capitalize on the fact that this is a time of the year when non-churchgoers will come to Church. This is also true of times like harvest, albeit to a lesser degree.

Normally, that is, on regular Sundays, I happen to think that services should be about worshipping God in the company of believers, not about preaching to unbelievers.

Of course, we should welcome unbelievers to the Church in as friendly a way as possible in the hope that, as St Paul puts it, they will fall down and acknowledge that God is with us. I emphatically don't think that we should tailor our worship of God to those who don't (yet) believe in him. Sadly, compromising worship in the name of being relevant and reaching out to those outside the Church seems to have become the order of the day.

It raises the question of whom the Church is for: is it for God or for the world? Naturally, if it is for God, we will also want to find ways to save the world. But if it is for the world, what place for God in a world that does not know him or who consciously rejects him?

The Carol Services continue with more services tomorrow and on Friday.

I'll keep you informed!

Countdown to Christmas

This weekend is a full one in the Church!

We decided to have our Sunday School Nativity Presentation and Carol Service on the Sunday coming. Our suspicion was that next week a lot of our congregation will be going away with the schools having finished. On top of this, many organisations are having their Christmas events this weekend. So starting tonight, there is something every moment of the weekend.

I don't know how many of you have seen Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. It is my latest favourite series. Created by Aaron Sorkin, who created West Wing (a previous favourite), it stars Bradley Whitford from the West Wing and Matthew Perry, who played Chandler in Friends (another favourite!) It is about a television programme that does topical comedy, which is recorded live each week. Matthew Perry plays the programme's writer. In his office is a clock telling him how long he has until the next episode. That's pressure!

I sometimes feel a bit like this with sermons. It can be difficult coming up with a new sermon or two every week, especially sermons that actually say something and connect with the congregation. I always feel like it at Christmas. What to say that hasn't be said so much better by others so many times before? How to preach in a way that will mean something, especially to those on the fringes of the Church who only turn up at Christmas?

The pressure was getting to me last night as I still had no ideas, which was probably why I was awake at 4.00am in the morning trying to come up with something. Then suddenly out of the blue a few ideas came. I am not claiming divine inspiration for them - although I hope God had a part - or that they are particularly brilliant! I am just relieved that I have something to work with. With sermons, I find that once I have an idea, I am ok. There is still work to do researching and writing. But as long as the idea is there, I don't mind! Not, of course, that it guarantees a good sermon.

Last night, I was so worried that I would forget the ideas I had had that I got up and wrote them down! Now, of course, I feel relieved, but tired. At the risk of boring you, let me share them here and if you think them shallow or poor, please let me know. After all, Matthew Perry in Studio 60 has a whole team of writers to go over his ideas with!

For the Carol Service on Sunday, I am going to take up something that happened last week at the Girl Guide's Carol Service. I was giving a talk on the meaning of Christmas, when a little girl put her hand up and asked, 'What have Christmas trees to do with Christmas?' What indeed? Richard Dawkins, the celebrated atheist, has just described himself as a 'cultural Christian' who will be singing carols this Christmas. I think this should give me something to go on.

For the Sunday before Christmas, the fourth Sunday of Advent, we will be lighting the fourth candle on our Advent wreath: the pink one for the Blessed Virgin Mary. We have a Lady Chapel here at Christ Church. Sometimes people refer to it as the Ladies Chapel, thinking it has something to do with ladies in general, rather than Our Lady in particular. Is it any wonder? It just looks like a seating area at the moment. Apparently, it used to have a painting of Our Lady in it, but one Vicar, fearing the danger of too much reverence for Mary, took it down!

A parable perhaps of what we have done with Mary in the non- Roman Church? I will be taking up the verse: 'a sword shall pierce your own heart also' and talk about Mary's pain and ours.

Christmas night is always my favourite night of the year. Each year, however, I always feel I have not been able to do it justice. I doubt that this year will be an exception. Still, I am going to take up an article I read on the BBC news website, which described how companies, responding to consumer demand, are wanting to put pictures on radio. I know! Bizarre. But now we can watch anything, anywhere on our mobiles, it is perhaps to be expected. I love radio. The best Christmas present I ever got was a Bush radio on which I used to listen to the news each night before going to sleep.

You will know the old saying about 'radio having better pictures'. I think that's true, but we do need pictures. I think you can guess where I am going with this!

For the Christmas day Eucharist, I am still thinking. Any ideas out there would be gratefully received.

Anyway, to all those of you working hard in your preparation for communicating the good news: may God give you inspiration! And may you and I both be more concerned to be faithful rather than original. For after all has been said, it is the old, old story that we are trying to tell to a new audience. And for those of you who will be listening to us, spare a prayer for us that our ideas might be good ones.

Survived - I Think

Well, I am back from my Council meeting. I can never sleep after a Council meeting so a quick blog. I find Council meetings the most physically draining meetings of all meetings that I go to - and I go to a lot!

The Anglican Church is divided at the moment over the issue of homosexuality.

I'll do a swap.

I'll sort out issues of human sexuality if someone can sort out what flooring we have in our hopefully soon to be renovated Committee Room.

Any takers?

A Real Council

Well, having written about a fictitious Church Council meeting in the last post, today is the day of my own Church Council meeting. I never particularly look forward to them. I know how even a seemingly innocent and uncontroversial agenda can suddenly become anything but. We have one or two issues tonight that have the potential to be, if not controversial exactly, then certainly the subject of disagreement. Handling disagreement is not something we always do very well as Christians.

I know some Vicars who rather like confrontation and controversy. I am not one of them. Paul tells us to stop quarrelling and to be of one mind. That's how I see my role as Chairman: to stop people quarrelling and to help everyone reach a common mind. What if they can't or won't though?

My fictional counter part in the Archers intends to deal with the disagreement on his Council by having a vote on the issue in question. Very democratic and all that, but it is not exactly reaching a common mind just giving into one side's mind. I can't help feeling that this is not the way Christians should decide things. I make a point to avoid votes whenever possible.

The trouble is that this can mean that sometimes decisions aren't taken and that the minority can hold things up.

I'll let you know how it goes tonight.

A Postponed Decision

Well, they didn't decide after all (see previous post). Too many people sent their apologies so they did not have a quorum to take a vote. I have to say this seems very unlikely. The script writers have done well so far in capturing the opinions and feelings on both sides of this issue, but they simply do not get it in this episode. One thing I know for certain is that on an issue like this people will turn up to vote.

They may not come to a Bible Study or Prayer Meeting, but suggest change of this nature and they care passionately. To the outsider, indeed, to some insiders, it can seem very petty. One character in the programme last night expressed the views of many when he said, 'typical of the Church, there's war, disease, and starvation in the world and they worry about the pews'.

This is, of course, hypocrisy of the worse kind. I know of very few people who don't spend a great deal of time and money on their homes, decorating and furnishing them. Are they too to be blamed for not caring about world hunger? Businesses spend huge amounts of money on offices and showrooms and no-one bats an eyelid. Let's get real about this.

Churches, for all their faults, do care about world poverty, disease, and death, but that does not mean that we have to abandon all concern about the buildings we worship God in. Indeed, Alan, the Vicar in the Archers, although I don't agree with him, wants to remove the pews so he make his church more available to the local community. That's why the pew issue is important to him. I think there are other issues to take into consideration that's why it is important to me. But I will be doing all I can to help those around me who are in need this Christmas and so will the Church in general.

One thing I love doing on holiday is visiting church buildings and cathedrals. These often took hundreds of years and masses of resources to build. Was the Church wrong to build them?

I don't think so.