HERALDRY AT NCBC: PART2

(Click to enlarge)

In the second part of this series I want to look at the middle window of the triad of lancet openings at the north end of NCBC’s nave. The dominating motif of this window, although at first sight a little difficult to see, is the depiction of a grapevine whose main branch runs centrally for the full length of the window. Two other branches sprout from the base of the vine and wend their way round the perimeter. Adorning the vine branches are bunches of grapes, leaves and spiraling tendrils.

The vine is, of course, a Biblical metaphor for the church, and it has undoubtedly been used consciously by the creators of the window. The rambling untidy grape vine provides an excellent allegory for the sprawling population of the ekklesia, a religious movement who form a striving tangled chaotic body of variegated traditions, a community with very fuzzy boundaries.

John 15:1-6 sketches an extraordinarily compelling metaphor of Christ as the true vine and his ekklesia as the vine’s branches, organically linked to the life in Him. The vine is a beautiful if untidy example of flora, but beautiful though it may be the Vinedresser (God) is primarily looking for it to produce the fruit of the vine, namely, the bunches of grapes we can see in our stained glass window (see Matt 7:16-20,Luke 6:44, Luke 13:5-9, Gal 5:22)

Interestingly, the central branch hangs with unripe green grapes whereas the perimeter vines hang with ripe purple grapes. My interpretation of this contrast between ripe and unripe fruit is that it carriers a challenging almost self-deprecating message: The central vine represents the ekkelsia at NCBC who are being summoned to look to the ripening of their own fruit and not to that of unidentified surrounding churches whose fruit is shown, for comparison, to be already ripe.

The Biblical passages I have quoted contain stark and terrifying warnings about the consequences of not bearing fruit and subsequently being cut off. I myself have very general ideas about just what constitutes the fruit God is looking for (see Gal 5:22). I do not I accept that this fruit is confined to a particular sectarian realization of Christianity. But no matter how general that fruit may be the warnings in scripture about failure to bring forth this fruit is extremely disquieting. And yet imagine a world without the fruits mentioned in Gal 5:22 – that is without love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness – it would be hell. Without this fruit the consequences are indeed as grave as the Bible suggests.

The picture of the vine helps us to contemplate the profound truth of dependency: Everything about us is dependent upon a myriad conditionalities as supplied by providence – we cannot claim our lives to be logical truisms; we can only lay claim to life being a conditional truism. Should any of the relevant conditions be cut off, then our existence is called into question.

In what I take to be master stroke the creators of the window have sharply reminded us of our existential dependency. The base of the vine is shown as if it has been cut, forcefully reminding us that we cannot take our physical and moral life for granted; we are the subject of numerous providences anyone of which if removed from the equation of life would bring our physical and moral life to an end.

Our greatest fear is loss of the fruit of the harvest (see Matt 3:10, Luke 3:9). The Biblical passages may be disquieting, but if they where anything less than highly provocative they would lose their gravitas, a gravitas that is so badly needed to keep our minds focused on what is of eternal value.

In the next part I will be looking at the coats of arms and other paraphernalia that adorn the central vine.

HERALDRY AT NCBC: PART 1.

The Mystery of NCBC's Stained Glass

In this series I want to take a closer look at the stained glass heraldry in the window at the north end of NCBC’s “nave” (See picture above). These windows, I assume, were added when the church was built circa 1952.

As I have remarked before, the church congregation of 1952 thought of themselves as pillars of society (and at that time still were); this fact, I submit, is reflected in the stained glass motifs of the window above, as we shall see. Since 1952 Christian culture has undergone huge shifts, especially during the 1960s when Christian fundamentalism and a vigorous secular liberalism separated out in the centrifuge of rapid change. The 60 year gap since these motifs were installed is effectively a much longer time span than it would be in periods when change was sluggish.

It is no surprise, then, that as far as NCBC’s Joe and Josephine Pugh are concerned the meaning of these windows and above all the rationale that motivated them is all but lost in the mists of time; to most people they are just a pretty pattern of colours. In fact Christian fundamentalists who have shrunk their epistemic horizon and purged their world of all that they don’t want to understand, would very likely underrate the spirituality of the peoples that built the impressive edifice which now hosts NCBC.

What, then, did these windows mean in 1952? Perhaps there are documents somewhere revealing just what motivated the 1952 builders to install these windows and just how they thought about then. To be honest I’m too lazy I lack the time to go on a long paper chase with no guarantee of a successful find at the end of it. In any case the ambient weltanshauug and mores of a culture often don’t get recorded as at the time they seem too self evident and axiomatic to need it. Also, the people of the day may be unable to consciously articulate the reason for the appeal of certain motifs; for them they just feel right. Thus, the historian has to embark on the hazardous business of trying to read between the lines of history in order to reconstruct the deeper rationale that motivated the lives of distant ancestors.

So, as is my usual practice when the pressure is on to come up with answers, I will simply have to give it my best shot. I’m not going to spend and inordinate amount of time on the subject, but I will simply express where my understanding is at the moment. I will decode the meaning of the window as best I can with the help of some heraldry web sites and my knowledge of history such as it is. Some of my conclusions may be fanciful and with about as much chance of being right as the interpretations of pre-historians when they are faced with something as distant in time and culturally enigmatic as Silbury hill ... for me it so often feels like that. In fact I’m reminded of the cautionary tale of H. G. Wells’ Time Traveler who found himself in an alien world and with little to go on he attempted to make sense of what he saw:

As I stood there in the gathering dark I thought that in this simple explanation I had mastered the problem of the world – mastered the whole secret of these delicious people…. Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough –as most wrong theories are! (The Time Machine, Chapter: “The Sunset of Mankind”)

..so at least there is the bonus of being in the middle of what feels like a scientific romance with all the sense of adventure and mystery that goes with it.

A BAPTIST CATHEDRAL

A visit to Silver road Baptist church, Norwich, revealed a classic non-conformist pattern: After the repeal of the Test Act in 1828, non-conformists quickly became recognised and respected pillars of English society. They started building churches that made use of time honoured establishment church architectural details and they erected monumments celebrating the life of those in their midst who were well placed in society. This practice seems to have lasted up until the 1950s:  However, at Silver road it is the first time I  have seen the use of Romanesque rather than Gothic (or classical) details in a non-conformist building. Perhaps they were attempting to go one better and  create the ambiance of the cathedrals, many of which are old enough to preserve details as early as the 12th century. These baptists no longer saw themselves as remnant upstarts or new kids on the block, but part of the broad swathe that Christianity cuts through history. Today's marginalised evangelical churches would never dream of aping these prestigious styles.

Romanesque windows on a pseudo transept.

Left: A façade with the unmistakable air of a Romanesque cathedral and a hint of Gothic Chartres thrown in for good measure.

 Right: Celebrating civic links.

ACADEMICS: BEYOND OUR KEN

Something is Eating Ham

In this Network Norwich & Norfolk article James Knight continues to development his theme of there being a connection between New Wave Atheism and Christian Fundamentalism. Almost to order Beyond Our Ken Ham publishes this post on his blog. Ken’s post provides both evidence for James’ thesis and YEC antipathy toward academia, a matter that was the subject of my last NCBC blog post.

Anyway, here is my comment to James article:

Hi James,

Once again I think you are onto something here, re: the connection between gnu atheism and Fundamentalism.

Unless you have already seen it, you might be interested in this link to Ken Ham’s Young Earth Creationist blog:

http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2011/06/01/i-agree-with-the-atheists/

Here Ken actually says he agrees, yes, *agrees*, with atheists and instead rails against “compromising” Christian academics who in the main believe in an old Earth. He goes on to say “What a sad day when the atheists understand Christianity better than so many Christians do”. What he means of course is that the atheists he is referring to understand his version of Christianity! They certainly would understand it better if many of them are ex-YECs. Simplifying a bit: One might claim that gnu-atheists are YECs with the signs reversed; at the very least there definitely is a connection between YEC fundamentalism and gnu atheism.

In the blog post Ken talks about Christian academics who “clearly compromise God’s word with man’s fallible beliefs about evolution, millions of years etc”. And yet he seems utterly unaware of man’s fallible interpretations of the Bible. Ken says “It is so obvious from Scripture that God created a literal Adam and Eve”. What he means here is that in spite of what they may say YECs give lip service to the question of interpretation and meaning. For Ken, meaning extraction is unproblematic and obvious and thus his words effectively become God’s Words. No surprise, then, that at the end of the article Ken can accuse Christian academics of heinous sin: He accuses them of attacking Jesus Christ and telling them they “need to fall on their knees before a Holy God and repent of their attack on the Word”. If one’s Biblical hermeneutic leads one to closely identify one’s own words with God’s words it is no surprise that one is then going to believe in the Divine authority of one’s own opinions. Consequently, Ken starts speaking as if he is God’s judge on Earth with the authority to impugn the consciences of Christian academics.

On the whole it all goes to show just how much Ken and his followers have isolated themselves from mainstream Christianity and in particular Christian academics.

I’ve been thinking about just what characteristic sufficiently defines the "fundamentalist" mind set. I'm coming to the opinion it is something like this: The common trait of fundamentalists is that they all closely identify their words with God's words (Of which my previous comment on Ken Ham gives an example). A fundamentalist, then, is someone who believes in the Divine authority of his own opinions.

ESTABLISHMENT SCIENCE vs. YOUNG EARTH CREATIONISM AT NCBC

When I first clapped eyes on this stained glass heraldry at NCBC I never guessed that it may be providing a big clue about fundamentalist resurgence since the 60s

On Sunday (22nd May) we had two excellent presentations on the creation and science question, one from an establishment academic and the other from a career scientist. The views they expressed were sympathetic to the established science account of origins. However, they expressed these views with a very Biblical fear and trembling and with an exemplary blend of commitment and understanding.

The event was largely a response to the talk we had in March from a Young Earth Creationist. Toward the end of his talk this speaker was very clear about the spiritual virtues of YEC and the demerits of not agreeing with it. The recommended book “Deluded by Darwinism” said it all. How is it that we have arrived at a juncture where the Christian fundamentalist is so polarized against establishment science that he or she sees it as a symptom of gross spiritual failure not only on the part of secular society but also of Christians who hold the established view?

If this post I wrote in December 09 is anything to go by then it seems that there was a time in our church when the YEC view wasn’t even on the horizon. In the linked post I reported on a church magazine article dated Christmas 1939 and written by the then Minister of the church the Rev. Gilbert Laws. The article is a reflection on man’s position in the cosmos. The most notable thing about it is that it displays no consciousness whatever of a dichotomy between established science and the fundamentalist account of origins. In fact Laws writes as if YEC doesn’t even exist; he takes for granted the science of the day and gives no cognizance of any issue between scientific cosmogony and Genesis. Laws’ assumed brief was to cope with the latest science by making Christian sense of it but without contradicting it.

Gilbert Laws was the minister of a church whose prestige and influence had increased steadily from the start of the industrial revolution. In fact since the repeal of the Test Act of 1828 Laws could look back on a church whose members included MPs, Sheriffs, and successful business grandees. By the early 1950s the Baptist church on Duke Street was still a respected pillar of society. Today visible manifestation of this history of civic involvement is evidenced by the stained glass heraldry in the north window of the church, heraldry celebrating civic connections. Moreover, after the bombing of 1943 the 1952 rebuild brought together a nonconformist classicism with established church gothic styles. It replaced an 1811 Regency styled “classical temple”, a style harking back to the days of a-vant-garde nonconformity. All this says a lot about how the church thought of itself in the years immediately following the war. They were patricians in a society in which they believed. In one sense they were that society

What then has happened between then and now? The quick answer to that question is: “The Nineteen Sixties”. The sixties downturn in church attendance and the move away from traditional patrician values was accompanied by a resurgence of a recrudescent fundamentalism. That fundamentalism was often accompanied by a literal interpretation of Genesis, a view well expressed by the fathers of contemporary YEC John Whitcomb and Henry Morris in their 1961 publication “The Genesis Flood”.

The slip and slide of the church as it shifted from an establishment position to the margins of society made it more attractive to unintellectual dissenters than it did to pillars of society. In particular scientific cosmogony, as is evident even from Gilbert Laws' sermon, left mankind with a rather puzzling picture of reality; science’s analytical elementalism looked more profane than it did sacred. The average Joe Pugh who was fervent about his Christian faith, unintellectual and profoundly ignorant of science, could make little sense of scientific results. His church now had less stake in society but he was too conservative to become a radical political defector and agitator, and so he became a protestor against the academic establishment. Joe Pugh’s cosmological tastes had the touch and feel of Kincaidian kitsch rather than the dispassionate universe depicted by JM Turner. Joe Pugh looked for a vision of the universe that had a sentimental ambiance and the cozy warmth of the living room. In contrast J M Turner’s presents a disinterested world of fuzzy ill defined boundaries, and potentially threatening to boot. Unlike Gilbert Laws Joe Pugh wasn’t going to cope with establishment science; rather he was going to rebel against it. In its place Pugh wanted something that domesticated and sanctified an apparently impersonal and profane looking cosmos. YEC was the perfect deal for him. YEC was used as a badge of identification that sent out messages that were the very opposite of the heraldry we see at NCBC.

For Christian fundamentalists YEC was exploited as a reactionary tribal marker that was an affront to established science. It was a form of theological punk; a safety pin and garbage bag “science” that told academia, loud an clear, that they were no longer being listened to. That the neo-fundmentalist’s identity was bound up with YEC meant that they were not going to be neither here nor there about their account of creation. They had far too much at stake for that. Rather, they were going to get uptight about it, especially with Christians who didn't assent to it. For to them it was “faith test” material. Like the heraldry we find at NCBC YEC was a statement about what these people stood for – therefore Christians weren’t supposed to prevaricate about it and a Christian couldn’t believe in an old Earth without being thought of as compromising. “Old Earth or Young Earth” was no theoretical nuance that could be discussed coolly; agreeing to differ has  never been an option with fundamentalists. 

Today Joe Pugh’s strong belief in literalism is self affirming – the harder he believes it the truer it seems to become – especially if he is surrounded by a heroic sacred and remnant community that are all doing the same. Anyone who doesn't affirm this belief will at best be looked at askance and at worst be considered apostate. And so we find ourselves in this polarized position today, a position where language like “Deluded by Darwinism” is de rigueur amongst YECs, thus upping the ante and feeding the process of polarization.

Polarisation passion feeds. Passion polarisation breeds. Polarisation is passion's cause, for crusade and holy wars.

The fundamentalist's kitsch view of the cosmos has only one blot on the horizon: Science.

SPIRITUAL SPIN FAILS TO DECEIVE

Fideists would have us going round in circles

James Moar, who attends NCBC, has sent me an email. In writing this email he is showing great intellectual integrity as he very succinctly and cogently sums up some deep challenges to Christian culture. He has given me permission to publish it here:

Hi Tim,

I'm having real issues with Christianity at the moment, mostly centred around how a world with God in it would be different from a world without God. Note that I'm not fussed about answered or unanswered prayer here, just about God's demonstrable action, something that is insisted on throughout the Bible. God does several things which are done (to quote a repeating line in Ezekiel) "so that they may know that I am YHWH". But where are these now? Incidentally, the notion that God has apparently done lots of things so that people may believe somewhat rubbishes the idea of epistemic distance. Why bring the Israelites out of Egypt to display his power if he's not prepared to display it in other ways?

There are many accounts of "answers to prayer" that have spectacular odds if they're coincidences, but consider how many prayers are made and suddenly the odds of any given one receiving some sort of answer by blind chance is much less. It's the same for general "miracles" that are highly improbable; given the amount of Christians worldwide, the odds of some of them experiencing coincidences go down a fair bit. We just ignore all the unanswered stuff (or the umiraculous stuff) because the "miraculous" draws our attention and allows us to make a story out of it.

To give a concrete example, Casanova considered himself to be watched over by some sort of divine provenance because he always seemed to get out of the scrapes he was in. But consider the amount of people who tried to live his sort of lifestyle, and the odds of one getting through it to the extent he did become much less surprising. In the same way, there was a philosopher who looked a painting of Zeus worshippers who prayed and survived a shipwreck. His response was "where is the painting of those who prayed and drowned?" We seem to blind ourselves to the true odds of something purely to give it an explanation other than chance.

So where is God in the middle of all this? My question is, as "miracles" seem arbitrary at times, so is there really anything driving them? Have we just plucked the successes from a huge experimental population and called it miraculous?

Also, people's response in "worship" at church seems somewhat artificial; people are a lot more "worshipful (handwaving, tongues etc) with songs and situations that they know. Also, those who pray out loud in services do it a lot. all this makes me think "learned behaviour" rather than the movement of the Spirit or a true connection with God. Which again leaves me wondering where God is during it all.

Any thoughts? I'm beginning to think that Christianity is just a package of group behaviours and narrative weaving based on a narrow selection of anecdotes.

Thanks,

James

I have had some contact with James, both by email and in person. I am not going to publish any outcome of our discussions until I feel that a hiatus has been arrived at. But let me just publish my provisional response to James before I got down to anything more serious:

You have laid out some serious challenges here. I hope nobody is going foist on you a "counselling" diagnosis by suggesting that you have some deep spiritual problem that needs "exorcising" and thus makes this a pretext for bypassing issues that are not just yours alone but should be questions others ought to be asking as well. I'm all for a self critical faith. Anyway, this is just to say that we can think through these things together, because you have made some very good points there. They must be taken seriously and not fobbed off as just "head knowledge affairs" that are inferior to "esoteric" spiritual knowledge of God.

What I had in mind as I wrote that first response was the fact that esoteric spiritual knowledge is often claimed to be the sacred way to rise above the sort of “profane” intellectual challenge James raises so compellingly. Having seen the way the “Jesus is in my heart” ethos is so often (ab)used to not only provide an excuse for a fideist bypass to difficult questions, but also as the thin end of a gnostic, elitist and authoritarian wedge, I deeply suspect the authenticity of much Christianity that is sells its self from a platform of a “head vs. heart” paradigm. This paradigm is often supplemented by a fundamentalist reading of the Bible, giving rise to a toxic blend of gnosto-legalism.

The created order does not have clumsy welded joins; the empirical and the analytical cannot be separated from the spiritual any more that it is possible to separate the Bible from its cosmic context: The Bible is itself an empirical object and it is so integrated with its context that Bible and cosmos form part of a seamless body of revelation. As my friend Jim Harries puts it “Meaning = Text + Context”.

ODE TO SECTARIANISM

For Classix Nouveaux fans here is what claims to be a rare low budget original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAiKC1FEc-A&feature=related

Another broken dream, they say all the time

Sorry if I can't be as you'd like to find

If we could only see

Things as they're meant to be

But we believe in dreams

Satisfaction - is it a dream

No distraction - is it a dream

No more fighting - is it a dream

No backbiting - is it a dream

Promises broken, it's an imperfect world

Harsh words are spoken though they weren't meant to hurt

If we could only see

Things as they're meant to be

But no, it's just a dream

See also here and here.

YET ANOTHER CHRISTIAN SECT

Coming out of church last Sunday I found a small booklet carefully folded into the door handle of my car. All the cars in the church car park had been similarly provided for. It turned out to be a tract from yet another Christian splinter group. That such a group treats a mainstream Baptist church as a mission field is a fairly sure sign that this group is likely to think of its self as a spiritually superior and holy remnant. A proliferation of this kind of sectarianism has, needless to say, been a feature of Christianity for at least as far back as the reformation. But who were these latest sectarians? Were they from the Strict and Particular Baptist sect who are housed in very small building over the road? Not likely I thought as their misrepresentation of predestination tends to suppress proactive evangelistic efforts. In fact the tract contained none of the buzz words and hobby horses that I’m familiar with given my acquaintance with the exclusive sect/cult world. I could therefore see no obvious connections with any of the Christian sects I know about.

However I did eventually manage to trace a connection to a religious web site which I will not link to here. All I want to do now is to make some general comments about the phenomenon we have here. The sect appear to have no obviously glaring Christian unorthodoxies. Whenever that is the case of an exclusive Christian sect the next question to ask is what particular distinctive hobby horses have they supplemented to the faith in order to define their group identity? This sort of sect will take a perfectly good doctrine, over interpret it with some fine tuned meanings, thus perverting its significance and loading it with the sect’s proprietary understandings. This reinterpretation is crucial to the dynamic of the sect, for their distinctiveness in this matter helps give them a sense of spiritual superiority and a group identity. But above all it gives them a raison d’être and mission in life as they then have in their hands a measure that can be used to faith test other Christian groups, check they are up to standard, sort out the sheep from the goats and proselytise the goats. The sect’s self image as the privileged faithful remnant is thus reinforced.

So how do these principles manifest themselves with my anonymous “car park” sect? What particular hobby horse do they use to pin a charge of spiritual inferiority on other Christians? Now, any Christian worth his or her salt understands in their inner most being that Jesus is Lord and thus honours Him accordingly with their life. However, this particular sect succeeds in evacuating the meaning of this doctrine by turning it into matter of external observance; Viz: Unless one uses the word “Lord” mantra like, one’s salvation is certainly in danger. As the tract puts it:

…the masses… speak of Him as Jesus without adding His rightful title. This way of speaking must be very grievous to any true child of God. It is the speech of unbelievers… only those who personally know and love Him as “Lord” will confess Him as such… the enemies of our Lord only call Him “Jesus”.

So there you have it: According to this sect it is not enough to love Jesus or treat him as Lord or refer to Him by name: What’s in your heart is of little value to this sect unless it is supplemented by the verbal use of the word “Lord” because otherwise you are in danger of being regarded as one of the unbelieving masses; in fact never ever refer to Jesus as Jesus because that’s what His enemies do! Such is the perverse thinking of a legalistic sect who have such a low view of the Grace of a God who adopts as children all who call on Him. Seldom can such sects get past the outward man and the suffocating trappings of a physical piety; in this case those trappings include "a way of speaking". Those external trappings are necessary to the sect’s survival as it allows some religious wallah to check up on its members and to make sure they are in line with the sect’s practices and teachings. For them Christianity is not about an inward relationship with the Father but rather about obeying their strict articlisation of the faith.

COUNSELLORS, NOT DICTATORS
We recently had a speaker at NCBC who took a very hard "Young Earth Creationist" line. This has generated some correspondence. Below I reproduce one of the emails I sent out. I have amended the  email to make it suitable for posting:

I think our epistemic limitations are with us in everything - even our grasp of the kernel truths we cherish most, like, repentance, forgiveness, sacrifice, and salvation by grace etc. (See my last post here) Any attempt to underwrite what we believe with the claim that it is "God's Word" ignores the truism that we are always ontologically other than God; we supply meaning to the bare "Word" and whilst we believe that a loving God is ultimately sovereign over our perception of meaning (via the Holy Spirit) we realise that this doesn't entail our infallibility in supplying it. The upshot is that there is, or should be, a healthy tension between knowing that a loving God is the sovereign manager of our perceptions and the undoubted fallibility of these perceptions. The indwelling Word supplies meaning, but I think He is a counsellor, not a dictator. Therefore whenever we proffer a message we too come in the role of counsellors not dictators.

The fuss over this YEC business is, I suggest, an excellent outworking and test case of this very tension. The differences we have in our fellowship are a sure sign of our fallibility. But the differences will only become sharp and angry if one or both parties think they somehow have direct access to the Word and attempt to account for those who differ from them as being compromisers with bad consciences. If an attempt to spiritually mandate YEC is made, it will inevitably cause tension.

However - and this is important - I don't see the differences being a problem at all...unless...unless...unless one party is utterly unaware that their beliefs are subject to epistemic uncertainty for reasons I have outlined above. I would hate to see the creation question to go underground simply because one party has such a profound epistemic arrogance that whenever the subject is mentioned a self righteousness kicks which will naturally be the source of hard feeling. Have you noticed that the more fundamentalist a fellowship is the deeper and nastier the disagreements? That's because both sides are sure they are on God's side.

If the Creation issue must surface in order to act as a test case and expose a deep seated sectarian and epistemic arrogance in our fellowship then I suggest that it is better to air it rather than for it to fester underground. People who are aware of their epistemic fallibility can agree to differ, but for those who "know" they are right, "agreeing to differ" is anathema - and it will show!

***

Note: The YEC philosophy seems to have come to the fore amongst evangelical fellowships since the sixties; it is worth comparing the views of our pre-war minister Gilbert Laws who appears to have accepted and came to terms with the findings of science. See here for a post I did on Rev. Laws views. Relevant to my comment above that "for those who know they are right, agreeing to differ is anathema - and it will show!" is an email I had from a member of an exclusive and exacting Christian sect who happened to visit the church on the evening of the talk. Almost to order he provided the expected response: He was appalled by the largely polite allowance that was given to the disagreements that surfaced in the Q&A session after the talk. This is what he wrote:


"How many spoke for and in the Lord in your meeting today? 1 may be 2 or 3? Any? Or was it all objective knowledge concerning this and that like the the age of the earth and you agreed to disagree yet still not touch the living Christ.  Did you practice the all inclusive priesthood? "

His sect has a view of man that approximates toward gnosticism: "particles of spirit" are trapped in a "soulish" world and by blending with the sect can one best learn how to "release" the spirit. What he calls "objective knowledge", is, of course, considered inferior to the inner spiritual knowledge (or gnosis) available to the initiates of  the sect - only they have the best chance of "touching the living Christ" via the sects teaching which imparts spiritual gnosis. And of course amongst this small group, whose number in Norwich is barely measured in tens, a uniformity of opinion reigns - as is the wont of exclusive sects where epistemic over-confidence is normative and the fellowship pressures are great (in this particular case those pressures are subliminally coded by my corresponded in the expression "practice the all inclusive priesthood")


Oh the childish arrogance of it all! It's all too human and predictable!

THE COOLEST EQUATION EVER

Long ago it was obvious to me that the texts of the Bible, in fact the text of any book, remain as meaningless marks on a surface unless those marks are the trigger for a very proactive process of interpretation. This is how I put it in 2001:

For some the issue is simple; it is simply a case of whether you are prepared to believe what the Bible clearly means and what it clearly means is, of course, what they believe it to mean. They think their interpretations to be relatively free of ambiguity and there is therefore perhaps more than a hint that those who disagree with these "plain meanings" are not doing so with a clear conscience. But as Luther's faux pas* has shown, Biblical interpretation is not to be trivialised and taken for granted. The questions of Biblical style and where and how it uses metaphor, literality, poetry, narrative, symbolism etc. are sometimes difficult to answer and impinge upon the extraction of Biblical meaning. Moreover, one extracts that meaning through the complexities, contextuality, informality, fussiness, historicity, and flexibility of common language and this binds the Bible to the ambiguities of the world of which it is part.

There are not many "meta statements" in the Bible telling us what "reading mode" one is to use to interpret it. In fact, it is impossible for any document, even a legal, one to contain exhaustive instruction on how it should be read, because such "meta-statements" must themselves be read in some manner; if each set of reading mode instructions were to have their own information on how they should be read, then one would get an impracticably large regress. Thus, to inform its readers the Bible must rely on them being suitably primed in the first place, although, no doubt, the Bible itself becomes, in time, a source of further priming. The process of interpretation necessarily requires that the interpreter bring something to it to make it happen. It is a process that cannot start or continue in a cultural and cognitive vacuum and requires not only a "bootstrap" to get it going, but also, I suspect, continuous input to maintain it and keep it in progress.

Without the act of interpretation scripture remains a sequence of meaningless symbols and the authority of scripture cannot be applied. Statements of the form "The Bible says so & so" are really short hand for the more subjective "My interpretation of the Bible is so & so". This does not mean, of course, that Biblical meanings are arbitrary or relative, as there are such things as right and wrong interpretations. However, whether right or wrong interpretations are reached depends on a complex of contingencies and conditions regarding the experience and propensities of the reader. Thus, whether the application of scriptural authority is either blocked or facilitated is a function of the interpreter who brings to his Bible reading various cognitive qualities; his culture, his beliefs, his personal history, his knowledge of the physical world, and above all his spirituality, all of which have bearing upon on the act of interpretation. For example, on the subject of the Solar System Luther brought to bear his respect for the astronomical establishment along with some very elementary physics and these probably coloured his interpretation of the relevant Scriptures. The conscious mind draws on a variety of resources when it makes its interpretations and in the case of Luther's comments about Copernicus those resources betrayed him. There is a deep lesson here about the nature of the rational consciousness which is God's gift to each of us: We have far less control than we think over the mental processes and resources from which our decisions flow. Yes, we are free to make this and that choice but self-referencing problems limit just what we are able to do with the complex mental skein which is the source of those decisions. When I think of this I think fearfully of Romans 9:15-23; but then I think of Col. 2:13, Eph. 5:14 and the like, and hope returns. God is sovereign over the countless strands of events that comprise and influence a neural end product that is staggeringly complex and yet not complex enough for full self-understanding and control.

That Biblical interpretation is a process, which harnesses a diverse range of non-trivial resources is an implicit challenge to the notion that the Bible is somehow an alternative source of information which competes with experience of the wider creation: For it is clear that our ability to understand scripture in the first place is influenced by an interaction with the creation as a whole. It is, therefore, wrong to suggest that the Bible and the rest of creation are two independent revelations which, when they apparently contradict, means that precedence is to be given to one over the other. Typically, in fundamentalist circles it is considered a virtue to give certain traditional interpretations of the Bible automatic precedence when these conflicts arise. But the messages of the Bible and the world around it are subtly intermingled and blended, and it is impossible to correctly interpret one without the other. These two sources of revelation are interdependent and together they form a single self-consistent body of testimony revealing something of God Himself and the Grand Rationality of the created order, which He has authored and underwritten. The veracity of these blended revelations is as good as their source, and that source is none other than God Himself, but their effectiveness is only as good as the recipient's willingness to seek the grace to correctly interpret the messages received. Apparent conflicts in the testimonies of the Bible and the rest of creation are not resolved by assuming the superiority of one testimony over the other but by seeking, under grace, to correct the faults in the interpretation of either source.

Now that was a rather long winded explanation wasn’t it? In contrast Vulnerable Mission director Dr. Jim Harries, who also has done a lot of thinking about this subject, has cut this explanation down to an extremely succinct and elegant “equation”, an equation I refer to "Harries Formula". Here it is:

Meaning = Text + Context.

It is this profound formula that I’m pointing to in the picture; in fact it has pride of place on my “Top Gear” cool wall. In this equation all the complexities of the Divinely managed resources of interpretation are embodied in one variable: “Context”. All Christians should learn this formula off by heart; especially the fundamentalists who so readily equate their interpretations and their understandings with the very Words of God. For them there is no context of interpretation. For them God’s Word is acquired very directly without any interpretative hassle. For them the process of acquiring meaning is so often thought of as a trivial process where meanings are “plain” and by “plain meanings” they mean, of course, their own meanings. If fundamentalists hold a suite of erroneous and proprietary ideas they are very likely to be unable to identify them as their ideas at all and instead take it for granted that they are the very Words of God to be obeyed and believed or else. Out of fear of Divine displeasure their self critical faculties are thus utterly hamstrung and they are unable correct themselves. Self criticism and epistemic humility are foreign to them.

* Footnote: Luther was alleged to have said of Copernicus: "The fool wants to overturn the whole science of astronomy, but according to the Scripture, Joshua bade the Sun and not the Earth to stand still."

THE FOUR-TO-SIX-MIX REMAINS STEADY

At NCBC's first prayer meeting of 2011 I counted 12 males and 19 females. (excluding employed male leadership which is overwhelmingly biased toward males) That ratio rounds nicely to 4:6. It's remarkable how averages like this hold up over all causes. Koeslter would be proud (See his "The Roots of Coincidence", page 26-27 )

See this post for more details.

ANOTHER MANIFESTATION OF THE LOGOS/MYTHOS TENSION

An African Indigenous Church meeting for Worship

Here is a link to the notes I compiled for my talk at NCBC on Vulnerable Mission. Vulnerable Mission is an approach to mission developed by Jim Harries in Africa. Roughly speaking the Vulnerable Missionary avoids being a channel of Western culture, language and wealth and instead seeks to work beside his native colleagues using the language and resources they already have. This circumvents some of the problems that arise when Western backed mission becomes bound up with crude attempts to graft the methods and resources of the industrialized world upon African culture, a grafting that often comes to grief in rural Africa because it fails to cater for vast differences in culture and industrial infrastructure. In this video Jim explains in detail what his work involves.

Jim Harries mission is of particular interest to me because it picks up on a recurrent theme in my thinking; namely, the polarisation between the Logos and Mythos world views. The Logos world view builds models of the world using linguistic tokens and in particular exploits the mechanistic “law and disorder” ontology that seems to be the dominant dynamic of the cosmos. This dynamic facilitates the techno-scientific exploitation we are familiar with. The Mythos world view, on the other hand, is far more intuitive and far less easy to articulate. It resorts to mystical connections with reality via feelings, sensings, epiphanies, revelations, rituals, mysticism, mythology, instincts etc. In contrast to the Logos paradigm which seeks explanation using the elemental and the impersonal, Mythos thinking has a propensity to personify the cosmic dynamic by imputing spiritual significance to the events around us. In its world spirits are pervasive; in other words it is inclined toward animism.

If the “Out of Africa” theory is valid then African culture is far older than the cultures of the northern hemisphere. Migration to northern latitudes was probably inhibited by the ice age and thus it is only relatively recently that the north hosted modern humans. It is in Africa then (and perhaps Australia as well) that human culture finds its roots, in particular, its roots in animism. But the experience of finding roots grates and highlights the existential dissonance present in Western thought. In the industrialized hemisphere there is an instinctual alienation from the anonymous social systems and technology required to administrate huge communities: Firstly, the sheer size of these communities means that it is beyond human cognitive ability to know and identify with everyone in a community; tribal identifications are difficult to foster. Secondly, the paradigm of mechanistic elementalism that facilitates industrialization cuts across preliterate animism, an animism that is so natural to the thinking of many aboriginal people, including, it must be said, the religious sensibilities of many Westerners.

The biggest intellectual feat of homo sapiens is not so much the discovery of the laws of physics as it is the ability to comprehend other human psyches – objects which are far more intricate than the relatively elementary models normally dealt with in physics and chemistry. However, humanity doesn’t piece together an understanding of other minds from first principles; when it comes to inter-human relations human beings have a large amount of “hard wired” faculties (like the “language instinct”) dedicated to enabling those relations. These built in social cognitive abilities do such an effective job in facilitating human-human relations that we are unconscious of the underlying complexity of the mental resources they muster, and in most cases this background mental processing only surfaces in our minds as instinctual perceptions. But these instinctual intuitions are extremely important for they make our human relations possible; without them we are autistic. It is no surprise that given this awesome instinctual package of dedicated mental resources for handling the understandding of personality it is very natural to turn the power of this package beyond human society to the cosmos as a whole; very naturally, then, the human mind populates the world with spirits and imputes to it intentional forces. It is second nature for human beings to humanize their environment in this way. In contrast the instrumentalism of science tends to exorcise the animistic dynamic and expels the magical enchantment of religious meanings.

Jim Harries Vulnerable Mission brings him into close contact with an ancient strain of animistic and magical thinking about the cosmos that is often at odds with the successful working of industrial society. Jim’s work with African Indigenous Churches reveals what to Western minds are bizarre practices. But there is no cause for Westerners to feel superior. Animism is not far under the surface of Western society; less than three hundred years ago, well into the Newtonian revolution and the enlightenment, witch hunts were still being conducted in Europe. Moreover, today, many Western Indigenous Churches have a version of Christianity that is weird & wonderful; for example, they may eschew intellectual engagement in favour of a shamanistic relationship with God and Angels mediated through trance like modes of consciousness. (See the video below). They effectively supplement the basic Gospel message of God’s love and sacrificial grace with Gnostic elaborations. In general there is an underlying dissonance in Christian fundamentalist philosophy that manifests itself in a dualistic outlook that sets the material against the spiritual. In contrast the culture of rural Africa harks back to a time when humanity’s world view was less dualistic and more holistic. But the thoroughgoing animism of Africa sits uneasily with techno-scientific mechanism and so it is not surprising that the vestigial animism of the industrial north has resulted in a gnosto-dualist discontinuity in Western religious thinking.

Like gravity and quantum mechanics, science and animism remain as an incommensurable and disunited duality in the West. But the simple mathematical objects of science are too simple to be self-explaining. Science, then, is therefore destined to leave an irreducible logical hiatus in our thought. Self explanation, I submit, is more likely to be found in the a priori complex rather than the simple objects of a law and disorder ontology. The fundamental and necessary incompleteness in scientific explanation leaves a vacuum that those very human abilities for dealing with complexity will rush in to fill; in short Humanity’s personality processing package will readily step into this space with an argument from intentionality. The fundamental incompleteness of scientific explanation will help ensure religion is here to stay; even in the West.

“Angels! Angels! Angels! Angels…” screams Todd Bentley. Weird vestigial animism manifests itself in Western indigenous churches

STEAM PUNK MUSIC FACTORY

Behind the sacred looking wooden façade of NCBC’s “rood screen” stands a large assemblage of machinery two stories high: this is the church organ installed in the early nineteen fifties. It stares everyone in the face Sunday by Sunday, but in spite of that the congregation is only conscious of the all too familiar sound of traditional organ music, music that gives the illusion of not emanating from behind this holy façade, but instead, ventriloquism style, from where the initiating action is seen to take place; that is, from the keyboard.

In the Middle Ages the chancel was the sacred domain of the priests. These priests dispensed the sacraments in accord with their divinely ordained authority. The mystique of this authority held the serf congregation in awe and also (mostly) in their God ordained place in the feudal system. But how times change. The Protestants who built churches like NCBC had a tradition that was apt to erode the distinction between laity and clergy. But during their socially up and coming years after the repeal of the Test Act, the Protestants often built churches along similar lines to the architectural styles of the established Church of England. They thereby gave themselves the problem of what to do with the chancel as they had no priesthood to make use of it. In NCBC’s case, however, the chancel was half filled with the machinery of music – a large two tier organ containing resonant pipes whose number must run into the hundreds. It is so large that it is one of those machines you can walk around inside of. It is, in fact, a semi-automatic music factory controlled by the human operator stationed at the keyboard.

When music machines were introduced into nonconformist chapels in the nineteenth century, thus serving notice on the traditional music leaders, there was, needless to say, resistance to them. As is so often the case, a peripheral matter bound up with convenience and taste was cast in the mold of a vital issue endangering the spiritual life of the church: Charles Jewson, NCBC Church historian, tells us of the stormy introduction of a harmonium in the second half of the 19th century:

The year 1863 saw a revolution in worship, when for the first time, a musical instrument – a harmonium – was introduced into the Chapel with the consent of the Church. Thirteen years before, when the pastor had offered to present such an instrument, Robert Tillyard, a deacon and a leading shoe manufacturer, had raised a strong objection to the introduction of an instrument as “imperiling the rights and spiritual interests of the church.” The idea had been dropped, and James Colman appointed to lead the singing instead.*

When it comes to new innovations the moral of this story seems to be to keep trying until people get used to the idea! However, today things have come full circle: The modern tendency to replace the traditional organ with a leading band is often met with disapproval from traditionalists. But the circle may have turned yet again: I suspect that there are Christians out there for whom the bulky steampunk organs of the past are just too steeped in stultifying tradition to express spiritual life. Thus, any revival of the organ’s fortunes is likely to be greeted with dismay by Christians who instinctively feel that an airy spontaneity and exuberance is a requisite of authentic worship and that this is incompatible with the traditional heavy duty mechanisms associated with large organs. I suspect therefore that the issue of music will, once again, likely be argued vehemently from fancied spiritual mandates.

For me the experience of entering the internal world of NCBC’s organ was very reminiscent of my time amongst the fully automatic organs at the Thursford collection (See here). To be frank the experience is slightly unnerving; it leads me on to think of those last scenes in the Wizard of Oz when the awe aspiring apparition of the Wizard is revealed to be the contrivance of a man operating some clever machinery. But in some ways the NCBC organ is also a fitting symbol of the demise of the medieval chancel-based priesthood whose mystique of authority, an authority which help sustain it for hundreds of years, was in due course revealed to be a contrived interface.

As I walked round the NCBC organ interior I was struck by the apparent discontinuity between the experience of its music and the mechanisms behind that music; the music is, if the organ is well played, a seamless and apparently indivisible experience, whereas the mechanisms behind that music are analytic and reductionist. There is a metaphor here for the human psyche: Human experiences are so well fused and orchestrated that their coherence seems axiomatic. And yet get inside the human skull with the latest probing technology and these experiences appear to map, on a point by point basis, to the operations of neurons, connections, signals, fields, neurotransmitters and the like. This dichotomy between the qualities of human experience and their formal tokens realized in matter must, I submit, be accepted and embraced as is. To make full sense of reality both perspectives must be held in the mind as complementary accounts of reality. We must come to terms with both accounts - one perspective should not be done away with at the expense of the other. It is a dichotomy that is an irreducible feature of our world, a dichotomy giving meaning to the cold and heartless formalities of mechanism and yet giving coherent scientific account of the qualia of experience: The formal objects of science give account of our experiences, but those experiences are required to provide science with the observations it needs; the relationship between the two is one of mutual dependence.

"I can't see any music in here - just pipes, wires and valves"

*From the Baptist quarterly 1941

THE FOUR TO SIX MIX

A survey at NCBC last Sunday returned a male to female mix  of 37% to 63% . So, after first posting on this subject three years ago what I refer to as the “four to six mix” of males to females is being approximately maintained. My previous posts on this subject can be found in these monthly postings:

http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html

http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html

http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html

http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html

SHIELD OF FAITH

English heraldry has its origins in the middle ages; it originated in the symbolism appearing on the shields of nobles as they rode into battle. These nobles were quite often far from noble in their behavior, but that didn’t stop heraldry accruing idealized connotations of lineage, stability, strength, dignity, chivalry, good breeding, excellence and above all identification with, and the protection of, the community the symbols stood for. The irony of human behaviour is that admirable ideals so easily become mixed up with pride and snob value and so in a desire to ape the upper classes the up and coming middle classes adopted heraldry themselves. Below are two examples of non-aristocratic parties associating with heraldic motifs.

The above picture is a detail of the statue of Sir Samual Bignold, son of a freeman grocer, Norwich Union grandee, Sheriff of Norwich and MP. The statue appears outside the Marble hall on Surrey street. The coat of arms can be seen hanging from the chain.

This coat of arms is found on the stained glass window of Norwich Central Baptist Church, home church of successful business men, mayors and MPs (we're talking ancient history here!).

The coat of arms we can see in these pictures is the Norwich civic coat of arms. According to this web site:

The City's arms are based on a seal of the Fifteenth century. They were recorded and confirmed on 27th May 1562.The shield depicts Norwich Castle and the royal lion of England. This was traditionally granted to the city by King Edward III (1327-1377).

Thus Baptists join with the old Norwich Union to proudly display their identification with their community, city and country. What a contrast: Today Christian groups are largely subcultures found on the margins of civic society with little to give them a sense of belonging, identification or protection. Accordingly, some Christian groups have become alienated “holiness” sects with a tendency to attract only clients with a propensity for an unbearable spiritual intensity and a self righteous hostility toward the rest of society (and church) around them. As I said, the irony of human behaviour is that admirable ideals so easily become mixed up (and corrupted) with pride and snob value. Let them take note of the following epitaph found on a tomb in St. Stephen’s church, Norwich:

“A scholar without pride, a Christian without bigotry, and devout without ostentation”.

Norwich's coat of arms: Symbols of dignity, protection and attack.

ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH DEAR FRIENDS, ONCE MORE: MYTHOS VS LOGOS

This post on Uncommon Descent by Young Earth Creationist (?) Paul Nelson tells the interesting story of Martin Gardiner, a man who started life as a Christian fundamentalist. I set this story against this post where I published a church magazine article by the prewar Minister to St Mary’s Baptist Church, Gilbert Laws. This article was evidence that Laws respected the results of science; he believed that those results should be coped with rather than rejected. The fundamentalist ethos that the findings of science are automatically suspect because they are to be identified with an anti-Christ scientific conspiracy probably never entered Laws head; but then those were was the days of the civic church, a church that identified itself with the establishment.




Paul Nelson takes up the story of Martin Gardner:

It is not generally known that Gardner grew up as a Christian fundamentalist in Oklahoma, and indeed entered the University of Chicago as an undergraduate zealous to defend his faith, and to return America to its Christian heritage:

"In his adolescent fantasies he saw himself as chosen by the Lord to lead this new awakening. And to carry out this stupendous undertaking he conceived a brazen plan….He would enter the very citadel of the enemy. He would master all the science and modern learning that a great secular university had to offer. Every false and infernal argument would be examined and exposed. He would probe the diseased heart of twentieth century theology, dissect it nerve by nerve, artery by artery."

The passage comes from Gardner’s autobiographical novel, The Flight of Peter Fromm (1973), which Bill Dembski has used as a textbook in seminary courses he’s taught. While Gardner’s fundamentalist Christianity died a long and painful death, his theism never did.

And according to Gardner’s Wiki page:


His semi-autobiographical novel The Flight of Peter Fromm depicts a traditionally Protestant Christian man struggling with his faith, examining 20th century scholarship and intellectual movements and ultimately rejecting Christianity while remaining a theist

The candid fundamentalist mind, when exposed to honest science, finds no elaborate conspiracy to deceive but instead genuine challenges to his faith. I don’t believe there is any necessary conflict between science and theism or between science and Christianity for that matter, but there is a conflict between science and fundamentalism.

The tradition of NCBC is not one of opposing science. However, the potential to oppose science and reason are present: The tensions and paradoxes found in the logos versus mythos dichotomy have a tendency to resolve themselves by resort to extremes of legalistic rigidity and/or gnostic irrationality. When faced with the challenges of science both of these religious extremes are apt to barricade themselves into the epistemological play pen of an assertive fideism.

THEODICY AT NCBC

The last two NCBC evening services have been café style services with the aim of introducing and discussing intellectual conundrums relating to Christianity. Rev James East has done an excellent job of presenting this series and has managed to cover a lot of ground succinctly and clearly. Last Sunday’s café service was on Theodicy. Below is a copy of the handout we received.

(Click to enlarge)

My Comments:
The need for theodicy arises out of the seeming inconsistency in positing a loving, just and almighty God who creates and sustains a world containing evil and innocent suffering. Are we to conclude that God is neither loving nor almighty? Or perhaps He simply doesn’t exist? A “Theodicy” is an attempt to resolve this paradox.

The Augustinian theodicy probably ranks as the de-facto folk theodicy of suffering and evil: “It’s not God’s fault; it’s all those creatures of His who keep abusing their free will”. This theodicy attempts to shift the responsibly for suffering and evil from an all almighty God to His created subjects. This answer, however, begs the question of why God should be absolved of any responsibility when it is He that creates and sustains free-will; surely an almighty God could do a better job of creation? If free-will is bound up with a strong likelihood of evil choice making, is it, in fact, right to claim that it is ‘free’? Should God have created it at all?

The other problem with this theodicy is that it obliges the view that all innocent suffering is ultimately sourced in human, demonic or Satanic activity. Thus, suffering found in natural disasters has to be somehow causally linked with creaturely willfulness somewhere; a point of view that can be tricky to maintain given our modern understanding that the natural world seems to conform to its own patterns and logic rather than the fiat of inscrutable freewill. Sometimes there are attempts to see suffering as an obscure ramification of the fall or may be construe it as a righteous judgment visited upon sin. There is a strong resemblance between this folk theodicy and the pre-scientific weltanschauung of a capricious nature ruled by malign spirits; a view well symbolized by the green man one sometimes finds depicted in medieval churches. The invention of agriculture lead mankind into an even more up and down existence; it offered very great winnings and yet at the same time the risk of disastrous famine.

I’ve never been impressed with the Augustinian theodicy. Trying to link every daily aggravation to the choices of humans, demons or Satan requires the same kind of paranoiac mentality that is able to support the intrigues of conspiracy theory. Moreover, as far as I am aware the Biblical writers expressed no similar sweeping opinion that all suffering traces back to the willful choices of God’s creatures.

However, the Irenaean Theodicy and the comments of Dostoyevsky and Clayton (see handout) lead us down an entirely different avenue. To be sure all three have an important commonality: They weigh suffering and evil against virtue and whilst they may not dare to suggest that virtue outweighs the former they leave us on the horns of a dilemma. One might ask, however, why isn’t it possible to have virtue without an offset of pain and evil? But the trick employed by this class of theodicy is that they make suffering and evil logically inseparable from an accompanying virtue. The Irenean theodicy points out that the virtues of courage, forbearance, hope, spiritual growth and above all the grace of Christ’s sacrificial love are best observed in a world of suffering and evil. Like stars they shine all the more brightly against a background of darkness.*

The underlying idea here is cost; some beautiful things come with an inevitable cost. Dostoyevsky invents a rather contrived situation in order to help us appreciate this truth, but there is, I believe, logical necessity behind it. God has chosen to reify the story of our contingent world, a world selected from who knows how many other possible worlds residing in the platonic realm. He could have reified a story of perfection and angels, but he didn’t; instead He choose to tell our story, a story of a world where our very existence is inextricably intertwined with the presence of suffering and evil – get rid of that suffering and we cease to exist; our existence is conditioned on it. Thus, I face a dilemma: Do I say ‘yes’ to life with all its suffering and evil? Or do I say ‘no’ and wish for annihilation or that I never was? For surely if God had created a world of perfection I, a saved sinner, would have no part in that world. Dostoyevsky is weighing suffering against existence itself: What is to be one’s choice given that one’s existence is being weighed against the suffering and evil inevitably entailed by this existance?

According to Clayton the dilemma here should be met with silence. But perhaps we know the answer in our hearts: Even Nietzche, the atheist, via the intellectual device of the so called “eternal return” answered with an affirmative ‘yes’ to life; to him sentient existence was worth all the pain and evil of this world. Something inside us puts a very high premium on conscious existence, come what may.

However, Clayton is right in one sense: In the face of real suffering silence (if not rage) is the most eloquent and empathic response. Clayton also alerts us to the ultimate cost of our painful yet beautiful world, namely, Divine suffering on an unimaginable scale. He tells us of an empathizing God who takes creative responsibility for His world and who, above all, identifies with it emotionally; a world only He can witness and feel in all its heart rending entirety. Thus, the gift of existence is given to our world with the deep love and tears of God. The picture is of a suffering God who reifies, maintains and identifies with our contingent world at profound emotional cost to Himself. What more powerful, enduring and inspiring symbol of that love and suffering can we find in the history of time than the cross of Christ? Given the grace that our world should receive the gift of existence, then once this choice is made there is a binding logic of divine suffering from which even the Almighty has no escape.

The Divine Predicament

Footnote:
* The notion of weighing evil and suffering against virtue may have some biblical support from St. Paul when he says: “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” (Roms 8:18)

HERALDRY AND SYMBOLISM AT NCBC

Have a look at these examples of heraldry and symbolism on the north windows of Norwich Central Baptist Church. What do you think they mean and what light do they throw on the spirituality of the post war church? (I'm working on it, but any help and comments welcome)

(Click to enlarge)