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Nifty

I only just worked out how to separate things out so I can headline stuff up here...

What's so bad about fundamentalism?

I think I might be a bit of a fundamentalist. This would probably be a bad thing if I wanted to be a high-flying careerist in the Church of England.

I realised that I was becoming a bit of a fundy when I noticed how annoyed I get with attempts to do theology whose raison d'etre was to avoid being labelled fundamentalist. I started to feel that perhaps avoiding fundamentalism was more trouble than it was worth since these highly sophisticated and incredibly complex philosophical approaches to theology were totally incomprehensible to virtually everyone in the entire world, both Christians and non-Christians, who generally do not possess doctorates in Foucault, Nietzsche or MacIntyre.

Many some good-old-fashioned religion like Mama used to make is still an option. I don't mean that I think the world was literally created in six days or something. But I do mean that the fashionable but rather cheap dismissals of naive, simple Christianity miss out. Here are some examples Gaby and I thought of. I subtitle them,

A bit of fundamentalism never hurt anybody

1. The gospel is primarily about particular people being rescued from eternal separation from God and being given the gift of eternal life through the death of Jesus on the cross. There are many implications of this, but they all flow out from this.
2. What's so wrong with proof-texting? Jesus and Paul did it all the time.
3. Naivity and simplicity are not vices but in fact are requirements of the Christian faith: Jesus told his followers they had to be like little children. Anyone can understand the Bible because God wrote it for everyone. Theology is the province of stupid people, not the preserve of the elite.
4. Why is it such a sin to think that you are right about something? What would be the point of thinking anything unless you think it is true? At the same time, one must be committed to learning more (this is ingredient to the notion of disciple, which means, 'learner'.)
5. The obssessive need to question and doubt everything, to suspect every doctrine and never take anything on trust is not Christian and deprives people of assurance. Certainty is nothing to be ashamed of! Rather, it is a gift of the Holy Spirit.
6. Doing the right thing is not a matter of agonising and confusion. God does not want us to live in confusion but to do the right thing - which is why he has told us what the right thing is. Grey areas are mostly invented by people who don't want to do as they are told.
7. Religious coercion is not always wrong. This might sound looney at first, but I do not mean converting people at sword-point. Rather, those who criticise religious coercion don't seem to realise that, to take an obvious example, church schools are coercive.

Terry Eagleton on Richard Dawkins

Terry Eagleton is a very clever literary critics and theorist, currently a prof in Manchester and formerly of Oxford where I heard him lecture during my brief spell as an English undergraduate. Here, in the London Review of Books, he takes on Richard Dawkins's latest hysterical production, The God Delusion beautifully. It is hilarious and pointed as well as right on the money theologically. Eagleton is a kind of erstwhile Marxist Catholic.

My favourite line: "The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you."

Faith, hope and healing

Around Wycliffe I am sometimes seen as a bit dodgy because of my views about miraculous healing. I believe that when Christians ask God to physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally or any other -ally heal somebody, they can do so in the confident expectation that God will do so. This is seen as dodgy or weird mainly because quite manifestly God does not always do so. Such a view is also sometimes associated with 'name it and claim it' theology which asserts that you can have anything you want if you just have enough faith that God will give it to you: health, wealth and happiness are yours from God's cosmic sweetshop in the sky.

Well, to some extent that is what I really do believe (except for the wealth part). Before you reach for your stones to throw at me, here's the reason.

The 'confident expectation' I mentioned above is a combination of two Christian virtues: faith and hope.

Christian faith is faith that God became human in Jesus because he loves us. In becoming human, God reveals to us what he is like in a way we can understand, i.e. in a human way. And one of the things that Jesus reveals is that God hates sickness and loves people. Jesus shows us, in short, that it is God's will to heal. If you believe that it is not God's will to heal, then you are in effect saying that Jesus does not really reveal God.

Christian hope is hope that in Jesus the kingdom of God has begun to break in. Therefore we can always trust that God wants things to be his way - on earth as it is in heaven. Sickness is not God's way, it is not part of God's plan of things. Hope is therefore the expectation that the kingdom of God (i.e. things being the way God wants them) can advance now, can break in now into our situation, into our lives and our needs. Hope refuses to be frightened into giving up by circumstances and experience. The challenge is always: will you let your experience dictate your theology or will you let the life of Jesus dictate your theology?

Does this mean that we should tell people that God will always heal them? No - this would be a lie (there are plenty of examples in the Bible where sick people are not healed). But it does mean that we should pray expecting God to do something, that we should believe that God really is interested in our lives, that we should hope against hope i.e. even when humanly speaking the situation is impossible - because all things are possible for God.

Blogging a book

My friend Michael has begun an online book in blog format. (As usual it has taken me ages to notice.) He is eager for comments and feedback so do check it out!

More on witholding treatment

The Nuffield Council has now published its report (it's long but there's an executive summary). It's not all bad, rejecting active intervention to end neonatal life, and pointing out the danger of allowing economic factors to rule our considerations. But (unsurprisingly), it readily buys into the idea that quality of life and sanctity of life can be played off against one another, that there can be circumstances in which it is in one's 'best interests' to die.

The bishops of this country, never slow in issuing press releases in which Scripture and Christian theology are totally absent, did not let the side down in popping out this comment pronto. They right say:

There is a clear distinction between interventions which are deliberately aimed at killing, and decisions to withhold or withdraw medical treatment when it is judged to be futile or unduly burdensome.

But they fail to note a further distinction between "futile" and "unduly burdensome". There is a surely significant difference between witholding treatment from a baby who is going to die no matter what you do, and witholding treatment from a baby who might survive if they receive such treatment. To put it more strongly, the difference is the difference between supporting and comforting a sick person on their deathbed and refusing to throw a lifering to someone who is drowning.

The last word on biblical criticism

I recently reread CS Lewis's "Fern Seeds and Elephants". If you haven't read it before, it is a genuine must, and only takes fifteen minutes or so to read.

Favourite quote: "I do not wish to reduce the sceptical element in your minds. I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds. Try doubting something else."

P.S. on letting die

Only a short clip from this withering piece in the Independent by Dominic Lawson is available online, but it is still worth reading.

Bioethics, babies and baptism

It's about time I started blogging again. And what got me started (apart from the fact that I have class to prepare for and therefore, obviously, am scratching around for other things to do) is the report made by the Mission and Public Affairs Council of the C of E to the Nuffield Council, which has established a working group to look into questions around fetal and neonatal care. It is due to make its report this Thursday.

The C of E submission, available here, has come in for a great deal of criticism - most notably in the Mail's screaming headline, "Church backs calls for severely disabled babies to be killed at birth". Unsurprisingly, the Mail quotes the report selectively. It also fails to take into account the distinction the submission draws between acting to kill and withdrawing treatment. Others have therefore reacted in defence of the submission.

But is such a defence really warranted? On reflection, it would appear not.

1. Scripture and Christian tradition would not seem to recognise the distinction between acting to kill and witholding action in the knowledge that such death will result from such witholding. Jesus warns that a failure to give care and provision to someone vulnerable and in need is to fail to give such care to Jesus himself. James points out that it is not enough to hope that someone in need gets enough food and shelter: the decision not to meet another's need is culpable. This is why many liturgical confessions of sin recognise not only that we sin in what we do, but also by omitting to do that which we ought to have done. As Luther put it, failing to feed someone who is starving to death is morally equivalent to killing them.
2. The submission explicitly subscribes to the widely discredited consequentialist idea that in some cases, love ('compassion' in the submission's terms) overrides rule-based ethics. Any undergraduate who studies Christian ethics will be familiar with the absurdities of such a position - but they appear to have escaped Bishop Tom Butler! Consequentialism argues that one is justified in doing something formally wrong (i.e. against a moral law, in this case the commandment "Do not murder") in order to maximise the good consequences in a situation (or minimise the bad ones). It sets up a tension between love and law which Jesus did not accept (on the commandments to love God and neighbour hang all the Law and the Prophets). Shall we do evil that good might increase? By no means!
3. Christians are called to be people who never give up on the hurting, the sick and the poor. We are called to be people of faith (trust) in a God whose grace and compassion has no boundary or limit. We are called to believe that God can intervene in any situation, no matter how terrible, to heal physically and in every other sense too. It is therefore difficult for me to see how Christians can ever give up on any particular baby, how we can ever resign ourselves to death? This is fatalism, not faith. Christians are called to believe that sickness and death are evil consequences of sin, and irreconcilably opposed to the will of God. Sickness and death is never God's will: there can be no truce with death. It is the final enemy, which the death of Christ has overcome. Such a faith will be profoundly costly, since it will call us to agnonise and be hugely frustrated with the prevalence of sickness and death in our world - rather than giving in to it. But perhaps such agnoy and frustration will produce a people who pray with ever more persistence and compassion for the sick, who suffer with patience and courage, and who eagerly cry out to God for the kingdom to come.