Welcome to Sean's Blog

Can you believe you are right, without being arrogant?

What we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt -- the Divine Reason.

GK Chesteron Orthodoxy, ch. 3, "The Suicide of Thought"

Some blogs

Instead of finishing my essay on pastoral theology I have found a good website: Virtual Theology. You can download podcasts and handouts and stuff and it's all quite appropriately lighthearted. Most of the posts are pretty old but Marcionism and Gnosticism haven't changed much since then.

I also discovered that the Bishop of Bristol (Mike Hill) has got a blog. I don't know if bishops' blogs are any more enlightened than us mortal folk but some of his posts looked quite interesting.

More Wimber

Posting the previous relating to John Wimber reminded me of my favourite Wimber story:

Shortly after John Wimber became a Christian, he became a voracious Bible reader. The Scriptures excited him. Finally, after weeks of reading about life-transforming miracles in the Bible and attending boring church services, John asked one of the lay leaders, "When do we get to do the stuff?"

"What stuff?" asked the leader.

"You know, the stuff here in the Bible," said John. "You know, like the stuff Jesus did—raising people from the dead, healing the blind and the paralyzed. You know, that stuff."

"Well, we don’t do that anymore," the man said.

"You don’t?"

"No."

"Well what do you do?" asked John.

"What we did this morning."

In frustration, John responded: "For that I gave up drugs?"

(From here.)

Reach out!

Custard asks:

I get the laying hands on people when praying for them. But what's with the vague stretching out of hands towards them? Are you expecting to be able to throw lightning bolts, as with the Emperor in Star Wars? Or is it a telekinesis thing? Or a telepneumatological thing? In which case why does it need the hand?

I am happy to provide the answer! It is actually rather funny.

Hand-extension, believe it or not, developed in the charismatic movement quite randomly (or, through the mysterious workings of God the Holy Spirit if you prefer). John Wimber recounts with some amusement the following in his autobiography. The original Vineyard church used to meet in a school hall in California. They would pray for the sick every Sunday at the end of their services, with the laying on of hands. And it was HOT. The person being prayed for would often become uncomfortable if several people laid their hands on them because it would make them feel hotter. So the practice gradually developed that people would stretch out their hands towards the person being prayed for, with perhaps just one person laying their hands on them. Then what happened was, John Wimber started travelling the world training other churches to pray for the sick, and taking teams with him from the Vineyard. They carried on praying for people in the way they were accustomed - that is, stretching out their hands towards them. In the event of someone falling over it also avoided the charge of them being pushed! And the people being trained, quite naturally, simply copied what they saw the Californians doing!!

Having explained that, it is worth pointing out that extending hands is nevertheless a perfectly useful thing to do in prayer since it helps one focus one's mind and heart in a particular way. One might say it is irrational if by irrational one means that it accomplishes nothing in the purely material realm i.e. it doesn't help one's prayers reach the intended recipient (!) any more than putting one's hands in the air in worship gets one nearer to God (although hand-raising is of course explicitly commanded in Scripture!). But it's not irrational in the sense that there is nothing irrational about one's posture assisting one's mind/heart/spirit/soul/insert appropriate anthropological component here. One might as well say that kneeling to pray was irrational. It's true but not informative. Yes it is a symbol - but symbols are important and helpful.

By contrast, the Bible is shockingly clear that the laying on of hands is not a symbol. It does not merely symbolise the impartation of the Holy Spirit - it actually confers the Spirit! (2 Timothy 1:6 and Acts 8:18). Scripture often challenges our ideas of what is rational and sensible!

When theology becomes biology

My friend the almost-Reverend David Cooke has posted this on his blog: when theology becomes biology. It's all about making sure that academic thinking about God does not replace experiencing him for yourself. Good stuff.

My favourite line:

A lecture this week told us about the animal husbandry of camels in the ancient near east and the importance of the distinction between a one humped and two humped camels. Apparently this fascinating information has some bearing on the dating of Genesis. Hasn't this slightly missed the point? This may well be true, but for me it is a long way from knowing the love, power and grace of God who has risen from the dead to redeem all mankind.

Baptism in water and Spirit

A belated happy Christmas! I hope you've all had a fantastic celebration and a good rest. India was great (thank you to those who asked about it - more on that anon) and I had a lovely Christmas at Gaby's parents. Now we're staying with my folks for a few days.

Thanks to the folk who have asked me when my baptism post was coming. You are either very short of things to do over Christmas or very gracious (or both)!

I just wanted to put something together on baptism following the Wycliffe teaching week at the end of term on birth and baptism. On the final day I caused some amusement and bafflement by asserting that in the New Testament it was always perfectly obvious who was a Christian and who was not because the Christians were baptised in the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues: i.e. it was a tangible, externally observable, unmistakeable and dramatic event.

My thesis, based on the work of the only slightly looney theologian David Pawson, is that in the New Testament, there are several aspects or stages of Christian initiation (i.e. becoming a Christian and part of the church). He argues that the reason many Christians today are so far away from the New Testament expectations of the normal Christian life is that they have not had the full normal Christian birth. Each stage is necessary and distinct though part of a whole.

The stages are: repentance, faith in Jesus, baptism by/in water, baptism by/in the Holy Spirit (usually but not always imparted by the laying on of hands). The normal pattern is that people turn away from their sin and trust in the risen Jesus. Then in some cases they are filled with the Spirit and on the basis of the clear, visible and tangible evidence of this filling are baptised in water. In other cases they are baptised and then hands are laid on and they receive the Spirit.

Baptism in the Spirit is always a tangible and observable experience which even others can observe. Usually but not always it is accompanied by speaking in tongues and/or prophesy. The New Testament does not know of any such thing as a Christian who is baptised in the Spirit but does not know that they are!

There's more below the fold: please click on the link if you're interested.

Anglicanism and tradition

Over on my friend Erik Twist's blog we are having a discussion on the role of formal, more set church services versus more spontaneous, informal church services. I tend to use the term 'liturgy' to mean these more formal services although in a sense any church service is liturgical. But I mean services which have set prayers, use perhaps a formal creed, similar words each time etc.

It has got me thinking about the role of tradition in evangelicalism. Evangelicals tend to follow the Reformation formula of 'sola Scriptura'. This means that only Scripture (as the authoritative self-revelation of God in verbal form) sets the parameters for Christian belief and behaviour. Obviously in the Reformation, this meant particularly that the Pope did NOT have the authority to set out doctrine.

However, 'sola' does not mean that everything else is irrelevant. It only means that everything else (e.g. church liturgy, creeds, the teaching of particular theologians and so on) cannot be used to establish obligatory doctrines which everyone has to agree to. They are useful guides and pointers but they must always be tested against the Bible. They are important, but not ultimate. The key question is, when Scripture and tradition disagree, which takes priority, as it were. The problem with some evangelicals is therefore not that they ignore tradition but that they accept it too much, even where it disagrees with the Bible!

Tradition is good and necessary. Without a community of Christians who believe that the Bible is the Word of God, nobody would ever know that it is. Without Christian tradition to show how Christians have read and misread the Bible in the past, we would be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past (often we repeat them anyway, usually due to not paying enough attention to said tradition). Tradition shows us where the path is. But tradition is not the path itself. And it must always be open to revision in the light of what the Bible says.

Many Anglican 'evangelicals' assert today that the problem is that the Bible is not sufficiently clear to interpret itself in this way. This is a very logical position with a good Christian pedigree - namely, Roman Catholicism. But it is not the Anglican position (still less the evangelical position), which as a reformed church asserts that Scripture, illuminated by the Holy Spirit, is both clear and sufficient.

The 39 articles clearly demonstrate that this is the Anglican position. The relevant portions are cited below the fold.

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.

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.

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."