orwellian evil

 

Lad magazines are rare, if not extinct, in Singapore’s officially prudish and ruling party-controlled newstands. Even the lustier ones like For Him Magazine (FHM) and Maxim are controlled by Big Brother – anything resembling the genitalia or the tits are opined as pornographic – which more than anything reveals the clerical immaturity of the authorities.

 

And the citizens. Remember the commercial walls of Orchard Road and their beautifully depicted male modeled muscled abbominals? Many among the public were pontificating about its abdominal obscenity, oblivious to the enlightened snickers of the discerningly educated few who are scratching our heads, wondering what the fucking fuss it was all about.

 

The perpretators of such ignorance are often the religiously motivated, drugged by a peculiar moral logic which rests on ancient texts instead of science and reason. Yes, primarily the ancient and thus very ignorant books of the monotheistic trinity of religions.

 

It baffles the common sense when any subject from politics (anywhere in the world except Singapore and the idiotic Asian lands) to football to Greek mythology can be slaughtered in the abbatoir of public discourse but NOT religion. The people “of the book” seem to be one very schizophrenic mob who would wince and weep at any jibe, profane or not, at their icons.

 

It is totalitarian, to say the least. It is the epitome of the orwellian vision of dystopia. It is evil.

 

Three days ago, the National Council of Churches of Singapore (NCCS) squealed like a hurt flesh of infant swine against two articles published in the latest edition of FHM. I didn’t know the council reads FHM. Godless and evil men like me do not even read FHM. I read the King James Bible. Really.

 

FHM pulled off shelves, editor apologises

 

The NCCS statement claimed that the articles “make fun of the Lord Jesus Christ” and “…hurt the sensitivities of the Christian community.”

 

Hmm. Does Bishop Dr Robert Solomon, president of the NCCS, who with three other leading clerics signed the statement, really know what he is talking about? HOW IS IT POSSIBLE FOR ARTICLES IN FHM TO HURT THE FEELINGS OF CHRISTIANS? UNLESS CHRISTIANS READ FHM.

 

Oh, I must be very ignorant then. I didn’t realise the godly christians in Singapore read FHM. There must be some good holy stuff there which I am not aware of which edifies my christian brethren. Must be the beauties of God’s creation.

 

Ungodly men like me only read the theology journals and Rowan Williams. And Marcus Borg. And John Spong. And George Orwell. And Evelyn Waugh. And Charles Dickens. And Ian Mcewan. Sigh.

 

Apart from the two blasphemous articles, perhaps I should start reading FHM. NCCS thinks it influences the christian community.

 

*******

 

religious blind spot

by Julian Baggini

 

The humanist philosopher Simon Blackburn recounts a wonderful anecdote told to him by a colleague about a high-powered interfaith panel discussion. Each speaker took turns to explain some key ideas of their faith – Buddhist, Hindu and so on – and the response from other panel members was always along the lines of: “Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great.” The same response greeted the Catholic priest who talked of Christ and salvation, but instead of being pleased with their enthusiasm “he thumped the table and shouted: ‘No! It’s not a question of if it works for me! It’s the true word of the living God, and if you don’t believe it you’re all damned to hell!’”

 

“And they all said, ‘Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great.’”

 

The puzzle for many of us is why this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often. The simple fact is that almost everyone who is serious about their religion believes that others have got it badly wrong. If they’re not going to hell, then they are at least missing out on life’s most important truths. So why the silence about the errors of other faiths?

 

The most obvious explanation is simple civility and a respect for different opinions. It would be rude and arrogant for a member of one religion to criticise another, so if they can’t say anything nice, they don’t say anything at all. But this doesn’t add up. Rowan Williams, for example, does not seem to think he’s being rude or arrogant when he criticises the government (especially since he frames it as “encouraging the present government to clarify what it is aiming for”). The Dalai Lama is not considered rude or arrogant for criticising capitalism for being “concerned only with gain and profitability“.

 

The Association of British Muslims was not rude or arrogant when it quite rightly criticised the UN general assembly for removing a clause abut the sexual orientation of the victims from its resolution on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. It seems religious leaders have no problem finding civil ways of being critical of everyone apart from each other.

 

So there’s got to be something else going on here and it doesn’t seem uncharitable to suggest that it’s a kind of sticking together for self-interest, a version of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. A religion’s direct competitors are not the biggest threat. People rarely switch between them and because the traffic tends to be two-way, the net affect is usually negligible anyway. The real danger comes from people giving up on religion altogether. So religions have an interest in “sector building”, seeing promotion of the profile of their kind existential product as being more important than their particular brand.

 

It’s another symptom of what Daniel Dennett calls “belief in belief”. Sure, people do sincerely believe the specific tenets of their faith, albeit with varying degrees of intensity and selectivity. But whereas the exact contents of the creed are up for negotiation, that there must be one is not. What matters above all else is to be religious: how exactly you do so is mere detail.

 

Of course, this isn’t how people explicitly or consciously see it. But if we judge people according to what they do rather than what they say, this explanation makes most sense to me. And I think there could be some benefits if religious people were to acknowledge this.

 

First of all, it would provide an opportunity to question whether the tactical alliance is really the right one. If “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” then I think many people are confused about who their friends and enemies are. There are plenty of moderate Christians, for example, who have much more in common with sympathetic atheists than they do evangelicals. Gay Christians should be more critical of their homophobic co-religionists than of atheist materialists. Such people should leave the opportunistic coalition of faith and join a principled coalition of the reasonable.

 

Second, recognising that belief in belief matters more than belief is a way of moving religion more in the direction of practice and form of life, away from discredited supernatural creeds. As I’ve said more than once in this series, I’m all in favour of religion being more about practice than belief, but it is just wishful thinking to believe it already is.

 

However, I am not holding my breath waiting for either development to happen. The more depressing truth seems to be that for all their aspirations for transcendent truth and higher purpose, religions behave like any other worldly individual or organisation and end up doing what protects their secular interests, not what most aligns with their values. And I’d be a liar if I said: “Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great.”

(source)

 

*******

 

the druid and the pagan

 

One of the delights, as well as irritants, I suspect, of the characteristically English debate is the gracious civility it offers to the interested spectator. One has to be forgiven for walking out on such a discourse if one expects more of a midnight brawl in the downtown bar than an arthurian match between two gentlemen.

 

It is so unlike the cowboys across the proverbial pond whose notions of intellectual entertainment range from the lowbrow comedy of presidential debates to the mentally deluded rantings of dollar-eyed televangelists. It is precisely one such wild-eyed ranter, disguised as the “respectable philosopher”, who went on an “apologetics” tour across the United Kingdom late last year in an attempt to win debates and thus score some heavenly brownie points against the very pagan and god-forsaken land of Shakespeare, the King James Bible and Winston Churchill.

 

The self-professed professional ranter went by the name of a William Lane Craig, and he had the nerve of inviting England’s greatest champion since Bertrand Russell and Antony Flew - the devilish Pope of the Church of Darwin – Professor Richard Dawkins, to wage verbal battle in the devil’s own cathedral, the University of Oxford.

 

Alas, it was an honour never to materialise when the Oxford don refused to give Craig the chance to polish up his CV by debating him. It has always been the refined oxonion’s principle not to debate any evangelical or fundamentalist christian whose views on science border on the idiotic and the mentally insane.

 

But many in Great Britain wondered if their much beloved Goliath was making a wrong move. A refusal by the professor would, in the eyes of the christian loonies, create a coward out of him when put in the backdrop of Craig’s numerous debating “victories”. Many in the christian world tout this bloke as the next big thing in the world of christian debaters, despite the irritating fact that he recycles the same arguments over and over again in all of his debates.

 

Craig got away with them NOT because his arguments were intellectually superior. On the contrary, with such silliness it is no surprise he had to exploit all the known trickeries of the known rhetorical world. Like his televangelist peers in the TBN and CBN world, Craig is one slippery customer.

 

Besides, manifold are the number of erudite and serious scholars in academia who make extremely poor communicators, let alone verbal jousters and debaters.

 

The gentle academic has his fair share of debates, although his is an acquired taste. He relishes the steadiness and deliberation of an intellectual “conversation”, a one-to-one free exchange of views so as to elude the constraints of time and moderatoral intrusion. As such he has shook hands with fellow gentlemen like the mathematician John Lennox, the former Bishop of Oxford Richard Harries and the theologian Alister McGrath.

 

So it was precisely this form of civilised chit chat that had Richard Dawkins drop by the very packed Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford last evening, along with his equally illustrious and damningly erudite counterpart, the Dumbledore and Gandalf of all England, Rowan Williams.

 

 

The subject in question was “the nature of human beings and the question of their ultimate origins” and it was charmingly moderated by a benign Sir Anthony Kenny, a distinguished academic in the field of philosophy whose personal views on the subject was agnostic, with a Roman Catholic bent.

 

Many in the audience last night would have wished Dawkins debated the thuggish Craig instead, for the latter would probably shock the distinguished and intelligent audience with his stupidity and thus make for better entertainment. Otherwise a match between two scholars can be dreadfully boring, with each giving in to the other with semantic evasions, philosophical tai chi and political compromise, as was indeed the nature of last evening’s almost ninety minutes of ping pong rallying chit chat.

 

On the other hand, to add the late Christopher Hitchens into the mix would be akin to setting off dynamite in a room full of gunpowder. It would be a magical night of mischief and mayhem. But sadly, there is neither entertainment nor wit displayed last evening, with both learned men too honest for their own good. Then again, the audience was asked not to respond to every emphatic point the speakers make. This very polite way of doing things is so charmingly unlike the barbarians across the atlantic, where rabble rousing is much loved and white noise worshipped.

 

Pop corn and box office aside, the politeness and courtesy which the intellectual combatants displayed last evening was one of humankind’s finest moments.

 

Nothing – yes – nothing – in the raucous muslim world of the barbarian Middle East can match the record set by last evening’s event – a civil exchange of worldviews so different and yet so united by one common thread of humanity.

 

The loud-mouthed, tongue-lashing and head-chopping imams and ayatollahs should learn a thing or two from the gentlemen from Oxford.

 

Give me the sleeping bag and go watch the Dawkins-Williams conversation here.

 

*******

 

in defence of liberalism

by Will Hutton

 

I write in defence of liberalism – a tradition as traduced by Baroness Warsi sounding off in the Vatican about a liberal elite undermining religion‘s necessary and important centrality in national life as it is by Dawkins’ high profile campaign to convert us all to atheism. There are many dimensions to liberalism – proportionality, due desert, mutual respect, belief in pluralism and tolerance of dissent – but we liberals would no more want to pillory those who have faith than we would want to endorse a philosophy that for all its appeal to rationality does not respect difference.

 

Liberalism is a doctrine of live and let live, and there has to be a very high threshold of harm before that liberal principle can be qualified.

 

Of course when religion is carried to absurd and dangerous degrees – the Tea Party movement in the US or Islamic fundamentalism – I am opposed, but for the same reasons I recoil from any zealot. George Osborne’s irrational zealotry on debt and deficit reduction is a much more serious threat to our wellbeing than Archbishop Rowan Williams’s Anglicanism. Indeed paradoxically the Church of England he leads is a great liberal redoubt – an institution that embodies proportionality, tolerance of dissent and respect for others along with considerable moral authority.

 

It is our ally, not our enemy, as we are discovering again in its battle against the devastating and thoughtless welfare cuts and the argument for a responsible capitalism. It is why so many English people support it even while their practice and understanding of Christianity is uncertain. Please don’t confuse that hesitancy with their quiet respect – even love – of an institution they understand and feel they need.

 

I am agnostic rather than atheist, which means I am much more well-disposed to the values and sensibility of faith. It also means I set a higher bar for my objections. I object to Baroness Warsi, Rick Santorum and radical Islam alike – but not to longstanding rituals such as prayers before council meetings or even in schools. I am more selective about my fights, and more anxious to protect my general liberalism and tolerance.

(source)

 

*******

 

pastor to the royals

 

 

Dr John Robert Hall (born 13 March 1949) is the Dean (somewhat equivalent to a senior pastor in an evangelical church) of the majestic Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster, or what is popularly known as Westminster Abbey – the ancient church which serves the British royalty for centuries.

 

It was the luscious venue for the recent royal wedding, by the way, of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

 

The Very Rt Rev. Dr John Hall represents quite accurately what it means to be a Church of England (anglican) preacher, the epitome of what some would call a dignified and intelligent churchman and others the symbol of all things “cowardly” and “pussified”.

 

I rather like him though. Unlike many of my contemporaries who would rather listen to US-type sentimentality and cheap emotionalism over the pulpit with the likes of John Bevere, Bill Hybels, Rick Warren, Joseph Prince, Kong Hee and what-have-you in the world of televangelistic extravagance (even someone as trite as the British charismatic Nicky Gumbel can be boring stuff to them); my tastes are much more down-to-earth.

 

My favourite preachers from the US would include renowned wordsmiths like the late Rev. Peter Gomes of Harvard Memorial Church, whose short (twenty minutes at a maximum) but very literary homilies were a sensual delight to my ears, and Rev. Alan Jones, the former Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, who loved to pepper his similarly literary homilies with poetry.

 

And with no surprise, my all-time favourite would be the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams. His homilies and lectures are loaded with substance and intelligent rhetoric as well as a living example of what good spoken English sounds like.

 

Dr Hall is no different. Although his homilies are far too brief for my liking (seven to ten minutes) as is typical with high Church of England sermons, his appeal for me lies in his mellifluous baritone voice, steady and quiet delivery, and good neutral Received Pronunciation.

 

If young people these days do not appreciate beautiful and elegant rhetoric, so what? What do they know? Must we lower our standards to speak like hooligans and ruffians so as to “relate” to them? Must we cuss and swear on the pulpit to attract crowds of equally insolent evangelicals?

 

Alas…evangelical christianity in Singapore is going the way of the loud-mouthed, hand-waving yankee.

 

Sigh.

 

*******

 

christmas day 2011 sermon

by Rowan Williams

 

When the first Christians read – or more probably heard – the opening words of John’s gospel, they would have understood straight away quite a lot more than we do. They would have remembered, many of them, that in Hebrew ‘word’ and ‘thing’ are the same, and they would all have known that in Greek the word used has a huge range of meaning – at the simplest level, just something said; but also a pattern, a rationale, as we might say, even the entire structure of the universe seen as something that makes sense to us, the structure that holds things together and makes it possible for us to think.

 

Against this background, we can get a glimpse of just what is being said about Jesus. His life is what God says and what God does; it is the life in which things hold together; it is because of the life that lives in him that we can think. Jesus is the place where all reality is focused, brought to a point. Here is where we can see as nowhere else what connects all reality – all human experience and all natural laws. Edward Elgar famously said about his Enigma Variations that they were all based on a tune that everyone knew – and no-one has ever worked out what he meant. But John’s gospel declares that the almost infinite variety of the life we encounter is all variations on the theme that is stated in one single clear musical line, one melody, in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. ‘In him was life, and the life was the light of men.’

 

But this shouldn’t make us forget entirely the underlying image. The life that lives in Jesus, the everlasting divine agency that is uniquely embodied in him, is like something that is said – a word addressed to us. Because, like any word addressed to us, it demands a response. And the gospel goes on at once to tell us that the expected response was not forthcoming. Before we have even got to Christmas in the words of the gospel we are taken to Good Friday, and to the painful truth that the coming of Jesus splits the world into those who respond and those who don’t. Once the word is spoken in the world, there is no way back. Your response to it, says the gospel again and again, is what shows who and what you really are, what is deepest in you, what means most. What we say or do in our response to Jesus is our way of discovering for ourselves and showing to one another what is real in and for us. Like the other gospel writers, John hints very strongly that some people respond deeply and truthfully to Jesus without fully knowing who he is or what exactly they are doing in responding to him; this is not a recipe for tight religious exclusivism. But the truth is still an uncompromising one: if you cannot or will not respond, you are walking away from reality into a realm of trackless fogbound falsehood.

 

There is the question we cannot ignore. It’s been well said that the first question we hear in the Bible is not humanity’s question to God but God’s question to us, God walking in the cool of the evening in the Garden of Eden, looking for Adam and Eve who are trying to hide from him. ‘Adam, where are you?’ The life of Jesus is that question translated into an actual human life, into the conversations and encounters of a flesh and blood human being like all others – except that when people meet him they will say, like the woman who talks with him at the well of Samaria, ‘Here is a man who told me everything I ever did.’ Very near the heart of Christian faith and practice is this encounter with God’s questions, ‘who are you, where are you?’ Are you on the side of the life that lives in Jesus, the life of grace and truth, of unstinting generosity and unsparing honesty, the only life that gives life to others? Or are you on your own side, on the side of disconnection, rivalry, the hoarding of gifts, the obsession with control? To answer that you’re on the side of life doesn’t mean for a moment that you can now relax into a fuzzy philosophy of ‘life-affirming’ comfort. On the contrary: it means you are willing to face everything within you that is cheap, fearful, untruthful and evasive, and let the light shine on it. Like Peter in the very last chapter of John’s gospel, we can only say that we are trying to love the truth that is in Jesus, even as we acknowledge all we have done that is contrary to his spirit. And we say this because we trust that we are loved by this unfathomable mystery who comes to us in the shape of a newborn child, ‘full of grace and truth’.

 

Finding words to respond to the Word made flesh is and has always been one of the most demanding things human beings can do. Don’t believe for a moment that religious language is easier or vaguer than the rest of our language. It’s more like the exact opposite: think of St John writing his gospel, crafting the slow, sometimes repetitive pace of a narrative that allows Jesus to change the perspective inch by inch as a conversation unfolds. Or of St Paul, losing his way in his sentences, floundering in metaphors as he struggles to find the words for something so new that there are no precedents for talking about it. Or any number of the great poets and contemplatives of the Christian centuries. It isn’t surprising if we need other people’s words a lot of the time; and it’s of great importance that we have words to hand that have been used by others in lives that obviously have depth and integrity. That’s where the language of our shared worship becomes so important.

 

This coming year we celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Book of Common Prayer. It has shaped the minds and hearts of millions; and it has done so partly because it has never been a book for individuals alone. It is common prayer, prayer that is shared. In its origins, it was meant to be – and we may well be startled by the ambition of this – a book that defined what a whole society said to God together. If the question ‘where are you?’ or ‘who are you?’ were being asked, not only individual citizens of Britain but the whole social order could have replied, ‘Here we are, speaking together – to recognize our failures and our ideals, to recognize that the story of the Bible is our story, to ask together for strength to live and act together in faithfulness, fairness, pity and generosity.’ If you thumb through the Prayer Book, you may be surprised at how much there is that takes for granted a very clear picture of how we behave with each other. Yes, of course, much of this language feels dated – we don’t live in the unselfconscious world of social hierarchy that we meet here. But before we draw the easy and cynical conclusion that the Prayer Book is about social control by the ruling classes, we need to ponder the uncompromising way in which those same ruling classes are reminded of what their power is for, from the monarch downwards. And the almost forgotten words of the Long Exhortation in the Communion Service, telling people what questions they should ask themselves before coming to the Sacrament, show a keen critical awareness of the new economic order that, in the mid sixteenth century, was piling up assets of land and property in the hands of a smaller and smaller elite.

 

The Prayer Book is a treasury of words and phrases that are still for countless English-speaking people the nearest you can come to an adequate language for the mysteries of faith. It gives us words that say where and who we are before God: ‘we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep’, ‘we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table’, but also, ‘we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs through hope of the everlasting kingdom’. It gives us words for God that hold on to the paradoxes we can’t avoid: ‘God… who art always more ready to hear than we to pray,’ ‘who declarest thy almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity, ‘whose property is always to have mercy.’ A treasury of words for God – but also a source of vision for an entire society: ‘Give us grace seriously to lay heart the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions’; ‘If ye shall perceive your offences to be such as are not only against God but also against your neighbours; then ye shall reconcile yourselves unto them; being ready to make restitution’.

 

The world has changed, the very rhythms of our speech have changed, our society is irreversibly more plural, and we have – with varying degrees of reluctance – found other and usually less resonant ways of talking to God and identifying who we are in his presence. If we used only the Prayer Book these days we’d risk confusing the strangeness of the mysteries of faith with the strangeness of antique and lovely language. But we’re much the poorer for forgetting it and pushing it to the margins as much as we often do in the Church. And it is crucial to remember the point about the Prayer Book as something for a whole society, binding together our obligations to God and to one another, in a dense interweaving of love and duty joyfully performed.

 

The Prayer Book was once the way our society found words to respond to the Word, to say who and where they were in answer to God’s question. Those who prayed the Prayer Book, remember, included those who abolished the slave trade and put an end to child labour, because of what they had learned in this book and in their Bibles about the honour of God and of God’s children. They knew their story; they knew how to give an answer for themselves, how to join up the muddle of their experience in a coherent pattern by relating it to the unchanging truth and grace of God. That’s why the coming year’s celebration is not about a museum piece.

 

The most pressing question we now face, we might well say, is who and where we are as a society. Bonds have been broken, trust abused and lost. Whether it is an urban rioter mindlessly burning down a small shop that serves his community, or a speculator turning his back on the question of who bears the ultimate cost for his acquisitive adventures in the virtual reality of today’s financial world, the picture is of atoms spinning apart in the dark.

 

And into that dark the Word of God has entered, in love and judgment, and has not been overcome; in the darkness the question sounds as clear as ever, to each of us and to our church and our society: ‘Britain, where are you?’ Where are the words we can use to answer? 

 

***

 

(source)

 

*******

 

 

a lot of rubbish on sale

 

I walked into one of the branches of Mount Zion (Christian Books & Gifts Centre) for the first time last evening, in almost a decade. My wife and I were looking out for presents – yes, for the Winter Solstice – for a very early celebration with some close friends this evening. We decided on the early date as one family would be expecting their third child any time next month. All of us are waiting in bated breath.

 

It was a small enterprise, this evangelical christian bookshop, approximately the size of two average HDB rooms and situated in as prime an area as a local shopping centre. Mount Zion had been a very popular haunt in the 1990s and early noughties among charismatic and pentecostal christians. Although it has since been very careful in the selection of titles it put on display, there are still countless of rubbish stocked on its shelves for sale.

 

Rubbish which range from the books and sermon recordings of Joel Osteen to that of Kenneth Hagin and Charles Capps - both very popular but intellectually challenged US televangelists. Liberal and thinking christians largely ignore preachers like them, but even among evangelical scholars, the Osteen-Hagin menu is one recipe for theological disaster. As one would have it, the sale assistants were women in their 40s to 50s, probably with no theological training as well as being romantically-challenged.

 

There was virtually no decent literature around, with the exception of maybe the bibles located at a corner. But of course, we were not looking for books, and eventually settled for two ceramic cross-plaques which left us about SGD$50 poorer.

 

That is quite an accurate representation of the current charismatic christian scene in Singapore – Mount Zion that is – churches filled with average Singaporeans who are ever so willing to be instructed with pollyanna nonsense. Where are the decent preachers like Rowan Williams (the current Archbishop of Canterbury), the late Peter Gomes of Harvard Memorial Church or Alan Jones, the former Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco? Where are the leaders who can commit to religious pluralism, interfaith engagement and offer intellectually-stimulating rhetoric in 21st century Singapore?

 

I will not be surprised that the most Islamophobic of Singaporeans would come from this community, who often zealously believe that they have a corner on the truth and that no one except those who accept Jesus Christ as God and their “personal saviour” will enter paradise.

 

This translates as people like you and I, free thinker and atheist, jewish, muslim and buddhist, hindu and zoroastrian, taoist and sikh; ALL of us darn it – will GO TO HELL.

 

Literally. Burning in there for ever.

 

But I suppose if the great Buddha or the late Mahatma Gandi is in hell, or great thinkers like Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Averroes are in hell…kiss my itchy arse – I will be in great company.

 

*******

 

“the king of the bibles” by peter mullen

 

We enjoyed a parish visit recently to St George’s Chapel, Windsor: the Queen’s Chapel. In there was a big sign saying, “Celebrating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible”. I must say, it was a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance. For at Choral Evensong, the lessons were both from some illiterate, godforsaken modern version. I knew we were in for trouble from the start when, in the Old Testament lesson, King Solomon addressed the Almighty as, “You God…” – as if the deity were some miscreant fourth-former in the back row. Of course it went from bad to worse.

 

On Wednesday, the Queen will attend a service of celebration at Westminster Abbey to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. The address will be given by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who earlier this year urged us to read the King James Bible in order to get a glimpse of what he called “the big picture”. Perhaps this was meant to go with Dave’s idea of “the big society”? This is a strange injunction, coming as it did from a man who has been in positions of power and influence in the church for decades. For in that time the same church hierarchy has ruthlessly suppressed the King James Bible, along with the Book of Common Prayer.

 

I can add a personal note on this subject. When I came to the City in 1998 I discovered that St Sepulchre’s did not have a lectern Bible in the King James Version (KJV). So I asked St Paul’s if they would lend me one of theirs.

 

They replied, “Oh yes, and you can keep it. We never use it at St Paul’s, only when the Royal Family comes – awkward people like that.” The King James Bible is a work of literary and spiritual genius. It is the religious register in English and its words and phrases have penetrated deeply into English literature. You cannot read 10 pages of Dickens or Arnold, George Eliot or the Brontës without coming across wholly integrated resonances of the King James Version. And, of course, English poetry is saturated with it. W H Auden said, as he witnessed the sidelining of the King James Bible: “It was our luck to have that translation made when English was at its strongest and most robust. Why spit on our luck?”

 

C H Sisson said that all we really know is what he called “the reluctant deposit on the mind’s floor”. That is to say, what you remember when you’ve forgotten everything else. For centuries, people of all walks of life have carried around with them echoes of the King James Version. So to throw it out as the church hierarchy has done amounts to a savage act of deprivation and, as this deprivation is of the Word of God in English, it is vicious iconoclasm. Sidelining the King James Version especially deprives our children and is therefore a notable case of child abuse.

 

There is no such thing as noble truth expressed in ignoble words. The choice of words determines what is being said. Therefore, we should choose the best.

 

 

“Strips of cloth” is no substitute for “swaddling clothes”. And Mary was “with child” – we think of the Madonna and Child – and she had not “fallen pregnant” as it says in one of the modern versions. You cannot satisfactorily replace “through a glass darkly” with the crass literalism “puzzling reflections in a mirror” or “sounding brass and tinkling cymbal” with “noisy gong and clanging cymbal”. The King James Bible was designed to be read aloud in churches. All the modern versions sound as if they have been written by tone-deaf people with tin ears and no rhythm.

 

What level of vacuity is reached when “Son of Belial” (i.e. the devil himself) is rendered by the New English Bible (NEB) as “a good-for-nothing”? As if the son of the devil is only a truant from the fourth form who has been stealing from the housemaster’s orchard.

 

The real Bible says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The NEB gives us instead, “The first step to find wisdom.” But that is only the way in which babyish primary school teachers speak to their charges. The first step to find wisdom – and then, if you are ever so good little children, I’ll show you the second step. This is infantilisation. Sometimes the New Jerusalem Bible’s (NJB) pedantry, this pseudo-scholarly fascination with all that is merely foreign and obscure, is just silly, as in “You, Yahweh examine me.” But occasionally it is mindlessly un-poetic and banal, as in the substitution of “Acclaim Yahweh” for the mesmerisingly beautiful and timelessly familiar “make a joyful noise unto the Lord”. But in one example of supreme idiocy the meaning becomes impenetrable: The King James Version says, “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord …” In the New Jerusalem Bible this degenerates into tasteless obscurantism: “If you live in the shelter of Elyon and make your home in the shadow of Shaddai, you can say to Yahweh …” The Revised Standard Version (RSV) loves to parade the translators’ acquaintance with the slightest nuances in the ancient languages but their utter ignorance of what will go into ordinary English. It renders the “giants” of Genesis as “nephilim” – to the confusion, one supposes, of elderly ladies everywhere. And the “two pence” that the Good Samaritan gave to the innkeeper as “two denarii” – lest we should imagine that the currency of the Roman Empire was the same as that of England, pre-decimalisation.

 

The RSV makes a habit of iconoclasm, as for instance in its destruction of that very familiar phrase: “Arise, take up thy bed and walk.” The RSV says, “Take up your pallet and go home.” Because we must on no account be allowed to imagine that the poor paralytic slunk off carrying his four-poster, we have forced upon us the literalism pallet: and the result sounds like instructions to a sloppy painter.

 

The NEB also cannot tell the difference between speech that is poetic and metaphorical and speech that is literal and descriptive. That is why for “wolves in sheep’s clothing” we are given instead the pantomime howler “men dressed up as sheep”. We recall perhaps Ulysses’ escape from the Cyclops or that pejorative expression “mutton dressed up as lamb”. In the KJV men are “at meat” or they “sup”; but the RSV mentions a Pharisee who “asked Jesus to dine” – where, at The Garrick or White’s? Likewise, his rebuke to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, “O fools and slow of heart” is emasculated to become “How dull you are!” How dull indeed. Can you imagine for one minute Our Lord Jesus Christ on the evening of his day of resurrection using such language? “How dull!”

 

The KJV’s “pearl of great price” is exhibited in more of that infantilised Blue Peter language as “a pearl of very special value”. And then the end of the world itself is described as if it were only an exceptionally hot afternoon at Goodwood: “My dear friends…” (that is the voice of the NEB’s urbane, housetrained St Peter) “…do not be bewildered by the fiery ordeal that is coming upon you, as though it were something extraordinary.” The end of the world not extraordinary?

 

There is a sort of discreet charm about the KJV’s saying, “It ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.” This is marvellous. It seems to reach up the underclothes of words, as that other great admirer of biblical prose, Dylan Thomas, said. But the Jerusalem Bible was written in the era of sex education, so it can confidently come straight out with “ceased to have her monthly periods”. And the KJV’s “great whore of Babylon” seems to have lost what is left of her character when the New Jerusalem Bible refers to her only as “the famous prostitute”. Who is this – Eskimo Nell?

 

With studied pedantry, the New Jerusalem Bible replaces “inn” with “living space” – I suppose because they imagined readers to be so literal-minded that we might think St Luke meant the Rose and Crown. A similar pedantry removes the KJV’s lovely “coat of many colours” and offers us “a decorated tunic”. The KJV translates Psalm 139: 16 – a beautiful poem in which the Psalmist declares that God knew him “while he was yet in his mother’s womb – as thine eyes did see my substance yet being unperfect.” This is allusive, evocative, tender. Unbelievably, the NJB gives us instead, “Your eyes could see my embryo” – as if God were a member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.

 

There is a pervading irreverence bordering on blasphemy. The translation of the Psalms in the Book of Common Prayer is by Miles Coverdale and he renders the Hebrew, “O let thine ears consider well …” The NJB gives this as “Listen attentively Yahweh”. But is that the way to speak to God? What more is there to be said when we notice that the NJB renders “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” as “Sheer futility. Everything is futile.” That phrase will serve as the motto for all the modern translations: “Sheer futility”.

 

How hypocritical and sordid of the church authorities relentlessly to suppress the KJV, only to take it out and gawp at it in an anniversary year, as if it were a museum piece and we were all blundering tourists. The proper place for the KJV is on the lectern in every parish church – to be read, marked, learnt and inwardly digested, week in, week out.

 

***

 

This article was written by Rev. Dr Peter Mullen, the rector of St Michael at Cornhill, and St Sepulchre in the City of London. It was published in The Telegraph UK on 14 November 2011.

 

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“alpha course” islamic style

 

One of the vices in which I am so well known for, at least in my own household, is my insatiable appetite for knowledge and intellectual inquiry. It is a vice because intellectual curiosity often leads me to tread beyond the “safer” waters of evangelical orthodoxy. And since the bible “is the sole absolute authority on faith and practice” for the evangelical christian (sola scriptura), to seek knowledge elsewhere is anathema and detrimental to the christian’s “spiritual” progress.

 

Darn it – but since I do not identify myself with the evangelical enterprise – and I value my intellectual independence apart from any community; I am often free to indulge in flights of philosophical, scientific and religious fancy.

 

As some of you might have already suspected, the British muslim scholar, Abdal Hakim Murad, is one of my “heroes” and one of the very few muslims whom I admire greatly, despite his having certain very traditional views on sexuality and marriage with which I disagree.

 

Anyhow, I came across a talk he gave at an Alpha Course-like event, organised by a muslim relief agency called Ulfa Aid. It was one of the most moving messages I have heard in recent times, and I suppose it reflects the state of evangelical sermonising today. I am often baffled as to how most of my evangelical friends could digest the anti-intellectual drivel that evangelical preachers offer, messages that deliberately bypass and in my opinion, insult the intellect.

 

But of course…brainwashed people are like cheerleaders screaming for their pop idol, all ready to go to bed with them.

 

Anyhow, Murad waxed eloquent about the weariness of human existence and the futility of secularism to arrest the human soul. I loved the way he weaved in snippets of how the Islamic view is similar to the other major religious traditions while at the same time proclaiming its distinct uniqueness in an irenic manner that even a staunch christian would not be offended. Okay, perhaps a loony fundamentalist will.

 

 

References were also made to the poet Rumi and this revealed Murad’s penchant for Islamic spirituality and mysticism, often called Sufism.

 

This is a “sermon” par excellence, a message that engages the heart as well as the mind – issues of existentialism and philosophy came to the fore – and thus allow my mind to say “amen” to my heart. Evangelical sermons, however, often expect the listener to stop their critical thinking faculties and simply acquiesce to the hurrahs, however ridiculous or unpalatable.

 

Thus other great religious thinkers whom I admire would be the current Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams as well as the Chief Rabbi of Britain, Jonathan Sacks.

 

You can watch the full talk on youtube at Come Dine with Me.

 

 

‘the spirit of assisi’ by rowan williams

 

For St Francis of Assisi, the condition of all dialogue was poverty.  I am not thinking only of the well-known story of Francis’ meeting with the Sultan of Egypt – though that is itself a deeply significant moment, a moment when the encounter of two different religious worlds was suddenly changed into a meeting of human beings.  It is true of the whole of Francis’ ministry.  Because we cannot speak of dialogue without speaking of listening to the other, and we cannot speak of listening without the acknowledgement of some kind of inner poverty.  We need the poverty of silence if we are to hear what the other says; and we need the poverty of recognizing that the other has a gift that we need if we are to be changed by the encounter.

 

Francis challenges us all to embrace his poverty in whatever way is appropriate for our context.  We celebrate his positive attitude to the natural world; but this was not a sentimental affection for beautiful landscape or wildlife.  It was a deep openness and attention to what the natural world was saying to God in praise and thanksgiving, just by being itself; it was a commitment to allowing the world to speak without interruption by the human greed for control.  This is the spirit in which he composed the Canticle of the Creatures.  And, as the final text of the Canticle makes clear, that spirit is also the spirit in which the disciple of Jesus is to encounter even pain and death as places where praise may be heard.

 

Poverty of spirit in this sense is to be silent so that the other – whether the physical environment or the animal world or the believer in anther faith or the non-believer – may be heard truthfully.  It is far from being the silence of uncertainty or relativism.  It is grounded in a firm conviction of the absolute reality of God as revealed in the Incarnate Christ – grounded, as Francis’ life shows, in the wounds of the Crucified.  It is grounded in the belief that the Christlike love of God is solid and strong enough to live in the face of the most powerful and obstinate contradiction; that the silence of attentive love will bring out the truth and that the truth is not something to be afraid of.

 

Our Lord gives the name of ‘blessed’ both to those who are poor in spirit and to those who are hungry and thirsty for justice.  No-one can doubt that Francis was hungry and thirsty for God’s justice.  He knew that to embrace those the world forgets is the clearest sign of the newness of a converted life: remember how he gave a sign of his own conversion in embracing the leper.  But in his life the hunger for justice was inseparable form the poverty of spirit – as if God wants to teach us through him that we shall only arrive at God’s justice by the way of silence and setting aside the noisy urge to power.

 

When we meet at Assisi, we need to listen to Francis and to ask his prayers.  We need in our dialogue the courage to be quiet together – not because we have nothing to say, no truth to share, but because we are gratefully aware that Christ has rooted us in his life and prepared for us the encounters in which we shall meet him and recognize him afresh in new person and new situations.  When we are quiet in the name of Christ, we shall discover that he comes to us in many unexpected ways.  And we are delivered from the passionate longing to overcome, even consume, the other so as to protect our control of the situation.

 

Dialogue, whether between Christian confessions, between faiths, or simply between persons and their world, must be more than an exchange of courtesies – and equally, more than an exchange of hostile certainties!  We have to seek a way of speaking with and listening to each other that allows the logos to come through – the energy and interaction underpinning all created things which is the foundation equally of justice and of contemplation.

 

Many have remarked how Francis’ vocation was of a kind that no one person can readily reproduce.  He was a man whose actions transformed the possibilities of all around him, whose spontaneous service to the whole creation was his life’s blood; and he was a contemplative and visionary, whose intense personal exposure to Christ found physical expression in the stigmata he received on Monte Alvernia.  He was a community founder whose calling was rooted in and renewed in solitude.  Ever since his death, not only his followers in the order but all who have been touched by his life have struggled to do justice to the whole range of his charism.  But what holds his life together, of course, is that in action and in silence he is filled with the logos of God, through his communion with the incarnate Word.

 

As we encounter one another in Assisi, we must pray for some share in this same communion with the logos.  We who are Christians base all our lives and acts and words on the conviction that the logos is once and for all made human in Jesus and that in communion with him there is communion with all persons and things.  But this is not a claim that shuts out others or a claim that we have nothing to hear, no life to receive from those whose convictions are different.  Because of Christ, and because of his servants and friends like Francis, we can find the courage to embrace poverty and to open our hands to receive.  And we do so in the hope and prayer that in such an encounter we may play some small part in God’s constant work of opening up the creation to its depths in his love and beauty.  

 

***

 

This is an article by the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, in a commemorative book presented by the Franciscans to the Pope on the “Day of Reflection, Dialogue and Prayer for Peace” in Assisi, an interfaith gathering organised by the Catholic church.

 

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the druid with the voice of god

 

 

That combination of a pair of extravagantly lush eyebrows brushed with wizened white plus a bush of gandalfish beard is familiar to millions across the world. But just in case, this druidic disposition belongs to the current Archbishop of Canterbury, the leader of the global Anglican church.

 

His name is Rowan Douglas Williams, the reluctant Welsh bishop who became modern christianity’s PR man since 2003. Seemingly introverted with a bookish demeanor, he seems more suited to academia and the local parish than as Anglicanism’s top dog. Born in Swansea, Wales and educated in both Cambridge and Oxford, he was a former Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford from 1986 to 1991, when he was elected as Bishop of Monmouth in Wales, a post he held until his enthronement as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2003.

 

 

The man superstitiously endears himself to me, in no fault of his own, via his age – born in the same year as my father (1950) - and on the day preceding mine (14th June). He is also a gentleman of immense erudition, born in no uncertain terms to be a man of the book, which is very unlike his predecessors like George Carey and Robert Runcie. A lover of the arts and literature, Williams has also published a few collections of poetry and is functionally literate in no fewer than 11 languages!

 

But it is his spoken English that I wish to highlight.

 

If one is familiar with the numerous speeches he has made over the decade as archbishop, one will not only notice his very rich and deep voice but also the very clear and well enunciated diction. His welsh roots notwithstanding, Dr Williams is one of the VERY FEW britons who actually speak good and elegant English, despite the very idiotic atmosphere of dialectical diversity so rampant in the british isles these days. Young britons may label him as an old-fashioned Received Pronunciation speaker, but Dr Williams’ speech patterns reflect more of a “general” RP speaker than a “conservative” RP one, which is spoken by a much older generation of the upper classes. A discerning listener would be aware of his rather neutral tone, with none of the plummy affectedness of Prince Charles or even the former Professor of Poetry, Christopher Ricks or the historian, Simon Schama, both of which speak with very “exaggerated” tones (think of the stereotypical British sounds which non-british people often imitate).  

 

He is thus a very suitable role model for Singaporeans to follow, with much of our English phonetics having based on the standard Received Pronunciation model.

 

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an interview with the archbishop of canterbury

 

 

Do you have a definition of the term religion?

A working definition, I think, would have to be a set of habits: habits of speaking, habits of imagining, habits of behaving physically. Habits which are intended to anchor you in relation to something invisible, incomprehensible and challenging.

 

And how does that relate to definitions of things like faith or belief?

Well, it has to do with thes shape that these habits take; these habits are formed by the stories people tell which are basic to their experience. Your relationship to those stories becomes a relationship of trust. You say, OK, I want to find myself in relation to that story. I trust that story to help me grow. These habits are keeping me in touch with that story, so that’s how I grow in truthfulness.

 

How did your religious habits begin?

I grew up in a Welsh Presbyterian community and so I got taken to chapel, and that was it for some years. But then, when I was a teenager, we moved house and I discovered the local parish church, which had a different kind of worship, a different kind of atmosphere. That’s partly because it was a high church: music, drama and the rest of it played a very great part in the worship. This is, I think, why I talk about habit, and the physical side of religion.

And, I was lucky in having a parish priest who thought that faith was about growing up, and he always struck me as a deeply grown-up man. He had a sort of emotional and spiritual maturity to him, and that must have rubbed off in some way. I must have been about 14 when I had some kind of breakthrough, in here (gestures to self).

It’s not just about words, but it’s about developing a sense of a relationship with something, someone, who’s enough like a person to be able to talk to in these terms, and yet, enough not like a person for you to need to be very careful about what you are saying. I suppose also it has to do with discovering certain aspects of the Eastern Christian tradition – that helped, and discovering certain kinds of poetry helped. And then somewhere around the age of 20 there was a sense that yes, actually this is gripping, something’s taking over me.

 

And your academic interest?

That developed at around the same time I suppose. I suddently thought, it’s really interesting seeing how people try to talk about this. I wanted to know, what are the criteria, what are the standards that make sensible religious language? Why can you get a sense of religious language that’s corrupt and stupid? The whole history of theology, which I taught for oever 20 years, in a sense, all about that.

Theology is often about: ‘What does a stupid religious statement sound like?’ I know that some people would no doubt say: ‘All religious statements are stupid!’ But you know, those of us on the inside don’t necessarily think that. We therefore need criteria to say, ‘What are stupid statements?’ And in my academic work, especially when I was teaching at Cambridge, I got more and more interested in this question of: ‘How do you really know it’s God you’re talking about?’ And it’s about developing a habit of that reigning up before you go as far as to say: ‘Yes, this is God we’re talking about; it’s not just a cosmic leprechaun, it’s not just a kind of big mirror in the sky: it’s God.’

 

Can you tell us something about the God you believe in as opposed to the God of other religions?

I’ll try, yes. I’m a Christian as you may have noticed! They still expect that from Archbishops of Canterbury! That means I believe in God as a trinity. This is one of those ideas that tends to produce a sort of glazing over sometimes. But for me it came alive when I was first thinking about faith as a teenager and then again when I taught it.

What it’s saying is that the word ‘God’ isn’t the name of an individual, somewhere else in heaven. God is the name given to whatever that life is out of which everything else is generated. And the character of that life is the relationship between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It’s a rather inadequate shorthand for saying the life out of which everything else comes is a life which, if you like, breathes out and breathes in, and relates to itself, folds back on itself.

I tend to reach sometimes for musical images here. It’s like a three-note chord, it’s something which is already plural, and which flows back and forth within itself; and out of that comes everything else. And we say Father, Son and Holy Spirit, because in the history of Christianity, in the Bible, these words and these images are what we are given.

There’s the aspect of tha life which gives out: so that’s the Father, there’s the aspect which communicates and responds: so that’s the Son, and there’s the aspect which binds those two together and then opens up the relationship to everything else, and that’s the breath, which means the Spirit. So that’s the God that I believe in, and that’s the kind of basis, though not necessarily in those words, on which I preach every Sunday.

Now the difference between that and other conceptions of God is best understood by going to the two different ends of the religious spectrum.

Look at the difference between that and Buddhism. I’ve always thought Buddhism is the next best thing, and I’ve learned a lot from Buddhists. A Buddhist will say: ’At the end of the day there is no thing that you are relating to outside yourself.’ The practice of religion, the habit of religion is so, if you like, gathering in itself, in consiousness, that all the selfish, distracting, corrupting bits of your emotion are purified all the time. They might call it that luminous emptiness, and so out of that, for a Buddhist, flows compassion. I think that’s wonderful, but it’s not quite true. Because when you get to the luminous emptiness stuff, I want to say, yes, that’s also Christian love, but it’s not just the emptiness’ there is somehow, a subject and object.

And then at the other end of the spectrum, there is the difference between Christianity and say, Islam. The Muslim says ‘God is God. You mustn’t associate anything else with God. God is absolutely different, absolutely one.’ The biggest sin for a Muslim is associating something else with God in their doctrine. And again, I think: ‘Yes, bang on.’ But the Muslim would go on to say: ‘Therefore forget this Father, Son and Holy Spirit nonsense. There’s one God, one great cosmic mind saying, ‘do what I tell you and it will be fine.’ And the disagreement there is that we align ourselves with the life of God. But it’s God’s own life that dwells in us, which makes us possible. And that relationship doesn’t just come out of obedience; it’s about going into a lasting relationship of intimacy. So, those are the sorts of differences.

 

How do you respond to the argument that there is no evidence for belief in God?

Well this is very difficult isn’t it? Because religious commitment, like most forms of serious commitment, isn’t something you just come to at the end of a process that you can terminate. Why is anybody a socialist? If you’re not a dogmatic, scientific Marxist, why are you a socialist? Why does anyone get married? Why might you perform Bach rather than Mozart? Faith is where something comes together for you, where you say: ‘On the basis of the form of the world, the form of the situation, I’m driven towards the best resolution that I can find.’

But if I were asked about evidence for being religious at all, I’d first put in the caveat that you shouldn’t expect it to be like a proof for something like the existence of the Loch Ness monster. To answer the question: ‘Is there a Loch Ness monster?’ you can look at the various bits of evidence and say, ‘Probably not.’ But the question of God’s existence doesn’t work quite like that.

Now there’s a perfectly real question about the nature of that energy which sustains the universe. Is it enough to say, ‘Well, it’s just a self-explanatory system’ or do you have to say ‘something energises the elements of the universe’? It’s at least a good question to ask. At school, in science lessons, when you start talking about the Big Bang, sooner or later most of us will think, well, did anybody ‘press the switch’? Of course, that’s not a watertight argument, but there’s a sort of instinctive drive to ask ‘Does the whole universe not depend on some energising material?’ So that’s one way which I think the idea of God can begin to make sense.

The other way, of course, is completely chaotic, messy and intuitive. And it’s about asking: ‘What do you say about the lives of people who are used to living with God?’ Do they look like more or less human lives to me? That’s where you get almost into an endless exchange of anecdotes. Some might say, ‘Oh come on – Osama bin Laden, does that look like a human life?’ Maybe not. Or you say, ‘Yes, but Desmond Tutu, that looks pretty human to me. That looks more than averagely human; Osama bin Laden looks less than averagely human.’ So you have to weigh that up.

 

How do you think God relates to people of other faiths and to people of no faith?

Well, the God I believe in is just there. And that life, that energy, that three-fold energy just goes on – it penetrates and sustains us breath by breath. Nobody can fail to be related to that God, because it’s his gift that keeps the whole thing going. So within that framework, the Christian faith would say that because of all sorts of complicated historical reasons – a particular place, a particular country, a particular language, the Holy Land, the people of Israel, the person of Jesus – things suddenly came together.

And so you can say, ‘That’s where it comes through, that’s where the whole thing suddenly comes to light.’ And, I would have to say, as a Christian, that without that, we wouldn’t know what God really was. So, does God never come through at all elsewhere? Well, he must do – there’s a lot of him around!

And it would be deeply surprising if Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Islam, let alone Judaism hadn’t got something to say. The fascinating thing about interfaith dialogue is that you can encounter something completely strange, and then sometimes, sometimes you want to say, ‘ That sounds familiar, I can do business with that’ – even with a Buddhist. So, it’s not as if somewhere up there, there is a God who looks down at the world and says, ‘I think I’m going to talk to those people, and I’m not going to talk to those people. I think I’m going to reveal myself here because I like the look of them, and I will ignore the rest.’

On the contrary, I think that God’s intelligent, loving presence soaks through them. And in this particular circumstance, in the biblical history, in Jesus it came through most fully and made the decisive difference; but in all the others, it’s throbbing under the surface, throbbing away, and comes to the surface in different degrees. And that’s what makes a really lively interaction between faiths.

 

Can we talk about the concepts of hell and judgement? You rarely hear those words in the liberal Anglican tradition these days.

Well, I’m rather in favour of hell, but bear with me for a moment! I think it comes down, again, to habits. If you get into the habit of living profound untruthfulness, what’s that like? Project that. If you live with deep illusions about yourself, other people, about the nature of the world you’re in, then you bump into reality. What if (I don’t know if this ever happens) you sort of got stuck like that? That’s hell for me, being in this state of perpetual untruthfulness.

 

What about after death?

Well again, it’s not God saying, ‘You’ve not done very well, off you go to hell.’ It’s much more me on Judgement Day coming face to face with God and thinking, ‘Have I been lying?’ – as the character in Dostoyevsky said, ‘I’ve been lying all my life.’ So then what? Well, I believe in a loving God, and that could mean that if I am prepared to say, ‘I’ve been lying all my life, oh God, sorry!’ I might have some growing to do. But what if I said, ‘No, I can’t face that, I can’t; I can’t admit that’? Well then I’m stuck. That’s hell for me, that sort of frozenness.

 

So you would characterise it in moral terms, not in doctrinal terms?

I don’t think God condemns anybody just for thinking things. The question has to be: what sort of a person have you made yourself? Is that sort of a person capable of facing the truth? Think of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, which is based on Cardinal Newman’s poem. There, after death, the soul finally comes face to face with God and says, ‘Take me away, I can’t stand it.’ And the taking away is part of the mercy of God.

 

What are your ambitions for religion?

Ambitions? That’s an odd word to use in this context, but I see why you’re asking. I don’t know if I would say I have ambitions for religion. I have profound hopes that what I do becomes interesting, and engages people in life. There’s a great phrase in John’s Gospel, ‘I’ve come that they may have life, and have it in abundance.’ Somehow I hope to act by my faith in such a way that the statement, ‘they may have life in abundance’ doesn’t sound ridiculous.

But of course you know, prima facie, when somebody walks past a church on a Sunday morning, with raindrops streaming off the flying buttresses, and a six-month-old harvest festival poster hanging by a drawing pin on the notice board, and five elderly figures huddling their way into it, it can take a while to make the connection!

But my ambition is to make that sort of remark plausible. Which means, going back to where I started, we have to keep telling the stories about those in whom it looks as if it’s in abundance, Desmond Tutu and so on.

 

Is it important to you to evangelise?

Yes, I suppose it is. I do want to convince people, but at the same time I need to recognise the very intuitive, unpredictable nature of how people begin to see things. The worst thing I could do is to try and manipulate people into it. But I’m happy to talk about it.

 

Do you think it’s possible to change people’s minds?

Well, it’s possible that people’s minds can change, but that isn’t quite the same thing. I was asked by a group of evangelical Christians from Africa a couple of years ago, how many people had I brought into living faith in Jesus Christ? It was very clear to them that I was a gutless Western liberal. And I said, ‘Well, I am not sure, because God brings people to living faith in Jesus Christ, not me or you. I can tell you about a couple of people that I sat with as their minds changed, as they moved bit by bit towards faith over a longish period. And, as part of that journey they shared conversations with me. And I think of one person who was baptised on her deathbed, and one Buddhist, finding their way back into Christianity.’

Well, these may not be great ‘conversions’ in a sense, but I think of them as that - they got there in the end. Though, of course, I’m not at all sure of what part I played.

 

A great number of churches, mosques, synagogues, have been accused of being manipulative, abusive, exploitative and intolerant. Aside from the question of whether or not they make up a majority of any religious community, why do you consider Church important for an understanding of, or a relationship with, God?

Religion is a very explosive thing. When it goes wrong, it goes very wrong. And if it doesn’t make you more human, it does make you less human – Desmond Tutu and Osama bin Laden again. But why do we need Church? Well, let’s distinguish for a moment between Church as an institution, with archbishops and all of that, and the Church as a community. As I read the Bible, God’s way of getting everyone through is not just by giving a set of instructions from heaven that anybody can pick up and read. God comes through in the lives of these people, these tribes of Israel. And it’s in the law, the working out of how to live together, that God reveals Himself.

In the Old Testament the message that comes through is, ‘God has chosen you, and given you the law so that the nature of God will be made known in the community.’ So for example, in Deuteronomy, God says, ‘You’ve got to be good to the strangers and aliens, because, when you were strangers and aliens, I took care of you.’ So, what sort of God do we believe in? We believe in the God who likes strangers and aliens.

Or again, don’t commit adultery: I am a faithful God. Don’t favour the rich over the poor: I am a God of justice and equity. These patterns, they’re not just arbitrary laws, they’re asking, ‘What sort of life is a sustainable life?’ So you can’t get away from the idea of relationships in community being part of knowing God.

It’s the same in the New Testament. But instead of the old model, the nation, Jesus says, in effect, ‘If you want to belong with the people of God, well, all you really need to do is just trust what I tell you and hang around.’ This is what is known as ‘repent and believe the gospel’.

So from the first, Jesus relates to a group of people – that group of people which started out as a bundle of North Country artisans in a backward province. But gradually this group grows, it gets to the capital city, it moves out to include non-Jews as well as Jews and then you’re on the road to a worldwide community: the Church.

And the word used in the New Testament is ekklesia. The word actually means a ‘citizen’s assembly’. It is the gathering of people where you make decisions about your common life. And then grafted on to that is the big metaphor in the New Testament of the Body of Christ.

Then to round it off, the institution, if you like, inevitably comes on top of that. When you’ve got common life, you’ve got to organise means of communication, the places you meet, the people who convene the meeting, and then you’re on the road to the establishment, the institution.

 

How do you relate to the Bible and those aspects of biblical tradition which might be unpalatable for a contemporary mindset, whether it’s on issues of homosexuality, or God’s vengeance, wrath and jealousy? And how do you relate to the idea of miracles, the resurrection and the virgin birth?

Well, first there is no reading of the bible that isn’t in some way selective. Even the most ardent fundamentalist is actually being selective. So the question is, ‘What is the principle of selection?’ The problem I think a lot of fundamentalists have is that they treat the bible as a flat surface. It’s ALL from God, it’s ALL inspired, and the inspiration ALL works at exactly the same level.

So if it says at the beginning of the book of Job that there was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job, it means there WAS a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job, end of story. So if anybody weakly and liberally says, ‘Yes, but hang on, isn’t this meant to be some sort of novel?’ when wrath descends!

Now, it’s the flat surface that I object to. Because I think, both the Old and New Testaments in their context are focused collections. You draw together a huge cluster of very varied documents: law codes, histories, novels, songs, and you say these are all together because, taken as a whole, what they give you is a picture of God’s engagement with this human community.

As for miracles, well, there are a number of different kinds of question here: because part of what you’re dealing with in the Bible is, if you like, folklore material. This is because you’re dealing with texts that are looking back hundreds, even thousands of years and so they just have that kind of legendary character. Of course, that is not to say that there is no basis for the outline of the story. But, to take a parallel that interests me a lot, it’s a bit like how the sixth century in Britain is re-imagined in our own literature, chronicle, and folklore through the Arthurian legend. There is something there, certainly, at the beginning, when you can pare it down to some basic things. But what that something has done is to make possible a great chain of imaginative elaboration. And I think we rather trivialise it if we imagine it’s all got to be viewed as Times-style reporting.

 

Does religion need policing?

By whom? Rational people? Show me some. I think one of the problems we’ve got is that in Europe we inherit this eighteenth-century idea that we all know what a rational argument looks like, what a reasonable person sounds like. They are a bit like us. And that’s led to a very sharp differentiation between rational and irrational beliefs. Now I would say that an irrational belief is one that not only has no evidence for it, but also one which makes no attempt to cohere with a picture of how the world generally works.

Religious philosophers since the beginning have at least a good try at making their beliefs cohere with the way the world actually works, even when they’ve talked about miracles.

But if you’re asking whether or not religious belief is dangerous, I think the answer would probably has to be yes. You’re dealing with such big things and such uncontrollable things. Religion isn’t necessarily nice. It’s serious, it’s deep, it’s mysterious, but it is not automatically nice. Faith is about the reality of God, religion expresses this commitment. Religion in and of itself is not always good for you, because you have got to ask, ‘What kind?’

And that is where there do have to be some kind of cross-checks between what looks humane, and even what looks reasonable from time to time – cross-checks, not policing; and that is why cross-frontier conversations are important.

 

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The interviewer was Mick Gordon, a theatre director and dramatist.

 

 

some theologians on ‘god’

 

Rowan Williams (current Archbishop of Canterbury & Christian theologian):

“…the word God isn’t the name of an individual, somewhere else, in heaven. God is the name given to whatever that life is out of which everything else is generated.”

 

Giles Fraser (Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral & former lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford):

“…we have to be really careful about thinking of God as a proper name for a thing. And I think that’s really easy to do, to see God as if it’s some object in the world. I think it’s quite easy to demonstrate through traditional Christian theology that God is not a thing as such…God cannot be both the creator of everything and something created…so he is not a thing. And to that extent the atheists are right, there is no such thing as God.”

 

Tariq Ramadan (professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford):

“In the islamic tradition you cannot say anything of God except for what He says of Himself. He is an entity which is beyond any imaginative description, nothing is like Him. You understand that He is, and who He is, but you cannot define what He is.”

 

Karen Armstrong (British scholar of comparative religion):

“God is one of the names that we give to transcendence. Our notion of God bears very strong resemblance to the way Nirvana or Brahma is spoken of in other parts of the world. The best Christian, Jewish and Muslim theologians all insisted that God is not one of the things that exist. God is ‘other’. You cannot call God a Supreme Being.”

Marcus Borg (American Historical Jesus scholar & theologian):

“I believe that God is present everywhere, in everything – that the universe is shot through with the radiant presence of God. Thus we are always “in God,” even as God is more than the universe.”

 

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one of the most vital keys to proper english pronunciation

 

Apart from learning the phonetic alphabet, another very basic but powerful rule of thumb in learning pronunciation is “word stress”. This is not an optional learning tip but an essential part of the language itself. Most of the time it is the incorrect word stresses that cause miscomprehension between native and non-native speakers.

 

Native speakers of English use “word stress” naturally – it is something that is innate to them due to their language culture and linguistic inheritance. Non-native speakers do not use “word stress” as naturally as do native speakers, and hence may encounter problems when speaking to a native speaker. They may either find it difficult to understand a native speaker when he/she is speaking quickly or they themselves may find that native speakers have difficulty in understanding them.

 

“Word Stress” is simply the syllable that is STRESSED in each and every word of a sentence. In the English language, we do not say each syllable with the same force or stress. Normally in each word, one syllable will be stressed more than the rest. This is unlike Japanese or French, whereby every syllable in the words has equal emphasis.

 

A very common example used by linguists would be the following: Try pronouncing these words:

• Photograph
• Photographer
• Photographic

 

Let’s see if you got them right. The correct stresses would be:

• PHOtograph
• phoTOgrapher
• photoGRAPHic

 

Even though these words have the same root “photo” in them, they are pronounced differently in a sense that the stresses are different. New learners of English have the tendency to stress the same syllable for all three.

 

Word stress occurs in ALL words with two syllables or more, such as jaPAN, TEACHer, converSAtion, INteresting, deMAND, etCETera, etc.

 

Please note that there’s always only ONE stress in a word. If a single word has two stresses, then it is pronounced wrongly. The stress is always on a vowel.

 

There are actually rules for word stress, but they can be rather complicated to the beginner. One of the better ways to learn word stress is to listen more. The more you listen to native speakers of English, the more you will learn to “feel the music” of the language. In due time, you will somehow “know” which syllable to stress. As I’ve mentioned before, do check out good speakers of English such as the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, popular host of BBC radio programme In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg, our Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and many of our newsreaders like Sharon Tong.

 

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“gethsemane”

 

Into the trees’ clefts, then, do we
push
our folded words, thick as thumbs?
somewhere inside the ancient bark,
a voice
has been before us, pushed the
densest word
of all, abba, and left it to be collected
by
whoever happens to be passing,
bent down
the same way by the hot unreadable
palms.

 

- Rowan Williams

 

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a stunning history

by Rowan Williams

 

 

The provocative subtitle alerts you to the fact that this is going to be much more than a textbook. Diarmaid MacCulloch begins with what turns out to be one of many tours de force in summarising the intellectual and social background of Christianity in the classical as well as the Jewish world, so that we can see something of the issues to which the Christian faith offered a startlingly new response.

 

Greco-Roman religion had ended up with an uneasy mixture of the cult of the emperor (increasingly odd as the empire became a military dictatorship constantly changing hands after bloody conflicts) and a chaotic plurality of local rites and myths. The Jewish world was marked by a lively tension over how Jewish identity was to be understood. What Christianity brought into all this was a definition of Jewish identity that opened up to become a definition of human identity independent of any particular state apparatus; it created, you could say, the very idea of a religion as a form of belonging together that did not depend on political loyalties.

 

Of course, Christians rapidly worked out how to deploy political power and to enforce conformity. But MacCulloch resists the glib narrative of decline and fall which is always going to tempt the sceptical historian of the church. Instead, he traces the sheer variety of ways in which the basic forms of Christian life and faith were fleshed out.

 

As a serious historian, he brushes aside the luxuriant growths of conspiracy theory – the Gnostics plus Mary Magdalene plus Knights Templar fantasy world. But he also cautions against the popular current assumption that minorities and dissidents in past ages were enlightened moderns in disguise – reminding us, for example, that Pelagius’s opposition to Augustine on original sin was not a sunny and optimistic vision but part of a fiercely rigorous morality that left little room for the lights and shadows of human experience and the uneven quality of what we call freedom.

 

MacCulloch’s treatment of Augustine is just one instance of the excellence of this book. He is fair, remarkably comprehensive, neither uncritical nor hostile; what is more, he shows an extraordinary familiarity with specialist literature in practically every area. The sections on Christianity’s expansion eastwards and the tragic history of the churches of central Asia, still a little-known and under-researched subject, are among the very best in the book.

 

Also outstanding are his treatments of the achievements and limitations of European Christian mission (he describes India as the “greatest failure” of Protestant mission effort, given the political advantage with which it worked), of the intimidatingly complex stories of Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox in the borderlands of the Russian empire, from the 17th to the 20th centuries, and of the distinctive legacy of Calvin, whom he rightly sees as setting out not just to carry through piecemeal reforms of an existing institution but to reimagine the Catholic religion itself on the basis of the same biblical and traditional material that others used to defend the papal church.

 

Time and again, there are glimpses of lost worlds, possibilities that flickered and disappeared – not only the Christian empire of China in the 13th century and the Unitarian commonwealth of Poland in the 16th, but the Islamic republic of central America (a short-lived proposal for anti-Spanish cooperation between Elizabeth Tudor and Morocco).

 

MacCulloch does what a good historian should in helping you to see developments as both intelligible and by no means inevitable (he is specially good on the papacy in this respect). He also makes it plain that a good many of these lost possibilities were own goals – lost because of internal Christian conflict, including the interference of Christian colonial powers. He knows the use of irony, but doesn’t let it become the nervous tic it sometimes is in historians who bring no theological agenda to their work.

 

Inevitably there are a few slips in detail. Bishops’ mitres are not borrowed from Roman official costume, but are medieval adaptations of a form of papal headwear; the black death was not referred to by that name until a few centuries later. And there are, equally inevitably, some gaps. I missed, in a very good overview of Ivan the Terrible’s reign, any mention of Metropolitan Philip of Moscow, murdered for his attacks on the tsar’s atrocities and a good example of the fact that eastern Christians were not always as supine as is sometimes claimed in relation to secular authority.

 

If Rembrandt is, as has been said, the greatest Protestant commentator on the Bible, we might have expected more of a nod in his direction. And, most puzzling, Dante does not merit a discussion. In one of the rare passages where there is a hint of textbook cliché, MacCulloch contrasts the “self-sufficient divine being” of Augustine and Aquinas with the personal God of St Francis. Apart from the fact that Aquinas would have seen every page he wrote as seeking to hold the philosophical and the relational or personal together, Dante’s Paradiso sets out what it was like, imaginatively and spiritually, to sense these dimensions of faith as essentially one.

 

But these are small flaws in a triumphantly executed achievement. This book is a landmark in its field, astonishing in its range, compulsively readable, full of insight even for the most jaded professional and of illumination for the interested general reader.

 

It will have few, if any, rivals in the English language.

 

The story is told with unobtrusive stylishness as well as clarity. And at a time when Christianity’s profile in our culture is neither as positive nor as extensive as it has been, this book is crucial testimony to the resilience of the Christian community in a remarkable diversity of social settings. The first three thousand years do not seem likely to be also the last.

 

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This book review is by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, published in The Guardian, 19th Sept 2009.

 

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