Hello 2018. Would you mind starting again?

So, here we are, just on halfway through the first month of 2018 and I and perhaps you as well are asking for 2018 to begin again.

In no particular order of importance:

(1) Down Under Summer: too much rain! Too cold! (Or, if in Oz, too hot!) Perhaps we could have a decent run of sunny, holiday mood suitable days and weeks of weather?

(2) President Trump: could we forget and wipe out certain things you have said and start afresh, speaking about and to the world in a kinder, gentler, respectful way?

(3) Visiting cricket teams to both Oz and NZ: a better standard of competition, please!

(4) I am starting back at work today and I am glad for all the practical things I have gotten done about the house and about my study ... but, really, there is still quite a bit to do and I wouldn't mind some more holidays in which to accomplish them :)

On a serious note, my holiday musings (including some contributory comments by readers and responses by me to the post immediately below), holiday reading, and holiday experiences at different places of worship, have gotten me thinking and thus re-keened up to blog in 2018.

Something I wonder if I might do is try to offer a bit more theological solidity e.g. by offering reviews/responses to serious theological reading. (However that is very hard to "live into" so "I wonder" and not "I promise"!).

Out of a wide ranging set of reading, thoughts, conversation, experiences, for the purpose of this blog, a very simple question comes to mind, What is the church?

"What is the church?" touches on associated questions, "What or who is the church for?" "What should our experience of church be?" "What did Jesus want the church to be?" "What would Paul and the other apostles make of the church in 2018?" "What makes the church? Preaching? Eucharist? Both? Something else?" "Where is the Holy Spirit in the life of the church today?"

Something I keep observing to myself is that different styles of church will mostly seem right and proper "church" to those enabling them either by preparing and performing or by choosing to faithfully participate in them. Yet pretty much every different style today - in my humble or not so humble opinion - can be severely critiqued from the perspective of Jesus and the gospels (e.g. see one book I have read on holiday, Sara Miles Take this bread), if not from the perspective of Paul and his charismatic, house churches.

Yet I also find, for myself, much that is good in each of the styles I experience and much to agree on in what I read. Obviously the perfect, if not ideal church is an amalgam ... :)

Praise the Lord: God in Christ is Lord of the church! And I love a comment in a Christmas letter sent to me. I paraphrase it here to avoid unfortunate and/or unnecessary identifications being made:

"For us the [Anglican church of the nation to which we belong] continues to amaze, astound, depress (delete as applicable – [where we live and go to church] IS the Diocese of Aregion!).  We are consoled in recalling that the [Anglican church etc] is NOT the Church as defined by [our] brother Paul."

So, I shall continue blogging in 2018 in a continuing attempt to contribute something, however tiny, towards the church becoming what God intends it to be ... thank you for reading, keep up the commenting :)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and Last Post for a While

Dear Readers,

Thank you for reading this year. Thank you for commenting.
If nothing else has been achieved by my blogging and interacting with your comments, my own thinking has been sharpened up!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year :)

In accordance with a very ancient ADU tradition, I won't post again until sometime into the New Year. We will all be fresher for a break. And I have some very exciting reading to do: thrillers and theologies ... if the latter don't inspire some 2018 posts what will?

PS We were given a "Google Assistant" today for a present ... wow! I think I will be posting about AI, robots, and techno-persons-at-the-dinner-table in 2018.

Will "Christmas" collapse as a cultural celebration in the West?

A thought popped into my head recently. As they occasionally do.

Will the cultural insanity of Christmas (shopping, parades, decorations, work festivities, community festivities, family festivities) implode?

Will the implosion come when we wake up as a secular society and ask ourselves what we are celebrating? Many will not know. Some will remember a connection with the Birth of Christ. Will the collapse be hastened when those who so remember think to themselves, "This is nuts. 20??* years after his birth, WHY are we celebrating his birth when we never think about him on the other 364 days of the year?" (*I am predicting this will happen sometime this century.)

As sometimes happens with popped in one's head thoughts occur, I noticed a couple of related items on the internet.

One - don't know where now - was an observation that in 19th century England, Christmas as a social festival was waning. Then Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, revived it and the rest, thanks to Disney and Coca Cola, is the history of modern Christmas. My point: what has been revived can yet die.

Two - this article posted on Stuff recently. While the point of the article is not quite my question-come-point, it is pretty close to it, especially with the sentence in the headline, "Christmas has had its day."

Now, not to misunderstand, what might happen.

Here Down Under, 25 December is near the end of the calendar year and the beginning of the major summer holiday period. I am not envisaging Christmas and Boxing Day ceasing to be public holidays (which will be helpful for Christians who will keep wanting to worship the Christ-child on Christmas Day). Nor am I envisaging "end of year" festivities ceasing in schools, work places and so forth: the events of the past year are worth celebrating and giving thanks for. But maybe singing Christmas carols or at least having the music of carols in the background will stop featuring at these events.

But I am envisaging a time when the commercialism which drives Christmas, focused on "gifts" (and the tradition of "gifts" which sends people to the shops), but also fuelling parades and decorating streets, collapses. It could happen pretty quickly when a few people ask themselves why gift giving is associated with the end of the year. There is no association (other than, say, thank you gifts to those whose service through the year we have appreciated).

It is not as though children do not have another annual occasion on which to receive gifts (their birthdays). It certainly is the case that adults repeatedly ask themselves why they give and receive completely useless things!! Once that asking translates into sufficient numbers saying "Let's not give gifts. Let's put the money into more booze and chocolates", the cultural Christmas of 21st century Western societies is over. Unless there is a 21st century Dickens ...

We manage to celebrate Easter with public holidays, festive food and no fanfare in the streets. I am prophesying the same for Christmas Down Under!

Reading for 2018?

I heard someone on the radio the other day bemoaning Twitter because he looks at his Twitter feed when he wakes up and moves from calm to anger in 30 seconds.

Not me.

I must subscribe to different Twitter buddies :)

One thing I do love about Twitter is the way it leads to treasure troves of ideas.

One I want to share here is a very intriguing list of books to read.

It is Ben Myers' "Most Interesting Books I Read in 2017" but we can recycle it as "Books to Read in 2018." OK. Unless we read them like Ben in 2017 :)

Ben is an Australian theologian and he seems like the best kind of theological teacher, as you can read here.

Cathedral Progress

Bit by bit things are falling into place for the reinstatement of our cathedral.

Read here.

This time next year, I wonder what physical progress we will be able to report?

I suppose that will depend on fund$$$raising progress :)

My Book of the Year 2017

It is getting towards the end of 2017 so it must be time for "Book of the Year".

What is yours?

Mine is both highly recommended and very affordable. Also, if you get the Kindle version, instantly accessible!

It is:

John Barclay's Paul: A Very Brief History

Written by one of the world's leading Pauline scholars and author of the best "thick" book on Paul in recent years, this quickly read book is neatly divided in two parts, The History and The Legacy.

In a relatively few words the reader receives a summary of Paul's writings, a summary of Pauline scholarship, and numerous insights into that Paul's writings mean for the world today.

This award has nothing to do with a very nice lunch I had with John at the annual Aotearoa New Zealand Association for Biblical Studies in Dunedin recently :). 

Seriously, it was a great privilege for all conferees to attend to a presentation John gave on Paul's theology of gift. We sat at the feet of a modern master!

Upstream: incarnation

There is no salvation without God embodying us, without the Word becoming flesh. Becoming one of us as well as one with us, Jesus the Son of God assumed the burden of our sin and guilt and dying on the cross made the one, full, final, complete, sufficient sacrifice for the sin of the world. The death we should die, the human-God experienced instead, for our sakes. Without this incarnation there would be no Christian faith, Christian hope or Christian love. Upstream of all Christian theology - of all talk about the God we meet in Jesus Christ - is the incarnation.

This also applies to Anglican theology!

Also, it is Advent, so a good seasonal time to talk about incarnation :)

Here, on this blog, a particular interest is in what theology means for our life in the world. So an "upstream" interest in the incarnation is simultaneously a "downstream" interest in working out how we live as Christians, as Anglican-shaped Christians.

Might that mean, I ask here, since the "downstream" interest is in life in the 21st century situation and not in the 1st century situation, that we should think about what the incarnation might involve in this century?

That is, what kind of man would Jesus be if he were incarnated in (say) 21st century Aotearoa New Zealand? What would he do and say? When asked about the controversial issues of today, how would he respond?

Thinking this way is not idle speculation. The church is "the body of Christ" so the incarnate God actually dwells in the world today and receives those questions and gives responsive answers. But it is a little complicated because the church often does not speak with one voice out of the one body. Might we discern that one voice if we reflected carefully on "what would Jesus do and say" today?

That careful reflection would need to start with the actual record of the incarnate Jesus (the gospels) and the first expression of the "body of Christ" developing that record as it engaged in a "new situation" (the epistles). But it would not stop there. It would always be worth asking, "If Jesus were walking the streets and byways of Aotearoa New Zealand, what would he say when we asked him questions, when we called on him to offer wisdom and insight on issues of our day, as he did in the first century?"

An associated question could be, "As we work on what it means to be followers of Jesus in 21st century society, what would be an approach to being church(-in-the-world) which both accords with the epistles and does not bring the gospel into disrepute (Titus 2:5b)?"

Easy questions to ask; harder to answer. Not least because it is well nigh impossible to attempt to answer them without our already at hand dispositions and presuppositions intruding!

Could we Anglicans, for instance, seriously rethink the church without insisting that it still have bishops, priests and deacons? All are mentioned (albeit priests=presbyters) in the New Testament, but the New Testament does not prescribe our particular construction of ministry orders.

Yet, the alternative, walking away from such questions and continuing to muddle along as we currently do, may not be much of an option. For starters, unless we radically rethink what we are doing, we may cease to exist!

What I have been challenged about, recently, by Bowman Walton (here), and by others elsewhere, (off-blog) is to tackle the questions I raise above with a "kingdom" mindset.

What did Jesus come to establish? It was the kingdom of God?

What does that involve? Precise orders of ministry? No. The kingdom of God is abundant life lived in direct relationship to God as Ruler of that life. In Pauline terms (cf. Romans) it is the "obedience of faith."

Put in other words, a constant challenge posed by the Incarnation is to keep the main thing the main thing, to think "big picture" and to destroy all idols (so that God truly is King).

To give an example as I close - better get this out before Christmas - and a timely one as the new female Bishop of London, Sarah Mullally is announced, the enduring question of the ordination of women as priests and bishops.

Would Jesus, incarnate in the world today, take account of and work with the new mode of women participating equally with men in social, economic, political, educational and cultural life? Or would he bewail this modern development and sternly admonish us to get back to the old ways? Would his great apostolic interpreter, Paul, prescriptively set down 1 Timothy 2:11-15 for today's church?

I think not.

In this world of flesh and blood, the Word entering, engaging and encountering us as one of us would continue to proclaim the Kingdom of God, calling all, men and women, Jews and Gentiles, bosses and workers into it, commanding us all to participate equally in doing God's will on earth as it is in heaven. In neither heaven or the Kingdom of heaven is there gender discrimination.

The incarnate Jesus today would make that clear! The body of Christ on earth today is becoming clear on this matter (albeit faster in some places than in others ...).

For Anglicans working out what it means to be Anglican, what does the incarnation mean for theology/hermeneutics today? The English Reformation was one meaning for "today" of the 16th century. The first Anglican missions in Aotearoa New Zealand were another meaning for the "today" of the 19th century Down Under.

So, what does being Anglicans following the Incarnate One mean today?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

There is NO invitation here to resume discussion of That Topic. The implication of "incarnation" as a hermeneutical consideration can be discussed on your own blog or Facebook page. Or, EVENTUALLY, when we resume discussion here ... after the Working Group's final report.

NOTE: In the background to this post and others in a series of "Upstream" posts is this comment by Bowman Walton, recently made here:

""I hope you will not despair of the loss of sight here of your appeal for debate about what is upstream rather than what is downstream."

...

It is worthwhile to try to identify the upstream assumptions that bedevil downstream discussion, so from time to time I try. My inspiration is the patient work of that 1922 CoE commission on doctrine that reported in 1938.

But even they admitted to a difficult problem: better thought had overtaken the positions that they were trying to reconcile. This could happen to That Topic in the C21 as it happened to the notion of *eucharistic sacrifice* in the C20. For subversive example, what if Romans 1:18-32 really is *prosopoeia*?

BW

November 18, 2017 at 4:19 PM"