Over the past couple of years we’ve loved being able to use our blog to share with you extracts, news, and views from our favourite authors and books. We’ve got lots more posts planned in the coming months, but be aware that the blog will now have a NEW HOME on our website.
We’ll no-longer be updating this blog, so if you want the latest on what’s happening at SCM Press, head over to our redesigned and improve blog.
Our Summer Sale has started, including text books, commentaries, and a large selection of titles on mission, practical theology, ethics and biblical studies.
In today’s post Senior Commissioning Editor, David Shervington, highlights a few of the books to look out for.
We use the phrase ‘post’ a lot – post-truth, post-modern, post-Christendom, but with ‘post’ come significant questions about what follows. For the church, the concept of ‘post-Christendom’ leads us to wonder ‘now what?’.
What does it mean to be one of many minorities in a culture that the church no longer dominates? How do followers of Jesus engage in mission from the margins? What do we bring with us as precious resources from the fading Christendom era, and what do we lay down as baggage that will weigh us down on our journey into post-Christendom?
This is an updated second edition of Stuart Murray’s provocative and important book. In it, Murray identifies the challenges and opportunities of this unsettling but exciting time for the church.
The last decade has seen a resurgence of the social action of the local church – responses to social need have included street pastors, cold weather shelters, debt advice centres and latterly food banks. My hunch is that the need for these kinds of projects is not going to disappear any time soon!
The aim of Just Mission is to demonstrate for church leaders and Christian activists how political and public theology wrestles and deals with the same kinds of dilemmas and difficulties they face day-to-day.
This is a wonderful example of how public, practical and pastoral theology can work together – it’s a resolutely practical book, but it is equally wise and inspiring in its vision of what church might look like if it really sought justice and loved mercy.
The problem with the ‘problem of evil’ is that too often we forget that at heart it is a pastoral issue. This book, from award winning author John Swinton, does a wonderful job of correcting the worrying habit we have of making theodicy a theoretical problem.
Swinton argues that in thinking about why evil exists, our primary goal is to find ways that evil and suffering can be resisted and transformed. This, he insists, will enable Christians to live faithfully with unanswered questions as they await God’s redemption of the whole creation. Swinton explores essential practices of redemption – lament, forgiveness, thoughtfulness, hospitality, and friendship – drawing out their implications for the faithful resistance of evil.
There are case studies from wider events and also drawn from Swinton’s own experience as a pastor and mental health nurse.
Israel, in the Old Testament, bears witness to a God who initiates and then sustains covenantal relationships. The nature of this relationship decisively depends upon the conduct, practice, and policy of the covenant partner, yet is radically rooted in the character and agency of God?the One who makes promises, initiates covenant, and sustains relationship.
God, Neighbour, Empire, is another classic from the formidable Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann. He brings us a characteristically penetrating and provocative account of the ways in which the Old Testament is offered as an alternative to the imperial narrative that dominates ordinary imagination both in ancient times and in the present. It’s a theme we often miss, and one of huge relevance for today.
Brueggemann suggests that the covenant of God in the witness of biblical faith speaks now and demands that its interpreting community should resist individualism, overcome commoditization, and thwart the rule of empire through a life of radical neighbour love. It really is a book that needs reading in our current climate.
In an edited extract from the introduction to her book Bathsheba Survives which we’re publishing soon , Sara M. Koenig introduces us to the many lives of the Bible’s most enigmatic character
When people have found out that I am researching Bathsheba, responses have ranged from frank curiosity to rude dismissiveness. One student asked me, “Why do you like her so much?” while a colleague—in an attempt at a joke—said, “And your book can be titled Everything You Never Wanted to Know about Bathsheba.”
While I think the colleague in particular could have used some etiquette tips on how not to devalue another’s research interests, I understand these responses because Bathsheba is a minor biblical character. She appears in a grand total of merely 76 verses: just four chapters in Samuel–Kings, mentioned in the superscription to Psalm 51, and only alluded to in the genealogy that begins the New Testament.
Moreover, the texts that do speak about Bathsheba are riddled with gaps, or holes in the narrative where details are lacking. If that chapter, where Bathsheba first appears, does not tell much about her, neither does the final chapter in her story; she fades away in 1 Kings 2 without a report of her death.
However, the post-biblical reception of Bathsheba is rich and extensive. She has not only been characterized on the spectrum from helpless victim to unscrupulous seductress; but also, she has filled that spectrum. It might seem that the sparse profile of biblical Bathsheba stands in stark contrast to the varying interpretations of her through the centuries, but they are, in fact, related.
Gaps: Promise and Peril
Gaps in any text give it both peril and promise. At times, readers have filled in the gaps concerning Bathsheba in such ways that the story becomes a tool for either anti-Judaism or misogyny; such consequences are more evident with the benefit of hindsight.
But the gaps in the text are what make the text more interesting and curious, and what invite the reader to participate dynamically, in making meaning of the text. In fact, without the involvement of the reader, there is so little to Bathsheba that she is—as has often been the case—completely overshadowed by the richer, more complex, and dominant characters in the chapters: David and Solomon, and even Joab and Nathan. Were it not for readers filling in the gaps, Bathsheba would be a mere parenthesis, or footnote, to the grand story. If there is no active reader, there is no Bathsheba surviving through the centuries.
While Bathsheba says very little, she does speak. Not much is known about her, but she is no Jane Doe: we know her name, and the name of her father and her husband. She is acted upon, but she also acts.
With the gaps that are present (for example, why does she send the message of her pregnancy to David in 2 Sam 11:5? Why does she ask Solomon to give Abishag to Adonijah in 1 Kgs 2:18–21?), the reader is invited to answer the questions that are left unanswered by the taciturn Hebrew narrative.
Without the gaps in Bathsheba’s motives and feelings, her character would be so predictable or so functionary that she would not be worth noting. Bathsheba’s character is given dry bones by the narrator; it is up to the reader to flesh out her character, to give her breath and sinew, and to allow her to live. It is Bathsheba’s sparely drawn character that makes the reader’s activity so significant.
“Here’s why I like Bathsheba,” I told my student. “She reminds me not to make assumptions about people when I know only part of their story.” If I saw that student today, I would add that Bathsheba’s character also serves as a reminder that the future can be different from the present. She reminds me to keep asking, “What happens next?”
This and the reasons mentioned above make the reception history of this minor, enigmatic biblical character something worthy of study and reflection that student today, I would add that Bathsheba’s character also serves as a re- minder that the future can be different from the present. She reminds me to keep asking, “What happens next?” This and the reasons mentioned above make the reception history of this minor, enigmatic biblical character something worthy of study and reflection.
Sara Koenig is an associate professor of biblical studies at Seattle Pacific University
Pre-order Bathsheba Survives via our website
Renowned New Testament scholar Scot McKnight’s new book, Reading Romans Backwards: A Gospel in Search of Peace in the Midst of Empire reconsiders the famous epistle in a fresh light. David Shervington, Senior Commissioning Editor at SCM Press, asked Dr McKnight to explain more.
David: Can you give us a quick idea of the journey in your own scholarship that has led to you writing this book?
Scot: For 2-3 decades of my life as a professor I concentrated on Jesus and the Gospels with a foot occasionally in Paul’s life and mission and letters. I grew up “in Paul” and so there was never a time in my life when I haven’t had some instincts for reading him and interpreting him.
When I was a PhD student at Nottingham, Professor James D.G. Dunn was my supervisor and he was at that time making a name for himself as a creative and innovative and pioneering expert on Paul. His writings on Paul are both numerous and influential. So, though I was researching Matthew’s Gospel there was plenty of chat around us about Paul and the New Perspective on Paul.
When I was offered a post to teach at Northern Seminary I was assigned to teach a course on Paul and I had already made a commitment to spend the rest of my career concentrating on Paul’s life, mission and letters. So, for the last seven years nearly all my writing and lecturing have been about Paul.
David: Romans is one of those letters which we either love or hate (what here in the UK we might refer to as a ‘Marmite letter’!) What on earth drew you to want to think about the letter in greater detail?
Scot: I don’t personally understand why anyone would put Marmite on toast, and I have plenty of friends who don’t understand why anyone would concentrate on Paul.
Paul suffers from some reputation damage, in part because he’s not Jesus (after all), in part because of what he says about women in 1 Corinthians 11 and 14 and 1 Timothy 2, in part because he does not seem to have seen the challenge of emancipating slaves – so let me summarize this: because of what is called “presentism” some look down on Paul. It’s easy to be a snob about Paul and it’s far more difficult to enter into his world and to see what he was saying in his time and in his own way. What we find in Paul in his world is that he may not take the steps we preferred him to take but he was a courageous Christian man innovating on the very theme of inclusion.
When I hear people say things about Paul I often say, “What are those very elements about us that we don’t see and that a few generations beyond us will see us as blinkered in our capacity to have clear moral insight?”
David: Why read the letter ‘backwards’? What different light does it shed?
Scot: In one brief statement: Because Romans is not abstract, systematic theology divorced from context and time but instead a letter written by one man to one set of churches in one city about one major issue: learning to get along with one another as siblings in Christ.
If you read Romans 14-15 and let those two chapters sink in deeply and write out some major descriptions of the Weak and the Strong, and then begin at Romans 1 all over again and keep those descriptions in front of you – and then ask in each chapter and over each passage – How does this relate to the Weak and Strong? … if you read this way by the time you get to Romans 5 and 6 you will have a conversion in your imagination of who is reading this letter the first time and why it mattered so much.
This is a letter about privilege – both Jewish believers and gentile believers were intoxicated with their claims to privilege and Paul’s mission is to knock that privilege out from under them and put the on level ground so they could learn to live not like Romans but like Christians.
David: You note in your preface that “Western Christianity has been shaped by Romans like no other book in the Bible”. Why is that, do you think?
Scot: Because of Augustine, I suspect. Others in the first four centuries of the church had emphasis on Paul but no one brought Pauline theology more to bear on crucial intellectual concepts more than Augustine, and Augustine was behind Aquinas and Luther and Calvin and the rest is our Western story.
Romans is the densest of Paul’s letters so it plays the biggest role in framing how Paul thought, and that has meant in the Western Christian church Paul and Romans set the categories for all theology. Compare the categories in James DG Dunn’s Theology of the Apostle Paul, which Dunn uses to sort out Paul’s ideas, with most systematic theologies and you will see that the latter uses categories identical to those used by Dunn to frame Paul’s ideas.
David: You say in the book that “the theologian’s Power and Privilege have made Romans about theology, abstracted from the peace it seeks to create”. Could you unpack that a little more for us?
Scot: Again, read Romans 14-15 and you see a war of cultures: Jewish believers who think their approach to Christian living is right, and it is shaped by observing the law. Gentile believers think their approach to Christian living is right, and it is shaped by freedom and non-observance of the law.
Yet, when you read many scholars and commentaries on Romans 1-8 or 1-11, you hear precious little about the Weak and Strong. If you ask the ordinary Christian what Romans is about they do not very often say “Weak and Strong.” They say “soteriology” or “Justification by faith” or “atonement theory.”
Why? Because the privilege of theologians to teach people and write books has formed people into thinking Romans settles modern debates about systematic theology. It does and it doesn’t, but what it does is provide a rationale for Christians to live with one another as siblings in Rome. In the heart of the empire. In peace
David: What do you hope we as readers will come away with after reading the book? What difference would you like to see it make to our pastoral and ecclesial practice?
Scot: I hope to breathe some fresh air into pastors and teachers and lay folks who want to read Romans carefully as a 1st Century missionary document that helps us to live the Christian life in the Spirit.
We could spend some long afternoons in prayer pondering who are our Weak and who are our Strong and how our own Privileges are blocking our life together as siblings in Christ.
We’ve got an exciting lineup of new books due for publication over July, August and September. Here’s a sneak peek:
First up in July, there’s a radical new approach to Paul’s Epistle to the Romans by one of the world’s leading New Testament scholars, Scot McKnight. Reading Romans Backwards: A Gospel in Search of Peace in the Midst of the Empire explores how Romans offers a message of deep reconciliation and living in fellowship as siblings – a message of vital relevance to today’s church. Exploring the oft-neglected motif of the weak and the strong in the letter, McKnight reads the epistle in the light of its closing chapters, where we get a glimpse of the everyday life of the church to whom Paul writes. He suggests that in Romans we can find a challenge to the contemporary church to consider whether privilege too often blocks the way to life together as siblings of Christ.
“Anyone who begins reading Romans at chapter 1 verse 1 may be forgiven for allowing their attention to slip by the time they have reached chapter 16. In this important reading of Romans, Scot McKnight offers a different way of looking at the letter – starting at the end, with the lived experience of those to whom Paul writes, and working backwards. It is a fascinating exploration of this most important letter and brings it to life in new ways/ Highly recommended! “
Paula Gooder
Rev Canon Dr Scot McKnight is the Julius R. Mantey Chair of New Testament at Northern Seminary, Illinois, an author of numerous bestselling books, and a globally renowned authority on the historical Jesus, early Christianity, and the New Testament.
Perhaps more than ever before, the concept of ‘truth’ is hard to pin down.
The essays in Truth and the Church in a Secular Age , which is also published in July, seek to explore the place of Christianity, the Church and their claims to uphold the truth in an age of `post-truth’.
Beginning with a consideration of truth within the biblical tradition, the chapters come from historical, theological and philosophical starting points in their concerns, setting out the groundwork for discussions of Christian truth and science, prayer, ethics and the liturgy.
The book is edited by David Jasper, Professor of Literature and Theology at Glasgow University and Rev Dr Jenny Wright, a parish priest in Edinburgh, with contributions from Trevor Hart and Alison Peden.
Published in August, Bathsheba Survives is a portrait of a biblical woman seen through the centuries as everything from adviser to temptress to victim
Bathsheba is a mysterious and enigmatic figure who appears in only seventy-six verses of the Bible and whose story is riddled with gaps. But this seemingly minor female character, who plays a critical role in King David’s story, has survived through the ages, and her “afterlife” in the history of interpretation is rich and extensive. In Bathsheba Survives, Sara M. Koenig traces Bathsheba’s reception throughout history and in various genres, demonstrating how she has been characterized on the spectrum from helpless victim to unscrupulous seductress.
Koenig traces Bathsheba’s afterlife in art, culture and scholarship from early Jewish interpretation, through the enlightenment to more contemporary portrayals in novels, films, and in music from such artists as Leonard Cohen and Sting.
“In Bathsheba Survives, Sara Koenig offers an impressive reception history that provides a revealing portrait of this complex character. Sweeping in scope, Koenig’s volume reclaims Bathsheba as a significant figure and takes readers on an exciting journey from ancient to contemporary periods. It will make you reconsider Bathsheba and her role within biblical narratives and beyond.”
Nyasha Junior
Theology began with the appearances of the risen Jesus. That is, theology began when persons were confronted with a presence that could only be realized by the act of God.
Published in September, The Eucharistic Faith, is the first of a significant new systematic theology of the Eucharist. The author, Ralph N. McMichael, weaves liturgy and theology together to understand the ways in which theology and Christian faith are, at heart, about the receiving of the gift of Jesus’ life in Communion.
“What McMichael has done is not theology as usual. This is not just another academic theologian trying to gain notice by emphasizing one or another aspect of the Christian faith—e.g. eschatology—to try to convince their readers how such an emphasis helps us better understand every aspect of the Christian faith. By rethinking everything from the reality of the Eucharistic faith McMichael recovers the Christological center of our faith in a manner that helps us see the radical character of the everyday.”
From the foreword by Stanley Hauerwas
Should women who preach, preach as women? In Preaching Women: Gender, Power and the Pulpit, published in September, Liz Shercliff argues that far from being a gender-neutral space, the pulpit is a critical place in which a gender imbalance can begin to be redressed.
There is a vital need for women preachers to speak out of their experience of living as women in today’s culture and church. Filling a glaring gap in the literature around homiletics, the book considers reasons why women preachers should preach from their experiences as women, how male privilege distorts what we hear from the pulpit, and what women bring to preaching that is missing otherwise.
“Women’s voices need to be heard not only as a matter of justice and as a means of building a better society and church, but because they are central to human flourishing. This book identifies the issues and proclaims that good news. “
From the foreword by Bishop Libby Lane
Finally in September, we have a new edition of one of our most popular Studyguides. The SCM Studyguide Biblical Hermenuetics offers entry-level undergraduates a framework for interpreting the Bible. The book goes beyond offering guidance on how to do exegesis, and is intended as a practical tool to help readers develop good interpretative strategies for themselves. As such it features pedagogical tools such as Try it Out boxes to assist students to develop a tested and thought – through overall interpretative strategy of their own.
The revised and updated 2nd edition takes into account the changing church and world context, and the new challenges to reading the Bible with attentiveness, integrity and faithfulness. To help students to apply biblical interpretation to ministry/mission in direct and concrete ways, the new edition is structured around 4 core themes: hospitality (being both host and guest); sustainable consumption; power and generosity (leadership) and migration and movement .
A guest post from Tom Clammer, author of Fight Valiently
In my curacy I had the privilege of a significant baptismal ministry, and as week by week I asked parents and godparents, “do you reject the devil and all rebellion against God”, and “do you renounce the deceit and corruption of evil?” I began to wonder what precisely they thought I was asking them.
As I explored this question, and began to read more widely the liturgical texts which the Church of England has received, adapted and developed over its history, I became increasingly sure that there were some profound questions to be asked of the coherence and consistency of our language of evil and of the devil.
Fight Valiantly is a response to those initial questions, and evaluates the present provision in Common Worship, as far as it relates to the devil and evil. It is a deliberately liturgically focused study, examining the texts which the church provides for congregations and individuals to use, and in that sense it is a profoundly practical book. It seeks to identify whether the Church of England speaks with a coherent voice when it makes its public prayer, and asks questions about the implications for the pastoral ministry of the church when that voice is found to be incoherent.
The book falls into three sections. The first section explores models of liturgical theology, and also a review of the liturgy of the Church of England from 1549 until the publication of the Alternative Service Book of 1980. The examination of liturgical theology provides some common language, and the apparatus for exploring and examining the liturgical texts. It includes a treatment of the often referenced claimed that the Church of England finds its theology principally in its liturgy. This is vital for the argument later in the book that deficiency in liturgical provision is dangerous because it results in deficiency in theology. The review of Church of England liturgies from the point of the Reformation until the end of the 20th century charts the way in which the Church of England has inherited and edited texts over its history. The focus in this section is on texts concerned with initiation: baptism and confirmation in particular, because these are the texts where the most substantial references to evil and the devil historically occur.
The third chapter is a summary of my methodology. I am profoundly indebted to Juliette Day, whose adaption of Robert Taft’s method of structural analysis I have further developed in order to examine the texts in which I’m interested. Structural analysis put simply is the examination of a liturgy section by section, breaking the liturgy down into the smallest ‘liturgical unit’ (Juliette Day’s phrase) possible, and then carefully identifying what is going on within that section of the liturgy and how it connects to what precedes and follows it. Attention is paid not only to the words, but also to any gestures, movements, silences, and actions that take place, and also to whether it is the minister, the candidate, the congregation or someone else who is involved at that moment. My methodology then seeks to discern whether, having carefully analysed each section of the liturgy, it can be demonstrated that there is a coherence running through the whole which results in a consistent theology. My thesis from the outset is that there does not seem to be the level of consistency that one would hope for. My conclusions go on to demonstrate that.
At the heart of the book are the three chapters which look in detail at services of initiation, services of healing, and services of deliverance. These are the three areas of the church’s ministry where a candidate, liturgically at least, comes into contact with or conversation with the things of evil and the devil. Turning away from the devil at baptism, and turning away from the world of evil and of sin are markers of the beginning of a Christian life and occur in liturgies from the earliest days. When the church offers prayers of healing often what is prayed for is protection from evil as well as other things. The ministry of deliverance in the Church of England is a slightly different beast because there are no centrally authorised or commended texts at present. This may change in the coming years, as the Church of England is engaged in a piece of work considering whether liturgies and guidance notes for the ministry of deliverance and exorcism ought to be centrally produced. One of my conclusions is that this piece of work is important and urgent, and I’m pleased to be part of the group which has been invited to consider this. At the moment, however, there are no authorised texts produced by the Church of England, and it is up to each diocese and each bishop to produce them locally. This, again, I identify as a deficiency.
The book concludes by drawing some liturgical and theological threads together, identifies the most significant deficiencies in the current provision, and makes some suggestions for further work on the part of the Church of England in order to improve the situation. Some of the most troubling inconsistency is demonstrated to be a result of a set of complicated and confusing liturgical texts and notes.
This book is important because, as I stated at the outset, there are genuine pastoral dangers in the current liturgical provision. People come to the church asking for baptism, confirmation, or the ministry of healing and deliverance in large numbers. In these and other pastoral situations where people are seeking answers for some of the deepest questions in life, it is vital that the church has given robust thought to the way in which it replies.
Rev Dr Tom Clammer is a theologian, spiritual director and a visiting scholar at Sarum College.
Fight Valiantly: Evil and the Devil in Liturgy is published later this month as part of the SCM Research hardback monography series. For more information, and to see other titles, click here.
A guest post by Brian Cones
As a divinity student in the late 1990s, I was among the few—maybe only—openly gay seminarians at my urban Roman Catholic seminary. That school was then and now on the progressive end of things—“Bold and Faithful” was the tagline—and not a few of our liturgies began with a once-common hymn “All are welcome.” Of course, we weren’t, not really. But for a time, the aspiration was sufficient.
My home congregation then was Dignity/Chicago, an assembly of LGBTQIA+ Roman Catholics who gathered for Eucharist once a week in a local Methodist Church. Dignity became famous in the late 1980s for rejecting the 1986 “Halloween letter” [1] drafted by the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, which asserted homosexuality was an “objective disorder” toward an “intrinsic moral evil.” Any Catholic organization unable to affirm that bit of theological terrorism was unwelcome on Roman Catholic property. So we rented from the Methodists. And thanks to them, we did more or less as the Spirit led us.
Among those things we did was celebrate “holy unions”—marriage by another name for same-gender couples—along with couples’ blessings, baptisms of the children of same-sex couples, coming-out celebration, commemorations of those lost to AIDS. All those celebrations over time shaped a new way—for us anyway—of being Christian: In our assembly, being queer whether in desire or relationship or gender identity wasn’t an exception, it was the rule, the norm. Even the straight folks were queer in their choice of assembly. And it was through our gatherings for common prayer that we insisted that our lives, too, reflected divine grace.
Fast forward 20 years and almost everything has changed in some places, while nothing has in others. On the one hand, same-sex couples are winning greater access to civil forms of marriage in many places, and trans- and gender-nonconforming persons are winning hard fought steps toward equal access and legal protection. On the other, the Roman Catholic Church remains intransigent on the question of same- or trans-gender anything, and the Methodist Church that used to welcome Dignity just hardened its own position on LGBTQIA+ ministers (non-partnered or “chaste” only) and same-gender marriage (not allowed).[2] While my own Episcopal Church in the U.S. has progressively extended marriage and ordination without regard to sexuality or gender identity, it is an outlier in the Anglican Communion. Worldwide Anglican uncertainty about sexuality indeed has reached almost comic proportions with Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby inviting the world’s Anglican few gay bishops to the next Lambeth gathering but excluding their spouses—both of them![3] (There are only two bishops married to same-gender partners in the Anglican Communion.) “All are welcome”? Not in the least.
These limits signal the problem with “welcome” or “inclusion” at church or anywhere else: It’s generally defined by someone else—the “welcomer”—often the gatekeeper of whatever “normal” is being contravened by “welcome” or “inclusion.” I have experienced these “normals” most vividly as a gay man whose sexuality and romantic life contravene the heterosexual expectation. The extension of marriage to my same-gender relationship is fast absorbing my difference into that relational “normal” (as long as I hew closely to a certain marital script)—though the gatekeepers at Lambeth seem intent on holding out. Believe it or not, I am happy for them to do so, if only to help me remember how easy it would be to give in to the “tyranny of normal.”[4]
That might sound a bit odd for a gay man to say, but these past 20 years of “inclusion” and even major wins for sexual and gender minorities have made me increasingly suspicious of any “normal,” and especially suspicious of the ways being “normal” gets worked out in the common prayer of the churches. It is interesting to me that the liturgies of both marriage and ordination have been and continue to be the battlegrounds in theological controversies around sex and gender. Both are primary ways Christians and their churches mark what is “normal” or acceptable in such matters. It is not a bad thing that women and gender minorities are now ordained in some churches, and couples can pledge themselves to each other regardless of the parties’ genders in some others. But are there not other tyrannical “normals” that need to be contested?
The answer to that question is surely, undeniably, affirmative. Many of these norms, like those governing gender and sexuality, are rooted in bodies. Persons with impairment will lament what Thomas Reynolds calls the “cult of normalcy,”[5] which renders many bodies problematic and thus consigned to the backbenches of church and society. Persons whose skin colour or cultural heritage marks them as outside the “white” norm in U.S. and U.K. contexts (among others) have documented well the ongoing effects of such inbuilt racism, and its continuing effects—so expansive that a simple reference cannot do them justice. Even granting the expansion of ordination beyond the historic male “normal,” the residual “male pattern” at the altar continues to perpetuate a legacy of clerical dominance over the “merely baptized.” Assemblies are only beginning to engage the challenges posed by the mass migration of people, whether at the southern border of the United States or the Mediterranean shores of the European Union. These movements follow previous migrations related to imperial expansion, displacement of First Peoples, and colonization—of which the churches in their many forms were an undeniable part.
“Like it or not church liturgies tend to perpetuate many of these tyrannical norms, whether through more obvious exclusions in the matter of ordination and marriage, or in more subtle ways.”
Like it or not church liturgies tend to perpetuate many of these tyrannical norms, whether through more obvious exclusions in the matter of ordination and marriage, or in more subtle ways. I note in my own Episcopal Church that the English language and the musical heritage of the British Isles dominate most gatherings for prayer—no matter the actual heritage of art and culture of those gathered in the room.[6] It is hard to deny that such preference suggests somehow that the English language and the cultures most shaped by it—and the persons who bear them—are somehow superior to other languages and cultures, which are, of course, no less capable bearing the church’s prayer.
On the matter of marriage, then, some churches have begun to scratch at the surface of the “normals” of which Christians have often been involved in enforcing. That in itself is a good thing—but only a first step toward exploring which other unexamined norms have oppressed and excluded in the name of God. As Hauerwas has written: “[T]he demand to be normal can be tyrannical unless we understand that the normal condition of our being together is that we are all different.”[7] The breadth of the divine welcome so expressed lies further down the road.
Bryan Cones is a presbyter in the Episcopal Church, a former book editor at Liturgy Training Publications, and was managing editor and columnist at U.S. Catholic magazine He is editor, with Stephen Burns, of Liturgy with a Difference: Beyond Inclusion in the Liturgical Assembly, published by SCM Press.
[1] The 1 October 1986 “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith identified a “movement within the church, which takes the form of pressure groups of various names and sizes,
attempts to give the impression that it represents all homosexual persons who are Catholics” (para. 9). In condemning these groups, the letter then directs that “[a]ll support should be withdrawn from any organizations which seek to undermine the teaching of the Church, which are ambiguous about it, or which neglect it entirely” (para. 17). Such directives resulted in Dignity chapters, including Dignity/Chicago, being excluded from Catholic parishes. See http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19861001_homosexual-persons_en.html.
[2] Emma Green, “Conservative Christians Just Retook the United Methodist Church,” The Atlantic, 26 February 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/02/united-methodists-fracture-lgbt-plan-rejected/583693/.
[3] Mary Frances Schjonberg, “Same-sex spouses not invited to next year’s Lambeth Conference of bishops,” Episcopal News Service, 18 February 2019, https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/2019/02/18/same-sex-spouses-not-invited-to-next-years-lambeth-conference-of-bishops/.
[4] The expression belongs to ethicist Stanley Hauerwas. See his “Community and Diversity: The Tyranny of Normal,” in Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped, and the Church (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 211-17.
[5] Reynolds defines that “cult” as “a set of rituals trained upon demarcating and policing the borders of a ‘normal’ way of being . . . so as to remediate and thus neutralize their deviances.” See his Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2008), 60.
[6] See, for example, my “Diary of Pilgrimage: An American Pilgrim Under the Southern Cross,” Worship 92 (September 2018): 396-414.
[7] “Community and Diversity: The Tyranny of Normal,” 214.
A guest post from Helen D. Morris
“Is the Church essentially a perfect or an imperfect entity?”
This is a question I like to ask the MA students that I teach. The answer seems obvious. We only have to glance into church history, around the Church today, or, for those of us who are part of the Church, into our own lives and hearts to see myriad examples of the Church’s imperfection.
The world outside the Church, understandably, calls this imperfection out. One recent example of such critique comes through the character of the priest in the critically-acclaimed series Fleabag. This priest, rather than leading the atheist main character, Fleabag, towards God, stands in the way of any attempt she might have made to reach out to him. Whether an intentional or subconscious depiction of the Church on the part of the writer, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the message conveyed is sobering. Rather than a group of people who inspire and encourage others to find life and hope in the good news of the grace poured out in Jesus, the Church, as portrayed in Fleabag at least, blocks the path towards God that others might take if only the Church weren’t in the way.
Many would testify that such a picture of the Church does not match their experience. Many lives have been turned around by meeting Christians who have demonstrated love, compassion, and goodness, encouraging others to know God for themselves. However, even if a picture like the one we see in Fleabag were only a tiny bit true, and most Christians would recognise that it’s sadly more than that, this would be a tragedy worthy of much grief and sombre self-assessment on the Church’s part. The Church is imperfect. Christians see this. The wider world sees this. God sees this.
So why ask the question? At this point in the lecture, after my students have voiced their own examples of the Church’s shortcomings, I bring in the work of Paul Minear and his Images of the Church in the New Testament. In the New Testament, there are descriptions of the Church in practice, in Acts and Paul’s letters, for example, where we see that imperfection in the Church is not new. There are also prescriptions given as to the character and behaviour that the Church should exhibit. However, the primary way that the Church is depicted, Minear argues, is through images, or metaphors. The Church is Christ’s body, the temple of the Holy Spirit, the people of God, the bride of Christ, the aroma of Christ, a family, salt, light, and a city on a hill, to name the most prominent metaphors used. Despite the variety, Minear contends, these images shed light on the one reality of the Church that they all point to. Different images emphasise different aspects of this one reality, but the reality itself is the same. It is the redeeming and reconciling activity of God the Father in the Son and through the Spirit in drawing people to himself. Moreover, this reconciliation of people to God is a foretaste and sign of the redemption of creation that God will accomplish on Christ’s return.
Therefore, Minear maintains, rather than the overly human-centred definitions and understandings of the Church that Christians today so easily adopt, in the New Testament, the Church’s identity and calling is firmly rooted, not in itself, but in the Triune God, whose being and acts are perfect. Not only is the Church founded on the works of a perfect God, but it is, itself, heading towards perfection. The bride of Christ image is particularly striking in this regard. Ephesians 5 looks forward to the time when Christ’s bride is without spot or blemish; Revelation 21 describes this future reality in glorious detail.
But that is then, and this is now — we might counter. Not so for Paul, who, like the other New Testament authors, sees a more complex relationship between the present and the future than binary opposition. For Paul, the future reality of the perfection of God’s kingdom has broken powerfully into the here and now through the coming of Christ. The Church, though awaiting final perfection, is now the body and bride of Christ and the temple of God’s Spirit.
The Church, then, is located in a tension between the perfect entity that it is in Christ, and will become on Christ’s return, and its current imperfection. The danger with any tension is that only one side is maintained. In this instance, imbalance leads to either an unhealthy triumphalism that fails to prepare and account for the current reality of sin, or an eeyorish pessimism that loses sight of the power of Christ’s work in and through the present lives of believers. The challenge is to hold both ends firmly. Paul does just this when, in Ephesians for example, he instructs his readers that the Church is Christ’s body and must grow up into the full stature of Christ, or that Christians are new creations and must put off their old selves, or that the Church is Christ’s fullness and then prays that the believers will be filled with the fullness of God.
Maintaining tensions can be challenging, but it also stabilises. The stabilising effect of tensions has prompted me to promote a new metaphor for the Church, based on Paul’s body of Christ texts: the image of the Church as a suspension bridge. Just as the tensions in the supporting cables uphold a suspension bridge, so, I argue in my book Flexible Church, maintaining the tensions conveyed through Scripture upholds the Church. The tension between the perfection and imperfection of the Church’s current calling and identity is one that I explore. I also examine dialectical tensions between: God’s transcendence and immanence; believers’ calling to be spiritual and religious; the Church’s existence as a network and an institution; the Church’s nature as inherited and innovative; and the Church’s relationship with the wider world as both inculturated and countercultural.
My hope is that the image of a suspension bridge encourages the contemporary church to maintain the flexibility and stability needed to faithfully communicate and demonstrate the good news of Jesus in a range of different contexts. My aim is to provide a diagnostic tool by which churches can evaluate their strengths and weaknesses and identify imbalances that may have arisen. My prayer is that those of us involved in Church would keep seeking God’s wisdom, infilling and strength to be people who inspire others to know Jesus too, and never a barrier that blocks their path.
Rev Dr Helen D. Morris is a BA Course Leader and Lecturer in Applied Theology at Moorlands College, Christchurch, UK.
Flexible Church: Being the Church in the Contemporary World is published this month. Click here to preorder with a special prepublication discount.
A guest post from Chris Lane, taken from his foreword to the new edition of Christianity Rediscovered
In May 1966, the Catholic missionary Vincent Donovan wrote a letter to his Bishop, a year into his work in Loliondo, Tanzania. He had joined a long-term mission which was having a strong influence in the locality through excellent work involving schools and a hospital. But Donovan was frustrated.
Crucially for the future of the work, he carried the godly frustration of a true pioneer, which ultimately leads to courageous and clear-sighted action.
This story, about a Catholic man communicating the gospel to tribes of mostly illiterate cattle herders on the plains of Tanzania, informed and challenged my own missional practice in planting a church in the Langworthy estate in Salford, England – a place renowned at the time for high levels of crime and deprivation.
Donovan’s work, separated from my own by 7000 miles and 40 years, gave a beautiful theological language to what we were experiencing as we pioneered a new expression of church in an estate where a tiny percentage of people attended any church or had any concept of the gospel.
The first thing we learned from Donovan was the importance of humble listening. A group of us had moved into Langworthy in 1999: young, shiny, happy Christians arriving with answers to every question and a clear idea of how to help people improve their lives and find Jesus. We didn’t realise at the time that we had much more to learn than we had to give. This was a painful lesson for us. When Donovan is asked by a Masai tribe whether his ‘tribe’ has found the most High God, he thinks deeply before answering ‘no…I have come a long, long distance to invite you to search for him with me. Let us search for him together’. He invites them on a journey of discovery. He will listen and they will listen and they will seek God together. Unlike his missionary colleagues, he doesn’t go with medical help or education, but simply to sow the seeds of the gospel and see what grows up.
There is a humility here that has echoes of St Aidan’s mission to the tribes of northern England. Not imposing the gospel from a position of power, but offering it with openness and a willingness to listen and learn. Aidan went to a place and a people written off by his peers as impossible to reach, too barbaric and wild. Donovan was told it might take one hundred years before the Masai were ready to discuss the Christian faith, that ‘it is impossible to preach the gospel directly to the Masai’.
Like Aidan and all true pioneers, it was this apparent impossibility that drove him to abandon the theories and discussions, and ‘simply go to these people and do the work among them for which I came to Africa’ (13). When he did this, the question he received was ‘why did you wait so long to tell us about this?’.
As Donovan and the Masai began this journey together they began to realise that the Most High God, the God of the whole world, had been with them before the missionaries came. When we began our work in Langworthy there was almost a sense that we were taking the light of Jesus with us into this dark, godless place. It was quite a revelation when we realised that Jesus was already there!
Donovan helped us to understand the Missio Dei – that God is on a mission everywhere and in every person. It is our job to join that mission. For every person I meet, my task is to find out what God has been doing in their life, and help them to join the dots and recognise that those moments of awe and wonder are signs that (to use Donovan’s analogy) the Lion has been pursuing them.
This is a reflection of the whole biblical story. Creation begins in the tohu wabohu – formless, void, wilderness. The story of the people of God starts with an elderly couple who can’t have children. The news of the Messiah comes to the shepherds. The impossible places, the unreachable people. Yet God is at work there.
Another issue that emerges in pioneering mission, or ‘first evangelisation’ , is we can often come with our quick answers and theological assumptions, and then they don’t work anymore outside the safety of our church bubble. Jonny Baker talks about a ‘theological homelessness’ (see Jonny’s chapter in The End of Theology) often experienced by pioneers as they leave the comforts of what they know and relearn the gospel for the culture or group they are reaching. It is fascinating to see how Donovan wrestles with this, ‘every single thing I prepared to teach them had to be revised or discarded once I had presented it to them. Just what was the essential message of Christianity?’ There is a thrilling freshness to the message that emerges as a result of this process, as there is all over the world as the seeds of the gospel are sown, including in a little forgotten estate in the north west of England.
We searched in vain for a proven model that we could use for our mission in Langworthy. Donovan taught us to discard the models and listen to the whisper of the Spirit. He taught us the importance of proximity – of friendship, and of living and working among the people you are reaching. Proximity is not only significant missionally but also theologically, as you observe at first hand the traces of the Missio Dei in people’s day to day lives and in their culture and the stories they tell.
Donovan gives a stunning example of this in the Masai custom of bringing peace between feuding families. The two families prepare endaa sinyati, or holy food, and bring it to the centre of the village accompanied by the whole community, and in the exchanging of food, forgiveness comes and a new covenant is established between the families. In Donovan’s words ‘a new testament of forgiveness is brought about by the exchange of holy food. What more can one say?’ (49) Evidence of the work of God in a supposedly ‘godless’ culture.
“It is both beautiful and unsettling, and speaks to the Christian church today with great relevance and power.”
What is the gospel? What is church? Every missionary pioneer will have grappled with these questions, and Donovan grounds them in this real and remarkable story. It is both beautiful and unsettling, and speaks to the Christian church today with great relevance and power. It reminds us of the importance of mission for the church – ‘a church that turns in on itself is no longer a church’ (85) – and challenges Western concepts of individualism and organisation. When decisions are made as a whole tribe, what about those who don’t fully understand the gospel? How are leaders raised up and recognised by the wider church when most of the Masai leaders are illiterate and the usual ordination processes simply don’t work for them? What is the future for such a mission?
There are many big questions raised here; some are answered eloquently within the book and others are left for the reader to wrestle with. It is an incomplete and imperfect story, yet beautiful and breathtaking, and this is fitting because this is the very nature of Christian mission. Our story in Langworthy is also incomplete and imperfect, yet at times beautiful and breathtaking, as is your story and that of your community. Read this book and be challenged and inspired, be frustrated, be equipped, but most of all, wrestle with the ideas here and sow the seeds of the gospel into your context and see what emerges!
Our new edition of Christianity Rediscovered is published later this month. Visit our website to pre-order a copy at a special launch price.
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