Worship and the word

Off the back of an Ed Clowney sermon, I was thinking about this whole business of the content of worship, with particular reference to sung worship, although not limited to such. While the argument for exclusive psalmody clearly isn't one Ed subscribed to, nor is it one I have much time for, he made an important point about having language—and thought-patterns—which are conditioned by Scripture, recounting the benefit of having prayed with John Murray whose prayers, he said, were almost all quoted Scripture.

Another side of this is an educational question, which came out of a recent White Horse Inn discussion about the "language of the faith": if you asked an average church member in your congregation what "propitiation" is, or what "justification" means, would they be able to tell you? It may well be that people can expound the doctrine without the vocabulary, but that's like trying to explain the off-side rule without using words like "ball" and "goalkeeper". Why should we expect the church to have less vocabulary than football?

Then there's a question about the way our culture is confronted by our theology. In the West, we have an obsession with expressing ourselves, and while in many contexts even within the church, self-expression is a good thing, we need to recognise our limits. Our own thoughts and feelings cannot always be trusted; we need look no further than Psalm 73 to see an example. We can all too often turn our feelings into perceptions of reality, and need to hear God, speaking through his word, in order to be given a less tainted vision: of Christ, first of all, and of ourselves secondly. In other words, put theologically, the fact that our sinfulness reaches throughout our entire being means that we should maintain a healthy scepticism about our abilities to come up with acceptable worship independently.

Finally, there's a theological question. In gathered worship, whose word has priority? Obviously, when the Scriptures are being read and expounded, then God's word has the priority; but how about when we sing, or pray? Whose word has the priority then? Surely, the word of God has priority even when it is us who are responding to his word in song, or seeking his face in prayer.

I get funny looks occasionally—not always—from people when they find out that if asked to pray in church, I have everything written out beforehand, rather than just "winging it". Of course, there have been occasions where some news has come in to be prayed about just before the service started and I have had to slip in a paragraph on the hoof. But I always wonder what's going on in their minds: it seems that they value spontaneity above everything else, and given Psalm 73, I'm not too sure that God agrees; I think that he values faithfulness to his word somewhat more.

Postscript: Bob Godfrey also wrote a very helpful article dealing with a lot of these issues; I understand that he himself believed in exclusive psalmody, but he clearly doesn't press the point, preferring to make the case for the priority of the word of God, rather than its exclusivity.

Hand over the keys, Pru, you're out

So, the simple fix to the 10p tax debacle has prevailed. Her Majesty's Robbers and Crooks will move a couple of tax bands around to send up to £120 back to each taxpayer below higher rate, at a cost of £2.7bn to the Exchequer. The MP for Edinburgh South West was on Today this morning, telling Sarah Montague that the famous 'fiscal rules' were more like… guidelines.

Apparently, when his predecessor—no, not Malcolm Rifkind, do pay attention—said that borrowing should only be to invest, he fully intended to add, 'over a full economic cycle (and not in any specific case).' So that's all right, then, the Debt Manglement Office can put out another £2.7bn of debt to finance this reversal. But only this year, we're told, which makes me wonder what's going to happen to the tax brackets next year.

He was pressed by the redoubtable Ms Montague on the point that this really isn't investment, and then decided that a better tack was to argue that it is going to be, kind of, sort of, ish, invested, in the British economy. I think he really wanted to say that the UK population is going to make an asset class out of beer and curry. And what a difference £3bn will make in a £1,300bn economy, I must say; this must be the Scottish equivalent of George Bush's vaunted tax cut in the States.

And of course, through all this let us not forget that this fix is not a solution, as reported by the Times. Those who were hardest hit by the initial tax arrangement will gain the full benefit, but as they lost out by £230, they will only recoup about half their losses.

Could Labour be bankrupt?

Not morally or politically, but financially, that is. According to a report in the FT recently, the Labour Party could need to file for bankruptcy. I've always wondered exactly how it is that political parties can get loans: what's your business plan for getting the money back? Surely any sort of scheme to turn an election victory into healthier party finances would be outright embezzlement.

Anyway, the good news is that Labour has a backer who's willing take over the running of the Party, paying a fair value (according to the Second Lord of the Treasury's own valuation method), and once it's been cleaned up, sell it back. Here's a full copy of the letter, sent to the leader of the Labour Party.

The Christ who isn't there

One of the things I've noticed is that while evangelical preachers can be hesitant to preach Christ from an Old Testament passage which is practically screaming his name at the Christian reader, they would sooner shed their own blood than preach him from a passage in which he is crucially absent. What do I mean, that Christ is absent from a passage, you rightly ask, especially given that I'm such a stickler for preaching Christ from all of Scripture? Let me give an example.

And the word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, the house of Israel has become dross to me; all of them are bronze and tin and iron and lead in the furnace; they are dross of silver. Therefore thus says the Lord God: Because you have all become dross, therefore, behold, I will gather you into the midst of Jerusalem. As one gathers silver and bronze and iron and lead and tin into a furnace, to blow the fire on it in order to melt it, so I will gather you in my anger and in my wrath, and I will put you in and melt you. I will gather you and blow on you with the fire of my wrath, and you shall be melted in the midst of it. As silver is melted in a furnace, so you shall be melted in the midst of it, and you shall know that I am the Lord; I have poured out my wrath upon you.”

And the word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, say to her, You are a land that is not cleansed or rained upon in the day of indignation. The conspiracy of her prophets in her midst is like a roaring lion tearing the prey; they have devoured human lives; they have taken treasure and precious things; they have made many widows in her midst. Her priests have done violence to my law and have profaned my holy things. They have made no distinction between the holy and the common, neither have they taught the difference between the unclean and the clean, and they have disregarded my Sabbaths, so that I am profaned among them. Her princes in her midst are like wolves tearing the prey, shedding blood, destroying lives to get dishonest gain. And her prophets have smeared whitewash for them, seeing false visions and divining lies for them, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord God,’ when the Lord has not spoken. The people of the land have practiced extortion and committed robbery. They have oppressed the poor and needy, and have extorted from the sojourner without justice. And I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy it, but I found none. Therefore I have poured out my indignation upon them. I have consumed them with the fire of my wrath. I have returned their way upon their heads, declares the Lord God.” (Ezek. 22:17-31)

Okay, so this is the "prophetic perfect tense", in which the Lord speaks in the past tense about something to happen in the future. And what's he saying? The prophets, priests and kings are arrogant, selfish and profane, and the people are rotten to the core. And so the Lord looks for someone to 'stand in the breach', classically taken to be intercession, but that doesn't quite do it. Walls don't plead with an invader to go away, they bear the full weight of the attack and thus avert it for the people behind the wall. There is a moral 'breach' in the walls of Jerusalem, caused by the lack of a righteous man who will stand for the people, and because of that lack, the Lord must lay the punishment on the people.

What Israel needs is a perfect prophet, priest, king; a true Israelite who will serve faithfully, and substitute effectively. Our passage leaves us with the question, Where can we find such a man?

That's what I mean by observing that Jesus is missing from the passage: there is no presentation of a potential solution to the conundrum, the Lord does not promise such here. And yet, we know that the solution is that the Lord provides himself as the one who stands in the breach, to bear the full onslaught of his own wrath. Jesus is the missing solution to the present problem. And having been there, I can tell you that even evangelicals whose preaching I generally respect will preach this kind of passage as if we are to provide the substitute by our intercessory prayer. So this outline matches that of the sermon I heard, and here's Matthew Henry's interpretation.

So you see, there is a kind of passage from which Christ is absent, and his presence is way in which the crucial tension within the passage is resolved. I wonder, can you think of any other Old Testament passages in which a similar tension is resolved by Jesus?

Oh, and if you want a bit of a chuckle, read this sermon. Verse 30, apparently, is a good springboard to talk about Patrick Henry, an 18th-century American Revolutionary. Lord, have mercy.

Get out of politics, Gordon

Ha! Fooled you. I'm not thinking of the beleaguered Minister for the Civil Service, although some may think the advice wise for him, too. No, I'm thinking of Gordon Ramsay, who today told the Beeb that he wants the Government to outlaw—yes, you read correctly, outlaw—the sale and use of out-of-season vegetables, with fines for those who break the law.

Half of me wants to treat this really sensibly, and half just wants to mock. So indulge me for a moment and then I'll try to put a straight face on.

A silent menace stalks the night. Sowing the seeds of destruction wherever it goes, it is deadlier than a crate of small arms and more lethal than a packet of Colombia's finest. This peril has extended its roots throughout the British economy, with tendrils threatening to squeeze the life out of the very air we breathe. And its name?

The Kenyan strawberry.

So, apart from the sheer ludicrosity of his idea, what else can we say about it? Well, there's always something a little unseemly about a trader who wants the government to stop his competition from doing something otherwise legitimate. It smacks of a trader trying to eliminate his competition by force of law. If Ramsay wants to make all his restaurants "in-season produce only" and advertise them as such, he's free to do so, as are others. There's no need for compulsion in this matter, unless what Ramsay really wants is not to compel restaurants but to compel consumers—that means you, reading this—who would no longer have the choice of eating Kenyan strawberries, and all because some jumped-up Michelin chef doesn't want to see asparagus in the shops out of season.

But secondly, there's something very unseemly about a rich Westerner calling for a ban on the import of foodstuffs from developing countries. Sure, someone might argue that with food prices hitting the roof, those countries need all the food they can get, but that's precisely the point: they need all the food they can get, whether by growing it or buying it. If a Kenyan farmer's climate and soil are so arranged that he can produce a greater value of strawberries than wheat, even with the current high prices on wheat, then he ought to be allowed to grow and sell strawberries in order to buy needed wheat, and Gordon Ramsay ought not to be allowed to stop him. While there are some caveats, and we obviously need some food safety standards and so on, the principle is fundamentally sound: free trade is good news for the poor.

Thirdly, I'm not all that convinced by the food miles argument on which people so heavily rely. Recent estimates (2007) have it that shipping only accounts for about 3.5% of emissions, and aviation, for only 2%; transport in total only accounts for about 14% (2000). Certainly for a product like chocolate, rather than shipping cocoa to an industrialised country to make chocolate, it would be far more environmentally-friendly to process cocoa to make chocolate in the country of origin, as well as contributing significantly to that country's economic development. For agricultural produce, perhaps that counter-argument holds less true. Nevertheless, the issue is less immediately obvious than Ramsay claims.

Perhaps, along with a few other choice contributions from Anglo-Saxon to our vocabulary, Gordon Ramsay's beloved f-word needs to be turned on him for a change?

Spot the difference!

In true Private Eye fashion, I present to you the following pair. One is a Muslim extremist who preaches terrorism against the West; the other is a famous actor who has spoken out against Islamic oppression and been quoted approvingly by the BNP for his troubles. Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you…

This raises the horrendous prospect that the Met have actually got the wrong man in custody: I bet they really wanted that vicious good-for-nothing dwarf, Gimli.

EDIT: I just looked at it and realised that the width is all wrong. Blinking Blogger layouts. 1220 09-May-2008.

Will evangelicals recover their mind?

There's a very good article at Chronicle.com about the place of evangelicals in the (American) academic world, by Michael Lindsay from Rice. He's got some very good insights, although being an academic, they're not really quotable sound-bites. But here's a few good bits.

In 1993, Michael Weiskopf wrote an article for The Washington Post in which he described evangelicals in the United States as "poor, uneducated, and easy to command." Although the comment provoked outrage from evangelicals, Weiskopf's assertion was not without merit. At the time, only 15 percent of evangelicals held college or graduate degrees. Even though religious conservatives dominated higher education at the turn of the 20th century, by 1993 they had lost their influence within the academy.

Or, as Mark Noll memorably put it in 1995, the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.

Forty years ago, conventional sociological wisdom said that society would secularize as it modernized. Such predictions were dead wrong. Levels of education and development have risen sharply around the world, while at the same time religion's influence has grown. It's time for the academy to come to grips with this dynamic.

He also quotes Stanley Fish, who said that in academic discourse, religion must become not merely an objct of study but a viable "candidate for the truth". I may quibble with the language, but the fact that it may yet be the case that a Christian perspective could be considered viable in academic discourse where it has much to say is a positive sign. Here's another bit.

Evangelicals are the most discussed but least understood group in American society. Observers often assume that they are in lockstep with the Republican Party, but the sociologist Christian Smith has shown that 70 percent of evangelicals do not identify with the religious right. Other observers conclude that evangelicals principally serve their own interests, but Allen D. Hertzke's persuasive Freeing God's Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) shows that evangelicals work as vigorously to protect the religious freedom of Buddhists and Jews around the world as they do that of their fellow Christians.

And ain't that true over here in the UK, and not just among academics?

Oh, man…

The most recent BUGB magazine has started a feature interviewing people who are involved in the Baptist Union of Great Britain, asking things like "favourite Bible passage", "favourite hymn", that kind of thing. While people often say of those questions, "There are no wrong answers!" that's quite the wrong way round: there are only wrong answers. Take, for instance, the President of the BUGB, John Weaver, whose answer to "last Christian book you read" was,

The Secret Message of Jesus by Brian McClaren [sic]. It's fantastic—basically he is saying that the church has lost the plot and we need to rediscover what the gospel is about. I believe that too.

The title, of course, would lead you think that McLaren was propounding gnosticism of some sort, but no! he's actually saying that the gospel isn't about sin and salvation, it's about something totally different. McLaren talks in this Youtube video about the core of the message of Jesus as being about living in a "new way of life", putting very firmly the sanctification cart before the justification horse. And the President of the BUGB thinks this is great. Oh, man…

Next up is Kwame Adzam, a minister (I assume) in West Norwood and a trustee of the BUGB. His story, when asked for "place felt closest to God" is this.

My bedroom. Recently there with my wife we realised that we need the prsence of God with us, and right there prostrate before God in our bedroom, the presence of God, his light, filled the room, and it was just a treasured moment.

Yish. Less said about that, the better I think. I guess the promise of Jesus, "Surely I am with you always," is a less certain guarantee of his presence than some shiver down the spine. Oh, man…

And lastly, there's Dianne Tidball, who said of the last Christian she'd read,

Surprised by Hope by Tom Wright. Fabulous book. First 200 pages not so good, but worth it for the second 200 pages: it is just brilliant.

Fair play, at least it's a good book, by all accounts. I've a few issues with Tom Wright (who doesn't?) but any book fiercely defending the fact that Jesus rose bodily, so that the grave lay empty after the third day, gets big plus points from me. Ah, but then, that's the bit of the book she just described as "not so good". Oh, man…

If I were in charge, I'd call it BUGBear.