Legal ordinance or evangelical sacrament?

One of the conclusions I came to a while back, while slowly moving from a sort of default quasi-baptistic position to a more thorough-going Reformed view, was that the Baptist view of the sacraments pushes them into the wrong category. In fairness, Zwinglianism isn't a sine qua non of Baptistry, but the fact remains that Baptists are generally perceived as Zwinglian [1].

Ultra-Zwinglianism asserts that baptism is no more than human testimony and, the Lord's Supper is no more than human memorial. Even a more moderate Zwinglianism will assert that the Lord is especially present, but nonetheless, the primary action is ours, not God's. The Lord saved us, and we now testify to that in baptism. He gave his life on the Cross, and we now recall his sacrifice in bread and wine. And of course, Jesus certainly said "do this in remembrance of me", so the notions of testimony and commemoration are not illegitimate, although they are far from all Scripture has to say.

But my thinking turned like this. Wherever this divorcing of the sacraments from the activity of God occurs, it results in the turning of the sacraments into "acts of obedience", as witnessed, for example, in the Baptist Faith and Message [2]. Such language is clearly and unambiguously legal in its viewpoint: these are human activities, fundamentally obedient [3]. The sacraments become ordinances, "things decreed". The promise is replaced by a law, and celebration, by obligation. Evangelical sacraments are made into legal ordinances. Such a confusion of law and gospel is deeply unsettling.

[1] For instance, at my home church, there are deacons who are clearly Zwinglian, as well as those whose position I cannot tell, but our minister's view seems to be Calvinist, give or take. He certainly has described the Supper in terms which are utterly alien to a consistent Zwinglianism.
[2] Link.
[3] Except when they aren't, which completely baffles me.

Tabloid theologian

Some accumulated thoughts from this evening's rubbish on telly (The Hidden Story of Jesus, C4 2030–2235).

Robert Beckford, Channel 4's favourite heretic, is on the box, telling us all how the similarities between different religious traditions on the birth of their respective founders/lead members show that they are all basically the same. So he thinks that Jesus is a created sub-deity and that Christmas was nicked from the pagans. Well, I think that's evidence enough for me to out Robert Beckford as a Jehovah's Witness.

Hindu gurus, Mithras worship, "out of India"… It's like watching every single trendy theological theory, distilled into one brain and filtered through one mouth. Bizarre.

We joke, every so often, in my Maths department that if we proved that 1 = 2, we'd go home: nothing left to discuss. Robert Beckford is a "theologian" who, despite claiming to be a Christian, clearly doesn't think there's much of a theos to logos about. Why doesn't he just go home?

Muslims believe that Allah made someone else to look like Jesus so that this person was crucified instead of Jesus. Firstly: that Allah is a right old jokester, isn't he? Secondly: that is so the wrong way round. Jesus died in my place.

Newsflash: Queen appeals for compassion…

…for the weak and vulnerable. "And especially for those who, despite being well past retirement age, are still slogging away at the day job, mostly because they don't trust the blighter who'll take over. 'Appy Christmas to all three of you who'll hear this live, or an enjoyable Easter if you're watching this on YouTube."

Result!

Mostly, I prefer to complain about the rail network. And mostly, it's justified. But every so often, you can get a real gem. Like today, when booking the cheapest way to get from from Stowmarket to York after Christmas, even with a Young Person's Railcard, was on Advance First. A whole thirty-six pounds and five pence says I'm able to travel first class. That's what I call a result.

Divers thynkings

1. There's something a little bit wrong about a counter-tenor.  Especially when he's beating the altos for pitch.
2. I'm in mortal peril of committing the sin of heresy here—was JS Bach the original "Jesus is my boyfriend" lyricist?  That this was directed at the infant Christ is, I fear, no excuse:

   Ah, my heart's beloved little Jesus,
   make Yourself a pure, soft little bed
   within my heart's chamber in which to rest,
   so that I never forget You!

   Individualised references to the Bridegroom are also, um, unhelpful at best. Especially when sung by men.
3. I think he might be. At least, he also wrote something which could have come from Tim Hughes:

   Jesus orders my beginning,
   Jesus remains always with me,
   Jesus restrains my thoughts,
   let Jesus only be my delight,
   let Jesus be with me in my thoughts,
   Jesus, do not let me waver!

   Admirable in many ways, but occasionally one wishes he'd got a bit more a grip on the Trinity.
4. If we're going to be involved in this Hope 2008 malarkey (and it seems we shall), wouldn't it be a good idea to try and encourage the church in the Gospel?  And if memory serves, you do that by preaching the Gospel week by week, not only teaching people what the Gospel is but also reminding them why it's such Good News.
5. I like the look of Gospel-Driven Church. A charismatic Baptist who, despite his two most obvious faults [snarf snarf], likes the sacraments, the liturgy and the church year! But it'll go down like a lead balloon chez nous.
6. Whatever the dickens has gone wrong with the line breaks today, I haven't a foggiest how to fix it.

Observed

From Toronto Bed and Breakfast.

All of our homes are gay-friendly, and many welcome families. [Emph. mine]

Sigh.

For four weeks only, see the Advent banner!

For those reading without the aid of pictures, I have a nice new Advent banner. Visit the main blog to see it. I ought to acknowledge the picture of a real banner was, erm, borrowed (with season's greetings, naturally) from Living Grace, a Roman Catholic supplier of … banners, I suppose. And whatever else it is that Roman Catholic churches use to keep the wheels on.

And if you're very good, Father Christmas may deliver a new banner for Christmastide. He may also deliver a tidy-up of the labels, which are getting out of hand.

Principles for pensions

I don't normally like to talk about personal finances, as I'm infected with the subconscious belief that money is such a frightfully vulgar topic of conversation, doncherknow [1]. Nevertheless, I'm quite happy to publish some thoughts regarding one aspect of my finances, and probably, when I can clean them up, some figures.

A few months ago, I started running a small holding of shares as the beginnings of what will, basically, be a self-administered, self-held pension. I've already explained a little of my inherent hostility to the way British pension provision is administered [2], and so have decided that, in addition to certain personal circumstances making self-provision desirable, it would be best to put my money where my mouth is and start saving for retirement.

I start with two principles to which any adequate pension provision should adhere:

1. a good, inflation-proofed income; and
2. control of capital at all times.

The stock market is generally acknowledged as the most sensible place to invest money for the long-term, which a pension certainly is. Additionally, I would say that (in a capitalist economy) it is probably the most ethical place to store capital for the ultra-long-term, since it is ploughed back into the economy in a productive manner.

Another principle to which I adhere is that "you don't spend your capital." [3] That is to say, once you've invested your money, you don't spend it. You might move it from one investment to another if you thought you could achieve a better return, but you don't remove it from the class of money called "investment" and put it in the class of money called "income" (which is to say, the kind of money you may well spend). The road between income and investments is one-way.

The final principle is that tax, while not an over-riding concern, is worth avoiding wherever possible.

I arrived at the conclusion, helped along by Stephen Bland of The Motley Fool [4], that the easiest way to invest for the future is to purchase a basket of equities, intending to hold them forever, which have a good dividend yield. Successful companies grow their earnings at a rate greater than inflation, and by holding the shares, you maintain control of your capital and can easily distinguish between capital (shares) and income (dividends). The fact that dividend income is effectively un-taxed up to £40,000 annually, not that I expect to be crashing the higher-rate tax band any time ever.

A few sanity-filters on shares to purchase makes sure that you keep the risks down to a manageable level—for instance, by purchasing shares in large blue-chip companies rather than small start-ups, I run the risk of missing out on a spectacular success, but I also avoid the risk (far greater, in my view) of investing in a company which goes absolutely nowhere. A dose of self-doubt when it comes to making detailed predictions about the future is healthy, too.

The last piece of the puzzle fell into place when I came across the Halifax ShareBuilder, which is a brokerage service offering extremely cheap trading (£1.50 per purchase) [5]. They achieve this by pooling investment money and making investments four times a month. I don't have enough money for an old-fashioned broker service, and I don't even have enough money to make an ISA worth using.

Now, not only is it possible to know what the best idea is (invest your own money directly in the stock market to obtain a diversified basket of high-yielding shares under your direct control) but it is also possible to do it. And if you've got enough money, an ISA can let you avoid all the tax implications while doing so.

[1] Cowdy, S., "It's Rude To Talk Money". The Motley Fool: 16-Nov-07. Link.
[2] Walker, P., "The two certainties of life". The Melangerie: 09-Mar-07. Link.
[3] Holding, D., "Don't Spend Your Capital". The Motley Fool: 8-Nov-07. Link.
[4] Archive.
[5] Link. I ought to say that other services are available, but most of them are just the Halifax service re-packaged.

Why a church needs a confession

Middlehampton Evangelical Church is a lively baptistic evangelical church, founded only a few decades ago. The people who founded it assumed that everyone knew what the Bible said, so never really bothered to write any of it down, nor even to use someone else's summary. It's left a few people in the lurch, though.

Meet Fred. He helps out with children's work at Middlehampton Evangelical, and loves doing it. He has good fun with the children, and relishes the chance to teach them about Jesus, opening up the Bible to them as he does it week by week. Fred's a Reformed Baptist, and that obviously carries with it a host of issues, some of which are nigh-pathological. But he's quite convinced, as a good Reformed Baptist, that God's covenants are a key factor in understanding the Bible, and in his time, he's taught 5-year-olds about God's promises, and that Jesus is God's "yes" to all that he has promised; he's taught 11-year-olds that God binds up his promises into something we call a covenant, which is like a contract or a treaty, and that Jesus is the person who brings God's covenant to us; and he's now teaching the teenagers about God's covenants, and is thinking that he ought to tell them about how Christians are under a new administration of the same covenant as the Old Testament Jews, with Jesus as the centre of that covenant. But within MEC, this is by no means a universally-held view. The Evangelical Alliance statement, displayed in a corner of the church's lobby, has nothing to say on the matter, and the church has no other formally-defined statement of faith. Fred's slightly puzzled as to whether the church would back him in teaching this, and definitely not certain that it is the kind of doctrine that the church thinks ought to be taught. What's a faithful teacher of the children to do?

Meet Barbara. She's definitely not a Reformed Baptist, and if we're honest, she's part of the reason Fred's a bit worried about his situation. Even more than proving Fred wrong, however, she is bothered about evangelism, and good for her. She's keen to start a reading group with some of the ladies from her workplace, who have all expressed an interest in finding out what Christians, particularly these weirdo evangelicals, believe. And so she's got this idea to do a sort of study course looking at key Christian doctrines. But she'd have dearly loved to have had something from her own church to use with her friends who, after all, want to know not so much what the Bible says, as what evangelicals believe. But it turns out that MEC doesn't believe very much at all. Can it really be that Middlehampton Evangelical is based, doctrinally, on little more than the current minister's theological fancy?

Meet Harriet, Fred's wife. She listens to the minister's sermons intently, and occasionally gets a bit worried, because every so often he seems to wander right off-message. She thinks he is basically a good minister, and his heart's in the right place, but sometimes, it seems like he must have run out of decent ideas and fallen back on something not worth wasting pixels over. She's not sure whether it would work all the time, but wishes she had something which said what Middlehampton Evangelical believed to be core truths, so that if the minister strayed from proclaiming a message which was consonant with those truths, she'd be able to voice her concerns from something other than her own private opinion.

Meet Peter. He's not from MEC at all, he works with an American mission organisation, which is as aggressive in its Zionistic premillennialism as its evangelism. For some reason, best known to the elders of MEC, Peter was invited to preach at church one week, when the pastor was away. Everything was going swimmingly, until about halfway through the sermon, and with at best only a tangential link to the text, Peter launched into something approaching a rant about how God was on Israel's side, and that God was blessing America for its pro-Israeli foreign policy, and that Christians who thought that the church had replaced Israel in the purposes of God were of the devil's party without knowing it. Unsurprisingly, Fred was perturbed by this sermon, and the elders of MEC were also rather shocked. But how, Fred wondered, would Middlehampton Evangelical try to make sure that this didn't happen again?

Sadly, Fred never suggested introducing a church confession, mostly because he recognised it would be the most fruitless, thankless task imaginable. He's chatted with elders from time to time, and they generally neither understand nor recognise the need for a church confession. He still teaches the children, and hasn't had any complaints yet, but does, every so often, wonder why it's so hard for evangelicals to write down what they believe. It's almost like they're scared someone might hold them to it.

The characters in this post are pretty much made-up, and almost every detail bears no intended resemblance to any individual, living or dead. I was once present at a sermon much like the one described. And I couldn't possibly be Fred, because I'm not married, and I'm not a Baptist. And I'm not Harriet, because—well, apart from the obvious differences—I have to say that "intently" isn't a word you could use of my sermon-listening skills. And I'm clearly not Barbara in any shape or form.