Monthly Archive for April, 2007Page 2 of 3

The role of Tradition

Published
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Graeme
on April 16, 2007
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Twice in two days I’ve been challenged to think about the role of tradition within Christian thinking. Yesterday, I reached Chapter 15 of A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren. The chapter is entitled “Why I Am catholic” and one of the reasons he gives is because of the role of tradition within the Catholic/Orthodox experiences.

Within this section he quotes Gabriel Fackre who said:

The circle of tradition is not closed, for the Spirit’s ecclesial Work is not done. Traditional doctrine developes as Christ and the gospel are viewed in ever-fresh perspective. Old formulations are corrected, and what is passed on is enriched. The open-endedness, however does not overthrow the ancient landmarks. As tradition is a gift of the Spirit, its trajectory moves in the right direction, although it has not arrived at its destination.1

This addresses one of the concerns I’ve had in recent years. As I grew up I remember very little teaching on the value of the traditions of the Church. Maybe it was there, but I don’t remember it. It feels as if I learnt about tradition in a negative sense, ie that using tradition to shape our thinking is bad, unless of course it goes back to the original New Testament Church, or the pioneers of the particular tradition (ie Booth, Railton, etc in The Salvation Army).

Which brings me to today’s exposure to tradition. This morning I attended a lecture at our training college for officers on Ethics. The speaker, Major Karen Shakespeare from the UK, was teaching on ethics and used the idea of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral as a basis for showing how we can develop our own ethical views on issues.

Of course within the Quadrilateral is the idea that Scripture, whilst being the most important, is illuminated by tradition. This tradition was not only restricted to the earliest days, or that of the Wesley’s and their immediate peers, but the whole 2000 year history of the church.

This whole train of thought sits well with me. I acknowledge that when I read the Bible I do so with some preconceptions on how to interpret what I read. To do so is to disregard my own humanity and would be arrogant in the extreme. I wish I knew more about church tradition, and intend to find out more so that my interpretation of the Bible becomes more developed.

It feels though at times that even those who espouse the renewed interest in tradition within faith, do so with an unwillingness to accept that there is an element of the Spirit’s work throughout the history of the Church. So when looking at how to overcome the effects of modernity on the church, they feel they must go back to before modernity started to pervade Christian thought and ignore the good that it has done. Conversely, those who back up a modernity based insistence on absolutes in all things Christian, seem to have an unhealthly disrespect for any part of Church history that doesn’t back up their view and an arrogant insistence that they only can truly interpret Scripture free of the preconceptions that most acknowledge.

No wonder so many people are searching for something in the middle of these views! I am coming to believe that in order to truly test the teaching we receive we need to learn more about church tradition so that we avoid heresy!

1 Gabriel Fackre, The Christian Story: A Narrative Interpretation of Basic Christian Doctrine, third ed. (Eerdmans, 1996) pp. 18-19, in Franke, Reforming Theology, available at www.emergentvillage.com, in Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy pg 256.

Reality of faith is love

Published
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Graeme
on April 12, 2007
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The reality of faith is the reality of love. You can’t smell, touch, taste or hear love, but you can see its effects in the acts born from it, in the relationships built upon it, the art inspired by it and in the lives transformed by its goodness. So it is with faith. The reality of faith is visible in those millions of daily acts of kindness and love that are born from it. Acts done not in self-interest, not as a down payment for a ticket to the life eternal. These are the selfless, costly, grace-filled, Christ-inspired acts that make our lives richer than that of any number of lottery winners.

Dr John Sentamu, Archbishop of York
Easter is about life. That’s why we make so much noise
in Sunday Telegraph 8th April 2007 accessed 11th April 2007

When I worked for the Anglican Communion in the late 90’s I had the pleasure of meeting the Archbishop, whilst be was still Bishop of Stepney, and he came across then as one of the less ’stuffy’ bishops in the Church. He seems to be using his current position to advocate for the things he believes are essential to the faith, and given my own viewpoint on this subject I couldn’t resist posting this quote.

If there was more evidence in the world of the Christ-inspired acts that should result out of our faith, then the world would not be such a terrible place to be at the moment!

Not bored to death!

Published
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Graeme
on April 11, 2007
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I’ve hesitated to write this as it means that I have to question someone who I don’t really want to question! In the current issue of the Journal of Aggressive Christianity (#48) there is an article by Commissioner Wesley Harris, someone who I normally seem to agree wholeheartedly with, with the same title as this post.

Without trying to put words into the Commissioner’s mouth, it seems that the article is suggesting that one of the causes for decline within The Salvation Army is that our meetings are no longer exciting to be in. It feels like he is suggesting that should the meetings only become exciting again, then we will recapture the fervour of our Army forebears. He recounts a couple of stories to illustrate his point and makes a good argument for his position.

Now without a doubt the Commissioner has a valid point. The vast majority of meetings that I’ve been in during my soldiership in this Army of ours have been anything but exciting. Certainly, this lack of excitement has led me close to leaving on occasions, but hope for more excitement in the future was not what kept me holding on.

Almost apologetically, I want to say that this is just too simplistic. It suggests that the most essential element of our Christian life is what happens on a Sunday morning/evening, which simply shouldn’t be true. Whilst I do believe that the spiritual temperature within the early day Army meetings was incredibly attractive to those who attended, it wasn’t what kept people going. Just like for me, hope of an exciting future wasn’t what kept them attending!

I suspect the thing that was most exciting wasn’t the worship or the evangelistic meetings. I suspect that it was the involvement they had with each other. The excitement was in being part of a movement that resembled more the early day church than anything had for quite sometime. There was excitement in being brothers and sisters in Christ, and being involved in each others’ lives.

It was a dangerous time! It was an exciting time! But above all it was a time where God showed His presence not only in the meeting place, but in the home, the workplace and the street. It was this that made the early Salvationists keep attending.

If we focus on excitement in our Sunday services this may keep a few coming. But if we concentrate on making the Christian life one of excitement (life in all its fullness perhaps?), that is intimately involved with each other on more than a Sunday-to-Sunday basis, reaching out into the community and spreading the Good News that is available for all, then we will see people coming in and decline will halt.

Men and Church

Published
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Graeme
on April 10, 2007
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On Good Friday I went to a joint service of the 2 Riga corps and it was a great time of fellowship even though there were only about 35 or so. However, what really struck me was the almost total lack of men there. In fact there was only 6 of us!

I look around the rest of the Army, which has to be my reference point here in Latvia, and I see a similar pattern everywhere I go. In almost all our congregations men make up only a small minority! The only exception is in the corps that is most impoverished and they have a very transient congregation that moves on as the people start to improve their life conditions. Many of the other churches I have had some contact with are struggling with the same issue.

So why is this? What is it about the Church that leaves us struggling to attract men to faith? Why is that we seem to have become spectacularly unsuccessful at building strong male disciples? What are we going to do about it?

Interpreting Easter

Published
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Graeme
on April 9, 2007
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With an additional day off today, I’ve been catching up with my reading around various blogs. Found the following quote over at Waving or Drowning? and felt compelled to repost.

The interpretation of Easter itself has been scrunched into the trap laid by modernity, and the Church has gone along with it. Either Easter becomes a happy little ending for an otherwise sad story, or it’s about bunnies and daffodils, or it’s the bald affirmation that there is after all a life after death. Modernity can cope with all those (hardly surprising, since it generated them in the first place). None of them would have made any sense to the first Christians, least of all the last: almost everyone believed in life after death, but Easter meant life after “life after death” - a new bodily existence after a period of being bodily dead.

What neither modernity nor cynical postmodernity can cope with - and hence what they, like the cultural thought police of the first century, stamp on whenever they see it - is the suggestion that the gloom of Good Friday and the lull of Holy Saturday are the prelude to a new kind of life. This sort of life bursts out and challenges all our power systems (in an electronically manipulated democracy, power follows money and the media), and declares once more the shockingly unfashionable truth that Jesus is Lord.

Easter is about the beginning of God’s new world. John’s Gospel stresses that Easter Day is the first day of the new week: not so much the end of the old story as the launch of the new one. The gospel resurrection stories end, not with “well, that’s all right then”, nor with “Jesus is risen, therefore we will rise too”, but with “God’s new world has begun, therefore we’ve got a job to do, and God’s Spirit to help us do it”. That job is to plant the flags of resurrection - new life, new communities, new churches, new faith, new hope, new practical love - in amongst the tired slogans of idolatrous modernity and destructive postmodernity.
N.T.Wright

Easter Poem

Published
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Graeme
on April 8, 2007
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Christmas Is Really For The Children

Christmas is really
for the children.
Especially for children
who like animals, stables,
stars and babies wrapped
in swaddling clothes.
Then there are wise men,
kings in fine robes,
humble shepherds and a
hint of rich perfume.

Easter is not really
for the children
unless accompanied by
a cream filled egg.
It has whips, blood, nails,
a spear and allegations
of body snatching.
It involves politics, God
and the sins of the world.
It is not good for people
of a nervous disposition.
They would do better to
think on rabbits, chickens
and the first snowdrop
of spring.

Or they’d do better to
wait for a re-run of
Christmas without asking
too many questions about
what Jesus did when he grew up
or whether there’s any connection.
Steve Turner, Up to Date, (1987) Hodder and Stoughton, London

Thank you Lord!

Published
by
Graeme
on April 6, 2007
in old uksalvationist posts
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Thank you Lord!
© James Pauls