Strict Sabbatarianism on the Web
You have to admire the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland for keeping to their principles: anyone trying to visit their site on a Sunday gets the following…
I tried a superficial attempt to get their server to “break” the sabbath by changing my timezone so that my clock ran ten hours ahead (ie. in Monday), but it wouldn’t play – presumably their site is linked to Scottish time. However, it struck me that the website was, itself, using electricity which had been generated on the sabbath (unless it reverts to battery power). So even by responding to my http request, it was breaking the letter, if not the Spirit, of the law. By the way, I wonder if anyone has told them that the Sabbath Day is on Saturday, and that Jesus was raised on a Sunday – which is hardly a case of God “resting”…
Posted on Sunday, 7 February 2010 by Paul | Posted in humour,theology | Comments Off
Quit strumming that guitar and cut the cheesy lyrics
It was fairly early into our marriage that my nearest and dearest gave me an honest assessment of my long-term prospects as a worship leader. I’d fallen into it somehow, either because I was the only guy in the university Christian Union who wore a leather jacket or because everyone else was even worse at the guitar than I (except Keith J, who was *good*). But by the time I’d reached my mid-twenties, I’d been playing the guitar and leading worship for a number of years. The problem was that I’d been listening to jazz-funk instead of Christian albums since I was in my teens and it had infected my strumming style with dangerous backbeats, so it was kind of hard to understand my playing. (That’s my version of the story, anyway.) Like most Christians of my age, I never questioned the lyrics, despite the fact that anyone with a passing acquaintance with Freudian psychology cannot sing “Jesus, take me as I am…” without feeling terribly guilty about the sexual associations it evokes.
How refreshing, then, to read Andy Walker Cleaveland’s blog post on Christian cheesy lyrics, with some concrete examples. This is getting familiar territory: Nick Page has tackled the subject in his book And now let’s move into a time of nonsense but his book suffers because he was (understandably) unable to get permission of any of the song authors to actually cite the examples of silly or meaningless lyrics which his book is about. At last, someone’s pointed out that though Mat Redman’s tunes are good (as examples of the kind of genre in which he composes), his lyrics seldom convey much by way of theological substance – in contrast (I would contend) to the much-maligned Graham Kendrick.
But things aren’t as bad as they could have been. My wife’s early ministry of discouragement (“it’s either the guitar, or me”) has probably saved the Christian world from something much worse.
Posted on Friday, 8 January 2010 by Paul | Posted in humour,music,spirituality,theology | Comments Off
In the wake of recent debates on assisted suicide…
This is a must-read. HT to Doug Chaplin.
Posted on Wednesday, 26 August 2009 by Paul | Posted in politics,theology | 1 comment
The Bible in One Hour: Talks 1 – 5 are now available.
Simon Taylor (partner in crime at virtualtheology.net and elsewhere) is drawing his summer series, The Bible in One Hour, to a close next week with a final talk on the Book of Revelation. However, five of the six talks are now available on the website for downloading on virtualtheology.net together with the associated handouts. They include the talks on Amos, Mark’s Gospel and 1 Corinthians. Nice work Simon!
Posted on Wednesday, 19 August 2009 by Paul | Posted in theology | Comments Off
The Bible in One Hour – first talk now available
Simon’s first talk in the current virtualtheology.net series, The Bible in One Hour, is now available on the website. Thanks to Niall Briggs for providing the server space. The talk deals with the whole Bible. Following talks will take a particular book as their focus.
Posted on Friday, 31 July 2009 by Paul | Posted in podcasts,theology | Comments Off
The Bible in an Hour
After two year’s break, the virtualtheology/bluffer’s guide enterprise is grinding its rusty wheels into life again with a series of talks. This time they will be by Simon Taylor alone (I’m still trying to move house this summer, less said the better at the moment).
You can get the details (and eventually, the podcasts) at http://virtualtheology.net – we hope to podcast them soon after the talk has been given.
Posted on Wednesday, 1 July 2009 by Paul | Posted in podcasts,spirituality,theology | 2 comments
Christine Sine is blogging about gardens
Back in the 1990s, in the early days of the Third Sunday Service, we did a service on the theme of gardens. Obviously there are gardens in the Bible, but what’s perhaps of more interest is the relationship between the gardener and the creation. Gardening is an activity of working with, and against, nature. Gardens are articial spaces, in that they seek to control the natural forces of chaos in nature which would otherwise have their sway. At one level, there is nothing wrong with nature space at all. However, gardening offers human beings the chance to selective work with-and-against nature to create various desired effects. In some ways, it parallels the relationship which God has with creation: in Genesis 1 we see the Spirit of God brooding over the waters of chaos, and from gardening we get the insight that creation isn’t (unlike other parallel near-Eastern myths) a crushing of chaos, but a shaping of it. Creation happens when God becomes enmeshed in chaos for his own, creative, purposes. So it was good to see the Christine Sine has been theologising and spiritualising about gardens. You can catch this on the Emergent Village website and her own website.
Posted on Thursday, 4 June 2009 by Paul | Posted in altworship,ecology,spirituality,theology | 1 comment
Office-speak
The BBC today is running a great magazine article on the most loathed office-speak phrases. The interesting question is why such verbal nonsense emerges in the first place. The consensus seems to be that it comes from minds which are operating almost exclusively within a work environment which is demanding (or even threatening) but also which is intellectually unchallenging and infertile. The world of the middle-manager is betwixt and between: it is pressurized, but ultimately not to do with life-and-death issues (as is, say, the world of medicine). It is routine, dealing with things which are ultimately banal, but where strong demands are placed on the manager which don’t bear on those lower down the pecking-order of the workplace. It is far removed from the innovative, intellectually challenging and creative environment of the research scientist or the focussed thinking of the academy.
The middle-manager, in order not to go insane, has to invent a kind of linguistic universe where the excitement of other worlds inhabits his or her own. This results in the large-scale importing of metaphors from other contexts which then are over-used, largely because they make the banality seem somehow more imaginative and glamorous. The world of office-speak is, therefore, a game of the imagination which prevents the middle-manager from going crazy with the cumulative effect of pressure and boredom: it’s a survival mechanism buried deep within their brains to prevent them from becoming cleaver-wielding lunatics. For them, the alternative is horrendous. Put yourself in their shoes (you may indeed be in those shoes): you are handed a set of figures which have emerged from a spreadsheet. They indicate an arithmetic difference between profits achieved in the year to date and the profits which should have been achieved in the year to date. This is the result of a simple subtraction, but the implications are that if that difference isn’t closed, either the expectations of shareholders will not be fulfilled, or some people are going to lose their jobs, or someone higher-up the the hierarchy is going to have their over-optimistic assessment of the profitability of the company significantly undermined by facts.
The middle-manager is then placed under pressure. What can he or she do to survive? You can’t simply wave the two figures at the team and tell everyone that they’ve got to work harder to close the gap. The banality and boredom of the situation conspires with the facts to produce demoralisation and further loss of performance. Enter the imaginative metaphor! The middle-manager remembers the phrase from a recent seminar they attended: we’ve got to ‘up our game’ he or she says. Suddenly, the dreary office disappears in the corporate cranium, and everyone is dressed in American Football kit – the crowds are in the stadium all around and just down the field are the ugly-faced opposition. The middle-manager is suddenly transformed into Bull Durham and the adrenaline starts to pump. Imagination turns that little subtraction sum from the spreadsheet into a drama. [Oops, wrong game! see Paul Davison's comment below!]
The last thing everyone needs is some linguistic pedant who punctures the metaphor with reality. The problem is that the work environment remains as dull as it ever was, which deadens the ability of the middle-manager to dream up endless imaginative metaphors. Eventually, the metaphors become routine, then they replicate and replicate until they take over the entire linguistic field. Eventually, nobody can understand what anyone else is saying because of this verbal fecundity. The whole office is drunk on metaphoric euphoria – until everyone is living in a parallel universe of disconnected imaginative images which have some vague connection to what they’re supposed to be doing. The whole office is on linguistic LSD, just about keeping things going in the real world, but in fact, off somewhere with the fairies.
The problem for English is that so much routine, boring commercial work is conducted in this language that there is a real danger that what started as an attempt at psychological survival has now attained the capacity to alter the language to the extent that it could become a meaningless stream of verbal dope. English could become the ultimate language of meaninglessness.
What is more worrying for me is that most of this is being reflected in church circles as well. The rich theological concept of ‘mission’ was, long ago, imported into management contexts, semi-digested by the behemoth of middle-management culture, then re-ingested by Christian leaders. These leaders have an impoverished view of mission which sees it purely in terms of the statistically quantifiable, where the spreadsheet is Lord. This theologically-starved view of mission debases Christian leadership from the truly apostolic into the managerial. As a result, we start to hear Christian leaders using management cliches, rather than biblical metaphors. So when you next hear your priest, pastor or minister talk about the Church needing to ‘up its game’, you know he or she has finally lost the theological plot. The answer is a sabbatical on a desert island with just the Bible to read. They may come back speaking in tongues, but they might also come back speaking plainly in English. For the mission of God takes place in the real world, not a fantasy one. And true mission involves true words, which call things what they are, and trustworthy language which opens people’s eyes to see what is really in front of them: that which the original Word brought forth and became flesh in order to redeem.
Posted on Saturday, 25 April 2009 by Paul | Posted in humour,theology | 2 comments
Some wise words for a New Year
I guess this is the season for thoughtful posts marking the change of a year. A month or so back, I read this article by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth). For me, it’s about as wise as you can get.
Posted on Tuesday, 30 December 2008 by Paul | Posted in spirituality,theology | Comments Off
Emergents and postmodernism
Regular readers of this blog (are there any left?) will have gathered that I have become increasingly unconvinced about the whole postmodern thing that you still hear about and read about in Emerging circles. I’ve written down some rather scratchy notes about why I’m leaving the postmodern Faithful and pursuing a vision of Church which is not avowedly postmodern. Since it’s a bit of a long piece, I’ve decided to post it as a separate page, rather than as an article in the blog sequence. For any odd person who’d be remotely interested, you can read it here. It’s still thought in process, but I can’t see myself going back to describing our present culture as postmodern without gazillions of qualifiers.
Posted on Monday, 15 September 2008 by Paul | Posted in altworship,emerging church,theology | 4 comments
