Stanley Hauerwas On Gay Marriage

by i.burgess on May 21, 2013

The problem with debates about homosexuality is they have been devoid of any linguistic discipline that might give you some indication what is at stake. [The denomination of] Methodism, for example, is more concerned with being inclusive than being the church. We do not have the slightest idea what we mean by being inclusive other than some vague idea that inclusivity has something to do with being accepting and loving. Inclusivity is, of course, a necessary strategy for survival in what is religiously a buyers’ market. Even worse, the inclusive church is captured by romantic notions of marriage. Combine inclusivity and romanticism and you have no reason to deny marriage between gay people.

When couples come to ministers to talk about their marriage ceremonies, ministers think it’s interesting to ask if they love one another. What a stupid question! How would they know? A Christian marriage isn’t about whether you’re in love. Christian marriage is giving you the practice of fidelity over a lifetime in which you can look back upon the marriage and call it love. It is a hard discipline over many years.

The difficulty, therefore, is that Christians, when they approach this issue, no longer know what marriage is. For centuries, Christians married people who didn’t know one another until the marriage ceremony, and we knew they were going to have sex that night. They didn’t know one another. Where does all this love stuff come from? They could have sex because they were married.

Now, when marriage becomes a mutually enhancing arrangement until something goes wrong, then it makes no sense at all to oppose homosexual marriages. If marriage is a calling that makes promises of lifelong monogamous fidelity in which children are welcomed, then we’ve got a problem. But we can’t even get to a discussion there, because Christians no longer practice Christian marriage.

What has made it particularly hard is that the divorce culture has made it impossible for us to talk about these matters–and many of you know, I’m divorced and remarried. It has made it impossible for us to talk about these matters with an honesty and candor that is required if you are not to indulge in self-deceptive, sentimental lies.

For gay Christians who I know and love, I wish we as Christians could come up with some way to help them, like we need to help one another, to avoid the sexual wilderness in which we live. That’s a worthy task. I probably sound like a conservative on these matters, not because I’ve got some deep animosity toward gay people, but because I don’t know how to go forward given the current marriage practices of our culture.”

Stanley Hauerwas, Faith Fires Back

If churches in the UK want to say anything at all to this society about their disagreement with the government’s proposals, let them first begin to practice Christian marriage. Christians are a people with an imagination big enough and a community strong enough to maintain a narrative which actualises an ethics otherwise impossible for the non-Christian.

Let’s pull the plank from our own eyes, please.

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Sooner or Later (Soren’s Song)

by i.burgess on May 4, 2013

Happy birthday, Kierkegaard! May 5th 2013 is the 200th anniversary of the writer’s birth.

Come back and haunt me
Follow me home
Give me a motive
Swallow me whole

They say I’ve lost it
What could I know
When I’m but a mockery
I’m so alone

Sooner or later you’ll find out
There’s a hole in the wall

Today is ours
Condemned to be free
Free to keep breathing
Free to believe

I look to find You
Down on my knees
Oh God, I believe!
Please help me believe

Sooner or later they’ll find out
There’s a hole in the wall
Sooner or later you’ll find out
That you’ll dream to be that small

I gave it all away and I lost who I am
I threw it all away
With everything to gain
And I’m taking the leap
With dreams of shrinking
Yeah, dreams of shrinking

A song inspired by the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, written and recorded by Switchfoot.

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What is Sin?

by i.burgess on April 29, 2013

I was sitting in a disused maths classroom one lunchtime when I was first told about sin. It was a lunchtime club for high-school teens and the leader had stuck a large target against one wall. We were asked to make paper airplanes and throw then at the target.

Nothing less than a perfect bullseye would be accepted.

We all launched our paper planes at the wall. None hit the mark.

Sin is failure to hit the mark.

I must have thrown that plane a dozen times before the leader stepped in to tell us the truth. Try as we might, our flights were as doomed as our actions.

That is: permanently incapacitated, condemned to failure and bound by a force I never understood nor chose to participate with.

Every act, every word and every thought judged against a standard I do not know. After every conversation, questioning myself: Did I sin? When? Which word was it? Which action was it? The minute details and subtleties of life on planet earth make such an existence impossible, or impossibly complex.

Just as well that the youth leader had his handy pat answer ready to soothe the existential despair such a confession so easily whips up.

The Gospel

The Good News of Jesus is that all my failures died with Jesus on the cross.

This of course gives the Christian leader enormous power. He creates a burden for the young person and immediately proposes a solution.

The problem is that in the world, sin is just fine. 

Well, not all sin. Acts of theft, rape and murder are still disapproved of by society. And especially white, middle-class society.

Yet upon leaving the context of a Christian youth group, each young person will realise that the consequences of sin are as good as imaginary: That is, they are a matter of faith. In terms of existential impact, the two are often indistinguishable.

Of course faith dissolves the tension completely, since Jesus paid the price and allows human beings to encounter God despite their sins.

Upon reflection, the whole thing can come across as rather contrived.

That might be why so many young people leave the church.

If sin is considered to be the failure to perform the acts proper to a person in relationship with God, then a sinner is anyone who fails to do as God requires.

Or, everyone.

This whole Christian conversation about sin can happily remain in the realm of the imagination, scarcely impacting the reality of the community in their life together, their life in society whilst simultaneously enforcing a defining narrative.

We can call ourselves Christians without being any different.

We might never hit that imaginary mark, but we get to not feel any guilt about our actions either.

The title of this post asks the question “what is sin?”

I did not ask “What is a sin?” or “What are sins”.

I want to know what sin is made of, what is it’s essence.

Sin is: before God or with the conception of God, in despair not wanting to be oneself, or wanting in despair to be oneself.

-Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death

Here is the possibility of understanding the real substance of sin. That is, the way in which it impacts the human experience (beyond the obvious acts of evil which affect us all).

Kierkegaard identifies 3 types of despair:

  1. Despair which is being sort of blissfully ignorant that one is in despair, or ignorant that one is/has a self.
  2. Despair in not wanting to be oneself. Have you ever been upset, and then realized you were upset about being upset at all, as if you should be above being upset about such petty things? That is what this type of despair is sort of like.
  3. Despair in wanting to be oneself. This is like knowing you are in despair & reveling in it. Kind of like playing a bitter, poor-me victim.

These kinds of despair arise from the refusal to acknowledge God or be known by him. It is the setting of the self up as the Only One, the One who generates the Self and governs it.

The effects of sin can then be clearly seen. They are seen in the one who goes along with the prevailing ethical winds of the moment, never acknowledging that he is an eternal Self created by God.

They are seen in the one who finds himself despairing that his existence is finite, and endlessly distracts himself from the idea of eternity. He fills himself with earthly things, as if to constantly remind himself that he does not stand eternally before the face of God.

They are seen in the one who despairs in the face of God, knowing himself to be finite and bound to the earth he spites the God he once knew by clinging to the pain his life has brought him. He rules himself as king of the trash heap, spitting in the face of the One who truly established him.

If this is the effect of sin, if this kind of tortured and life-swallowing existence the sinner endures then the response must be more than an idea of forgiveness for arbitrary missing of the mark, but a new existence grounded in the new life of the resurrected Christ.

We know that  everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but  he who was born of God  protects him, and the evil one does not touch him.  We know that we are from God, and  the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.  And we know that the Son of God has come and  has given us understanding, so that we may know  him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and  eternal life.  Little children, keep yourselves from idols.

1 John 5:18-21

And be kept from the idol of yourself.

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Kierkegaard on despair over pain and weakness

by i.burgess on April 26, 2013

But the more consciousness there is in such a sufferer who wants in despair to be himself, the more the despair intensifies to become demonic. It usually begins like this: A self which in despair wants to be himself, suffers from some kind of pain which cannot be removed or separated from his concrete self. He then heaps upon this torment all his passion, which then becomes a demonic rage. If it should now happen that God in in heaven and all the angels were to offer to help him to be rid of torment – no, he does not want that, now it is too late. Once he would have gladly have given everything to be rid of this agony, but he was kept waiting, and now all that’s past; he prefers to rage against everything and be the one whom the whole world, all existence, has wronged, the one for whom it is especially important to ensure that he has his agony on hand, so that no one will take it from him – for then he would not be able to convince others and himself that he is right.  This finally fixes itself so firmly in his head that he becomes frightened of eternity for a rather strange reason: he is afraid in case it should take away from him what, from a demonic viewpoint, gives him infinite superiority over other people, what, from a demonic viewpoint, is his right to be who he is. Himself is what he wants to be. He began with the infinite abstraction of the self, and now has finally become so concrete that it would be impossible to become eternal in that sense, and yet he wants in despair to be himself. Ah! demonic madness; he rages most of all at the thought that eternity could get it into its head to take his misery away from him.

Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death.

I read this an felt as is a ghost passed through me. You know, the eerie feeling of being known. Only I seem to be known by a man centuries deceased.

Not that I am complaining. I am grateful for the connection. But here Kierkegaard illuminates my own soul, shining that light on my inner being. Such is the illuminating power of words. He doesn’t even specify any one vice, or weakness yet manages to connect so powerfully to my experience.

It goes something like this:

  1. I am conscious of those vices and failures which I am powerless against.
  2. I am driven to rage against these failures.
  3. I will no longer look to God to help me, not now.
  4. I cling to the pain from that wound as the source of my being, my raison d’être.
  5. I shrink in fear from the vast eternity of God, lest he should show himself so much more mighty than this painful thing which I cannot move.

Is is as though the pain which once attached itself to a part of me, I have now attached myself to and will cling to it as to a lifering in the sea. If I let go of it, I will drift away.

The question I think Kierkegaard raises to me is this:

Why are you afraid of drifting into God?

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The Importance of Belief: A Response to Stephen Fry

by i.burgess on April 22, 2013

I hate myself for enjoying Stephen Fry as much as I do. I am unsure I have seen him act in anything in at least a year, and even that might have been in Blackadder. I scarcely get the time these days to watch QI, yet still I have a giddy excitement come upon me whenever I see him on TV. The excitement doubles when I see him holding an Apple device.

It’s nearly pathetic, I know. He is such a winsome and enjoyable personality that I can’t help myself.

So I saw the video above in my suggestions list on Youtube and couldn’t resist this combination of title and presenter.

Honestly, if it were Richard Dawkins presenting on the subject I would have carried on scrolling.

I played the video. I was not disappointed.

He demands that we think deeply and at length about things.

Fry refuses to be seduced by the sentimentality of the age which rejects the need for essential questions (or, questions of the essence of things), requiring a deeper engagement with both the nature of reality and the ethical suppositions which follow.

Like me, he is not ‘spiritual’. Like me, he sees the modern language of spirituality as an opiate which grounds our ethics in nothing.

Yet the ethics I hold will prove to be anathema to Fry.

He makes three contentious claims:

  1. Those who believe in an afterlife are lazily disinclined to ask fundamental questions of existence.
  2. Monotheism is a ghastly mis-interpretation of reality. Reality would cause us to believe in capricious and mean gods who are essentially in disagreement with one another. Only a polytheism in the Greek/Roman tradition makes any sense.
  3. If there were a God, wouldn’t he want humans to do better than slavishly following the words of a book?

“You have to account for bone-cancer in children” – Stephen Fry

With God, the afterlife and revelation dispensed with, the only use religion has is for its music and art.

Yet Fry must concede that there have been many great acts of kindness committed by persons of faith.

He hold us Dietrich Bonhoeffer up as an example of a virtuous religious man, yet he has emptied the man of his faith.

Bonhoeffer’s thought, writing and patiently endured suffering only make sense in light of his faith in God, in the afterlife and in the words of Jesus as commands for his life. He lived in an age and place where the entire mood of the society, even the enlightened minds, was on the rightness of the Third Reich. Bonhoeffer only has a voice of opposition to this because of all that Fry would do away with.

“To be called to a life of extraordinary quality, to live up to it, and yet to be unconscious of it is indeed a narrow way. To confess and testify to the truth as it is in Jesus, and at the same time to love the enemies of that truth, his enemies and ours, and to love them with the infinite love of Jesus Christ, is indeed a narrow way. To believe the promise of Jesus that his followers shall possess the earth, and at the same time to face our enemies unarmed and defenceless, preferring to incur injustice rather than to do wrong ourselves, is indeed a narrow way. To see the weakness and wrong in others, and at the same time refrain from judging them; to deliver the gospel message without casting pearls before swine, is indeed a narrow way. The way is unutterably hard, and at every moment we are in danger of straying from it. If we regard this way as one we follow in obedience to an external command, if we are afraid of ourselves all the time, it is indeed an impossible way. But if we behold Jesus Christ going on before step by step, we shall not go astray.”

Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship.

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Yahweh: A God of grace

by i.burgess on April 18, 2013

If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.

2 Cor. 5:17

The death and resurrection of Jesus changed the world. More specifically, it changed how humanity relates to God and to itself. In a bygone era, there was a complicated system of sacrifices, observances and rituals to be observed before a person could be considered righteous before God. A complex code of moral obligations surrounding personal piety and hospitality to strangers and kin regulated a Godly society.

Jesus, with his simple way and transformative death ended these overbearing rules, the demands of a cantankerous and capricious deity.

Or at least this is the implication of such thinking.

To dismiss the Old Testament as the unreasonable demands of an uncompassinate God makes Jesus so alien to the previous story that one wonders whether he really is Yahweh’s Son, or at least whether the whole history of Israel is some cruel point-proving exercise in human fallibility.

To affirm that the New Testament has done away with the painful experiences which fuelled much of the Old Testament implies that the Christian Church has no fellowship with the pain of the world. It is only a doctor, never a patient.

Plainly, the Christian Church is not immune to sickness, suffering, grief and death any more than individual Christians are. The Catholic church has been beset with a sex abuse scandal for the last decade, and even newer families can’t escape the failures of a few.

Look and see, we have not arrived.

We, the community of faith, are not morally pure.

We are not pious.

We are not holy when eyes are off us.

The Christian Church inherited a grand tradition: The Hebrew faith in a God who calls people to be his own, who listens to the pleas of human voices and has grace upon the sinner.

Give ear, O Lord, to my prayer;
listen to my plea for grace.
In the day of my trouble I call upon you,
for you answer me.

Psalm 86:6,7

The ancient singer would not call upon God’s grace if God were not gracious.

Yet why would he call upon grace, if God were truly gracious?

That is to say, surely a gracious God wouldn’t need to be called upon? Surely he would have already acted to save, to soothe, to heal, without waiting to be called upon?

And isn’t this what he did in Jesus, stepping into human existence to solve all our problems?

Why does God want to be called upon? Why does it matter that our prayers must be spoken or sung aloud?

The faith of the Christian Church is not private. It is a story which demands to be told, yet it can only be told if it is true. The Psalmist in the quote above tells part of a story, and other psalms report of God’s favour and grace as it has been experienced.

Jesus was a man, he was God written in to human experience. Not human words or ideas, but human being. What could this mean apart from the radical expectation that real human lives can be touched and changed by this same God?

Grace is not an idea, a righteousness which I confess yet do not experience. It must be experienced before it is confessed. Yet the sacred tradition of the faith gives me the words for every step from despair to hope.

And sometimes back again.

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Between Confession and Testimony

by i.burgess on April 8, 2013

Have you read The Cross And The Switchblade? It is the thrilling testimony of Nicky Cruz as he left behind a world of drugs and gangs and found a new home with God’s people in the church. David Wilkerson writes with agony and passion of the many young people he met in the city’s gangs, speaking with the love of a brother as he faithfully pursues Nicky and his friends.

It is currently the #19 bestseller in Christian Biographies on Amazon.

First published in 1962, it remains as popular as ever. It is a gift given to every youth-group teen on their baptism, or after reaffirming their commitment to Jesus, or when the Youth Pastor thinks that they might be boring the youth.

That a 40 year old paperback can remain so popular in our increasingly skeptical age tells of the power of testimony. I have heard it said that new Christians are the best evangelists. It is implied that this is because when you stay in the church for too long, theology and other trivialities begin to overshadow that powerful testimony which you once proclaimed; that convicting witness to truth you once knew so thoroughly. So my theological studies, and my experience teaching and preaching in churches has dulled whatever testimony I once had.

Now I have no tale of Divine Mercy to tell. I have no conviction in my own narrative with which to convince you, dear reader, of the rightness of my faith. It would have been better if there had been a period–no more than six months–after my conversion where I got to go on a tour. Maybe a few churches, school assemblies and arts festival engagements, culminating in a big summer festival. After that, I should have been flown off to a remote retreat house in the Alps, far away from the prying eyes of the world. Because, you see, the testimony I told was a narrative I could never live.

The marketable story, so refined by the consumers choice, is of a life gone wrong and turned around through the transformation of the human heart wrought through intense suffering and unbelievable love. They will never be the same again, they tell the crowd of teens in a darkened room, before asking everyone to close their eyes and raise a hand if they want to become a Christian.

So I should have been whisked away to a remote place. Then the world wouldn’t have to see how the stains of sin which mar my heart, become an infection which I eagerly pass on to others in my jealous rage and furious self-pity.

It’s as if I created Christianity for myself, and then let myself down.

In truth, I think I have only disappointed the story I tried to sell. It’s not even in the Bible anyway. Yahweh, the Bible’s God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He is the God of generations and ages, of children and elderly, of women and men who knows the time of birth and death for each person. He patiently bears with the grievous wrongdoings of his people for centuries, from the moment they left Egypt (Exodus 32:9).

This stiff-necked people constantly remained the people of God, despite their sins and rebellion. And I am part of that now. Why should I try to live a story which was never true? God bears with the sinners, calling them to himself, saving them and sanctifying them. Why would I desire to change that?

Probably because that story isn’t as attractive to me as the magic of the youth-group testimony.

Whoever  conceals his transgressions will not prosper,
but he who  confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.

Confession is halfway to a testimony, since through confession God’s mercies are obtained and it is mercy which the church proclaims. So it is through confession that I can tell a story truer than the one I once believed. Yet I suppose I do not know if it will be true until I have lived it.

Does mercy truly await the penitent?

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Everything Changes

by i.burgess on April 4, 2013

A smart man with a smart haircut
And a smartly-cut suit told me
Everything changes
Whispered it to my ear, he did
As I scrolled through
Welfare cuts, Nuclear war and equal marriage
Everything changes
It said so on the Internet
Where there are no lies
Yet plenty of liars
Where everything changes
fast as grey-plastic ‘click’
Quick as a blink
Everything available,
Changes instantly

The internet proves to be a better God
Than the dead-then-alive
Whose pet project has outlasted empires
Survived wars
And sold itself to an immutable order
Smart salesmen with haircuts and suits
Everything changes!
Everything changes!
Liars! Liars bidding for a chance at truth

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The Meaning of my Baptism

by i.burgess on March 26, 2013

Today is the 6th anniversary of my Baptism. I was 15 years old when I chose to declare my faith before a community of people in a public rite of initiation.

The practice of only baptising those who can be reasonably trusted to understand the meaning of their confession is the most controversial aspect of the so-called “Baptist” church.

Why is this? And why does it matter to me, now?

The most common objection, particularly from laymen in the past, has been “well what happens if my baby dies?”

It is implied that this act of baptism has some transforming effect upon the recipient. It is the sign of salvation, and so being baptised equates to salvation. No?

More sophisticated arguments build upon this and will speak of “covenant sign” which is to say that the children of believers are included in the same covenant as their parents, thus they ought to receive the sign of this covenant which signifies that they are of the new covenant community, and thus included in the full life of the church.

Functionally, of course, the result is the same: A person is given full access to the church and her life without limit or cost.

This is why the rejection of pedobaptism matters. It matters because of what it says about the life of faith.

It matters to me because at the core of my faith journey is this one action which is fully mine, insofar as I chose to enter the waters, and yet fully God’s since he is the one who gave me the faith and created the church community which held me through the waters.

This glorious synthesis of Divine and Human action, where both occur without contradiction, is surely a testimony to the essence of life in the church. The church is the community which exists by God’s power under his headship, yet remains a fully human community which must use wisdom, experience and searching prayer to discern the will of God.

Credobaptism, or Baptism on condition of belief, is the building block of a church where every member can minister in some sense or another. Every member has undergone the humbling rite of telling out their testimony and being submerged under water. Every member knows why they did it. Every member wanted to be part of the church and to participate in its life.

And the fact that I made the choice to undergo Baptism, stands witness to every other choice I make. It reminds me that each action I take on this earth, in this physical existence, matters to the glory of God. My testimony to him isn’t an intellectual assent or family tradition, but one marked by an event in time which I fully acknowledged and participated in.

That event marks the grace bestowed upon me, and the promise I made to turn from evil and onto the ways of God.

That event marks me as a part of something bigger than I’d ever dreamed.

I am thankful.

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Christ the (not) King

by i.burgess on March 24, 2013

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Behold, your king is coming to you;
righteous and having salvation is he,
humble and mounted on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
(Zechariah 9:9 ESV)

So Jesus makes his final trip into Jerusalem with the kind of public theatrics of which Boris Johnson would be jealous. Colliding religious images, national hope and communal longings he draws on all his fame, giving the loud, clear signal to the people of Jerusalem: The time is here! I am taking my throne! I am winning this victory! I am bringing peace and security to my people! (Zech 9:10)

As if on cue, the mob of nationalistic zealots and devoted disciples are in a frenzy, calling him the “Son of David”, the great king of Israel.

Yet his subsequent march on the Temple subverts what might be the expectation of an assault against the nearby Palace of Herod or even Governor’s residence. His most impressive display of power, of influence is wasted in a useless display of blessing to the sick, rather than a siege of the seat of power. Jesus will not get another opportunity.

The close reader of the Gospels ought not be shocked. Jesus was already offered the nations of the earth. He turned them down (Matthew 3:8-10). At the start of his ministry, and here at the end, we see Jesus is no respecter of nations, rulers or powers.

He acts like a fool: Crowned prince of nowhere and nobody. He rides on the celebrations of the people, then turning away from them to fulfil his purpose in the Temple (Matthew 21:12-13). Yet none of this is new information about Jesus. None of this need shock the reader about him.

The reader knows that Jesus lives to do and reveal the will of God (Matthew 3:10). We know how he loves to have compassion on the sick and demonstrate God’s favour for the poor and broken, especially in the face of the Religious. Matthew’s Gospel tells us all this already. So what is the purpose of this pageantry?

It is twofold: To show that Jesus is the promised Messiah, and to show how utterly different his reign is to all other powers in the earth. Thus, the essential otherliness of the Christian Church is plain, delivered like a punch to the gut.

Palm Sunday is the celebration of Jesus’ triumphal entry and paradoxically the rejection of worldly power for the followers of this Messiah. It is called a triumphant entry in a theological sense only.

Practically, politically this event ends in failure, broken and bloody on a cross.

It is very easy to become caught up in the sweeping strength of a movement, pushing for some change or agenda. Jesus here harnesses this power and utterly wastes it on the meaningless, trivial and short-sighted.

He makes a scene in the Temple. He calls all the nations to prayer. He heals some sick people.

The markets will be back tomorrow. And the nations will continue in their prayers to their gods. The sick will die again.

Christ is heralded as a king. This king casts off his crown.

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